n: vb: the spice of imagination
There will be a movie night at my place, Tuesday the 13th, of Snow White: a Tale of Terror, a more faithful adaptation of the Grimms Brothers’ tale, starring Sigourney Weaver and Sam Neill. A Potluck will start at 7:00 with movie at 8:30.
Today Graham and Burrow and I are going to Grandview Park to sell books off a blanket. Bad fantasy novels and old sci-fi for a negotiable two bucks a book. Come join us, we’ll be there until the weather kicks us out.
EDIT: The weather won.
A triff trailer mash-up that hurts in only the good ways, Toy Story 2: REQUIEM.
    link thankfully appropriated from Andrew.
Relaxed, she stands at the bus-stop. Watches a man exit backward, pulling a small wire basket full of fake red flowers, wonders briefly what they are for. A book is folded under her left hand. Her right hand has already fumbled in her coat pocket and found her bus-pass. She’s going to be on time for work with fifteen minutes to spare. She’ll open the store early, she decides, instead of waiting.
In her mind are tiny snippets of conversation caught like film stills fighting against a projector. Nothing stays very fixed, it all moves too fast for words to bind. Outside there is blue sky, her eyes blandly track a cloud as it intersects with an airplane contrail. Seizures, that’s what her thinking can be like. Feelings overcoming her body, twisting her lips or her hands into a smile. Remembering when he kissed her, her eyes warmly close and open again. Curious if anyone else is doing the same, she scans the other faces on the bus. No one interesting today. A cluster of yoga clothing imitators, some people going to work, a couple in the back discussing a television series. Someone is reading a paperback novel but the cover looks too glossy, the book looks too thick. It’s an incarnation of the dime-store novel, the summer blockbuster hit parade. Empty calories and too much talk about weapon specifics.
Her key in the new lock turns harshly. In spite of the extra filing when she replaced the lock with the hardware store clerk, there is still something uneven. An expected alarm sounds when she opens the door, a warning keen, piercing but still quiet. Enough to tell the wrong person that they’ve made a mistake. She half trips on a newspaper someone kindly slid under the door earlier in the morning and pulls the CLOSED sign to OPEN. The useless paper and her bag are deposited on the glass topped counter while she wonders why she never seems to do any of these things in the same order. Some mornings the buttons stick on the alarm console and she has to talk to stoic sounding security people on the phone. She smiles nervously when she does it, knowing she doesn’t have the passwords and not sure if she should care.
A combination of coupled enzymes to construct a simple circuit in which enzymatic reactions correspond to logic operations.
    link cruelly wrenched from the bosom of darling Warren.
My housemate, Graham, is away right now, up with his family, clustering around his grandmothers death. He says in his journal that he got to say to her the things he needed to say before she left. I’m glad for that through the commiserative sadness, though I keep a narrow sliver of being unable to relate. I know when my remaining grandmother goes, it will be barely a family affair. My mother and I will stare at the ceiling a bit, covered with the inevitable and distinctive blanket of pondering about immortality that every death brings. My brothers will ask if we’ve inherited anything and we will ask my mothers sister, Reine, who will be far more affected, the one in charge of all the necessary arrangements that accompany a death. She will tell us of something small that may come our way. Tacky jewelry from her shops, maybe, or an inappropriate coffee-table. Then it will be done. If we were the sort for annals, her passing would be the year of nothing in particular. All the known history in her head is either commonplace or inaccessible. Her drop in the sea has no flavour to leave and savor.
I like how Graham talks about his family. They seem to be a unit, a partition of people that all carry more than just a name together.
Good morning to the new lunar year. On the Chinese calendar it’s my year, the year of the Dog.
The roof of my mouth feels lightly of electricity. Yesterday was falling backward, a door opening accidently, opening onto a room full of people I never see and don’t think about often enough. I have a new ring, a silver thing like the branch of a mother of pearl tree. I have eyes too open to see sleep properly. The parade through China Town was extremely beautiful. Ray and I bought explosive paper twists, you throw them to the ground and they spark and bang. I fell in love all over again every time I dropped one to the pavement. I took a slew of incredibly colourful pictures, but I will upload them later, when I am not rushing against the time I need to be at work.
She retrieved a clove cigarette from her purse and put it to her lips. I hurriedly offered her a light with my lighter.
“I want to sleep with you,” she said.
So we slept together.
-Haruki Murakami
“This General Motors Futurliner was one of only 12 such vehicles ever built. They were introduced in 1940 as part of GM’s “Parade of Progress,” spun out of the 1933-34 World’s Fair, themed “A Century Of Progress.” There are nine known Futurliners that have survived. Three are in operating condition, including this 1950 model which sold at an auction last week for US$4,320,000.”
The day before yesterday, I felt like terrible company. Saturday night I simply crashed. Blearily I answered the phone a couple times, tried to wake up enough to get myself together enough to go to dinner with my friend, failed, and finally closed my eyes. There was a knock on the door a little past midnight, Andrew and Ian to pick up some electronics pieces, and a bit later, Matthew to tuck me in, but no one stayed and I fell back into uncomplicated darkness, tangling my ferret in my hair and forgetting to dream.
Any time it snows, parts of my brain shunt into being six years old. This can be rather embarrassing, like when you’re about to turn on someone and be upset for them unclipping your bra when you told them not to but your eyes have caught sight of magical fluffy little frozen clumps of white falling from the sky, so instead your lips blossom into a smile and the smallest little happy voice spills forth with, “Ooooooh…” and you forget to dish out what’s coming to them until it’s way too late and rather pointless anyway.
Blixa Bargeld, lead singer of the German industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten, does commercials for Hornbach, a home improvement superstore. Here they are: Mosquito killer, Paving stones, a Power Drill, and Paint.
Brian collected me from work Saturday like an exhausted figurine. After dinner, I crumpled in the car on the way to a birthday party, a tired pile of black fishnets, velvet, and feathers, the air escaping my deflation taking the shape of an hour’s worth of clarifying how sick I am of me and mine meaning more to me than I do to them. He’s very good for me to talk with, he’s too soothing to get bitter at. Always he drowns me in affection. After the first unsteady hour, where my independence wants to lash out and kill him, I begin to relax. The next little while, all my carefully locked away pains want to leak out, but that too goes away. They grow tired of fighting with me and go back to hide again where I’ve put them to stay. It’s a trick I’ve learned to have. Hurray for trained repression. One day I should count how many people there are who are allowed to embrace me, allowed to find out what I’m really saying inside my head. I suspect the figure could be counted on one hand.
TUESDAY, (not tonight, my mistake, verysorry hope this catches you in time, etc), at 9:30, there’s will be a group of us at Tinseltown go seeing what they’ve done to Aeon Flux. You should take part, yes yes. Strengthen our community through entanglement of social possibility
Thank you to the lovely people who came over last night after Graham and I cleaned up. Andrew, Nick, Ian and Ethan – your dishes are a sweet testament to your arrival. I’m sorry I fell asleep during disc three of Aeon Flux. It’s been so long seeing some of them that I’m not even sure which episodes I missed. I don’t even know what time I fell asleep, the only time I looked at the clock was at six:thirty when I noticed it was light out and the ferret needed into the hall.
This is for Ray:
Today is my last day at work.
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.
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.
