Tag: montreal

snow is like lightning


phantomile.com
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

Though I walk through the valley of strange holidays and mouths that ask me for change in the name of a dead man that people believe in like tables and chairs and truth, to this world I say, “You can not take the wonder of snow away from me, for lo, it is powerful and bright and slides under my feet.”

You Are Beautiful.

My flight leaves from the airport here at five:thirty and arrives in Vancouver, though the strange vagaries of time-zones, at only eight o’clock. I imagine Ray will be there to greet me and whoever else would like to be there should contact him. I understand the Twenty-fourth is traditionally a family evening, so I won’t feel slighted if you’re busy elsewhere. However, if anyone has any parties, get-togethers, pot-lucks, or general meanderings that are open invite, I would like to know about them. I want to continue moving when my feet touch the ground, to distract me from being there and to remind me why I stay.

You Are Movement.

It’s thirty and ten steps to the corner of the street. Another fifty to notice the absence of good friends in the crowd, another fifteen to secretly smile at a pretty stranger. Six backwards and it’s possible to fall into a dream while you’re counting paces. Three, this leg wakes the dead whenever it slips on ice. Three is all stories, three then two, the pair, the holy lovers falling together though all the skeletons that live in the closets that were born in the suburbs. Back and forth, bodies and warmth and winter time is here, not there, but right in this very spot that I am looking up in the sky and trying to catch flakes of alien ice on my tongue and inside my smile. This smile, right here, this smile is wintertime. My feet hit the cracks in the pavement but my mother doesn’t die, only the little sheets of I want to turn back and explain myself. Take away my forgiveness and rain down ambiguous threats of calling you on the telephone until I have a map to follow back home, that mythical place that you all seem to have that I never found. I imagine a hall full of doors, a place of a thousand keys but no, I’ve got these three steps, now two, now one. My schedule is walk under this tree, walk forward, swing my feet like the water crumbling a sand castle by the sea glued together with my lipstick smelling like me.

Swinging like the back door, this is the final part of the operation, setting my feet straight on the slippery street.

I’m so tired of being the responsible one. The star in my heart wants to go out.

A. FOUR JOBS YOU’VE HAD IN YOUR LIFE (all previous jobs):
1. He sent me a letter
2. I met him dancing, I was sitting on the stairs
3. Brought to his theater, we had a friend in common
4. It was a new place and he was standing by the bar

B. FOUR MOVIES YOU COULD WATCH OVER AND OVER:
1. When I replied, I laughed, he thought I would know him
2. He tapped me on the shoulder, acted like I knew him
3. I took him up on a roof, surprised he would not know it
4. We went home together, though we didn’t know each other

C. FOUR CITIES YOU’VE LIVED IN:
1. Smiling, we corresponded every day
2. I was stunned to discover he had a wife
3. Standing outside his window was so difficult and necessary
4. In the cab, his english was better than mine

D. FOUR TV SHOWS YOU LOVE TO WATCH:
1. There were happy pictures, and clever sounds, and fun videos.
2. I kissed him on the cheek and told him to ask permission first.
3. My lips were hungry and two years later, so were his
4. His apartment was neat, plants in the window, books in the glass table

E. FOUR PLACES YOU’VE BEEN ON VACATION:
1. I ran home through the park to meet him on-line
2. We held hands when we walked and strangers told us we looked good together
3. Curled up on the couch, slowly we curled into each other
4. I sat on the counter and he explained his red wine

F. FOUR WEBSITES YOU VISIT DAILY:
1. Description sufficed to make my bed less lonely
2. When I slept over, it was on his side of the bed, not hers
3. Queen size bed now and we still almost fell off
4. There was a wide mirror above the bed framed by two guitars

G. FOUR SONGS THAT MOVE YOU:
1. johnny boy – U are the generation who bought more shoes and u get what you deserve
2. lamb – gorecki
3. emilie simon – graine de etoile, lamb – gabriel
4. marvin gaye – let’s get it on

H. FOUR OF YOUR FAVORITE FOODS:
1. Then the letters came less frequently and I didn’t know why
2. Eventually I couldn’t deal with the fact he was married
3. He was so beautiful, but I knew he never loved me
4. The next morning wasn’t too late, but there was a phone-call

I. FOUR BOOKS YOU’VE READ & LOVED:
1. Hurt, I assumed that work was taking his time
2. Hurt, I broke down, dissolved, died.
3. Hurt, I tried to tell myself not to believe in illusions
4. Hurt, I explained to myself that it’s what I should have expected.

J. FOUR PLACES I’D RATHER BE RIGHT NOW:
1. Then I finally went for a surprise visit.
2. He divorced the wife, I took him back, he went away on a trip.
3. He never calls, so I walk over to his house at night.
4. Today he called me back, canceled our plans.

K. FOUR THINGS YOU FIND YOURSELF SAYING:
1. There was another woman.
2. There were two other women.
3. There might never be anyone.
4. There’s another woman in potentia.

L. FOUR FAVOURITE ALBUMS:
1. He never apologized.
2. I’m fragile too.
3. Living with little is better than nothing.
4. At least he’s sorry.

the prospect of suffering

Toronto is measured now more by time than distance. I leave at six, get there close to midnight. I still have nowhere to stay.

Traditional News Year’s is coming, as well as another city, and I’ve been considering if it means anything to me. Today as I was cooking my meal for the train, I was trying to tally up my last three hundred and sixty-five days. So far I’ve been instrumental to one divorce and three affairs. Both my lovers this year ran off on me with someone else and let us all find out by accident. I discovered someone else never loved me in return and one that night stands can be frighteningly easy.

All of it adds up to so very little that it hurts me. It used to be that my passions repaid me in kind. I don’t know what happened or how to fix whatever it is that shattered. Where is the bowl I kept my heart in? The one I used to offer in dreams to passing strangers as an alms cup. I want to think that my soul is racing to find me and that all the time in between is time standing still, but I know that it’s crying for no use. Apologies aren’t coming, I’ve been forgotten somehow. I’ve seen this face before in the mirror, it’s unhappy. At least when I’m not in Vancouver, I don’t have to think, “He’s walked this street.” It’s like changing where I live in my head. There’s a hi-hat hit and a deep thump of bass and the place I was forgotten isn’t inside me anymore. It’s in front of me, on this keyboard, and I’m emptying everything painful into the ether for you to see and read and maybe understand. You’re out there, it happens, just like everyone else. Why did you never call me back? Only the musician ever told me how to find him.

I see your picture, all of you, any, and I smile with a sting in my ribcage. I lie down my walls and I let you in again like the best kind of refrain. I love you, yeah yeah, baby, let’s do it again. The part of me that marries people is still carrying you.

Do-wop-she-bop-pretty-damn-bang.

There are some basic elements that pain shares with surprise, but I couldn’t tell you what they were right now. I’m too busy trying to open my unfinished business like a dried flower in my mind that’s going to draw me back to Vancouver. All I can find is a job offer, Creative Director of a Friendster-type website, and maybe that I need to pack my things properly. My dream machine is hiccoughing, refusing to process anything that isn’t movement forward. What I need versus what I get. The end of this story has yet to be written so maybe I can fight my way through the ranks of mediocrity with a pen. Ink my skin the same way some people use school to charm the corporation. Electric glass pages, as many as I can collect, strapped to the back of my night time invitations. Writing like lyrics, writing because it’s what we came here for. I want to feel my hand in the hand of the world, keening with me that things have to change to be better, that what we have isn’t enough to live off. There’s too much starvation and not enough education.

I just might get that tattoo here. Just to carry something with me.

I’m just not used to it


the first taste of winter
Originally uploaded by -Angela.

I woke up this morning and Montreal felt like home. Siz hours sleep and The snow was right, the fallible plans for the evening, the christmas music leaking up from the street. Everything, click. Out there somewhere is a boy who likes me, and I like him, and out there someone laughed when they walked past snow that I had tramped all over in a childish glee. Out there is a city with no pressure, a piece of land attentive to diversity in a way that the language monoculture doesn’t touch.

Walking on snow feels like walking on creaking cotton wool. It’s soft, but somehow the smooth texture catches on itself. I’ve been falling into unmarred pile drifts of it since Thursday. Just tipping myself backward until the white powder ground has caught me. Unreal, I keep saying it’s unreal. The sense of suddenly trusting the earth is novel, a cellular structure worth of edification.

Typing’s so difficult on so little sleep. I’m not sure of spelling as much, my grammar begins to decay, words begin losing cohesion like entropy coming down like heaven. Flakes cold in my lashes. They fly as if feathers to land in my hair and cake around the cuffs of my ankles. Magic and another name for wonder. Light, these crystals, the sun comes up and smooths them out. The wind comes up, flash and glitter. Pulling a white rabbit out of a hat two minutes too late, because I’m already leaning into gravity backwards, holding out my arms as if I’m being crucified, as if I’m reenacting the feeling given to me on a digital platter of my last two relationships. Then the cold catches me, it cradles my body, the perfect pillow formed exact to my specifications. I fit into the cavity made from giving myself up, pretending for a moment that everything’s all right, and I smile. I want to fall asleep, content in the knowledge that one day I too will die and all of this will have worked itself out and into the next generation of fools who think they mean something.

Marvin Gay won’t get out of my head.

IMG_5715

After the Mongolian restaurant that had neither Mongolian food nor (apparently) staff, we climbed out of Chinois Town and left James to go to bed. He’d taken ill with whatever camouflaged “ethnic” food that he’d eaten. Joseph and Michel and I were left unscathed by our meal, though perhaps not by the restaurant, and continued bravely onward, collecting Johnathan and finding Saphir. Mistake. Hipster kids. Hipster kids and hipster goths. If possible, hipster 80’s music. Heavy metal upstairs with a live band and too much badly dyed black hair. Eventually, it was simply too many kids with trendy boots and ironic cut-out plastic earrings and not enough silver lame short short pirates.

So we went on a quest to find funk.

Unsurprisingly, as we’re a fine cluster of geeks, we failed. Not being able to find Rouge, (though I have on good authority that it does in fact exist), the newspaper led us to walking up St. Denis to Mont Royal and the Que De Quat, (sp? Sounds like Kitty Cat is all I know). Also a mistake. Twenty minutes trudging through snow to find that the club had canceled the show was a bit of a disappointment. Lucky for Montreal, next door had red strawberry jell-o. Otherwise, aching ankles or no: bloodbath. Actually, they also had clear plastic dishes of butterscotch pudding. That might have been what really saved the day as the jell-o, though shiny, was terrible.

  • Bob Dylan tries to win over another generation by being DJ and presenter for XM satellite radio.
  • YouSendIt.com is now offering a special “community” rate, (subject to terms of service), for people who have obscene numbers of people downloading off their site.
  • Other Music, an excellent alternative NY music shop, has listed their impressive End Of Year Best.

    • I’m always hungry for a little more than I’ve had in life

    Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

    —R.M. Rilke

    I’m floating too fast to close my eyes. My skin is still scented with someone else, the edges of them sitting on a bed, handsome head in hands, hair tied in black wheat warrior knot. I feel like I could make music right now, if only I had percussion. Inside my fingers have been trying to dance to a melody that has everything to do with the sounds of breathing. When I woke up, it was afternoon and the outside world was white. Everything buried and I didn’t know where my body began in relation to this strange acquaintance. Snow and light. Snow and a hand creeping into mine, a sigh, and they turned in sleep, delineating the places where my body began and the universe ended. The dry earth can’t kill me because once again I have meaning.

  • Alleged pope incarnate excommunicated.

    I’m so sorry he didn’t get the part. Later I’ll call in the afternoon, try for a rain check on breakfast. Films are like that. It’s fickle. They drag you in to threaten the other players, they drag you in and blow your face up ten feet tall and thirty million theaters wide. I understand the inclination as much as I understand the way a teardrop tastes.

    Before that, in a few hours time, James and I will be calling Michel, finding somewhere for breakfast, and making our way to the Urban Photography Exhibit currently taking up advertising space all over the subway system. After, James will vanish off to be a psychology guinea pig for some group studying how different artists solve the same problem, and if I’m lucky, I’ll have a date for lunch. Late afternoon, Jacob and I are going to hit up the House of Architecture and the skating rink in the Old Quarter. (On Saturdays there’s a fireworks show above the ice). It feels nice to have days planned again, as if now I’m safe somehow because I’m strong enough again to pull a city around me like a blanket. The stars, they are holes I punched there myself merely by searching for them.

  • Romania shepherd finds 80 human fetuses in forest.

    It felt strange to be at a party where everyone knew about the Zombiewalk. I stumbled, uncertain how to discuss it before I threw language barriers to the wind with enthusiasm. I’m beginning to recognize that I tread every day on ground that other people could never take for granted. It’s taking me over slowly, like the realization that most of my friends tell their friends that I’m a writer. I was so very good at avoiding that particular phrase. Smacks too much of art and creation, holy things, and I am but a girl who walks through the forest at dusk, who leaves before the gods come out to play.

    • I heard people saying I was easy like sunday morning


    around the corner
    Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

    First time kissing a man shorter than me. First time a few things, actually. I was out with James after dinner, we’d been talking about the death of our personal industries, and we were hunting for a nightclub. Somewhere with people, somewhere with dancing, somewhere with music going on. Stairs and stairs and stairs. Different designs, different prizes. It was like a treasure hunt or playing french doors with real ones. At the top of one set of crude roughly painted steps, ones surrounded by lemurs and monkeys in some kind of imaginary tropical tree, was a bar filled only by intensely drunk under-age girls dancing saucily to Duran Duran. Another set of stairs, these ones low and mirrored, opened up into the inside of a fake airplane with red kanji characters splashed above the bar and filled with atrocious hip-hop. Another place, we didn’t even make it up all the way. A song came on, something immediately recognizable from the late seventies, and it kicked us into immediate retreat. We barreled down those stairs as if the eighties hair gods were chasing us with hairspray and lighters.

    Somewhere along the way, at the television music place I think, James his his head so hard that I heard it in my teeth. We poked our heads into a few places after that, a two level place playing house on top and 80’s music on the floor filled with exact replica’s of the strung out lead singer of The Wolf Parade, a sour booze place with choppy wooden floors and too much cigarette smoke to see through, but he’d lost momentum and it was time to head back. One more place though, one last chance to see. Red rope out front, a wicker ball threaded through with christmas lights, the foyer a strangely residential hallway with a make-shift table as the mandatory coat-check at the foot of the metal and tile stairs. This is it, I thought, but first, to walk James home.

    Upstairs was a long low room cut into different areas through clever use of stairs and stripper poles. I liked how well crafted the space was. The walls were lined with dark velvet and the mood was Upscale Having Dirty Fun. It’s been noted that I appreciate style. The clientele were a different matter. The VIA rail staff party collected some of the IBM staff party, migrated in earlier and now were dominant. Drunk engineers in black suit and tie who called me rude because I wouldn’t drink with them. “If you were a francophone girl, you wouldn’t be so uppity. I’d be kissing you right now.” They kept surrounding me and trying to push shots into my hands. “Where are you from? You’re here alone, aren’t you?” They were entirely sleazy, but easy enough to shake off and occasionally better entertainment than the music. The music was unbelievably bad. At one point there was an audacious and painful mash-up playing made of Pump Up The Volume and the Miami Vice Themesong. It was a toss-up if the DJ was brilliant or simply brain damaged.

    At the point where I’d decided that I either had to leave or burn the place down and salt the earth, things changed.

    we hold these truths to be self evident

    Samorost 2, the sequel to one of the best flash art games ever made, has been released into the wild and is now devouring small portions of the earth that thought it couldn’t hurt to just look.

    I was slowly taking over this apartment in tiny hesitant increments. My toiletries were all in one tidy corner of the counter, my clothes were heaped only inside my suitcase, but now? Now my coat is on the floor, drawing a playful tangled line with my scarf between where I took off my shoes and where I landed to spread out newspapers with entertainment listings and determinately scribble all over them with a bright pink marker. Now my book and cell phone have marked an X spot on the chair I was leaning against, the one spilling over with comic books, my increasingly sick camera is lying as if dead, hinges open, while its card takes up a slot in the computer, and there would be dishes if I wasn’t expecting at any minute to jaunt off into the darkness to find dinner with James.

    Obviously, I have landed.

    Once again, Couchsurfing and Global Freeloaders came to my rescue, immunizing me against the rough-edged bicarbonate feeling of going stir crazy, sprouting social wings from my failing backbone. In half an hour, I’d received four invites to the same party, and another three to hang out on Sunday. Now I’m hooked up for the rest of my time in Montreal. However, this is practically just in time for my glass bone departure to Toronto. A rather telling example of apolitical timing, to be sure, and annoyingly typical of my life in general. Laugh-Cry moment. Shake fists at sky/self. Friday’s going to be interesting.

    “The narwhal’s single, spiral tusk has always been a mystery. Now a Connecticut dentist has discovered that the eight-foot-long modified tooth has as many as 10 million tiny nerves reaching from its surface to the central core and, ultimately, the whale’s brain.”

    This was last night’s entry. I was whisked out of the house before I got to post it, and then I spent my whole night out. I figure for the hell of it, I won’t delete and instead’ll just leave it here.

    over a year ago, do you remember?


    Heaven’s in the backseat
    Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

    Here there are no weeds growing, there are no patches of green grass to startle the eyes through the snow and hard packed side-walk ice. The reality is fiercely burning ears, tips of noses too numb to feel, and lips slurring inexpansively from cold. It gets dark quickly with no ocean to snare the sun. Walking down the street is noticing the flash of neon signs reflecting off eye-glass lenses, is watching black trends in coats and scarfs, is wishing for someone beautiful to step out from the crowd to ask your name. I’m feeling like I’m failing at being at peace. I could find something here to capture me, but I’m lost for a direction. There’s so much to explore that all I’ve accomplished is walking. I’m not clicking into place like a missing computer chip, instead I’ve barely scratching a surface I’m not even sure I’ve been allowed to see.

    Why aren’t you here beside me? When I’m running on so few hours of sleep, my dreams are always just on the edge of sleep, as if hallucinations are forcing me down into the bed instead of the insistent hand of gravity. Around the screaming edges of my tired lids are dark curls bleeding into my field of vision, the institutional brushes of a fingertip along the inside of my arm, the certainty that a tongue has just shaped the sounds required to speak my name. I flinch away, turning my head into my pillow, and sink into sleep, haunted by subliminal echoes of another bed, the one I would rather be in, wherever that is. I’m not even sure right now. People make fools of places, expose them for the space occupied that they are no longer living in. My memory lies to me, tells me that if I put my hand out, the right hand will take it, swing it to the softest lips my needs spill into and take my heart from it to cradle gently and let me rest. Sleeping lately hasn’t been rest. My heart is soul searching without me, leaving me always on the edge of exhaustion. I’m finding it difficult to follow simple conversation and the native language isn’t sticking to me at all. Instead, I’m shoving off, wandering on-line, trying to find somewhere within walking distance that would be interesting to be at two a.m.

    I slipped out of the apartment earlier to try and look at the wonder that is the sky. (A pregnant woman survived a fall from it earlier, though elsewhere.) There’s an easily accessible rooftop deck on the twenty-first and a half floor. Through the tiny gaps in the clouds, the stars are a seemingly endless metaphor for a patternless universe. I’m considering finding some of my most solid underwear and going back up. The other part of the roof encloses a heated pool. If I can’t find freedom, I might as well splash my toes around and read a good book. Last night I stayed up reading comic books that James had chosen for me from his prodigious collection. Fast fiction snacks, I thought. Strange little things, not solid enough to take a full bite of. It felt odd to be reading dedications written by people I know in the front covers, like I was deconstructing reality just the tiniest bit. Enough so that maybe when I looked up from the last page, it would be perfectly in time to see an unexpected explosion through the window, chunks of building spinning orange and black into the sky twenty blocks away.

    Well, one can hope.

    I have a media request of the internet audience again. You folk were so utterly amazing the last time that I figure this particular search should be a breeze. James introduced me to a music video, (download), a few months ago at Quickie Culture Night, DJ Krush – Truthspeaking, (linked here as an mp3). He’s in love with the singer, I fell in love with the DJ. However, his work is easy to find. DJ Krush is high in the hierarchy of wicked hip-hop fusion gods to come out of Japan in the last ten years, but Angelina Esparza’s a bit of an enigma. James has been unable to find anything else of hers in spite of a rather intensive search. If anyone’s got anything, could you toss it our way? Personally, I find her a little generic. Instead of finding her enchanting, I’m left craving more video with this man in it. The depth of personality he’s got engraved in his motion is simply breathtaking.

    also, we had dinner in a power outage

    Walking into a building draped with a giant inflatable orange octopus to discover that it’s a venue converted from a swimming pool carries a vestige of the same satisfaction as reading the line, “Deep Mix is a nice IDM/minimal internet radio station out of Moscow.” There’s just something inherently beautiful about the context, the message, no matter what the medium is discovered to be. “Scientists announced they’ve created mice with amounts of human brain cells.” Same thing.

    The white tile basin was scattered with inflatable red cloth couches and various forms of francophone hipsters in black clothing and striped retro boots. A table was in one corner of what used to be the deep end, flanked by lava lamps full of silver glitter and loaded down with copies of the trendy magazine the event was supposedly celebrating. Michel found his friend there, a dyke with pretty hair and a nice taste in shirts. She’s an SFX designer, makes amputated limbs for film and T.V. I didn’t catch her name, Veronique, until she gave me her card. It was hard to hear over the the two musician types on stage. Higher than us, even with the walkway where signs might have said PLEASE DON’T RUN, they stood wrapped in christmas lights. One was a good beat boxer with respectably solid work, the other insisted on crooning into a snorkel for the microphone over and over, occasionally dipping the end into a glass of water for atmosphere. The entirety felt like a film, like the two were too improbable to ever be expected to play music anywhere real, and especially not together. I tried saying as much to Yanick Paquette, but I think I was drowned out by the blurry sound.

    Once I was alone, I stood in the dead middle of the drained pool and practically sang “No known human has ever received an injection of embryonic stem cells because so little is known about how those cells will mature once inside the body.” I was loud enough that people standing at the edges looked at me as if I was insane, but I didn’t care. It was just the proper thing to do. These are the sounds that make my world continue spinning.

    Downstairs, found through a hole in side of the pool, was a tiny art gallery lined with pieces that I would have expected to be new in a very cutting edge 1986 or an evenly matched 1993. One wall was photoshopped photographs clumsily layered with pictures of women and digital scribbles, reminiscent of the pages of a wannabe Mondo 2000 magazine. Another was lined with mannequins with baby blue and brown corderouy dress suits appliqued with white flowers. To be fair, the smallest wall had interesting illustration examples in blue gesso, but they were badly mounted. The shine off them was blinding and made the art impossible to see unless you stood at an acute angle to the piece you were trying to examine. I gave up quickly on the basement, though it was quieter there, and went back upstairs to examine the space more. The possibilities of such a venue seem almost endless. If you could properly EQ a swimming pool…

    Damn me for finally leaving my camera at home.