The skeleton of a blue whale presides over the 3rd annual “Bake a Cake for Darwin” event at Vancouver’s Biodiversity Museum.
I had a piece of “the evolution of the bear, as shown by graham crackers”
Tag: taxidermy
they’re asking for taxidermy lends, but only heads
Ray and I are going to Ravishing Beasts this evening, the taxidermy exhibit curated by Rachel Poliquin at the Vancouver Museum, tucked away under the Planetarium. (Ravishing Beasts runs until February 28th, 2010.) I was meant to go to the opening night with Fitz, but missed it. My own mistake, and one that’s still bothering me. Perhaps tonight I will excise my feelings of failure in the glassy eyed embrace of a room sweetly full of stuffed meat.
artpost: looking for the catalogue
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Taxidermy elephant sculpture by Daniel Firman for the exhibition Superdome at the Palais de Tokyo.
artpost: this week’s favourite artist
nine months ago, some parents got it ON
pour des dents d’un blanc éclatant et saines (2005) stuffed birds play records by putting their bill into the groove by Jeroen Diepenmaat. thank you Larry.
Happy Birthday to Sam, David, Victoria, Jordan, and my un-cousin Darren today!
The Fountain, by the way, directed by Darren Aronofsky, (Pi, Requiem for a Dream), opens here as part of the Vancouver International Film Festival on Wednesday, October 11th. Tickets are only $9.50, so you have no excuse not to go. I will be attending even if I have to roll pennies off the street to pay for my ticket.
Head On, one part of a three-part installation by Cai Guo-Qiang commisioned by the Deutsche Bank Collection in Berlin, consists of 99 life-sized wolves made over a period of six months out of sheepskin, straw, and other such materials, crashing into a wall of glass. thank you Andrew.
Penn and Teller in Bullshit! take on PETA. thank you Vicky.
Today Ryan sent me a letter from work:
“I think that the word ‘Amputee’ should be amended to ‘Amputeer’ in the English language. Amputeer is a much better word. It implies the sort of person who would consider keeping there taxiderm’ed limb in an umbrella stand, and I fell that this is a behaviour that should be encouraged.”
I think he’s onto something. I miss my taxidermy. I haven’t done any work on it since I’ve been unemployed, feeling somehow like time spent polishing bones is time taken away from my job hunt, that pleasurable or relaxing activities aren’t productive ones and that until I find myself a reliable pay-cheque, I don’t deserve to affix wings onto mink.
People are just monkeys who worry. thank you Stephen.
never get that anymore
A few years of violence and now I flinch in my sleep when the maid comes to collect towels in the hall. Waking comes slowly, but comfortably. In spite of the lingering memories of being six, hotels almost always feel like home. An acoustic Life on Mars is blending seamlessly in my head with the police car siren dopplering past as I open my eyes and look at the alarm clock with serious doubt. It’s begun blaring terrible R&B hip-hop rip-offs of uninspired 90’s music. Terrible. Unforgivable. It’s nine o’clock. I slide out of the blood messy sheets and get up to turn it off, knocking a pack of cigarettes off the bed. It’s a good place to be, I think, picking it up and putting it back. I understand how to fit here.
My clothes are over the back of a little chair, except for my bra, which has somehow found it’s way into a plastic milk crate of three-quarters full of funk records. I look in the mirror as I pull my shirt over my head and ridiculous hair. It’s lined with photographs of Kyle with his baby son. They look happy together, the smiles almost match. It’s obvious that his child is paramount. He wears dog-tags around his neck with both their names engraved. I like them, how they chime musically when he moves. I like almost all of him, how he laughs easily and sincerely, the way our hands wind affectionately together when we’re talking. His body feels like candles. That warm glow particular to wick’d fire, as if I can taste a pool of light on his tongue. His body is that way too, though not his movement. There’s a smooth weight to it reminiscent of heavy bronze sculpting wax. I like how he purrs and teases me for my taxidermy, makes silly jokes about carrying around giant skinned mink to terrorize the front desk clerks with. It’s refreshingly supportive. Exactly the kind of pleasing mockery I require. It makes me bury my head in his neck with unfeigned delight.
The night before, we’re lying in bed and he asks me if I’ve seen his tattoo. I sit up a little, “Where is it?” I’ve never seen it. “It’s a little scorpion, really intricate. I did it when I was in jail.” I start to ask why he was in jail, but he brings his left hand close to my face and I see a small dot of ink and start laughing. “See? It’s really detailed.” “Incredibly.”
His smile tells me he’s almost kidding as he explains that he was in for aiding and abetting a felon. Seems years ago some cops had shown up at a party and started rounding kids up in a rather typical Vancouver fashion. Kyle sneaked around them and pulled an arrested friend out of a cop car. They ran, banging open gates, running across yards, but eventually they hit a locked gate in a chain link fence that his friend couldn’t climb with the cuffs on. Kyle was caught two blocks later. They were held an extra half day because the cops thought they were jerks – they were put in separate cells, but as they could hear each other, they stayed up all night drumming on the black metal bed-frames loudly singing DAY-O, DA-AY-O, DAYLIGHT COME AN’ I WANNA GO HOME.
understand me, I’m not going to wire you shut
My invisible relationship continues. His son spent the weekend in the hospital. Last night I expected him to be home at seven and he wasn’t there by eight. I suspect there may have been a relapse. Either way, I’m worried. I feel now that I should have accepted the proffered key to his bedroom. Then I could at least sleep in his bed, play goldilocks and the sweet-hearted amateur DJ. It’s only a block away and our work schedules strangely match. He starts at five in the morning, I have to leave for work at ten to start at eleven. There’s enough time for sleep in there. In the evening he wakes up at five:thirty, I lock up at six. I could have set the alarm, rescued it from where he threw it if he hasn’t already. Red glowing lights made up by little bars in rows. It’s enough to make me smile. My clock is for the blind almost specifically. The dial is huge, blue, and exceedingly bright if I want it to be. I can read it from the head of my bed if I squint a little. A miracle clock, granting me time without eyes.
A week after NASA’s top climate scientist complained that the agency’s public-affairs office was trying to silence statements on global warming, the administrator, Michael D. Griffin, issued a statement yesterday calling for “scientific openness” throughout.
      “Remember there is no such thing as global warming. Use only space words. Don’t mention the big bang. NASA needs to teach more religion.”
We met again at the bus-stop yesterday. He bashfully idled out of the hotel as I was on my way to work and explained what his day was going to be. Last night I padded over at midnight in my barefeet and almost wasn’t let in by the nervous front desk clerk. (This morning, of course, he was incredibly friendly. I suspect my “position” logically asserted itself). It is refreshing to finally have a relationship not be that delightful and frustrating thing, a secret, (those were too many), but standing the confidence of being coupled on the strength of only a few encounters feels odd, as if I shouldn’t assume so much, though I know I am a fool to think so. Established is established, with no reason to justify calling or arriving at the door. In my long absence from these things, my natural inclinations have been eroded. I’ve forgotten that my partners also tend to think in marriages.
old news: MIAMI – An agitated passenger who claimed to have a bomb in his backpack was shot and killed by a federal air marshal after he bolted from a jetliner that was boarding for take off.
      No bomb was found. “Go back to bed, America, your government is in control. You are free to do what we tell you.”
Aiden and I made headway on one of the mink last night. We sliced off about a pound of flesh from the female. Once beheaded, it looked less sad and depressed and more anatomically interesting. We filleted her until she was almost skeletal, then we packed what remained in salt and put her in the fridge. Aiden wants to name her Anne Rand so that he’s had the satisfaction of tearing out her intestines and slitting her throat. I am refusing, however, on the grounds that my mink will be pretty when they’re finished and not fascist.
He also made the incredibly unfortunate comment that claimed that he was feeling better about it as the corpse cooled. When pressed as to why, he very haltingly admitted that he was finding too much similarities between the feeling of the dead mink and plunging fingers into female genitalia. I think that disqualifies any of his more poetic suggestions. There was also a comment about killing me if I posted that, so I suppose I’m lucky he never reads this thing. *teases*
he wants to run his fingers through my hair but he doesn’t call
Ice-skating’s at 8pm this evening at the 6-Rinks in Burnaby.
I’m cleaning my room. Ryan‘s things are unprotected, the consequence is boxes. There’s the idea floating about that we’ll see him more once he’s officially moved out, but no matter that, we’ll see far more of my floor. The perpetual pile of fabric that’s been living in front of my closet will have evaporated into the now empty drawers. This tightrope act of practically living tidily will collapse out of illusion and into reality. When the lady is sawed in half, this time there will be screaming. Think gore, think the horrible wail of a vacuum cleaner.
E3 conference banned “booth bunnies” at upcoming shows
Man trips, destroys ming dynasty.
UK phone company has Tom Baker read text messages sent to landline messages.
Part of my week in pictures:
dear holy mother death, my music is wierd
I have wrapped myself in pixels and lost myself in who I used to be a little more. This means my feet are returning to stone. I haven’t been writing as much, which felt awkward, but perhaps it only reminded me what was gone. In the abandonment I’ve made a new friend, an else person, someone sweet to talk to me out of sleep. The free long distance option has been illuminating. The light’s been blinding me until I fall down smiling, cradling my joy within my body through incredible acts of will. Sparse news, but breaking important to me.
The people I love, I paint them as half a myth, partially a ghost, and as clear as faulty memory can make. I think of one in particular, so vulnerable without their glasses. I wondered at the time if that’s how different my face looked as they smiled into me through an expression clear as the sky. Here, take my hand, take me upstairs again. My acceptance an open letter, addressed to nothing. Made of laughter, the ink of my hand wiping my mouth. Shining laughter, the word rill. Teeth like the trigger to procreate. Such a gentleman, all euphemisms and too much poetry, enough and more to fill me. Hit with words, I entertained what I could keep, the bare minimum of what I could stand. Such a denial of the closest thing I have to a fetish. The cream of my curiosity, oh. It was thick, it was all I could do. The idea at the time was to not miss him the way I wanted to, the way my blood was telling me to, so that like now, I could wonder. I could question and write these invisible love letters, trying to pour my problematic methods into explaining why I was impossibly putting everything off so I didn’t have to carry him with me, so that I could have his weight to look forward to instead of around my neck.
Time, of course, bends wills better than wind does trees, and curiosity will find pleasurable answers in the unlikeliest of places. In the same day, I was given him to freely write to, but never to anything else, as well as a repository for my starving affection. It’s like free insurance, that wedding ring, a name for the noose to hang my weakness from until it quits kicking. That word could is no longer directionless. I don’t think, how long since last year, since the year before that. How long until I see them again. Instead, I think how every perfect vision blinds itself with time, how unsteady all my life has been, how my rocks threw me into the water to drown, so how damned nice to have new ones. And only a block away.
On my off days, I feel like my emotions displayed here are a compilation tape with a relationship theme. The first song says that every time I see you, I understand the meaning of “swept off my feet”. The second song considers the effort of movement as I forget to breathe. The third tries to breathe as it tries to remember the last thing you said to me as I tried to resist the urge to kiss you until you know what I mean, sugar sweetness segue into all the days I spend alone that don’t armor me, but pretend, but really break me down. Middle of the tape and I’m skinned. Minute by minute, the music watches where your eyes trace, as if by some resident understanding of your gaze, I’ll be able to train it to stick on mine, to watch it shake and take me in for the finale, the poignant fuck moment of eyes meeting until they can’t and close instead.
It’s like I should take up a hobby, but I’m already beginning to fill up my days as my schedule calcifies. Korean Movies take up Mondays, Gamelan will be every Tuesday, and the drop in ballroom dancing is on Wednesdays. Kendo is looking to end up on Thursdays for lack of anywhere else. I have a suspicion that Kyle has weekends more free than other days, though at this point, I could be entirely wrong. All my tricks of gleaning information don’t work well without a modicum of input.
Speaking of hobbies, I’m finally picking up my mink corpses tomorrow! Waiting for me in Terri‘s freezer are two skinless mink, a male and a female, Dahmer style, she says. Bloodily packed, so fresh off the floor that the corpses steamed as they were placed in the clear plastic bags, they should be an adventure in kitchen misappropriation. I’m glad there’s two, as I’m certain that I’ll botch the first skeleton somehow. I’m considering attempting to boil the fledgling crow corpse tomorrow too, if I have time before ice-skating, or at least dip it quickly into boiling water and plucking the straggling feathers out to start. Eventually the finished product will be a flying mink skeleton to put in my window next to my angel mouse. I need to get some silver jewelers wire with my next paycheque and maybe a pair of tiny pliers, if no one has a pair I might borrow, and try to find out how to bore very tiny holes. Glass eyes are always tempting as well, though I don’t want to spoil the pure effect of wax polished bones.
Once I find how mink are to work with, I’m likely to make more. Bliss suggested dropping by various pet stores for dead birds, which is a far more reliable than my method simply finding them on the street. Slightly more sanitary as well, probably, as so far I’ve been carrying them home bare-handed and relying on my ridiculous immune system to take care of whatever germs I might have touched. They might have other dead pets as well, she said. Things like hamsters and guinea pigs tend to expire at the stores, creatures much more size-suited to budgie wings or cockatoos. Aside from being beautiful, I want my flying creatures to be improbable, not impossible.