Author: foxtongue

my toes went blue on the mountain

We went up the mountain this morning to watch the dawn. We sang in the car and wore my beaver fur hat. Earlier there were hot dogs, a birthday thing with different people. I brought an incense holder in the shape of a ying and yang together in gray glazed and fired clay. First, however, was Rabbit Hole Day, then work, then home. The lusciously soft plush roses, the isopropynol alcohol, the whipping chemical fire on the back porch was after the sausages came and before we stood in the rain for an hour waiting for the city to rescue strangers from an accidental deathly chasm-trap where a fence fell down on the edge of a construction site, leaving behind a two story cliff on the bare edge of a sidewalk. What a night. I feel like myself again.

arc-en-ciel

No sleep, of course, but that can wait.

I was meant to go to Seattle today, drop by the Roq La Rue, but instead I double-booked plans with a friend here and decided it would be kinder to stay. My ferret, Skatia, is looking at me, asking silently when I will come to sleep, and Michael is lightly snoring, somewhat like I imagine a child might when they want their parents to believe them asleep.

rabbithole: time to check the mail

What woke me up was the ticking. It wasn’t slow and regular like time being chopped into seconds, tick tick tick, but more like the articulated movement of a mechanical insect walking with a hundred clockwork legs. Bloody unsettling was what it was, so I got up, unhealthy hour or nowt. I looked around and didn’t see anything out of the ordinary until I happened to poke my head into the solarium and discover that I couldn’t see the sky. Beauty. Guess what people, it’s another damn plague.

Government promised we’d used all of them up this year, but they bloody well lied. I was expecting another eight months clear. It’s not like they couldn’t raise the forest up, block these annoying invasions before they even reach the city. I’m suspecting the idiots we voted are incompetant or lazy. More likely both.

Now I don’t know how I’m going to get to work. I hear the defences marching by *thoom* but they’re obviously too far away to be clearing my neighborhood of the pests. I’m debating tossing my boss an e-mail. If her neighborhood was cleaned up in time, she’ll come in and think it irresponsible of me not to report in, but if it wasn’t, then how’s she to know I never put any hours in? She’ll assume I was working all day. It’s like a free paycheque. I’ve still got some time to decide. An hour or so to have breakfast in and brush my teeth. I’ll post in a bit, tell you what I’m doing.

If I’m staying home, does anyone want to risk the tunnels with me? We could get a beer over at Thumbelina’s.

celebrating rabbit hole day since twenty-twenty-five.

too tired to make words go



Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

A generation of polite liars says:
Have to admit, from an objective point of view, there’s nothing sexier than a girl wearing her hair like a shirt. Even if it does look like a twizzler factory.

My last few days have been pleasant to the point of being ridiculous. After staying up all Monday night taking pictures, I went for breakfast with Matthew at Slickety Jim’s then sat reading my book in a puddle of sunlight on the drive for an hour. It was calming, a nice way to even out the wellspring of conflicting smiles I was inflicting on passers-by. When I got home, I made plans to meet with Andrew, Sophie, and Kate over at Zulu Records, but by the time I got there, Andrew had already bought our tickets to the Afrika Bambaataa concert coming up, so we all gaudily trooped down to English Bay for a vague picnic on the beach instead where it was chilly, but nice. I met Dan Fairchild, which was neat, then we all went back to Andrew’s until Ray arrived, which is the point where I fell asleep on the floor. Bang. Out.

Even one year on, tsunami toll remains elusive.

Half an hour later, I shook awake and lifted myself dreamily to the couch next to Ray, where I promptly lost consciousness for another half hour. Eventually they ran out of pity and woke me up, dragging me out for a delicious dinner, then back to watch SCRATCH!, a painfully good documentary on the origins of hip-hop. It dug through my brain like a refresher course at gunpoint. By the time I got home, I dropped successfully into bed and sleep for the first time in a month. Wednesday morning Jenn came over deadly early for a Metal Walls breakfast, and from there we ran into a cheerful David Bloom who went on charmingly about a play he’s hoping to get into this summer as Macbeth. After I dropped her off, I ran into Chris, the contact juggler, and a couple who wanted to know if I would be willing to be their paid tour guide of the city. I told them no, I wasn’t qualified to put a light spin on this place, but I gave them a list of sweet places to look at trees from and that made them happy.

NASA Stardust: “We’ve removed first aerogel cells!,” webcam url.

There were messages waiting on the machine, the owners of Hypatia, a local higher end fetish footwear shop, were asking me to call them for a job interview. Odd, as I never left them a resume or had ever talked to them before, but Raphaella works there, and her recommendation was enough. They hired me on the phone and I started today.

I spent up all night taking photos

IMG_0334

i carry your heart with me
e. e. cummings

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

Voting is now open for the 2006 Bloggies™
Click here to vote.

In similar news, I discovered today that Van2.ca, a tiny website I’d never heard of before today, has listed me as one of Vancouver’s Best Blogs of 2005. Thank you Javina for placing me on the roster. I’m baffled as to what the site is about, but I appreciate it. (In fact, excellent timing, as I just today re-worked my sidebar to include a directory of where I am on-line and, yes mother, a donation button).

reminders, to love who we can, that fire, and whose feet have walked these streets

ScanImage250

It’s strange cycling in the darkness before dawn. The cars aren’t expecting you. They are tired, they are balancing coffee against the ever-present rain. Everything looks like a sad slow song, a woman singing, her heart broken six months before when she came back to find a note taped to the door, “I don’t love you anymore.” My glasses had covered up with rain and the streets reflect like they were made of water, so it feels a little like blindly flying. Sterring myself onto the dotted line, I let go of the handlebars and thought of death, how so many people believe there’s something after, that it’s a door. My hands up, I tilted my head back and let cars slide by on either side. There are no stars here, no souls to carry me home.

The viaduct I was on curves between our two stadiums then arcs above what used to be Expo 86 but is now just leveled industrial area turned into closed off parking lots awaiting miraculous rebirth as condos in time for the Olympics. From bicycle level, on one side you can see water, on the other, the Sun Yat Sen gardens, the beginnings of our thin Chinatown where they filmed the opening of Global Frequency. Late at night it’s usually empty, you cycle along it and feel like the sole survivor of some strange war, but traffic slowly gathers after six o’clock, gaining a crucial morning momentum. Dangerous. There’s no space for anything but a breath between the cars and the cement side guards. I’d forgotten what hours weren’t safe anymore. It’s been so long since I’ve ridden such a strange quiet time on the highway. Traffic lights are still ignored by taxis but joining them are people speeding and people too slow to remember the gas pedal, how it makes the machine roll forward.

I could have touched the vehicle as they’d passed. The wind lifted my artificial hair and it danced, a perfectly timed stunt-driver minute, as cinegraphic as a pearl. I looked back again, up, and bitterly smiled. The only truth in stars are that they might not be there anymore, the light we see is such a shadow, and that they travel.

I looked down after the cars had passed, wondering if they’d even seen me, and quietly said out loud,

“Some people would think that was lucky.”

It’s a strange mood, feeling invisible, feeling like that woman after she smoothly drops to the floor and leans on the door, note in her hand, hurt too dry to drip from her disbelieving eyes.

Ashes and Snow will be on view in Santa Monica, from Jan 14 to May 14, 2006. I want to go.

[pj harvey – water]
Now the water to my ankles
Now the water to my knees
Think of him all waxy wings
Melted down into the sea
Mary, Mary what your man said
Washing it all over my head
Mary, Mary hold on tightly
Over water
Under the sea

Ashes and Snow
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp Gregory Colbert has updated his website. &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp Remember to breathe.

I’m so sorry there are not more angels. That there are not more years for grace.

I’m sorry I don’t have words for what I feel I want to say.

This is a universal thing, I know, but it brings us down every time.

May you have time to give everything you still have to say to the family you’ve made.

You have my deepest sympathies for your sorrow.

This isn’t enough, but I don’t know how to play the song that needs singing.

pack up your bags for moskau, kids

“Hey you!!” “WHAT!” “Nothing…”

Remember a year ago, that Eurovision Contest Band that Nicholas and I were banging on about so loudly that BoingBoing finally picked it up a month or two later?

25 years after they disbanded, Dschinghis Khan has returned with a world-wide reunion tour called “Back On Their Horses”.

A little digging and we find the man who used to play Khan passed away from AIDS complications. When they played at the Olympiyski Arena in Moscow to 30,000 screaming fans on the 17th of December, 2005, they had a replacement. From pictures found here and here, it appears the years have not been as kind as they could have been.

This is the first video that I found. There were more found by Nicholas, but world save us if we spend the time to dig them up again. We’re already becoming dangerously interested in this retro-disco pop band from before we were born. Any more time spent researching Dschinghis Khan and William Gibson will dedicate a dry mocking paragraph of some short story to describing us in uncanny detail.

Environment in crisis: ‘We are past the point of no return’

Of course, a latent obsession with a discontinued gimmick band is admittedly a little outré. It’s much more conventional to share surreal clips of Japanese culture like this nicotine energy drink commercial featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger exploding out of a girl’s head or this happy-hardcore music video featuring a fire-breathing fat man in gold lamé dancing with a harem of pretty, um, genies?

It’s understandable, a country that gives us such gems as japanese girls versus the syncopated masturbation video of doom“, “japanese girls in meat-visor hats versus the giant lizard” or “japanese girls versus the giant black man” deserves whatever press they can get. (Doesn’t being Bob Sapp in Japan strike you as an excellent way to make a living? To hell with being a Pro Wrestler and K-1 fighter, just cash in on being incredibly big.) In fact, when I discovered “japanese girl in seal hat versus the polar bear“, I think I watched it three times in a row, my hand over my mouth in vague shock each time, more concerned for the bear than the screaming girl.

However, I think it’s only fair to give the rest of the world’s astounding media a moment in the sun. Like, alright, I know it’s not as weird as the hip thrusting lingerie flamingos, (and what do you even call Shingo Mama no oHa?), it’s more of a catastrophe, but what about the David Hasselhoff Ooga-Chacka video that’s been dominating my friends list? The thing with the fish or the eggs or the flying fairy children are all just as messed up as anything spewed forth from a pop idol incubator. (Don’t even get me started on the green screening. I did better with a painted floor and a second-hand handheld camera that had an eyepiece with a tendency to fall off mid-shot). After all, American Idol has its own trainwrecks, some so spectacular it’s a wonder they don’t bring back the tradition of leaving brain damaged babies in the hills to die of exposure at the Burger King Tender Crisp Bacon Cheddar Ranch.

Brain scans reveal men’s pleasure in revenge.

BoingBoing recently featured Heavy Ammunition, for example, who has put together a brilliant clip of the Che-Stormtrooper phenomenon comprised solely of individual photos put together to look like video and put to a catchy hip-hop version of the Vader theme, (Here is where to get the stickers). They also pointed the way to a neat page showing a side-by-side video of an eerily identical Apple commercial and a Postal Service video.

Not blindingly funny stuff, true, but decidedly as artistic as SHUN! or the classic slap-stick german safety film and about as equally creative as when The Tonight Show rigged a phony free photobooth and created a clip so delightful that LOL becomes LOL and not “I smile gently at this”.

As an eye-wash, even if you weren’t brave enough to click on anything else in this post, (and shame on you for missing out on the marvelously astonishing photobooth), Everyone must watch this video. That means you, yes you, who is looking at this with skeptic eyes that are already wandering down to what’s in the next entry. Too bad, toughen up, this is where your attention’s at if it knows what’s good for it. If you really must know, it features dogs and lasers, but that tells you nothing, so there was really no point in saying so. GO NOW WITH THE CLICK!

edit: the dog video is for Vitalic and created by Pleix.

Conquer Greenland. Sprout some extra limbs. Walk on water. Marry an insect.

get code for this box here.

it’s too late at night for harmony

Hey mister, are you in a hurry?
I have this package, it needs to be delivered.
It’s a matter of life and death.

In the event of an emergency,
we ask you to please remember to
keep both hands within the safety zone.

It was a dozen roses
I did not know what to do with.
So I hung them in the kitchen
until they dried into powder.

Please believe me.
This manuscript is the one
that will change my career.

On transit, she watched faces.
Tired to find someone to talk to.
Sometimes she would smile if
they were reading a book.

Seems the way, the solution
to finding the melody
is right in front of you.
It’s called sheet music.

She sings swing low sweet chariot
when she’s shopping for cotton.

You don’t cry enough.

In his dreams he is a doctor.
He had no business in the hospital.
It was an accident he cut you.

The color of leaves falling
is such a cliché
it’s a wonder the trees
don’t die of shame.

My lover used to be mythical,
I found him in the pages of a book.
Shame when he met me
I wasn’t pretty enough.

The clerk at the shop with the
healing crystals has too much acne.
Obviously, she never listens to
the right kind of music.

Chapter one is brilliant.
It reads like a phone call between
Einstein and someone who
grew up poor in New York.

She walks on the outside of the curb
and tells him it’s so if there’s an accident
she’ll get hit first.

Dear, you don’t understand.
I need to learn these lines by tomorrow.
If I don’t, I’ll be fired.

The moral majority has
declared that you’ve stepped too far
This time we expect you
to relinquish your relationship
with the child.

Prosthetics are too expensive.
Your eyes are beautiful just the way they are.
Plastic can’t replace liquid honey.

My troubles with gods began
when I was very young.
I found a book in a hotel drawer
read it and thought it was poor fiction.
No one alive could believe that.

He just kept repeating
the same haunted phrase over and
over “Please yellow bird.”

The mayor claimed it was for
liberty and honour
that he cut the ribbon on the bridge.
Really, it was so he could drive to work
ten minutes faster.

You lied but I would still marry you.

Skin as soft as gentle spring rain,
that’s what it was going to be covered in.
Leather like butter, like a naked
teenager with no self control.

The postcard of San Francisco
arrived with no name so he left it
on top of the stove
and forgot.

You are pensive and often melancholy.
You are everything the internet tells you
except you don’t need viagra.

I wanted hexadactyly when I was little.
My girlfriend wanted a baby.
We split the difference and sewed our
mouths together with red surgical string.

Grandfather claimed that
junk food was communism,
fine in moderation but
not the a way to win the war.

These wings of balsa wood may
be too thin to hold my weight
If you want, you can have the cat.





January 27th is the Second Annual

LiveJournal Rabbit Hole Day!

Fall down the Rabbit Hole for 24 hours and see what’s there. It will be beautiful.

January 2026
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