Happy Birthday!
not dead for teh win
Tag: angeles
I called him last night at 3 a.m. Somehow, I thought he’d be more awake.
I was working over at Alastair’s the last couple of days. Not at home, yet still, it’s up for argument.
His place is a gentle time-warp, like a mirror only vaguely curved. I hear whispers of old conversations in what we say now, as if once we lived downtown and everything that’s been past is only traffic on the other side of the door, or as if our time apart was only a phase in an ongoing relationship that was never broken. Then I go outside.
A false sense of summer – barefoot, wet and warm, heat without end, amen – saturates the Drive. Unbidden, the words to PASSION spring to my brain and I chant it to myself in time with my footsteps as I cross the street. Reine’s sister stops to say hello, I’ve only been out the door less than a minute.
Back inside, music on, old records I remember spinning in the old eastside studio – Kid Koala, NinjaTunes, DJ something-spelled-with-a-K. I remember dancing all night. We would stay up, bass loud, crashing into the windows, making them shudder like glass drum-kits. Talking about the parties we were going to host, talking about the next gig, the latest thing the kids were into. The phone was perpetually ringing and the paintings on the wall never sold.
The Boy will be here tomorrow.
“… allow me to present Koreans sublimely breaking, scratching and beat-boxing a cover of Pachelbel’s Canon in D, (hosted on the always awesome Transbuddha). With thanks to dear Larry for digging it up, I’m wondering if anyone has any leads on whatever else this group has done. I love dignified cultural mash-up’s. I think taking stylistics that evolved from the South Bronx in the 1970s and combining it with a gayageum cover of a baroque german composer is possibly even more brilliant than Dr. Fu Manchu, rocking out on Casio synthesizers.
Similarly beautiful to the Korean clip is the riveting UK promo for the tv show LOST set to Portishead and enchantingly directed by David LaChapelle. (LaChapelle is the man behind Rize, the recent must-see hip-hop documentary). It reminds me of Massive Attack’s video for KarmaComa…”
I need to involve myself with a writer again
Looking for a Green Light: “Lighting is a greedy user of energy, and public projects can be particularly heavy consumers. But many lighting designers are in fact trailblazing the use of low-energy technology.”
I sent you a letter with only one word, Hold. A train ticket word for long distances, a place to put your baggage, to put your arms, the embrace awaited, wished for, forgotten. I picture us as if through the lens of a camera, floating in glassy space, anchored by places we have been, where I have touched you, streets that have been warmed by our breath. It is as if an echoed copy of you is still here, imprinted inside the tiny fractures we left on reality with the molecules of our voice, our motion, simply waiting for you to come home. We are clips from some greater film, the title of which is beyond me. (Before the screen, there was the stage.) I think of our constant tired laughter and your sly technical hands, the way they drifted, fidgeting, up and down the hems of my skirts. My imagination wonders about the airport, wonders at my apprehension, (as it creates shaky lists of reasons why I might not like you again), asks why I feel so dreadfully shy.
I have been refusing to count down days; instead we are down to my Cassandra test of silence and all its implications. (Really we are down to fingers now, less the number of a clumsy butcher. I can feel my panicked heart constricting.) When, to combat my almost professional anticipation of misfortune, I sent you flowers, I irrationally felt like I had betrayed an unspoken agreement, yet my smile supernovae bloomed when I discovered the accompanying note had been garbled through a game of florist telephone. It was like discovering a new favorite song, transforming the simple into the sublime, with my eyes wide open.
I am looking forward to seeing you again.
Some electric companies have created tourist interest with their manatee populations. “… conservationists say the potential closure of aging electric plants is an unsolved problem for the survival of the species.“
“She takes from life, eating its words and minutes and licking her lips, not wanting to waste any, “
Paintings: The Seduction of Oedipus
It has been a struggle to sleep this week, and when I do, there has been no comfort in it. I dream of California, but not the California I had lived, full of bleak stories I tell now with terrible humour, but of the possibilities I could interpret from every building I walked past, their sunburnt lawns, every house a microcosm, every business an untold discovery, and the palm trees swaying almost shadowless to the sky, perfect emblems of hot modern fantasy lining every street.
I blame my current reading material.
Before I go to sleep at night, I read. Being a basic thing, there are variations, but it always the same pattern. Finishing with the computer, I turn off my lamp, plug in the ornamental lights, and snuggle in underneath them with my book. When I am done, I pull the plug. It is almost ritual, except that it carries no meaning. It is only the reputation of necessary movements, like washing dishes or putting on a shirt one sleeve at a time, that create the illusion of depth. Every day, the same ingredients.
This week I was reading White Oleander, a harsh book yet beautiful, set in Los Angeles. I am told it was turned into a film once, but I never thought to see it. Why are all my favourite books set in L.A.? Reminiscent of buying my fierce summer clothing on the boardwalk in Venice, they are almost always written by women, couched in some foreign manner of prose that still remains english, always reminding me so strongly of my own writing – as if I were to live there again, it would be my turn to write a book, something powerful and achingly frail, like the bones of the body that I miss so much. Visiting the wild beaches was like stepping into fairyland. A fairyland punctuated by stairs and people in cheap foam and plastic flip-flops.
there is always
I do not love you as if you were salt-rose or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that never blooms,
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers.
Thanks to your love a certain fragrance,
risen darkly from the earth, lives darkly in my body.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride,
so I love you because I know no other way than this:
where “I” does not exist, nor “you”
So close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
So close that your eyes close and I fall asleep.
-Pablo Neruda
The Boy is coming back for a visit near the end of June.
Bad grammar makes me [sic]
Summer is about to break upon the back of my birthday. I’ve been tracking the pulse of my cleaning with small packages I’ve been randomly sending through the post office. Some of them might not have been successful gifts, but it’s stimulating, and I tell myself it’s not a test. I dreamed last night that my room had finally been scoured clean; to see my shelves empty was like to see with a strange light.
As I’ve been dissembling the strata of my things, the waste and wrack of past romances has been floating to the surface from hiding places, inside the pale pockets of long lost envelopes or messily scribbled in the elusive margins and days of old calendars, and successfully distracting me. Sometimes it is only images, imagos, ghost trapped in a gesture or the form of a book, as if these objects were merely receptacles for memory – a muted production line of manufactured what-if’s, to handle them is to release precise chemical triggers.. These letters and gifts, small inscriptions that say I love you my darling, my sly kitten cat, enjoy this, smile, until later, I love you, I cannot put them as easily aside in a pile like I do ticket stubs or Christmas lights, they arrest me, trap me in uncertain amber, instead. I do not know what to do with them. My practical reasoning says to let them go, recycle them, but would it be injustice? I hesitate. These once meant something visceral, but my emotions reach no immediate consensus. If I feel nostalgia, it seems to be really only a scented-hanky kind of nostalgia, the vague wish that clutters antique shops or even that cable documentary-type nostalgia for people and places I’ve never known, not a longing for the relationship we had, but a longing for our “relationship”. As if the letters represent the sort of dusky melodrama that movies and TV tell us we should want rather than most of what was actually experienced, day-long crying jags, sharp elbows that defiantly attacked me in sleep, or worse – a savage belief in astrology. Mostly I have been putting on cheerful California sunshine riff music, thinking of my delicious April, and spinning them out the door. However, once they are gone, they are gone – unrecoverable. When I am older, will they matter again? Will my feelings loop back, recursive, and successfully recapture the singing nervous system these words used to bring? I simply don’t know.
As the digital age reaches out to swallow more and more people, I find my papers feel less and less essential. I prefer the talismans I carry now, that are objects instead of words, useful as well as meaningful. Every day I wear a striped scarf that I stole, was given, took, carried, love, and still, a month later, it almost feels like something he has handed to me, as if underneath the black and gray wool, there is a way to continue to touch his hands, thread my captured fingers with his, or meet his eyes like seeing the playground wonder of the milky way again after spending years trapped under a city sky. It is not something I can imagine growing tired of carrying around, like these aging piles of paper, or consider putting into storage, a trait I find wasteful. It is true the memory connection will fade, as such things do over time, but the scarf will remain a scarf, cherished for its protection from rain and its soft ability to muffle the wind.
on the heels of the inevitable “I’m not in love with you” phonecall which always makes me spit black
Also:
To whoever it was so thoughtfully tucked the pair of condoms down next to my bed?
I am still smiling randomly on the street, I am trying not to wear my memories thin
It’s been discovered oral sex leads to throat cancer.
I wear a pin that carries a last kiss from a common name on the lid of my eye, around my neck coils a scarf that brought my fluttering wings back to life, my wallet is camouflage for how much I still love him, it lives in my witty black bag, the stain of two infidelities. I am armoured, the only one who can break my heart. Pieces and parts, twisting my hands in the sink, water running red, the lesson of a clothed walk through life. Things, how little of them are mine. Of course I want more, to have their voices rise with mine again, to create a rhythm of easy conversation, the happy patina of bitten tongues and worlds beyond words, but these are what I have; the way I wear my pocket watch on my wrist and cradled in the palm of my hand, my ear against the door of the sky, my permanently borrowed hat always the word No. There is no cavalry.
I leave the room, hear behind me, “she’s my brothers girlfriend.” remember to write. My surprise is mechanical. Shelter. I rest my head on his shoulder, let the flesh give substance to a ghost, and settle in.
What is passive? This is my kit, the way I wear a skirt, lipstick, stockings, the way I shift my hips against a close explosion or brace my feet when I swing to defend myself. Nothing to be scared of. The angles of these faces, lighting up on a street corner, attached sweetly to my memory, wear quietly. Composers, compositors, blocks of personal mythology, barely attached, like birds fluttering along a wire. I have never laughed so much in my life.
I like you more than I can say
It’s Too late To Say I’m Sorry the newest book from Joey Comeau of A Softer World.
Alastair‘s sister is visiting this week, so we have been rushing around cleaning and trying to make his apartment feel like a civilized adult lives there. Saturday we went to IKEA to buy furniture, so that meals may be eaten around a table, as grown-up’s traditionally claim they do. I’ve been joking that we should paint on coffee rings for added verisimilitude. He dislikes IKEA, but it doesn’t bother me, I like the futurism inherent in the company, (the IKEA catalogue is the only book printed in more languages than the bible), but it bothers him how they homogenize apparent individuality. As if in retaliation, he’s been threatening to go to Costco, which just makes my skin crawl.
Yesterday the Boy called to (accidentally) gloat about the warm L.A. weather, “I can even see the HOLLYWOOD SIGN FROM HERE.” (Here the sky remains a sheet of gray with occasional attacks of vicious rain. One shower smashed my umbrella and left me hiding under a tree for fifteen minutes.) He told me about a mylar balloon he watched escape from someone into the clear blue sky. He thinks he might be able to see Gerry and Suzi’s place from his building. I told him how my mother wants to do a motorcycle road-trip in his direction this summer. The idea of meeting my mother makes him nervous, which I understand, but still find amusing. His voice made my day, I think, as well a pleasantly delaying a return-a-wrong-thing trip to IKEA.
None of us can think of an appropriate name for the flavour of yuppie they are, these technocratic boys, only that it’s markedly different from the Gap-Shopping Two-Point-Three-Career stereotype that over-ran Joseph Epstein’s classic definition. (Originally yuppies were defined as “a market segment whose consumers are characterized as self-reliant, financially secure individualists who do not exhibit or aspire to traditional American values.” Values having shifted, thank you baby-boomers, the last bit has fallen off in the back-lash, leaving us with a cold vision of consumer based living.)
Caught in the middle of a surge in media and technological advances, they grew up generationally bilingual, technicians yet artists, geeky yet culturally aware, raised on computers and television but almost entirely lacking commercial influence. They’re like Douglas Coupland characters, but instead of remembering nuclear emergency classroom drills, it’s the Berlin Wall coming down and the birth of the internet in the mid-nineties. (Back when internet was capitalized. Remember Altavista?) They work specialized jobs within what they refer to as The Industry, be it Video Games, Television or Film, and though there’s a high burn-out rate, they continue with 100 hour work weeks, generally too busy for families or “proper” homes, because they are financially available for unusual or exciting experiences later. (Travel to foreign countries, Burning Man, etc.)
Any suggestions? James? You’re one of them too.
this was much harder to write than I thought it would be
Hair like clutching moss today, skin and energy slathered in exhaustion, I feel like I need to either sleep a week or force myself to run a marathon. Sasko asked where my beautiful man was, summoning a moment of all the electric chair ease I’m carrying from yesterday’s dream of the airport. Suddenly the full power of my newly absent desire clawed into my chest. After I caught my breath, pasted a half-lie of a smile on, I told him in return about how my last trip to L.A. was a disaster.
Walking into Compton, religious zealots, being kidnapped. A TV movie with no budget. I can’t help but picture him there, my strange and beautiful kindness, somewhere, graceful, smiling. Not the city, but the beach and an apartment I have never seen. Rolling out of bed to look the morning in the eye. Fishing in the sleeve of the yukata for a package or a lighter.
Yesterday he gave me money for a taxi back to the city, but I couldn’t think of anywhere I wanted to go, so I purchased a new ten dollar pocket watch instead to get change for the bus and watched as the minutes ticked past to his take-off.
Now I’m filling my days with make-busy tasks, as if my week were a small bottle to fill with the blood of a murder victim. When a chirping is heard, I’ll know I’ll have conjured my demon heart successfully. Usually invisible, she must be fed blood from my fingertips every day and in exchange, she will cause madness in whomever I desire. Enter writing, creativity, creation.
Or so I hear.