This is his picture of my reaction, (post rooftop snow-angel): |
This is my picture of Lung‘s reaction:
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As I said in his post on the matter, “EVERYONE PLEASE NOTE THAT HE WAS NOT EVEN OUTSIDE WHEN I TOOK THAT PICTURE.”
Tag: lung
uplifting through adversity
I spent last night at Lung’s place being wined and dined with David and Claire and writing a glossy, shiny happy proposal article for Reader’s Digest about Slab City, where we were staying by the Salton Sea. Considering that Slab City is essentially a small town comprised of poor and crazy people pushed out to the ultimate margins of society, it was pretty tricky. Not only did I have to write in the sappy, almost vapid style of Reader’s Digest, I had to gloss over anything untoward. Nigh impossible, but I think I succeeded. By the time I was done, I had a rough article draft which failed to note any of the incest, open meth use, unbalanced people suffering from mental illness, or the terrifying number of sex offenders. Instead it talked about how great our friends are. It was pretty awesome, like looking at the moon with a microscope.
Via Lung today:
fricking frack: things I hate to miss more than
It’s that time of year again…
November 21, 22, & 23
The 2008 Crawl map.
FRIDAY November 21st 5:00pm – 10:00pm
SATURDAY November 22nd 11:00am – 6:00pm
SUNDAY November 23rd 11:00am – 6:00pm
The Eastside Culture Crawl is a free, annual 3-day arts festival that involves artists opening their doors to let the public tramp through their creative studio-spaces, (and sometimes homes), to exhibit work for sale.
“Painters, jewelers, sculptors, furniture makers, musicians, weavers, potters, writers, printmakers, photographers, glassblowers; from emerging artists to those of international fame… these are just a sampling of the exciting talents featured during this unique chance to meet local artists in their studios.
Purchase something that strikes your fancy, commission something to be uniquely yours, or just browse through the studios and meet the artists, learning about their specific works of art, materials and tools, approaches and techniques. This is a once a year opportunity to meet many diversely talented artists and view their creations in the studios where they work. Be part of this exciting event, which brings people from all over the Lower Mainland, and share in the imaginations that enrich our neighbourhood and lives.”
Last year Dillon and I went to a bit of it, and it was absolutely spectacular. Almost endlessly fascinating, as every room contained an entirely new collection of art. 1000 Parker St., especially, as it has the highest concentration of artists. (Though there seems to be more paintings of crows at 1000 Parker St. than there are actual crows in a fifteen mile radius of the building itself. Go figure.) Thankfully few studios were devoted to watercolour trees or flowers, instead it was a little like coming home, exploring every room as new, colour-spattered, welcoming universe. Last year there were over 300 artists showing. This year there’s going to be more.
It’s one of the few Vancouver events I consider unmissable, which is why it’s killing me a little that I’m not going to be in town while it’s happening. Instead I’m going to be in Seattle, and then hopefully on a plane, making my way South, towards Lung and the Salton Sea, the ecological disaster desert west outside of L.A. Take pictures, everyone. Attend, discover, and explore.
hold it down
Moonhead, by Andrew Broder:
did you hear the one about the day the moon fell to earth?
it had a crater exactly the size of a human head on it
and it landed on my head and now my head is the moon.
or the one about the day a thousand lives from now
when we return as a team of archeologists
and discover fossils of ourselves in a former life
on the day we spurned our nervous twitch
and found our yearn to hint at winter bliss.
on the day the stars sang the national anthem of sweaty disbelief,
of coelacanth teeth, to scream loud enough
to shatter the roof of a coral reef
and the shrapnel ground up into paint
for robin’s egg colored dream and root beer float,
second hand flavored drool absorbers
and the words “hope” and “home” that sound the same,
smell the same as the day the doe caught a sad snowflake on her
tongue and melted it in an instant
and it tasted like the blackhole’s wild-eyed longing for light,
whether from the starts that radiate
or the planets that reflect it or the eyes that reflect the reflection,
or the eyes looking into those eyes and seeing the reflection of the eyes,
which if all goes according to plan,
will outlast the universe itself.
..::..
Lung is talking about bussing me down to Las Vegas to meet with him and Natasha somewhere near the end of November, and then traveling with them to the Salton Sea, finally to pick up the letter Kyle left there for me sometime last year. As November closes around me and the sun drowns in fallen leaves and crowns itself in flash flood puddles that mirror the endless gray sky, it feels less like a blessing and more like a fairytale already told, like somehow I missed it between one blink and the next, as if these places never really exist, but only hover over pages of books and mimic the careless sheen of photographs, haunting our collective conscious in a waking haze of forgotten days as long as winter dusk.
Out there is the storm, strangely calmed, another twist in the river, another chapter of life. Here is a pool of known days, painting, adjusting, David job hunting, tinkering with very little, watching a movie at home every two days. I’ve said yes. Of course I’ve said yes. I’ve missed Lung, his crackling humour, sharing our puzzle-piece twin set of anger and frustrations. There is no other answer. Now it rests on my workplace, if they will let me leave for a week, to work away for five days. If it all works out, I’ll bus down to Seattle after work on the 21st for Robin’s party on the 22nd, then catch a bus to Vegas from there on the 23rd. My fingers are crossed, my fingers and my heart and my bones and breath. My hope is an elephant living deep inside the cage of my chest, pressing against my skin, forged out of a cello’s long humming strokes of sound, invisible until an answer arrives.
Until then, I won’t know myself. I’ll be a string of notes without direction, as crazy eyed inside as unexpected blood on the hands, a tight rope walker with her lover on the other side and a den full of sharp toothed, hungry lions below.
Meanwhile, Antony and I are e-mailing back and forth, a piano falling from the sky. There’s nothing quite like home. Apparently he arrived in Montreal just over a week after I left, and he’ll be there until half-way through December, far after I would return from the south. Tag, you’re it. Unexpected, how life plays these games of just missed, all the way through, both directions. If he sends me his address, I’m going to try and make sure he gets another palm tree, to keep in touch.
Some times I am lucky and an entire week can go by without missing his laugh. I wonder, occasionally, that I am so changed within since we met. Given all that is fixed, will I ever want to be able to walk away again?
she’s making us dinner later, too
Lung‘s other best friend, Melo, is in from Montreal this week, so last night we took her to some of our favourite places, starting with a delicious dinner at Phnom Pehn, moving on to dessert at Cloud 9, (where the food is expensive and terrible but the view is unparalleled), and ending the evening with a late night drive around Stanley Park, stopping to take tourist pictures on the seawall in the dark. I think she’s wonderful. Not only is she incredibly fun, she looks like a Russian fashion model, tall, and solid, with the sort of black cut hair and pointy-toed boots I’d expect from a Red Mob girlfriend in a William Gibson short story.
Today he’s taking her to Granville Island Market, the LuluLemon store, (she wants to shop), and possibly the Museum of Archeology. Does anyone know if there’s any Giant Sequoia trees within a day’s drive? I’m fairly certain they’re all either on the Island or down in California, but she says she read something about local ones. Apparently she’s never seen any truly massive trees before and really wants to see some trees bigger than anything else alive, as if real mountains versus Mt. Royal wasn’t enough size shock.
Tonight David and I are going to the Pay What You Can premiere of Letters from Lithuania, a Mortal Coil Performance Society production at the Stanley Park train, before catching up with them again.
Based on a true story, originator and performer Bessie Wapp recounts: “For generations, my ancestors lived in a small Lithuanian village called Varniai. Fleeing from the pogroms of Europe, my great, great grandparents immigrated to the United States in the later 1800’s. Of the large extended family who remained in Varniai, only a young mother and her three daughters survived World War II. After the war, they were reunited and the mother wrote to the only living relative she knew of, her brother-in-law in South Africa. But she didn’t hear back. Twenty years passed, and then word came from the son of the brother-in-law in South Africa. While sorting out his recently deceased father’s belongings, he had found her letters. But they were unopened: his father had kept them for 20 years but had never read them.”
And as if that isn’t fascinating enough, it features friends who are A+ performers, stilt-walking, shadow puppets, and a klezmer band on a miniature train. How could anyone say no? I don’t think there’s a better ticket in Vancouver tonight.
gosharoonie
If any of you are in Montreal, now you know where you need to be tonight.
whatever tomorrow brings
German staging of Verdi’s A Masked Ball on 9/11 with naked cast in Mickey Mouse masks
Yesterday I rushed from the apartment from a kiss at the door like a teenager caught by parents for the very first time, sneaking out the back as if dashing out a window, Black Crowes slipping out of me as I cheerfully walked barefoot, grinning, she never mentions the word addiction, in certain company.. along the alleyway to meet my friends down the street. Strangers catching my eye and smiling back, lighter. It was a nice day, though it hadn’t started out that way.
I had a fever the night before last. My body, finally exhausted, broke down into a haze of heat and hallucination. I lay drenched in a pool of quiet pain, two cats huddled over me, whiskers in my face, a plastic bottle of juice luckily next to the bed. When I could finally stand, I’d missed a job interview, couldn’t find my voice, and had to lean on the walls to take a shower. The world was pulling at my nerves, searching for signs of anyone home, but I felt invisible, as if all my senses had detached some time in the night. I bumped into edges, forgot where I’d put things down, and generally felt as if I’d suffered brain damage. By the time I was stable enough to leave, it was almost noon. Not only had I missed a job interview, I was late for Lung’s celebratory Canada Council Grant dim-sum. Ten points for surviving alone, minus several hundred for sucking at life.
(Thankfully, sort of, he and Claire had been waiting on my call, and perfectly understood once they saw me. When I look pale, I look pale.)
Everything after that was roses, however, minus a persistent, nagging bit of headache. Dim sum was excellent, the company as fun as the food was delicious, I met up with a nice young man and we seem to be coming to some sort of relationship, dinner was amusing argument that wasn’t really, visiting friends was a treat, and someone ran to meet me, something I haven’t seen in years. For the life of me, I never would have thought it possible while lying in bed the night previous, cursed, huddled with the blankets like new best friends, certain any mirror I found would shatter upon the impact of my reflection, so much was the heat radiating off my face, wondering if there was even one person in my own city I could call if I needed rescue.
Reviewing life and the real world as if it were a massive multiplayer game.
keep the engine running
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photos, unsurprisingly, by lung liu
“This life turned out nothing like I’d planned.” “Why not?” “When I was younger, living in L.A., I only wanted to grow up to be a famous pro-skateboarder. Pretty good at it too, not one of the insane guys, but up there.” “So what happened?” “My father moved us back to San Francisco and I became a musician.”
Saying goodbye, listening to the taste of every word that’s falling from my mouth like a flower petal, pearls spilling on the floor, why doesn’t he hear them? I hope the waiter doesn’t slip. A fortune of curiosity rilling across the floor. Formica table, silver edged, I’ve written about this before. It seems to be a place I say farewell to lovers. Late night, wishing we had picked the music, juke box saviors, noise, funk, tanned in the red light. My taste buds are crying out for the flavour of his sentence structure, how I find myself pronouncing his the word friends. A wild-eyed longing for something new, for all the stories he has to give the world, suffering from never enough. We should have, his future, another time, my past, we could have, but we won’t. Rain check. I want to lick his eyes, tri-coloured, red in the middle like a demon, green edged, the colour of jealousy, getting to fly away and jump away from here, cramped maybe, but I can’t care about that. Amazing. Summertime. Warmth. I’ll see him then, same old city, secrets open, wide, blazing. Press passes. Another stage, another show. Performances on and off, back behind fences, over by a beach, tucked around the lake. Maybe I’ll catch him a rabbit, eight track ears, folding back the soft fur, the sunburned faces of the people in the front row. For once, I don’t mind that I crossed the river. At least he held my hand.
“When I was sixteen, I had a decision land in my lap which would have changed everything. He was very rich, very famous. I see the face of the girl who said yes on magazines.” “I think you made the right choice.” “I think so too, or at least, I like to think so. Sometimes it’s hard to tell, but right now, all of it brought me to being here with you, and I’m okay with that. That feels alright by me.”
the best sort of flattery
Happy {one-day belated) Birthday Lung!
I hope you like it, it was bloody freezing out there.
mentally calculating terminal velocity, hanging upside down
What are people doing for the “holiday” this year? I believe I’m attending Dan Mangan’s gig at the Media Club over on Cambie Street, though there’s vague talk of a North Shore house party too.
I’m not sure if I’m up for very much. Silks class was rough this week. My body, weak from a cough, wasn’t prepared, wasn’t as able. Come Tuesday morning, I looked like a recovering accident victim – thighs ringed with dark black bruises and rope-burn, with tiny blood blisters where my pants got caught in the cloth as I was falling into a flip. (All of my weight pinching. Aie.) Terrible and aching. If I hadn’t been asked to soak in a hot-tub after, I don’t know that I would have been able to walk the next morning. Doesn’t matter, though. It’s for a good cause. It’s worth it, so worth it. We’re getting progressively fancier as we learn more skills and upper body strength begins to set back in, so not only is it fun, it’s beginning to be beautiful.