Month: February 2008

I’m waiting for my man

Twenty-six dollars in my hand

Took pictures of a doctor today, got off the phone with a photographer friend, made plans with a painter for later, going to a gallery tomorrow, giving spare keys to somewhere else, promised to wear a kimono, promised to find a home for a house-pet. A mask waiting in a box on my bed. Cats asleep. Words glistening like the fruit juice at my wrist as the sun falls down behind clouds, too far to warm my city, to light my room more than this screen might. Double exposure, the different brands of cigarette collected in a tiny bottle on my windowsill I do not empty, a model museum of names who’ve stayed the night. The times I’ve closed my bedroom door.

Feel sick and dirty, more dead than alive

I have a cough for the first time in years. Walked home in the cold on Sunday night, upset, throat tight, by the time I arrived my clothes had frozen in patches where the sweat from my skin had wet my shirts. When I was done, after I had peeled off the cracking frost of frigid threads, I sat curled in front of a heater and sent a letter trying to explain why, what had been decided. Hat off as fire licked me. Silent. Too close. My body cracked open, left without a voice.

Oh pardon me sir, it’s the furthest from my mind

Daily photos continue, more than a month now, though always in stolen moments, never more than five minutes. Trying to stay alive has been fighting, trying to catch up from where I have been behind. All of my books have been read as my writing is put aside. My back arches, hanging from one ankle, I’m relearning, examining where I put my punctuation as I redesign where I keep my bones. New skills tying into old ones, applying left onto right. Cloth flaring from my shoulders as the fever breaks. Ink and memory soaked into silk, the shape of this fall the same as my pen. Someone shouting at me about Kafka as I remember to point my toes.

Here he comes, he’s all dressed in black

I keep hoping to hear from certain voices, dark haired creatures I’ve tied to the surface of my heart. Jumping in with both feet solidly planted on water, the waves of our phone numbers, the little cards I buy at the corner store late at night, embossed with maple flags, red and white, all the better when we flip through the books together, contrasting prices against countries, microscopic lists, the ritual of me and the girl behind the desk. She smiles like the taste of someone’s home rests behind her teeth, waiting to get out. Scratch off the possibly carcinogenic silver with a coin, enter the pin number digits, type the long distance, make a song of it, and wait for it to ring. Terrible, the wait for it to ring.

He’s never early, he’s always late

There was a promise of shirts off, standing where I asked, the placement of a camera, the fixing of a light. No time, in the end, as expected, suspected, being justified is never any fun with the things I believe of people. It’s not being negative if it’s realistic, however precious hope can be. Another time, some future we don’t know enough to plan, season shift, other cities, the places we choose to live, the furniture we fill them in with. Conventional wisdom. Dark lines drawn under every eye, cuffs and collar matched, like these are checkpoints to cross the same way I insist I buy flowers for men.

First thing you learn is you always gotta wait

If there’s one thing to learn, as much as anything, I need affectionate goodbyes.

Until tomorrow, but that’s just some other time

doom, gloom, windows xp

Something has gone terribly, wretchedly wrong with my computer. No data’s been lost, but it can’t boot out of anything but SafeMode. (And even that has been rife with sketchy moments). We’ve been trying a little bit of everything to fix it, (bare minimum start up sets, system rollbacks, etcetera), but nothing so far has worked, instead the errors grow more esoteric as we continue.

Thankfully, my friend Frank is bringing over a system disc for a fresh OS install, but as that’s going to be at ten tonight, if you need to get a hold of me today, call.

I’m signed up

365 day thirty-three: closing in
365: thirty-three

Improv Everywhere has launched Improv Everywhere Global. There’s a Vancouver faction!


From wikipedia, “Improv Everywhere (abbreviated IE) is an unorthodox comedy group based in New York City, formed in 2001 by Charlie Todd. Its slogan is “We Cause Scenes,” which the group lives up to by executing non-demeaning pranks in public places. The events (“missions”) organized by the group are often considered flash mobs, but the group’s website insists that they have nothing to do with flash mobbing and that IE was created years before flash mobbing gained popularity.”

Here’s a link to their most recent action, Frozen Grand Central.

didn’t see much

Small Metal Objects started with a sense of wonderful displacement. We sat in tiered rows of seats placed in the main square of the Vancouver Public Library, wearing headphones that were wired directly into microphones worn by the actors. A fantastic idea – as the soundtrack started, suddenly all of the people who happened to be walking by were part of the production. They acquired extraordinary depth and meaning as we scanned faces, trying to pick out what we were meant to be watching for, much like background music sets tone in movies. Voices began, a plodding two-person conversation punctuated with surprisingly effective ambient pieces of song. It was interesting watching other audience members examine the surrounding pedestrians, searching for the actors we were ostensibly there to be watching. I liked how divorced we were from our surroundings, how replacing what we heard created an artificial barrier between participants and everyone else, molding us into a rather ultimate audience. Suddenly absolutely everything was part of the show. One man, dapper in a works-at-university sort of way, white hair, books in hand, did a little dance number as he walked past, enjoying the attention, as did a tiny girl. Another pair stood directly in front of the actors, blocking our view entirely, and pointed to our smirking amusement, unable to figure out why everyone was suddenly looking right at them.

The story itself was not particularly arresting, an (unconfirmed) awkward drug-deal that didn’t go anywhere, tense, interesting and fun without being captivating, but I loved how simply the production premise transformed the beautiful, though otherwise mundane space into a gloriously semi-anonymous stage. It reminded me of what flash mobs have evolved into, groups of people participating in what seems to be something completely random to anyone not in on the event. Invisible theater. Pillow-fights, flash-freezing, going without pants on subway trains, silent dance parties. Especially silent dance parties, but with an extra level, as we were only passively participating, yet could be mistaken for a performance all our own when we laughed in unison at apparently nothing.

I saw another hyped show this week, Clark And I Somewhere In Connecticut. Heavily relying on video, it involves a man in a subversive, slightly creepy, caramel coloured bunny suit telling the story of a suitcase full of anonymous photo albums he found in an alley behind his home. Tied in with accounts of a famous Japanese cannibal and strange repeated interviews about a story of a puppy killing, the facts and fictions woven around the family history he reconstructed from the photo albums make for a fascinating narrative, as well as a perfect background for the legal saga that unfolded once he found the family pictures. The family that, unfortunately, did not want him to use the photos in any way whatsoever and threatened him with a lawsuit if he continued, which led into a very interesting exploration of copyright and the use of found images in art.

I felt somehow that it started out trying to be provocative, but ended with a catch in its voice, thoroughly sincere, as if it’s impossible to remain cynical or ego-less when dealing with such personal subjects. One of the books, for example, the fifth book, is devoted entirely to a poet Pomeranian, Mandy, who gets more attention than the other fourty years of family combined, and it was easy to tell that the artist who wrote and acted the piece, James Long, found something inescapably heartfelt about it. Though initially he mocked the dog-obsession with a wry condescension, his tone becomes compassionate, more serious as the emotions tied to the books become increasingly anxious and urgent. In the end the little dog is a showpiece, a fluffy little metaphor ferociously loved and compellingly protected. There were other choices I appreciated, like how, in order to avoid mentioning any of their names, he created complicated physical memetics for each one, like the patting of his breast to signify as the name of The Archivist, his title for the woman who seems to have put the books together. The tone was heavy water, but bright as an oil slick on a puddle. Michael tells me he’s booked it to play at the High Performance Rodeo next year. by then, we agree, it will be really worth seeing.

maybe I will find her at the PuSh closing party tonight

Stepping into the shower, something clatters to the floor of the tub. Immediately I step over the drain and check my ring, thinking I don’t have any earrings to catch in my hair anymore. The ring’s still there, circling my finger. Trying to look down finds me nothing, my eyes can’t focus as far as my feet so I lean out, snag my glasses from the counter, and try to check again. Steam makes them as useless as my eyes, so I take them off again, curse my childhood reading, and drop to my knees, squinting against my failing vision and the water falling. A second clatter, now I worry that I’ve broken something or that maybe a washer in the spout is failing. A plumbing problem to worry about, I don’t want that today. I have a show to go to, a day of sitting at a desk at work, maybe a loved one to visit and take care of. My hands sweep the ground, looking for answers. I’m not quite awake enough for this. Maybe I imagined it. Then I find them.

Two dollar coins are sitting next to my left foot, gleaming wet in the shower rain. My tips from bartending last night that I had tucked into my bra, forgotten, then slept on.

It’s been an anomalous week, full of antonymic events and discoveries. I just now, for instance, found out that Faun Fables, the group Mer‘s in, played at the Western Front this Friday. A show Michael was supposed to be at, where I was meant to meet him, except that he abruptly and unexpectedly came down sick. So there it is, a weirdly missed opportunity, (unless she’s still here, though I have no way of getting a hold of her if she is), sort of my week in a nut-shell. Good things, bad things, all mixed up, like a chemical chain diagram written by a second year student. Useful, comprehensive, but full of peripheral mistakes, dirty with a list of uncertain side effects.

life as therapy, a plague on the workhouse

Conversations like unsatisfied lovers, humming melodies around the truth, leaving dishes of promises over night to congeal into something a little more honest. All I can hope is for the best. I hold my head up, nod when it’s appropriate, smile like I don’t know precisely what will happen once the lights are off. I’m not a miracle. What they make of me isn’t even very real.

Violins sway, paint a pretty fabrication, a space built up like a palace of what they think I mean. Rescue, some sort of shift, a princess made of dragons who can take them away from the same scenarios they live day after day, shake up the routine, make it bearable, make it change. The foundations of fiction. Everything ideal, nothing unusual, nothing thought quite through. Such a shame.

I think to myself, this will be less, but at least for now we’ll be okay.