Tag: employment

this week’s favourite band: hymie’s basement

I’ve spent the majority of my day dissolving myself in layers upon layers of technical writing, business plans, copy edits, consultations, proposals, and articles, anything I could use for some concrete writing examples, and you know what I’ve discovered? That joke I have about living the majority of my life behind non-disclosure agreements is more true than I considered. I don’t think of documents as isolated work, but as it turns out, maybe I should.

Almost all of the design work I’ve done, the packaging, the clever promotions, even the press releases, are locked. Weeks of my life seem to have been swallowed up in what might be considered completely invisible work. Only the trashier articles are freely my copyright – the ghost-written fetish tartlet interviews, the essays on how the McCarthy Era is to blame for Japan’s end-of-the-bell-curve pornography industry – very little I would be comfortable shopping to prospective employers. ‘Course, I don’t show them here, either, for very similar reasons. (It’s the rare page that even carries my real name.)

Obscene interiors: terrible decor with invisible pornography.

Which brings me, (if sideways), to something Juan and I were discussing the other day, the self-referential use of digital cameras that’s begun to quietly permeate our culture. People will go dancing, bring a camera, take a picture, show it to everyone, pass the camera around, keep dancing, keep taking pictures, keep pausing to look at them. Micro documentation, preserving a moment while living it. Especially odd considering that these pictures don’t usually go anywhere and are rarely looked at again. They’re hard-drive space.

What I think is interesting is how people are beginning to tailor the way they act in public for things like photos they know will inevitably end up on-line. I have articles I sign with a pen name, which I thought was almost shallow of me, but apparently I’m not as self-conscious as I thought. I overheard a woman on the bus talking on her cell-phone the other day, passionately discussing how she only wears make-up if she knows there will be “technology types” at a party. She felt “liberated” that she was going to a “hippy house” where no one would have cameras.

Spaz.Mike had a nice little essay on post-scarcity that I feel relates, about how the web is bringing around the death of celebrity, a topic we hash out together with some regularity, and I’d like to take that a little farther and say that it’s taking what’s left and spreading it thin, sure, but it’s spreading it over us. Our personal narratives have become individual expression painted entirely by collective context. We have begun wearing the behaviour of miniature celebrities, even when we’re not aware of it. Our journals are quietly expanding their borders, leaking out into full scale multimedia presentations that saturate our real life social interactions, as if our constant connection to the network is warping us from observers into the content itself. We The Public learning to manage Being Public.

Me, I like it. What about you?

—
edit: speaking of celebrity vs. real people – Go vote for Mike as That 1 Guy! He’s almost at number one!

when this used to be my playground

The graveyard shift at the Dance Centre has turned out to be a gig baby-sitting a minirave. The people attending are all familiar, even the strangers, as their archetypes blend and shift and phase in one conglomerate whole, typical for this, marked with obvious accoutrements from west coast music fests. It’s been a long time since I felt part of this tribe, nevertheless, I know them.

I should have made a clothing based bingo card, mapped the psychographic ahead of time. Crystal jewelry, face-paint, dreadlocks mixed with braids, celtic knots, seams on the outside, elf tipped hoods, button up shoes. Bonus points for the guy who always arrives in a tuxedo and the girl who always looks like an army-boot goth with a glitter dot in the middle of her forehead, right in the spot where her third eye would be if only the drugs worked as perfectly as advertised.

last night I cried

Let me breathe. Let my breath stream past my throat and fill my heart and lungs. I have a graveyard shift Saturday night, then my regular Sunday night shift. I’m re-reading an article on neuromarketing and looking to maybe help edit the Devil’s Chord wikipedia page, trying to stay awake, but it’s not working. Already my body is shutting down around the edges, trying to put me to sleep. Dreaming has been fickle this week, so the chance to collapse without a morning feels too good to be true, but also like a trap. My alarm clock waiting in the stair-well, a knife in hand, shaving seconds off my heart, like the phone refusing to answer up the names and voices I want to hear.

I am relying on spell check to correct my substandard touch typing

A screw fell out of my glasses, which is leaving me the most helpless panicked thing I can actually be. I’m two points away from being legally blind without these things. I can’t leave the house without them and no matter how thoroughly I looked for the screw, it seems to be gone. Also, of course, if it FELL OUT, then the threads are too worn for me to actually put it back in with any certainty.

Ah well, I’ve found some copper wire in the back of a drawer, a really DIFFICULT thing to do when you’re blind, by the by, and now I think I can twist it through enough to keep the arm on safely enough for me to move around. Like, to an optometrist’s office, so I may stop feeling like I need to cry. Sheesh. So, yes, I called in at 7:30 trying to keep the I AM FREAKING OUT as much out of my voice as possible to say that “I will be late, I do not know when I will make it, if at all. kthnx call me” and so far they haven’t, though I was meant to be there at 8 a.m.

(I am taking a moment to try write this out as a way to steady my hands for this damned tiny fragile wire. Not that I can see the damned screen. Or the keyboard. Or more than two inches in front of my face.)

And now it’s 8:45. AND I AM MISSING OUT ON AN AWESOME DAY AT WORK.

BOO.

edit: 9:20 – wire snapped. more panic. breathing deep. trying again.

and I’m not sleeping well

Another afternoon breakfast of mysterious Vietnamese insta-noodle. It’s bland, uninteresting, and the only english on the entire bright packet is the word “chicken”, but I’m following the principle of It’s Good Because It’s Food, (ostensibly), similar to the late-night restaurant rule of It’s Good Because It’s Open. When I was little, I ate them dry as a treat, enjoying the novel way they crunched and then dissolved between my teeth. Now, every time I open one, slitting the brittle white plastic package with a fingernail, fishing out the spice pouches, I remember apocryphal stories about poor college students afflicted with scurvy or perishing of malnutrition after relying on them too long.

  • Top Ten Transhumanist technologies
  • Motionportrait animates still photos

    I cocooned exhausted into bed last night without taking out the rugged froth of fancy curls the hair-dresser on set perched on top of my head and didn’t notice until this morning when I tried to run my fingers through them. Yesterday was a tiring day. My first prom and it was twelve hours long. The whole production looked amazing, though. Two hundred actors as teenagers, some pretending, some not, dolled to the tens in a gymnasium decorated by Disney into an incredibly expensive high school prom. The lighting really made it, like a favourite movie seen on repeat, I couldn’t get tired of the clever colours. The whole thing was fantastic. I loved the shifting star-like spangles that warmly painted our strange, sequined velvet party people who sat down in silk, taffeta, and tuxedo clumps every chance they got. It had the disorienting, hallucinatory quality of a dream.

    • I just need you to tell me it’s okay

    help with what you can

    My cats turned one year old Oct. 11th. I missed it, I was on set from 6 a.m. until 10:30, then had to be back at 6 again the next day, so stayed at a friend’s house. This month, for the wonder that is TV-land, I have played a high-school student, a college student, an art teacher, a senator’s daughter, (wayward, of course, complete with musician boyfriend, hah), and someone waiting in line at the DMV. Next week I’m to mock-attend an upscale banquet at an international embassy, a prom, and an Irish pub.

    It’s lovely-strange, the background work I’ve been doing. Like a low level hum, I’ve been reconnecting with friends, making new ones, and generally being paid to be social. Other things have been neglected, though, and I hope to rectify that soon. Chores littered with hyphens, mostly, (house-work, copy-editing, e-mail…), but there are legitimately important things too. I need to write copy for Foxtongue that I don’t immediately delete with a sense of despair. Every time I read a finished newsletter out loud, I feel as if it should be crumpled into fish-wrap, and I promptly scrap it. I’m beginning to think I should have someone else over to write it, someone who could translate my nihilistic ranting on the project into something cohesive and actually useful.

    As Vonnegut said so succinctly, “There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”

    just another reason to miss l.a.


    From Hauser, Robert M. 2002. “Meritocracy, cognitive ability, and the
    sources of occupational success.”     CDE Working Paper 98-07 (rev).

    Two homeless men walk past, communicating in sign-language. The unexpected precision of their motion almost disqualifies how slum dirty they are, the grime embedded in their skin and under their milky fingernails, but not quite. Instead they resonates like a picture captured by Rodney Smith. “Summer is meant to be beautiful,” a woman says, glancing at them like gathering clouds. She is a flower exhaling, expensive hair, an overly embroidered skirt, antique shoes found cheap at the flea market. Standing next to her are t-shirts, endless t-shirts, in a marching line with distressed jeans, hand held out beside her, clever slogans faded by repetition into a koan against design, painted blue on green and white. The past history of her seasonal relationships, embodied in one exquisitely average boy.

    In 1908 a comet made up of loose dust and ice crashed into an ancient Siberian forest and flattened 2,150 kilometers of trees with a blast equal to 10-15 megatons, or 770-1155 Hiroshimas. It left no crater.

    On her first night here, as I was curled in bed on the edge of sleep, my new flatmate burst into my room swinging two black dildoes the length and girth of her forearms. “See! They’re wiggly!” she exclaimed, waving them at me like porntastic ninja weapons from an exploitation flick. They did, in fact, wiggle. Alarmingly. I fumbled for my glasses, not entirely certain what I was looking at, dread curiosity goading me, and asked if she could swing them like pasties. She gladly obliged, holding their toy-sword handles in front of her nipples and jumping that particular burlesque hop guaranteed to send them whizzing in dangerous black-cock circles. My two cats, already traumatized by their recent move into my apartment, were terrified.

    Warren interviews William Gibson regarding Spook Country.

    After coming within breathing distance of a recurring romantic interest role on Bionic Woman, I spent a full day at the Art’s Centre pretending to be front row centre at the MTV Music Awards with one hundred and fourteen other starfucker pretty extras. Sitting in gossiping rows at cafeteria tables up on the mezzanine floor, bored eye-shadow and disco-ball boots, we looked like a misplaced mini-dress scene from Massive Attack’s Karmacoma, glamorously capable of sudden surrealism. When it finally came time to shake ourselves out of our hours spent in the cruel, overly air-conditioned hall, we then stood at the foot of a light-lined stage for hours instead, with nothing to do but traffic in speculation about the shiny people above us who came close enough to casually inspect.

    One of the fledgling celebrities, recognized solely from a music video my last boyfriend worked on, was Avril Lavinge’s bass player. Blonde, unassuming, but monied, he looked younger than me. After a short discussion on the varying merits of different Les Paul’s, we settled into a conversation about the Avril manga recently produced by House of Parlance, the local publishing house that prints Shane’s poetry. He was enthusiastic, having just seen them in Hong Kong, prodding me to wonder at how far products travel and how lovely his life must be. I couldn’t imagine the scope of it, I said, and I meant it. I thought of L.A., the way the city looked from the plane, flying in. All those Spanish names strung together – Ana, Santa, Las, Los – dissolving. The groundbreaking scope of it. What that must be like every day for a solid week, but globally. Lights forever in every direction, always. When he was gone, I gave a short lecture on post-humanist body-modification, unexpected piercings, and RFID chips. “They take little shiny pieces of metal, implant them in your eye.” “Why?” “Because they can.”

    The term “futureshock” refers to a psychological state having to do with informational overload most easily defined as too much change in too little time. It is invariably tied to technological paradigm shifts and can be applied to individuals as well as societies.

    our production meeting went past midnight.

    How William Gibson discovered science fiction.

    He sits on my bed, talking to his mother on the phone, his car keys plugged into my computer, taxidermy birds at his feet, familiar with my room. I have already met his scientist father and taken pictures of them both. Possibly this makes me uncomfortable.

    We have been reacquainting ourselves after six years apart in the same city. It has been interesting, though unexpected. We are very different people than when we first spent time together in the almost perpetual darkness of the constant heaven threatening raves and parties that we used to work at. (We met, like Shane and I, (and Jacques and T. Paul), as part of the first incarnation of C.R.’s Fr8-train Land.) I think we have far more in common now than we ever might have then.

    Perched on the roof of his truck, we watched the night occlude the city from Spanish Banks and discussed stars and noise, art and engineering, information architecture, and how to wire lights to make bursts of sound, constellations of old ideas polished into new. When we drove back into town, swaggered into the bar, and kidnapped Shane to star-crash on my couch, it was like we completed a circle that took almost a decade to make.

    Human After All.
    History begins now.

    At work, my boy haunts the hallway from months in the past. A reflection of when we sat here over our greasy chinese picnic and laughed over chopsticks and our mismatched everythings. His eager grin and long legs folded, the mischief in his eyes conspiring against my cleverness. It’s difficult to be there some days. I catch my ears bent listening and I almost have to close my eyes against the superimposed image of his voice sitting next to me. He’s hung up the mirror-ball I gave him for his birthday and sent me a picture from L.A. It looks like the perfect accessory. As consolation, it beats a drum within me like the clapper in a bell. We had a good thing. He remains the happiest part of my dreams.

    Robert Silverberg on Philip K. Dick.

    These long summer evenings have been both good and bad for me. I’ve been getting up early, it being too sticky hot to stay in bed, but as the day molasses crawls down the windowpane of the sky, I don’t feel I’m accomplishing as much as I could be. I want to be as busy as sin, not living this meandering odd-jobs existence I seem to be dreaming up daily. Tuesday I’m on set again, but I haven’t heard about call-times yet. It’s still too early to say. My flashing re-boot of a film career is suffering from the drop in the American dollar. Crews are being pared down. It’s not as cheap to shoot here as it was five years ago. I’ve been keeping my fists up, but it proves to be difficult. The industry’s not being kind to any of us. It might be time to side-step into the Jolt and Doritos fuelled modern fortress of video games, like James wants me to.

    William Gibson explains why science fiction is about the present.

    feel free to invite other friends who may be interested in seeing the Pantages.

    Darren Aronofsky as interviewed by rollick over at The Onion.

    My friend Bobbi Styles is getting married this Saturday, and as soon as I received the news, I watched as a tiny part of my brain took over the task of what to wear to what has the potential to be an extraordinary event. (It wandered off into the distance and I haven’t heard from it since. I’m not worried, that bit can’t be integral to function). Bobbi was a music producer in Britain when the size of your immovable hair measured against the leather of your trenchcoat and summed with the depth of your eye-shadow gave you a measure of success. I seem to recall he worked with Duran Duran, to give you a better picture. There’s a video. (If you really must know, you can find it yourself). I’d link to his MySpace, but it sort of hurts. (It has The Hair in it.) However, he’s a very different man these days. His son, Tempest, is going past ten any day now, and he’s lived in Canada for almost as long as he lived in the UK. I’m not sure what to expect. I haven’t seen him in too long to guess.

    After that lovely event, work is finally sending me to the Rolling Stones Concert at time-and-a-half. Details have had a chance to devolve in the intervening weeks, regrettably. It doesn’t look like this will this garner me a free pass in anymore. The Stones people have changed their minds. Probably for ones with less drugs in them. Instead we’re standing outside and attempting to politely harangue passers-by into answering a survey. Missing Van Morrison feels a little like salt in a wound. I only ask that it doesn’t rain.

    And all of this means I’m going to miss the Pantages Tour.

    If you’re interested in theatre, Vancouver history, heritage restoration, community-building, the future of the Downtown Eastside, or all of the above, then it’s a bit of an important to-do. Fitting into practically all of these categories, I’m disappointed that I’ll have to miss one of their tours. (I missed the last one). The interior is being restored to its original glory, a project surrounded with happy political glitter. The tours are a chance to see what the excitement is about surrounding its planned restoration and re-opening – which will hopefully occur by late 2009 or early 2010. The Pantages tour will take place on Saturday, November 25th at 2 p.m. (Dress warmly, the theatre has no heat).

    Adam, the impressionante webmaster of Heart of the World’s website, has apparently been recruited to act as stage manager for a small musical performance that will take place at the end of the tour. He says “It will be a pretty interesting little event.” It was his friend, Charles, who put me touch with Todd, the Save the York Theatre Society fellow. And so it goes. Until we get it. Or, maybe, I sleep.

    Biologically it’s weird of us humans not to have a third eye-lid.