n: vb: the spice of imagination
Today is the Annual Dyke March, the Powell Street Festival, and the Grand Finale to the Celebration of Lights Firework Festival.
Sunday is Vancouver’s Pride Parade, Kimberly‘s birthday at The Cambie, and Sanctuary’s 10 year Anniversary, (also their last Sunday, they’re moving to Fridays after this).
Monday is Catfish and other Delicacies at the LampLighter, Beth‘s annual music evening.
Am I missing anything?
Ohio is freaking me out. Basically there’s a bill going through that would make it so women seeking abortions would have to get the permission of the father of the fetus before she was allowed to have one. My understatement: It’s creepy and Americans should all raise hell.
Makeshift submarine found in East River. flickr set here. Kudos to Duke Riley for making a functional replica of a Revolutionary War era submarine and being brave enough to try it in Brooklyn waters.
So, as if to piss me off, I have discovered today that the little child that has been running about over my head in the apartment above me this past month can’t actually exist. I have been under the misapprehension that Amy was going to be moving into apartment 302, so I thought nothing of it, but alas, no. Apparently, she is moving into apartment 301, the one with the joyful stomp-about-the-house toddler who occasionally drops heavy-sounding objects. We went upstairs together for the first time today. Upstairs to a completely empty apartment.
So I asked, of course, entirely innocently, “so who the heck is the little kid that’s been running around in here?!” Amy‘s eyes went shining wide and she asked, “You’ve been hearing it too?” Of course I have, so has everyone who’s been over visiting for the past three weeks! It even kept me up a little last night. Whoops. Apparently there have been no visiters, no tenant, no anything.
Ergo, my roommate is moving into a dead baby apartment.
Either that or, my theory, it has either been left unlocked and someone in the building has been using it as a bit of an unofficial nursery.
FYI: For those interested, there will be a group of us camping out by the water slide downtown at First Beach to watch the Fireworks tonight. For more precise directions, call Michael‘s cell. (We won’t be there until around 7-ish. Expect picnickery).
Congratulate him here.
Better yet, add him and enjoy his devastatingly creative daily fiction!
Exclamation point!
August 6th is coming up quick. We are ditching my grandmother-blue velveteen sectional couch, would anyone like it?
I have begun something this week, wrapping my fingers in scarlet coloured string. A new slice of history, doomed to repeat, something that looks like broken water – a rusty puzzle that I can lay on a table, translucent pieces breathing slowly under my fingers, like a fever building and taking away the safest powers of language. My thoughts on the topic are surprisingly vague. I am being warmed by the next best thing. Unclarified affection.
The Boy left some things here I have yet to send back to Beverly Hills. A phone charger written like a nostalgic poem in my window, a pair of Armani shirts that I want to wear until they smell like my body instead of his. These stories are meant to hurt. This is what I tell myself as I stand over them, seconds from wanting to uselessly cry again. I can barely bring myself to touch these things, and I have made certain that it is someone else who fills the drawer I emptied for him when he was living here. (Walking past where we’ve been, the sidewalk is a staring contest.) Objects as a doorway, his voice over the phone describing the hot mathematical arc of Los Angeles traffic, apologizing for missing my birthday. I am caught imagining the shape of his body as he stands at the beach, remembering being in his apartment, naked on the porch except for a blanket, and us, the pictures we took at the airport, reaching out goodbye, the most honest portraits I have ever seen.
Social Suicide, our favourite UK tailors, have an interview with PingMag.
She stood in front of me with a rainbow of metal studded hair-bands on her metal studded belt, looking like a young crow clone of a first nations girl I used to know. Long dark hair, silver printed t-shirt, short denim skirt. Too young for me to watch. I almost said Hello. She swayed with the bus and got off at the Skytrain, oblivious, leaving me to my borrowed Pynchon, a fictional account of WW2, thick as if the paper had been dropped repeatedly in water and dried without care.
“Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.”
And the creative world flinches as it suddenly becomes a little less interesting.
EDIT:
And R.I.P. Michelangelo Antonioni too.
FYI: The Wednesday TT Taiko performance venue has been changed to the WISE Hall, (out of respect for the picket line at the Roundhouse). It will now be at 8 PM. As a result, there are 75 more tickets available at the door.
Lung came over the other day while Mishka was visiting,
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The One Laptop Per Child Foundation’s beginning production.
Fourty-five minutes until freedom. There’s a loud show downstairs, lacing the air with frantic piano, lathering the foyer with a nervous energy. Some student thing. It’s the sort of music I would choose to unsettle an audience with, as if I wanted to dislodge their perception of time, kick it disjointed and paste filters all over the lights. In my head, the dancers are testaments to fanciful make-up and Cirque-style motions. They kick, scream, and astonish.
It’s actually a ballet performance. Something bleach-blonde and mild, culturally appropriate for the family and friends in attendance, many of whom were too old for the stairs. Many of which, I’m sure, are currently wincing at the thrashing rock music that’s replaced the piano, that’s begging for big hair and glittery tight pants lined-up outside of cheap bars where the floors are perpetually sticky with spilled and stolen beer. Of course, any minute now, this will all segue into something hideously classical.
And, yes, there it went. French baroque, rather, and overcooked, dreaming of soulful arpeggios that might travel barefoot on horseback in the rain along the Seine into the sunset. And it didn’t do the dishes, either.
Oops, no. Now it’s faux-traditional Irish rock, a la Riverdance. Mixed with beat-mix 60’s remixed retro-pop.
Thirty-five minutes until freedom.
Laurenn and Nicholas are looking or a ride to Shambala.
A snake, as well as a bag of frozen bunnies, is to be dropped off at my house today. It apparently comes with a table as well, so I expect my livingroom to be oddly crowded for the next dew days until Amy moves out. (Graham who was Sasha is now Amy, which is a lovely name which I think suits her immensely.) As I’ve never taken care of a snake before, I am still uncertain if I am looking forward to it. My attitude towards them is one of carefully friendly apathy. Charmed, I’m sure. Mostly I’m curious if it will carry enough consciousness in its cold-blooded body to have an opinion of me.
I’m beginning to pick up the steps of the old dance again, treading softly over the frozen bones of rabbits, but it’s not so much that I am beginning a new chapter as shelving the hopes of the last one and stepping carefully backward as far as I can safely reach.
