Tag: love

dressing red as candy blood

Tonight at the Anza Club! Springtime Lullabye!
Jess Hill’s costume party music video debut!

“It’s true! As of yet there has been but a whisper in the wind of the coming of wonderful things. The magic people are busying themselves excitedly with the creation of an evening of dream and inspiration, song, poetry, burlesque, and decor. Minds, bodies, and spirits will then make a dream come true as we raise funds for the production of Jess Hill’s upcoming album: Orchard.”

doors at 8, show at 9. tickets $10 at the door.
Lullabye’s start at 9pm sharp. So don’t be late.

The night will feature la musique of Jess Hill, Tarran the Tailor, Maria in the Shower, CJ Leon, Chelsea Johnson, and Sneetch, burlesque performances by the fine feathered ladies in Booty Burlesque and the one and only Rad Juli, and mad poetics by The Svelte Ms. Spelte and RC Weslowski.

The theme is dreamland so do please let your imagination dress you. After all anything goes, it’s your dream.

PERFORMERS:

Jess Hill: Hauntingly beautiful, the shadow singing with her crows, the blond-haired, blue-eyed, guitar-riffing sweetheart of East Van, Jess Hill will be playing with her band The Dreams of All and Sundry featuring arrangements for strings by Aaron Joyce and electro-acoustic foley artist Lee Hutzulak.

Tarran the Tailor: An enchanter of hearts, eyes, hips, and toes Tarran combines boombox and banjo to cast Cajun-style charms on his enraptured audiences. His organic beats seem a perfect fusion of musical technologies from the past, the future, and the land of East Van.

Maria in the Shower: A fascinating troupe of soul-singing mimes! Their engaging performances mix theatre and cabaret, horn and voice, musicianship and character into an unforgettably ecstatic happening.

CJ Leon: Clever as a crow with cadaver in his throat, CJ is bleaker and funnier than Hell with classical guitar accompaniment.

Chelsea Johnson: Soulful and true, when she rocks the mic, the world rocks too.

There will also be performances by the folk = fun act Sneetch, the hot and fiery Booty Burlesque, the naturally Rad Juli, the scarecrow prophet of East Van The Svelte Ms. Spelte, and surrealist poet and the current Vancouver Poetry Slam Champion RC Weslowski.

looking stricken

You’ve captured me completely.

I washed my face with tea this morning, poured into my hands over my bed by the boy next door.

He holds me close and tells me not to go, while I can tell the clock is ticking, siphoning seconds away, sucking then into now, a little more than near. Later I find a note in my bag, thin black ink, I Treasure You with a heart and a name scratched quickly in perfect hand writing both aching familiar and painfully arcane. I arrange it on my desk, still with the taste of his cigarette in my hair, an attempt to resist an automatic urge to tuck it into my shirt, one quick gesture over my left breast, folded safe and warm against my skin. Hours pass, half a day, then, as I write this, tick, I give in.

I wish there were a stronger way to say it.

here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life

  • The neurological basis of intuition.
  • The science of romance: Brains have a love circuit.
  • Hairdresser turns robber into sex slave.

    Social patterns like chemical reactions, like an activity series of kinetic glances timed to meet, pouring the basics of attraction and attachment, (three factors constituting love: desire, attraction, and attachment), into days fluidly bonded into a continuous spectrum of weeks, amphiprotic and effusive and damned, a full month of experiential enthalpy and entropy. At first glance, insoluble, immiscible, an unshared pair, two electrons uninvolved in chemical bonding, as out of synch as oil and water, but proven in part false, the expected endothermic endpoint nowhere to be seen.

    I dreamed of my hands caught in dark curls, as if they fell from my mouth like roses every time I said his name.

    Studies have shown that brain scans of those infatuated by love display a resemblance to those with a mental illness.

    I dreamed of his voice tangled in mine, as if his golden lion’s breath and tongue was something I could tame.

    Somewhere in this, equilibrium. Relief in small hidden places between moments, between voices. Words flowering away from the flint edges of the options given, (the punishing, complex crunch of serotonin spikes, multipath hypervigilance, stress triggered dissociation), into an interstitial place to breathe, where I can stretch my fingers to the answer in positive, (safety first norepinephrine, amphetamine dopamine reactions, oxytocin whirled with vasopressin), certain and solid, ionic attachment “more thicker than forget”, and feel the new, incredibly delicate covalent bond, though insane, might finally be okay.

    • “the dust has only just begun to form crop circles in the carpet”

    The sunlight flares us into creatures made of dark, burned honey. We are tangled, metaphorically, literally. Marry me, he says, eyes on mine, searching past the layered blue stone for a seed, I want to spend the rest of my life with you. This feels like a moment I’ve lived before, somewhere out of reach, as solid as summer, as certain as a dream. Luckily, I reply, I’m already engaged, like a boyscout, always prepared.

    Between our lines are novels unwritten, hammered into bone with pens of situational ink. (There is more to it than this, more and enough to break my heart.) He takes my hand, I will cover your fingers in rings, one by one, week by week, until you say yes. His hands gently trace his words in the air. Hang jewels from every part of your body, your fingers, your toes, your ears, your neck, wrists, and hair.

    His fingerprints are warm on my collarbone, even after he’s taken his gesture away.

    I only have one ear pierced, I laugh. Something I can fix, he smiles.

    Anyone watching would think we’re in love. That we live together reigning as the pale sun and moon. Instead we are a melody heard over the rushing river sound of a freeway, a missed connection trying to find somewhere to stand on origami folded sand. Impossible. Improbable. All signs point to doomed.

    How many weeks would that be? We are laughing again, our serious moment passed, submerged, allayed, alloyed. At least twenty-five. My toes curl into the grass of the park, pretending to glitter. Half a year of months. Our conversation launches itself into the sky. Who could wait that long? I would die. My head would explode, fall right off. I think of dandelions, ‘mama had a baby and her head popped off’, destruction, thumbs smaller than dimes.

    (you’re only as sick as your secrets)

    Forever’s Not So Long

    365: 85 - 26.03.09
    365: 85 – 26.03.09

    “..the sound of children crying in their beds in the night because something is wrong with them that they can never fix and so they must be braver, better, stronger, fiercer.”
    – Hal Duncan, INK

    There are lessons in this world that I should have learned by now: when to assess and turn away, when to see fire for flame. Clockwise consequences with no interpretation flux. (As piano kicks in as quiet and soft as what’s trapped beneath my skin.) I can’t help but feel I’ve been here before, as the edges of me shatter, as I prove myself again a wire too twisted not to break. Breathing in, a taste, I lose myself, caught in sincerity, a line, netted in the sweet, staring colour of maybe this time will be okay, no matter that I know better, no matter that this story is old, older than any one of us can see or even read in hard fossil beds, and I know all the endings, hungry, bruised, have been all the endings, myself a creature that doesn’t remember what being in love feels like, and have hated them. Breathing out, the pressure drops, leaving only anger screaming at myself, you ruin me, (us against the world, heart-breaking, and only for children too young to question myths), and I splinter, a massacre holding in what I can, as the pieces scatter, as sharp as my hopeless tongue, as defensive as a mirror, as iron unhappy as silence between friends. I think of my heart as being pierced, the truth that drove the boy Kay to run away with the Snow Queen, as the cold wraps me up, as my throat closes thick and my eyes sting shut, hollowing me clean, draining my blood corrosive of everything I need.

    oh mercy

    via bOINGbOING:

    Over at BBGadgets, our Lisa Katayama has an incredible post up about a widow in Japan who is publishing an anthology of text messages she sent to her loved one, after his death.

    Her husband, Motoo, was diagnosed with mesothelioma in 2006, probably from the steel pipe factory he worked at. He got worker’s comp, but the disease ultimately destroyed his lungs and left him with hallucinations for the remainder of his life. Shocked, the widowed Fukuda started sending text messages to her dead husband every time she thought of something she wanted to say to him. Things like: "I couldn’t live if I didn’t think you were still beside me. I can’t live [without you]. I’m crying every day" and "I want to call you ‘Otosan’ to my heart’s content. Why do you have to be inside such a small urn?" Every time she sent a message, the phone by his home shrine vibrated (she made sure it was always charged).

    Woman publishes book full of text messages sent to her dead husband’s cell phone (BBG)

    instant platonic anything friends

  • Extremely rare shark found, then eaten

    Been addicted to Omegle all day, the chat program which connects you to a completely random stranger. I just wished a gay Brazilian teenager good luck on his exams, after spending a quite significant chunk of my day in a rather gratifying discussion with a Swedish student named Phillip about med school, music, Italian earthquakes, and, finally, the current global economic downturn and what it’s been going to Iceland. It’s also freaking fantastic for surreal fun, so much so I’m going to start a file of my favourite saved conversations. Have you got any?

  • Extinct bird rediscovered, then eaten

    • space bat puts a pang of happy into my heart

    Shuttle-Riding Bat Dies The Most Glorious Death Imaginable:

    On a cool spring eve March 15th, 2009 a bat, crippled and wistful, clung to the Space Shuttle Discovery as it was thrust toward the great beyond. Goodbye and godspeed, my magnificent Spacebat.

    At some point during the countdown, Spacebat—a Free-Tailed Chiroptera—was spotted latched to the foam of the external fuel tank, occasionally moving but never letting go. Wildlife experts deduced that he had injured his wing and shoulder, leaving him with little chance of survival. He remained on the tank until launch. NASA’s cold report?

    The animal likely perished quickly during Discovery’s climb into orbit.

    True! But here’s how it should have read:

    Bereft of his ability to fly and with nowhere to go, a courageous bat climbed aboard our Discovery with stars in his weak little eyes. The launch commenced, and Spacebat trembled as his frail mammalian body was gently pushed skyward. For the last time, he felt the primal joy of flight; for the first, the indescribable feeling of ascending toward his dream—a place far away from piercing screeches and crowded caves, stretching forever into fathomless blackness. Whether he was consumed in the exhaust flames or frozen solid in the stratosphere is of no concern. We know that Spacebat died, but his dream will live on in all of us.

    appreciate what you have

    Emilíana Torrini – Heartstopper

    It used to be that I heard certain songs and a sweet pang of memory would spring through my body, uncoil between my legs, hold my hands like grace, and I would unconsciously close my eyes, breathing in what it was like to be there with him, the depth and width of us. The liquid vowels of his voice, the way he said my name, as if it were a word made of quicksilver instead of a single clumsy syllable, drenched in adoration the same way he could pull me out of my body by sliding his fingers through the roots of my hair.

    It seems now that I can’t relate, that I’ve drifted too far away. All I’ve got left is a cavity where all that used to be, hollowed out enough I can shout into it and not even hear a replied echo. Where did those mellow afternoons go? Those fantastic grins? Does this happen to everybody? I look up the names of the chemicals responsible for love and wonder if I’ve just been running out. Somewhere I have a photo of myself that I’ve never looked at, sitting alone in his bed, destroyed, taken the same day I left a line of poetry in lipstick on his mirror, the same one I wrote on his skin in ink the day he left me, the only evidence I could bear to leave, even though I knew he would wash it away.