Month: April 2016

affirmations (“for your trials and tribulations”) -::- I am looking forward to it with some relief.

The Life of Death from Marsha Onderstijn.

More travel approaches. Nevada. California. Festivals of thought and music. The desert. The rich. The coast. More of the rich, though a slightly different kind. Lights. Action. Arduino. An experience in a large dark room underground, the entry the same as the cost of a plane ticket.

Tomorrow I’m going on an in-depth, insiders tour of the TRIUMF Accelerator Laboratory, Canada’s national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics and accelerator-based science, to learn how to use the world’s largest cyclotron.

Later, by a week, I’ll be at Future Forward, a Burning Man spin-off for the one percent run by Robot Heart. A double-date just outside one the most artificial city in North America. Google’s Eric Schmidt is the keynote speaker. Darren Aronofsky will be wandering around with a camera. I will recognize no one, both a weakness and a strength.

I write this while streaming Coachella live, a private concert projected onto a wall, Underworld and M83 and LCD Soundsystem, five feet tall and eight and a half feet wide. I write this while the man on screen singing is the same man who held the door for me at Michael’s funeral. How small, the world.

Later in May, I’m going to San Francisco for my birthday again, bracketed by Maker Faire. (I have never been.) There are secret plans afoot and a place to stay for ten days. The secret society is gone, but there will still be a party. I will still find my way.

Joining the world of missing persons and she was.

The Darker Sooner
by Catherine Wing

Then came the darker sooner,
came the later lower.
We were no longer a sweeter-here
happily-ever-after. We were after ever.
We were farther and further.
More was the word we used for harder.
Lost was our standard-bearer.
Our gods were fallen faster,
and fallen larger.
The day was duller, duller
was disaster. Our charge was error.
Instead of leader we had louder,
instead of lover, never. And over this river
broke the winter’s black weather.

-::-

Work pulls me onto trains, lately. Seat upon seat, row upon row, the windows looking out onto the same dark green trees and slate gray ocean that I’ve grown to associate with my own failure to find colour and light. These trips, short and small as they are, would have been special, would have been seen as stepping stones, but there has been little, since Michael died, that inspires, that cradles me or helps me feel alive. I am thankful that the places I’ve been going have community; cleverness and kindness meshed together, a basket to land within that protects me from hitting the ground.

I made a new friend through work, one of my on-going contracts as a copy-editor for a group of Information Security professionals. He lives far away and we don’t talk often, but when we do, we have the sort of personal, political, and philosophical discussions that I always imagined friends must converse about deep into the night, sitting on hypothetical porches with bottles of wine or in imaginary living rooms flickering with candlelight, post dinner-party or house-party. Maybe there’s a cat, the furniture is well loved, and discoveries are being made, bridges are being raised, and beliefs and opinions are being forged, tested, and reforged.

I use “hypothetical” and “imaginary” because I don’t know how to find myself in such cozy situations, (though I crave them more than most things). Like many things, I only know they’re real because I’ve been told about them and seen them at a distance or through the lens of media. That said, I still like it when I find its echo on-line and it’s been good to have again, as it’s something I’ve been missing for a number of years, since defeat took me and my capacity to reach out diminished (as is easily mapped by the decline of this journal).

He has me reading books I would have skimmed over, summaries of Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell. They haven’t pulled at me yet, there’s been no internal tug of recognition, but I appreciate the gentle push into new directions. I haven’t had the focus for entire books lately, so I spend my reading time on-line now, following the news instead, like the Panama Paper leaks or the horror show that’s passing for the Republican primaries. Topics: Science, privacy, human rights, politics.

I miss art and design, but I’ve misplaced those impulses too. They’re somewhere in my history, but not my present, along with my languishing photography backlog, my lost animation reels, finding new music and singing along, dancing, movement, creation. Agency, desire, grace. The spark.

pass the popcorn

Hominid from Brian Andrews.

Hominid is an animated teaser based on the Hominid series of photo composites by Brian Andrews, described as “photo composites made from human and veterinary images”.

-::-


A weekly movie night has sprung up in the homeless-yet-have-a-place dichotomy I’ve been inhabiting. Challenging films, insistent and smart, things I haven’t seen before, but have dearly wanted to. An exquisite corpse of connections from week to week.

It started with Fassbinder’s Macbeth, a faithful and brutal retelling of Shakespeare drenched in colour, shouting, and death, then moved to Far Side of the Moon, written, directed, produced, designed, and starring Robert LePage. Based on his visually striking theater production of the same name, he plays two Quebecois brothers awash in tides of their mother’s recent death, set in the context of the USSR-United States Space Race of the 1960s.

The loss of a parent, the small kingdom of the stage, brothers, strife. Small threads, alike in dignity.

LePage is known in Canada as a national treasure, the intellectual French-Canadian prince of visual delights. The transitions in his films are especially beautiful, as the round door of a coin laundry becomes the port of a space capsule or the green screen background of a weather channel becomes the wall of someone’s apartment. They are playful and unexpected, much like the films of Michel Gondry, the French-Parisian master of surprise and whimsy, who directed the next choice, Mood Indigo.

Based on a book written in 1947 and set in a blur between an imaginative retro-future of when the book was written and the modern day, it concerns a joyful couple who meet, fall in love, and marry, but the wife, played by Audrey Tatou, falls ill with a flower in her lung. What was bright, grows dark.

Next, pivoting on the love story, the toxic flower, the here and now, we showed Upstream Color, written, directed, produced, edited, composed, designed, cast by and starring Shane Carruth, the man responsible for Primer, which details the path of a man and a woman who fall in love after being poisoned by a parasite from a specific flower. From darkness, comes light.

It ends with an unconventional family, isolated in the country, like the subjects of Dogtooth, a Greek film by Yorgos Lanthimos we’re showing this week.