Tag: vancouver

leaving without a conventional expression used at parting

Poetic Justice found in the trailer section of the imdb page for Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life.


Landscape on skin, by Huang Yan, from the East Link Gallery, Shanghai.

Robson street, Vancouver’s brand-name straight-line shopping district. Peace as body lotion instead of solution, sold for fifty bucks a bottle behind white walls and vast plate windows, images torn from magazines that cost more than a meal. Thick with logo stamped angels, tight strappy sandals and tight strappy jeans, wide retail smiles and cocaine-bright children surgically attached to thin cell phones and even smaller hand-bag dogs, this is not my neighbourhood. Barefoot, I can feel the concrete but don’t feel connected. “Can’t buy me love, everybody tells me so.” Looking for nothing in particular, I stop for breakfast.

My dyed hair is a flag, marking my place in line. I look for my reflection in the black marble facade in front of me and find nothing but the eyes of red haired chef making crepes. On reflex I wink at him, but my thoughts are elsewhere, threading from the apparent cure for cancer just found in Alberta to the neuro-chemical reactions that trigger love; dopamine, serotonin, vasopressin. Triggered by the sad knowledge that I’ve likely burned out all the neurotransmitters that are part of the brain’s built-in reward system, I order my memorized taste of a perfect oxytocin kiss – strawberries, lemon juice, and sugar.

It works. Instant flash of a cold stone floor, the second hand taste of wine, cigarettes, a forged key to my weakness, waking with tousled black hair and my favourite voices. Music sent back and forth to finally meet in an airport, meet in a stairway, on the street, the lights strung up above the bed from before Persepolis abandoned me back. Why do they always have dark hair? I never noticed until just now. Curls. Temples going to silver, little places for me to kiss.

By the time I reach the bus-stop, I’m already talking to strangers and figuring out who to contact to prepare my house as efficiently as possible. My roommate, Sasha and I are on the same page. Out as soon as we can without leaving the other in the lurch. He’s going to be moving in with Mel, I’m still uncertain where I’ll end up. I need a staging ground for our last shot at the theatre before I finally give up, fold house, and leave town. Mihi cura futuri.

Akira Kurosawa‘s Rashomon has fallen into public domain and is now available on Internet Archive and Google video.

feel free to invite other friends who may be interested in seeing the Pantages.

Darren Aronofsky as interviewed by rollick over at The Onion.

My friend Bobbi Styles is getting married this Saturday, and as soon as I received the news, I watched as a tiny part of my brain took over the task of what to wear to what has the potential to be an extraordinary event. (It wandered off into the distance and I haven’t heard from it since. I’m not worried, that bit can’t be integral to function). Bobbi was a music producer in Britain when the size of your immovable hair measured against the leather of your trenchcoat and summed with the depth of your eye-shadow gave you a measure of success. I seem to recall he worked with Duran Duran, to give you a better picture. There’s a video. (If you really must know, you can find it yourself). I’d link to his MySpace, but it sort of hurts. (It has The Hair in it.) However, he’s a very different man these days. His son, Tempest, is going past ten any day now, and he’s lived in Canada for almost as long as he lived in the UK. I’m not sure what to expect. I haven’t seen him in too long to guess.

After that lovely event, work is finally sending me to the Rolling Stones Concert at time-and-a-half. Details have had a chance to devolve in the intervening weeks, regrettably. It doesn’t look like this will this garner me a free pass in anymore. The Stones people have changed their minds. Probably for ones with less drugs in them. Instead we’re standing outside and attempting to politely harangue passers-by into answering a survey. Missing Van Morrison feels a little like salt in a wound. I only ask that it doesn’t rain.

And all of this means I’m going to miss the Pantages Tour.

If you’re interested in theatre, Vancouver history, heritage restoration, community-building, the future of the Downtown Eastside, or all of the above, then it’s a bit of an important to-do. Fitting into practically all of these categories, I’m disappointed that I’ll have to miss one of their tours. (I missed the last one). The interior is being restored to its original glory, a project surrounded with happy political glitter. The tours are a chance to see what the excitement is about surrounding its planned restoration and re-opening – which will hopefully occur by late 2009 or early 2010. The Pantages tour will take place on Saturday, November 25th at 2 p.m. (Dress warmly, the theatre has no heat).

Adam, the impressionante webmaster of Heart of the World’s website, has apparently been recruited to act as stage manager for a small musical performance that will take place at the end of the tour. He says “It will be a pretty interesting little event.” It was his friend, Charles, who put me touch with Todd, the Save the York Theatre Society fellow. And so it goes. Until we get it. Or, maybe, I sleep.

Biologically it’s weird of us humans not to have a third eye-lid.

there is a road that leads to my house, but I don’t live there yet

I fall in love with these people. It rains outside and I fall in love with them. The sun fights off the morning clouds like it’s kicked itself free of thick dreary blankets and I fall in love with them. This is the future. Every day this week I have shared thoughts with another country, written across an ocean, explained very carefully to a tiny video camera how I think I can make this work. I’m not chasing a shadow, I’m chasing a dream. It’s like I’m that metaphorical one girl army, one that’s fought its way off the page to actually stand. The screen in front of me is a window, as is the screen in front of you. It’s alive in the same way that mythology used to be, in the same way that thousands of people carry a cross around their neck. Slowly, we are building the next town with wires. Last time I heard, fifty percent of the human population had never made a phone call. Last time I heard, tribesmen in Africa were climbing trees to get better cell-phone reception in the middle of the bush. We can’t lock them out.

It’s because of these things, I don’t want to fail. It’s because of the choices we hold in our hands. I want to change something, not raise a glossy flag then look away. I’m tired of people being scared of the dark, deciding that because it’s not their concrete back yard that they don’t have to care.

Vancouver has a water warning on right now. Tumultuous weather has thrown an avalanche into the water supply, bringing with it possible gasto-intestinal parasites. The number of people who don’t seem to understand that we’re still obscenely rich in natural luxury in spite of this is staggering. They have to boil it first, but it won’t kill them, and they still have access to it. Compare that to the number of people in the world who have, on average, a bucket of water a day to live with. Maybe it’s too late for us to see outside ourselves, but I’d like to think that the recent inconvenience here might force some sacred hearts into flame.

harping on because writing’s my only vice


parents to blame
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

Been hard to find inspiration lately, what with the constant flow of people who are happier leaving me than helping me rebuild. Instead of standing up to them, I’ve learned to be weak and it’s ruined my interpretation of language. I need a reinstallation of faith, someone to give me a space to fall apart where I know they’ll pick me up again. Too young to be sad about better days, I’m beginning to walk as if I’m an emotional catastrophe anyway. Devastation Jhayne’s been my on-line name for far too long. This project, I think it will give me the impetus to forgive myself for not being able to forgive them.

WorldChanging: An encylopedic user’s guide to the technology and social movements of the 21st Century being used to make the world a better place.

It feels strange to be considered ‘higher risk, with good growth potential’. This goes through and I suspect it might be a little like being reborn to be so suddenly justified in my belief that Vancouver can be a good place culturally if only we’re willing to stand up and put the work in. Force this place to grow up a bit, fighting against the Yaletown soullessness we seem to be stuck with. There’s no sense of history here, we’re too new. I feel it’s a shame hardly anyone seems to remember The Pink Slipper, The Town Pump or the Starfish Room, venues that were closed, (some of them, like the Pink Slipper and The Main St. Candy Shop, torched by arsonists who were never caught), and never replaced. It’s like we’ve got gaps no one’s seeing because they’re just part of the landscape. It’s like our absence of meaningful architecture. There used to be great places here for all sorts of live performances, local and otherwise, but now it looks like we’re even going to lose The Vogue? Bloody crime, all around. Even more reason to get my place going, a performance theatre like the Cultch used to be.

Current global consumption levels could result in a large-scale ecosystem collapse by the middle of the century.

And now, to bed, to sleep until it is time to peer into what hopefully will end up being my theatre.

domni: “you do rather throw yourself into things with impressive abandon.”


Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

I feel as if I were planted in a warm garden only to be drowned in someone else’s story, some thick memory of another woman’s legs wrapped around him and how that tangle painfully untied. This feels like it has so little to do with me that I don’t understand how it came between us. It makes me wish I were a drinker, have the ability to blur my sold-out world, so I could take that fourth drink then try to drive to some mythical home. My heart is heavy and red, holding me down like a lover with their hands at my neck. I wake up raw, my nails having clawed into my sides when I wasn’t paying attention.

I know that come some far tomorrow, I will learn to break yesterday. Dismantle what I cared about and wish instead for something else, but right now I wake up with my eyes watering, exhaustion paramount, only knowing that I hurt and that there’s nothing to hold me up, nothing to feel right.

Tyler brought me to the opening of a comedy club tonight. It helped. The last man on, Marc Maron, strangely reminded me of a welcoming yet possibly unsettling-only-if-I-consider-it mix of an ex of mine and my not-godfather-seriously-people, Michael Green. In a charming aside, he explained from the stage why he and I shouldn’t go back to his hotel room and have sex. How it would only end in tears. His painted image had a lot of the intense flavour of We-Both-Have-The-T-Shirt.

Walking through Crackton to the bus-stop, I wondered what it would be like to live in a building with a lobby and an elevator, a swimming pool in the basement that’s always watched by a security man on the other end of a camera. See, I know there’s an enormous sun-dial on top of Tinseltown that’s always wrong. It uses the apartment building as a gnomon, but it doesn’t account for any time in the world. Useless thing, I love it. It’s not even pretty. It’s just this tacky secret for everyone who lives in a certain half of the building.

Stephen sez: Here’s a low rez picture of the Tinseltown sundial.

(Oh, right, and I figure I should mention this because there are people here who would appreciate it: In spite of the fact that I have been barely sleeping, barely eating, I still scored apparently far too high (only 155) on an IQ test, resulting in the people testing me refusing to hire me on the basis that I would “get too bored”. I also “did them too fast” no matter they gave me half an hour to fill out only 80 questions. Oi. Shoot me. Least it’s Rosh Hashanah tomorrow, which means a delicious dinner at Silva’s.)

to keep you damned kids busy and off my lawn


the kiss
Originally uploaded by Agata….

Icelandic nitro-jeep hydroplaning.

The click of teeth. I kissed his mouth and felt like Salome.

Being held, it’s that feeling, being held. A stone beneath my feet, the desire to both crawl inside and all consume.

Part of my recent news is that I’ve agreed to go to the SCA Clinton Wars this year, the west coast’s biggest medieval nerd-prom. I have resisting invitation for approximately half a decade, but I’ve finally been given an offer I can’t refuse. Terrifying, but lovely and enchanting all at once. I am both honoured and respected.

Duncan has epitomized my Clinton warnings all at once:

“Clinton’s a hoot. I hope you have fun. I got married there to five women when I went. and then their head concubine killed me the next day. and one night I was a woman. and I got burnt to a crisp. The battle’s frickin’ awesome to watch though.”

For those not stupid and or insane, this weekend can still be an exciting slew of events.

Friday is the very last day of Boca Del Lupo‘s astonishingly delightful The Shoes That Were Danced To Pieces, their yearly “Free, Outdoors, All-ages, Roving Spectacular” performed in Stanley Park. (At Picnic Place, just past Prospect Point, because you know how much we all love alliteration). I went today and, hours later, my face still aches from smiling so much. Their exceedingly clever fairy-tale, full of self referentials and witty tongue-in-cheek, pulls you through the forest, following the often prettily singing actors as they dance from aerial wires or hang in nets from high up in the trees. Tom Jones does an excellent job aiming humour at the children, but the over-all charm is barely limited by the format. It’s free admission, but you have to call ahead and put your name down, because spaces fill up. 604-684-2622.

Later on Friday, Tiffany is in town with her Taiko Drumming show: JODAIKO, presented by Pride in Art, Friday, August 4, 8:00pm, at the Roundhouse Community Centre, (181 Roundhouse Mews). Tickets: $10 -$18 sliding scale, available at the door and at Little Sister’s Books, (1238 Davie St, 1-800-567-1662), and Rhizome Café, (317 East Broadway, 604-872-3166).

Saturday is the DykeMarch from McSpadden Park, (fourth and Victoria), to Grandview Park. It starts at noon and ends by dissolving into a party, the Dykemarch Festival, at one o’clock.

Either that, or the Powell St. Festival, themed this year as Memory Streams: 30 years of Japanese Canadian Arts on Powell Street. It’s fairly standard culture-fest fare – taiko drumming, sumo wrestling, martial arts demos, folk and modern dance, Kokoro, alternative pop/rock/urban music, visual arts, film/video, etcetera, as well as the expected array of Japanese food, crafts and displays.

Sunday, of course, is the Pride Parade from 12 – 2. The route along Beach Avenue is the same every year, starting from Denman and Robson and ending at Pacific and Thurlow, by the Aquatic Center. This year there’s over 130 floats scheduled and approximately 185,000 spectators expected. I recommend heading down early to get good seats, the earlier in the parade, the better, before the performers use up all their energy with booty waving. (Wave at the cow-girls for me, will you?). When the parade ends, it turns into the Sunset Beach Festival, which goes until 6pm.

why it’s important to leave the house #45908

A patient’s self-rewired brain revives him after 19 years in a vegatative coma.

Minus Kyle, Duncan, & Grant, you people missed a fantastic show. Tigers crept off the stage, dreams of lights, lakes of visionary stormy weather. The Roman Empire shuddered and fell under the waves of Atlantis. Shane brought his mother back to life as the audience cried and his grandmother told us all to rise and shine, all to a really good steel string slide. I managed to film clips of most of the first act, but not all of it, only enough to give you the barest skeleton of what actually happened. In the end, I have shaky teasers, but no real trailers. Next time, you, be there. Get out your silver kitchen knife and go culture hunting when I tell you to.

So with only about a full day’s warning, we managed to get almost thirty people to Pirates of the Caribbean. An affable man sitting behind me noticed that our group took up two full rows and asked how much organization went into it. When I told him we hadn’t bothered with very much this time around, how it was entirely arranged through our on-line journals, he mentioned oh-so-fortuitously that he has an event coming up at the Planetarium. He handed me a cleanly designed flyer, the sort of thing I would notice on a table, and smiled when I said I would give him a plug. After a bit more conversation, he asked, “Will you really mention us?” Then handed me a free ticket.

UK scientists have developed technology that enables artificial limbs to be directly attached to a human skeleton.

I’ve been listening to the music The Beige have on their website for hours now and I’m going to leave one on when I finally go to bed. The flyer design made me ask if it was ambient, but though their songs powerfully insinuate Brian Eno leanings, they seem to play something else, a translucent mellow jazz with a delicate twist of quiet pop. I really like it. Stylistically, they remind me charmingly of Múm. The musicians, Andrew Arida, Geoff Gilliard, Mark Haney, Rick Maddocks, and Jon Wood, manage to dance the line between chill, softly effervescent, and catchy without being fluffy, bland or relying on hooks. I’ll have to remember to bring extra money when I go, because I want to buy the album.

The show is only an hour long because they have to vacate in time for the stoned kids to watch the resident Doors/Zeppelin/Hendrix/Pink Floyd laser show, but they’ll have drinks and mingling downstairs afterward and their own visuals projected on the ceiling during their set. I’m curious to see what they’re going to do with the space. It can be awkward to set up anything meaningful around a giant robot projector ant that rises from the floor, but already I can imagine how their melodies could transform awkwardness into underwater gracefulness, sort of how a good director cuts out the sound in moments of tension.

University of Alberta researchers have created an ultra-sound technology to regrow teeth, the first time scientists have been able to reform human dental tissue.

About half my books have been spoken for and some already bought.
a list of what’s left

he needs what I have but can’t give away

There is a raccoon stuck bottom-half inside a tree, I see it when I walk from the bus-stop. There is a man on a blue ladder, his arm up to his elbow in the hole, trying to shove the squirming creature free from the other side. I want to walk up to the situation and reach up and grab onto the creature, ignore the claws and teeth that would tear at me and pull. Yank it free in one smooth movement. Instead I run my tongue over the inside of my teeth, ossified pearls, and walk away. I will be late if I do not go now. I am obscurely disappointed my skin will remain intact.

  • Net-funded professional journalism.

    I’ve been sleeping heavily lately, as if everything shuts down, as if my soul goes absent. I’m not used to it. Every morning is a dim entrance, a watery sky debut into a film I never needed to see. It’s like there’s a blanket of dust over me in my dreams. I twitch, I can feel it, just on the edge outside of consciousness. My body is trying to cope and maybe not doing as well as it used to. There’s something in my head getting in the way. It’s like when I lie in bed, when it’s time to dream, my mind seizes the chance to escape me, drive fast and away, disassociate from the crashing tide of conflicting shades of ache that run underneath my point of view, instead of resting, instead of taking the space to relax and fix my scrapes and bruises. It’s tiring me out, not being in my body. I have to find someone who knows how to connect the bits and pieces. I have hopes for Saturday.

  • The Sexy Beast is talking to you.

    Today the radio plays songs I used to listen to last year. It’s like nostalgia without the immediacy of caring about what happened. My in-box tells me letters from people who used to be my lovers. Someone drops the word muse on me and I smile, warmed by a rare spark of feeling worthwhile. If they weren’t so far away, that’s exactly what I want to be. The weather here never changes. Overcast with a chance of sun, sunny with a chance of rain. Always water from the sky. Even when it is blue it looks gray. I haven’t taken part in creating in a long time, too long for me.

    • someone should dress as paris hilton

  • Watching an airplane hit by lightning.

    Vancouver had a another successful pillow-fight flash-mob this past Saturday. For those interested, here’s pictures and video. Regrettably, I couldn’t go, my time was with Skatia, but there have been reports filtering in from various people that tell of traffic stopping and feathers drifting down for blocks.

    In a similar vein, The 26th Annual International Fool’s Parade is this Saturday. It’s been a tradition to dress up as spectacularly as possible and sing and march eccentric down the seawall. This year, however, plans have changed. We’re meeting at Robson Square at Noon. No costume too loud, no instrument too silly.

  • Drawing Restraint 9 AKA sometimes Bjork is a bit much.

    • the day cain slew abel

    There’s a graffiti sticker on the cross-walk button at Davie and Jervis that I press every morning on my way to work. It’s a small cartoon man with a hard on and a blank speech balloon. Every day while I’m waiting for the light, I write another message in the empty space. REMEMBER THAT SHE’S IN LOVE WITH YOU. And every day it’s erased by rain. I HAVE A SCHEDULE TO KEEP. Always in sharp blue ink. MEMORIZE HIS FACIAL FEATURES. I feel like maybe I’m waiting to find out which one’s the right answer. THERE MUST BE SOMETHING TERRIBLY WRONG WITH ME. So far, nothing. The next day, it’s wiped clean. PROMISE THE GIRL A GRAND ENTRANCE. I have to try again.

    STOP ASSUMING IT’S THE WRONG DECISION.

    These small moments, tied tight to sailing and dancing and metaphor, these miniature dramatic acts that crash down from the aether to remind us that we live, these in love and hating it, in pain and digesting the chest crushing constriction of too much stress, too much breathing, these times of end times, of just in time, of coming closer, of kissing bitterly or gently saying no moments, these glorious debilitating moments thrown to the bed, to the rain, to the romantics, I either need more of them or I need them to stop. The crashes afterward, it feels like that’s all my life is being constructed from. Alone on a street, I stop and I stare upwards and lose twenty minutes of my life. Again.

    what is it you plan to do with your one
    &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp wild and precious life? ~ mary oliver

    Hush, the cars drive by. Shush, close your eyes. No more silence, this is the city. All of our eyes are on the clock, we’re giving it time. Schedules flying. I’m too tired. I haven’t been paying attention. A collection of solitary Man Ray photograph moments. Her tears are made of glass, her eyes are made of yesterday’s favourite songs. Hysteria seems like a waste of time – there will always be a fire in the forest. How else to clear out the undergrowth? Outside there is sunshine.

    SHE WANTS TO MATTER. &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp

    IT’S IMPORTANT TO BE HAPPY.