Tag: photography

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.

there are more photos to work into later conversation

Andrew

Truth or Dare. The things I’ve written are not spells and remedies. I want you to give me the illusion that I am caged by your arms. I am willing to find a poison toad, if you require it, and pry the gem from inside the skull to feed you in payment for this simple service.

Yesterday was my first graciously busy day in what might be a long time. Ray and Sophie came out for breakfast, a group of us helped Andrew move, (the boy in the picture), Nicole and I bought Ray new glasses frames, and after I went for dinner and studio photography with Nick. Right now it feels unreal, as if yesterday was some term of time too far away to see minutely. Admittedly, I am suffering that strange lightness of balance that only a scaldingly hot shower after a long day of no food can give a body, so perhaps tomorrow I will have a more lucid understanding of nonspatial continuum, but it’s now that I have a moment to sit and type blankly into the computer screen, so it’s now that you’re going to read, not an enchanted later.

  • Neuroscientists at Washington University can use a brain scan to predict if a subject will succeed or fail at a simple videogame.

    Someone tagged me with the 5 Things About Myself meme that’s been cluttering up my friendspage with admissions like I had a crush on my neighbor, but never told her. Now she’s married to my ex-boyfriend and doesn’t look the same, so I don’t fantasize about her anymore. Well, okay, no. I made that one up, but I’ll assume it’s simple to understand how banal repeated running of this meme can read without going through the hassle of finding an actual entry with it in.

    Here’s the only thing I could think of:

    You sent away to the postal gods when you were little. Did you get everything you asked for? In classes we practiced our writing in overly looped lines of Dear I Want Please Thank You This Thing How Are The Reindeer? The only holiday more foreign was Fathers Day. Every year the teacher would reprimand me for telling them that I didn’t have anyone to make a card for. Some years I would be brought into the principals office. “This girl is being very unco-operative. She says she doesn’t have a father.”

    And instead of answering that meme with four more uninteresting tid-bits, instead I will theft this one:

    If you read this, if your eyes are passing over this right now, (even if we don’t speak often) please post a comment with a COMPLETELY MADE UP AND FICTIONAL memory of you and me. It can be anything you want – good or bad – BUT IT HAS TO BE FAKE.

    • with the photography of Darren Holmes (a tisane is a medicinal tea)

    At first I understood balance, measurement of days. I could cook on a boat like I could at home. Mesne thaumaturgy. It wasn’t like going up a mountain, where the pressure of the air changes and suddenly every recipe begins looking like a chemistry exam. Instead, I changed. By the second week, I could no longer find the chicken for the eggs, the forest for the metaphors. My cupboards were too cluttered with leftover accents given to me by kindly local actors. The first disaster came when I tried to whip myself into shape, forgetting how literal my paper-clips essay instructions into similie. A day passed before I could drag myself from bed to prepare a tisane. Another day before I could believe simple movement didn’t require the same dedication as circus contortion. The next week was better. I was jumping at shadows, stepping on edges and peeling back their skins to get to the soft pulp within. They squirm on the tongue, so sure of isolation that they don’t understand you’re eating them with that dash of pink salt, that pinch of ginger and pepper and honey and folk songs.

    Polyphemos visited yesterday. His solitary eye licked my face. I flinched and fell in love, my vision obscured by his lawless spit. Dinner was ruined as the stars fell into it, torn from their hollow orbits by the sudden gravity of my invincible passion. Embarrassing, this walk through my fusion seared kitchen to our cracked china bowls. I stood between the stove and the comfortable bleach blonde table, apologizing. This happens every time. Soon, my more ornate cutlery will delicately wince when he comes, troubled by his painfully predictable effect on my mustered years, his shaggy fistfuls of tired wilting flowers.


    buckwheat hair, I hide it well

    Oxygen gasps, skin taut. That’s what I’m thinking of. I landed on the surface homeless and running. Check your balance, I thought, check your stride. It was a pun. Before this hundred pace book begins, I need to smile hard and develop a quick will. It might take an entire month to write this all out in human paper. Thirty days and a trip around the moon. A hot air example of summertime blues.

    My stylus is scratching sound from a round disc of specially pressed memory, those old black things, before your time, I’m sure, but brought back into being by the trendy Ibiza boys, those Edinburgh saints of groove. Voice replies, back and forth. I wonder if I’ll ever get a telephone call, a crunched machine echo of a warm lovely taste synthesized as pleasure. Sixty cycles deep electric, an instrument of more than torture.

    There’s an ease to this I missed. A glitter burst of putting words down. They don’t have to mean anything except to me. I fill my time with love letters, tiny particles of bits and bytes dreaming of a future where I can touch the sky and the stars are known to have planets it’s possible to visit. Recording everything would be impossible, but it doesn’t mean I don’t want to try. Stand on the lip of a seascape breeze and teach you all the meaning of that particular colour blue to the first people to have ever told a story about it. Photographs and moving pictures, add sound and protect the world by showing it off. Explaining why Barrakka beauty should be seen by more than art degrees. Spell out the memes of historical creation and cultural division.

    Imagine a downloadable scrap of earth. A television history-scape of depth and vision with an insertable tactile interface. Install the ability to blink and hear the local traffic, the crowd sounds of a multitude of conversation. Even this little office would be of interest to somebody. A man in a net cafe somewhere over a tiny street, it’s late at night and he misses the lights that streetlights used to bring before someone went through with a gun and shot them all down, he might want to see me typing this. He might like to look out the window to my right and see an entirely new kind of tree or to my left and examine a production facility. The lack of pollution erosion is fascinating. The pink of the ice-cream shop is too garish, however, and so he flips to a woman making dinner in an outdoor market, somewhere arabic where he doesn’t speak the language. It could be a spelled end to destruction. In a optimistic view, the phrases in language would change. The media would drop it’s fear propaganda, unable to explain anymore that difference means danger. We would all be press students, members in an underground club that might even have it’s own secret handshake.

    the price of bread and plane tickets


    control yourself
    Originally uploaded by sucitta barlow.

    We ask how atoms exist, how they create the water that washes our ports of call and hither, how we can split them to see what’s inside, how we can re-arrange them to discontinue the latest brand of sickness, but how often do we consider the tiniest grain of sand as perhaps a piece of emotion? Do we think of the volatile structure when a drop of salt water drops from the eye?

    I ask for travel, a pair of stamps added to the inner passport pages. I remind myself that I am standing on the edge of a bridge that I am building myself, shaking dust from my fur to cement the rocks I’ve placed floating upon the waves, and that there is an opposite shore with enough wonder to make this worth it no matter I cannot see it yet, no matter how arduous this seems, this continual collecting of government minted grains in my hair and hands. The results that came back don’t tell me that I will have blisters, instead they say “Your friends will stand by you.”

    lafinjack found something enchanting today, beautiful portraits by Andrzej Dragan that look like meticulous paintings.

    In return, the flickr this post is a tiny pane that looks into an example of the delightful works of Atticus Wolrab.

    as well, odd music: macha loves bedhead – believe

    there’s a narrative with the pictures too, because I’m like that

    Yesterday was spent in the Emergency Ward. It didn’t start there. First, I was home, waiting on laundry and having tea with Tyler. Chris had been with us earlier, but he was angry with the world that day and left to save us his company. We were concerned, but not overly. Not until the phone rang. It was Chris.

    He said, “Hello,” and it sounded like panic. I quietly turned to Tyler and said, “Get your shoes, get your coat on, I’m going to need my things, we’re leaving.” Chris said there was blood everywhere, that he’d done something stupid. “Breathe boy, tell me what you did.” Seems that in his distracted growling at the world, he’d gashed himself. “Do you want me to take you to the hospital for stitches? Do you want me to put some in? Tell me what you want.” He was mostly inarticulate, “Um, well, there’s a lot of blood.”

    It was decided that I would go alone and approaching the house, I wondered briefly at the wisdom of this. What if I had to break in? He might be half conscious in a widening red pool. By the sound of things, he’d hit veins. Instead, I was greeted at the door by an abashedly blood smeared boy, right hand awkwardly wrapped in a black t-shirt that was already visibly soaking through. There was a pile of glass rubble on his computer keyboard and more piled in front of his monitor. In spite of the obvious effort he’d put into cleaning, there were still daubs of blood on the floor inferring where it had splashed earlier.

    My first impulse was to re-bandage the hand and then sweep up the glass, but Chris pulled me aside, asking me instead to sit on the couch with him. He then poured out everything as to why he’d been angry and what he’d done to hurt himself. Nothing that particularly bears repeating. He’d been frustrated, furious some, and had smashed his glass into the desk. Also, by default, his hand. Not the most clever of moments, he conceded, and I finally had a chance to peel off the sodden t-shirt he’d wrapped himself in. It was a mess. His hand welled with blood in three or four places, the worst cut on his thumb. The lacerations on his fingers were bad, but that was dexterous hand turned to meat, swollen and requiring three or four stitches. Six altogether, I guessed. The smell of iron was thick on us, enough to set my stomach to starving. I demanded scissors and cloth. I cut strips from an old cotton shirt, and bound his hand properly, pressing apportioned pieces of flesh back together and slipping a pad underneath to keep pressure steadily on. My hands were red to the wrist.

    I licked my fingers and laughed.

    Angus was on the street outside, half a block away, talking with friends. We were grinning as if we were mad when we talked to him. We said we were on the way to the hospital and not to worry. His face lit from within with “Fuck you, I love you.” and then we ran into Keely on the Skytrain platform, who straight up laughed. We were just as guilty, taking a delightful take on the entire proceedings. There wasn’t a line at the hospital. They asked the usual questions, “Do you have an emergency contact? What’s your middle name?” and had us follow a yellow line down some twisting hallways to another waiting room. They put Chris on a bed within ten minutes, though we had to wait closer to twenty before a doctor came. We unwrapped my make-shift bandages and I sponged up the blood as he looked over it. The doctor was incredibly kind, I’m sorry I don’t have his name. He tutted, glad of my cloths and wincing a little as he injected freezing, which sprayed. Chris lay down, unable to bear seeing the needles, and listened to the man who was talking on the other side of the curtain that was next to us. Words came through the green cloth that were like scripted eco-friendly motivated poetry. The man sounded so kind that it was charming. He actually used the phrase, “Bless your kind heart.” to a nurse.

    For the stitches themselves, well…

    I took pictures.

    be there or be absent

    birthday photography: saturday june 11th

    The idea is that we gather everyone possible together for brilliantly tacky group photography at Sears. Everyone toss in five to ten dollars and I believe we can afford it easily. Either we meet at my house or we gather at Grandville and Robson. I suspect it will be a mix of the two. I want everyone in typical clothing, nothing too out of left field.

    It’ll be fun. Honest.

    reality shift, wow

    from quantz:

    A Group of Workers Harvesting Tea, ca. 1907-1915.

    “This exhibit, The Empire That Was Russia, has been a favourite of mine for a while now. I come back and look at it once in a while.

    Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii was a photographer in Russia at the turn of the last century. He developed a technique wherein he took three pictures of a scene – each with a red, green, and blue filter – and used projectors to display what were, in effect, colour photographs, before the technology of colour film had actually been developed. In his day, they didn’t look so hot because it was hard to get the projectors lined up. But today, we (ie: the Library of Congress) has scanned them and combined them digitally, and the results are AMAZING. You should all look at those pictures: it’s like seeing an alternate universe or something. I can’t recommend them enough.”

    This picture, Peasant Girls, was taken in 1909.

    and this, View of the Monastery from the Solarium, 1910.

    I am rather in awe at how modern these look while at the same time, so antique. The clothes are a give away, as are the manner of industry. I think these are precious. I seriously endorse giving this page a thorough look.

    more beneath the cut