Month: March 2009

time to live

Amanda Palmer – Everybody’s Gotta Live

I’ve got a sudden photography gig tonight, very last minute. Nothing fancy, only a conference dinner sort of thing. People making speeches, possibly some accountants schmoozing after. Their photographer had to cancel to attend to a funeral, and Lisa was kind enough to recommend me as her replacement. In order to save them, I had to cancel my original plans to attend the Workless party party, but I figure it’s for a good cause, both for them and for myself. It’s been too long since I’ve had an opportunity fall into my lap to swoop in and easily excel at something, soothing panicked people happy. Maybe, if I’m lucky, I can still go dancing after.

COILHOUSE: Better than Coffee – The Flocking Behavior of Starlings.

camels aren’t that breakable (today I moved desks, so now I have a window.)

Sleepwalking through the calendar like a hollow teenage love song, this week has been difficult in new ways I should be used to, where I’m always a thousand miles away from everything around me, living under glass, behind my skin, too tired to remember there are different ways to feel. So instead I’m here, walking the line like Johnny Cash, beating my head against the virtual glass, wondering if I’ll ever escape or if I’m simply going to be always trapped here, only leaving in slow motion, in drips and dribbles, like an easily bruised fairy tale character only waking from sleep once a year, just long enough to take one bite of enchanted bread before my gray eyes slowly dim of electrical light again, filling instead with thinning, silvery cardboard dreams.

Out in the world, good things are happening:

Lung, who is back! in ! town!, won the grand prize in the photo essay portion of the Expose Your World contest, which means he’s just won a trip to Tasmania for him and Mel, a damned sweet lens and camera, and some being pinned to my bed as I noogie him into letting me borrow his “old” not-as-awesome-as-his-new-camera. (Also, rumour says Claire just won something prestigious over in France-land. Go Claire!)

David (Schwartz), through some esoteric process even more awesome than usual, is now a Nebula Award-nominated Author running against authors like Cory Doctorow, Ursula Le Guin, and Terry Pratchett with his novel Superpowers. (Take that Publishers Weekly, right in the fork!)

Eliza has a new painting featured in This Is The End, a California art show an hour south of San Fransisco, alongside the famous, yet improbably named Chet Zar. She’s also starring in Warren’s latest take-it-to-the-masses comic book, Ignition City.

Toren (and Jay) are presenting Toren’s 10th Annual Saturday Morning Cartoon Party at the Rio, complete with weird imported cereal like Frankenberry, Booberry and UK Chocolate Shreddies. I have it on good authority that if at least 30 people attend each one, it will become a regular thing.

Chris is starring in a circus show at the PNE Garden Auditorium, 1 pm and 7 pm daily, March 12-15, with the Avatar Circus Project, part of the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad.

Jason has a show of his oil paintings at the Exposed Gallery, 4225 N. 7th Ave, just north of Indian School, Pheonix, Arizona. Also, three of his paintings are in the current Phoenix New Times.

Back at the home front, most of my evenings have been spent glued to my dying computer, merrily aggravating my nigh terminal RSI by slogging through the thousands of photos my shaky computer has been threatening to delete, trying to rescue them, pluck out the best, and polish them up, because Kyle “freaking” Cassidy has asked that we put a book together.

what mash-ups are meant to be, when the medium is partly the message

thru-you.com, by Kutiman

Music + (Video/Sample) x Mash-up = Sexy

“What you are about to see is a mix of unrelated YouTube videos/clips
edited together to make ThruYou. In other words, what you see is what you hear.
Check out the credits for each video – you might find yourself…”


Unbelievable. Kutiman’s ambitious project, to create an astonishing album of meta-song videos slash home-sampled music made up of a ridiculously complicated collection of cleverly layered YouTube videos, is entirely successful. It sounds half-baked, especially given every song is a different genre, like the sort of thing an undergrad would try to throw together for a media studies class because it sounded relevant on paper and they could use words like “synergy” and “interscape” in the artist statement. Instead? It’s amazing and I’m thrilled. The videos are bloody brilliant, super impressive, as unexpected as they are incredible and compelling. As someone on StumbleUpon said, “I can’t favorite this hard enough.”

I’ve actually been trying to post this for days, but the site’s been down. Hit by too many people, Kutiman’s bandwidth went bork. Now that it’s back, set aside twenty minutes, turn up your volume, turn off your power saving screen settings, and expect to have your socks knocked off.

friends of so many friends

Crossposted from COILHOUSE, as Posted by Meredith Yayanos on March 4th, 2009:

Performer/Cyclist Hollis Hawthorne Needs Our Help


Performer/cyclist/activist Hollis Hawthorne. Photo by Alicia Sanguiliano.

There’s this awesome, beautiful gal I kinda sorta barely know through our many mutual circus friends here in the bay area; her name is Hollis Hawthorne. She’s a founding member of a cycling dance troupe called The Derailleurs, a fabulous velocipede-inspired dance team active in a bunch of bay area-based critical mass stuff. Their goal:

To educate and entertain audiences with the possibilities of alternative transportation. Our performances embrace critical inquiry that reaches beyond conventional thought and action. We promote radical self reliance and mine local talents to unearth their strength.

They’re wonderful and vibrant folks leading adventurous lives who are trying to affect some sort of positive change in their community. They smile and laugh a lot; they are very shiny people. To be honest, I rather envy them, most days. But not today:

Late last month, Hollis was traveling by motor scooter in Pondicherry, Tamil Nadu, India when something terrible happened. Some sort of freak hit-and-run accident that wasn’t her fault left her bleeding out on the side of the road with her boyfriend Harrison frantically performing CPR for 20 minutes before a van of German tourists picked them up and drove them to a hospital. According to her best pal Eliza, Hollis was wearing her helmet and driving very slowly at the time of the accident. I’ll spare you the gory details, but it sounds very bad. Now she’s in a coma in a rural hospital with a serious brain stem injury. (You know, that part of the brain that controls, um, everything?)

According to Harrison, who has been with her from the moment it happened, “there are huge rats scurrying around on the [hospital] floor. I am sleeping on the ant-covered floor outside her room as I am not allowed in and the water they have used for many procedures is not even purified.” When Hollis’ mom flew in from Tennessee a couple of days ago with emergency support from the US consulate to see her own daughter, the orderlies were dismissive and curt. “They are not observing her brain pressure and have done nothing to alleviate the swelling in her brain. These are things that can make or break her early on in her recovery and healing process.”

Through a series of fortuitous connections, Hollis’s case has been reviewed and accepted by Stanford Medical; one of the best hospitals in the world. As a charity case, even. (Just like me and most other starving artsy fartsies I know, Hollis has no insurance.) All we need to do is get her there. The friends and family of Hollis are reaching to everyone they can to raise funds to get her on an I.C.U. plane (aka air ambulance) to fly her back to California.

This is truly a matter of life and death. They need move her quickly as possible.

Before that can happen, Friends of Hollis must raise $150,000 dollars. They’ve already raised approximately $40,000. Can you spare a dollar, or five, or ten?

Yes, I know, life is risk, and life is uncertain. Life is also precious. If we can help someone in our community to come back from the brink, in some small way, we really should. Click here to help.

because my brain does stuff like that

One of my morning neighbors, those people I pass regularly enough in the morning to recognize, is a pleasantly unremarkable young man, taller than I am, with short reddish blond hair and a black jacket, who I never would have noticed except for his astonishing, perpetual grin and permanently glued on ear phones. He is thin, caucasian, and completely bland.

Somehow, though I am rarely there at the exact same time every day, and sometimes take a different route entirely, it is more likely than not that when I line up to wait for the light at Pender and Howe, he will be there too, smiling, facing me from the other side, oblivious to the entire world, trapped instead in whatever he is listening to that makes him so happy. He does not notice the traffic or the weather or the time, and only begins to walk when the people around him step forward into the street.

All that said, he still would not have made any impression upon my memory except that one day, the day I truly noticed him, I had a terrible, strong, and wrenching idea as we were passing each other in the intersection. I fancied that what played in his ear phones every day wasn’t music, but screaming.

February. Get ink, shed tears. Write of it, sob your heart out, sing, (Boris Pasternak)

365: 62 - 03.03.09
365: 62 – 03.03.09

His voice is almost convincing, “We could always try tantric sex.” Her mind races for a few seconds, failing to place the non sequitor with any current topics of conversation, before discarding the notion altogether. This is very obviously an entirely new discussion. She thinks about the last time she felt beautiful. Once, before, even in this bed. “Where was that question six months ago?” she asks, instantly wary, “I mean it. Where?” He stumbles, reeling, “I… I don’t know.”

In one white wooden drawer are her stockings. Fishnets full of torn holes, seamless black nylons with a back seam of flashing white rhinestones, purple velvet thigh highs that stay up without a garter belt, a pair of red and black vertical stripes with the toes danced out. Electric memories of sweat, ghosts as distant as England, as far as away as reaching out three feet and yanking on a bronze pull shaped like a vacant new moon.

She feels as acutely cold as surgery, like she’s splitting her arms open and only the bright dust of stars is spilling out. “I don’t mean to be insulting, repeating this,” she says, with a feeling akin to tearing off limbs, “but that was precisely the problem in the first place. I would tell you I need mental input more than physical attention.” She taps his forehead, trying not to walk away behind her eyes, wincing that he never once breathed poetry, “And you’d only try to answer with sex.”

Dreampepper this time but before: March 3rd in 2007.