Tag: links

mocking my taste in music

As a pleasant lead up to our local production of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead that Beth is organizing, I’ve found Hamlet as a text based adventure game:

It’s so unfair! You’re in trouble again, just because you called your uncle – or rather, your new stepfather, Claudius – a usurping git. It’s true, though. Your real dad was SO much better than that guy. Too bad he was found mysteriously dead in the orchard a couple of weeks back. Anyway, your mother (who was, incidentally, looking quite something today in a sparse leather number, er…) sent you to your room, and here you are.

Bedroom
You are in your luxurious palatial boudoir, all of ten feet square. There is a four-poster bed, and not much else. A portrait hangs on the wall. An exit leads north.

Also found on the internet today, Soviet space monkey pants for sale on eBay and a gallery of vintage toy rayguns, (I remember playing with number 70 once. The frontispiece was that strange dry metal that reminds me of badly melted tin.). The news is less futurist and more dystopian. In addition to the unrelenting Katrina clusterfuck, there’s loyalist riots in Belfast and Typhoon Khanun flattened 20,000 houses, and destroyed large swathes of crops, industrial units and infrastructure in Zhejiang province. This puts my wake-up “we’re going to cut off your electricity” phone-call in a bit of perspective. I may be too broke for reliable groceries, but at least I’m not swimming to the store.

However, if I had a dime to spare, I would support Planned Parenthood, Philadelphia, in a heartbeat. They’ve come up with a rather choice way to deal with protesters called Pledge-a-Picket. (Click on the link to take part.)

Every time protesters gather outside of our Locust Street health center, our patients face verbal attacks from them. They see graphic signs meant to confuse and intimidate. They are sometimes blocked from entering the building and occasionally they are videotaped. They are offered anti-choice propaganda and free rides to the closest “crisis pregnancy center.”

Staff and volunteers are also seen as targets. We are all called murderers, are lectured to about committing sins, and are told we will pay the “ultimate price” for our actions.

You can stand with others in the community against these acts of intimidation and harassment.

Here’s how it works: You decide on the amount you would like to pledge for each protester (minimum 10 cents). When protesters show up on our sidewalks, Planned Parenthood Southeastern Pennsylvania will count and record their number each day from October 1 through November 30, 2005. We will place a sign outside the health center that tracks pledges and makes protesters fully aware that their actions are benefiting PPSP. At the end of the two-month campaign, we will send you an update on protest activities and a pledge reminder.


This weekend was your last chance to conceive if you want your baby to be born on 6/6/6.

I knew I went down with the ship when he turned to me with a radiant smile and said, “I’m happy.”

When his eyes looked at me and the sun caved in like a cathedral.

I wanted to say, “when you let your hair fall down, rapunzel cried.”

Instead I turned and walked away, beginning to choke when his hand touched my arm.

I missed posting on September 11th, which is likely for the best, considering how dour my humour has been today. Now it is September the twelfth, and Ryan’s birthday. I found him a present in my room while I was sorting today. I’m minimizing, paring down my possessions as best I can. I want to be down to one box of miscellany, one of books, a computer, a lava lamp, and my mouse with wings by the next month. The furniture will be dealt with according to piece when the time comes. I want out of here. I’ll post what I find that can be given away. Today I threw out a colouring book from when I was young enough to have a sister still, (I was five, she was four, that story may still end with I never saw her again), and the top half of a musical china clown my father gave me when I entered kindergarten. It used to be that you would wind it and it would play The Lovers Song, sort of an Italian answer to Greensleeves.

My city is burning. It smells a little like every neighbor I have is smoking a very chemically treated marijuana outside my window, and ash is drifting down from the sky. At first we thought it was a chemical accident, a nasty edged flame burning plastics somewhere by the water, but the internet told us otherwise. Burns Bog has caught on fire. The last time, almost ten years ago, Vancouver was blanketed in ash for two days. The methane-rich peat can smoulder underground almost indefinitely. This is especially nasty, as that’s one of our most protected pieces of wild preserve. It’s rather essential to our local environment. For one, it’s where almost all of our crows live. They commute every morning to scatter over the city and gather every evening to fly back in an immense trail of flapping black. They’re beautiful.

string them together

Adrian’s finally a father. Send tentative moments of nervous congratulation over to him and A.J. They’re braver than the rest of us. When Adrian first informed me at SinCity, almost six months ago, I actually began to fall and he had to catch me. Apparently that was the most popular response.

It’s Ryan‘s birthday on Monday. I had mixed up the date, thinking it was to be on Sunday, September 11th re-wiring my brain for importance. I thought about having party for the Fallen Towers, a wake for the American Empire. Very antique commiserations, a very old world celebration. Fancy dress, champagne glasses we smash in the street, a cake in the shape of a flaming airplane. A toast! Oh land of freedom, we barely had a chance to say that we’re sorry for letting you become what you did.

Out in the real world, the California Assembly has become the first state legislature in the US to pass a bill endorsing gay marriages and pictures of Katrina are finally coming on-line. Someone accused me of harping on about New Orleans the other day, claiming that I was blowing the disaster out of proportion. I have to wonder where they’re getting thier news, because I don’t think I’ve an imagination that could overstate how badly the response was handled, (ex. Hosptial closed for President visit.), even down to the simplest things:“The good news: If you’ve survived Hurricane Katrina, the government will let you register for help online. The bad news: But only if the computer you’re using is running Windows.“

transmigrant‘s been posting some fabulous links on the topic, like this short clip available for download.

—

Carpark North has a video that sequels Human. They’re the same children who work such miracle wonders as love, only a year later. They seem so much older, the wisdom has changed into something far lonelier. I don’t like it as much, I feel it lacks the wonder that makes the first one gasp, but it’s still interesting to see. Click on Media, then Video, to watch them. Human is simply divine. Andrew found a page of films by the same director on Videos.Antville, a multiblog list where people join and post links to “cool” music videos.

As a nice segue, I’ve discovered Sigur Ros‘s new album, Takk, is available for a listen on MySpace here.

—

Once I thought the world turned without me. I stood still in a small bubble that was coated with my name and no one ever saw me. Now I’m recognized on the street so regularly that my friends don’t act surprised anymore. Last night after work, a tall boy approached us at a bus-stop. “I’m a struggling artist, I’ve just released my first CD.” A familiar refrain, the voice of an indie kid who might not be any good, and we don’t have any money, sorry. Mid sentence he stops, “Are you Jhayne?” Ryan laughed and part of me cursed for not knowing who he was. “We went to elementary school together. My name’s Kyle!”

I blink, this is too surreal. My memories of him are as sharp as lonely knives, I used to watch him to try and figure out how he laughed in such a world. He wore a red t-shirt with a neat band logo on it and won all the racing games in the gravel field. The brightest flame of personality in the entire grade, he’s now unrecognizable. What happened to his smile? Where’s his curly mop of hair? “You were the tallest boy in grade seven. I remember you. You were the only one who danced at our end of year dance.” I told him that I hadn’t any money, but there was an ATM at the end of the block. As we walked, he explained to Ryan how I was the weirdest girl in our entire school. “You read books, well, I suppose you still do, but you were really strange.” It occurred to me that he hasn’t seen me in about a decade but he managed to know who I was. Does that mean anything? There’s a guitar on his back, my eyes passed him over anyway. “Would it be safe to say that you were far more conservative then?” He didn’t have any change, so I bought him peanut butter cups at the 7-11 on the other end of the block, handed him his ten dollars and felt uncomfortably like I was being charitable.

We talked a little more after that and I wished him luck and promised to e-mail him. I’m wondering where this will go, what I will discover about the people who ostracized me when I was twelve. Thinking now, I miss the rare kids who talked to me. I think he’s still in touch with some. Brodie, he mentioned, a boy I knew in highschool who wasn’t that bad. Rather sane, by my accounts. He played Seymour when I played Audrey when we put on little Shop Of Horrors. Our strange plant was a cactus covered in shredded newsprint. Apparently he’s in a band now, the Living. They have gigs sometime. I hope to go.

how many downloads of IKEA porn would happen if I posted our video?


Please, Ikea, hit me again!
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

Ryan is ill. Last night I stared at the ceiling a moment and thought, “Well damn, there’s no hair to hold out of the way, what else is there to do?” I’ve been living with a different kind of boy all my life, this mild cat fur is out of my purview. Strange that there’s even sickness in my house. I’m rarely ill, and I haven’t had a cold since I was shorter than a coffee table. I brought him a towel, a housecoat, and a glass of water, and he came back to bed rather quickly, the dry heaves accomplishing nothing. I entirely blame Dragon*Con.

Now I’m going with Ray, Sophie, and Ryan to brave The Brothers Grimm, having giggled appreciately a little at Warren‘s Engine troubles to off-set looking at New Orleans, (some brief examples: US disaster chief delayed for hours, Navy Pilots Who Rescued Victims Are Reprimanded, Instead of Rescue Work, Fire crews to hand out fliers for FEMA, New Orleans Mayor orders ‘forecful evacuation’ as contaminated waters threaten an environmental disaster, (again, here, with audio and slideshow), FEMA Blocks Photos of New Orleans Dead, and a collection of other stories on FEMA).
edit: here’s the video.

which as is east?

Scientists in Australia’s tropical north are collecting blood from crocodiles in the hope of developing a powerful antibiotic for humans, after tests showed that the reptile’s immune system kills the HIV virus.

Putting the crunch of a piece of metal against my skull, I wake up. The people are gone, there have been no voices or music for hours. I breathe, thinking I don’t like silence. My clothes are tangled in the bed, and I put my glasses on to see. The sky is a dull blue, obscured from a cutting edge by a pretence of clouds. I work this evening, and for some reason I want to say I’m sorry. A general apology to the world for existing, like if I were to talk, my voice would quaver with a thick underlying bass note.

New Orleans is finally getting rescued, what’s left of it. Estimates say the city will have to be abandoned for at least nine months. (Of course, bloody Halliburton gets the rebuild contract, bastards.) People are still shooting, people are still dying and standing knee high in corpses, (they refused to let people leave the Dome), and there’s barely anywhere to put the survivors, but a start has been made, hopeful clans of organized humans are coming to light, fundraisers are getting properly underway, and the Red Cross is finally being let in, no thanks to the White House. (The presidential being what stood in the way of almost all rescue operations that were stalling.)

My mother rang yesterday, left a message. When I gave her a call back, my brother Cale picked up. “I got my lip pierced.” He’s all of fifteen, really the age for this sort of thing, I figure. I told him that just that day I’d been discussing how unattractive they are, and from there we degenerated into an arguement about who spits and who swallows. “I’ll bet you deep throat”, he said, and I replied, “Course I do, brat, I’m a good girlfriend. Not like you.” “I do too! Oh, wait. Fuck. You caught me. You suck, Jhayne.” “Yes dear, put mum on the phone” His girlfriend was listening on his end and kept dissolving into laughing fits. “You’re sick Cale.” “But my sister says she doesn’t swallow! It’s a crime!”

My best quote, “Oh come on mum, it sounds bad that I’m working in a sex shop, I’m best friends with my cheating ex, and I’m taking up with someone with a cokewhore sister, but it’s not. I’m the most stable I’ve been in a long time.”

I may not attend Korean Movie Night this evening. It depends. Are you planning on going?

blessed, the way, it is


for kentucky megachurch;)
Originally uploaded by sucitta.

“The U.S. government has chartered three luxury cruise liners for the next six months to provide temporary housing for victims of Hurricane Katrina, Carnival Cruise Lines said Saturday.”

You are what I haven’t written about yet. Stability and comfort, two unexpected islands ringed by eye-liner, shored by language and anchored with glyphs in the middle of the night. That you’ve never seen me naked means something for once, like it did when I was younger, before I began to try and discard romance because everyone around me had grown out of it years before I was born. You are what I haven’t questioned, because it won’t matter, because what you are thinking is enough for me. I watch you and it’s like I can see a mist around you, an aura of intelligence that I can walk into and feel safe. It should be uncomfortable, but instead I feel like I could fit like a smaller matryoshka. Nest inside, curled like fingers over the keys of an ivory piano, and sing with you, creating chords with the words you haven’t learned to say yet and yours that I never thought to know. You are slender fingers poised artfully and laughter longer than your hair. You are interesting in a new way and I’m hoping you come home to me. I like your smile. By the end I’ll owe you so much time, I’ll owe you so much effort and attention and missing you more that I worry a little at the deficit I might be wracking up this month in my time of tasting peculiar dust. You don’t see how strange this might be from my eyes. This city’s been a bloody cage, bars of people and relegation, since I walked out into the desert, saw visions, and never found my way back. My house has been cursed this last while and my luck brought out from under me to be thrown on a pyre of miniature disaster – who are you to stand by my side? You’re the closest thing to freedom that I’ve held by me in quite some time. That you’re mild, it’s fresh spring water. Something clear, something to carry in my cells after standing dry so long. I’m hoping somehow that it doesn’t matter that I’m hanging by threads, that the ink used to write on my heart was just bitterly burned, a frostbite scorch needing too long to heal, and threatening to scar in complicated knots. I won’t claim you’re the only person on my mind, but you’re patient. Like stones in fairy-tales I said, and it’s true. It will be enough.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin speaks openly and candidly about the current situation in New Orleans. Transcript here.

From unquietmind, “One of my jobs in monitoring the Associated Press photo wire. I see hundreds of images that will never be published, but I think these photos are worth sharing with you. Even though some of these images are sad and harrowing, I take comfort in them. They remind me that people are inherently compassionate and caring. I hope you draw strength from them, too. All images by The Associated Press in New Orleans, Biloxi and the rural Gulf Coast.“

Topography of the flood

I dont’ know where I’m going with this, how embarassing


lift
Originally uploaded by davenyc.

lafinjack has found vogueing vinyl ninja gangsta Michael Jackson clones. It’s bad because it’s good.

Bloody tar pit apartment. I don’t even much like it here, but yesterday I couldn’t bring myself to go. Ryan came home and that bit the edge off. Vagabond blue jello today for breakfast in a clear glass bowl. I don’t know where the rabbit is, but occasionally I hear things fall down in the living-room, so I’m taking that as a pulse positive sign. I am clearly awaiting a mental cohesion I’m not currently capable of, because the thought of a fashion photography bunny rabbit pin-up set continues to pass over me like a fast moving cloud. Place rabbit in life, begin to use as prop. It all sounds worse than it is. On the back of the motorcycle, my mother gunned us up to 120 and I let go. Leaned back against the wind and slowly raised my arms backward behind me. My wings for flying, it’s the same for everyone. I thought of taxidermy, a white winged mouse holding out its dried heart with tiny paws, the cavity in its chest apparent and stuffed with small rosebuds. The tiniest smudge of red on its hands and fur. I would hang it from a piece of ribbon, thin and shining satin. Black, because I thought of who I would send it to.

The Aristocrats (movie) Today at 8. Meet in Tinseltown up by the box office @ 7:30.

My humble pen in head has been thinking a lot about the texture of L.A. lately. I don’t know why. Something about futurism, about how Los Angeles got trapped in the bright promise of the shiny sixties, when optimism was still allowed, in a way that I’ve never encountered in Canada. I don’t know if I want to go back yet, but I consider it every time I think of getting a driver’s license. Ray sent me a film clip this week, General Motors’ view of what the world was going to be like. A woman dancing through a dream of glittering cars and enviably automatic kitchens. It ends with her and her masked man driving down a model of a freeway surrounded by rolling parks and well spaced tall buildings. All very Norman Geddes, the industrial designer who unveiled ideas of Tomorrow back in the American 30s. All very comfortable and lovely. The Future was something to look forward to.

Of course the allure of Futurama was polished with the wishful spit of GM to sell new cars to a depression laden country, but I think we’re more cynical now. It’s difficult to write any positive forecasts, which is important, in its own way, as people are entirely in love with soothsaying the Next Big Thing. Nostradamus had a surge of popularity back with September 11th, we’ve obviously not lost the bug. We still like looking backward to trace our way forward. We trail over whatever paths that look the most reasonable, metamorphing pattern recognition into a full blown precog bit of back-patting hindsight fiction.

That AIDS is a crises, (check this though), wars are blossoming anywhere on the globe where there’s oil, and that terrible news of any sort is available in a way that it never has been before, creates an open glimpse into 1984 bad dreams. Try to create something hopeful and the result seems slightly too soggy to be taken seriously. Social optimism is cyclical, and we are a very low swing of the pendulum. Our architecture has finally reached out into shining glass towers and we’ve found they all look the same. Expression of emotion through stone is all but a lost art form. Scenarios of happy thronging places seem wrong, out-dated and moded. Apocalypse ideas seem educated, smart and fact driven, less theoretical.

However, just because our predictions are darker than they used to be, don’t mean they will be any more accurate. Orwell gave us a place where security cameras covered our every move, yet never dreamed that we would be broadcasting from our bedrooms every day to a limitless audience of strangers. When my ex-roommate and I had a webcam in our living-room, we had upward to a thousand hits a day, and really we had no content. There’s the forever complaint of older writers, too, that there was no way to predict the cellular telephone, dating their work of the future with the stamp of Before The Technology.

I’m tired, you’re sick, we’re not sleeping, you haven’t called me yet


Chicago sculpture
Originally uploaded by mosaic22.

Rain is falling tonight, water against the windows sliding down into water on the street. It’s such a Vancouver evening, warm except for the chill of wet clothes. There was no one on the streets, cars absent, pedestrians a myth. I like the smell coming in from outside, it detaches me from time in a healthier way than my day to day wandering has been.

I forget how old I am a lot. On my knees, I asked your name. I asked for a moment, for a dream of needing me. Could you please, just one moment, do you see how pretty I can be? I saw you there, you put your hand on my shoulder as if you knew me. For the first time, I finally understood the meaning of having a name. Heaven was a place.

  • New York Times on the Theremin.

    One way to look at tonight is that I was getting paid for my opinion. I was in a focus group on the upcoming mayoral election. Burrard street, they gave us sandwiches, little bits of carrot cake. Draw a picture of your perfect mayor, what do you think of this man’s politics? I was more of a force than I thought I would be. Youngest one there, but supplying everyone with words, vocabulary. He answered my questions particularly. What she said.

    7:30 pm Thursday, we’re meeting at Tinseltown to watch The Aristocrats. (check out how the cast list never ends.)

    shadowblue discovered tonight the Canadian Heraldic Authority. “Apparently it was established in 1988, and all you have to do to get one is send a proper letter and a biography of yourself to the Chief Herald of Canada. It’s all very interesting — corporations can get them, too. Canada’s the first Commonwealth country to get its own heraldic authority, apparently. When your petition is approved by the Chief Herald, they basically consult with you to come up with something good.” Governor General Adrienne Clarkson’s coat of arms is Gules a Chinese phoenix regarding a lightning flash and rising from flames issuant from a maple leaf the whole ensigned by a representation of the Royal Crown all Or. It would be delightful if a group of us drummed up a brainstorming session to create some ourselves.

    Don’t you want one?

    • you can see the changes


    jhayne silver curve
    Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

    My house is divided. One night, two evenings, three days, four fingers, five. A hand without you, counted every time the sun goes down and terrified of my heart. Another night, another day, that’s two more. Arithmetic on my body. My shadow on fire, blazing something tired and nameless whenever I close my eyes and don’t hear your voice. Haunted by more words than I can encompass without looking into your eyes, by letters unwritten in every pore of my skin that remember your lips. I’m not sleeping so well. Instead I dream of stars, painful pointillist versions of a city I’ve never been to, haven’t seen pictures of. Fire on top of pillars. It’s all under the same moon, I tell myself, the words like a broken bridge tumbling into a river in slow motion. Instead my eyes sting with the splinters of roses and I imagine a painful sprouting of wings from my back. Dark feathers to take me away from here.

    My fingernails are long again, white crescents I could place in the sky. I would offer to prostitute my soul if it meant that I would be able to create exquisitely as Alessandro Bavari does. His art is enchanting, captivating my eyes to the exclusion of time. I look outside and the warm air’s been pulled out over the ocean, taking the light with it like a blanket to tuck in the other side of the world.

    edit: a re-write for lj user inktea

    free bird!

    A little boy looks up at a man with graying hair, “Why do you play with desperation?” The man, he puts down his worn clarinet and replies, “Because they live in every town I have a gig.”

    Two-thirds of the populace were living alone when it happened. Hallucinations, at first faint, flickerings in the reflected blue light from television screens, almost transparent in the cheap halogens found over bathroom mirrors. There were rumours of an LSD dump in the reservoir. Doctors complained that there was no standard procedure for treating so many for psychosis. Somebody blamed violence in video games. A week later, they had mass, depth. Archetypes, like a fat sodden guilt that would sit in the fridge and pout whenever the door opened, were haunting the under stimulated, the lonely, and the old. Stocks in drug companies soared, there was a run on anti-psychotics. Cities were drastically effected, tall office towers especially, but not as much as the small towns, rife with tiny disasters. In one rural area, an entire nursing home committed suicide.

    –

  • Fishermen catch a missile.
  • Pictures of the Mermaid Parade.