“We had an idea. Got to a place. Ask 50 people the same question. Film their responses.”
If you could wake up anywhere, where would it be?
By the end of the day, what would you wish to happen?
Month: March 2009
appreciate what you have
It used to be that I heard certain songs and a sweet pang of memory would spring through my body, uncoil between my legs, hold my hands like grace, and I would unconsciously close my eyes, breathing in what it was like to be there with him, the depth and width of us. The liquid vowels of his voice, the way he said my name, as if it were a word made of quicksilver instead of a single clumsy syllable, drenched in adoration the same way he could pull me out of my body by sliding his fingers through the roots of my hair.
It seems now that I can’t relate, that I’ve drifted too far away. All I’ve got left is a cavity where all that used to be, hollowed out enough I can shout into it and not even hear a replied echo. Where did those mellow afternoons go? Those fantastic grins? Does this happen to everybody? I look up the names of the chemicals responsible for love and wonder if I’ve just been running out. Somewhere I have a photo of myself that I’ve never looked at, sitting alone in his bed, destroyed, taken the same day I left a line of poetry in lipstick on his mirror, the same one I wrote on his skin in ink the day he left me, the only evidence I could bear to leave, even though I knew he would wash it away.
you know it’s bad when I’ve gone pale (that said, thank you for dinner)
The Periodic Table of Typefaces
So there in the restaurant, we’re happy and chatting. Good conversation with good company stretches on forever in front of us, much like the demolished plates of food covering the table, when disaster strikes with sensory missiles of purified hate, as the waitress passes in assassin black carrying a serving of something piscine.
I fled for the door faster than light. Outside and away, fresh air, into the rain. Standing still, clutching the rail, letting it hold my weight, I felt better immediately. Then it started to snow. To hell with this, I thought, held my breath and ducked back in. When I left again, still wracked with gut wrenching spasms of fighting reverse peristalsis, I was more prepared. I had my coat, a shawl, two scarfs, and a book. Fifteen minutes or twenty went by before everyone else had finished. A good read.
Now I’m at home, randomly doubling up as my body attempts to cough up the sick rich smell of fish. It’s uncomfortable, to say the least, and I think I just tasted blood. It’s bloody lucky I didn’t accidentally eat any or else I would be too sick to sit up enough to write. My entire weekend would be a miserable write-off. I would be in the bath, poisoned, running hot water, shivering, and possibly hallucinating my death.
Oh sushi, my bane, how vile, how cruel, that you are always the most popular gig in town. You look so damned pretty, glittering just so, arranged delicately, carefully, dotted with a gemstone snow of roe, and yet you make my stomach attempt to turn inside out like a starfish’s stomach, wet and acid and deadly.
Just a note to the internet: Don’t call me tomorrow during the morning.
one of my employers accused me of being affiliated with criminal terrorists
365: 67 – 08.03.09
Reading Vellum, a book mixed in dark Sumerian myths that mentions a childhood spent in Slab City, I feel the world is held together with cellophane, that everything touches a clear film of shared experience; a theory continually upheld by strange synchronicities and fantastical, personal proofs, as I perpetually discover that the people out there I’ve never met, but read about, turn out to have been next to me all along, living only ever one singular person away.
sing!
Oh My Lawless Mercy, MAH COMPUTER HAS BEEN SAVED!
We stayed up until four o’clock this morning duplicating my data to the super amazing off-board drive of terabyte awesomeness that Ray gave me, wiping my computer clean, then installing everything fresh. My computer is a jewel again, sparkiing in the sun, flawless and beautiful. He even whished out all the cat furred dust bunnies that had been clogging the fan. It’s not even plugged in yet, I got in too late this morning to spend the spaghetti time, but I already feel reborn.
You know what this means? This means I can bloody well work on my photography again!
I didn’t dare, before, at the risk of losing anything I opened. It was terrifying. Mail archives going back to 1992, phone numbers, music, writing, media.. everything was at risk, held hostage. (“Fuck the cloud“). My computer was in that dire a state. First it stopped seeing my disc drive, which meant no more burning DVD back-ups, then my photoshop wouldn’t save, then nothing Adobe would even open, then I couldn’t open any files from 2006, then, worst of all, if it froze while I was copying/moving anything, anything, whatever I was trying to back-up would vanish into the ether, never to be seen again, not even in DOS. It plateaued there for a few weeks in that purgatory land of uncertain files while I desperately ran malware-security scan after malware-security scan, purging the evils as best I could, before finally hard crashing so violently it would take out the internal clock. I’d have to reboot three times to get through my mail.
Curator Michael Wright with the first fully functional working model of the Antikythera Mechanism.
how I live halfway
Bre Pettis and Kio Stark’s “Cult of Done” manifesto via bOINGbOING:
1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
3. There is no editing stage.
4. Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
7. Once you’re done you can throw it away.
8. Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
11. Destruction is a variant of done.
12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
13. Done is the engine of more.
Frank is putting the moves on my computer tonight, bringing it back from the steely edge of death. Once that’s finished, I am taking these rules and turning them into a nifty desktop wallpaper, to make certain for awhile that I see them every day.
Currently my home desktop is a gentle sepia photo of a young girl with a fluttering dove, an anonymous photo of a magician’s assistant, beautiful and inspiring. Before that was Let’s Keep This Party Rolling, a New York City photograph by Rodney Smith of a couple kissing on top of a fleet of taxis. What’s yours?
good industrial design is a beautiful, beautiful thing
(and chevre. chevre fixes everything else)
Secret Film School is presenting The Red Violin tonight. 400 West Hastings st. Doors at 6:30, Film at 7:00.
Met up with Lung for lunch at the Art Gallery today, my favourite downtown cafe. (He’s selling prints cheap right now. I recommend you jump on it while you have the chance.) We talked about girls, boys, travel, the friends we have in common and left with the strong conviction there are very few ills that a perfect tiramisu cannot fix (or at least delay).
images I keep
365: 65 – 06.03.09
It snowed here yesterday. Gigantic flakes, as big as my entire eye, in clumps the size of small birds. It was almost scary, how fiercely cold it suddenly was, how blindingly white. It felt like being in another country or traveling through time. January, 1993. Somewhere in the city, I am smaller, cold, looking out a window, ignorant that another version of myself is out there somewhere, speeding along in a vehicle with friends I couldn’t imagine having, to an apartment in a city where I would never believe I’m still living. Vancouver translated by the weather into a monochrome model of itself, a ceramic Christmas display for sale in the back of a Family magazine.
Oddly, even as the clouds blotted out anything farther than a block away, yesterday’s dry blizzard had me feeling more connected to the rest of the world, as the entire weekend was filled with reports of freak weather from friends all over this corner of the globe. San Fransisco mildly buried, Seattle laughing out in lightning and unexpected cold, cascades of vintage soap flake perfection drifting through New York. It let me wake feeling lighter today, glad that the trees were still heavy with thick cotton drifts of white, even as everywhere else the streets were melting back to damp black, leaving the sidewalks naked of everything but the usual ragged polka dots of spit out chewing gum.
Because of the snow I witnessed a beautiful thing today: flakes falling powdery out of a tree’s branches, (limbs sketched in charcoal strokes against the downtown morning), like a small, perfect, localized winter, the circular width of a dream.
things that are awesome #450986
Former NiN Drummer Takes Album Promotion A Step Further:
$500 (limited edition of 15)
– Signed CD/DVD and digital download
– T-shirt
– Signed cymbal and sticks
– Meet Josh in Venice, Calif., and go floating together in a sensory-deprivation tank (to be filmed and posted on YouTube)
– Dinner at Sizzler (get your $8.99 steak and “all you can eat” shrimp on)$1,000 (limited edition of 10)
– Signed CD/DVD and digital download
– T-shirt
– Signed cymbal, drum head and drumsticks
– Josh washes your car OR does your laundry … or you can wash his car
– Have dinner with Josh aboard the Queen Mary in Long Beach, Calif.
– Get drunk and cut each other’s hair in the parking lot of the Long Beach courthouse (filmed and posted on YouTube, of course)$2,500 (limited edition of 5)
– Signed CD/DVD and digital download
– Get a private drum lesson with Josh, or for all you non-drummers, have him give you a back and foot massage (couples welcome)
– Pick any 1 member of the Vandals or Devo (subject to availability) to accompany you and Josh to either the Hollywood Wax Museum or the lunch buffet at the Spearmint Rhino
– Signed DW snare drum
– Take 3 items of your choice out of his closet (first come, first serve)
– Change diapers and make bottles with him for an afternoon (after hitting the strip club)…
$10,000 (limited edition of 1)
– Signed CD/DVD and digital download
– T-shirt
– Signed DW snare drum from A Perfect Circle’s 2003 tour
– Josh gives you a private drum lesson OR his and hers foot/back massage (couples welcome, discreet parking)
– Twiggy from Marilyn Manson’s band and Josh take you and a guest to Roscoe’s Chicken ‘n’ Waffles in Long Beach for dinner
– Josh takes you and a guest to Club 33 (the super-duper exclusive and private restaurant at Disneyland located above Pirates of the Caribbean) and then hit a couple rides afterward (preferably the Tiki Room, the Haunted Mansion and Tower of Terror)
– At the end of the day at Disneyland, drive away in Josh’s Volvo station wagon. It’s all yours … take it. Just drop him off on your way home, though, please.$20,000 (limited edition of 1)
– Signed CD/DVD and digital download
– T-shirt
– A signed drum from the 2008 Nine Inch Nails tour
– Maynard James Keenan, Mark Mothersbaugh from Devo and Josh take you miniature golfing and then drop you off on the side of the freeway (all filmed and posted on YouTube)
– Josh gives you a tour of Long Beach. See his first apartment, the coffee shop on 2nd Street where his buddy paid Dave Grohl $40 to rip up tile just weeks before joining Nirvana. See the old Vandals rehearsal spot, the liquor store he got busted at using a Fake ID when he was 17 (it was Dave from the Vandals’ old ID). Go check out Snoop Dogg’s high school. For an extra 50 bucks see where Tom and Adrian from No Doubt live. For another $25 he’ll show ya where Eric from NOFX and Brooks from Bad Religion get their hair cut.
– Spend the night aboard the Queen Mary and take the “Ghosts and Legends” tour. (Separate rooms … no spooning.)
– Josh writes 2 songs about you and both are made available on iTunes and appear on his next record (you can sing back up on ‘em, clap, play the drums, triangle, whatever)
– Drum lesson OR foot and back massage (once again … couples welcome and discreet parking available)
– Pick any 3 items out of Josh’s closet$75,000 (limited edition of 1)
– Signed CD/DVD and digital download
– T-shirt
– Go on tour with Josh for a few days
– Have Josh write, record and release a 5-song EP about you and your life story
– Take home any of his drum sets (only one, but you can choose which one)
– Take shrooms and cruise Hollywood in Danny from Tool’s Lamborghini OR play quarters and then hop on the Ouija board for a while
– Josh will join your band for a month … play shows, record, party with groupies, etc.
– If you don’t have a band he’ll be your personal assistant for a month (4-day work weeks, 10 am to 4 pm)
– Take a limo down to Tijuana and he’ll show you how it’s done (what that means exactly we can’t legally get into here)
– If you don’t live in Southern California (but are a U.S. resident) he’ll come to you and be your personal assistant/cabana boy for 2 weeks
– Take a flying trapeze lesson with Josh and Robin from NIN, go back to Robins place afterwards and his wife will make you raw lasagna