Author: foxtongue

breathe


the merits of hating television
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

YEAR ZERO: the new NIN album.

Time is a cruel and whimsical creature. This week I’ve been barely sleeping, too busy with other things, kissing thin shadows and wrenching my system into sudden early mornings so hard I can feel my body protesting when I move, as if even walking is a strained effort for my tired muscles. Yet, oddly, I’m feeling rested for the first time in years. It’s like I’m finally feeding a deficiency I never knew was plaguing me until now.

Stephanie was writing today about how human memory works, how all positive memories are linked together, so when one is activated, they all light up. I’ve been trapped for a long time on the other side of that. After my Year Of Disaster, my positive experiences had little to link to, they felt constantly isolated. “Fleeting” was the word Steph used, and it fits, but now everything’s falling into place. My theatre project is ticking along quietly, just as it should, (though I sincerely need to take some time away from job-hunting to write some copy), my personal life is new, easy and only complicated in highly amusing ways, and rather than be simply ignored by magazines, I’m beginning to get rejection letters.

I think I’ve reached an ideal, the stable place I’ve been wanting from which to shake my life into some semblance of what I’d prefer it to be.

can’t stop laughing that he slept with my sister


my finale
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

Today’s dose of Cultural Disphoria brought to you by the colour Bollywood, DC comics, and the letter Internet!

I’m sitting in the studio corner of Alastair‘s apartment, listening to a Janis Joplin and Tom Jones duet from 1970, and tidying a script intended for his summer students. (I work for free here as kitty-rent, on Saturday we made a table, tomorrow Nicole and I start painting). The cats are glad to have me home, taking turns unraveling the ribbon hem of my skirt and hunting the raindrops sliding down the window, purring as I grin at lines like, “Get me [amount]cc’s of [something that brings people back to life]”. We might be back to a terminal case of No Sky No Weather, but I have declared an Awesome zone today, so it’s not affecting me as it usually would. Both RC and Basco were in the paper today, tonight is Seder dinner with Silva, and, last night after Network and a dinner of white chocolate fondue, as I stood wrapped in a king size blanket on a balcony overlooking downtown, my heart of snow redefining the word romantic, I felt like the luckiest little arsonist that ever was.

edit: download: dj tripp – tear my sharona apart

Seven Brides Electrified

Lovely lads and ladies, if you’re in L.A., make sure you don’t miss this!

Seven unique, fascinating, surreal, and enchanting contemporary artists, all in once place. It’s going to be the show of the season. Even I’m looking forward to it, and I live in the wrong country. As extra incentive, Molly, founder of Dr. Sketchy’s Cabaret Drawing School in NYC, is the artist who drew Heart of the World‘s corporate cartoon.

in my top ten powerful performances

Tonight Network is playing at 7:30 at the VanCity Cine.
“I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.”

People commonly talk about Network using words like “classic” or “landmark”. My word is “essential,” as in absolutely necessary; indispensable; pertaining to or constituting the essence of a thing. Taking the ordinary vanity of television and turning it into a wicked radio babylon, it only continues to gain social relevance, even thirty years after its release. There has yet to be made a better exposure of the all too common greed-before-democracy propaganda reality that’s taken over popular media.

“More (UK) servicemen and women have committed suicide over the past two decades than have died in military action.”

local equation: banal life < I have too many secrets to write

“Thou shalt not buy Coca-Cola products.
Thou shalt not buy Nestle products.

“When I say “hey,” thou shalt not say “ho.”

Thou shalt not shake it like a polaroid picture.
Thou shalt not wish thy girlfriend was a freak like me”

Do you ever discover music you like far more in theory? My cultural upbringing tells me I should like Nat King Cole, for example, but whenever I find some on my computer, I invariably only listen to half the song before I track down the file and delete it.

When she leaves, she’s just asking to be followed

santapau‘s put me in The Secret Knots!

I feel like the vision of a girl who writes personality, warped and made prettier in water-paint parentheses. The Secret Knots is one of my silver cocaine addictions. I check it every Monday, a wrought iron internet-princess hoping for snow and honey to bleed distraction from Vancouver’s dirty tinsel sky. Of course, Spring has arrived, bringing with it art! weather! joy! and more Secret Knots!

As grateful thanks, I present: The Books.

my first shot at writing a proper review, feedback welcome

Bertolt Brecht’s Life of Galileo at The Western Front. Further details here.

Peter New’s Galileo is a charming man full of frustration and obvious delight, instinctively in love with his passion for the truth, and more susceptible to politics than he would like to believe. When he discovers incontestable proof that the current scientific order of heavens, a mythic selection of nested crystal spheres that encapsulate the earth, upon which are studded all the stars in creation, is patently false, the Roman Catholic Church decides he’s too intelligent for his own good. After all, what use are they if their God did not place Earth in the centre of the universe?

Luxuriously intellectual, the performance begins in Venice, with Galileo at his work table, tutoring a house boy in his theories and critical thinking. He is presented as poor, though brilliant, and a little at familial war with his housekeeper. The set is spare and the minimal costumes effective. (I made note of the Pope, especially.) Immediately, we are drawn into sympathy with Galileo as he struggles to overturn Dogma with Fact in a nation dominated by creepy Inquisitors. The play doesn’t really take off until the advent of the telescope, when astronomy becomes a dangerous and hotly debated subject, propelling Galileo into a risky public spot-light as a possible martyr to knowledge, but when it does, its appeal is instantaneous.

Having more characters than players, the cast was constantly switching between roles. Raphael Kepinsky, for example, flawlessly played both Ludovico, a cocky rich student in love with Galileo’s daughter, and a supercilious Cosimo, so perfectly patronizing that I constantly caught myself checking that he was not standing on tip-toe as to look even further down his nose at the liberal scientists daring to challenge the status-quo. This duality is like a ghostly reflection of the inherent dispute in the play. Every breath drawn is in defense of an argument, and while sometimes painfully amusing, some of the outdated sentiments on stage, innocent with age, are still attached to certain darkness. It occurred to me, uncertain if I could clap louder during the applause, ‘This is an old fight, but we haven’t won it yet.’

he says, “Today’s vocabulary word is “proprioception”.”

from jwz:

Mixed Feelings:

For six weird weeks in the fall of 2004, Udo Wächter had an unerring sense of direction. Every morning after he got out of the shower, Wächter, a sysadmin at the University of Osnabrück in Germany, put on a wide beige belt lined with 13 vibrating pads — the same weight-and-gear modules that make a cell phone judder. On the outside of the belt were a power supply and a sensor that detected Earth’s magnetic field. Whichever buzzer was pointing north would go off. Constantly.
“It was slightly strange at first,” Wächter says, “though on the bike, it was great.” He started to become more aware of the peregrinations he had to make while trying to reach a destination. “I finally understood just how much roads actually wind,” he says. Deep into the experiment, Wächter says, “I suddenly realized that my perception had shifted. I had some kind of internal map of the city in my head. I could always find my way home. Eventually, I felt I couldn’t get lost, even in a completely new place.”

On a visit to Hamburg, about 100 miles away, he noticed that he was conscious of the direction of his hometown. Wächter felt the vibration in his dreams, moving around his waist, just like when he was awake. […]

When the original feelSpace experiment ended, Wächter, the sysadmin who started dreaming in north, says he felt lost; like the people wearing the weird goggles in those Austrian experiments, his brain had remapped in expectation of the new input. “Sometimes I would even get a phantom buzzing.” He bought himself a GPS unit, which today he glances at obsessively. One woman was so dizzy and disoriented for her first two post-feelSpace days that her colleagues wanted to send her home from work. “My living space shrank quickly,” says König. “The world appeared smaller and more chaotic.”

[…]

During a long brainstorm session, they wondered whether the tongue could actually augment sight for the visually impaired. I tried the prototype; in a white-walled office strewn with spare electronics parts, Wicab neuroscientist Aimee Arnoldussen hung a plastic box the size of a brick around my neck and gave me the mouthpiece. “Some people hold it still, and some keep it moving like a lollipop,” she said. “It’s up to you.”

Arnoldussen handed me a pair of blacked-out glasses with a tiny camera attached to the bridge. The camera was cabled to a laptop that would relay images to the mouthpiece.

I cranked up the voltage of the electric shocks to my tongue. It didn’t feel bad, actually — like licking the leads on a really weak 9-volt battery. […] I walked around the Wicab offices. I managed to avoid most walls and desks, scanning my head from side to side slowly to give myself a wider field of view, like radar. Thinking back on it, I don’t remember the feeling of the electrodes on my tongue at all during my walkabout. What I remember are pictures: high-contrast images of cubicle walls and office doors, as though I’d seen them with my eyes. Tyler’s group hasn’t done the brain imaging studies to figure out why this is so — they don’t know whether my visual cortex was processing the information from my tongue or whether some other region was doing the work.

The author also has a blog about this stuff: sunnybains_feed.

wish I heard his voice more often

BABIES AS WEAPONS is the most twisted thing you will see today, even if you’re a regular at ModBlog. It’s the inelegant site of XenoSapien, a man in the States who believes he is “suffering from deep feminist-culture side-effects.” I hope he never discovers gifs, as the flame motif is bad enough already. (Warning: for reasons unknown he plays inappropriate music very loudly). The front page has a pencil sketch named MyPain of a woman dressed as a stripper about to whip a prostrate man with a baby that’s still attached to her by an umbilical cord that snakes from between her legs. For added wtf, the diapered baby seems to be angrily shouting into a microphone. The entire thing gives me the quesy feeling he watches Wicker Man and touches himself on Friday nights.

  • “NASA can no longer afford the future.”
  • Plans for making a Jacob’s Ladder from readily available parts.

    Today has been full of unexpected phone calls, disco light moments, when the blare of music fades into almost silence at the exact moment you see her face. Theatre people, friends, night and day. Someone’s finally read my pen written letters, public transit edited. A long distance shout from an ex-lover, three defeated countries away, sunburned voice peeling across the lines, unexpected and welcome and a little puzzling. I love him, but why now? Little mirrors refracting light, circling in the room. Another chrome ring, pick-up-the-phone – a potential investor, in town from Memphis, surprise, someone I’ve been considering handing the project off to once I get it up on its feet and properly connected to my city. (We all know I want to leave.) I’m cancelling my plans this evening so as to see him.

    Just as a reminder: Bertolt Brecht’s Life of Galileo opens tomorrow at The Western Front. Further details here. I’m going, are you? Especially quick comments have a chance at a comp.