Author: foxtongue

radio silence

I had an evening awhile back with someone that really cemented my self-worth back into my being and I don’t think I’ve had a chance to tell them that. I don’t know how I properly could without explaining the tortuous process of how I lost myself in the first place and it’s not my place to do so. The groundwork isn’t there for my unleashing of torrential emotional explanation. We’re not lovers and we’re not going to be. It’s enough that I have it back, my assumption of self. It’s enough that I know I still have what I used to, that I can be full again.

I’ve been trying to think of the positive. My life is taking off again. I’m stepping back into being a person of dancing shoes and social understanding. I need to leave my house more, facetime in the cold of winter. I have reasons now, I’ve been collecting invitations and friends again to meet in flesh. There’s books to return and people to stomp the stores with. I need to play catch-up with a few friends. Tell them I’m going back to California, to live just outside of L.A. for a month. Tell them everything. How I want to meet people there this time. Meet people and keep them. Drown myself in the ocean of humanity. How I’m planning on running away with the circus. Drafting myself into a pyromania outfit of dancers and sparking machines, explosions of sound, grace, and coloured smoke. I want to tell them about my boy, my darling Alastair, whom I’ve never had time to know and how it hasn’t mattered. How the rapport thing is clicking back into my life. How he’s clever and sweet. More intelligent than I am, but likes my random lessons on biology and social science. How he gets self-conscious when I point a camera at him and makes me laugh. How important that is. How I’m full of joy and soul again. I want to spill all of this on people, sprinkle it on them like a baptism of friendship, but I don’t know if I can.

It feels selfish, but his week I’ve been crying myself to sleep a little. A song will come on my playlist and suddenly I realize there’s this weight hanging upon me. It’s hard to carry, it’s shapeless and I don’t know what to do with it. I miss someone. I found a letter when going through my in-box the other day and it caught in my throat. I couldn’t believe the date on it. It was from so long ago. The last thing they’d sent me. Searching for a picture, I found I’d clicked on their name. The date was from too long ago. I miss them more than I ever thought I would. It was something I hadn’t been thinking about, something that was important but I’d been laying aside. I can’t sleep now. They’re in my head. Granted there are worse things, but this is slightly more persistent than feverdreams with murderous intent. By slightly, I mean my blood is singing with it like the note has been found to make it vibrate and it carries their name. I miss them and it’s heavy. It feels like a death in the family, but I know they could pick up the phone.

I’m young and I hate it. I’m foolish and female and it hurts, but don’t tell anyone.

It’s a secret.

Told to find an outlet, I tried and I think I failed. One day I should read a romance novel.

She holds her tongue between her teeth. Her fingers will speak for her. Keys depressed to send sooty desire in his general direction. It’s been a hard and dangerous hiatus of communication. He gets lost easily, it’s only a tenuous thread what binds him, what reels him in. An invisible hair that must be wound and wound again, tightly, lest he escape and see what’s been done to him. Enough of this and he will crave her like the sting of the needle he never knew, he’ll shake for his hit. The wound will bleed nuances and he’ll lick it up.

With a little click, she signs in.

He’s there, in front of her. Witty t-shirt and long close jeans. His voice is distorted a little through memory, his face caught clear like a photograph. Anything for her, he claims. She’ll hold him and keep him. This one is special, this one is dear. She reaches out to slip off his shirt, he’s motionless, body bending little in the process. It falls to the floor to his bare feet, ignored from then on.
It’s smut – just smut. Go away – it’s embarrassing.

found via superflow

F*ck Big Media:
Rolling Your Own Network

Mark Pesce
Lecturer, Interactive Media, AFTRS
markp@aftrs.edu.au
www.playfulworld.com

Preamble

The worldwide consolidation of media industries has led to a consequent closure of the public airwaves with respect to matters of public interest.  As control of this public resource becomes more centralized, the messages transmitted by global media purveyors become progressively less relevant, less diverse, and less reflective of ground truth.

At present, individuals and organizations work to break the stranglehold of these anti-market-media-mega-corporations through the application of the courts and the law.  However, because of the inherent monopoly that anti-market media maintain on the public mindset, legislators have been understandably reluctant to make moves toward media diversification.  We are thus confronted with a situation where many people have interesting things to say, but there are progressively fewer outlets where these views can be shared. 

The public airwaves, because they are a limited resource, are managed by public bodies for the public interest.  While honorable, the net effect of this philosophy of resource management has been negative: a public resource has become the equivalent of a beachfront property, its sale generating enormous license revenues, but its transfer to the private domain denying the community access to the sea of ideas.

If a well-informed public is the necessary prerequisite to the democratic process, then we must frankly admit that any private ownership of public airwaves represents a potential threat to the free exchange of ideas.  Now that private property has mostly collectivized the electromagnetic spectrum, and with little hope that this will soon change, we must look elsewhere to find a common ground for the public discourse.

We are fortunate that such ground already exists.

Part One: Refugee Status

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.” – George Orwell, 1984

I’m not from around here.  You can probably hear it in my voice, that I’m North American.  Not only North American but from the United States, not only from the United States but from California, not only from California but from Los Angeles, not only from Los Angeles, but from Hollywood, and not only from Hollywood, but from Laurel Canyon, the cozy bush-in-the-city neighborhood that played host to the likes of Jim Morrison, Frank Zappa and Joni Mitchell – 30 years ago.

Those days are over.  For the last twenty years, ever since the military industrial complex fled Los Angeles for cheaper digs in the American South, Los Angeles has been a company town, home to an ever-dwindling number of media megacorporations.  These corporations produce 92% of what Australians see on the movie screen, at least 50% of what you watch on the telly, and about 80% of the music that you hear.   These megacorps have an ever-growing array of subdivisions invading every area of the mediasphere.

But we’ll come to that in a moment.  fascinating to the last word

singing at the sunset

You bring out the man in me. I stand with my feet apart, my hips don’t swing when I walk. You think like a girl, we know that both. Properly put, this is a lesbian relationship though you’re the one packing. A little unfair, really, since when was life any different?

You’re in the city made of concrete, but I’m in a place with the gray coloured sidewalks and the sky to match. Our bridge a bridge of air, it’s too far to leap the stream without getting our feet wet. A high tune, a sprightly tune what pays the cabmans fees. Charon holier than thou today, Demeter standing with a riding cane.

the internet will reign

 ROBOT EXCLUSION PROTOCOL
By Paul Ford

I took off my clothes and stepped into the shower to find another one sitting near the drain. It was about 2 feet tall and made of metal, with bright camera-lens eyes and a few dozen gripping arms. Worse than the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

“Hi! I’m from Google. I’m a Googlebot! I will not kill you.”

“I know what you are.”

“I’m indexing your apartment.”

“I don’t want you here. Who let you in?”

 “I am Google! I find many good things. I find that pair of underwear with the little dice printed all over them. And I watch the tape of you with the life-sized Stallman puppet. These are good unique things. Many keywords and links! My masters will say ‘much good job, little robot!’ Many searchers will find happy links of Stallman puppet see you! Ahhhh.”

“I put the robot exclusion protocol on my door. Didn’t you see it?”

“You understand Google, person? I index many things and if I am very good I get to go to Bot Park and have more processors. And an oiljob! Thank you Google! Must come inside apartment and index. Must!” His video eye winked up at me.

“I know my rights. I’m giving you 10 seconds to leave.”

“Yes. I will leave. First I index everything. Everything! I am Google!” It put out one of its video arms and began to read the label on my shampoo bottle. So I beat it into shards with a folding chair and let it index the dustbin.

It hurts to whisper today.

December 22 2004
Alaska Airlines Flight
Depart: Vancouver, Canada at 10:33 am
Arrive: Los Angeles, California at 1:22 pm

This is like a bid for an undertow love affair, lurking to drag us under. I’m starting to be sick today, my head leaving flicker trails of aching teeth when I move. My eyes have been shellacked with sand and gritty liquid. I’m starting to lose reality coherence. A broken body, a broken mind. I have to close my mind down from the faeries.
I’m due at two housewarming parties tonight. I’m wondering if I’ll survive.

It’s cold, winters foreclosure. The good little girls are inside with hot chocolate, trying on mittens made of kitten fur soft wool. Outside the wind is bitter, moaning its dejection over the weather. Its lover left, its fantastic affair with the sun waning, winding down. A masquerade of river currents, leaves red in the gutter, like the star above dying. Fire drying up, too old in the year for predatory burning.

This is when the bad things come, the remnants of nostalgia and memory taking flesh to brand us, to beat us, hold us down and drink our breath. A thousand eyes will open with the wrong people inside. Looking out blue windows and gray and hazel, the voices will scour the world, hunting us down. Happy people aren’t allowed here, laughter when you walk your dog is dangerous.

there’s not a first time for everything

I put something into voice tonight, an urgent spoken story in under sixty seconds. It’s the time limit that gives me my speed, a rushing articulation of being unable to properly convey the desired emotion. I’ve installed a sound forge, a program to beat my head against like the iron deficiency currently in my veins. It doesn’t agree with my mike, all I have is what comes with the windows package. Barely a slit to let light through and with such tacky curtains, dear god. I shouldn’t be up this late today, but I am anyways. It’s the time, it’s the moon pulling. Scratchy eyes and the ill’s upon me. If I don’t kill it in my sleep, I may be looking forward to a dread week of feverdreams and hallucinations. A pithy time of not being able to recognize a face and feeling my fingers turn to sticks and my skin too small. I know my delusions now when I’m sick, but they’re unshakable when I’m living them. I admit that I’m worried. For the first time in a very long time, I haven’t a partner in town to make sure I don’t die.

It occured to me tonight that I’m a grand in debt. A weight I hardly ever think about what’s going to drain off the top of my resource cheque. There’s less than there should have been, but maybe still just barely enough. A light-weight camera and a set of new eyes. The beginnings of the travel-plan to Europe side, already set in motion. I have to get my mother onto her passport stamp. Through her windfall, I might get a citizenship. I want to be eight, nine, ten hours away. I want to have daylight rise and set across another ocean. I’ve never tasted any other sea than this.

Give me stones, my loves. Give me stories.

geeks take pet pictures, I just don’t have a cat

My cam takes bad seventies pictures. Photography from the past, back before I was born. Still-birth moments of gritty focus and strips of light, yellowing. Another dash of the wrong age. Aggregate strata of vintage images, still life and frozen. Something about the reality captured keeps me. Boundries needling into me, I like it. The awareness of the passage of time. I want to build an album to show the world. Angles and continuity paths, the structure of something to share. Here on the internet, I’m only made of media. You, my bored and thinking audience, I don’t know why you’re here, but you’re appreciated. I want to share more, I want to play with all the possibilities available. Textures of multi-media streams, jumping jacks and bouncing balls. I caught three today, how about you?