Author: foxtongue

Silva’s selling all her really cool stuff. Jump on it!

As some of you may or may not know, my godmother Silva, my mum away from mum, is soon to be moving.

To facilitate this, she’s selling as many of her non-essentials as possible, this includes silver, books, furniture, mirrors, tea things, antiques, oddities, and almost anything shiny and interesting you can imagine. (Sorry everyone, the giant plaster parrot has already moved to my house.) Bonus: 250 books are for sale, $2 for any hardcover and $1 for any softcover

So come one, come all, to Silva’s Super Saturday Sale!

She’s been a constant inspiration in my life and I’ve always been immensely proud to be related to her. What she’s about to do, move across the country to be with the woman she loves, is going to be difficult, and she needs all the help she can get. Even if you come by for five dollars worth of books, you’ll be contributing. Added up, it tips the balance. That, and it gets it out of the house, which counts for more than you might think. The less she has to worry about, the better.

More pictures of what’s for sale in her journal.

impossible that there isn’t something

I’m going south again, down to Seattle, for another brilliant weekend with Robin, Ivo, Adam, MJ, and the polite gang of miscreants they run with, but this time with some special guests. I won’t be the only person from out of town – animator Sean C. Adams, a dear friend of mine from Atlanta I’ve never had the good fortune to meet in person, will also be in Seattle. I’m thrilled! (Well, except for that dubious, nay-saying bit of my brain which won’t stop claiming that somehow we will be unable to find each other, something will go wrong, the bus will break down or the house will catch fire or.. You know how it is. Tremendously good news in all directions? Must be a catch. Really I’ll get there and I’ll catch fire, scarred horribly in a freak accident as a piano falls on me from thirteen stories up.) Already I’m annoyed with myself for not being in bed, asleep, so as to get to tomorrow just that much faster. The nagging question, however, as I’m packing at two in the morning, what obvious, essential thing am I forgetting?

we take polaroids with his father’s camera, finishing off the roll

A clean uniform of friendship, tattered in places, worn in the elbows and the shoulders, but strong all the same. I think of stone, how it erodes too slow to see, though it shapes itself to the wind almost perfectly. Holes in the middle of mountains, sunsets in the middle of deserts, countless grains flying through the air. Sometimes we go on holiday, go weeks without talking, stretching ourselves between the days, our names ignored like advertising, repeated until it’s meaningless. It used to be calling every day, voices in bloom, eroding our negative spaces until they adapted, filling like smoke, glued to each other like words to paper, content a hundred days, ships on water, floating side by side. Then something happened, there was a split, a rift like fire shouting down a forest with silence. It took a very long time for him to talk to me, though it happened, and almost, somehow, over the horizon, everything seems fine. Now we are a story mostly written, soaking in solitude, aware of the other, solid friends, but purposefully apart. Civilization risen up, cities yawning into view, the rocks have been cut into walls, the foundations cemented down.

It occurs to me that this is the formation of family, laying in the darkness of a winter night, tearing stories out of history and presenting them like they were wine, showing where the scars are like a road-map of decisions never made, sharing what has happened in an effort to make something new, to frame a future of reaction and place that will make sense outside the room. Failing is part of it, crashing the bicycle to get up again, scrawling on the walls in crayon, dusting off our knees, calling bluffs, and saying alright anyway, holding hands, commiserating. It was awhile ago, but cities, once put to task, continue building, even in the absence of an architect. Once populated, they evolve, reach for the sky, develop eccentricities, and form personalities clothed in architecture or maybe memories. Along the avenue, all the presents we’ve presented, all the fact, fiction, and morning details no one else will ever see, they form a garden, they form a line, they spring, blades of grass, flowers, chaotic, ordered, a personal deduction against any further damage. A metaphor we can take with us into sleep, a certainty as easily satisfying as cake.

not going to forget this year, you people won’t let me

“It’s been believed in the past that the camera steals souls. I once thought this preposterous. Now I think it’s self-evident.

This is why we photograph. The fear of oblivion, ours and our worlds. We will inevitably die, but our photographs, if they’re honest, if they show our lives with clarity, unafraid, our photographs will preserve us. Our souls at least. Who we were inside, and the things we saw. Our images? Particles of light that have been traveling forever bounced off our subjects, were focused through our lens into the tender tissue of our eye, and our brain, and our film. Now, those very same shapes, made by those very same particles, the same ones we saw, others can see. Forever, they can see that fraction of a second we saw.

That’s immortality.” -Clayton Cubitt, 2005

Scientists discover exotic quantum state of matter.

May is quickly waltzing into being, every day one delicate step closer, bringing with it spring and, with that, my birthday. Fragile, the social ties holding me to it. Already people have started asking about a party, as I worked through my birthday last year. So once again, and this year I mean it, does anyone know of an appropriate venue for my birthday party at the end of May? My apartment is far too small to hold the 100+ people who will wander through during the course of the day and outdoors, really, is never an option I care for. It’s impossible to foster the security of the microcosm we call a kitchen party in a park.

What I’m hoping for is the kind loan of a house with a yard for a BBQ that won’t mind if we go over-night, preferably with crash space, that won’t mind if we cook breakfast in the morning. Last time our resident Stephen was kind enough to lend us his place, but it has since been partitioned and rented out to people. (I think Frankie‘s girlfriend’s sister or something now lives in the basement, like, just to go to show how small this city really can be.) It was perfect, big, two yards, just off the Drive.

It came out unscathed, too, minus a large pile of dishes in the kitchen we cleaned up the next day, two snapped guitar strings, and, I think, one broken glass. The people I know tend to be remarkably tidy when it comes to parties, we’re not hard-drinking bar-stars with anything to prove, more the sort of argue films and physics over spanish guitar on the porch. Profit: fifteen dollars in returnable bottles, a set of car and house keys no one ever claimed, (I still have them, people, identify them and they’re yours), and some wonderfully embarrassing arm-wrestling photos.

So, please, if this sounds remotely feasible, drop me a line if you’ve got a place or know of one. Let’s see if we can’t work something out.

edit: so far we’ve got the foxy house. anyone else?

working a temp job from nine to five

Researchers at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa compared the feet of people from different cultures plus 2,000 year old skeletons. The skeletons had the healthiest feet (at least when they were alive), followed by the modern population that normally goes barefoot.

“Natural gait is biomechanically impossible for any shoe-wearing person,” wrote Dr. William A. Rossi in a 1999 article in Podiatry Management. “It took 4 million years to develop our unique human foot and our consequent distinctive form of gait, a remarkable feat of bioengineering. Yet, in only a few thousand years, and with one carelessly designed instrument, our shoes, we have warped the pure anatomical form of human gait, obstructing its engineering efficiency, afflicting it with strains and stresses and denying it its natural grace of form and ease of movement head to foot.” In other words: Feet good. Shoes bad.

Justifying, wonderfully, what I’ve been telling everyone since I was at least six years old. Never again will I attempt to look meek when someone berates me on my lack of footwear, instead I shall raise my head high and declare quite gladly that science is on my side. I have citation!

the only theme I could find is black

Sidewalk Psychiatry graffiti.

365 day one hundred & eight: have a nice day

This is a story: ink hair, Queen street, where the roots are, I walked barefoot, crucified by how beautiful he was, how beautiful he could be, I was unknown, achingly young, it was perfect enough for me. Learning the boundaries of narrative, learning the theme and flow of biography. Another: ink hair, on stage in love, wings as wide as geometry, meeting, a lobby, a lost book, a romance of hotel rooms and late night cameras, smoked with his passions, it was more than it seemed to be, and sometimes less. Summaries, diagrams, lists. An old project is percolating in my head with a newer idea, photographs, coloured string.

He doesn’t like it when I chew gum, but he watches me take out my hair pins as if the act carries the same intimacy as removing my clothing.

Being constructed naturally of disciplined angles, his only defense was to move with a maximum of constant, weightless grace.

Chapter headings in the shape of their hands, page count off how much poetry I can wring from their skin. Something is taking shape: ink hair, a familiar bar, an unfamiliar feeling of awe, music parallel to skill, traveling the next day, his unmatchable grin, every day always too far away, a myth, circling the world twice to end everything thirty feet from where it began. If I took a photograph of every one and layered them, there might be details submerged, but perhaps a clarity for all of that. It looks like: ink hair, eyes meeting, singing in the street, a miracle, his poetry, his children later on the phone, impossible, the sweetest thing.

Digital culture-inspired oil paintings.

Van Burlesque Fest

The Vancouver International Burlesque Festival kicked off with a bang last night.

The show those girls put on at The Red Room was unquestionably the best burlesque show I’ve ever seen. I think I have a crush on one of the performers, Whiskey Rose, she was so much fun.

Between Worlds Burlesque, billed as Genre-Hopping / Era-Dropping / Mind-Popping, was EVERYTHING IT PROMISED. It was a comedy education, a sizzling phantasmagoria of stockings, high heels, and mixed media entertainment. Every girl had a completely different show, highlights of which include a Marlene Deitrich as done by Liza Minelli, a mad punk chicken beheading, a hip-to-the-hop hardcore booty-dancing water nymph, Tristan as a bioengineered Alien Queen, and, my personal favourite, Sexy Little Red and the Raunchy Fun Wolf. Just… wow.

Lucky for everyone who missed it, there’s way more coming, so hold onto your tiny feathered hats, and run on down to check out some of the shows!

Tonight, Friday, April 25th, it’s…

The Evil Bastard International Burlesque Showcase
Start Time: Doors at 8:00, Show at 9:00
End Time: 1:00pm
Price: $20
Venue: The Grandview Legion Auditorium
Venue Address: 2205 Commercial Drive

Performers: Ana de Lara, Bella Trixx, Bettina May, Champagne Sparkles, Ember LaValle, EmpeROAR Fabulous!, Go-go Amy, Holly Peno, Jacqueline Hyde, Midori Colada, Miss Kitty Baby, Ravenna Black, Scandal from Bohemia, Shetan Noir, Slick Moorehead, Star Rising, The Baby Jessicas, The Purrfessor, Stephen Taddei, Urban Improv, and Canadian Content.

If you can’t make it tonight either, don’t fret! The festival runs from April 24th – May 4th.

Full event listings: shows, workshops.