Tag: vancouver

empty time today



Originally uploaded by Boytoy.

I’m vacillating between listening purely to The Arcade Fire and what new music I’ve found this week. It’s a difficult decision, Funeral being a powerfully difficult album to put down.

The lighthouse is fractured, a flash of light explaining very strange pieces of personal mythology. blink The first time I was seduced by a woman. blink Going there with the band the next day. blink Balancing rocks with my missing lover, my best friend, the only person who’d met him last time. My eyes cannot be covered by my hands to shut it out. blink I don’t want to. blink It’s a strange place to think about only because I’m not used to it. I forget it exists. blink A picnic, they talked about making a music video on a sailboat for a song about whales. blink A different lover, but the same best friend. Fire. blink oh Nikki’s hair blink oh how he used to have a temper blink the painter blink the violent drinker blink different people, the time I almost threw myself in. GLITTER WARNING FLASH. One of the only lights you can accurately see across the inlet. The memories creeping into the fabric of the trees and cliffs and water. FLASH. It’s Vancouver, this particular quality of light remembering. The sign on the road. The parking lot hemmed by forest. Running the path. Running the cliff. The water looks like expensive gun-metal silk shimmering in a radio play. Everyone sits and raises the children of conversation in front of the ocean. It’s only human, but how I wish I could swim.

`Wearing an aura of rugged-intellectual charm like a plastic raincoat …’ — Sam Merwin Jr.

Fantasy spark: water warmer than this, with you.

This weekend was your last chance to conceive if you want your baby to be born on 6/6/6.

I knew I went down with the ship when he turned to me with a radiant smile and said, “I’m happy.”

When his eyes looked at me and the sun caved in like a cathedral.

I wanted to say, “when you let your hair fall down, rapunzel cried.”

Instead I turned and walked away, beginning to choke when his hand touched my arm.

I missed posting on September 11th, which is likely for the best, considering how dour my humour has been today. Now it is September the twelfth, and Ryan’s birthday. I found him a present in my room while I was sorting today. I’m minimizing, paring down my possessions as best I can. I want to be down to one box of miscellany, one of books, a computer, a lava lamp, and my mouse with wings by the next month. The furniture will be dealt with according to piece when the time comes. I want out of here. I’ll post what I find that can be given away. Today I threw out a colouring book from when I was young enough to have a sister still, (I was five, she was four, that story may still end with I never saw her again), and the top half of a musical china clown my father gave me when I entered kindergarten. It used to be that you would wind it and it would play The Lovers Song, sort of an Italian answer to Greensleeves.

My city is burning. It smells a little like every neighbor I have is smoking a very chemically treated marijuana outside my window, and ash is drifting down from the sky. At first we thought it was a chemical accident, a nasty edged flame burning plastics somewhere by the water, but the internet told us otherwise. Burns Bog has caught on fire. The last time, almost ten years ago, Vancouver was blanketed in ash for two days. The methane-rich peat can smoulder underground almost indefinitely. This is especially nasty, as that’s one of our most protected pieces of wild preserve. It’s rather essential to our local environment. For one, it’s where almost all of our crows live. They commute every morning to scatter over the city and gather every evening to fly back in an immense trail of flapping black. They’re beautiful.

ZOMBIEWALK 2005!!!

Usually held in Toronto, this shambling, stumbling, flailing good time will be held in Vancouver this year! Yay us! So if you have a mild obsession with Zombies (as many of my friends do), or you simply love to get rotten and yell “Braaaaiiins” at random people, then mark this one on your calendar:

Saturday, August 27 – starts 4pm from the VAG and 5pm from 15th and Sophia
(near Main St).

(a month away, so you have plenty of time to plan to be there!)
The walk will start in two-stages as follows:

1. All non-lazy zombies (or “super zombies”) are invited to gather on or around the big steps at the Vancouver Art Gallery no later than 4pm. From the VAG the horde will be skytrain bound. After a stumble through the mall and a short jaunt on Vancouver’s fine public transit system we will de-train at Main St. station and stumble on up to the Bethlehem Lutheran Church – 320 East 15th – two blocks east of Main. Once there, we will take a short pause to collect ourselves, gnaw on brains, and meet up with . . .

2. The lazy zombies. A second group of zombies will gather in front of the above mentioned church (Bethlehem Lutheran, 320 East 15th, at Sophia and E 15th) at or around 5pm. Remember – zombies tend to move slowly and occasionally have problems with limbs falling off, body stiffness and possibly skytrain security officers. If you do not see any of your brethren exactly at 5pm, be patient. Mill about and look scary.

Once all zombie factions have massed at the church it will be time to head onward and uphill to Mountainview Cemetery at Fraser and 31st. For reference, the walk will proceed along Main Street to 31st should any zombie stragglers be left behind and/or spontaneous zombies wish to join the braaiiins procession.

Once at the cemetery, please be on good zombie behaviour – respect your brethren.

We will linger a short while in the cemetery before moving onwards to nearby Queen Elizabeth Park for some games, brains, fun, prizes, brains and a pinata or two.

Yes, you do have to dress like a zombie. Those who do not do so are welcome, but risk having their brains eaten by confused zombies. You have to admit – they’re not all that smart, but they know a good living brain when they smell it.

Potentially useful things to keep in mind:

Causes of zombie-ness:

As everyone knows – or should know – zombies are usually
attributable to one or more of the following:

1. voodoo
2. science gone astray – chemical or biological accidents, experiments, viruses and the like
3. the apocalypse

Of course, there are many more possibilties. Be creative. Corpses in all stages of decay are encouraged.

For the low-budget zombie:

1. Oatmeal and liquid latex works wonders.
2. Food colouring and corn syrup makes convincing blood, but sticky. However, also tasty.
3. Value Village – but I’m sure it’s hardly necessary to mention that.

Finally: As mentioned previously – zombies are only really effective when travelling together in large groups. Bring your friends, foes, family and other loved ones.

Nothing says you love someone quite like caking yourself in make-up, limping down the street together and eating them in the park!

Pass this info on to anyone who might be interested – it has a bit of a ‘viral’ feel to it, but see zombie cause number 2. It all makes perfect sense.

flesh and blood are 90 points water


are watching
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

Andrea is taking July SinCity as conquest for her birthday. Her army is to be the Pantheon.

I am part of that army, as Eris Discordia.

If anyone has any ideas as to where to find tiny golden apples…?

Today I feel as if I’m procrastinating, though I can’t think of what I could be doing. My playlist is on random, my entire music folder shuffling back and forth between righteous piano and demo mixes for obscure bands that I feel sometimes like only I’ve heard of. It’s appropriate, somehow, melding well with the invariable sirens this neighborhood attracts, and it occurs to me on days like this, as I look out my window at blank rainy gray, to ponder if art is created more at night. Every painter I’ve ever lived with, every musician, all the illustrators I talk to on-line, they’re always up late at night, running themselves into the ground to finish something, to get that last detail just right. I imagine all the insomniacs creating beauty to fill up their time and their loneliness while the stars turn overhead.

Which reminds me, Chris wrote me something. In an odd way we wrote it together, much of it being pieces of my conversation, though he’s the one who put all the words on screenpaper. I want to actually try writing with someone, but I haven’t the first idea as to how one would go about that. Megan is having a blogprov week in her journal, and I’m tempted to do the same, just to throw me back into writing things down. (I gave her show me on the doll where the internet touched you as a seed line.)

Sunday afternoon is the Mad Hatters Tea Party. An event that I am continually trying to get involved with, only to be thwarted by life in general. Chaos raining down upon me as if I’m simply not fated to be an Alice In Wonderland Character. It’s at Trout Lake (15th and Victoria) from 1-4:30pm. I’m due at Jenn’s Last Sunday Tea in the morning and early afternoon, but this is where I’m going right after. (Come in Costume!) Sunday is also DriveFest, a neighborhood event where Commercial Drive is closed off for a few blocks. There’s going to be performers for hours and little kids wandering around with face-paint on. If we’re lucky, there will even be balloons. Commercial Drive is the only unified neighborhood in Vancouver, so this should be lots of fun. There’s been gentrification at work, but it’s still the artistic core of the city. (Come one, come all!)

I sat here (j’vous dit pas la fumée dans l’atelier…)

From where I sit, I can look up to three black birds I brought back from L.A. They rest on a garland of sage that I’ve carried with me since I first started having sex with boys. It was an afternoon of singing for strangers in a strange land. Six years ago I was beginning to claim this city for my own. The birds look alert, like they could spread their fake wings and fly through the wall to some place I’ve never been. Pop out the other side of the white stucco and into a night sky with unfamiliar constellations. I can’t imagine them having any natural sound. I can imagine the computer hiss of an old modem maybe or the blurry tone of a rotary phone. Blackbird call home, blackbird eat the clouds, blackbirds that carry an analog name that I don’t know.

I’ve got days hanging from a dreaming tree, branches tearing upward and leaving contrails behind. The sound of shoes in an airport, the hallway, the picture I took there, the way the pictures were the same coming back. I fly and I follow by accident, by motorway, by the wrong direction.

This is a simple transition in my mind, Los Angeles to Vancouver to Toronto. There’s no disorder, only misplaced moments melding themselves into the best home movie. Hands in every shot, the evolution of devotion lagging behind the reality as my eyes sweep past out plane windows and I try to find my way home. There’s a dead child out there, hanging from a damned red moon, but I don’t see it, I’m blind from the panel glare, the colours that are printed in three little dots at a time. Something broken seems to flutter from my hair and the world changes, the person in the seat next to me has seen me cry.

Illuminaries

I am fully aware that Illuminaries was somewhat pathetic last year. I had, in fact, completely forgotten it’s existance. It took a wonderful poet of a tomato-thief gentleman to remind me. Silly me. I apparently make more of an impression on people than I am aware of. So!

Illuminaires!! Come one! Come all! See weaving serpents, birds in flight, planets in orbit, schools of fish, and creatures of the imagination, glowing and shimmering with music, fire sculptures, torch choreography and a fireworks finale… Join us July 26, 2003.

We’ll go from the pool party to the park!

Added bonus – I have all the materials we’ll need to make our own little lanterns, (excepting tealights. If anyone knows a good, cheap place to buy a bag of them, either tell me or bring them).

they tore down my childhood home

Yesterday I finally had a chance to go see for myself where the old house used to be. They tore it down on Saturday and now all left is a hole in the ground. Not a stone of the house remained. I feel somehow that I’m less of a person because I’m not sad that it’s gone, that I’m only disapointed that I didn’t get to watch the wreckers crush it into the ground. My best friend was there to see them destroy it and she said she cried – thinking about the years, her childhood, she/we had spent there. I cannot seem to care about it. No tears inside me anywhere. I have looked. I have scoured the little looked corners of my nostalgia and have found nothing.

Is there something wrong with me?