n: vb: the spice of imagination
Ignite, a Puncture Vine CD Cover, painted by Canadian illustrator Robert Carter.
Other personal favourites include, Halo, Crack!, Sgt. Shakespeare, Unraveling Fire (boy), Inner Dialogue, and Black Gold Or Green Earth.
Prints and commissions are available through his website, Cracked Hat.
Found through Thefunnyweb.com, which has a nice collection of his work posted here.
Lung‘s other best friend, Melo, is in from Montreal this week, so last night we took her to some of our favourite places, starting with a delicious dinner at Phnom Pehn, moving on to dessert at Cloud 9, (where the food is expensive and terrible but the view is unparalleled), and ending the evening with a late night drive around Stanley Park, stopping to take tourist pictures on the seawall in the dark. I think she’s wonderful. Not only is she incredibly fun, she looks like a Russian fashion model, tall, and solid, with the sort of black cut hair and pointy-toed boots I’d expect from a Red Mob girlfriend in a William Gibson short story.
Today he’s taking her to Granville Island Market, the LuluLemon store, (she wants to shop), and possibly the Museum of Archeology. Does anyone know if there’s any Giant Sequoia trees within a day’s drive? I’m fairly certain they’re all either on the Island or down in California, but she says she read something about local ones. Apparently she’s never seen any truly massive trees before and really wants to see some trees bigger than anything else alive, as if real mountains versus Mt. Royal wasn’t enough size shock.
Tonight David and I are going to the Pay What You Can premiere of Letters from Lithuania, a Mortal Coil Performance Society production at the Stanley Park train, before catching up with them again.
Based on a true story, originator and performer Bessie Wapp recounts: “For generations, my ancestors lived in a small Lithuanian village called Varniai. Fleeing from the pogroms of Europe, my great, great grandparents immigrated to the United States in the later 1800’s. Of the large extended family who remained in Varniai, only a young mother and her three daughters survived World War II. After the war, they were reunited and the mother wrote to the only living relative she knew of, her brother-in-law in South Africa. But she didn’t hear back. Twenty years passed, and then word came from the son of the brother-in-law in South Africa. While sorting out his recently deceased father’s belongings, he had found her letters. But they were unopened: his father had kept them for 20 years but had never read them.”
And as if that isn’t fascinating enough, it features friends who are A+ performers, stilt-walking, shadow puppets, and a klezmer band on a miniature train. How could anyone say no? I don’t think there’s a better ticket in Vancouver tonight.
“Get ready for 96 glossy, full-color pages of art, photography, music, fashion and literature. In this issue, the stark android beauty created by Andy Julia for our cover is counterbalanced inside by his elegant portfolio of vintage-style nudes. Coilhouse travels to Ljubljana, Slovenia (literally! we actually went!) to interview Laibach, while singer Jarboe tells war tales from her career post-Swans. Photographer Eugenio Recuenco contributes a lush 10-page portfolio and interview, while Clayton James Cubitt delivers a poignant, visceral spread (again, literally) on the topic of genital origami. Renowned science fiction author Samuel R. Delany shares an exclusive excerpt from his forthcoming novel, “From the Valley of the Nest of Spiders,” while our first installment of “All Yesterday’s Parties” digs up forgotten party photos from eras long gone, starting with London’s Slimelight circa ‘95. Fans of WZW and Z!ST will love Zo’s fashion pictorial, in which she reconstructs a Galliano outfit on a budget. Pop-surrealist Travis Louie gives us a glimpse of his inner monster, and cult painter Saturno Butto has some medical fun at the expense of Catholics everywhere. All this, and much more – including supervillain how-to’s, Coilhouse paper dolls, interviews, fashion and art await.
Readers of the blog, we have another treat just for you: the fact that the version of the magazine that you are buying here today will not be available in stores. Coilhouse will be in stores this fall, it won’t be the unique version that’s available here. On this site, and on this site only, you can get the uncensored edition. This version includes a powerful piece that was too risqué for stores to accept without problems due to the graphic (and in our opinion, beautiful) images involved. Only 1000 copies of this very limited version exist – a mere fraction of the entire print run. And that version is only available here, on this site. When we run out, we’ll start selling the censored version that will also be available in stores – so get the limited edition copy that we call the “true version of the magazine” while we still have them!”
My deepest and most sincere congratulations to Mer, Nadya, Mildred and Zoe.
Listening to the Kronos Quartet covering Sigur Ros’ Flugufrelsarinn, music as quiet, rich, and thick as the calm pumping of blood. Sound like running hands over sheets, straightening them out on a September morning, as leaves fall outside, golden and red and silent in the gutters. I’m letting the cello soothe out the jangled nerves of today’s news, of going to bed at three and waking up at eight to the telephone ringing with police on the other end wanting to talk about permits and crowd size and kids running around with replica guns.
Karen is considering moving out the end of October. She misses Main St, hopes to find a nice flat there, something vintage with wooden floors and windows that get stuck when it rains. I’ve been worried about her lately, she’s been absent from the house a lot, and I know her family isn’t as supportive as they could be, little things that add up into hoping she’s okay, so it’s nice to know that she’s well and together enough to keep on top of things. Plans will coalesce, they will calcify, they will become fact. It’s one of the nice things about living, how we continue to change and transform and become more of who we are as we become who we think we need to be. I hope that wherever she finds, she gets to paint her room again, whatever shade of light, minty lime green she likes best.
David will be moving soon, too, though more immediately, at the end of the month. No longer will he be staying with me as his place becomes piles of boxes full of books, instead the two of us will be staying up too late, unpacking his life-things into a nice, wine coloured room in a big house across from the Ridge Theater on Arbutus. I’m looking forward to it. I’m going to teach him how to make really nice, to-the-ceiling cinderblock shelves, (remember to pad the ends of the blocks with hidden felt), and lie in the garden with the rabbits hopping on leashes as the city drowns around us in every day, ordinary life. I might not have very much passion these days, but I can see putting a mild time aside for just that sort of thing, and being okay.
The Swedish Chef, Gonzo, Beaker, Sam The Eagle, and Statler & Waldorf now have YouTube accounts.
Colour photographs of 1930’s America.
Not having a camera is beginning to kill me in tiny paces. It’s been two weeks, but I still reach for it every time I leave the house. I wake up at night, ideas battering like moths inside of my skin, things I want to do, but can’t do anything about. I need a miracle, an oracle to sweep out of the clouds and tell me what to do. Stand over the smoke, hallucinate, find another way to make money, another way to try and get my equipment capabilities back. It’s always a matter of money. Living under debt, everything is a negative, everything is already earmarked to go to someone else. All pay-cheques are split in half, and then there’s a line-up of other hungry details. Rent, utilities, cat supplies, groceries, always in that order. After that, when I’m lucky, I find a sale on something tiny I can use to improve the house. Plus, too, I’m trying to figure out how to pay for a trip back east to see Katie and maybe stop by Montreal for a visit. Work will let me take two weeks as long as I can work remotely, but then I’ll need a lap-top with net, something else currently out of reach.
Early 20th c. George Eastman House photos now on Flickr
Not having photo ID has become crippling as well, in strange little ways I never thought about before. A friend is coming in to Seattle from NZ, and I want to see him very much. We’ve known each other for years and never had a chance to hug. I worry my ID won’t arrive in time. It’s in the mail, ready to arrive any day now, but never today. Weeks of waiting, of being in limbo, not existing to any institution larger than a penny. At the ER, the administration and I had to weave a path back almost ten years of phone numbers and addresses to discover I exist, answering esoteric questions about street names and parental middle names in order to prove I’m not masquerading, a foreign impostor with a damaged foot, trying to ride the system for free. (For the record, I’ll be fine in a few days. No bones were broken, the muscles were “merely crushed,” said the doctor with a smile.) I can’t imagine what hoops might exist at the border, what strange marks would be made on my record if I arrived without picture ID. It’s bad enough crossing the line without a passport, trying without an image, a government shot of what I look like nervous in the ICBC office, is beyond me.
Nuclear Sunset, (2007), a screenprint produced for a university project by designer and illustrator Dan Mumford.
David now has a livejournal, bunnihead. He’s only written one post so far, but I’m sure more will follow, and he shows promise. Everyone please welcome him to LJ-land!
Over three thousand people signed up. Not only were we the first major Zombiewalk, we may be about to become the biggest.
