Author: foxtongue

Marvin Gay won’t get out of my head.

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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.

    Longbaugh: You know what I’m gonna tell God when I see him? I’m gonna tell him I was framed.

    I can’t turn my back on you for a minute. I’m in from the cold, inspired by darling gunn to fix my dye, so wandering on-line while waiting for all the coloured goo to set. I look and it’s like Warren wrote the news on an especially bitter-hate-world sort of day.

    Australia’s on a second night of Race Riots.

    The United States, (as insidiouswanker points out), “always so fond of criticizing China for human rights transgressions, just keeps on running with that human rights abuse.” As an aside to that, The United States now ranks behind South Africa in civil rights. (for counter-point: A stylish music clip setting to get the vote message across to South Africans.)

    All in the same month, a cram school teacher murdered a twelve year-old student, a Peruvian killed a 7 year-old and left her body in a cardboard box, another 7 year-old was stabbed to death in Ibaraki, and a high school girl was murdered by a fellow student because he thought she was “going cold” on him.

    As if to top it, the State of California has just executed a man nominated five times for the Nobel Peace Prize.

    What the hell people? Do we have to come over there and fuck-start your heads? Make where you live a better place to be, already.
    Spread this link around. This one right here.

    (my suitcase in my best friend)


    super sexe
    Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

    Architecture to stretch out in without scraping my fingers on roughly green glass walls. There are no mountains to hem people in here, no ocean to swallow their gaze completely to the exclusion of culture. I blend in. In Vancouver, I stand out in the street as something odd to look at. It’s like a weight lifted, all those people looking elsewhere. I don’t feel like a bare gallery of this hat, these clothes. Instead, beautiful pieces of public graffiti sprayed onto the brick skin of buildings a century old reach out to me and remove weight from my shoulders.

    My trip to Toronto is confirmed: I leave on Monday, Dec 19, at 6.15 on train #69.
    I return to Montreal on Friday Dec 23.

    I’m living with James at Sherbrooke and St. Laurant. It reminds me of the first time I lived in Toronto, when my apartment was at Queen and Spadina. There’s a similar sense of being exactly in the right place downtown to properly chase dragons. It’s like Sigur Ros is playing underneath every creaking step I take on snow, lending me magic and grandeur. Tkch, tkch, tkch. Everything is dusted white. I don’t pad around here. It’s impossible. My feet are encased in big clunky shoes. My feet are clumsy. My feet are walking somewhere they’ve never been. Every curb is a cliff leading down to some improbable country where I’m glad I don’t know the language.

    Yesterday, like the day before, I walked for hours. I haven’t done anything yet, but I’ve seen.

    I’ve got salt in my eyelashes

    There are plumbers here. They’ve been taking a quiet forever of time to fix a little leak we found in the kitchen last night. I don’t speak french, so everything they do has been like a pantomime. Over exaggerated explanations of what they’re doing every step. Wiping up water like sins, tightening screws. I don’t care. Just torture the pipes until they stop, alright? I keep nodding okay and trying to get them to ignore me and get on with it. My head still aches as sharp as a judas kiss, I don’t want to have to pay attention. I want to turn the shower on as hot as my skin can take and stand in it for a thousand heartbeats, then find my way to wherever Michel is hiding in the streets of this gloriously chilly city.

    I keep checking my fickle in-box, hoping for some distraction past this waiting. I suppose I could say Screw It and have my shower in spite of them, but I feel that would be awkward. I don’t like the idea of hiding damply away from strangers on the other side of a thin apartment door. I would rather jump the queue and have some privacy.

    Ah, and there they leave. What a relief.

    Red Cross picks a new, neutral, symbol: the red crystal.

    Now my hair tastes like towel fluff.

    saint street ell


    read straight
    Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

    We walked four hours, returned, and subjected ourselves and Michel to Guitar Wolf. My head is splitting, the result of a nasty accident between it and the fridge door. An explosively loud japanese rock god movie might not have been the most wise decision. Over my shoulder, James is in his bedroom reading a book I cannot see. Tomorrow he goes to work early and I am left alone in the city.

    Tomorrow.

    I will spend time discovering the schedules required between here and Toronto. (I promise, these words are a rudder for you as much as me.) The train takes five hours. Ryan North tells us that the Secret Swing is gone, torn from the chains, but I still want to go. I suspect I will leave early Tuesday morning. Jessie will be meeting me there, she flies to Halifax Wednesday evening, and I have a holiday present for Katie that still needs to be wrapped. (Darren has yet to get back to me.)

    My eyes feel as if they have cracked.