Month: April 2006

the store just filled with MySpace hair


softly sounding nicely
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

Haunting the hospital, I walk barefoot down quiet hallways. Together we go in circles. This door, the next door. We hit the button and they swing open like prophecies. The cold sound of planes traveling overhead can’t touch us here. This is life. Chilly floors, small milky plastic cups of ice. All around us are other lives. Recovering under different names, other paths to guide us by. Some of them are happier than I am, some of them more depressed. Me, I’m trying to be content. Pictures out the window, a thousand thousand directions, every one thinking they have something to do, knowing the faces of their parents more than I do. Dreams about my father lately. Running away when I’m asleep from the violence, the danger. Springtime. The petals falling from the trees.

Definitions with references of the different species of science blogs.

I’m booking a trip to Santa Monica again. This ruins all my concert plans, I’m torn. I can stay and drown in music for three days straight. Share a connection with people here I love, or I can go alone on a train to Cinco De Maya in Santa Barbara, see Ashes and Snow, then dance in the glory outside under starry skies next to the ocean with hundreds of people I’ll never get to know. Either option is grand and a little bit terrifying. If I don’t go south, I’ll miss the show. If I go south, I miss my favourite music. This is my last chance to go. Operative word is chance.

Who wants to buy some tickets? I’ve got TV on the Radio for Saturday May 6th, ($17), Sunset Rubdown & Frog Eyes (w. a member of Wolf Parade) for Sunday May 7th, ($10), and Secret Machines for Tuesday May 9th, ($16.50). All are at Richards on Richards. Depending on responses, I’ll likely decide tonight which way I’ll decide.

I actually met the Wolf Parade fellow on the street yesterday. I saw him coming and said, “I love your band,” as he walked past me. He looked startled, said thank you, and generally acted stunned. We had a short conversation, “Well now you’ve been recognized on the street it’s like you’re a real rock star.” When I said I had a ticket to his next show, he managed to brighten even more, “You’re coming to Coachella?!” Out of my range, I said, but made a note of it. I suppose they’ve Made It now. He made sure to shake my hand before skipping off down Davie St. It was a small thing, but it made me happy. He was so surprised that I suspect he’s going to tell more people about it than I will.

Mexico proposes decriminalizing pot and cocaine

yo quiero a los que me quieran y olvido a los que me olvidan

Sometimes it occurs to me that I could populate a very unrealistic novel by simply describing the daily customers that come into my shop. Currently there’s a bronze-tone airhead escort and a nice couple in shopping for leather that I rather like. Middle-aged, short hair, I’m making castrati jokes with the wife and they’re asking for my opinion on how everything fits, whether his bouncy penis is showing or no. Another man is shuffling around, a senior citizen with immaculate inch long nails, (one pinky nail painted gold and a full inch longer than the others), trailing an oppressive floral perfume that goes well with his wrists full of jewelry and his over-size rhinestone rings, but painfully with his hawaiian-print silk shirt, teal gore-tex jacket, and ill-chosen dark brown lipstick. Even with the door open, the air will be choking sweet for hours after he leaves.

Yesterday a cross-dressing hooker dressed entirely in shades of pale baby pink gave me half a box of chocolate covered almonds because she’s trying to watch her weight. Last week a midget in a three-tier camo-print mini skirt came in with her intimidatingly conservative chinese grandparents and a girl with a inexplicable jar of peanut butter, which initially doesn’t sound odd until you’re aware of just how polished she seemed, as if she were wearing plastic on her skin to keep the dust off.

Every day is a little bit like this. A long song of eccentrics, broken up by bleach blond trendy girls with hoop earrings, playboy belly button pendants, and puffy white ski jackets that show their navels, clothing marking social regularity or mis-match. It’s a parade of costumes to the point where I can spot call girls from strippers in a crowd without trying just by the way they wear their hair. Eye make-up and foundation are also beginning to be tip-offs. I wonder if this is the skill I’ll pull away from this job, being able to spot market trends in people who put themselves up for sale.

Undressed – From the Hotel Lobby to a One Night Stand, a mix-tape by dys

There’s a Christopher Walken movie night happening this Friday at Michael‘s house downtown. At this point the plan is to watch the William Gibson film, New Rose Hotel*, the King of New York (by the same director), and Suicide Kings. (These are subject to change due to availability or complaints). There will be also various potentially painful SNL clips, if you are brave enough, and a reading of Poe’s The Raven.

*New Rose Hotel comes with a warning: Willem Defoe appears naked. This is more scarring than you would previously suppose.

this is my problem


Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

Point A is a little shop twenty feet wide by fifty feet long. Point A has taupe walls and a varying selection of shiny PVC boots in black, red or white. Point A is only properly bearable through the magic of the internet. Points B are exciting. Points B are made up of concerts, house-parties, restaurants, theaters, and various happenings. I suspect later I will leave Point A for an A.2, A Place Where Good People Are.

However, what I’m constantly searching for are Points B. There’s a slew of scientists here, as well as video game types, some skilled illustrators, a couple more musicians, and assorted accomplished writers. I know you folk can cough up. Be my friend, tell me what’s going on where you are and where I am. Die Puny Humans has been tickling my Need To Know with a damned heavy hammer.

Mike discovered where the Adicolor ads are coming from. Red and Green are now available. They make me happy.

Australian writer, Ben Peek, says “I quite like Nathan Ballingrud’s blog.” So should you.

“Serious writers have an obligation to empathize. If you can’t do that — if you can’t make an effort to feel the experience of another person, no matter how cosmetically and culturally different, then who exactly are you writing about? Are you writing the same set of characters over and over again, only with different names and in different settings? Am I?

Recoiling for fear of fucking it up is unhealthy for the writer, unhealthy for the genre, and unfair to people who find themselves either under-represented or all-but excluded from the genre. It is also downright criminal for a category of fiction which styles itself as forward-thinking, and culturally literate.”


“I’ve been a long time coming, and I’ll be a long time gone” ani difranco

I forgot to being Imogyne‘s birthday present with me to work today, despite that I remembered it yesterday. I’m hoping she’ll like it.

I win at Derek’s brain.

Yesterday Terri visited and brought black chocolate gelati. Andrew called and bought me concert tickets that I will later have to pay for. TV On the Radio, Secret Machines, Frog Eyes with a member of Wolf Parade. (video). On the phone was my mother, we tried so hard to keep talking. At the hospital, I left hungry letters to myself on Devon‘s laptop while he tried to sleep. Darling man, if I’m lucky, he won’t find it until I’m gone.

It was exactly this time last year that I decided to go to Toronto.

2005-04-27 00:23
Once upon a time, there

were fairytales
princes and
strange iron shoes
what meant honour
Once upon a time, there
were childhoods
we believed
in gold and
thought being good
was winning

Tell me a story, they said
explain to us why we crave
towers
why we crave pastel dresses and
happy endings

Tell me what matters
when everything is beautiful

Foxtongue - Writer

Ask me five [inappropriately?] personal questions and I’ll answer them no matter what they are.

Walking down the dock felt natural. Finding no key in her pocket did not. She sighed, unable to understand how she could have forgotten something so simple. It felt like a holiday, being here, sitting on the dirty deck of the boat, as if even stepping foot off of the earth was a reprieve from her day to day life. Uncertain what to do about the key, which was likely sitting on a table an hour away, she looked down at the dirty water, wishing she were somewhere it was possible to swim. She’d love to slip out of her clothing and bravely splash foot first into the ocean, but this water was grimy, covered in a scum of sea-wrack and oil. Instead she looked about, trying to remember if there was a spare tucked away somewhere. Under the plant pot would be too easy, but it reminded her of the small window at the prow. They didn’t lock it, thinking it was too small for anything but the boat cat to crawl through. She stood, balancing against the rock of the craft, and decided it was time to prove herself wrong.

The paperclip guy has finally traded himself a house.

Sunday night, for a lark, Stephanie, her teacher friend, and I wrote a love letter by popular consensus over drinks at the bar at Moxie’s. (I told the bartender what we were doing and he gave me a free drink.) It came out strange. Our three personalities laying out the groundwork for an intimate exchange didn’t create a cohesive whole. I feel like my words sit on the surface of the elementary sentences like oil on water in a tourist shop toy.

foxtongue —
[adjective]:

Visually addictive

‘How will you be defined in the dictionary?’ at QuizGalaxy.com

My Dearest Love,

When we finally made that connection, you made me forget myself. I looked into those mesmerizing blue eyes and I felt something in my soul change. I felt my sadness slip away, to be replaced by the feeling of light serenity. When I dance with you, I feel transported, as if my limbs were made of silk. Before we were together, I felt like I was sleep walking, but your kiss has brought life into sharp focus.

Somehow we managed to cover all the bases in such a way that I don’t feel like there’s any effective communication. I think part of it is that the three of us have wildly differing needs in our relationships. We’re all three monogamous, but Stephanie is a very strong Men Are Pigs type, and though her friend is a bit more laid back, she also inherently believes that every one of them will cheat on her, while I yearn more for grace than control. My control issues are invisible, cloaked in my absolute trust. My need, instead, is to be essential, but from what I’ve gathered, they’re more concerned with getting regular sex than being necessary. It was an odd realization. I’m not sure what most people expect.

Why did I never notice that Bob Marley was sexy?

Now this is a real opening: She thought, There must be a hundred thousand dollars here. A man attacked me, chocked me, bit my neck, burned my hand, then stuffed my shirt full of money and put a dumpster on me and now I can see heat and hear fog. I’ve won Satan’s lottery.

another reason why life is worth living

Spaceship Junkyard: some amazing photos of the retro-tastic Future As Now by Jonas Bendiksen.


ALTAI, Russia – Villagers collect scrap from a crashed spacecraft, surrounded by thousands of white butterflies, 2000.
Environmentalists fear for the region’s future due to toxic rocket fuel.


ALTAI, Russia – A farmer takes an evening stroll past the wreck of a Soyuz spacecraft, 2000. In this farming village, rockets routinely fall into people’s back yards.


KAZAKHSTAN – Scrap-metal dealers wait for a rocket to crash, 2000.

more photos

(verso) I can’t remember to forget you.

http://sevenphonecalls.org/

Devon came out of surgery fine. He’s tired and looks worn, but that’s to be expected when your innards have been slipped out of your belly and rewound, I’m sure. His intestines had twisted, kinked themselves into knots in ten different places. There’s no need to worry, he’s resiliant, recovers like I do from damage. I have a fabulous picture of him in the hospital bed, looking put upon by uncomfortable plastic tubes, holding hands with his beaming parents. I didn’t get to post it last night, unfortunately, but it will be available soon. He’s possibly not sleeping enough, but that’s so close to normal that it almost doesn’t bear mentioning. We’re a batch of night owls, we are. A coven of ridiculously interesting people who are most alive when everyone else is in bed. Dancing with blades, dancing in gruops and apart from eachother, dancing and being glad that life continues. Sneaking into hospitals at ten minutes to midnight and being turned away at the last possible moment.

Duncan’s got a livejournal.

Various people have been asking me what my plans are this week. As of yet, I really don’t know. I’d been planning on going to the Pacific Cinematheque double-bill tonight: Paul Williams hosting THE MUPPET MOVIE and PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE, followed by an After-Party at the Media Club where he’s going to play a set alongside July Fourth Toilet, (no, I don’t know who they are either), but I expect to skip the first film entirely for the sake of visiting hours. Tomorrow I may end up missing rehearsal for the sake of other things. Visiting Devon in the hospital, for example, or dropping by Bob‘s for a showing of A Tale of Two Sisters, one of my favourite movies, (just as Phantom of the Paradise is my mother’s), and finishing the cleaning of my room that’s been dragging on for something akin to a month simply because I’m never there anymore.

http://notyourusualbollocks.squarespace.com/

looking as if an angel had been threatened with a baseball bat


taking a break on metropolis
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

I sat on top of a news-box downtown for half an hour with a book in my lap, trying to tune out the religious zealots handing out sheets of paper with the word Jesus at the top. Too exhausted to run for the bus, I was twenty minutes late. No one was there. No one came. I did not expect them to. Dinner had obviously been decided without me. No way to contact my friends, I decided to gather my chores in hand before I went back to the hospital. Official visiting hours are over, I thought, and I am having difficulty imagining myself mouth that I am Devon’s wife.

The drugstore felt hollow, as if somehow I had fallen into a facsimile. I stood in the hair care aisle and let my eyes scan the products without me, looking for the word Organic. In my head, I would try to concentrate on the mundane task I was undertaking, but instead I would glimpse Devon in surgery, a garden of stars unconscious on a table, the illusion of a slight flash of the metal knife as it sliced into his skin. Eventually I chose two bottles of shampoo and turned to find soap. The cheap soaps are sometimes the best. Less scent means less chemicals. Small thoughts that have nothing to do with what went wrong or his face on the bed.

Earlier, I had to re-set my day’s plans. Alicia was to come by for eleven and I had set my day by that. Things came up however, as they often do, and it was two o’clock before she could swing by for her errand, so things red-shifted over a bit. I had dinner with Andrew instead of Alastair, and instead of going to a fencing demo, when I got off the bus across from Duello, I followed random impulse and turned left into Gastown. There’s a shop there I rather like, crammed with odd antiques and paper masks. In the basement there’s a chinese chest full of hundreds of small drawers that can steal an hour if your life if you let it. This time, however, I knew exactly what I came for. At the foot of the stairs is a small display of golden music boxes, the sort you crank by hand to hear the music. They’re louder when you place them on wood. I sorted through them as efficiently as possible to find the one that played the Beatles song, She Loves You.

Going back to Duello, I fell into step behind a man I didn’t recognize. I heard him unlock the school doors above me and cursed a wee bit, knowing that meant that I’d missed everyone. I poked my head in anyway, curious to see if I was wrong. “Who’re you looking for?” “I thought to catch Devon.” “He’s in the hospital today.”

At that, I turned and ran, another impulse. Down the stairs, across the street, down the hill, straight to Waterfront train station, where Randy happened to be standing inside the hall. Seeing him, standing perfectly as if framed for me to find him, I recognized my impulses as the impelling force of cinematic timing and I laughed. I stopped running and walked up to him. He covered the mouth of his cell phone for a moment, “Hey Jhayne, I’ve got news for you.” “Yes, but what hospital?” We stood chatting for close to ten minutes, glad to be in company, “I just talked to him, he’s obviously not dying,” then took the train together. As soon as the doors opened on Granville station, I began running again.

There was a group of boys on the escalators, seven deep on either stair, pretending they were surfing. Such was my blithesom running that I decided they were an obstacle I wouldn’t wait for, rather I made thier day by jumping up onto the slippery thin metal divide between them and dangerously running up that instead. They cheered, but for safety’s sake, I didn’t look back down. Another two blocks and I was on the bus, feeling as if my legs were going to mutiny if I forced them one more step.

like heroin amber dust

http://www.unphotographable.com/

There are flower petals flying past much how I’ve always imagined lightning-bugs must be. Bright fluttering pieces of colour added into the air over the street like a surreal yet expected light pink snow.

I’ve never seen a lightning-bug, except on television. I’ve always wanted to see them. They sound magical. When I was a child, I carried a particular episode of the Twilight Zone with me, just because it had them in it. They were something a vampire showed a boy before he died. Black and white, a little bit grainy. Those were my lightning bugs, my tiny bits of flying fire, almost pure static showing through some sound-stage reality.


love
Originally uploaded by * jo_anna *.

The sparks from the first highway torch I ever lit reminded me of that show. They way the red flared and sputtered, all the sparks flying up harmlessly to bat my fingers. Moths, I thought, No. Lightning bugs. Bright chemicals with soft wings. Later, when I began being lucky enough to work in fireworks, it was like my peaon to all those lost moments of my childhood. How I never saw a lightning bug, how I never broke a window, how I still don’t know how to play marbles. Lighting the torch was my victory over all those things. My mirror movement to a hundred people before me, touching contact to contact, connecting the charge. All of my work going up in a blaze of glory. It’s a silly phrase, blaze of glory, but that was it exactly. The light shooting into the sky, the exultation I found in myself watching it, knowing that I had created this, that my hands were responsible.

The last show I worked was Illuminaires, Vancouver’s lantern Festival of Lights. Thousands of people slowly turning around a lake, carrying waxed dragons and paper nuns and all the towers of Moscow above their heads, the water reflecting all the fire and muted colours into a faint vision of another world. It was supposed to be my first success in the struggle against my difficulties. Life had been hard, a stress test that I was rapidly failing. Friends had been dying like teenage drunken drivers, family had been absent, lovers untouchable.

Instead I lit the match, took my place by the sand and explosions, and cried at the foot of my spectacular display. Exciting as it was, when I turned away to examine the thick sea of faces crushed together at the edge of our orange barriers, there was not one face that I knew, not one person to share my moment with. I had painted the sky with pyrotechnics, brought heaven like the seventeenth century. This was my passion play, this intense exhibition, and there was no one to give it to. I could only see the empty excitement of strangers glaring into the light. Eyes that never once dropped to meet mine, eyes that didn’t conceive how I had worked that day, blistered my fingers twisting wire, slivered my palms on the trestles, eyes that didn’t know my name.

That night was when I finally shivered apart. That was the last and final thing, being unable to reach out and touch another face, even in such an incredible place. I lost myself after that. I wasn’t anymore than the sum of my fragile parts, more a mirrored reflection of myself split into delicate pieces. I stopped sleeping, I forgot how to eat. Between my experiences and the inside of my head was such an incredible distance that it seemed ineradicable. My hands would never stop shaking and I would fall down in the street in fugues of missing time.

Now is recovery. Flower petals above the street.

To everyone present last night, thank you.

faster than speeding water


Originally uploaded by noveltywearsoff.

KindelingBoy Michael is having a party tomorrow evening to celebrate his final freedom from Too Much School TM.

My cool news today is this letter:

Hi,

Just a head’s up to let you know that I’ve added your blog, Dreampepper, to the British Columbia Blogs directory and aggregator at publicbroadcasting.ca – if for any reason you do not want your blog listed, please let me know and I’ll take it back down immediately.

Cheers,
Justin

I don’t know how they found me, but the list looks pretty small, so I’m pleased. Apparently the main criteria be that they’re well written, been around for awhile, and update frequently, as well as having that undefinable “something”.

Max Headroom creator made Roswell alien.
Deathboy makes a song based on the very first episode.

This week has been a successful book of matches, every day burning when I strike it with my eyes. I feel like a chemical reaction, sparkling and fizzing, exploding strong-box secrets and licking what’s inside. If I were Rapunzel, this would be me letting down my hair, suddenly afraid that my princes were just a dream. This would be taking myself and my bedding and my famous blue raincoat to wind my fairy-tales a rope, offering them a way in instead of a noose, banishing my fears, losing them one by one like beads from a broken string.

AXE’s GameKillers advertisement series.
Adidas Idicolor viral-marketing films. (watch PINK especially)