Tag: the preacher

Lung is trying to talk me into being a lap-dancer

Sam sells Samsung as Ted Brown. My favourite part is that he doesn’t know the slightest thing about football, and his instructions were to ad-lib, so when he told the director, the director wrote a batch of post-it notes of football sounding factoids and stuck them to the green screens for him.

I love my friends.

How to Sell Your Uterus, Eggs, Kidney, Liver, Spleen, Plasma, Sperm, Hair & Body for Cash.

Listening to unreleased Coldplay at work, some follow up thing to the new album, wondering what it’s going to be like traveling across the prairies. I took this trip before, once, a very long time ago, to visit my grandmother in Winnipeg with my father. He bought me a milk carton full of gumballs somewhere half-way through Saskatchewan and made me promise I wouldn’t tell my mother. I bit into them like tiny, hollow, miniature apples in rainbow colours, orange, green, yellow, blue and red. They were white inside and stale, chewy. If I sucked on them, they painted my lips like convenience store make-up. They tasted like childhood, even then, as if I already understood that cheap sugar and heavy dyes are basic ingredients in the manufacture of poor children. Some moments, twenty years later, I can still taste them, the candy flavour echo like sad edges of broken smiles.

I expect this trip to be more memorable, though perhaps in twenty years it too will only survive as one thematic memory, a single ikon that encapsulates the entire six days in transit.

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.’

you could have told me less casually


naiad
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

When you say, you in the plural, in the too many of you, “I’m not telling my wife,” I have a perception shift as a tense block of knowledge creaks suddenly into place. You are partitioning me away, removing my reality. You are creating a space for me, which has nothing to do with your solid life, that is to abandoned as soon as primary characters arrive. I’ve done this before, had to live as my role is reshaped around me into the idea of my body and grace, I know what you’re doing before you do. When I look down into my lap with resignation, what else is there to do, it is with this understanding. From there on in, your honesty diminishes every time you kiss me. You might not even see it. Every time my hand is held, every time I am told that I am loved or treasured, our light dims, laced with the knowledge that I am an eradicable betrayal that you will want later to erase.

And then we playfully kiss like sticky children outside a door, we share a glance and giggle at something improbable. I carve lines in the air around your body with my breath like prayer. You hold my hand and trace the lines there, as if you could grant me immortality with the poetry of your smile. But there never is any poetry. As soon as I am out of the room, you can reattribute your actions, decide after the fact what you meant and how you meant it. It burns, your plausible explanations, how you write all the rules, how you’ll still be cruel enough to pretend that I have any say in the matter, as if I had any power except to leave.

Yesterday the line, “cradling my hips like a warm cup of tea,” popped into my head. When I was younger, I imagined that’s what I wanted. Someone who would hold my body canted to their lips as if I was a chalice of some sort to be poured. It might have even been the word canted that gave me such a fancy. Now that I’ve found a few of those people, I’ve discovered that I was right. It’s comforting to know that not everything I thought would be nice turned out to be wrong. There’s a not a lot else that I still have, not in the long run. I had a golden summer once that taught me how to smile. I cried when it was time to leave and when my then partner held me in the cloak of his obscene hair and comforted me, “Life is long, you will fall in love again, many times,” through my wracking body, I knew he was right. What he failed to explain was how few people would bother face the fear of falling in love, how they would hold back and hold back and hold back until finally, in cowardice, lose their mind and flee to be free.

edit: p.s. Finland won?? whiskey tango fff?

ficlet: not the man you think he’s for

The door opens and a man walks in. (The beginning of a thousand stories.) Tall in a brown suit and tan shirt, his tawny eyes scan the room, glancing off strangers, trying to pick out a face. Dark shoes, no cufflinks, a tie close enough to straight to count. His fingers snag a drink off a passing tray and an intelligent smile slowly finds his face. A girl is animatedly talking at a small table crowded with people, a bundle of personality traits he’d always wanted to meet. He can tell from her coloured hair.

she’s staring up at the building, not certain how she came to be there, because she should have called, but it would have been awkward to say hello in front of people because she is shy of their so called intimate relationship and so she decided she would call as soon as she was alone, but then the bus was there and it would be another twenty minute wait if she didn’t get on as it pulled up to her feet, and then it was her stop out front of his building, and her heart feeling heavy and

At his apartment, she is quieter, tired. Taking her shoes off, she pulls without any of her previous grace. “How many times are we going to do this?” He takes off his jacket, sits down in front of his computer. “As many as it takes.”

A nightclub, dim lights and a red fish-tank behind the bar. The crowd is helplessly young. Older than they are, the man walks in wearing the same long suit, the same discovering smile. He carelessly pays for a drink with stolen quarters from a laundromat. A girl is dancing to the thunder, clever porcelain hands trying to grasp the sound around her, everything he wants to change about himself. He can tell from her painted nails.

she’s arrived, so it’s pointless to think of calling, and it’s always like this, indecision making her decisions, but she could go across the street to the public telephone, but then she would have to walk past the building to the corner and then she would have to backtrack and that would feel so stupidly inexperienced because of course it’s okay that she’s arrived and why is she calling from the corner, come up, come up

Damp from a shower, she drops to the couch, a towel wrapped around her head. “How did this even start?” He offers her another towel, “You’re dripping on the carpet.” She looks to her pale feet, looks back up and slowly accepts the second towel. “I remember when I loved you.”

Surrounded by pigeons, a girl is sitting on a bench by the water. From a paper bag, she is scattering birdseed. Her friends are laughing at her attempts to have them eat from her hand. Every time they laugh, the birds startle and flit farther away. She does not care, the sun is warm. The girl laughs too. Under a tree, the man in the suit waits with a box camera, the carapace of an enthusiastic black insect. He raises the instrument like a hammer. It chitters when the shutter snaps. With her, he would not have to sleep to dream. He can tell from the shape of her name.

mihi cura futuri (but my concern is the future)

LiveJournal Haiku!
Your name: porphyre
Your haiku: in less perilous
times it was dedicated
to musique concrete
Username:
Created by Grahame

The preacher called me martyr as he finally found his name, (it’s good to have a name, I cannot write without a name, oh my tarnished scientist, oh my bleeding star), because I give in to the emptiness biting at my heart, because I strive to believe it better to drink the dreadful rain than to be proud and drown in it. I walk out alone, looking at the smoke that passes for a sky in our city and wonder why I’m never good enough company to keep. I have no pure fey and giddy anticipation, it’s threaded through with hard-earned dread. Crumbs from a table. Semantics twisting in. And I’m still terrified to talk to you, still too tired to cry. When everything changed, when the worst happened, it was the supports I never questioned that gave way, that turned from stone to sand beneath my feet. The cement is the same colour as the rain and as the water runs, I feel it must match my eyes. I lost the charm to fly, the meaning. Sometimes I only laugh to let a cold wind out. When I can’t casually say your name without feeling like I’m lying, what can I help but dream you’ll dream of me? My answering machine is silent, except when asking me what I want to do. Press two. Press three or four. I hesitate and hang up.

Original letters sent by Frank Zappa and the PMRC to various instances during and after the ’85 PMRC hearings on music and censorship.

I dream you will come with me to the station when it comes time for me to leave. That you will reason with me the night before, try to hold me as if I would crack, like the light of a candle dimly holding the darkness back. In the morning, you’ll kiss me goodbye and wave, knowing I’ll come back for you. I dream I’m enough to fight for, an ideal with flesh surrounding, not a shell with soft hurt inside. That’s I’m real instead of filler. That there is music to my madness, that it’s not a lost cause again. Another reason to be myself, another reason to stand my ground against the cynic’s world. I dream and think sadly that I’m too young to feel this bitter, but there is no one to cradle my hands and draw my poisons from me. Not in this city. Not in this place. My time here has already been drawn as dry as glass burned back to sand.

Every single Playboy centerfold ever published, (in order).

The weather the past few days has been beautiful, sun and wind. I have been keeping busy. Friday was beach visiting then Jacques birthday, Saturday was dinner out with Duello-folk, then the TV on the Radio concert, Sunday was Sunset Rubdown and Frog Eyes, Monday was Korean Movie Night, Tuesday will be the Secret Machines concert, Wednesday is dinner with Nicole and Matt, Thursday is dinner and archiving vintage family-photographique with Silva, and then, as true as the trees let me be, Friday-I-do-not-know. I work this weekend, Raphealla having something else she’s doing, so I will only be available outside of shop hours. If you want to claim some of them, do so now or hold your peace. I have no internet at work, however, so you’ll have to use the telephonic device made so popular by the previous century, TOLL FREE: 1-888-HYPATIA. Handy, no? Yes. Minus the lack of net at work, which leaves my employment stupefyingly dull.