n: vb: the spice of imagination
via booooooom
Niagara Falls 2007, a painting installation by American contemporary artist, Valerie Hegarty
Foamcore, paper, paint, wood, glue, gel medium, 150 x 300 x 65 cm,
Also of note are her pieces Cracked Canyon, Bierstadt with Hole, Unearthed, and Rothko Sunset, and her exhibition Seascape.
Valleywag: LiveJournal, the San Francisco-based arm of Sup, a Russian Internet startup, has cut 12 of 28 U.S. employees.
CNET: LiveJournal clarified that it was “about a dozen” cuts, amounting to about a fifth of the company.
The beginning of the end. Again.
Given the current situation, I’m going to start running my LJ Archive back-up daily, instead of monthly, and cross my fingers that someone out there finds a way to make LJbook run again. I don’t believe the entire site will evaporate overnight or anything, but I’ve been writing on Livejournal since 2003. To lose it would be a death in the family, as the site contains not only a clear and concise map of my life and a full history of my writing, it also holds all of you, my friends and family who daily sustain me. How many of us even have each others real names, let alone e-mail, address or phone number? This is the medium of the majority, if Livejournal vanished, so would our ability to keep in touch.
In the interests in making sure we don’t lose what we’ve built if it all falls down goes boom, I’ve whipped together a quick little poll. Don’t feel you have to fill it all out, but if you don’t give me, say, your phone number, who else will call you up on your birthday to sing you e.e.cummings?
If you don’t feel comfortable posting your personal information to a livejournal poll, e-mail whatever contact info you like to my hotmail address: bloodkrystal@. Also, here I am on: facebook – myspace – flickr – you.tube – del.icio.us – twitter.
Via Jake Applebaum: BART Police (in Oakland) murdered a man on NYE.
It appears that police in Oakland shot and killed a man on New Years Eve. He was apparently involved in a fight on BART but this is unclear as things quickly spiraled out of control. The police pulled him and several other people off of the train.
(If you know more information about the officers involved, please consider leaking their photographs, names and badge numbers to wikileaks.)
There was an SF Gate story on the incident. The story (for those who aren’t reading the link) details what the witnesses saw. In short, a man was shot and it was said he was shot in the back, while on the ground. The comments on the story are horrible, most of them directly side with the police and suggest that all of the witnesses were lying. Some of the comments are simply racist and many suggest this is what you get for having a fight in public. While I certainly found it doubtful that the police would murder someone or even shoot them in the back (especially in such a crowd) it’s pretty clear that this is what happened.
At least two people took videos of the shooting and one of them had a direct line of sight. You can clearly see that the victim is talking to the police. He raises his hands as any reasonable person would, especially when dealing with the police. This is I would expect someone to comply, to show that they don’t have a weapon and that they mean no harm. The police put him on his stomach. This was with multiple police officers handling him.
He was reported to have begged to not be tasered. Supposedly he said that he had a four year old daughter right before he was put on the ground. The police officer in the video is clearly not at risk of any serious violence. Another police officer was holding the victim down. He had time to think and his response was to pull his gun, stand up, wait, aim and then he fired a shot directly into his back.
Someone in the comments of his post also noted that “Vargas (the filmer w/ the video camera) claims that she resisted police attempts to confiscate her camera.“
I made a deal with a dear long distance friend of mine this New Year’s Eve that I would toast him at midnight if he would toast me. As the venue I was at was ten minutes late with the midnight, and I didn’t have anything to toast with anyway, I instead made a post to him in reparation right before bed.
This was my reply:
“That’s really sweet, if slightly creepy. You were toasted at the Radegast Beer Hall in Brooklyn by about twenty people in a rolling, gregarious mood. The majority were men. Tequila had occurred prior. It went, word for word, like this:
VS: And to Jane with an H!
Tim: Who the heck is Jane with an H?
VS: She’s a good friend of mine.
Tom: Why should we toast her?
VS: Because she’s my friend.
Danny: But why should we TOAST her?
VS: Sigh. She has breasts.
All: To Jhayne!What can I say, I know how to work a crowd.”
It’s nice to feel so appreciated.
The ever groshing Meredith Yayanos (and now Alice and Sara) tagged me in the 16 Random Things meme, “Once you’ve been tagged, you have to write a note with sixteen random things, shortcomings, facts, habits or goals about you. At the end choose sixteen people to be tagged, listing their names and why you chose them. You have to tag the person who tagged you.” I’m no good at this sort of meme, but I love rock star Mer (and Alice and Sara) with the warmth of six suns, so for her I will try.
1. “Even your voice has changed,” he said, looking at me, hearing the wounded strawberry tears that caught all the way up from my heart to my tongue and out into the air. The freeway was so familiar I felt I could have drawn it in my sleep, divided the roads into lanes with a cunning accuracy I didn’t understand I had. It was like the promised land, green signs marking exits as well as the graves of so many dreams. “I’m not sure what it is, but you sound softer, like you’re an entirely different person here.” “I am,” I replied, “too full of history to burn.”
2. I used to write fortunes, love letters, and wishes in spidery black ink on the dried leaves I found fallen under trees in the fall and let them go in the wind to fly without watching to see where they might land. They weren’t for me, they were for other people to find.
3. Perhaps if I killed him, he would live on as a ghost, feather light and improperly dead. I woke up earlier this week, wishing I could secretly stab him in the heart with rusty kitchen scissors and open him up like he did to me with his fingers. The only thing that keeps me clear is that I don’t think his murder would change anything. You can’t erase memory like a stain. It would just mean a little less money coming in around my birthday.
4. When she speaks on the phone, I know my place is to quietly do nothing more than make encouraging noises in the appropriate gaps and pauses. She is like a colouring book with everything but the eyes filled in with religious illumination, as if someone spent thirty years merely shading in her skin. I love her, so I don’t mind. Maybe someday it will be my turn to talk.
5. There is a pile of books in my room which do not belong to me. They are borrowed books that represent less what I would choose to read and more what people think I should. From top to bottom they are: Blade Runner: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Mistress of the Empire, The Complete Robot, The War of Flowers, How To Not Get Rich, (which I never read), So Far From God, A Little Larger Than The Known Universe, What Colour Is Your Parachute, (which I also never read), His Dark Materials, and Brandjam. Some of these books have been with me for years, yet I refuse to incorporate them in with my own books, believing somehow, tenuously, that they will eventually be given back to their respective owners.
6. I loved him like no one else I had ever met in my life, but recently it eased back and closed over. All it took was sleeping in his bed, knowing it wasn’t mine, then driving away the next day. Now I’m absolutely stone terrified I will never care about anyone like that again.
7. For no particular reason, somewhere in my room is a birthday candle I kept from my third birthday cake.
8. Reading back entries into my journal can be like reliving the relationships I wrote about. When I started this journal, I had no idea what it would be like to have such a static essence of memory waiting at my fingertips. People I can talk blithely about now, or some that I mention not at all, are waiting for me there, frozen in time instead of (decently?) dissolved like jet streams. There is nothing in my life that can compare. My valued moments, they are not trapped in objects, they are there, freely available for the whole world to read. How I felt when that one danced or when that one cheated on me. It’s unreal, the immediacy. Photographs are not the same.
9. Sometimes horrible pop music is just going to happen in my house. Life isn’t all gamelan, mystery, poetry or jazz. Occasionally it is Blackstreet’s No Diggety on repeat for an hour. I’m not sorry.
10. “Will you sleep with me later if I ask you to?” He looks at me, blinks a moment, and grins. (We’ve only just met, though we’ve known each other on-line for years.) For a moment it’s like I’ve kissed him, then he ignores my question as if I never asked it, because it didn’t need to be said, and reaches out his hand. The girl next to him look confused, uncertain if she heard what she thinks she did, my words a spectre in the tiny industrial kitchen.
11. I dislike religion and ritualistic behavior. It is fine and wonderful and inspiring that people like to make themselves meaningful, that people try to be more than themselves, but to require emblematic props to do it offends me somehow, as if intelligent people should know better, should know they do not require symbols to attain self worth. (Also, I will judge you if you actually believe in astrology of any kind. Quietly, but it will be there. You! The offended one. Half a point. Docked.)
12. The last time I was sick, it was because of him. We had quarelled. I had walked home. It was freezing. Standing within his gravity again was sensory overload. Had it really almost been an entire year? My hands shaking as we said hello. Watching him stand at the podium, I tried to pretend I was a solid being, but my eyes tripped, caught by the enigmatic living miracle of his face. He still had me on a string. I didn’t want even a week to go by without a hello, but after the last time we’d seen each other he wouldn’t even answer the phone when I called. Instead I had to crash his party, all cameras and politicians, as if I was welcome, as if it were planned instead of a lucky accident of bus arrival.
13. If there is a book in the lavatory, it’s because I like to read while I brush my teeth.
14. Though Marissa, (who I later renamed Mishka, which stuck), and I were ten when we met, neither one of us had pierced ears. Mine because my parents thought it was cruel to do to a baby, her because her parents treated it as a coming of age. From this, I couldn’t have cared less while she could not wait for her sixteenth birthday. As it approached, she was practically vibrating with excitement about how she was finally going to get it done, so for her birthday party, I gathered all of our mutual friends together at the mall downtown to get our ears pierced with her in solidarity. (This took some managing, as one of the boys we knew, Charles, had a highly evangelical mother, who thought this was a terrible sin somehow). After an hour of waiting for her and calling her in vain, we finally got a hold of her. She couldn’t make it and had completely forgotten to tell us to call it off. Rolling our eyes, the group of us went through with one ear of the procedure anyway, with the intention to do the other one with her later. About a month after this, she went off with her mother one afternoon and had them done alone at a tattoo parlour, forgetting again about our group effort-in-waiting. As a result, I still only have my left ear pierced. For all I know, so does everyone else involved.
15. “When my husband came back from Iraq,” she said, and it struck me as it has before, completely new again, “I am in a foreign country”. Curled on the bed with my friends, it was easy to forget, the same way it didn’t occur to me later while I was away on my trip. Even when guns were involved. Too much about the USA will always feel implicitly like the word belonging.
16. I will not tag anyone in a meme. It is far too interesting to see who will pick it up for themselves without prompting.*
Where it’s gone from here: Ben Peek, Duncan Shields, Sarah Edwards-Noelle.
I wrote months ago about years ago, “How we’ve moved to hold each other in our sleep.”
I took this picture this morning, posted it this afternoon. I did not think to get this reply.
Be careful, you out there, and remember us here. Even in your absence, we remain strong.
