Month: September 2008

lipstick on a sinking ship

A recent Anti-Palin rally was the largest Alaska political rally in the history of the state.

from Cherie Priest:

So who is this woman anyway, and what do we know about her?
Well, let’s see.

She tries to force abstinence-only education, because apparently her daughter is more special than everybody else’s; and she crows about the “decision” her daughter has made to keep an unexpected/unwanted child — even while bracing herself to strip the decision-making ability from other women (even in case of rape). Speaking of rape, when Palin was in charge in Wasilla, victimized women had to pay for their own rape kits in order to “save money.” What a feminist!

She doesn’t believe in global warming; she advocates the hunting of Alaskan wolves via the sportsmanlike activity of exhausting them with low-flying airplanes and then shooting them to death with high-powered rifles.* She’s fought tooth and nail to keep polar bears off the endangered species list. What an environmentalist!

In a real fit of pique, this “fiscally responsible” “maverick” who bleeds integrity billed the state of Alaska for 312 nights which she spent in her own home. She advocates the banning of books from public libraries, and once threatened to fire a librarian who vigorously opposed attempts to do so. But that’s not so surprising, considering there’s ample evidence to suggest that she also tried to get her ex-brother-in-law fired, too. What an upstanding public servant who would never abuse power!

Left to her own devices, she’d just as soon take her state and mount a secession from the union. That whole “Bridge to Nowhere” thing? Yeah, she’s a rather mistaken when she sings about her virtue in refusing it. She’s also been known to fudge her travel/diplomacy credentials. And oh, wait. There’s that whole malarkey about the jet she so cavalierly sold. That didn’t happen like she said it did, either. But maybe she was just confused. The record will reflect that she’s not much of a businessperson. What a qualified leader!

Gosh. She sounds like a real peach.
(And all this with just a >2-year stint as governor and a 7-year run as a small-town mayor.)

Also: bOINGbOING – Sarah Palin: spammer and digital secrecy scofflaw.

Is anyone else being warmed by the media backlash that seems to be springing up in her wake? Every bit of bad news about her seems to bring an Obama win just that much closer, which, it’s true, will not fix everything overnight, but should at least slow the crashing disaster that seems to be the modern U.S.

day two of three

Traveled 192 km (or 104 nautical miles, as the useful internet tells me), to be stood up, the first time I’d ever been asked to a dance.

Today I’m awake early, nine o’clock or so, and the apartment still throbs with silence. Later, once Qais and Eliza wake up, we will go after breakfast to the Lighthouse Roasters, (400 North 43rd Street), to hang her show. My plans here are vague this time, and tenuous, (as my lack of cell-phone creates oddly empty spaces around me), though right now they mostly revolve around taking a hot shower and scrubbing the accumulation of Thursday and Friday off of my skin. I still have hot-tub water dried in my hair, and a coating of the warm grease of a thousand exhalations from the gallery last night.

It was packed, by the way, a heavy showing with at least a hundred and fifty variously costumed people drifting in and spilling out back out to chat in the relative cool of the sidewalk, like a black, brassy tide of self examining particles, fresh from the internet, fresh to the scene. ANACHROTECHNOFETISHISM was a success. I don’t think any of the organizers expected it to be so popular. Me, I was suprised at how many faces I knew, and, especially, how many people knew who I was. “I’ve seen your pictures, love them!” or, “I’ve never said, but I adore your writing.” Unexpected, that, in this place, my company being the shiny stars of this newly stilted subculture.

I spent the longest time with Tony, a warm friend, who I met once five years ago when he crashed on my couch after SinCity. Facebook reacquainted us, and I hope to see him more, now that we’re back in touch. We walked through the pieces together, telling stories and reaffirming the mythos of past relationships. It was fun. After he left, I mostly drifted, wandering between my local friends and the people Eliza introduced me to. The show went late, to the point of exhaustion, until we dropped into chairs, wilting against the constant influx of new people, an hour after the gallery was meant to be closed. I don’t think we escaped until midnight.

when you’re jonesing, you’re jonesing

Stephen Fry video birthday card to the Free Software Foundation’s GNU project

Tonight I leave for Seattle, which might not be the most clever thing I’ve ever done, considering that next week we leave for back east, (for which I have barely prepared for), but the ticket is bought, the plans are made, and I can’t help but look forward to it. A group of us are going dancing tonight, there’s ANACHROTECHNOFETISHISM tomorrow, then then Nicole rides into town with her imaginary boyfriend in time for Eliza‘s solo show on Saturday which we plan to follow with a night of sci-geek concertry at the Funhouse.

Next week, David and I leave for Montreal, (on the same bus as Karen New, coincidentally enough), and make or break our relationship as we travel together, nonstop for two weeks, six days of which will be spent on in transit, knees together, prairies outside. We’ve had a lot to work out since he took off on me at the folk fest, which hurt him more than it did me, and as he finds it significantly more difficult than I do to communicate, my patience has been eroded away, until I can’t bear to bring anything up anymore. I suspect that being trapped together in a bus will be, at least in part, a last ditch attempt to see what intimacy we can bring back from the ashes of his insecurity. Heavy, annoying, and heart-felt, I know.

Thankfully, there will be little stop overs in Calgary, Regina, Winnipeg, and Ottawa! Yay!

In Calgary, Gavin and Michael might track us down for tea, in Winnipeg, my cousin Francis is going to swing by, and I might be lucky enough to reconnect with Darren in Ottawa. One thing remains, however, does anyone here live in Regina?

canine: In common usage, a synonym for dog or an adjective meaning of or resembling a dog

Black Mirror

Picture this, we’re riding up the I5 at night, the wind in our helmets making the sort of sound that broken headphones might, and around the 300 st. exit, maybe fourty minutes out of Seattle, the gas tank starts reading E. So we pull off the highway, spilling straight into the set of a horror movie, the sort where they kill the back-packing teenagers for buying condoms and booze at the convenience store, one by one, but don’t bother running much to do it.

Will you admit to seeing House Of Wax? It was like that.

The gas station we found was closed, empty, though not abandoned. Though it was built, at a guess, sometime in the late seventies, all peeling paint and white wood, and eerie lighting, it seemed oddly updated. Instead of offering coffee, a banner advertised ESPRESSO, and the text on the free standing, four legged marquee next to the street in front offered Chai Tea, $1.79. These touches of modernity weren’t very reassuring in the dark. Rather, they seemed smeared on like fake smiles, as if to put us at ease while out back Jimmy grabs the knife he’s going to slash our tires with.

happiness is a warm gun

Brushing this off as a side-effect of mixing heavy pop-culture saturation with the primitive fear of the dark, we stopped. I got off the bike, verified the pumps as new enough to accept credit cards, then Vicki followed suit and we stretched our legs as the bike started filling. Curiosity led me to peer in the windows of the gas station store, to see if the inside felt as left behind by time as the exterior. Sadly, there wasn’t enough narrative in the soil. It only looked like a stereotypical small town corner store, harmless, complete with a comic book rack, crates by the door, aisles of cheap toothpaste and cheaper potato chips. There was no formica counter, no rusty bear traps on the wall – slick give-away posters for soda-pop, juice, and iced-tea bursting from CG water were the only decorations. I turned around, disappointed, to ask Vicki how far we’d come, but then the barking started.

The sort of barking you hear when you’re running from the law, when you’re tearing through the woods away from the vampires, the werewolves, and the farmer you stole those chickens from. At the other end of that barking lies slavering, teeth, someone with a shotgun, pain, fear, and blood. I’d forgotten dogs are capable of such a massive sound.

Two of them came out of the darkness, low to the ground, and loud, a large rough collie and a great brown creature that came up to my hip. Get the Hell Out Of Here, they angrily shouted, Get The Hell Out Or We’ll Take Your Leg. Suddenly our Isn’t-This-A-Creepy-Place-Ha-Ha, didn’t seem as amusing. They came closer, barking louder, and I shouted at them, “Hey, Get off. Go.” The collie did, though grudgingly, but the bigger dog, the great brown thing, did not. It only got quieter as it continued to stalk closer, walking towards us in a criss-cross pattern, as if to stay out of reach while it looked into options to circle us.

Eventually, it came close enough to kick, or claw in the eye. Vicki stayed behind her motorbike, keeping the FJ between her and it, but I was still out in the open, so it came up to me, tail wagging, jaw dropped in a grin, and growling like a sound that came out of the earth. It sniffed at me, continuing to growl, and started budging at my hands, trying to get them out of my pockets. Generally, I’d be more than happy to oblige, (I love ruffling the velvet of doggie ears), but the sound didn’t stop, the growling continued, growing in intensity, so it seemed a friendly gesture full of menace, as if it was hoping to snap fingers off to chew on later.

Now me, I like dogs. I had a puppy I named, all full of blossoming irony, Spot, when I was little, and I loved that dog like mad. I even like big dogs. Really big dogs. The bigger the better. Dominique and I once saw a dog outside of Uprising Bakery that we both simultaneously mistook for a pony, and my immediate reaction was to go cuddle the damned thing, though it weighed more than both of us together. This dog, however, not so much. It would be a gross overstatement to say it had the spark of hell in its milk chocolate fur, but it wouldn’t be far off to say it had the hate of a righteous preacher in its eyes. We were atheists impinging on the gas station Holy Land, and we needed a killin’. It wanted us dead, or hurt, or maimed, and gone.

We, of course, were happy to oblige. The dog backed off enough when I shouted at it to edge over to where Vicki was getting the bike ready to go, and when it saw we were both behind a big crazy metal thing, it dropped back off a few paces, still growling a guttural, menacing promise of walking the world with eight fingers, and dropped to the ground to watch us. Vicki was worried that it might have been the sort of dog to chase motorcycles, as some find the sound drives them crazy, but we lucked out. This one only watched, turning its head as we left, roaring out of there as fast as zero to sixty could take us.

“That was weird.”
“Oh good, it’s not just me.”
“Nope. That was a bit scary, Jhayne. It’s not just you.”

Seattle: what I’m doing this weekend, a partial list

ANACHROTECHNOFETISHISM: artifacts by pioneers of american steampunk.

“Long before the age of the internet, and well before the cold efficiency of the assembly line, existed fantastic and terrible machines, run on hope, sweat, and steam.
It was a time in which form and function lived in sin, and everyman was a revolutionary.

We are 13 American artists united by broad geography and narrow aesthetic.

Marrying narrative and nostalgia to design and technology, we imagine the triumphs of the past overriding the failures of the present to create from the ruins and detritus a dazzling future-perfect.“


From Eliza,

“Starring me and twelve other retropostapocalypticians, including Molly Porkshanks and Jake von Slatt, this show will feature insane amounts of designer teas and chocolates, a full set of my fine art prints, and a half-dozen original oil paintings that I have never shown in public, including Shine, Rustbutton Brass, the City, Afterglow, Twilight in the Roachfields (What I Did On My Summer Vacation), and most ridiculous of all, the Vacuum Traffic Controller: a 40 x 66″ collossus that I hope will dominate the room with his deep, slightly furrowed gaze.”

September 12 – October 3, 2008
Opening Reception: September 12 6:00 PM – 10:00 PM
SUITE 100 GALLERY: 2222 2nd Ave Suite 100, Seattle, WA 98121 (206) 956.3900

::..::

She also has a second show opening this weekend in Seattle, a solo affair launching on Saturday the 13th at Lighthouse Roasters, (400 North 43rd Street), from 4pm – 7pm. “The flagship painting, an original oil on a 24 x 24″ circular board, is the Cardiographer: dark, slick, and glowing, a portrait of a ghost-muse spinning a pulse out from ectoplasm. Co-stars include brand new (as of yesterday) 12 x 12″ Flee, a silvered landscape with robot on the lam; the ever-popular Bat Smax, an extremely adorable collaboration with my partner in rape-and-pillage, Jhonen Vasquez; the complete set of original sketches for the Bee Commission (monsters, demons, and vespid whores); and a full host of fine art prints, including many that won’t be shown at the steampunk show because they simply are not steampunk. And of course, refreshments will be served. Which is really the only reason to show up to an art opening in the first place.”

And, at my gentle nudging, it’s been decided that after her coffeehouse show, we’re all going to saunter over to Toren’s The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets concert at The Funhouse, (206 5th Ave N), where they’ll be calling up non-euclidean demons with BLOODHAG, (“Our mission is to spread the gospel of Edu-Core. Bang The Head That Does Not Read. Everyone Smarter Than Everyone Else. Use Heavy Metal music to promote literacy and vice versa. General Info: BloodHag play really short Heavy Metal songs about Science Fiction authors.”) and The Keeper, (“D&Dish wizard rock. Our EP is called Twenty Sided DIE!.”). Angel is a good friend of Jake, from BLOODHAG, and she warns us, “be prepared to be pelted with Sci fi books!”

seattle scenes

Wind tearing at my helmet, I let it pull my head back and up, as if hands were cradling me, and stare at the star rich sky sliding above my mother’s head as we thrum up the highway North. I know I’m likely cold, blood slowing and a chill setting in, but I can no longer feel it, I’ve been sitting perfectly still for too many hours. My body has fallen into stasis, it’s merely an organic part of the machine we’re riding, one hand locked around the passenger handle, the other braced on the gas-tank, motionless, and it has nothing to do with me. The only things that move are my eyes, as if the edges of my helmet are the edges of a screen and the stars are a hypnagogic film spun out of my memory.

–

“I’m sorry your girl left you. It’s hard, sometimes.” “This one was the special girl, I liked her even more than I liked sex with her.” “Though I don’t relate to some of the background there, I do understand. Want to know my sad-hearted secret?” “Sure.” “I knew he’d started seeing someone else, months ago, before anyone ever thought to tell me.” “How’s that work?” “He stopped writing me back.”

–

An old man three tables down keeps raising his tired voice to answer moments of our conversation. We are five slumped at a table which seats four, geek t-shirts and utili-kilts, politics, software, and video games, tired from dancing, hoping for food. Our perfect, tragic waitress, dark haired, pretty, looks over us to him, frowns, shakes her head, and puts the pad away as we order. “Don’t mind that,” the antique sound of a scratched phonograph, “How was your night?”. She’s a friend, warm, kind, and brings us extra whipped cream in the milkshake we split.

When the man stands up and shuffles past us to the back of the cafe, the dim light erases his face, so he seems made of darkness, only the shape of a man inside a worn thrift-store suit.