everything I accomplish is your fault

sanfran leap

This year marked the first time I’ve ever revisited every place I’ve called home: Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, L.A., and San Francisco. A perfect ten.

In each place was a moment waiting for me, as if from the last time I had been there. A moment of realization, of change.
A moment of sublime connection, of time curling back, of traveling forward, of evolution and social magnetism.

In a strange way, it was like following a low key route of the person I used to be. Nothing was a surprise, except for how much it meant to me.

Thank you for everyone who helped me survive this year, for everyone who was there for me.

I can never thank you enough.

meme: 2008 in LiveJournal, the first sentence of the first post of each month for the entire year.

JanuarySeattle was the escape I needed. Not only does it have a refreshing amount of honest-to-mercy architectural and social diversity, it seems everyone I know there is brilliant, fun, and good-looking.*

February – He’s young in that way that teenage girls find attractive, fizzing with ginger enthusiasm, wiry, laughing, his arms beaten with a couple of tattoos.

March – Ray and I are going sailing on a Viking War-ship tomorrow! Anyone want to come?

AprilOnce upon a time when time was shivering apart and memories seemed more real than reality, the girl who fell from the sky and the west coast hacker king came to an agreement.

May – A clean uniform of friendship, tattered in places, worn in the elbows and the shoulders, but strong all the same. I think of stone, how it erodes too slow to see, though it shapes itself to the wind almost perfectly.

June – Walking across the street in the rain, there’s someone in front of me with a spiderman brand popsicle, the blue eyes two wan gum-balls that look like they were manufactured years before I was born.

JulyI’ve been mistaken for a porn star.

August – Something’s wrong with my internet at home. It’s corpse blood sluggish, and flickering faster than an animated disco.

September – The weekend was spent moving David from his cave apartment of the mysterious smells to a pleasantly crooked #9932CC-darkorchid room in an old heritage style house on Arbutus street, right across the street from the Ridge Theater.

October – Something I can’t seem to get over is how much mind-bogglingly delicious food there is in Montreal, for incredibly cheap.

November – We’ve decided to paint the guest room library the colours of a Hypselodoris nudibranch bullock, but darker and a bit richer, leaving us with aubergine, pumpkin, sunflower mustard, and crimson red.

December – Today we’re hitting up, (or on, your pick), Lou O’Bedlam, Frederick’s of Hollywood, Kevin again, (who will hopefully have recovered from his sudden death-flu), and somewhere delicious to eat, hopefully in Venice, with dear Crunchy of Mutaytor if we can line up with her lunchbreak.

vancouver to seattle

I know this is a bit of a long shot, but does anyone have an extra seat driving down to Seattle tonight? It seems I might have a flight tomorrow morning.

I’ve already checked with the bus companies and the train, but apparently you cannot pay your way out of Vancouver after 6:30 pm.

EDIT: Flight cancelled. I couldn’t get down to Seattle in time. Boo.

m to the a to the sh it up

Dj Earworm hit it out of the park again with his newly annual end-of-year mash-up, United State of Pop.

This year’s track is distinctly melodic, but just as scathing, tongue-in-cheek impeccable and ultimately addictive as anything. From his site, (where you can directly download any of his music): “Here are bits of the Top 25 hits of the year, according to Billboard Magazine, arranged into a four and a half minute song. This is a follow-up to last year’s mashup of the Top 25 hits of 2007. This year in the charts, we’ve gone all soft. The songs are sexy and defiant, less macho than in previous years. Accordingly, I’ve selected Coldplay as the instrumental track, giving the whole year a sort of symphonic feel. This edit is called “Viva La Pop”, and I hope to post more edits soon.”


Download: United State of Pop 2007

Download: United States of Pop 2008 (Viva La Pop)

enjoy, duh dah dah dah dah

Last year for New Year’s Eve Alastair and I set up an impromptu photoshoot in his livingroom on Dec 30th with the scarlet fun fur coat he’d bought years ago for our New Year’s Eve together in L.A. years ago at the Mutaytor Ball. We then stayed up until 5 a.m. rigging the photos together into a sweet little something that was finished and posted just before I left for Seattle with Ray, to celebrate the coming onslaught of 2008 with Cherie, Aric, and Alex.

Here it is again, our little red something, almost exactly one year later:

WISHING YOU A….

seriously, click it
click it now

next: glow in the dark fetus kittens

Meredith for Victory: Associated Press just covered her DIY home-genetically-engineered “glowgurt”

Meredith and I met in SF earlier this month through (The Amazing) Julia and immediately bonded over my improbable desire to have kittens implanted in my womb. She is, how you say, awesome. I’m glad everyone else is starting to find that out too. Of course, as it likely goes without saying, I really like people with unexpected hobbies and passions and ideas. As far as I’m concerned, they make the world go ’round. I love the future. I love that we create it, that we have no choice but to carry on. I love that two people can look at the same moment in time and come away with staggeringly different ideas. I love that we invent, create and discover daily, that we have filled our world with language, poetry, mathematics, music, and ideals.

Who are your bright favourites who make a difference, who spark in the night and inspire you to new plateaus of fascination? Who is it that makes life bearable, that springs eternal hope in your veins, that keeps making tomorrow seem an alright place to be? What do they do, how do they do it, and why does it matter to you?

I want to know. Will you share?

r.i.p. Eartha Kitt, who Orson Welles described as “the most exciting woman in the world”.

Mer says, “Just a quick goodbye air kiss to glamourpuss Eartha Kitt, who passed away today [Dec 25th] at the age of 81. It’s nice to picture her sitting on some sparkling, inter-dimensional yacht this evening, having scintillating conversation over moon martinis with [the also, sadly, recently deceased] Harold Pinter.”

Also recently lost to us is Gene Rodenberry’s widow, Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, “the First Lady of Star Trek”, who died in her home of leukemia December 18.

via JWZ: You stay classy, Music Industry.

Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls says:

if you hadn’t noticed, all of the dresden dolls and amanda palmer official videos have been taken off youtube.

yes, folks…girl anachronism, coin-operated boy, shores of california, almost everything from who killed amanda palmer….pretty much the whole deal. all gone. go look for yourself. and you ask…wtf? this is why: nytimes, wired.

basically: "Unable to reach new licensing terms, the Warner Music Group has demanded that thousands of its videos be removed from YouTube, which is owned by Google. Warner Music’s videos, the source of a billion views on YouTube, gradually began disappearing from the site on Saturday, although many remained online Sunday evening."

in other words, roadrunner is a subsidiary of warner and i’m stuck in hell with madonna and the other poor bastards, because warner wants more money. even worse, warner has almost no bargaining power…they’re not even in the top ten of labels who have huge artists with material streaming on youtube. they’re just starving for cash right now and they’re doing anything they can think of to come up with cash. it’s abSURD. they are looking for money in a totally backwards way.

money that, i should point out, i would NEVER see as an artist. if they got their way and youtube decided to give them a larger revenue share of the videos, it;s very unlikely it would ever make it’s way into the artists’ bank accounts.

damn, man. this shit is fucked UP.