Writer and web-auteur Marc-Anthony Macon offers up wonderful podcasts over in his livejournal, city_of_dis. The newest podcast – Sounds of the City of Dis Halloween Spookcastaganza 2007 – is a funky, tongue-in-cheek exploration into the groovy side of Hallowe’en.
Author: foxtongue
Betty Boop & Cab Calloway’s ghostly Minnie the Moocher
absurd and macabre, the eccentric work of Kris Kuksi
Kris Kuksi – “Lust and Self-Abuse” – mixed media – 29″ diameter – 2007
I’ve posted about this uncanny art before. It’s beautiful, bizarre, elaborate, and morbidly embellished. What’s there not to love? It’s time to reacquaint ourselves with his outlandish and perverted sculpture! Especially, as lucky for us, Dark Roasted Blends has an illustrated interview with Kris Kuksi.
the BEST spooky thing you’ll see today
welcome to la Noche de las Brujas, the end of Eiseria’s fertile period
Al Mader was a fantastic Edgar Allen Poe last year
Come dressed as your favorite dead poet, author or literary figure.
(Or even come dressed as a favorite dead character from a poem or story.)
Reading in charactor is encouraged as it gets you a better chance at prizes!
“For what seems like the 343rd year the Vancouver Poetry Slam will be raising the dead and perhaps raising hell at the annual Dead Poets Slam. Your host will be the ghoulish Svelte Ms. Spelt. Bring a couple of poems and dress up in your pumpkin high heels to try and win the scary prizes. Cover is $5, doors at 8, show at 9. We’ll be going until the witching hour.”
(I’m going as a warmly dressed Sappho)
This will also be your last chance to purchase advance tickets to the Solomon Sparrow show (Mike McGee, Anis Mojgani, Buddy Wakefield, Dan Leaman and Derrick Brown) happening tomorrow night at the Cottage Bistro. $15 in advance. 7pm or 10pm. I don’t know which one Duncan and I are going to, but I’ll try to remember to ask.
should have skipped on sin and gone to the jackson house party instead
A million seconds is 13 days.
A billion seconds is 31 years.
A trillion seconds is 31,688 years.
dum spiro, spero (while I breathe, I hope)
Everywhere I go looks aged from the dust still falling from my powdered hair. I had a shower this morning before I went to bed, but my pillow still looked like a movie prop when I woke, post apocalyptic, like something that hasn’t been touched in a decade. I will use all the hot water tonight after work, I think, sluicing the talc out, laughing to myself as I sit in the tub, brushing conditioner through and trying to melt the braids, curls, and Marie Antoinette styled back-combed pouffe.
The Parade of Lost Souls was tremendous fun. A lot of the usual was missing this year, even more so than last year, (it’s a long list), but the event is such a fierce creature that slip-shod planning has yet to destroy it. Instead, I think of it as dented, and as such, fixable.
People were found, collected, stripped from us by the crowd, collated with strangers dressed as a thousand fantastic things. Paintings, muppets, robots, dead TV shows, dead royalty, unexpected objects, and other assorted imaginary creatures. After losing Alastair, Devon, Lung, James, Kyle, Merlyn, etcetera, etcetera.. Nicole and I became part of the parade, dancing at the very front with the annual White Band Sweepers, a man dressed as an iPhone, and a silent-film version of Crispen Glover complete with rat. (And very dapper he was). Everyone was smiling, joyful, singing, dancing. Hundreds upon hundreds.
Delighted, feeling blessed, loving the rogue pyrotechnics, the howling enthusiasm, Nicole and I bravely watched the surging crowds and fire dancing finale from the dark slippery roof of the Grandview Park Community building in spite of my climbing-inapropriate costume, (my corset, my trailing wedding dress, my suicidal six inch heels). The police eventually discovered our intrepid group and coaxed us down, but we felt proud of our little dangerous adventure and continued exploring the madness undaunted. Well, until we came upon the pastel furry fight pile – that was a little much. That’s when we turned back and went to SinCity instead.
shane koyczan & the short story long at the cultch, oct 27th, 2007
stress
Chasing shadows across the streets, neon signs beginning to look too timeless to be real, my paragraphs are walking barefoot next to the side of a highway, lost in the sound of a voice it doesn’t quite remember. To compensate, I stay up excruciatingly late learning a contemporary calligraphy designed for my favourite of the things my last boyfriend worked on – an L.A. based Alice in Wonderland music video, its director born in Vienna, that features English couture, shot-for-shot rips-off Czechoslovakian stop-motion art direction and starring a woman appropriating Japanese Harajuku culture, (a reassembling of American/English fashion) – just so I can write a four word letter and mail it to next month. It’s a toss-up, either I need new hobbies or I’m just continuing my life out of habit, going through the motions because they’re so deeply ingrained, doing things because they seem like the sort of thing I would do. Neither option particularly comforts me at three a.m., when I keep myself busy with these preposterous things.
socalled music
I have a new musical obsession.
Brainchild of musician, photographer, magician and writer, Josh Dolgin, they’re a Jewish-culture Montreal Jazz-Klezmer Hip-Hop group with shimmering 1920’s piano and Romanian/Latin-American percussion.
Seriously.
Their latest single, You are Never Alone, begins with a soft clip, reminiscent of The Avalanches, and drops down into a catchy riff which positively throbs with promise, clearing the way for a theatrical bout of MC story-telling. It all works exceptionally well with the video, a fantastical transformation of Mr. Dolgin into a complicated, high-tech re-imagining of an antique theatre. (You might remember their rough video with (these are the) good old days too).
“Truly these are the good old days where man, woman, and child can all log on the internet and text message each other across their own house, where there is any form of contraceptive from solid, liquid, to gas, we have reached the point of civilization like the Incans reached when they had gold roads and the Egyptians reached when they had, like, magical buildings and secret things, so what you do is you kiss whoever you kiss, grab whoever you grab, because these are truly the good old days and it does not get any better than this. When it does you wake up and then you’re dead.”
I’ve had their latest album, Ghettoblaster, on infinite repeat since I found a copy. I can’t not. From the clever intro, the sound of someone slotting a cassette into a car tape-deck, to the bonus hidden remix track, it’s eclectic, relevant, wickedly smart, funny, and perishingly sexy. It groans and grins, powerfully melodic, full of cultural anthropology, swinging horn solos, splashes of Yiddish rap, layers of juicy, highly literate rhythms, and a willowy, elegantly stretched sense of timing. Even unexpected clips of musicians talking in the studio are beautiful, adding a charming depth of personality and character to moments that might have been weak without them. As a hint, their wikipedia entry states some of their almost inexplicable, modern style as “…drums & bass and other types of folk music.”
It’s only when you start to really listen do you realize how gracefully strange their punchy melding of cultures really is, how tightly they wove what should have been a vocal sprawl. Every song is really its own mysterious and wonderfully imaginative mood, an entire exploration into genre. Each time I pay attention, another thread of creativity manifests. Banjo, for example, it has banjo? I missed that it’s practically glittering with banjo? Yes, apparently, I think, rewinding and playing again. How rare.
BUY THE ALBUM: it’s not even $10.
(find them on MySpace)
(the socalled video blog)