Tag: family

Concert with the Now Orchestra Monday Night Workshop Band‏

This just in from my mother, Vicki:

Hi All,

I am sending out this e-mail to invite you to the Western Front next Monday evening on Dec 7th at 8:00pm.

The event is the culmination of this year’s improvisation workshop series at The Western Front, 303 East 8th Avenue.

Every Monday, since October, an ad hoc group from 12-20 players has assembled together to make music and next Monday you are invited to join us. There is no admission charge.

For more information check out: http://www.noworchestra.com/workshops

I will only be singing as I have parked my motorcycle for the year and I have not been bringing my guitar or computer rig on public transit. There are enough guitarists already and I am sure you will find the show interesting and musical.

Please e-mail me for more information or check my website later this week for rehearsal soundclips.

One of the Family has fallen on tough times and sincerely needs our support!

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Hey everyone, Ink Tea’s in trouble!

Friend-family Cole, who I love very much, has been having a damned hard time surfing the warm industry this year. In spite of desperately trying to find income, job hunting like mad, and generally being as responsible as a human can, she’s reached the point where she has no more unemployment benefits, no job, and very little in the kitchen, an untenable situation, one she’s helped me rise from in the past.

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I am an Arts Administrator, photographer, and writer, based in Minneapolis, (or, alternatively, in Starving Artist land), trying very hard to get work. I have been unemployed for over a year now, in spite of lots of office skills, lots of experience, and lots of mailed resumes. I was one of the two Best New Spoken Word Artists of 2009 in Minnesota’s Urban Griots Spoken Word Awards and represented Minneapolis at the 2009 Women of the World poetry slam in Detroit. I also teach poetry to immigrant children.

I will print photos from my flickr account at your discretion, do headshots and portraits, write poems for you, make mixed tapes for you, scrub your kitchen floor, or make you a delicious vegan dinner, if you can help me pay my rent and student loans off.

Here is her Etsy, where my favourite is her Sponsor a Roll of Film program. If you’re feeling more direct, her Paypal address is inktea at gmail.com. Please help if you can!

purveyor of the prettah

Bethalynne, lucky partner to my clever internet cousin Myke, has updated her website, “All freshened up pretty for Halloween” with a new collection of artwork. Go check it out! Not only is she brave and beautiful, she’s wicked talented too:

www.bethalynnebajema.com

Bonus! Her chock-a-block full of wonder Etsy shop where you can admire her art then take it home. Unbelievable, right? Right. Go get some here: Etta Diem

an animated description of (mr) maps

Trimpin : What an odd, lovely minded, delightful man. What odd, lovely minded, delightful art! I spoke with him after the film, and I’m going to see what I can do about making him an on-line calendar, so people will know where and when to find his installations and shows.

–::–

People tend to synchronize blinking when watching film, at moments calculated to give the least information loss.

–::–


We wandered in and out of our weekend, sidling up to previously made plans and usually walking away again, tied only to our smiles, our warm hands bound together better than our hours. Saturday was a day of birthdays, getting up slowly, swimming from bed as if from water, heavy limbed and discarding the charted day we’d made, instead filling it with a late breakfast at Havana’s and a wander down the Drive, searching out the perfect present for my found brother Michael. Indonesia, Bali, black wood and red glass, three hollow faces in a candle-light row, placid, eyes sweetly closed, a puddle of calm light for a time lately troubled. Downtown, then, our treasure tucked in a bag, downtown to Davie and Denman, the purpose seawall and ice-cream, something like a date, something like something we should have done years ago, arm in arm, sharing sugar on a park bench as the sun set into the ocean, orange and sparkle and gold.

Chasing the day with dinner, the present fit as right as expected, a train pour of alcohol down the table, familiar faces, names, periphery friends, lost family, personal history, remembering suddenly I had met Sara on the dance-floor we counted out New Year’s Eve together the same night I saved a life, the first good holiday midnight I’d ever had, as if the memories were only visible under blacklight or her pretty eyes. When the crowd split off for sushi, we dawdled behind over dessert, then walked out on our own, peeling away the city into paths, transit, and routes.

Frank‘s place was crowded, the floor a plane of pillows, inflated mattresses and grinning people lit by the flourish and improbable end of Buckaroo Bonzai. (A great attack of hello from Sam, a surprised, pleased greeting from Daniel.) Shedding our clothes in the storage closet felt like shedding skin, as we borrowed pyjamas to snuggle the night, clothing I haven’t worn since I was a child, and my body, strangely, just as small inside the loaned plaid flannel as it was wearing adult clothing then. Tony preferred the Strawberry Shortcake pants, he was welcome to them. In the velvety dim light of the party, he could have been handsome in almost anything. Finding a vacant beanbag, we settled in for Hooped, then Zombie Strippers, a movie that maybe should never have been made, except that parts of it were so much fun. After that we shifted to a mattress with Claire for Amazon Women On The Moon, then tried to sleep through most of Hell Comes To Frogtown, instead waking horribly to all the shooting and shouty bitz, which involved such complex philosophy as “why does that mutated(?) frog king have three snake penises, anyway?”

Shakes The Clown was next, which I wish I’d seen more of, then apparently Night Of The Creeps, which I completely missed, followed by Airplane!, which was kind enough to wake me for the lovely opening red zone white zone argument, but not keep me that way. Dawn arrived like a ghost, sliding between the cracks of the party, prying the new day out of the cracks of our long, cheerful night. I don’t know when people left, but there were only a few of us by the time morning and breakfast arrived, a small heaven of perfect waffles, strawberries with maple syrup, and bacon.

That day, once we walked home, with matching clouds of impossible hair, we stayed in all day, in bed, until it was Monday.

I want to talk to someone like me again

Every time I listen to Let The Devil In, from the TV On The Radio album Return to Cookie Mountain, I’m inspired to track down a bunch of musicians, get them drunk, and have a giant sing-along house party. I blame Naysayer.

Also, does anyone have Talvin Singh’s Heavy Rotation Radio Refixx remix of OK?

Tales of The Unexpected: a Roald Dahl inspired Tim Walker fashion editorial featuring, among others, Tim Burton and Helena Bonham Carter.

The weather today is a slow molasses jazz of rain and cold wind, but last night was gloriously different. The skies were profoundly open, a bit of silk fluttering dark black and blue pinned in place with a bright, round, almost full moon. My mother and I took a night ride on her motorcycle, enjoying the last drop out of her last day with insurance, out to the store, the long way around. Five layers of clothing against the cold, three jackets, stockings, tights, black leather gloves, my matching black helmet. I’m still not used to how small she is against me on the bike in the same way I’m not used to how big her newest bike is. There’s nothing like realizing you’ve grown bigger than a parent to remind yourself of mortality.

Riding out into the night, we flew downtown, soared across the Burrard St Bridge, and out to UBC, to circle around and come back along Spanish Banks, the most splendid view to be found in Vancouver. The glut of ugly picket-fence condo development that’s been climbing up the mountains is transformed into a skein of tangerine gemstone glitter at night, tiger striped black by the remaining runnels of nature that drip from the tops of the peaks all the way down to the ocean. Downtown becomes a dream of skyline, a precious, tiny thing floating on water, but like it’s in the sky, held up by a willing suspension of disbelief. Everything that wasn’t lit up didn’t exist. I felt like we were something new, my mother and I, connected better than we have been, the city blocked out by the motorbike, separated from our weekends and bleak days. As if to prove my fresh perspective, or to reward the moment with permanent memory, I looked up over her head at just the right time to see an airplane perfectly silhouetted as it flew over the moon.

who can feed the cats while I’m gone?

Vicki and I are leaving on her motorcycle for Seattle tomorrow afternoon. We’ll be staying with Robin, Joseph wants to go dancing, Ivo put dibs on Saturday brunch, MJ’s asked for Saturday afternoon/evening, and Kyle and Trillian have called Sunday afternoon/evening. After that, we’re on the road back home. Pray, my people, it does not rain.

cleaning out the closets

I started writing a book this week. “This book begins and ends with a birthday, twenty five years after my story started.” The internet at work was down, leaving me with nothing productive to do except open Word and begin to write. Two hours later, I had twenty five pages and the beginning of an out-line. I don’t know if it’s a good idea, what I’m doing, or if I will finish it, or anything, but I’ve started one.

It’s not the autobiography people have been asking me to write, full of oddball miniature adventures, names changed and details blurred to protect almost everyone involved, but the story of my parents, my dangerous childhood, and how it relates to me now.

As many of you know, my sociopath father, (who I generally tell people is dead), has been sending me letters since I sent him a hello on my birthday last year. He writes a minimum of once a day, though I never reply and rarely read anything. The more he writes, the more ingrown the stories become, the more pathological, until the only way to understand the later letters is to start at the beginning, to see where certain codes began. Now that an entire year has passed, there’s hundreds of replies to my one small note, poisonous, hateful, and full of self aggrandizing lies, that I haven’t even looked at. They’re just sitting there, taking up server space somewhere in the states, not quite ignored, but dormant.

As a body of work, it reminds me most of case studies I’ve read about violent obsessives who paper their walls with scribbles about jesus. The tone is similar, but with my mother and I featured in place of religious figures. My intention is to use his letters as material, as something to respond to. “Find inspiration where you can.” I’m not sure what else there is to do, (perhaps I can donate it to a psychological institution?), I don’t like his bright confusion speaking to an empty room. It feels like I’m neglecting a chore, an old bit of furniture that needs to be painted.

Silva’s selling all her really cool stuff. Jump on it!

As some of you may or may not know, my godmother Silva, my mum away from mum, is soon to be moving.

To facilitate this, she’s selling as many of her non-essentials as possible, this includes silver, books, furniture, mirrors, tea things, antiques, oddities, and almost anything shiny and interesting you can imagine. (Sorry everyone, the giant plaster parrot has already moved to my house.) Bonus: 250 books are for sale, $2 for any hardcover and $1 for any softcover

So come one, come all, to Silva’s Super Saturday Sale!

She’s been a constant inspiration in my life and I’ve always been immensely proud to be related to her. What she’s about to do, move across the country to be with the woman she loves, is going to be difficult, and she needs all the help she can get. Even if you come by for five dollars worth of books, you’ll be contributing. Added up, it tips the balance. That, and it gets it out of the house, which counts for more than you might think. The less she has to worry about, the better.

More pictures of what’s for sale in her journal.

we take polaroids with his father’s camera, finishing off the roll

A clean uniform of friendship, tattered in places, worn in the elbows and the shoulders, but strong all the same. I think of stone, how it erodes too slow to see, though it shapes itself to the wind almost perfectly. Holes in the middle of mountains, sunsets in the middle of deserts, countless grains flying through the air. Sometimes we go on holiday, go weeks without talking, stretching ourselves between the days, our names ignored like advertising, repeated until it’s meaningless. It used to be calling every day, voices in bloom, eroding our negative spaces until they adapted, filling like smoke, glued to each other like words to paper, content a hundred days, ships on water, floating side by side. Then something happened, there was a split, a rift like fire shouting down a forest with silence. It took a very long time for him to talk to me, though it happened, and almost, somehow, over the horizon, everything seems fine. Now we are a story mostly written, soaking in solitude, aware of the other, solid friends, but purposefully apart. Civilization risen up, cities yawning into view, the rocks have been cut into walls, the foundations cemented down.

It occurs to me that this is the formation of family, laying in the darkness of a winter night, tearing stories out of history and presenting them like they were wine, showing where the scars are like a road-map of decisions never made, sharing what has happened in an effort to make something new, to frame a future of reaction and place that will make sense outside the room. Failing is part of it, crashing the bicycle to get up again, scrawling on the walls in crayon, dusting off our knees, calling bluffs, and saying alright anyway, holding hands, commiserating. It was awhile ago, but cities, once put to task, continue building, even in the absence of an architect. Once populated, they evolve, reach for the sky, develop eccentricities, and form personalities clothed in architecture or maybe memories. Along the avenue, all the presents we’ve presented, all the fact, fiction, and morning details no one else will ever see, they form a garden, they form a line, they spring, blades of grass, flowers, chaotic, ordered, a personal deduction against any further damage. A metaphor we can take with us into sleep, a certainty as easily satisfying as cake.