i'm so mad about this head-butt towel usurpation. i bet the people who sell it need use only one part at a time ("which part do i use when i have my head up my ass?"). bloody bastards. of course, the pants you can sit down in while standing up in have also been exploited. argh.

...and her diamond pituitary

A surf video. Brian Wilson's Smile and The Who Sell Out. Julian Cope's "Upwards at 45 degrees". A wayward, ice-spun candle. Our man Dave, irrespressible and a true 'are you feeling what I'm feeling?' kinda guy. Like kites, Steve, Dave and I (if only my first name was Lysergic, our initials would've rivalled even our 3 mushketeers days with Jordan) left Dave's rusted row boat and strolled speedy-quick to the GreenRoom. The tarmac was wetted by orange stars. A mist shrouded the forest in murk and magic as we passed and the angel was in static trip, pressing montreal close, wings backlit by construction lights. I couldn't care to ground others. To be there for others to push against, there was little to relate, because there was everything available.

we made the green room. merging with it, uncomfortable, damp and supreme. i went out to breathe through something other than others. and i saw the harp strings of the city, a latticework of time and semantic synaesthesia, like the silver chest-goo of determinacy in Donny Darko, except full and humming and backwards. prisms caught in the strands, of streaks of passing cars, in peoples' facial gymnastics, in a form of will that is normally found rarefied, but here was full and aligned, self-supporting and cohesive. i could not share this with anyone, so full of myself was i. sound was liquid, and i could focus on the slightest of attenuated detail. caught, like a plastic bag in a november tree, was the war of artistry. was i the sculptor or the sculpted? my hand hovering a crystal breadth from making the sodden surface of clay. the delicate ones on the dancefloor, too easily punished by truth. the sculpted I could become the master, a golem with a word in its skull. my abstaining hand whipped me around the material. I became the sculptor through the sculpture, by joining with it, with knuckle and nail, every pithy ounce of it I came to know through that width of weave that withheld the world.

lucid and dreaming, the night went on. us, the seekers. until we broke the clouds open the next day by climbing the mountain and upzipping the sky. the sun shone because of us.

Lucy

I've been looking for a new job for some time, so long, I don't know what I'd do if I get one.. I'm not fresh, or eager, and I'll likely just wave away the interview questions with disdain, if they ever even happen. In an attempt to counteract my encroaching apathy, I had a fake interview the otherday, with myself. In this encounter, I ran over every interview I could remember, in my mind, until I answer each with ease. Surprisingly fun. The one most wince-worthy was when I got called in to an interview as the press-release, media guy and kiddy-fun-man for a fledgling toy company a few years ago. At first it went swimmingly, the man and woman were both robotics geeks and we had a good immediate rapport. But then they called me on something I said: 'I have an inventive mind.' I guess they took this quite literally, and so asked me what I had invented. I had very limited examples at hand, so, thinking quickly (and obviously not thoroughly) told them about a towel I'd come up with. I call this the 'head-butt' towel. The concept is rather simple, but clicks with something everyone wonders about: when I last dried myself, which part of the towel did I use to dry my head and which my genitals? The towel would be huge, and split vertically into black and white. The black bit saying 'BUTT', the white 'HEAD'. This confession was met with absolute silence, other than the sound of me sucking on my teeth. The interview became awkward and basically terminated one slender minute later. I didn't get the job. I would have hired me on the spot. Like the release of all good ideas into the ideational stratosphere, someone caught it with their dream-net and made it happen. Even down to the colouration. Bastards.

@ @ @

Meanwhile, I'm at a 'stand and be counted' crux of my life. I have no job. My relationship with Isabel is over as of this past week, and I've been cut from Isabel's blog links. I'm down to my last $8. McGill has a collection agent after me. Telus is threatening me with social castration (not that that'll make much difference these days). My sister's going to Kenya for 2 months, but I haven't yet spoken to her. I haven't eaten since Friday and counting (other than a slice Steve-o boughted me yesterday). I feel like one of those white dried-out turds that noone'll touch, not even a sniff from the mangiest dog. Yet, I have something good to relate. Something that I'll take with me for life.

If Quebec ever does seperate, I think it should change it's name to Quba.

book to the future

i've withheld jotting down lists here for as long as i could: today i fold. here's my last year in book. approxiately (it's probably more like the last 2 years, just to sound more smarter and this is in no particular chronological order.)

*The Englishman's Boy - Guy Vanderhaeghe
The Final Crossing - Guy Vanderhaeghe
*The Crossing - Cormac McCarthy
*Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
*Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
*Foundation - Isaac Asimov
*Bone Doll's Twin - Lynn Flewelling
The Eye of the World - Robert Jordan
The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand
The Future of Architecture - Frank Lloyd Wright
*A Fire Upon the Deep (Zones of Thought) - Vernor Vinge
*The Untouchable - John Banville
House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski
The Boat Who Wouldn't Float - Farley Mowat
Embryos, Galaxies and Sentient Beings - Richard Grossinger
*The Poetics of Space - Gaston Bachelard
Harry Potter, 1-6 - J.K. Rulestheworld
Sea Stories (The Nigger of "Narcissus", Lord Jim and Typhoon) - Joseph Conrad
Ender's Game (again), Speaker for the Dead - Orson Scott Card
The Magus - John Fowles
*Justine (Alexandria Quartet) - Lawrence Durrell
*One River - Wade Davis
Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson
*Neuromancer (yet again) - William Gibson
The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

* = I recommend
There's more, but my brain is little more than a tuborous root when it comes to book tracking.

@ @ @

I walk through the alleys a lot, they're great ways to circumnaviagate the commercial streets both quickly, get lost in thought and see some honest buildings... this particular tuesday, i saw some fake poo in the alley. I thought to myself 'that poo looks fake' and went to pick it up. Then I remembered where I was, and on closing on the poo, it now an armspan away, it didn't look as fake anymore. I thought to myself: ah, only in Montreal would they have fake looking real poo, and not real looking fake poo.

The Moron Terror

I saw a heartwarming thing this morning: a hair-stylist on a ciggie break was being given a lesson on how to squeegie windows by a squeegie kid. I stood directly behind them as I waited for the Duluth and St. Denis light to change. It was like one of those odd-couple Disney moments, like the Fox and the Hound catching beetles together. I also wondered if she intended to complete the trade-trade, invite him in, give him scissors and offer him one of her clients' heads. "This is Scab, he'll be your beautician today." Most righteous hair cut Cindy's client will ever get and from a guy who probably cuts his own hair by slamming it in car doors. The moral of this story is that I waited for a traffic light to change.

@ @ @

Of late, in my conversations with people, the topic thread of optimism/pessimism and its relation to fulfillment has been revived. I've always wondered about optimism: if a self-proclaimed optimist generally believes in favourable outcomes, does that inherently mean that they believe the world to be a shitty place? Therefore, would a pessimist know the world to be a happy-fun place, but expect the worst? Because both optimism and pessimism stray from some sort of consensus of reality, the expected consequence of the opto/pesso must also pass comment about their personal reality, no? Or is personal reality only an expression of expectation? In which case an opto is such when compared against the average norm.. DANG, I can never quite say this the way I mean. While I'm confused, I may as well bungle through another thought that pops up often... re: DNA... I'll need a new paragraph here. For the sake of argument, I won't consider animals sentient here (whilst I do consider them so in real life, here it'll just muddy the proposal)

* Humans are sentient beings (with some distribution error)...

* Sentience is determined by us, so therefore it is a soley human trait (necessary and sufficient)...

* Environmental reality determines the conditions for successful micro/macro recombinative recreation...

* Sentience, on some level, is our awareness of and prompts our reaction to, our environment (nothing new here)...

* Sentience is nought more than a focal point of biological processes, which are in turn founded upon (and yet mysteriously disobey) thermodynamic principles (again, those principles being terms we cocreated in forms in which we understand them, we need some remedial metaphysics classes badly)...

* Sentience, or human intelligence, is arguably the cutting edge of evolutionary biology (wherein we are learning to control our details through control of our inner/outer environments)...

* Consciousness is a necessary condition of sentience...

* Consciousness (what is it?) is indivisible, and the thin edge of the evolutionary wedge...

* How is consciousness experienced fluidly (in terms of temporal procession, what joins one moment to the next)? and is it? would it still be consciousness if it could be served episodically, like in Slaughterhouse 5?...

* Could consciousness be the thinnest of contemporary enviromental connections, made confluent by memory and co., but otherwise a connection of gossamer proportions?...

* So then, is consciousness just a playground structure for DNA in function, the proto-lab of all that determines successive reproduction? To exact the premise: consciousness both determines and is determined by DNA. All our sentient and executive biological functions serve ourselves MORE and GREATER than our Selfs (if that makes sense). Genetic memory, then, is responsible for everything and is determined in a spatial/temporal 'moment' of infinitely small porportions (right NOW... etc.). Therefore, is your consciousness a 'hologram' or 'impression' (for lack of better words) of your culminative biology as it exists momentarily? You are both more and less than you thought you were. Where this gets really interesting is how singular conscious beings interact: Reality, here, is a weapons-development and testing arena for micro-organic transcendence. Crazy. This may sound trite and obvious to some, but I think, if you wallow in the questions a bit, they get more fascinating than the potential answers. It's kinda nice to be able to think of consciousness as function for a change.

followup thoughts, again, hardly new stuff, but hey...

-is our concept of Time sufficient, or is it a biological trap?

-say we're 10% thought, 90% swampy, briny, tendon strung, walking ponds. don't all we want to be able to do is push that to 11% thought, to 12%+?

-this guy's got a lot to say: Embryos, Galaxies and Sentient Beings

-as we enslaved/coopted organelles to work cellularly and thereon to create multi-celled creatures (greater than the sum..), i believe humans have the desire to recapitulate the same on a macroscopic degree: the city as body, for example (body politic?). i also believe that this (dare I say evolutionary) desire is where we got all scrambled up about God. we are trying to create God, he is destination. in that regards, historical religion has made significant contributions towards approaching God: unifying and standardizing languages, code of law, commonality, allusions to personal transcendence etc., but all through allegory (so dangerous) rather than actual professed intent. if only we could unstick ourselves in mortal time, and see it all with different scope. like how a geologist or astrophysicist must be attempting to understand it all.

-what authority can we trust to shape our future?

-with such pressure to optimize ourselves, to get ever quicker (existential impatience), we miss out on slow processes. when was the last time you performed a pedestrian task trying to go as slowly and thoroughly as you could (brushing your teeth, a walk to the dep)? i've tried this a few times, and it's a surprisingly interesting device in reawakening experiential levels that may've been occluded or sent into exile (ie. great trick for coping with depression or burnout or desensitization). it is more than just smelling the roses though: The Art of Slow, like any art, is a practice, not an accomplishment. Your body becomes vessel again, and not constraint. I want to write a lot more about this.

FUNNY! as i was lummoxing through the above vagueries, a trio of aged Germans came up to ask me where DNA Records was! That works on so many levels... The only thing funnier than German sterotypes is Germans.

Isabel told me last week that I've been very arrogant as of late. I wish I'd replied with something like, "I'll tell you when I'm being arrogant." Instead I said "oh."

if i had a head made of wood (i estimate only a few more dedicated nights at the biftek), i'd carve out a bat-box. you'd have to speak quietly to me, or else i'd be forced to shoosh you, or spit an angry bat at you. "you remember what happened last time you yelled at me, Blinky got the runs and i oozed guano out of my nose for a half hour afterwards." i think i'd also have matching doorknobs for ears. that'd be nice.

this is just stupid, what am i saying? no-one respects people with doorknobs for ears. i have really little ears right now, so if i get any kind of ear-augmentation at all, i'd go for a pair of boobs. that'd be nicer. i'd probably get to about 7 or even 6 on the 'best Montreal weirdo' in next year's BOM. #7 Wood-headed, bat-filled, B-cups for ears guy.

my laptop takes a while to fire up its beefy innards, wheezing on the billows (generating enough heat to set up a popcorn maker, or hair-curler. i'm looking into the hardware). each time, my desktop'll display a picture of a bubble-base on a moon. it looks like a primary school science fair contribution, but it's actually from the NASA archives ("Billy, get those crayons out of your mouth"). you'd think they were beyond the 'artist's impression' stage of conjecture, but... regardless, every day the machine comes on, and i have a long 4 minutes of blinking shortcuts. during this, i count how many moonmen i can find. assuming there's two in the launched shuttle, how many moonmen can you see?

hangover, hangover, I call ____ over

some sentences, pause
words, like gaps in a smile
silences pop
the tiniest spaces are the tinnitus
in meaning's ear nest

language is sometimes a cowled coward
the inner battle of a lonely cod

silver and silver

does our hero suture
action to intent
seemlessly?
what tongue licks salt from the rocks,
but replaces apples to the crisping trees

too bad your brain
is grey
and decay
a glyptic hermit who'll never touch
daynight
only receive whispered report
from his friends, the crickets

we, the pond
enrapt in hushed bondage
shuffling gapward
do words taste?
do sentences really?

SHURIKEN-DO

steve, graham, julian and justine, their mates pete and suzie, and i all took a few metal petals to the head on saturday night. it was NINJA TUNE's 10th anniversary in Montreal held at metropolis, the principle venue hall for strolling minstrels and pop-royalty. we met with isabel and her roommate of yore, hillary, at the foufs, seeing them off to their The Stills show. as a group, we resonated with collective quivers of anticipation. the line-up: Blockhead (a hip-hoppier Bonobo. only comparison i can really make there) with DJ signify, KID KOALA, and Coldcut. now, some might scoff, but this represents a significant tour de force, in both market power and musical innovation, and maybe one of the most mentionable labels of the last baker's decade. and the ticket price reflected that (a veritable skinning), but it was well worth it. the place was about as packed as it could get, without being an Our Lady Piece of Fecal Vomit concert (die already, OLP) and excitement ran very high. Blockhead played a few of his tunes from Downtown Science and Music by Cavelight, with Signify scratching atop. it was a good set, and engaging. the incredible happened though when Kid Koala was released onto the stage: a wee man, he humbly adjusted his dj dais in the dark (he needed a bit of a vertical boost) and touched each of his four (!!!) turntables ritualistically. he said hello and then morphed into a blur of virtuoso. i think i blacked out, but i'll recount what i remember. alternating between cheeky tongue-on-teeth grins, licked fingers and the occasional giggle as picked up by his mic, he switched between collector's esoterica and notable pop songs of the last few years, playing THROUGH each one, layering rhythms to the point that each song was perverted into a massive, and weighty, merging pudding.. the sound fidelity was astonishing. he closed by attributing a song to his mum (mother's day and all), where he played Moonriver against itself (he may have even had 3 copies playing at one time, inserting a percussive kicker towards the end). the only other prop he had on stage was a towel (if he'd only bottle his sweat, i'd definitely make lemonade with it). best set i've ever seen, bar none. 'super-scratchuated' as graham aptly put it.
Coldcut came on, as only they could, they are the mainstream sound of ninja tune, basically maintaining status quo without straying too far from fomula. as steve said, how can you hope to follow the kid? it was flashy stuff. big ol' beats and a video formula that kept your eyes wide. highlights: whilst there was scratching galore, one trick i'd never seen live (though it sounds obvious enough) was the juggling of the image to each sound clip. for example, an angus young VS. jimmy hendrix guitar-battle (who HASN'T wondered about that one?), or Prince Charles popping and locking. Fun.
Then we went to the afterparty, courtesy of pete, who interns at the ninja. it was a funny little affair, astoundingly pretty girls, and a few of the bigwigs wondering around. i could only really manage an obsequious goggle at some of them, which is silly, as, to our credit, we don't usually get THAT overwhelmed by someone's notoriety. the music at the afterparty was a bit of a ninja preschool (like watching the bluebelts spar) and not that amazing (obviously, there wasn't 20,000 watts of sound anymore, more like 500). but we'd been wiped clean by the kid, who we spent most of our time scouting for. i found out yesterday that he didn't even make it in, the bouncers told him to go away (i think we took his armband), which if i was ninja chief, i'd have the bouncer's job for. even amon tobin had to hustle to get in. we definitely did not belong there, no matter how much at one point in our lives we wanted to. and now i can't frigging get Coldcut and Mr. Manuva's 'True Skool' out of my head (you know that spot where the likes of REM and Joan Osborne have mind-raped you for hours at a time, right in there). it'll be one of those ubiquitous summer songs, you can just tell.

@ @ @

To reiterate a question from a few months ago, what is it about girls and Sublime songs?

@ @ @

Something quite sad is happening, that I'm not really ready to talk about, but my roommates and their friends are all packing up to go back to their respective countries. I miss Miss Amy Baty so much already. I'll set up a shrine for them all when I get the piccies in.

@ @ @

I haven't forgotten about you thinkbeforedoing@hotmail.com, I'm just staggeringly stubborn when it comes to riddles like yours. A shared memory like Marc Guillet deserves as much deductive credence as possible. Though I must admit, I ALMOST give up.

@ @ @

If you do happen to read this, thank you very much Lynn (one of my favourite reads of the genre ever) for writing back. Very informative resources those, answering questions I didn't even know I had. Ta for that. If only Christopher Walken had been as considerate.

more diverse than your mother

I've always wanted to go up to a member of the clergy and ask to speak to his supervisor. I have no idea who I'd be introduced to.. Jesus, their founding CEO, took waaay early retirement; their current Press Secretary is a creepy German who looks like his kidneys migrated up to his eyelids; all the other guys in middle management seem to be caught up in some kinda pyramid scheme.. actually, the only reason I'd ask would be to see the guy's reaction. It's probably the best scam ever created: a life-long investment for a product that happens only when you're dead.. (I think the quarrel I'd present the super is that I'd want to sign on terms that allow the transmigration of soul BEFORE I died). I really do wonder who'd come from out back: "Hello, my son, I am ___" the A&W bear? Tom Cruise? George Lucas' neck fat?

@ @ @

For some time, I've been reminiscing over Diversity Fest, a 3-day island party Kim, Meghan and I went to last summer. No words really exist to capture it. It was on Texada Island, a tiny spit of land a 15 minute ferry from Powell River, just off the coast of mainland BC. Hippies and ravers and contortionists and all people tribal were there, and traipsed between 4 stages of continual music. My favourite label was represented by Adham Shaikh, a psy-tribal deej who made my feet bleed. Suns set to Fire Hurlers (particularly fire Marshal, a guy who lives in Cowichan Bay, and delivers great barn afterparties there, where he'll twirl fire atop a decommisioned missile launcher. Awesome.) Mornings were met by crashing waves and naked hippies swimming. Sleep was best had during the morning. AND THERE WAS A PIEROGI BAR!! The beats were fat, the jam-bands were hot, there were didjeridoo workshops, there were Jewish gypsy youths that played some mean folk, stoneds extras from Mad Max movies (walking up a path, I saw some guy wearing welding goggles standing abreast of my route. He wasn't paying any attention to me, only to what he was holding. He put a pipe up to his mouth, and then placed a magnifying glass in a device attached to the pipe, twiddled with a tuning bolt, and lit his pipe with the power of the sun. What a fucking hippie.), Meghan bartered for everything, food, clothes, beads etc., as she carried a particular commodity that proved very popular amongst the peddlars. Overall, it was an AMAZING time, and Kim and I have made a pact of sorts to attend again this summer. I implore anyone who is interested to look into going. You'll be so much cooler when it's over. Oh, and itchier.

Willy Power

This picture's been floating around the web for years, and I'm sure it's on every second blogsite. For the more impressionable amongst you, just remember, it's poor form to doubledip.

I am back in Montreal... met fresh off the plane by sweet Isabel. What a nice surprise. Now I retreat into a minor Island diatribe.

Every time I visit, I get the feeling that the Island is one large social experiment. Vancouver Island has the highest concentration of women I’ve ever seen. The ratio is something close to 2:1, w:m. The vainglorious would say this is a wonderful thing, as generally more women = more women. But the actuality is several degrees more complicated. Ladies’ associations are social forges, and admittance to them demands comportment to the rules. These rules are unwritten, of course, but they decree that you toe the line. It is crucial for this account to recognize that the vast majority is composed of white women, and they’ll drop the political correctness curtain on anyone who holds an unsavorary stage. This results in a social phenomenon of literal symbology: if you say X, you must mean X. This only helps protect ignorance, as issues are tactfully avoided, rather than mined for solutions or causality. Racial problems are rarely experienced and discussion of them is taboo. I believe this misdirected largess could be due to west coasters’ sensitivity towards the First Nations. Meanwhile, half the men there have been subjugated to living the life of social relic. For this reason, guys opt for the more recreational lifestyle: dirt biking, kite surfing, spitting, model car racing… the list is inexhaustible. This causes a mild sensation of social stagnancy and somehow contributes to an ambience of arrested maturity. Vancouver Island, as my sister and I recognize it, is a veritable Never-Never Land, though that has much to do with many other factors. Meanwhile I have a few examples of fauxmenism: 2 springs ago, an ex-friend of my sister shut me up on a day-trip to Saltspring Island with the risible statement that “guys do not get as much out of traveling as girls”. For some reason, she was blind to the realization that they might get something completely different out of it, something she couldn’t relate to (therefore, it was negligible). She spent the rest of the day nit-picking over any action I did: peeing outside, inspecting a newt, cross-examining me every time I spoke. Eventually I had to tell her off for superimposing her idiocy on me. Another story that made the editorials in the Victoria paper The Times Colonist was of a rally group called Take Back the Night. The idea was to have a march of solidarity for victims of rape and mugging. This candlelit procession was sent through the dodgier neighbourhoods and Beacon Hill Park (perhaps the most beautiful urban park I’ve ever witnessed) in a show of chanted support. However, when a man arrived to march alongside his wife and children he was booed away. They actually told him to leave! I could see how some victims would be sensitive to his presence, but their emotional response undermined the point of the whole gathering. That’s not feminism, that’s sexism.

My point is that while feminism has a very real purpose of design, it fails exactly where all other ideologies fail: when it stiffens into dogmatism. Then it is used without adherence to the greater goal, and mutates into self-interested promotion. Most instances of professed feminism that I witnessed were actually methods of controlling other women. Unless social equity is not the objective here, it is positive action that is needed: acts of tempered inclusion, promoted awareness, open discussion, acceptance, and self-inspection. A negative focus will only twist the point and belie any progress that may’ve otherwise been made. Doesn’t hating men give them a certain power over you? Are you going to hate them for that as well?

There is also many great things to having a greater proportion of girls: the annual homicide rate in Victoria is whopping great 1. There is a vast wealth of pretty girls. Gardens are wonderfully maintained. Fruit drips off the trees. Newspaper editorials are pretty superfickle and don't go plumb depths much deeper than heated debates over the rights of dogwalkers and the softwood lumber debacle. The food, though really expensive, is healthy and fresh. Even one of the streets is called Menzies.

Alright, I’m off to take a Midol. I’ll try and write more about my mum’s house and actual visit of Bex, Kim, Ben, Dave, Nicole and Jordan later, as they're all really deserving of a meaty description. Hopefully I’ll have some pictures of them to pace it.