Archive for November 2008
http://toronto.en.craigslist.ca/tor/mis/
My mother, when she was young, had a son, and
It was pouring rain..and we both found ourselves standing outside
you even cite the James Blunt tune
tune
you even
tune
Is it that you are you afraid that they will snub you?
and flashed a huge goofy smile
and flashed a huge goofy smile
and flashed a huge goofy smile
and flashed a huge goofy smile
Hume and Locke will make you feel better.
Trust me
me
TTTTTTTTTRR
My friend interrupted our brief encounter,
caught your eye and tugged
What harm is there in that?
What harm is there in that?
What harm is there in that?
What harm is there in that?
to your
to your computer to post your feelings on Craigslist
I am her daughter, and tonight, I found out about it.
the times we spent together,
the together the the times
You were ahead of me in the line
(Bloor West), approx 2:30 on Thurs, Nov 20
Maybe I’ll donate next time 
.
Would YOU be offended?
Or is this a cruel joke?
I can’t help but smile.
For a Cold November
Brr! The stocks and leaves are falling and my family is kind of coming apart. I don’t feel much like writing right now. Instead I give you the refuge of the writer’s blocked, music posts with brief comments!
Can – Vitamin C // Ege Bamyasi
Never say a bad thing about Damo Suzuki or I will appear before you and club you with a rainbow. Listen to them drums!
The Dixie Cups – Iko Iko // Soul Jazz Presents: Saturday Night Fish Fry
Behold, the power of ashtray percussion. The song makes me happy. I want a cigarette. COINCIDENCE?
Clouds – Shallow // Tes La Rok/Clouds Split 12″
I’d never heard Joanna Newsom before when I first listened to this and I had no idea who or what was singing. Was it a creepy little boy? Was it a pitiless and cheerful elf? No, I discovered. It was not a boy. It was not an elf. Just Joanna. In my daydream music video, she is portrayed by a large animated spider and she kind of looks up at you when she says “Do you want to ride on my back? Pray that what you lack does not distract,” because she is deciding which herbs and spices would go well with your body.
Anyway I’d date her.
King Midas Sound – One Ting (Dabrye) // Cool Out EP
Okay, the vocals don’t set my soul on fire, but you have to— hey, there goes a subway made out of xylophones!
It’s pixellated, see? And you’re on all of these clouds, way up high, and the sky is a really deep like, navy-black. You can see lots of stars. They twinkle pixelatedly. An iron-red meteor passes BWEEEEEEEOOOOO, then a Sputnik streaks by, BWAAAAAAAOOO, and then SHEEEOOOOW this little spaceship crashlands in the clouds. There’s a puff of cloud. A kid in pajamas gets out of the spaceship and he’s greeted by a walking green sprout thing with a mustache.
“Hello!” says the mustache sprout. “We don’t get many visitors here. What’s your name?”
“I… I don’t remember,” says the kid in pajamas.
“That’s a shame,” says the mustache sprout. “A shame. I see that your spaceship is broken. Would you care to be a good sport and play through several clever puzzles in return for the space junk required to fix it?”
“I… I guess so,” says the kid.
“Splendid!”
Lee “Scratch” Perry & The Upsetters – Double Power // Rhythm Shower
I think I associate this with water because in Zelda for the N64 the Zora level starts with the same organ fall and reverb. That’s why. Thank you for asking. You have a good day, too!
Joey Beltram – Energy Flash // Classics
When I listen to this I can kind of understand the people who thought that rave would change the world. Ignore the cheesy 909 hats and imagine yourself sharing the total darkness of an abandoned warehouse with four thousand other people, out of your mind on a drug nobody’s ever heard of, neon squirming everywhere like seafloor predators, perspiration running down the walls. I think you’d be well convinced. Am I projecting?
Jamie Woon – Wayfaring Stranger (Burial Mix) // Wayfaring Stranger 12″
Boo hoo I am a sad religious cyborg subjugating the third world in the name of the faceless corporation which took my humanity away. At least I get this wicked golden messianic dream sequence/gritty battle scene montage!
If only more music was like being yelled at by Martian hillbillies. Whenever I get sad I just remember the time that Damo Suzuki put his hand on my shoulder and said “Joe, PRRRRRGABABBAGAG FFHNGNGNAAAEEEE ANG ANG ANG FRRRADDLEPADDLE PRRRRREEEOOOOPAPAPDABDABDEDADADFRRR GRNNNNN SMUUUUU WAHBABAZABBADA” and I think “you know, he had a point” and I don’t feel so bad.
Anyway I should be doing homework. You take care now.
What I Did On My Summer Vacation
Eighth August, 2008. Cold friday evening. Streets full up with slack pink or turquoise fratbeasts. Sidewalks larded with their acrid vomit. What’s on the floor? Bugs; jabbing with the toe of my sneaker I paste one to the dirty tile. Clear viscera.
—
What I Learned on my Summer Vacation
I too have seen the violet fire of katyusha salvos in the night; I’ve smelled the burned juniper and heard the pines crack their guts with heat. Stained with smoke and breathed fine dust in Baba-Yagaland, my brains boiling in electric dexedrine syrup, grinding my teeth, on my belly with the other recruits, peering into the dark and hooting to each other.
Enter my BM-27 and you will find that it is a vehicle of people and not just a thing. There are coffee cups in the cabin, a small red air freshener in the shape of a circle, cigarette butts on the dashboard and broken pencils, maps with corrections, stiff and filthy carpeting which has milky crystals of ice-melt salt still in it from last winter, the winter before that, back and back to before Glasnost. The freshener has “breeze” written on it in white cursive cyrillic. The BM-27 is a home for wayward boys.
The action of it is so beautiful and the target so far away that it is easy to forget about them as one thing and easy to think of them as two things instead. In the back of my electrocuted mind I can trace the link because I’ve seen the effects directly. A BM-27 will strip down a row of khrushchyovkas into broken brick teeth and burn the insides into greasy fumes in the time it takes to pour a cup of tea. This I know because the summer of the katyushas was also the summer I walked through quiet quiet Tskhinvali to look upon my good works.
Missiles have to them a schizophrenic violence which I saw in the cratered dentition of the apartment rows; I saw a kitchen was open in the air and walked through it. There was a dog shit dissolving in rainwater on the floor of the kitchen. The bathroom had a wall for some reason and clung to its privacy. I walked around the wall and found that there was a chunk of ceiling too. It was a drywall and timber ceiling, mostly clawed apart. The fibre in the drywall was animal, maybe horsehair; where it gave way above to grey daylight it was bearded and this beard had crumbs of sheetrock and wet beads of rain in it like spittle.
I walked away from the bathroom and the kitchen and saw a foot in the road, in a shoe. A white tennis shoe, quite clean. The body was missing like the roof or the west walls or some of the windows of the buildings. The windows some of them were completely intact; within the rows of khruschyovkas they formed a binary of broken and whole. Their message was to me unclear.
I did this, I thought. I pressed the button or it’s equal to if I pressed it; my missiles did something like this if these were not them. It was three days ago that we’d deployed in the pine forests in the mountains to the North. Most of the movable bodies were gone and the people had long since disappeared.
An ambulance lay on its side with one half through a twisted iron fence on a short front lawn and the other half on the sidewalk and the street. It was a Lada from the late 1970s and had originally been a cargo van. Maybe it had been other things. Probably. Separate lives and separate owners I would not meet. As an ambulance I guessed it was mostly a hearse. It was covered in dalmatian burn marks and its tires were melted. Twenty feet away on the road there were short black scuds and a crater which opened into the sewer, marking where it had been scooped up.
The undercarriage of the ambulance must have been mostly rusted out before the missile hit it and the impact had shattered it straight through so that the roof was visible through the bottom. Inside was a mess; when I began to understand it I looked away.
Three days ago in the forest on the night of the attack I was smoking and looking around for a place to piss and I found a carved thing planted in the dirt under a tree. It made me jump when I saw it because I thought it was a little person crouching down and I laughed at myself and looked around.
The carving had the look of a man though this was mostly implied; its shape was that of a cartoon gravestone. Maybe it was supposed to be wearing a hat. Runnels had been chiselled out of its front to look like a beard and there remained a film of faded woodstain on it in red and blue triangle patterns. It looked very very very old. How is it so preserved? I asked myself. Looking closer I found the placement of the eyes was strange and the face odd. There was no crucifix around its neck or any other iconography I recognised. Now I had a dexedrine shiver and felt something disturb me. I unzipped my pants and untucked my dick and peed on the carving almost without knowing what I was doing and at first I was laughing but I stopped mid stream. I felt suddenly awful.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I said and backed away and zipped up and left with my eyes over my shoulder.
Here in Tskhinvali there is nothing old but a sense remains. There is less old now because of the old SSSR and also modern katyushniks like me. Still I feel the ribcage of this place enclose me in its history and drag me to drown. The Cossacks and the Russians and the Tartars and the Slavs and the Pre-Slavs down to the neolithic tribes were teenagers with weapons looking for blood each locked into a mob chain of trying to outdo the other. Carrying torches and out of their minds on Fly Agaric, drinking their own piss, running knives through pregnant bellies.
Sitting down on a chunk of fallen masonry I unwrapped with shaking fingers a dexedrine from my pack and discarded the stiff clear plastic wrapper into the air. A laundry line had fallen onto the road and the clothes had been sullied; cast-offs from an English speaking country in chip grey and pale cool pastels. There was a girl’s slip of faded yellow with lace edging, something worthwhile. It rained two days before and the clothes were wet. The new dexedrine began to replace the old dexedrine and I heard voices calling “Marek! Marek!” and stood up but no-one was there.
