n: vb: the spice of imagination
Secret Film School is presenting The Red Violin tonight. 400 West Hastings st. Doors at 6:30, Film at 7:00.
Met up with Lung for lunch at the Art Gallery today, my favourite downtown cafe. (He’s selling prints cheap right now. I recommend you jump on it while you have the chance.) We talked about girls, boys, travel, the friends we have in common and left with the strong conviction there are very few ills that a perfect tiramisu cannot fix (or at least delay).
It snowed here yesterday. Gigantic flakes, as big as my entire eye, in clumps the size of small birds. It was almost scary, how fiercely cold it suddenly was, how blindingly white. It felt like being in another country or traveling through time. January, 1993. Somewhere in the city, I am smaller, cold, looking out a window, ignorant that another version of myself is out there somewhere, speeding along in a vehicle with friends I couldn’t imagine having, to an apartment in a city where I would never believe I’m still living. Vancouver translated by the weather into a monochrome model of itself, a ceramic Christmas display for sale in the back of a Family magazine.
Oddly, even as the clouds blotted out anything farther than a block away, yesterday’s dry blizzard had me feeling more connected to the rest of the world, as the entire weekend was filled with reports of freak weather from friends all over this corner of the globe. San Fransisco mildly buried, Seattle laughing out in lightning and unexpected cold, cascades of vintage soap flake perfection drifting through New York. It let me wake feeling lighter today, glad that the trees were still heavy with thick cotton drifts of white, even as everywhere else the streets were melting back to damp black, leaving the sidewalks naked of everything but the usual ragged polka dots of spit out chewing gum.
Because of the snow I witnessed a beautiful thing today: flakes falling powdery out of a tree’s branches, (limbs sketched in charcoal strokes against the downtown morning), like a small, perfect, localized winter, the circular width of a dream.
Former NiN Drummer Takes Album Promotion A Step Further:
$500 (limited edition of 15)
– Signed CD/DVD and digital download
– T-shirt
– Signed cymbal and sticks
– Meet Josh in Venice, Calif., and go floating together in a sensory-deprivation tank (to be filmed and posted on YouTube)
– Dinner at Sizzler (get your $8.99 steak and “all you can eat” shrimp on)$1,000 (limited edition of 10)
– Signed CD/DVD and digital download
– T-shirt
– Signed cymbal, drum head and drumsticks
– Josh washes your car OR does your laundry … or you can wash his car
– Have dinner with Josh aboard the Queen Mary in Long Beach, Calif.
– Get drunk and cut each other’s hair in the parking lot of the Long Beach courthouse (filmed and posted on YouTube, of course)$2,500 (limited edition of 5)
– Signed CD/DVD and digital download
– Get a private drum lesson with Josh, or for all you non-drummers, have him give you a back and foot massage (couples welcome)
– Pick any 1 member of the Vandals or Devo (subject to availability) to accompany you and Josh to either the Hollywood Wax Museum or the lunch buffet at the Spearmint Rhino
– Signed DW snare drum
– Take 3 items of your choice out of his closet (first come, first serve)
– Change diapers and make bottles with him for an afternoon (after hitting the strip club)…
$10,000 (limited edition of 1)
– Signed CD/DVD and digital download
– T-shirt
– Signed DW snare drum from A Perfect Circle’s 2003 tour
– Josh gives you a private drum lesson OR his and hers foot/back massage (couples welcome, discreet parking)
– Twiggy from Marilyn Manson’s band and Josh take you and a guest to Roscoe’s Chicken ‘n’ Waffles in Long Beach for dinner
– Josh takes you and a guest to Club 33 (the super-duper exclusive and private restaurant at Disneyland located above Pirates of the Caribbean) and then hit a couple rides afterward (preferably the Tiki Room, the Haunted Mansion and Tower of Terror)
– At the end of the day at Disneyland, drive away in Josh’s Volvo station wagon. It’s all yours … take it. Just drop him off on your way home, though, please.$20,000 (limited edition of 1)
– Signed CD/DVD and digital download
– T-shirt
– A signed drum from the 2008 Nine Inch Nails tour
– Maynard James Keenan, Mark Mothersbaugh from Devo and Josh take you miniature golfing and then drop you off on the side of the freeway (all filmed and posted on YouTube)
– Josh gives you a tour of Long Beach. See his first apartment, the coffee shop on 2nd Street where his buddy paid Dave Grohl $40 to rip up tile just weeks before joining Nirvana. See the old Vandals rehearsal spot, the liquor store he got busted at using a Fake ID when he was 17 (it was Dave from the Vandals’ old ID). Go check out Snoop Dogg’s high school. For an extra 50 bucks see where Tom and Adrian from No Doubt live. For another $25 he’ll show ya where Eric from NOFX and Brooks from Bad Religion get their hair cut.
– Spend the night aboard the Queen Mary and take the “Ghosts and Legends” tour. (Separate rooms … no spooning.)
– Josh writes 2 songs about you and both are made available on iTunes and appear on his next record (you can sing back up on ‘em, clap, play the drums, triangle, whatever)
– Drum lesson OR foot and back massage (once again … couples welcome and discreet parking available)
– Pick any 3 items out of Josh’s closet$75,000 (limited edition of 1)
– Signed CD/DVD and digital download
– T-shirt
– Go on tour with Josh for a few days
– Have Josh write, record and release a 5-song EP about you and your life story
– Take home any of his drum sets (only one, but you can choose which one)
– Take shrooms and cruise Hollywood in Danny from Tool’s Lamborghini OR play quarters and then hop on the Ouija board for a while
– Josh will join your band for a month … play shows, record, party with groupies, etc.
– If you don’t have a band he’ll be your personal assistant for a month (4-day work weeks, 10 am to 4 pm)
– Take a limo down to Tijuana and he’ll show you how it’s done (what that means exactly we can’t legally get into here)
– If you don’t live in Southern California (but are a U.S. resident) he’ll come to you and be your personal assistant/cabana boy for 2 weeks
– Take a flying trapeze lesson with Josh and Robin from NIN, go back to Robins place afterwards and his wife will make you raw lasagna
COILHOUSE: Better than Coffee – The Flocking Behavior of Starlings.
Sleepwalking through the calendar like a hollow teenage love song, this week has been difficult in new ways I should be used to, where I’m always a thousand miles away from everything around me, living under glass, behind my skin, too tired to remember there are different ways to feel. So instead I’m here, walking the line like Johnny Cash, beating my head against the virtual glass, wondering if I’ll ever escape or if I’m simply going to be always trapped here, only leaving in slow motion, in drips and dribbles, like an easily bruised fairy tale character only waking from sleep once a year, just long enough to take one bite of enchanted bread before my gray eyes slowly dim of electrical light again, filling instead with thinning, silvery cardboard dreams.
Out in the world, good things are happening:
Lung, who is back! in ! town!, won the grand prize in the photo essay portion of the Expose Your World contest, which means he’s just won a trip to Tasmania for him and Mel, a damned sweet lens and camera, and some being pinned to my bed as I noogie him into letting me borrow his “old” not-as-awesome-as-his-new-camera. (Also, rumour says Claire just won something prestigious over in France-land. Go Claire!)
David (Schwartz), through some esoteric process even more awesome than usual, is now a Nebula Award-nominated Author running against authors like Cory Doctorow, Ursula Le Guin, and Terry Pratchett with his novel Superpowers. (Take that Publishers Weekly, right in the fork!)
Eliza has a new painting featured in This Is The End, a California art show an hour south of San Fransisco, alongside the famous, yet improbably named Chet Zar. She’s also starring in Warren’s latest take-it-to-the-masses comic book, Ignition City.
Toren (and Jay) are presenting Toren’s 10th Annual Saturday Morning Cartoon Party at the Rio, complete with weird imported cereal like Frankenberry, Booberry and UK Chocolate Shreddies. I have it on good authority that if at least 30 people attend each one, it will become a regular thing.
Chris is starring in a circus show at the PNE Garden Auditorium, 1 pm and 7 pm daily, March 12-15, with the Avatar Circus Project, part of the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad.
Jason has a show of his oil paintings at the Exposed Gallery, 4225 N. 7th Ave, just north of Indian School, Pheonix, Arizona. Also, three of his paintings are in the current Phoenix New Times.
Back at the home front, most of my evenings have been spent glued to my dying computer, merrily aggravating my nigh terminal RSI by slogging through the thousands of photos my shaky computer has been threatening to delete, trying to rescue them, pluck out the best, and polish them up, because Kyle “freaking” Cassidy has asked that we put a book together.
Music + (Video/Sample) x Mash-up = Sexy
“What you are about to see is a mix of unrelated YouTube videos/clips
edited together to make ThruYou. In other words, what you see is what you hear.
Check out the credits for each video – you might find yourself…”
I’ve actually been trying to post this for days, but the site’s been down. Hit by too many people, Kutiman’s bandwidth went bork. Now that it’s back, set aside twenty minutes, turn up your volume, turn off your power saving screen settings, and expect to have your socks knocked off.
Box Of Clouds
, “For use on days with uninteresting skies.”An electric photo viewer keyring, hacked, dismembered and put in a tin, by London artist Kim Laughton. The clouds inside cycle every five seconds.
Crossposted from COILHOUSE, as Posted by Meredith Yayanos on March 4th, 2009:
Performer/Cyclist Hollis Hawthorne Needs Our Help
Performer/cyclist/activist Hollis Hawthorne. Photo by Alicia Sanguiliano.There’s this awesome, beautiful gal I kinda sorta barely know through our many mutual circus friends here in the bay area; her name is Hollis Hawthorne. She’s a founding member of a cycling dance troupe called The Derailleurs, a fabulous velocipede-inspired dance team active in a bunch of bay area-based critical mass stuff. Their goal:
To educate and entertain audiences with the possibilities of alternative transportation. Our performances embrace critical inquiry that reaches beyond conventional thought and action. We promote radical self reliance and mine local talents to unearth their strength.
They’re wonderful and vibrant folks leading adventurous lives who are trying to affect some sort of positive change in their community. They smile and laugh a lot; they are very shiny people. To be honest, I rather envy them, most days. But not today:
Late last month, Hollis was traveling by motor scooter in Pondicherry, Tamil Nadu, India when something terrible happened. Some sort of freak hit-and-run accident that wasn’t her fault left her bleeding out on the side of the road with her boyfriend Harrison frantically performing CPR for 20 minutes before a van of German tourists picked them up and drove them to a hospital. According to her best pal Eliza, Hollis was wearing her helmet and driving very slowly at the time of the accident. I’ll spare you the gory details, but it sounds very bad. Now she’s in a coma in a rural hospital with a serious brain stem injury. (You know, that part of the brain that controls, um, everything?)
According to Harrison, who has been with her from the moment it happened, “there are huge rats scurrying around on the [hospital] floor. I am sleeping on the ant-covered floor outside her room as I am not allowed in and the water they have used for many procedures is not even purified.” When Hollis’ mom flew in from Tennessee a couple of days ago with emergency support from the US consulate to see her own daughter, the orderlies were dismissive and curt. “They are not observing her brain pressure and have done nothing to alleviate the swelling in her brain. These are things that can make or break her early on in her recovery and healing process.”
Through a series of fortuitous connections, Hollis’s case has been reviewed and accepted by Stanford Medical; one of the best hospitals in the world. As a charity case, even. (Just like me and most other starving artsy fartsies I know, Hollis has no insurance.) All we need to do is get her there. The friends and family of Hollis are reaching to everyone they can to raise funds to get her on an I.C.U. plane (aka air ambulance) to fly her back to California.
This is truly a matter of life and death. They need move her quickly as possible.
Before that can happen, Friends of Hollis must raise $150,000 dollars. They’ve already raised approximately $40,000. Can you spare a dollar, or five, or ten?
Yes, I know, life is risk, and life is uncertain. Life is also precious. If we can help someone in our community to come back from the brink, in some small way, we really should. Click here to help.
One of my morning neighbors, those people I pass regularly enough in the morning to recognize, is a pleasantly unremarkable young man, taller than I am, with short reddish blond hair and a black jacket, who I never would have noticed except for his astonishing, perpetual grin and permanently glued on ear phones. He is thin, caucasian, and completely bland.
Somehow, though I am rarely there at the exact same time every day, and sometimes take a different route entirely, it is more likely than not that when I line up to wait for the light at Pender and Howe, he will be there too, smiling, facing me from the other side, oblivious to the entire world, trapped instead in whatever he is listening to that makes him so happy. He does not notice the traffic or the weather or the time, and only begins to walk when the people around him step forward into the street.
All that said, he still would not have made any impression upon my memory except that one day, the day I truly noticed him, I had a terrible, strong, and wrenching idea as we were passing each other in the intersection. I fancied that what played in his ear phones every day wasn’t music, but screaming.
