Month: October 2008

using a telescope to find pumpkins

The world just got smaller again, Ben just did an utterly smashing cover for one of Pia‘s Dr. Who comics.

She’s actually going through a bit of a rough time right now, a close friend recently passed away from cancer, (she was sending us updates while we were away), so this is especially nice news. Help her out by voting for Y: the last man. I’m hoping soon we can get together again for coffee and ragging on the world, as the world so deserves. Any week now, David and I are planning on hitting up her husband Ian’s “Canadian Content” Urban Improv comedy night over in Kits, (every Monday at the Chivana Restaurant & Lounge), and buying them some commiserating drinks.

Until then, we’re mostly going to be staying in and being poor. David is an unemployed house-husband right now, (he lost his job to come on the trip), and my bank account is running scary low, especially as I may end up catching the entirety of the rent myself in November. I plan on setting up a photography space as soon as there’s room in the house, though, and selling prints for Christmas. I’ve got some concepts already sketched out that I’m really looking forward to bringing into being. Shots with white and red and metal, symmetry and pop. The house is too much of a mid-move disaster to get started, but soon, I’m hoping, soon.

In other news, my Hallowe’en costume is a go. I bought a lion tamer costume off eBay, a little ditty that comes with a corset with tails, (100% of my costume choice motivation right there), which saves me having to make one. I’ve always loved Hallowe’en and making my own costumes, but this year, I just hit a wall. Being back east in cities that actually celebrate Hallowe’en was just too much for me. Now I’m here, I want quick and dirty access to the joy that is dressing up. I don’t want to have to stay up until three in the morning figuring out a pleat, pins in my fingers, chalk in my hair, in a city that just doesn’t really care. I’m done with it. Time to simply give in to consumerism – keep the car running.

Images from Bernie Wrightson’s FRANKENSTEIN

can’t wait for the parade of lost souls

A close-up of a wet leaf taken by “Sophie” with a Canon Powershot A610,
from Wired.com Editor’s Choice Macro Photo Gallery.

My Own Private Tokyo, by William Gibson

Nuit Blanche was one of the most positive experiences I’ve ever taken part in. I came out of it exhausted, but feeling newly born. Slumped at a table at the Gladstone Hotel, trying to pull up the blinds behind my eyes long enough to focus on a breakfast menu, I was as useless as a corpse at a dance party, yet feeling better about the world than I had in a very long time. Merciful hell, it was good to be home.

Being back in Vancouver is harsh. My daily bus-route takes me through the heart of Crackton, where junkies scream in the streets, collecting like politics destroyed, running into traffic, swearing for Jesus and mercy and junk. Used needles collect in the gutters and hide in the cracks of the sidewalk, shattered plastic a lot like the people, waiting for someone to care enough to pick them up. There are always police cars, as persistent as the obscene graffiti and greasy breath of the people who cage rides on the bus, bags of found cans and bottles slung over their shoulders, teeth missing, spider prints of tracks inside their arms. Before I left, I was used to it, but now, having spent a few weeks in places more civilized, where such ghettos are unheard of, it’s grating at me again, like it used to years ago, before I became acclimatized.

7 things you thought you could recycle, but can’t.

As a result, I can feel myself hiding, taking refuge in my apartment and the changes within it as we prepare for David moving in to replace Karen, who’s moving out to be with her boyfriend too. Narratives converging. We spent most of Monday moving in nine bookshelves bought on Craigslist that we’re going to use to convert Karen’s bedroom into a library for our fourty boxes of books. I know it’s not quite escapism, we’re doing something useful, staying in, but that’s not what it feels like as I consider my morning commute to work through the blown out neighborhood that abuts the downtown.

Men with tangled beards, muttering about tangled affairs, clawing at their stomachs as drug cravings tear at their insides. Women in miniskirts, scarred down both sides, prostitutes who look like they’ve survived explosions, who might have been only thirty once, maybe even just last year. Children dragged behind single mothers in lycra and t-shirts, fed sugar water and kraft dinner, skin pocked with malnutrition because the school system doesn’t care enough to feed them when the parents can’t afford to. Cat fighting in the alleys, pushers and johns, addicts and the crippled that our health care system left behind. (There’s even an entire genre of YouTube videos which involve semi-drunken suburban college boys cruising through in their cars, pointing cameras out the windows, with soundtracks that consist almost entirely of “holy fuck, lookit that!”). There’s nothing else like it in Canada. It’s heart-breaking, skin thickening, horrific, and one hundred percent howling day to day.

Yet, somehow, Vancouver got picked for the 2010 Olympics. Hope all you Canadians are voting today.

artpost: how awesome is that?

I adore my in-box. This just came in from a sculptor friend of mine, Chris Hausbeck:

046

This coming Saturday, October 18th my assistant Dawn Exton and I will introduce the massive mechanical sculpture ‘Inside Hausbeck’s Head-Keeshen Delight No.9’.

All are invited to join us starting at 5:00 until 10:00 for a reception and close viewing of the mechanism.

This mechanism will propel a 500 lb. clown head to a height of 50 feet out of the top of a 150 year old grain silo on the grounds of Wild Bill’s Nostalgia on rt. 3 in middletown, ct. (map)

We have constructed a giant 1200 lb. device, counter weighted with a twisted ball of steel, bone, glass, wood and implements of destruction rising and falling twelve feet through the floors.

Attached are some images and a more complete story in my flickr set.

install day 097


I sincerely hope all will be able to join us for this monumental event and help celebrate this amazing sculpture.

Cheers, Chris Hausbeck

(not) a tragedy starting to happen

A map of breaking news.

Prairie sliding past in the dark, giving the illusion of being in orbit, five feet above the ground.

David and I are back in Vancouver, spending the weekend entirely on house things – putting away our clothes, doing laundry, dishes, clearing out furniture, swapping out my monitor, putting up curtains, acclimatizing the cats to the rabbits – preparing space for him to move in. It’s interesting, how I can hear doors slamming shut all over my future while we do this. I know, given all the options, this is the best possible decision we can make right now, yet still, it’s unnerving. Whispers of change, of stability, less possibility of incipient chaos creeping, cheerfully twisting my days like promises. Bridges burning. A day-job, a live in partner, multiple pets. My number up at last, or again, depending. Back against the wall by choice, the blindfold thrown away, considering a final metaphorical cigarette. Sunlight.

itinerary-ary-ary

Scientists have discovered the monogamy gene.

“Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment.” Buckminster Fuller

Yesterday was my sixth month anniversary with David. To celebrate, we went for La Cafeteria for breakfast with Michel, picked up the now-fixed polished aluminum deer head we brought for Christine, (a bit of antler broke off in transit), did our laundry, had pumpkin spiced hot chocolate, went for a delicious pick-your-own-pasta dinner, met with Mélanie and Mike Kitt, then for pie with them and Michel, and decided to move in together.

Nice how I slipped that in, hey? So yes, when David and I return to Vancouver this week, no matter that he just moved, we’re moving him again, this time into my place as Karen leaves for Main St. We’ll be a house of two people, two cats, a rabbit, and a library. I’m strangely looking forward to it, even with the pre-knowledge of Just. How. Heavy. His. Book. Boxes. Are. No one’s ever moved in with me before, not really, not for more than a couple of weeks. I’ve always moved in with them, the proverbial them, the lovers, partners, the boys/men. I think it’s going to be interesting, and less of an adjustment than I might suspect.

Today we’re getting on a train to Toronto with the glorious Christine, who last night came home from work dressed as a sexy ninja, because that is how awesome she is. Once there, we’ll be meeting up with my fellow-monarch-in-bad-timing Shane Koyczan, who just happens to be in Toronto this weekend, and painting the town some sort of appropriate colour, as I glory in being home for a weekend.

For the double-plus, Nuit Blance is running this weekend, so the current plan is to hang out glorying tonight and most of Saturday, then spend as much of Saturday night as humanly possible wandering the all night arts festival with Shane and the funtastic duo that is Zaiden, Will and Mellissa, before breakfasting somewhere delicious and catching an early Sunday morning bus west, back towards Vancouver.