Author: foxtongue

“I scrub the sharp edge off my appetite.”


Go forward and forward by Ryohei Hase

Perhaps I should be ashamed, says the back of my brain, as I reach out for reciprocity. Perhaps I should fall down, check myself in to the lost and found, say there peacefully until claimed. Kick my heels, properly tagged, next to a small box of forgotten apples, two overdue library books, a rain ruined Klimpt print, and wait.

This part of my brain is obviously insane.

Instead, when I am nervous, I want them to be nervous too. I wish us to match like a pair of jittery, colourful addictions, ready to dribble words the way a cork pops from bottle of something bubbly, ballistic and driven, dangerous in the wrong hands. I want us to assume and feel unsafe doing so, to tinker, to rewrite boundaries like history and we’re the last ones standing. I want to be saturated in it, that understanding, that shared, halting drive, the cartilage landscape of unknown territory. Feel the certainty of it swelling in my chest, devouring my entrenched dragons of well trained doubt, dispelling the honeymoon aura of dread, and trust where I stand enough to take root in the sediment we’ve accrued, tall as a birch, as practically imperishable as the same.

It’s primitive how I find the discovery of shared fear to be soothing. It triggers something deeper than sleep, more important than the shape of bones under skin, like being able to see the basic geometry of need, the invisible pillars upon which we build our waking dreams. I am reassured instantly as somewhere in my genes a fatal desire to know is fed. Such moments are a gift for which I do not know how to say thank you. They remind me of fire escapes in the same way they represent a way down from a burning building to solid ground. Effective, quaint, and incredible.


Uninterrupted chain by Ryohei Hase

I’m going to the secret film club tonight, we’re showing

Cross-posted by request, via Duncan:

“I know this guy and he puts on an incredible show. Also, I’ll be guest-starring for a short portion of it. Sorry for the short notice and the expensive ticket but if you feel like catching some theater this week, this would be a good place to go.”


The Amazing and Impermeable Cromoli Brothers Present: HELLO VANCOUVER!
A Vaudeville Act for These, Our Modern Times.
Tuesday, Feb 3, 9 pm, at Performance Works

Fifteen vignettes including Heaven’s Gate Webcam, Dear Mary I’m in a Gang Now, Cover Song, Nude Beach, Pilot Talk, Olympic A Go Go and more!
Songs performed on ukulele, melodica and glockenspiel!

Winner of the BEST COMEDY award at the New Zealand International Fringe Festival
Written and performed by Lucas Myers with Special Guests

Warning: NUDE SOCK PUPPETS, META-SINCERITY, JESUS.

Me, I am poor as poor does, so I’m going to be attending the Secret Film School tonight, (which is free), where Kryshan is showing the silliest movie in existence, The Forbidden Zone. “A freak musical that manages to synthesize ingredients of virtually every other midnight hit into the cheerful consistency of bad-taste vaudeville.” -Jonathan Rosenbaum.

Here’s Kryshan’s bravely attempted description,

“Forbidden Zone is hard to describe without making it sound completely ridiculous…okay, it is completely ridiculous, but it’s the best kind of ridiculous, a one-of-a-kind act of unrestrained creativity. This guilty pleasure cult classic is about a sado-masochistic midget (Herve Villechaize from Fantasy Island) ruling an alternate dimension with Susan Tyrell (Fat City), also featuring Satan (played by composer Danny Elfman of The Simpsons, Batman, and Beetlejuice), frog men, human chandeliers, headless boys, babbling twins, Monty-Python-esque animation and a lot more weirdness where that came from. Forbidden Zone has the visionary logic (illogic?) of a Max Fleischer cartoon (meets-Tim-Burton-meets-John-Waters-meets-Betty-Boop…). It’s a midnight-movie-musical-romance-farce-science-fiction-fantasy-fairy tale-animation/live action hybrid explosion with an incredible soundtrack by Elfman’s band The Mystical Knights Of The Oingo Boingo and…okay, I’m giving up trying to describe it..

biannual introduction innoculation

Twice a year I do a shout out, I ask that everyone speaks up, even if they otherwise stay silent. Like a good house party, it’s always fascinating to see who turns up.

So, please, tell me your names, post your picture, introduce yourself, tell me why you’re here, how you found me, and what inspires you.

I want to know who’s on the other end of my screen, what fun and fantastic people are out there, waiting to be met.

Even if I know you, introduce yourself to others, and tell me what you’ve done lately.

Explain a piece of your world with something beautiful, make something new, or dig up the grave of an old favourite. Anecdotes are welcome, as are pictures, job descriptions, inspiring links, stimulations, titillations, and your pretty hidden treasures. The name of the game is networking, so share what you want everyone else to know.

You are artists and scientists, nihilists and dreamers, comic book illustrators, archeologists, hackers, retail managers, photographers, teachers, librarians, hair dressers, and submarine captains. You are novelists, derby girls, musicians, and accountants. Optimists, pragmatists, magicians and politicians, fencers, film addicts, home owners and homeless. You are lighting designers, poets, animators, and lawyers. You are glorious, fabulous, interesting creatures, rich in colour, thick with story – and I want to hear from you all.

For those new, my name’s Jhayne. I’m a writer and photographer currently trapped in Vancouver, Canada. I live on the internet, work for a media company, and occasionally get paid to set off fireworks. I’m also an amateur taxidermist/cryptozoologist, play french horn and the saw, and edit other people’s novels. I once started a global initiative to save a local turn-of-last-century theater and turn it into a new multimedia venue called Heart of the World. It fell down, went boom, but oh well. Other people have recently managed to save it, at least, so I guess that’s something.

Welcome to my journal, a mixture of wonder, pointlessness, isolation, and community where I talk about life, love, art, technology, and try not to hate the world.

Now it’s your turn. Spill.

Mercury Found in High Fructose Corn Syrup

“Quantities of mercury have been found in high fructose corn syrup, the ingredient that has replaced sugar in many of our processed foods. Reports have also come out that the FDA knew about traces of the toxic substance in food, and sat on the information.”

The rest of the article is here.

Courtesy of lynchwalker.

With this post, I am officially calling dibs on Oren Lavie.

Soon she’s down the stairs
Her morning elegance she wears
The sound of water makes her dream
Awoken by a cloud of steam
She pours a daydream in a cup
A spoon of sugar sweetens up		 Sun been down for days
A winter melody she plays
The thunder makes her contemplate
She hears a noise behind the gate
Perhaps a letter with a dove
Perhaps a stranger she could love

Today, using addresses given to me by friends on the internet, I prepared and mailed tiny packages to London, Seattle, Atlanta, Brooklyn, Carolina Beach, Herts, Cambria, Dumfries, Burlington, Urbana, Roanoke, Phoenix, and Manhattan. A fine spread, beautiful evidence of the far reaching influence of modern communication.

I sat in a puddle of white envelopes at the park, addressing them, tipping ingredients into one, and then into another, slipping cards into each, slipping in cards, rose petals, and my smile, wishing I had through to bring more tiny plastic dinosaurs. The sky was almost like summer today, except too pale, as if seen through a film of soap.

Curious pedestrians would stop and ask what I was doing, wanted to know if this was a business I had, sending interesting letters to strangers. I told them this was far too bare bones, that I was too poor to be anything but kind in a nostalgic way. “People have trusted me, wouldn’t you want to reward such behavior?” This seemed to satisfy as, once I said that, they would gently walk away, glad to have asked, but not interested enough to stay.

just now in the hall: sudden alarm -> woman’s voice, startled, “fuck you” -> angry high heels

Mockingbirds mastered police sirens
and now the city is on edge.
Grinding their teeth at night, the people
send out their swollen moans to the powerlines.
Their dreams are troubled, a caravan of trolls
bedding down, picking their yellow teeth
with a white chip of bone.

The people are no less uneasy in the morning rain,
when no birds sing. When lumpy blue clouds
gather outside like flies’ eyes.
When a house is pounded by rain and for the first time they hear
how small it really is.

-Matthew Rohrer

The fire alarm testing men are in my building today, setting off pitch tones that sound precisely like clarinet. A perfect G. Geeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. It continually throws me from whatever I am doing, as I unconsciously flex my knowledge, remembering precisely how to match that note on the french horn. My coworker and I take up the keen, pretending to be conductors, tapping our screens, singing “me me me me” in wavering, high pitched fake voices. Oh orchestra, you never truly leave me.

Sitting nervously in a long black skirt, in the only white shirt I owned, back row, trading filthy jokes with the percussion, trying to keep the note while leaning forward to turn the next page, placidly counting bars, keeping the time with only one toe, 1-2-3-4 2-2-3-4 3-2-3-4 4-2-3-4, too short to quite see past the trombone.

(Still faultlessly memorized: all the fingering to The British Grenadiers).

It was an incomplete time for me. Feeling my instrument, this apparently difficult thing, was easy, a skill smooth and uncreased, but disliking who I played with and the musical choices made. Perhaps if I was with a different group, I would have taken to music more, but there are a lot of possibilities every day, and these few, taken as a group, to do with my instrument, are no more or no less than a vague irritation brought on by the hum, the pitch tone hum, of the sad, steady keen of the fire alarm.

The insect’s flight path can be wirelessly controlled via a neural implant.

The Army’s Remote-Controlled Beetle:

A giant flower beetle with implanted electrodes and a radio receiver on its back can be wirelessly controlled, according to research presented this week. Scientists at the University of California developed a tiny rig that receives control signals from a nearby computer. Electrical signals delivered via the electrodes command the insect to take off, turn left or right, or hover in midflight. The research, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), could one day be used for surveillance purposes or for search-and-rescue missions.

…

The beetle’s payload consists of an off-the-shelf microprocessor, a radio receiver, and a battery attached to a custom-printed circuit board, along with six electrodes implanted into the animals’ optic lobes and flight muscles. Flight commands are wirelessly sent to the beetle via a radio-frequency transmitter that’s controlled by a nearby laptop. Oscillating electrical pulses delivered to the beetle’s optic lobes trigger takeoff, while a single short pulse ceases flight. Signals sent to the left or right basilar flight muscles make the animal turn right or left, respectively.

I love living in the future, it’s just. so. neat!

See also: Growing neural implants, first successful robot fly.

having a long day

A burnt out electronica kind of day. Every one of my steps seems to synch with something, even the rain, while the clouds upside seem stitched onto the sky in fast forward, a time lapse capture of crumpled white. The lights shift at the corner with an audible click.

Things are shifting in my home. As the rhythms finally arrive, so we drift apart. David’s finally on the dole, which helps us, but not him. At my insistence, he’s finally begun talking to me, what we worry is that it might be too late. What we worry is that he’ll fall to far inside his head to ever climb out. I am doing my best to wait, but my best is a shaky thing made of fragile days. I feel abandoned underwater, under pressure. Words catch in my throat, ready to burst out as an explosion of pain at the slightest thing.

I find myself awake in the middle of the night, my cheeks wet, with no clear explanation for either fact.

My warm core today is made entirely out of Saturday moments cut up and punctured, clipped together like magazine pictures, inspiration to reference for later. Curled in my seat in Waterfront Theater, singing along to a pop song famous when I was born, recognizing the lines I helped write on stage. Sweet treats of contemplation, pop culture, and intrinsic appreciation. How much has stayed the same, in spite of change. Johnathan’s daughter is in Kindergarten now, he says. I haven’t seen her since her fist was the size of my eye. The soothing song of machines.

Leningrad Siege: Now and Then (history like ghosts)

via EnglishRussia:

“The Siege of Leningrad, also known as The Leningrad Blockade was an unsuccessful military operation by the Axis (Nazi) powers to capture Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) during World War II. The siege lasted from September 9, 1941, to January 27, 1944, when a narrow land corridor to the city was established by the Soviets. The total lifting of the siege occurred on January 27, 1944. The Siege of Leningrad was one of the longest and most destructive sieges of major cities in modern history and it was the second most costly.” – from Wikipedia.

Photos by Sergei Larenkov. More here.