Author: foxtongue

COILHOUSE: for sale

Coilhouse Magazine, Issue 01 is finally here!
I bought one, have you?


from thier site, emphasis mine:

“Get ready for 96 glossy, full-color pages of art, photography, music, fashion and literature. In this issue, the stark android beauty created by Andy Julia for our cover is counterbalanced inside by his elegant portfolio of vintage-style nudes. Coilhouse travels to Ljubljana, Slovenia (literally! we actually went!) to interview Laibach, while singer Jarboe tells war tales from her career post-Swans. Photographer Eugenio Recuenco contributes a lush 10-page portfolio and interview, while Clayton James Cubitt delivers a poignant, visceral spread (again, literally) on the topic of genital origami. Renowned science fiction author Samuel R. Delany shares an exclusive excerpt from his forthcoming novel, “From the Valley of the Nest of Spiders,” while our first installment of “All Yesterday’s Parties” digs up forgotten party photos from eras long gone, starting with London’s Slimelight circa ‘95. Fans of WZW and Z!ST will love Zo’s fashion pictorial, in which she reconstructs a Galliano outfit on a budget. Pop-surrealist Travis Louie gives us a glimpse of his inner monster, and cult painter Saturno Butto has some medical fun at the expense of Catholics everywhere. All this, and much more – including supervillain how-to’s, Coilhouse paper dolls, interviews, fashion and art await.

Readers of the blog, we have another treat just for you: the fact that the version of the magazine that you are buying here today will not be available in stores. Coilhouse will be in stores this fall, it won’t be the unique version that’s available here. On this site, and on this site only, you can get the uncensored edition. This version includes a powerful piece that was too risqué for stores to accept without problems due to the graphic (and in our opinion, beautiful) images involved. Only 1000 copies of this very limited version exist – a mere fraction of the entire print run. And that version is only available here, on this site. When we run out, we’ll start selling the censored version that will also be available in stores – so get the limited edition copy that we call the “true version of the magazine” while we still have them!”

My deepest and most sincere congratulations to Mer, Nadya, Mildred and Zoe.

emotionally satisfying music

“A toddler whose remains were found inside a suitcase in Philadelphia in April was starved to death by members of a religious cult, including his mother, in part because he refused to say “amen” after meals, police said.”

Listening to the Kronos Quartet covering Sigur Ros’ Flugufrelsarinn, music as quiet, rich, and thick as the calm pumping of blood. Sound like running hands over sheets, straightening them out on a September morning, as leaves fall outside, golden and red and silent in the gutters. I’m letting the cello soothe out the jangled nerves of today’s news, of going to bed at three and waking up at eight to the telephone ringing with police on the other end wanting to talk about permits and crowd size and kids running around with replica guns.

Karen is considering moving out the end of October. She misses Main St, hopes to find a nice flat there, something vintage with wooden floors and windows that get stuck when it rains. I’ve been worried about her lately, she’s been absent from the house a lot, and I know her family isn’t as supportive as they could be, little things that add up into hoping she’s okay, so it’s nice to know that she’s well and together enough to keep on top of things. Plans will coalesce, they will calcify, they will become fact. It’s one of the nice things about living, how we continue to change and transform and become more of who we are as we become who we think we need to be. I hope that wherever she finds, she gets to paint her room again, whatever shade of light, minty lime green she likes best.

David will be moving soon, too, though more immediately, at the end of the month. No longer will he be staying with me as his place becomes piles of boxes full of books, instead the two of us will be staying up too late, unpacking his life-things into a nice, wine coloured room in a big house across from the Ridge Theater on Arbutus. I’m looking forward to it. I’m going to teach him how to make really nice, to-the-ceiling cinderblock shelves, (remember to pad the ends of the blocks with hidden felt), and lie in the garden with the rabbits hopping on leashes as the city drowns around us in every day, ordinary life. I might not have very much passion these days, but I can see putting a mild time aside for just that sort of thing, and being okay.

the golden age


zombiewalk
photograph by nicholas burke.

Colour photographs of 1930’s America.

Not having a camera is beginning to kill me in tiny paces. It’s been two weeks, but I still reach for it every time I leave the house. I wake up at night, ideas battering like moths inside of my skin, things I want to do, but can’t do anything about. I need a miracle, an oracle to sweep out of the clouds and tell me what to do. Stand over the smoke, hallucinate, find another way to make money, another way to try and get my equipment capabilities back. It’s always a matter of money. Living under debt, everything is a negative, everything is already earmarked to go to someone else. All pay-cheques are split in half, and then there’s a line-up of other hungry details. Rent, utilities, cat supplies, groceries, always in that order. After that, when I’m lucky, I find a sale on something tiny I can use to improve the house. Plus, too, I’m trying to figure out how to pay for a trip back east to see Katie and maybe stop by Montreal for a visit. Work will let me take two weeks as long as I can work remotely, but then I’ll need a lap-top with net, something else currently out of reach.

Early 20th c. George Eastman House photos now on Flickr

Not having photo ID has become crippling as well, in strange little ways I never thought about before. A friend is coming in to Seattle from NZ, and I want to see him very much. We’ve known each other for years and never had a chance to hug. I worry my ID won’t arrive in time. It’s in the mail, ready to arrive any day now, but never today. Weeks of waiting, of being in limbo, not existing to any institution larger than a penny. At the ER, the administration and I had to weave a path back almost ten years of phone numbers and addresses to discover I exist, answering esoteric questions about street names and parental middle names in order to prove I’m not masquerading, a foreign impostor with a damaged foot, trying to ride the system for free. (For the record, I’ll be fine in a few days. No bones were broken, the muscles were “merely crushed,” said the doctor with a smile.) I can’t imagine what hoops might exist at the border, what strange marks would be made on my record if I arrived without picture ID. It’s bad enough crossing the line without a passport, trying without an image, a government shot of what I look like nervous in the ICBC office, is beyond me.

Who We Were: a snapshot history of America

going to take you home

Katie West is having a blow-out print sale.

I’m worried that I’m slowly transforming into one of those domestic goddess types, where every time you talk to them, the topic leans hard on decorating, cooking, and new ways to clean out your closet, try now! Fill in pin prick holes in your white walls with toothpaste, (it also takes wax and crayons off walls), use cigarette ashes to clean your silver, and newspaper to wipe down the mirrors. Don’t stand your brooms on their bristles, use equal parts vinegar and water to remove wall-paper, use salt to clean cast iron pans, and remember sunlight is a free UV disinfectant.

I suppose it’s because outside of Zombiewalk, all my news is apartment related. The mirror I painted has been wrestled onto the wall, I bought a batch of pictures frames and a black, epoxy/polyester powder-coated steel coat rack from IKEA, a birch wood IKEA bed-frame from Craigslist, and replaced every shared-space lighting fixture in the entire apartment with brushed steel fixtures I bought from Jane, an exceptionally nice woman who lives next to Paul Plimley. (It’s amazing what a difference lighting makes to a space). Soon I’ll be purchasing a little pot of raspberry/strawberry-daiquiri coloured paint for the kitchen, replacing the behemoth cupboard in the closet with something more functional, and putting up wall-paper.

Last night I framed the letter and the photos Lady Anomaly sent me, put them on the wall, abandoned the old lighting fixtures in the lobby of my building with a note saying they’re for my landlord, and sorted all the recycling that’s been languishing on the porch. (Does anyone want an easel? I’m not sure which ex-roommate ditched it here, but it’s a good one, if a bit rusty legged from being outside.) Tonight I’m going to do a last check around the house for things that need to be sent to Silva, itemize the boxes of things we’re giving away, (after Silva has a shot, as she left some things behind she’d still like to own), post my give-away list, and find a charity willing to take away what’s left. (That said, does anyone know a good place to give books to? David‘s got literally hundreds he wants to give away.)

Small changes, but creating order from chaos. Neg-entropy, the impregnation of order and coherence into the structure of matter.

I’m also thinking it would be a good idea to whip round a petition that the landlord put a bicycle rack into the space next to the stairs on the bottom floor. It’s empty, just the right size, and would save us all hauling our cycles upstairs away from the perpetual thieves that prowl the neighborhood. Is there a way to make this easy? I know he won’t want to put the money in, but maybe we could pool resources, buy the thing ourselves, and simply have him install it.

Ha Ha Ha America