Tag: flickr

keep jhayne from partying alone


jhayne as a southpark kid
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

Jacques LaLonde and Jhayne Holmes present

KEEP JHAYNE FROM JHAYLE

a party of proportion

#340 – 440 west hastings

The Date: Friday, November 25th (today)

The Time: 9:00 – onward

The Goal: $300.00


Pass it on.

The day of the party has woken up. A thick spicy thing, too crisp to cut, with a sky too dull to remember. Another average Vancouver morning. It’s warm, but it’s wet. It’s raining, but it’s held close to our wool wrapped breath. I come home and put Brian Eno and Sigur Ros on to play in an attempt to escape the abrupt mundanity of walking home in the middle of a bland Friday morning full of school kids and transit commuters with sweeping grand songs about nothing at all. It’s that kind of day. (The jury is still out on how it’s working). Part of it is that Dominique kept me out later last night than I had planned and, unfortunately, my weariness has not only continued but spread, creating a fine measurement where guilt, intention, desire, and night come together into one thing. I’m not sure how I’m going to survive tonight. My endurance will be entirely complicit with whoever comes. Mark that file UNKNOWN.

Jenn is coming over now, bringing milk to match my cereal, playing the cheerfully complimentary yang to my still yawning and starving yin. We would go out for the traditional breakfast, but we’re broke, so instead I’m providing spoons and bowls and somewhere warm and welcome. Hopefully, I will have tided enough to make a habitable space by the time she arrives. It’s difficult to clean around a sleeping ferret. It’s possible for the animal, just over a foot long, to take over the entire bed. It’s tempting to simply curl up around him, let the day turn awhile without me, and sleep until the heralding buzzer wakes me up.

If anyone is interested in helping set up for the party, please either arrive half an hour early to the venue or call Jacques on his cell phone at 604.812.1496.

That and he’s beautiful like a jade fire.


Yelena Yemchuk
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

A pleased yet raffish smile deepened the perfectly etched lines around his face, around his closed eyelids. A sigh, and he looked up into my eyes. His own were very light, a sensuous honey infused with the essence of dead cities, empty of orthodox sins, and extremely open in a sense that has nothing to do with age, but with the eternal youth of ancient things. I thought of gods, the old greek imaginings that drove women to madness. I thought of braille and souls.

I could describe him more, but I don’t know if you would recognize him walking down the street. He wears t-shirts and black pants just like everyone else. If he wore his hair unbound, then I might have a chance to let you stop, say hello, and examine him, see him for how beautiful he is under the poorly worn cover of being unexceptional. His hair is an inky explosion caught by a very clever illustrator, someone who fell in love with myths at an early age and let it reflect in every halo they ever drew. It’s exceptional. When his hair is wet, it catches in my throat and fills my lungs with the need to say that I am drowning. Maybe if you saw him in rain, drops caught like cliché jewels in his lashes, there might be a flash of recognition, a glimpse of how divine.

I feel so antique, describing a lover in terms of looks, but I am always transposing feelings, depths of emotion or dialogue, and yet so few ever know who I’m revealing, even when it’s myself. Earlier in the car, when I tugged on Andrew‘s hand and said, “Oh! I have news! Persepolis has fallen.”, he understood what I meant, but Tyler did not. “We talk in shorthand.”, Andrew explained, and it occurred to me that here I write in it. A code of association so baroque that only by reading for any length of time will meaning emerge from the tangle of references. Truthfully, I find myself most comfortable with people who can follow abstract trains of thought without effort, but I’m beginning to question if it’s fair. I’m wondering how often my privacy is misread. (Graham got the impression somehow, in spite of my practically rabid monogamy in the face of people like Dominique and Christopher, that I was promiscuous.) At times, it’s been psychotically useful, but part of why I continue to update almost daily is that I want to explain to my friends and family my keystone ties and transformations.

Matthew hated when I wrote about him but he would never tell me a decisive why. He would spin gluey reasons that would change, but always, (no matter how mutable), they were negative. I think, now, especially near the end, that he was trying to hide his whereabouts and actions from people who might possibly read this. After he came back, he attempted to expressly forbid me from mentioning that I stayed the night, and was upset when I ignored his injunction. (I still don’t know who wasn’t supposed to know this time. Last time it was Sarah. I know his wife used to drop by occasionally to catch up on things, her best friend tried to step in and defend him once from one of his first terrible injunctions against my decency before she understood what my complaint was, and there are other people. Friends, family maybe. I don’t know, they just show up on my counter and leave rare anonymous comments from IP addresses located in Perth or Sydney.) My next closest relationship, they were always delighted when they could find reference to themselves in my entries. It filled their heart, they said. Made them feel exponentially appreciated, like every letter added to their worth. My friend Wilhelm, he complains that he never appears here, that I only write about people I can hyperlink to, but I know that I put his little misdemeanors of complexity here quite often, so how else can I reply except by becoming, if only briefly, a more concise exhibitor?

We used to talk until the sun came up, a confused tangle of how a head will fit into an arm, how the angle of a bent leg will comfortably into the slant of another leg of a different shape. His bed was small enough for both of us, and it was going to eventually be summer. Visits were too rare, for they were addictively pleasant, and I fell very into liking him. His casual strength of thought, his delightful leaps of imagination. Ostensibly, I was living in another part of town, staying on charity at a friends apartment, but as it gradually becoming more intensely uncomfortable to stay there, this small room full with its tiny bed became my home. I would always feel welcome, but an imposition. When I visited, I would stand silent in the street with my terrified heart, trying to collect courage with the pebbles I would find to throw at his window in lieu of a doorbell. Once Loki the cat found me and sat purring at my ankle, almost causing me to cry. I wanted to feel safe, and it was ten feet away, and I couldn’t move. My housemate had pulled a dirty conversation on me earlier, full of tense demands, and I was so nervous of the world that just this little cat being kind to me was enough to unbalance me. When I crept in, quiet as to not wake the baby, I hoped he wouldn’t see my hands shaking.

Loki is gone now, replaced by two cats. One black and one white. The baby is gone and my lover’s switched rooms. His window is an undeniable bitch to hit with a pebble now. I tried the other night, failing, as it turned out, not because of my aim, but because we wasn’t home yet, and I worried with every stone about hitting the neighbors house on the rebound. It didn’t help that my hands were shaking again, my adrenaline screaming at me that I was being an idiot. Years pass and yet I stay the same. He claims it’s brave of me. To do something I’m scared to do because I know it’s the right action, but I’m not so sure. I’m expecting to have to apologise with impeccable courtesy for merely arriving while my heart is craving vindication, some forgiveness for the hour. If I’m scared, then I’m not being brave, am I? Being brave might be writing this down, not knowing what side of the disclosure line he stands on.

reminder: KEEP JHAYNE FROM JHAYLE -a party of proportion- #340 – 440 west hastings, Friday, November 25th, 9:00 – onward

(secretly) I turned around (to love you)


tinted vintage by onfinite.com
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

Start Again: Blue haired calling. Blue haired, one-eyed. Wisdom like a bitmapped earth, programming the tree to find all the answers. Breaking fast with genius, reminiscent of the night before the night before, lasting impressions of that would be really great, that would be enviable, let’s spread disease through the pommels of guns. DNA discussions, eggs on the plates, grasping for a cure to AIDS. We walk to Broadway with time still left in our pockets. We sit where I sat last Sunday. Half a million dollars at this meeting, I got to go. People walking past, strangers with bags, with different coloured jackets. It’s winter time.

Work is a back-seat exploration into self-pity glad I don’t know how to drive.

Start: Missed rehearsal, missed Sophie. Very simply missed my walk to the bus-stop. Missed a bit of everything. My eyes were closed. Open now, the phone rang. My directer, in a panic. Fluster and worry, flashing to life, spending the night. The telephone, answering questions, reassurances. Exhaustion trying to claim me back but now I’m awake. I’m got left-over chinese food on the stove, I’m going to be a gourmand’s nightmare. Toss it all in one pan, toss it all around with a fork, drip out the grease and call it food. I’ve got creases on my belly where my clothing pressed too tight in my sleep.

Work is a multi-lingual dull burning drive into why am I not done yet with this?

Start a year ago: His hair is tied in a kerchief, nothing imagined, but I like it. This is cotton street. Blue print patterns, every line a perfect curl. Cleaning, I found him in a photograph, behind me. I was so sad, corsetted and dismal. I can feel the black behind her eyes, I am surprised. I’d forgotten the day. How my love would not come to my show. Instead, this one crept behind me.

The door opens, I am blinded.

overheard in NYC: Little girl: I’m tired of thinking about ponies! Now it’s time to kill!


candy corn
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

Intelligent conversation is good for the release it brings. I am not a joyful girl, I don’t know how to express myself. I have a careful library in my head collecting things I care about, but not in any particular detail. My education is practically non-existent. I’m a highschool drop-out without obviously marketable skills. I was never taught, like so many of you, another language or how to fix something or write something or how to do anything useful, but I can remember. You tell me something, I will keep it. You lend me a book, I will file the words away to dust off when the topic comes up. The input of another mind reminds me that I’m clever, that I can keep up and surpass. I need someone to prod me into illustrating the lack of time on the internet, while pointing out why it makes sense that it also moves faster than social light-speed, because otherwise, I’ll forget that I can. I lapse into only remembering how disordered everything is, how little I’ve actually learned. I’m beginning to suspect it’s a self defense mechanism. Something to do with being angry with the systems currently in place.

Jenn told me today about a woman who’s calling out for articles for her anthology on female geeks. I think it looks like it’s going to be another Go-Grrl empowerment book for people who are old enough to remember being hassled in a computer workplace for being female. Me? I am not the target market. I’m too young. I’ve never struggled with living my gender. Jenn wants me to write for them because, she says, she wishes she could see the world more like I do, claiming they need post-feminists, people who’ve already moved past equality of gender to seeking equality of access to information, but I don’t agree. The book looks like patting the past on the head, like people congratulating themselves on how politically correct they are for not hitting on the secretary without looking at her past fortitude from when they didn’t “know better”. Write about St. Jude overcoming prejudice, not people now who don’t understand that to overcome sexism, they need to ignore the idea that they are doing is special because they are women. Sorry, womyn? w0m3n?

The write-up claims that “More than anything, She’s Such a Geek is a celebration and call to arms: it’s a hopeful book which looks forward to a day when women will pilot spaceships, invent molecular motors, design the next ultra-tiny supercomputer, write epics, and run the government.” ignoring that all these things already happen. I’m reminded of how I want to kick newsboxes when I see a front-page of our “news”paper congratulating a group of young people for being tolerant and pan-ethnic. Thanks, idiots, this is Canada, they didn’t notice until you pointed it out.

I’d write more if it weren’t five in the morning.

Earlier tonight I was basically paid in tasty food and delicious chocolates to examine Picasso with people who assumed that I was important. These political things, I should really go to more of them. Both the company and the conversations, were wonderful, surreal on many minuscule levels. For one, I had my HENTAI INSIDE bag with me at almost all times. For another, I got away with saying rather audacious things to people who are apparently running for various offices in the city of Vancouver. Oh, right, it’s the children of unwed mothers you tie into sacks and dump in the river, not kittens, my mistake. The ones who didn’t blink, they’ll get my vote. I felt somehow like I was representing alt-youth to some of them. An odd sort of dyed hair child who can speak lucidly on whatever subject you want is here, let’s go see, honey. From controlling the police to art history, political correcting institutions or obscure attempts at bailing out on theater, it was all easy, it was speaking back to them. An echoing trick of the light, fade out then on to the next person washed up on the beach of this gathering of people who live in a tax bracket that I only swim in on a guest pass.

from domystic
link
11/10/05 – Aretha Franklin was teary-eyed, Carol Burnett was teasing, Alan Greenspan was reliably taciturn, and “The Greatest of All Time” stole the show when President Bush bestowed the Medal of Freedom on them and 10 others in a White House ceremony yesterday.

Bush, who appeared almost playful, fastened the heavy medal around Muhammad Ali’s neck and whispered something in the heavyweight champion’s ear. Then, as if to say “bring it on,” the president put up his dukes in a mock challenge. Ali, 63, who has Parkinson’s disease and moves slowly, looked the president in the eye — and, finger to head, did the “crazy” twirl for a couple of seconds.

The room of about 200, including Cabinet secretaries, tittered with laughter. Ali, who was then escorted back to his chair, made the twirl again while sitting down. And the president looked visibly taken aback, laughing nervously.

sounds like zappa


all the way down
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

Obscene, the number of people who came down tonight to our Korean Movie Night. There was Ray, and Beth, and Christopher, and Erin and Tilly, but then the last two left after I took pictures of someone’s breasts for them. They left us to have the room to ourselves, couches full only with one or two bodies each, and seating for everyone. It was like there was something wrong. (Not the breasts, that sort of request seems normal now). It was more a family gathering than a weekly event of some slightly epic proportion. Comfortable but unexpected. Expecting a battle, there wasn’t even a war.

Sara, Graham, and Nick arrived later, though only Sara got see part of the movie, the bit where father’s just bashed a head in. It was a Korean movie, after all. There had to be some statement of graphic violence that slapped us in our jaded eyes. It’s partially why we keep coming back. The ability to shock is a precious one and something we hold dear. The cinema we find refuses to hold back, details are upfront and basic. Fish-hooks in faces, child autopsies, slaughterhouses based on actual events like soldiers lined up on a particularly militaristic mantelpiece. It’s what we want. Art, truth, and beauty bombs. The shrapnel glitters like blood because it is. Death, there’s a lot of death. We’re learning history and camera angles, cultural references, ambiguities, and the delight that can be found in basic story-telling. We’ve been at this for months now and it’s very rare we watch anything lacking in story. It’s a relief after most modern western films, things like Corpse Bride, which are pretty but meaningless after the nice Hell-is-An-Oingo-Boingo-Jazz-Club bit.

This is where, if I were more awake and aware, I would launch into a miniature tirade essay on the nature of story and how we don’t have enough of it anymore. How our myths have died, eaten mostly by a lack of education and an unwillingness by major studios to believe that an audience does not, in fact, require explosions. I want special effects, I will go find some Peter Greenaway. No one’s made movies like he did. I want explosions, I will make some. In part, that is why I paid for my pyrotech tickets. I want some plot instead. Honest. (In fact, all of you, go see Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. It made me exceedingly glad). However, the time is inching closer to three in the morning, and I am expecting a long day tomorrow. Visits and breakfast and taxidermy rounded off with an evening at the Art Gallery for a political gala. My life sounds better on paper.

I’m listening to people sing who’ve never seen a television


vincent cassel divers (2)
Originally uploaded by BorNv@gabonD.

  • “PATRIOT” Act secret-superwarrants use is up 10,000 percent.
  • Vatican rejects intelligent design, accepts evolution as compatible with the bible.
  • Evidence emerged that the United States dropped white phosphorus on Fallujah during the attack in November 2004.
  • Israelis receive organs of slain Palestinian boy.

    My fingers have grown cold while I’ve been sitting here, ingesting various bits and detritus pieces of news and updates. All of it a few days old and so ancient. Old news, scattered by wind and the constant flow of new information pouring onto the web. People like you and I and us, tip tapping away, quickly, slowly, two fingered or with ten, and always, always adding to the cause, to a place that isn’t real to half the humans on Earth. I live here though, so I don’t mind cold fingers. It’s expected, a side effect of too long with a mouse, too long sitting in one position, but never long enough to learn everything I want to. My eyes almost always give out before my mind. I fall asleep thinking about social equations, how to build an iPod and if I have the capability with my very limited knowledge of electronics, if tomorrow will be the day I hear an apology or tell a secret, if tonight I will wake up in the dark to an unfamiliar body in my doorway whispering, “come”.

  • Man goes mad in flat with chainsaw.
  • Pillow-fight mob in Toronto’s Dundas Square.*
  • Purse snatcher takes woman’s finger.
  • Brian Eno auctioning off some of his personal music-making gear.

    And someone asked how I write things down, how I sculpt my words into being, but really, the trick is I speak them. I silently say them out loud to these imaginary trees that use light like paper instead of falling, cut so directly to cypress knees. And yes, that was a terrible pun. And yes, you deserve better, but the window is open, the air says winter, and I’m too tired to argue with my train of thought. Any two cents I toss in will derail it. Flatten the thoughts like atoms destroyed and release a blinding spasm of I should go to bed please.

    Also, augh, I left the room for five minutes and my ferret deleted my Dylan Thomas folder in a mad dash across the keys that said YES, DELETE THIS BECAUSE IT IS TOO BIG FOR MY TINY RECYCLING BOX. Darling Chrystalene, would you be so kind as to yousend them to me? I’m feeling unfairly robbed. I did, as a matter of fact, only leave him in the cage for two measly days. This exacting revenge seems a stated overkill. Next I will find messily typed notes, telling me that I either walk him more or the roommate gets it.

  • Conservatives oppose HPV vaccine.
  • Bacteria modified to combat HIV.
  • Antibiotics are proving to be a wrong answer.
  • A clip of a thousand-hand Bodhisattva Dance.

    *I’ve danced in the water fountains there in my underwear somewhere close to midnight. One of the best stupid things I’ve ever done. I highly recommend it.

    • winding up in the sort of movie that middle aged women would take me for the hero


    city glance
    Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

    I wish you were here in my empty bed so it would not be so hollow. It’s been filled with clothing to mimic the twisting forms of company, but last I checked, sweaters don’t talk. They don’t try to keep me. I wrote once that my sheets felt like sand, that if I were to turn over in the middle of the night, absence would hit me like a blinding storm. They’re doing it again, right now, with this soft music playing that reminds me so much of your hands tracing my cheekbones when my glasses are off.

    because

    You are small beautiful simple things, like a line perfectly written, the only one in the novel that you’ll bother to remember later, but when you’re away is all the time. It reminds me of the time I missed someone to death. When it happened, my pillows and blankets quivered, shuddered, and stopped breathing. My heart was dazed, dropped from a great height, and I have yet to recover its wings from the wretched broken mess of glass shattered connection.

    because

    The shape of you fills with mistakes when you are not around to fill in. The secondary characteristic of your absence is my dwelling on how much I can’t deal with it. When I’m missing you, your smile bleeds out of my mind, to be replaced by how often I sleep alone and never with you. You right now are someone else. A heavenly creature I don’t know, who sacrifices something that looks like my integrity to an altar I’m not allowed to approach or respect.

    because

    Then it slips out, my joan of arc moment, seeping through the cracks in all my routine and argument. It’s the pattern. You cut here and put these seams together. You prick your finger on the pins that have somehow found themselves between your lips. My fear is a foot on the pedal, the sway and yank of social fabric. I’m uncertain. I can’t wear this dress, it’s heavy and the embroidery’s just tacky. Not already, not so soon, but then your voice is crashing into me. I’ve been tackled by a thousand foot wave of feeling like myself again. You push me up to the firmament.

    Tonight I thought I saw you standing on the corner of that memory, just enough out of vision that I could place you where I wanted to. It was a conversation about skin, about nerve endings. The technology that craves contact. Our first hint of compatible loneliness.

    he said, I dreamed about making out with you. It wasn’t even sex.



    Originally uploaded by folkfestfan.

    It was a tiny alarm in an unfamiliar gloom that smelled like honey. I picked it up and couldn’t figure out how to turn it off, so I nudged the priest next to me, and put it into his hand that wasn’t trapped by my body. He mumbled, I was serious when I said the bit about the nipples was about you, and shut it off.

    It sounds like fiction, but it’s true. I sat up, did up some buttons that had been undone, straightened my stockings and kissed him on the forehead. Go back to sleep. His shirt was open, so I put my hand on his chest to feel for his heartbeat, and smiled. Some mornings I know how much of this holy book was made for me.

    I’m usually intimidated by sacred things, but instead I’m still okay. I am blinded by halos and I fear for my vision. Don’t let me burn like a witch scalded by a writer’s rejection, I want to say, but I don’t, because in my heart, we are family. I’ll call him later, and laugh a little, and I’ll make him happy.

    I passed the cenotaph today walking home in the rain. It’s our Remembrance Day here. Veterans were lined up in black capes with their heads down. I stopped until they began talking about Jesus. It makes sense to me that soldiers would have gods, but I woke up next to my rabbi, so I kept on walking.

    Home is a shower, maybe. Home is downloading my videos of the last night’s proceedings and uploading them for you here. Home is this keyboard and listening to Shane, knowing that he’s still content to be left in bed because I tucked him in there, because his rings got caught in my fishnets, because one of these days we’ll have time for each other, but not just yet.
    download these

    “This one’s called Finally.“

    “I saw some cows and it got me to thinking about love.“

    “If your lips were crayons, I would like you to press them to the colouring book of my face… and scribble.”
    (You can hear me murmur, oh no, on the video when he began talking to me.)
    Video II, continuing the same poem.

    A bit of crowd banter. New rule: you must be that beautiful to ride this ride.

    “For the woman who told me to fuck off after I told her she was beautiful.”

    “All you need to know for this poem is that a lanyard is nothing more than a glorified keychain.“

    “I’m sorry that I keep saying I’m sorry.”
    This is where the band kicked in.
    Video II, continuing the same poem.

    “I don’t imagine you saran-wrapped in black latex or seeping out the edges of something tight and red.“

    “I’m going to shit books so bad-ass that they’ll be banned for trying to define bravery as walking into a biker bar wearing a pink sweatshirt with a picture of a unicorn being tamed by a gnome.“
    He used to scald me with this from stage. He knows a little better now, but he stills whispers it at night. I like the BrickHouse, I said to my friend. Whenever I go, I leave with Shane. I don’t even know you yet, but I’ve been sleep walking towards your kiss. Shh.

    In his own cunning way, my friend tells me about his girlfriends oral sex habits.“

    edit: I’ve also got two videos downloaded a long while before.

    World Slam Finals: Help Wanted. Every day my grandma would come into my room and I’d hear her say, “Rise and Shine. The world has a window that holds a sign there’s help wanted somewhere, young man”, so I rose and I shone. I put on my shoes and I was gone.

    CBC: People Get Better.

    I cursed myself for forgetting my place

    I found myself unexpectedly in a pub full of familiar theatre people this evening after rehearsal. As it’s been close to three years since I was regularly working shows in Vancouver, there was a tacit agreement that I belonged, but hardly anyone could place me. Jacques arrived, and when he finally noticed me and said hello, I caught several people relaxing. They’d been worried that I was some strange mis-perception, a mental twitch of a stranger who only seemed familiar. I collected a few e-mail addresses of people I’ve missed talking to. I’ve got to remember to send them an appropriate hello before I go to bed.

    “Then she sank down to her knees, grasped the cutter by both hands, took a deep breath and plunged the long blade through the middle of the package, through the middle of the masking tape, through the card- board through the cushioning and (thud) right through the center of Waldo Jeffers head, which split slightly and caused little rhythmic arcs of red to pulsate gently in the morning sun…“

    My teeth feel sweet now. Rose gave me a black to smoke while we stood outside socializing after. I accepted, forgetting that I don’t smoke, never have. The tops of my lungs are now complaining, reminding me that it’s been six years since I’ve lit anything up, but I mystified myself by having all the proper mannerisms. I suspect I will either eventually blame the city I live in, as Vancouver is a place where Marijuana isn’t considered a drug by any but the repressed children of the far right, so everywhere there are people with little rectangles of white paper rolled into tubes to be gestured with, or my exes who smoked and so gave me a character to unconsciously pattern. Either way, I was somewhat perturbed by how easily I took holding the soothing crackle of tar and clove.

  • Texas Voters Approve Ban on Gay Marriage.
  • Denver voters make adult possession of one ounce or less of marijuana legal.
  • Kansas education board downplays evolution.