Author: foxtongue

her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever

Twitter: Fake Christopher Walken.

Clicking through ticket after ticket, work is interrupted by cookies and impromptu myths, glad for the heart, subscription hard on the brain. Planning tonight over text messages, chocolate/hazelnut cake Y/N, the a/s/l of bakeries as David hunts on foot, tracking down baked goods downtown as I sit trapped in the office, my company a lemon ginger cup of tea, testing music tracks that have yet to be released, wagers of popularity against winter coats in small sugary solfedge doses.

This week holds so much relative, discriminating promise as to be nigh unbearable. Already microelectronic moments have begun to develop like rosebuds blushing on the tip of my tongue. Wrapped in the untethered joy of feeling inadequate, (like music you want to play so loud you bleed from the eyes), I am caught by a thread of invitation punctuation I am not in control of, confronted with an arsenal of black t-shirts and faked secret societies in shaken hotel rooms stocked with cryptic, cutting edge commentary in twisted acronym languages I only half recognize. It’s glorious. Comfortable and irreversible, like swimming through a seething bath of sweet, primitive nanobots programmed to overwhelm with fuzzy blankets.

“We are All Gonna Die: 100 meters of existence

who’s up for making some noise?

A composer friend recently took up the pen again after a very long hiatus and is looking for local musicians willing to perform his finished music. I can assure you he’s fun, his work is top notch, and you won’t be disappointed. Here’s the basic info:

* It’s 149 bars, running at just over 10 minutes in length;
* The instrumentation is for french horn, violin, viola, ‘cello and baritone/low tenor vocalist (range: F-sharp below Middle C to G one and a half octaves above Middle C). A vocalist with training/experience for singing on the stage is preferred, but not absolutely necessary;
* The primary key is D major, with a few modulations to A major, E major, B-flat major, and B minor (not necessarily in that order). The time signature is 6/8.

If you happen to know of anybody who plays any of the above instruments, (including yourselves), and would be willing to give this music a try, please let me know and I’ll put you in touch with him. Thanks in advance!

appreciate what you have

Emilíana Torrini – Heartstopper

It used to be that I heard certain songs and a sweet pang of memory would spring through my body, uncoil between my legs, hold my hands like grace, and I would unconsciously close my eyes, breathing in what it was like to be there with him, the depth and width of us. The liquid vowels of his voice, the way he said my name, as if it were a word made of quicksilver instead of a single clumsy syllable, drenched in adoration the same way he could pull me out of my body by sliding his fingers through the roots of my hair.

It seems now that I can’t relate, that I’ve drifted too far away. All I’ve got left is a cavity where all that used to be, hollowed out enough I can shout into it and not even hear a replied echo. Where did those mellow afternoons go? Those fantastic grins? Does this happen to everybody? I look up the names of the chemicals responsible for love and wonder if I’ve just been running out. Somewhere I have a photo of myself that I’ve never looked at, sitting alone in his bed, destroyed, taken the same day I left a line of poetry in lipstick on his mirror, the same one I wrote on his skin in ink the day he left me, the only evidence I could bear to leave, even though I knew he would wash it away.

you know it’s bad when I’ve gone pale (that said, thank you for dinner)

The Periodic Table of Typefaces

So there in the restaurant, we’re happy and chatting. Good conversation with good company stretches on forever in front of us, much like the demolished plates of food covering the table, when disaster strikes with sensory missiles of purified hate, as the waitress passes in assassin black carrying a serving of something piscine.

I fled for the door faster than light. Outside and away, fresh air, into the rain. Standing still, clutching the rail, letting it hold my weight, I felt better immediately. Then it started to snow. To hell with this, I thought, held my breath and ducked back in. When I left again, still wracked with gut wrenching spasms of fighting reverse peristalsis, I was more prepared. I had my coat, a shawl, two scarfs, and a book. Fifteen minutes or twenty went by before everyone else had finished. A good read.

Now I’m at home, randomly doubling up as my body attempts to cough up the sick rich smell of fish. It’s uncomfortable, to say the least, and I think I just tasted blood. It’s bloody lucky I didn’t accidentally eat any or else I would be too sick to sit up enough to write. My entire weekend would be a miserable write-off. I would be in the bath, poisoned, running hot water, shivering, and possibly hallucinating my death.

Oh sushi, my bane, how vile, how cruel, that you are always the most popular gig in town. You look so damned pretty, glittering just so, arranged delicately, carefully, dotted with a gemstone snow of roe, and yet you make my stomach attempt to turn inside out like a starfish’s stomach, wet and acid and deadly.

Just a note to the internet: Don’t call me tomorrow during the morning.

one of my employers accused me of being affiliated with criminal terrorists

365: 67 - 08.03.09
365: 67 – 08.03.09

Reading Vellum, a book mixed in dark Sumerian myths that mentions a childhood spent in Slab City, I feel the world is held together with cellophane, that everything touches a clear film of shared experience; a theory continually upheld by strange synchronicities and fantastical, personal proofs, as I perpetually discover that the people out there I’ve never met, but read about, turn out to have been next to me all along, living only ever one singular person away.

sing!

Oh My Lawless Mercy, MAH COMPUTER HAS BEEN SAVED!

We stayed up until four o’clock this morning duplicating my data to the super amazing off-board drive of terabyte awesomeness that Ray gave me, wiping my computer clean, then installing everything fresh. My computer is a jewel again, sparkiing in the sun, flawless and beautiful. He even whished out all the cat furred dust bunnies that had been clogging the fan. It’s not even plugged in yet, I got in too late this morning to spend the spaghetti time, but I already feel reborn.

You know what this means? This means I can bloody well work on my photography again!

I didn’t dare, before, at the risk of losing anything I opened. It was terrifying. Mail archives going back to 1992, phone numbers, music, writing, media.. everything was at risk, held hostage. (“Fuck the cloud“). My computer was in that dire a state. First it stopped seeing my disc drive, which meant no more burning DVD back-ups, then my photoshop wouldn’t save, then nothing Adobe would even open, then I couldn’t open any files from 2006, then, worst of all, if it froze while I was copying/moving anything, anything, whatever I was trying to back-up would vanish into the ether, never to be seen again, not even in DOS. It plateaued there for a few weeks in that purgatory land of uncertain files while I desperately ran malware-security scan after malware-security scan, purging the evils as best I could, before finally hard crashing so violently it would take out the internal clock. I’d have to reboot three times to get through my mail.

Curator Michael Wright with the first fully functional working model of the Antikythera Mechanism.

how I live halfway

Bre Pettis and Kio Stark’s “Cult of Done” manifesto via bOINGbOING:

1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
3. There is no editing stage.
4. Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
7. Once you’re done you can throw it away.
8. Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
11. Destruction is a variant of done.
12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
13. Done is the engine of more.

Frank is putting the moves on my computer tonight, bringing it back from the steely edge of death. Once that’s finished, I am taking these rules and turning them into a nifty desktop wallpaper, to make certain for awhile that I see them every day.

Currently my home desktop is a gentle sepia photo of a young girl with a fluttering dove, an anonymous photo of a magician’s assistant, beautiful and inspiring. Before that was Let’s Keep This Party Rolling, a New York City photograph by Rodney Smith of a couple kissing on top of a fleet of taxis. What’s yours?