sitting in the grass at a Saskatchewan truck-stop
Tag: travel
if you blink, you miss it (travelling through Canada in the fall)
ready to shake my buttmachine
365: 41 – 10.02.09
Thank you to everyone for the overwhelming response to my post regarding the potentially illegal use of my image in a pro logging campaign. Your support is appreciated and very welcome. I will do my best to keep everyone updated as information comes in. So far I have yet to discover what company it was or even when the campaign ran, but I’ve tracked down the photographer, (a very nice fellow I do not want to damage), though have not yet spoken to him, and have been promised a copy of the poster, which I will likely pick up next week. (I can already tell I’m going to feel uncomfortable having a life sized poster of myself in residence. Creeeeepy.) Everything else is going to have to wait until I get back from my weekend trip to the states.
Which reminds me…
Come out to a show, point us toward where the good food lives, or even just say Hi!
We’ll be arriving in Portland late tonight, probably too late for anything special, but should have almost all tomorrow free for exploration, meeting people, and general bumming about. Our current Things To Visit is a whopping list of two, (Sock Dreams, Voodoo Doughnuts), so we’re open to suggestions. I think we’ll head up to Seattle late Saturday morning or early afternoon, and spend the rest of our weekend there, with a quick Sunday gig stop with Mike in Bellingham on the way back. Bon voyage! I can’t wait to get out of dodge.
“I find the map and draw a straight line over rivers, farms, and state lines”
as referenced in guitar player magazine (apparently)
bring bad design to justice with printable Visual Enforcement Kits.
I’ve started to plan my trip down the coast for That Mike‘s gigs, calling people, asking who’s going to be where, and trying to figure out how to get around.
I really like the idea of spending time out of town on Valentine’s Day, though it means my friends in Seattle might mostly be “busy” elsewhere. Already I’m considering buying another pair of ridiculously skimpy panties to throw at him to celebrate. I’ve never had a pleasant Valentines. One of my better ones involved someone locking me out of the house in the rain. Last year Mike was in playing over in Australia for Valentines, and Stéphane had just died, so I instead of going out, I was effectively single, alone, and in mourning. The highlight of my day was when Ben Peek wrote me into an autobiographical story introduced by a large picture containing the word COCK.
So far things seem to be falling into place. Nick called last night to tell me his van survived the fire somehow unscathed and that he and Nicole want to come as a romantic trip of their own. (That word again.) If it all works out, we’ll drive down to Portland on Thursday morning, love life there for a day, groovy down that night with Mike, drive up to Seattle, groovy with Mike some more, then spend the rest of the weekend drifting happily around Seattle like vacationing techno-hippies, and get back in time for my work on Monday morning. Depending on money, we might even make it down to his Wednesday night gig in Bend, which I find a delightful idea not least because I like the idea of a town named Bend. Seriously. You liked a place so much you decided to settle there, and that’s what you come up with? Bend? I love you guys.
salton sea beach
Animal, vegetable, mineral.
pictures from the south, surfacing
Liontamer at the abandoned bathhouse…
This is the very first photo Lung and I worked together in creating. We’ve never done anything like it before, but I’m pleased to say, looking at the finished product, that our first shot seems to be a winner.
Before, he would always tell me to go over there, stand here, tilt your head that way. Almost invariably we would end up with a result I didn’t like. My accusation, founded very fairly though a bit tongue in cheek, is that he can’t take an attractive portrait of someone he didn’t want to sleep with. He agrees, and so when we found ourselves at the abandoned ruins of the Salton Sea bath-houses, we finally took the next step, and collaborated.
It was a strange experience, as he chose the spot, and I chose the position, peering through his camera and deciding where I should be based on the light, then assembling myself while unidentified animals made chewing noises in the ceiling, trusting as Lung had me look over my shoulder just that little bit more.
I’m glad it worked. More than glad, I’m delighted, as I really wanted it to come out well. Our recent trip South brought us closer together than we’d ever been before, and to have tangible evidence of how our friendship is evolving is comforting. It’s nice that I can look at this photo and point to one of the exact moments we shifted, no matter that it was only one tiny step among many over a process of several months. It’s still a singular moment captured splendidly, and one with enough meaning for me.
An added bonus, too, is feeling completely justified that I dragged my Hallowe’en costume all the way down and back just to cheerfully wear it once or twice in highly inappropriate circumstances. Next had better come the boot pictures, where I dangerously tottered in stiletto heels along a shoreline beach made entirely of bone.
amanda freaking palmer blew my brains out last night
Flying Virgin Air felt like reaching into tomorrow. Intellectually I knew what sort of experience it was going to be, I’d read articles about the in flight interactive computers and seen shiny, smiling pictures of people enjoying the interior of the plane, but I didn’t understand how, as an experience, it would be so comfortable and intuitive, yet subtly new.
I loved it. I loved the psychiatry precise Buddha Box ambient music, the violet lights softening the iPlane cigarette-white edges of the comfortably wide seats, the oddly flawless hand-set/computer-keyboard controller, the look&feel of the touch-screen design, and even the this-close-to-annoying mock trendy animation that explained what to do in event of a crash. Everything about the flight was a visceral reminder that we’re already in the future and you would have crashed that flying car anyway. I felt like a target market perfectly catered to, coddled, even in business class, with a desire to do it again instilled in me immediately, a thousand times more powerful than any advertisement could.
Clicking the handset out of the armrest, I clicked through the computer system, poking at everything that was available. (No one else signed onto the seat-to-seat chat, unfortunately, but it was enough that the option was there.) Finding a Music section, I braced myself for a tedious, arduous list of tenaciously popular artists, only to be pleasantly surprised. I found jazz, indie, rock, pop, techno, classical, and opera – everything I listen to at home, alphabetically listed all the way to Frank Zappa. Satisfied, I leaned back and shrugged out of my shoes. My schizophrenic play-list was a lovely thing, (inspiring me to want a long, intimate dinner with whoever programmed Virgin Air’s music selection), matched in beauty only by the ridiculously cotton pink dawn beginning to break so perfectly outside my airplane window.
some things only make sense from far away, others only from right up close
How To Walk In the Snow, A PAMPHLET
A US military F-18 fighter jet has crashed into a residential area of San Diego
I’m looking forward to watching the American Astronaut on a big screen tonight. It ties in so nicely to my recent adventures – sloshing through tunnels under Vegas as dark as outer space, talking Billy Nayer Show out in the desert with Charlie, then staying in San Fransisco, stickily aware of other people’s personal history in the city, maybe I’m standing where they have stood, taking steps inside where they once did, and finally driving North along the lyrical roads Mike has taken a hundred iron times, along the same ocean-starry route that eventually delivered him to me.
If I require a fulcrum to swivel upon as I return, it may as well be that movie, as much a sincere and solid reminder of the unlikely turns my social life thrives upon as anything else out there. If my trip had a theme, that would be it. The tango of this person knowing that person knowing this person knowing them, corrosive echoes of decisive lives over thousands of people, verve fluttering in every direction, scattering media and music, a haunting massacre of staring moments, a deadlock artillery map of unusual experience etched ouroboros inside the memory of my skin.
leaving for vegas
Sliding exhausted out of Michelle’s black miniature SUV, barely able to focus my eyes after a weekend spent almost entirely awake, I was a bone palace ballet wrestling with an over-sized suitcase and a faulty, tired memory. Trying to be cohesive was like making bets in a burning house.
A flash of David’s fedora perched in the back of Robin’s car before the pretend Sisters of Mercy concert, Michelle and I trying to see, no evidence of people on stage, just lights stabbing through fog, a whole bottle worth of smoke juice drowning them out. Could have been a CD. No one would have known. Dancing later, taking the motorcycle with Joseph, talking relationships in Chinatown, it wasn’t there, I didn’t have it. Relief. Still in the car, safe in Seattle, more safe than this trip.
I was expecting SeaTac to be a mad as rabbits, bruising gauntlet of security questions and TSA horror stories. Instead Virgin Air smiled, took my bag, gave me candy coloured boarding passes like cheerful paint chips, and sent me to the gate without once asking for a passport while Security ignored me past the usual Put Your Stuff Inna Box and Walk This Doorway As We Wave A Wand. It felt nothing short of miraculous, as if I’d stepped back in time somewhere between the front doors and putting my shoes back on. Instead of wasting an hour tediously answering meticulous questions about unessential details of my life, suddenly I was free, soothed, out of the epilepsy lights of the dance club, away from everyone who might want something from me, curled on the floor with Cloud9Dream, pressed tight against a wall of window, watching night planes taxi in. Time to breathe. I felt like I was entering a new age, like on the other side of my flight was a birthday I had somehow missed.