Tag: that mike

all I wanted was to paint us in mythology

wednesday's child
365: day 2

I wrote the rough of this while sitting on a table in the back of the club Mike played in Edmonton, waiting for his fans to disperse after the gig. I want to polish it properly, but feel stuck, so I’m posting it anyway:

Driving West along either street, you will come across too many one way streets. Your head will turn, searching for the butterscotch of centre lines, hoping to find some rhyme to the maze. Instead, the streets will seem to coruscate, shine, and blind you, balefully offering oblivious wrong turns. Undaunted, you will keep driving. The asphalt will become brick, cobbles, cut stone. Red and granite and gray. You will look to the moon to guide you, a sideways glance, as she sits in the passenger seat beside you, as tall as winter, nestled in black fur, laughing, offering perfect directions. You do not doubt her. Her gray eyes are sharper, can survive the tangled city traffic, though in the daylight she is almost blind. Her egg-shell maps are drawn directly on her empty hands, woven from experience and time. In a year, you might find out why, but for now, you do not need to care. You are glad for her company. She likes your scarlet heart, even stained fog thin as it is from travel. She likes your polished voice, how it brings colour to her airless skin. When she shyly kisses you, as loud as paper, she is exactly what you need. From her place in the sky, shaking the tops of trees, sweet as candy, her smile looks like your teeth.

“The impulse to travel is one of the hopeful symptoms of life.” Agnes Repplier

Mike flies from SF to Australia later today, so I made a little video to send him off. It’s terribly amateur, it being filmed at four in the morning, but I’m pleased with it anyway. It’s the first thing I’ve made with the tripod Ray just gave me for the holidays.

I don’t know how many of you were aware, but I didn’t have one before. Generally what I do is pile books into more or less stable stacks to whatever height I require, then pray that the cats won’t knock it over in the ten long seconds between pressing the timer button and hearing the shutter click. Occasionally I’ve been lucky enough to temporarily steal one off someone for a day or two, but that’s about it. My set-up is ghetto to the extreme. I’ve used flashlights and metal mixing bowls to light things, as well as hand mirrors taped to reading lamps. Having a tripod will be wonderful. Now let’s hope for some sunlight.

last night I cried

Let me breathe. Let my breath stream past my throat and fill my heart and lungs. I have a graveyard shift Saturday night, then my regular Sunday night shift. I’m re-reading an article on neuromarketing and looking to maybe help edit the Devil’s Chord wikipedia page, trying to stay awake, but it’s not working. Already my body is shutting down around the edges, trying to put me to sleep. Dreaming has been fickle this week, so the chance to collapse without a morning feels too good to be true, but also like a trap. My alarm clock waiting in the stair-well, a knife in hand, shaving seconds off my heart, like the phone refusing to answer up the names and voices I want to hear.

a verb’s action noun

Trucks like monoliths, grumbling gods to some sort of travel plan, the kind of yellow covered maps you only buy in gas stations. Row upon row, headlights as big as our heads, snow gritty with gravel, running to skid on the ice, arms silently flung out for balance like sweatershirt wings. We walked through them transformed from adults into children by sheer scale. Machines built by hands like ours, but unimaginable as only a collection of parts, a warehouse of nuts, bolts, and aluminium siding. Machines that growled, spit smoke, carried worlds in their bellies and dwarfed us, our chilled faces, our frozen laughter. The way I wanted to kiss him there, between the vehicles, between history, but didn’t.

Crunching white footprints leading back to the hotel and I still wouldn’t do up my coat.

My trip to Alberta was like a trip to Canada, too. It felt like time travel. Vancouver is warm winters, high heels in December, ocean sunsets, miniature dogs, Kitsilano graphic designer vegetarians with tans, fake nails, and eight word coffee orders. Twenty four hour internet cafes lined with serious young men with short hair, Mac laptops, and Clark Kent glasses, planning on working in video games, dreaming of going to Japan.

I’ve been anti-social since returning, picking my company with exquisite care, unwilling to give up my time away. My trip spoiled me with inspiration, with company, with care. The people I went to see put me back on my feet, lifted me from myself and gave me new direction. As we drove to the airport, he held my hand, and I gave him directions that included I was pretty. I worry that if I give myself back to Vancouver, I will lose the complex taste of these memories, that they will flatten and take with them that precious ice edge of rediscovery that we so sweetly forged together. The cloud machines, the black sticks of prairie fire licking the sky. How terrible to fade, to disintegrate like a chalk-drawing photograph left out in the rain.

his linguistics have burrowed into my tongue

My music on random. Snare snap, three beat four four, lifting on the three. The lyrics are enthusiastically running backwards, something groovy and probably bizarre that I really like. Familiar guitar. I’m not even sure what I’m listening to, I’m only listening with half an ear. Suddenly, my head snaps up. What? I know that voice. Even through backmasking, my blood knows that voice. The Men Of Dreams and Secrets. Billy Nayer Show. My relief when I turned out to be right had absolutely nothing on how hard I laughed when I ran the song in reverse. “She couldn’t get it out and it REALLY, REALLY HURT!”

Hilarious. Certainly distinctive. Like everything else they’ve done.


This charming little film was hand-painted with house paint on paper over a course of several years by Cory McAbee in his bathroom. This should give you an idea of the implicit dedication to creative, sparkling intelligence with which he founded his addictive band, The Billy Nayer Show. I cannot reccomend them enough. Warmly glowing songs that teasingly defy definitive genre, straining at the leash of epic, mystifying humour, no one else in my experience has ever written a song about the smell of sex that’s light, dirty, tuneful, regretful, and oddly restrained. “And all the rest of your friends watched you leave together, so they know.”

They’re also 100% responsible for one of my All-Time Top Five Favourite Films, American Astronaut, a movie so good that it was introduced to me as a way to get into my pants. (Which, in light of recent events, if you look at things sideways and leave out a lot of facts, could be said to have just worked for someone involved with the project. How embarassing.) Breathtakingly impressive, the cinematography’s like an outer space reply to Six-String Samurai, while remaining absolutely unique. I’ve given lectures on how much it kicks ass. Buy it here. Seriously. And then have a movie night. Invite all your friends. Hell, apparently it could even get you laid.

I would write more about it, except the best way to see American Astronaut is to simply find a copy, unplug your phone, turn off the lights, and go in blind.

Don’t know anything about it. At all. Because I said so. It’ll blow your socks off.

To be fair, they’re not for everybody in the same way that not everyone appreciates David Byrne or Frank Zappa, (as I’m writing this, I’m listening to a rather ludicrous short story about a princess who isn’t allowed to keep her kittens unless they can carry their weight in the household), but track some down, give them a try. If we can win even ten more converts, think of the good that would do. Sponsor an album and they’ll immediately send you a wonderful CD, full of hope for the future. By sharing the wealth, you’ll make a difference, for less than a dollar a day! Think of the children!

delicious

In Finnish, “onni” means “luck”.

I think of them in metaphor. Black doves, shape changers, the old stories of Prometheus. I lick my writing from the taste of their skin, my words from the twists in their gestures. By the woods of our correspondence, a river flows. From the shape of their hands, I can place every single one against my fingers, the places I truly call home, and leaf through our fingertips touching. Encapsulated interaction, catalogued small details that I can carry later. Preferences. Coffee, cigarettes, tea.

“Here.”
“What’s this?”
“That’s a hundred dollars to cover a taxi to get you into town and back.”
“What? That’s too much. I can’t take that. You know most men give flowers or chocolate or, like, earrings.”
“Well, I’m giving you money.”
“You tawdry American. You’re just buying off the guilt of leaving me.”
“If I give you another hundred, will you just get the abortion and promise never to talk to me again?”
“It only costs fifty here in Canada, but I’ll take the other fifty as a promise never to send you bronzed booties. Is that what they’re called? Those little knitted baby shoes?”
“Yes.”

They are the second generation warfare of my inspiration, prodigies, a reason to ‘take my shoes off and throw them in the lake’, the impetus I require to create, to claim the word artist as my own. Without these black and ivory dreamers, I have no focus, no lens to collect light into fire. That high holy spark. The currency of competition. Engendering wonder by twisting the world into a better configuration. The etymology of the word awesome, a sacred dread mixed with veneration, an education in love.

In Japanese, “oni” means “demon”.

as much of a relationship as I want it to be

Steady hands, voices like light waves, dark hair mirrored between the tips of my fingers, always a variation of the same kind eyes.

Backstage was downstairs, through a door to the right, then down a long nameless hall to the left so narrow I could almost touch my fingertips to each side. The room was that dark, unwelcoming, underwashed colour of the seventies that’s too depressing to be beige, with a large metal legged office table in the middle and a wall of long stage mirror with a bland formica counter running behind an open wooden slat pull-down door. Backstage was two toned, the laces of my corset reflecting behind me, our feet up on the chairs, his milk-chocolate hoodie given to him by a soundman somewhere where the ground never freezes and there’s no such thing as snow. Backstage was us and a pile of local newspapers that didn’t print our names. Taking pictures to perfectly capture his smile, making him look like a fashion model. How frightening.

When it came time, footsteps in the hall, ten minutes, I wanted the boy in the hall to be wearing a severe suit, something governmental, official, bearing the weight of strangers. Instead, he was just a boy. Ten minutes. Okay, alright. Clear plastic water bottles, a small pile of clothes about to be pushed to the floor. Rather than helping, I slipped hands underneath his t-shirt. Soft dark fur, the sweet, thin pelt of a sleek sea creature. Otters, shape changers. Let them cry and they’ll return to their previous life, singing under the waves. Ten minutes. Hide his skin. Pen tied wild in my hair, body flat against his back, I hid my grin behind his shoulder. “Are you ticklish?” He pinned my fingers, matching my pleased expression in the silver glass, and didn’t try to do anything but tell the solid truth. S.O.S.

let our bodies hit the floor

This was our favourite video this trip. Mike would start singing the chorus and that would be it – whatever we were talking about would dissolve into laughter. Politics, music, movies, it didn’t matter – we were lost. The fanaticism fascinates us, illusionists, the passionate power of suggestion, how much it can affect the body, how many of these so-called healers are debunked only to return ten years later on television, selling snake oil holy water in little plastic bottles for $15 each. He bent a spoon for me over a two:thirty a.m. Husky truck-stop breakfast, expertly rubbing the handle with his thumb, making fun with a Uri Geller trick we both know enough to especially love. My smile at that moment was worth the plane ticket, right there. I felt my writing return. The price of admission paid.

kisskiss

Worship Sloth

Snow is falling outside that looks like television storm static, a confetti illusion drawn across the world in monochrome pointillism, as if the sky’s receiver needs a bunny ear adjustment. Nick is playing some nasty war game with excessive amounts of shooting and I’m curled up on my couch, warm with upcoming plans. (So far, there are only people I love in my in-box today.) There’s dinner with Gavin and his lovely, meeting up with that Mike at the airport for midnight, and somewhere in there, I’m going to go ice-skating with Michael’s skates again before I give them back. (I haven’t fallen yet, obviously I need to try harder). The day feels full of light, as if it were suddenly okay to walk barefoot, as if the cold couldn’t touch me through my tenuous contentment.

Floria Sigusmondi’s updated her site.

Yesterday Nicholas and I went to the Zoo, (which is large and interesting enough that I recognized it from the plane). We began with exploring the Canadian Wilds section where the elk, owls, sheep, and fairy-tale wolves lived. There was an ocelot as well, continually pacing it’s cage back and forth, back and forth, dreaming of freedom and the delicious flesh of screaming toddlers, and the smallest adult moose I’ve ever seen. The place felt abandoned, as if we were on an adventure in a ruined city, looking at the map and checking to make sure we weren’t going to run out of sunlight before we found shelter. We only managed to see about half of the rest of the park. The African section had the most flinchingly cute animal in the entire zoo, a tiny, solitary meercat perched atop a rock, giving us all the eye. Across the room from it was a giraffe and the first hippos I’ve ever seen. I was struck most not by their bulk, but by how artificial they looked, as if they were rubber-skinned animatronics, poorly designed.

quick into the snow

Alright, so Calgary is cold, but not that cold. Of course, when it came to nip out for groceries at night.. I… uh… I didn’t go. I quite happily stayed behind in the warmth and safety of Sean‘s living room. Win!

We’re going to go out-door ice-skating tomorrow evening and then to One Yellow Rabbit’s preview of Gilgamesh. I’m calling Gavin Monday morning and Mike will be showing up any day now.

Should be fun.

Can this get any more inconsequential?