nothing like it
Tag: flickr
how embarrassing
“TVfolk.net now presents 409 videos of traditional music from northern Europe.” via sir w. vitka.
http://www.tvfolk.net/
First video: Oort: Öised orjad.
Have you ever felt such a connection with someone that you knew it must be broken? That you would have to walk away for fear that, no matter how inappropriately, you would kiss them on the street? It’s darkly entertaining, catching yourself about to forsake everything anyone knows about you, understanding that your decision would be irrevocable, and simply not caring.
There might be something wrong with me. I found Outkast on my computer, and.. well.. it’s groovy. A lot. To the point where I have Hey Ya on repeat. Is it sleep dep? I don’t know. I just know that I really want a pair of loose shiny pants and somewhere to wear them while dancing to this. (This and some Gnarls Barkley, please.)
Don’t get me wrong, Speakerboxxx is still perhaps the worst dirty south hip-hop album I have ever flipped through, and you won’t catch me defending these lyrics unless under extreme duress, (“Don’t want to meet your momma, just want to make you cum’ma”), but this song is rocking me. There is bop happening. Head nodding. Shaky things in my hips that remind me of the twitchy tip of a purring cat’s tail.
Dear porphyre,
You have a nice______. You make me _______. You should _______. Someday I will ______. You + me =________. If I saw you now I’d __________. I would build a _______ just for you. If I could sing you any song it would be _________.
Love,
_______________
(P.S. ______________.)
another day applying
Matthew Hurst of Nielsen BuzzMetrics created a map of some thousand or so of the web’s most popular blogs.
One for Livejournal is posted to his blog.
Almost fifteen years ago, celtic arm band tattoos took Vancouver by storm. It was the big trend, the most awesome fad. It went well with the Irish pubs that were quietly springing up all over downtown and the Xtreme sports and the short spiky hair that looked fried into position.
The driver of the bus I was just on, he had one on his right arm. His hair was just beginning to go white.
I like things like that, cultural ways to mark time.
Websites as graphs.
I’m playing a silly meme game that’s wandering around livejournal right now, a dungeons and dragons maze, where it takes your list of interests and the names off your friends list to decorate and populate a simple dungeon. Mine are turning up some really pretty ideas, embarrassingly like the sort of thing I write, like “Across one wall is a faded fresco of thoughts.” or “You notice some graffiti about explaining intuition.” or “It tastes like climbing trees.” It’s sort of a little one-handed thing I can do instead of reading a book while I’m eating my sad five dollar lasagna dinner from Quest for the Holy Donair. The only drawback is my sudden deep and abiding desire to dig up a copy of ADOM and tap away little ASCII monsters until dawn.
up too late at night, putting up the last drivefest photos
I’ve created a Flickr Pool, Drivefest, to collect all the photos of the Commercial Drive Car Free Day. Add yours and tell yours and pass it on!
I wanted a water sprinkler to run through today. I wanted to run water through the ink of my hair and to desperately feel like laughing. It’s hard to explain. I wanted to turn to someone and share a conspiratorial glance, rife with a desire to smile a thousand times. I miss the anonymous letters. They were the closest thing I had to anyone calling to see if I was okay, now that no-one cares if I dream about them anymore. (I haven’t received any since May). Precious and rarest of things, they remain mine and only mine.
This lovely Levi ad has been posted before, but now there’s a sweet parody by a UK tropical drink company called Lilt.
I suspect the game became tired. Instead of posting my thoughts here, my lovely impressions, I kept them close to me, wrapped in my writing book and tied with ribbon like I was an old-fashioned child. How so, then, a reward? Reine read them today in the park before we got up to play frisbee with Will. I read one aloud this evening to dear friends who were driving me home from morris dancing. They’re beginning to slide into the consciousness of the people around me. I read them like rosary beads, asking who’s trying to make me smile, like perhaps I’ll be allowed to slip stories into conversation again some day. Ravenous angels dancing on pins, that’s me. A tiny figure, sitting at the feet of who I used to be, looking up and disbelieving. If I am a city, these letters have been tagging my walls.
UBC engineering students have built a vehicle so efficient that it achieves 3,145 miles per US gallon (0.074 litres/100 km)
not changing my mind on the reproduction thing
I’m sorry, apparently Canada had an attempted terrorist attack this week? What? Did anyone bother explaining to these people what we’re like here? Gruesomely chopping off Stephen Harper’s head would not send us into an epiphany of terror, we don’t like him. We sort of expect it to fall off anyway, like a withered vestigial limb might. Blowing up Parliament might raise some blood-pressure because it’s some of our only architecture, but I imagine it would become an interesting bit of novel political history to be bantered over dinner rather than a great loss to rally with. As far as I’m concerned, unless they blow up the CN tower, they’re out of luck. Poor sodden fools, let’s dip them in maple syrup and throw them to the moose for being ignorant in their goals.
Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain
I went to AJ’s after work yesterday and by midnight we had finished my gown. (My mother had been wonderfully helpful in procuring tulle for me while I was at work). While I was there sewing tulle to my crimson dupone silk, AJ was finishing a dress for another masque attendee, a black and white kimono that, in contrast to mine, perfectly exemplified the spray of different aesthetics I’m expecting to see Friday. It was fun. I’m going to have to dive-bomb them randomly with cookies later.
living in the wrong part of the world for what sustains me
The Secret Machines didn’t really kick in until a third through their set, but when they kick in, they’re kicking in more than just the front door, they’re kicking in your entire cellular system. They sure do love their lights. It’s a first class show, only a little below Metric or the Arcade Fire with Wolf Parade. Duncan took a great little video of glasses dancing off a table from the thump and pull of the music. I was farther forward, in the front against the stage. It was both a tragedy and a shame that there weren’t more people, but it meant that I could move back and forth in front of the stage as much as I wanted, trying to get the perfect angle for my fan-slavish photography.
Two found ads that taste great together: Campari & Choco.
And here I am, glad to be on-line again because a friend is building a spaceship that’s going to fly with NASA and a 43-tonne wooden elephant took over London and Burrow has a new boy and they’ve discovered the oceans on Titan are actually sand. I felt horribly cut off without my pretty little window screen into the rest of the world. Trapped in my own head, unable to push out my miseries with keeping busy, is a wretched place indeed. I don’t recommend visiting. As I said to a friend earlier today, my posts this week have been the written equivilant of my computer catching me in the middle of a crying jag. I would apologize if what I had written wasn’t also true, however, so that’s that.
(verso) I can’t remember to forget you.
http://sevenphonecalls.org/
Devon came out of surgery fine. He’s tired and looks worn, but that’s to be expected when your innards have been slipped out of your belly and rewound, I’m sure. His intestines had twisted, kinked themselves into knots in ten different places. There’s no need to worry, he’s resiliant, recovers like I do from damage. I have a fabulous picture of him in the hospital bed, looking put upon by uncomfortable plastic tubes, holding hands with his beaming parents. I didn’t get to post it last night, unfortunately, but it will be available soon. He’s possibly not sleeping enough, but that’s so close to normal that it almost doesn’t bear mentioning. We’re a batch of night owls, we are. A coven of ridiculously interesting people who are most alive when everyone else is in bed. Dancing with blades, dancing in gruops and apart from eachother, dancing and being glad that life continues. Sneaking into hospitals at ten minutes to midnight and being turned away at the last possible moment.
Various people have been asking me what my plans are this week. As of yet, I really don’t know. I’d been planning on going to the Pacific Cinematheque double-bill tonight: Paul Williams hosting THE MUPPET MOVIE and PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE, followed by an After-Party at the Media Club where he’s going to play a set alongside July Fourth Toilet, (no, I don’t know who they are either), but I expect to skip the first film entirely for the sake of visiting hours. Tomorrow I may end up missing rehearsal for the sake of other things. Visiting Devon in the hospital, for example, or dropping by Bob‘s for a showing of A Tale of Two Sisters, one of my favourite movies, (just as Phantom of the Paradise is my mother’s), and finishing the cleaning of my room that’s been dragging on for something akin to a month simply because I’m never there anymore.
http://notyourusualbollocks.squarespace.com/
like heroin amber dust
http://www.unphotographable.com/
There are flower petals flying past much how I’ve always imagined lightning-bugs must be. Bright fluttering pieces of colour added into the air over the street like a surreal yet expected light pink snow.
I’ve never seen a lightning-bug, except on television. I’ve always wanted to see them. They sound magical. When I was a child, I carried a particular episode of the Twilight Zone with me, just because it had them in it. They were something a vampire showed a boy before he died. Black and white, a little bit grainy. Those were my lightning bugs, my tiny bits of flying fire, almost pure static showing through some sound-stage reality.
The sparks from the first highway torch I ever lit reminded me of that show. They way the red flared and sputtered, all the sparks flying up harmlessly to bat my fingers. Moths, I thought, No. Lightning bugs. Bright chemicals with soft wings. Later, when I began being lucky enough to work in fireworks, it was like my peaon to all those lost moments of my childhood. How I never saw a lightning bug, how I never broke a window, how I still don’t know how to play marbles. Lighting the torch was my victory over all those things. My mirror movement to a hundred people before me, touching contact to contact, connecting the charge. All of my work going up in a blaze of glory. It’s a silly phrase, blaze of glory, but that was it exactly. The light shooting into the sky, the exultation I found in myself watching it, knowing that I had created this, that my hands were responsible.
The last show I worked was Illuminaires, Vancouver’s lantern Festival of Lights. Thousands of people slowly turning around a lake, carrying waxed dragons and paper nuns and all the towers of Moscow above their heads, the water reflecting all the fire and muted colours into a faint vision of another world. It was supposed to be my first success in the struggle against my difficulties. Life had been hard, a stress test that I was rapidly failing. Friends had been dying like teenage drunken drivers, family had been absent, lovers untouchable.
Instead I lit the match, took my place by the sand and explosions, and cried at the foot of my spectacular display. Exciting as it was, when I turned away to examine the thick sea of faces crushed together at the edge of our orange barriers, there was not one face that I knew, not one person to share my moment with. I had painted the sky with pyrotechnics, brought heaven like the seventeenth century. This was my passion play, this intense exhibition, and there was no one to give it to. I could only see the empty excitement of strangers glaring into the light. Eyes that never once dropped to meet mine, eyes that didn’t conceive how I had worked that day, blistered my fingers twisting wire, slivered my palms on the trestles, eyes that didn’t know my name.
That night was when I finally shivered apart. That was the last and final thing, being unable to reach out and touch another face, even in such an incredible place. I lost myself after that. I wasn’t anymore than the sum of my fragile parts, more a mirrored reflection of myself split into delicate pieces. I stopped sleeping, I forgot how to eat. Between my experiences and the inside of my head was such an incredible distance that it seemed ineradicable. My hands would never stop shaking and I would fall down in the street in fugues of missing time.
Now is recovery. Flower petals above the street.
To everyone present last night, thank you.
faster than speeding water
KindelingBoy Michael is having a party tomorrow evening to celebrate his final freedom from Too Much School TM.
My cool news today is this letter:
Hi,
Just a head’s up to let you know that I’ve added your blog, Dreampepper, to the British Columbia Blogs directory and aggregator at publicbroadcasting.ca – if for any reason you do not want your blog listed, please let me know and I’ll take it back down immediately.
Cheers,
Justin
I don’t know how they found me, but the list looks pretty small, so I’m pleased. Apparently the main criteria be that they’re well written, been around for awhile, and update frequently, as well as having that undefinable “something”.
Max Headroom creator made Roswell alien.
Deathboy makes a song based on the very first episode.
This week has been a successful book of matches, every day burning when I strike it with my eyes. I feel like a chemical reaction, sparkling and fizzing, exploding strong-box secrets and licking what’s inside. If I were Rapunzel, this would be me letting down my hair, suddenly afraid that my princes were just a dream. This would be taking myself and my bedding and my famous blue raincoat to wind my fairy-tales a rope, offering them a way in instead of a noose, banishing my fears, losing them one by one like beads from a broken string.
AXE’s GameKillers advertisement series.
Adidas Idicolor viral-marketing films. (watch PINK especially)
I’m going to be a liquid tired later
There is a soft rain falling.
Saturday morning we were as tangled as a gordian knot, no way to extricate a hand or a leg without changing reality. Who knows where this piece of skin begins and that one ends? We are too comfortably warm to care.
A train is howling sorrow into the weather, as if the water is bringing it pain.
The flower has been put into a dairy bottle half filled with water. It’s on the kitchen counter, where we can’t see it, because we’re trapped in the bedroom with the door closed. This feels like the memory of an anniversary. We make two spoons, melted out of shape, conversation crawling famously between us, draining ourselves of impurities, setting ourselves up for a fall. He makes me laugh.
It’s earlier than I’m used to, but part of this is allowing ourselves to get to work on time.
Two in the afternoon and we finally go for breakfast. Aiden is there with his friend Graham. The woman behind the counter knows me. I make another mental note to bring her flowers as we slide into the window seat. I forget, but Sara is downtown, waiting for us in the basement of Dressew. We have to go. On the bus, a girl smiles at us in approval, half a couple perceiving another pair. I feel under siege by only pretty things.
The bits of food I have squirreled in my room are running out. I may have to find myself breakfast.
Sara is pretty, fresh and welcome. We poke heads into goth stores, a second hand shop, the studio. We’re on a quest for things to wear at SinCity. He and I are failing, but she’s doing okay. We take gorget from the studio and take the bus to my house. I collect my black things, a fishnet shirt that ties at the sleeve, a bra thick enough to dance in, and we wave goodbye to Sarah at Broadway. There is a tree full of birdhouses, stuffed branches with a little town. Kinsgway we decide, to get back to the boat, after Rowan’s. Our fingers lace together as we walk and I’m not sure when I notice.
I’m considering going to Uprising Bakery, but I’m too nested to feel any urgency.
The boat is beautiful, inspiring. I have never felt a pull to sail across an ocean before, but the impulse was dizzying once I’d stepped inside the hull. Panama, it tugged at me, photographs of industrial locks filling with water, the idea of being entirely surrounded by nothing but water. The sway of seasons pushing us across to a place with a different language, a different set of gestures and streets. A city sky lit by different stars at night, a ship to rest against a dock made of stone. Italy, the masks of Venice. The curve of the hull drew me in and drew me through, led me scouring the constellation of books around the bed tucked away in the prow. The sort of place part of me calls home, more so than where I live.
I wonder if there’s a letter downstairs. When does the mail come? My alarm will ring too soon again.