a life for two hundred November 4, 2009
Posted by eatnorthamerica in things that are not quite things we know.2 comments
Elton John keeps playing on the radio when I use the washroom at work. Three for three, these last two days.
My mother had a collection of songs by Elton John, recorded by various other people who were sometimes better and sometimes worse than Elton John. At ten, at eleven, I pored over the CD cover insert, wondering about the stories that went along with each song, and why Wilson Phillips did a better job of singing Daniel than Elton ever did.
I hardly ever buy CDs, now. Gone’s the day when I used to fear tracking a greasy smear over a fold of glossy sleeve paper. Lost, long gone, dearly departed. The world at your fingertips. It’s too easy, just like everything is these days, which is why if you don’t make a substantial effort to be entertaining or entertained, you end up really bored. Danger, danger. We’re so cool.
My friend, a neophyte record collector, just drove off to somewhere nowhere in BC to pick up 2,500 records, the sum total of a man’s life in music. Imagine that, trading the songs of a lifetime for a mere 200 dollars, a paltry amount, less than 10 cents a record — what drives a man to that? I wonder if the old fogey who sold them bought an iPod to replace the records you can’t even find catalogued on the internet — the internet, for chrissakes. Some of them date back to 1905. Think about it. That’s older than anyone I know. It gladdens my heart that there are still people who worship the outmoded, that there are people who journey hundreds of miles to collect a pile of records that some people happily sell for a dime. It’s either low junk or high art, or maybe a little bit of both, and perhaps the stories we all leave in marginalia — those are all we are, after we leave, and pass on.
rules for rejection #2 October 25, 2009
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Reasons to replace books on shelves: they contain the word purring, but not the word cat.
Posthaste is a word that seems to have fallen out of fashion lately.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/caitlin_moran/article6878191.ece#
I like telephones more than email, but only hold conversations with a very select group of close friends. Mostly dear people in foreign parts with whom playing email catch-up turns into a segue rally of ten thousand word disquisitions. Or those in my hyperfriends zone.
We spent an inordinate amount of time on the phone when I was young. Now we buy overpriced drinks, and sit around in bars bemoaning our lost youths.
here some random art crap be oh what larks and joy
marilyn monroe quick head sculpt (pure maya box model): not quite finished, obviously; shall patch it up once body’s done. it’s kind of nice to work with just pure polygonal modelling sometimes. i just eyeball this stuff to get a feeling for the face rather than rotoscoping. it’s all stylised anyway.
ugly man: quick zbrush doodle (couple hours)
a secret i’ve never told October 9, 2009
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Here’s a story I’ve never told anyone. I hate the concept of ghosts, the paranormal, of anything that can’t be coldly dissected.
I lived in the house of a colonial merchant whowas by no small coincidence also my grandfather. In the heart of Singapore, buried amongst the verdant fronds of palm and the fumes of dreaming machines.
The house stood tall, stood beautiful; hieroglyphs rambled over carved wooden doors I could not read. My grandfather made his fortune trading antiques, beautiful old ebony chairs inlaid with mother-of-pearl, chairs made by a dwindling supply of old men (all men, and old), the masterworkers of a craft that once dead will never live again. We are losing them, the wickerworker with his raffia baskets, the ting-ting candy man with his cart of hammered white candy, tailor’s chalk shards of sugar. I only ever heard the dulcet chimes of hammers less than the sum of half my fingers; the flavour prickles still, on my tongue.
These ornate chairs, these inlaid chests and boxes with their dragon scrolls and phoenix coils; they sat in our basement, shadowed and dark and squeaking with rats. I was seven hells terrified of that damned basement. My parents knew it; they liked to wield it as a threat. Drink your cod liver oil, damn that stuff, eat your carrots, do your sums, practise your violin. Or sleep in the basement tonight.
No! I don’t believe in ghosts. I deny them as purely illogical. Pray the hungry ghosts do not believe in you.
I was five. I did my sums. I ate my carrots.
We had this shipment in, one monsoon season. The lovely thing about these gorgeous storied objets d’art is that many of them arrive from the estates of people who have recently, well, died. My folks were quite taken with one lacquer music-box, unusual, with a Western mechanism, a hybrid. They wanted to keep it upstairs, in the family rooms. I didn’t like looking at it. Something about it made my skin crawl. My father put it back in the basement.
One night I did something particularly annoying, and possibly bad, although I don’t remember what — maybe I was just being hyperactive, the product of an early high fructose corn syrup addiction, I’ve forgotten; it matters not.
EIther way, I really did get locked out of our upper floors that night, and so I stood shivering in the oppressive darkness before I had the presence of mind to reach out, waiting for teeth to come out of the dark and slash my fingertips, or the chill distals of a grasping hand to claw my wrist — none of which happened. The light snapped on, that stark fluorescent flicker that either reminds you of a mental ward, or puts you there.
Squeezing my arms over my ribs, dead centre in that big basement, under the light, I turned, stretching the basement into a seamless panoramic view. The rats hid, silent.
Rotating quietly, sweating, that’s when I heard it; the faint tinkle of a music box, chiming through the night, echoing around the dull walls. I didn’t go around making shit up as a child, I’ll tell you that for free.
I don’t mind telling you this for free, too; I was up the stairs and knocking on the living room door and screaming my lungs out so loud I’m not surprised my parents let me in right away. In the warmth and light, I never told the whole story; it seemed ridiculous, and when they asked what I was yelling about, I said — maybe a rat. I told you, I didn’t go around making shit up as a child — maybe it was a rat, who knows, one that just managed to lift that heavy lacquer lid — hell yeah, let’s call it a rat. Why not.
But the one thing I don’t like talking about is that my last glimpse of the box, as I ripped up the stairs three-by-three, was the lid. It lay shut.
I don’t like thinking about that night; it’s like holding up the hagiographic pages of Time, and realising that the paper is so porous that you can see little halos limned by stabs of light.
When the shipment sold, I stood watching the furniture get packed up, and drawn by some dumb compulsion, I told my brother to look inside the music box. The date on the box — I don’t know what date it was, or who put it here, but it was there — it was the same date I was born, and now my skin’s begun to crawl.
The whole story I just told you, it’s all bullshit. There were no ghosts, there was no music box, and I never snap straight up in the void darkness, sweat slaking down my spine.
It’s not true. It’s not.
The tale of the ting-ting candy man is resonant of this the kamishibai man. They are gone, and soon they will be dead.
mean people suck September 29, 2009
Posted by eatnorthamerica in things that are not quite things we know.3 comments
In just under two months I will have been here for two years. I was twenty-seven. I am twenty-nine. I smell the new decade coming, and it smells like summer, falling.
2007, November, rain.
There was a paving stone, on the block up from me, vandal-slashed into the idiom ‘MEAN PEOPLE SUCK’. Which says it all, really. This is not a city with many problems. Or at least, this is a city that likes to either pretend it has problems, or glaze them over, and if you take a drive down Hastings you’ll see, immediately, what we all try very hard not to see. Here on Seymour, you have pretty little pavement platitudes, and just a block away you have human excreta filthing down the goddamn wall. We are talking shit on Robson-fucking-strasse, the Oxford Street Light of Vancouver. The most expensive street on a Canadian Monopoly board, the fifth highest for world retail rental rates (really? Bloor looks a hell of a lot fancier. and take it all with a pinch of salt, it’s no London/Tokyo). And it still smells like crap, half the time.
It’s amazing, actually, just how much of a problem Vancouver has with homelessness. I thought London was problematic until I came here. If London’s problem is violence, Vancouver’s is apathy. Apparently they’re shipping all the homeless people off to some remote frigid location in Northern BC, just so the flocks of Olympic vultures won’t realise Vancouver’s a real cold place to be, and not just in winter. And then they’re shipping them back, because fixing a problem ain’t a problem if no-one’s around to see it.
Enough about that. I’ve had many a conversation with down-on-their-lucks in London. The ones here just tend to freak me out. Which begats a whole new world of guilt.
2009, September, sun.
That paving stone is gone. Mean people still suck. You don’t find a lot of those around here. What you do get is a certain strange apathy, which I can’t quite fathom. Or maybe it’s more like a blocked-off hope that someone will break down barriers. I can’t say I don’t have a certain sympathy for people who are, like myself, cautiously guarded. All things end in excess, however, and when I say that people here can be more cut-off and clique-locked than girls in an English public girls’ school, that’s one hell of a something.
My industry surrounds me with a lot of young-at-hearts, big friends with big souls who come from all over the world. Outside, and from others, I have the feeling that Vancouver is a lonely, frost-smeared city, that freezes you out before you get the chance to burn out.
Seriously, all Vancouverites (at least, the ones that pollute my Yaletown ghetto) seem to want is to be on a fucking boat, or more specifically to own a boat, or even more specifically (but gender non-specifically, mind), to marry someone who owns a goddamn bloody boat.
This is not to say that all Vancouverites are assholes, because generalising is generally fun, even if it isn’t strictly true, and because some of my best friends really are born/bred Vancouverites, which proves that maybe it’s not Robsonstrasse, or even Hastings, but I who am simply full of shit.
Someone I once knew, that I once thought myself closer-than-god to, yet who never was invited to read these words, and never will be, tellingly — someone once said something true; Vancouver as a place, as a doe-eyed force of sheer physical beauty, is one of the hardest places in the world to hate. Yeah, I was never one of Mother Nature’s children, but when I clamber up a mountain and gaze out over the islands glinting in the bay, it’s hard not to feel like maybe there’s a lot more to this world than this transient humanity.
Vancouver has this little-big-city vibe, and big scenery, and big nature, and big hearts, if you know where to find them. It’s weird. It’s either the most accepting or the most unaccepting of cities, depending on whom you’ve come to know. It’s a melting-pot or a hoarhole, whichever you fall into.
But if you’re lucky you find, lurking amongst the chill concrete, the warmth of day, breaking through the endless skyscrapers, warm and welcoming souls, good words, good friends. And you will keep these hearts forever.
I’ve been lucky. I’ve been lucky all my life. Two years on, I love it here, really. I do. Enough to throw aside my fear of bureaucracy and take the plunge towards permanent residency. The year of twenty-nine smells, finally, like home.
preachers in the street September 25, 2009
Posted by eatnorthamerica in farcical review bullshit, things that are not quite things we know, verbiage clusterfuck.add a comment
If you’d told me fifteen years ago that I would end up watching the Manic Street Preachers play in a concert hall in Canada, I would probably have looked at you the way people look at people who are, perhaps, screaming on a soapbox somewhere on a street corner.
But there I was, stuck somewhere in space, some place in time, jolting up and down, feeling half my age, twice my age, feeling oddly invisible.
These jolly geezers from Seattle said they’d travelled up to Vancouver just to see the show. I never cared much for the Preachers. Too pop, who knows? Yet five feet from my nose, that band belonged on stage; lead guitar punched and crisp, ripping seven hells of sonic waves out of aural membranes, drumbeats stretched tsunami taut and crashing, emo-looking guitarists willowing in the background, a whole new generation of teenagers falling irrevocably, unrequitably, in love, the strains of la tristessa shredding sweet sorrows over a broken setlist.
The band picked up more momentum. The geezers, friendly as they come, took photos of the crowd. A random girl leaned over, and with unfathomable compulsion, yanked the front of my shirt sharply down. Our moment never made it onto the photograph that flashed, a pulse after all sartorial function was restored. And I laughed. She poked me in the cheek. She did it again. Later, she pressed her finger against my skin and said, ‘I’m sorry — I just can’t help bugging you.’
And I found that I mind less, these days, being bugged.
Later, I listened to Zoe Keating tracing cello strains into a sorrow skein. I listened to her song. Circling, mingling, propagating. I watched her, too, watched her body spasm with the white slashes of her bow. I, like the street preacher girl, wondered about putting my finger on her, to break her transfiguration, to dissect by simple disruption the complex duality of enharmonic possession.
Fifteen years ago, fifteen years from then, I thought I would be standing on a stage like the band that played tonight, night after night into the longest night. It was something I thought I knew would happen, but never did. I was fifteen and my heart sang starstricken dreams as I stood, arms uplifted, a player on a slumbering stage, and waited for the world. I thought I knew all things about time and god and love and death. The world never came to me; I went to it. I met people I wish I’d not. I became, briefly, whom I wished I had not. I learned about truth and life and love and other trite things that stubbornly resonate, like empty vessels under electric storms. And if there was one song, my song, it was crazy and dumb and young, and dreamt stages that glowed gold and dark.
You could have asked me if I understood, then, what I would come to understand now, and I would have told you that I did, and not been able to do anything but tell that lie, without ever knowing why. That girl tugging down my shirt, baring my heart to the world, I couldn’t tell you now what at fifteen I would have done. I would have laughed. I should have laughed. I, now, would have reached out, put a finger on that unweary cheek, told you it was okay. And now I laugh.
Today the mirror says, look away from what is past, into dreams long-extirpated, into bliss, into a patient accretion of all that gentled you — that asks but what did you regret? and what did you expect? and I pause and say nothing, everything and briefly, I realise it is true.
And looking at the face I grew into, I shut my eyes and find myself finally able to say; yes, it was me. Yes, I am, I am, a different dream.
The sun on my skin, the wind in my hair, here it is — gold, in October, the honied homecoming scent, red cedar. And the song has changed, as all songs do. Or my ears have, or the world has, or all of us, or just me, and you.
snowballing August 31, 2009
Posted by eatnorthamerica in productivity 101.add a comment
I bought one of these, so you get one of these:
I call this song, uh, snowballing. as you can tell, I had no idea where I was going in the middle section. SoundCloud’s embedded widget plays at 128k, so if you want to hear the 192k version, click the download icon.
variant here: recorded with the ‘clarity’ setting
(recorded on a full and resonant cedar top classical guitar, very slight volume boost and reverb from mini vox DA5 amp. I might turn down the reverb next time.)
My take? The Snowball’s pretty reasonable for 130 cadbucks, although it loses quite a lot of nuance, but what do you expect? I’m too cheap to spend 500 bucks on a proper setup, and this is mostly for practice purposes anyway, so.
some other test crap:
recuerdos de la alhambra (francisco tarrega), second half
Apparently I have a psychological problem when it comes to playing first sections.
The microphone has three settings, the first being the fullest, second being my best for clarity (but softest), third being a mix of the others. I recorded the classical pieces on setting #1 without amplification. Talk about depth overkill; next time I’m setting it back to #2.
I kind of like the way the Snowball looks, although I wouldn’t class it as portable, seeing as it’s a fairly hefty 4 inch ball. At half a kilo, certainly sturdy enough to withstand repeated bouts of cat-poking.
It is nice and simple and mostly pretty damn good.
EDIT: fuck it, I returned it, planning to borrow swanky condenser microphone from good friend K. FOSTER BEST PERSON IN UNIVERSE.
because the snowball will never sound like this:
(sloppy but everyone likes this one)
for once, an art update August 15, 2009
Posted by eatnorthamerica in artshit, productivity 101.add a comment
zbrush sculpt (had to retopologise this a couple times with topogun. saved me quite a few hours of blinding annoyance despite the turbulence. sign up for the beta. I found it exactly as unstable as polyboost but less iffy. or polyboost hates me. NB: 3d coat is much, MUCH better than any other retopo tool I’ve tried so far, but topogun is free right now)
I recommend you click the thumbnails if you’re curious.
Behold, the endless dilemma of nipples. I opted for none this time around, possibly due to the number of people making annoyingly unimaginative comments over my shoulder when they were extant. Pfah! Plebeian sentiment should never fetter artistic truth; I shall reinstate them, when my eyes no longer bleed.
I dig current workflow trends (popularised by Epic?) towards [super simple base model] > [zbrush/mudbox highpoly mesh] > [decimate with decimation master or meshlab] > [retopo to medres ingame model]. Far more creative freedom/saves a fair amount of time — then again, it’s all context-dependent. Sometimes you just can’t beat purpose-building a tidy little quad base.
Hark the day we throw point clouds into engines and laugh.
secret code May 22, 2009
Posted by eatnorthamerica in onanistic bullshit.2 comments
‘__[jaded videogames artist]_____ (character) desperately tries to achieve __winning the state lottery_____ (their desire) or prevent ___[who cares, not my problem]______ (someone else’s desire), even as ___fate____ (their Nemesis) and ___the gods____ (other forces) try to prevent him from achieving that. In the end, he goes from being a ___rebel warrior____ (who he was at the story’s start) to __disillusioned destitute_____ (something different).’
You fill it in, then.
Today I picked up The Scar (China Mi[e]ville) (here’s your obligatory wikipedia link you lazy people).
The clerk looked at it, then announced he had it lying around at home.
‘like it?’ (I say, while signing off my credit)
*beat*
‘I never finished it.’
‘…oh.’ (now contemplating my signature for $11.42)
‘well, you know, it’s well-written, I just have this thing about weird names. The names were weird. I guess I’m kind of weird about fantasy like that.’
‘I swing my sword, teehee’
‘…anyway, you might like it, if you don’t mind weird names.’
Unreasonable consonant strings (R’rhhzthahjzks swing your sword GO!!) make me throw books back on shelves, but The Scar seems acceptable. No swords yet, which either floats your boat or does not. It’s well-written, which is cause enough to celebrate. In a world reduced to lisping mishmashes of three-letter acronyms, I grasp at poetry like water.
Ashley Wood did the cover. I wouldn’t have guessed, although it’s an exercise in understated elegance, thereby avoiding my current and exceedingly superficial code of book cover rejection
=
10 breasts? [increment variable r by 1]
20 got swords and big oily muscles? [ditto]
30 pirates [ditto ditto]
40 space pirates [etc]
50 is twilight? [increment variable r by ∞]
60 if r > 0, terminate with excessive intolerance
Ѿ
Cyrillic looks rude.
And since you are all so concerned re: my exclusive consumption of meat animals, here’s my new health slogan:
switching to an ALL-CARB diet in preparation for the coming apocalypse of WORLD FOOD SHORTAGE better STORE FATS NOW
xii May 12, 2009
Posted by eatnorthamerica in farcical review bullshit, onanistic bullshit, pseudo-informative bullshit.Tags: final fantasy xii
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I am staring up at the juggernaut glaciers of the Paramina Rift, a sole speck of warmth in a desert of ice. Snow scourges my face; fog scythes the booming peaks from view. Ice drowns the turbid river. I look around; all is time, everlasting. The cliffs stare us down. Move on, they say
but I am caught in the frigid beauty that spreads before me, all particles and polygons. A last tribute to a dying platform, the ephemeral dreams of a forsaken machine. Under heaven, slipping across hell, I stare down the last sullen triangle of light between the ravine walls. I hear it, an eerie sad song of the done.
The wolves are wailing. The dead come.
don’t pour that on the dog April 21, 2009
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I have been pigging out on bontan ame, also known as Botan Candy (you google dis t’ing) — it’s good for your health, if you have some sort of blood sugar deficiency. Apparently this used to be made of millet (still tastes like it is), but no longer. All things fall from grace in the eyes of those who wait.
Random snippets from around the office:
‘hey, don’t pour [that can of coke zero] on the dog’
‘oh no’
‘don’t say ’oh no’ and then start pouring’
Random snippets from my life:
‘yeah, I dunno, I kinda wanna go back to school.’
‘do what?’
‘dunno, figure out what I want to do’
’shouldn’t you figure out what you want to do before you take two years off your income?’
‘ah, yeah’
Tsst, sensible people. I considered doing something about my joke-calibre tertiary education (art school is a joke, BA or no BA), in which I wrote a total of three papers — a shockingly sparse 10000 words. All you have to do is make vaguely-coherent gestures at laissez-faire sentence structure, and sort of spell your name right.
Who dreams of scrapping steady income for campus hijinks in the middle of an economic hellturn? Is a major lack of challenge enough to make any man turn career quisling? Jobs, jobs are vampires. I just googled [a job is a vampire] and got this: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=vampire%20job kinda NSFW unless you have 30 inch monitors and 72 pt text, in which case you deserve what you will get.
Speaking of which, Twilight– really?
the black swan of nanowrimo October 14, 2008
Posted by eatnorthamerica in farcical review bullshit, pseudo-informative bullshit, things that are not quite things we know.1 comment so far
The Canadian government finally returned the money it owed me from the time I spent being unemployed last year, so I decided to blow some of it on Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s idiosyncratic Black Swan.
Very briefly, Taleb is an iconoclast ex-quant (and full time wag) who does things like buy options geared towards the inevitability of economic disaster, accepting constant losses while waiting for crashes to send his option values skyrocketing.
Commonsense dictates we go for small, constant gains when we invest, yet opens us up to getting screwed by unpredictable economic failure. For Taleb, the world has been shaped by these acts of random chance, acts that have a minute chance of occurring and carry huge impact, acts that we claim are inevitable after the fact and yet never plan for.
We carry on with life because some things are completely out of our ability to predict. You can’t bank on what they’ll be, you can only bank on the probability that they will happen. Hot from Taleb comes a moniker for events of this ilk: black swans. I won’t get into the details, because far better minds have written more informative material on him. Eristics aside, his viewpoint radiates some uncommon sense. Sometimes it’s refreshing to hear someone say, “I don’t know.”
I’m reminded of the Time article (this one made it to Time’s 85 year anniversary compendium) on Deep Blue, the chess computer that beat Kasparov:
What is Deep Blue’s secret? Grand master Yasser Seirawan put it most succinctly: “The machine has no fear.” He did not just mean the obvious, that silicon cannot quake. He meant something deeper: because of its fantastic capacity to see all possible combinations some distance into the future, the machine, once it determines that its own position is safe, can take the kind of attacking chances no human would. The omniscient have no fear.
In Game 1, Blue took what grand master Robert Byrne called “crazy chances.” On-site expert commentators labeled one move “insane.” It wasn’t. It was exactly right.
Here’s what happened. Late in the game, Blue’s king was under savage attack by Kasparov. Any human player under such assault by a world champion would be staring at his own king trying to figure out how to get away. Instead, Blue ignored the threat and quite nonchalantly went hunting for lowly pawns at the other end of the board. In fact, at the point of maximum peril, Blue expended two moves–many have died giving Kasparov even one–to snap one pawn. It was as if, at Gettysburg, General Meade had sent his soldiers out for a bit of apple picking moments before Pickett’s charge because he had calculated that they could get back to their positions with a half-second to spare.
In humans, that is called sangfroid. And if you don’t have any sang, you can be very froid. But then again if Meade had known absolutely–by calculating the precise trajectories of all the bullets and all the bayonets and all the cannons in Pickett’s division–the time of arrival of the enemy, he could indeed, without fear, have ordered his men to pick apples.
Which is exactly what Deep Blue did. It had calculated every possible combination of Kasparov’s available moves and determined with absolute certainty that it could return from its pawn-picking expedition and destroy Kasparov exactly one move before Kasparov could destroy it. Which it did.
Kasparov himself said that with Deep Blue, quantity had become quality.
Taleb repudiates the power of human inference; the computer is incapable of it. Sometimes you have to overthrow human frailty to succeed. Is that good, or bad?
Everyone’s iPhone is Wikipedia-enabled. The showboat of knowledge sails on, leaving us only the lifeline of connective insight.
November is coming up, and that means NaNoWriMo is here again. I have been putting this off for far too long now, and I’m fed up with being unproductive, so here goes: 50000 words for the month of November, the amount that mutates novella into novel. I did not know that Brave New World contains a mere 50000 words of blazing beauty.
1,666⅔ words per day, for thirty days. If you don’t make the effort, you never get the chance to be a black swan.
That, combined with spending enough time on my guitar to not screw up someone’s wedding ceremony, is going to be a hell of a lot of doing. But when people are doing this, what excuse do I have? Let’s go learn from failure.
Apparently it takes a minimum of 10000 hours to become world-class at anything, so I’d better get cracking.
I had a clump of songs in major keys on my playlist zoning together whilst I was writing this; all background noise, until a minor key popped out and my focus was jerked right there.
Our random lives boil down to self-imposed decisions. Unpredictability may be the new god, but it doesn’t mean we can’t choose which dice he throws.
“I’ve spent a lot of energy and many years trying to learn a very few basic things, which may turn out to be mostly crude opinions anyway. There’s so little in the world we can be sure of, and maybe it’s the lack, that flaw or deficiency, if you will, that drives our strongest compulsions.”
- Ben Fountain
cat shit prolix beauty October 4, 2008
Posted by eatnorthamerica in things that are not quite things we know, verbiage clusterfuck.add a comment
If everything in our heads were laid out in the open, would the world be a better place? Nobody would be able to inveigle or obfuscate. Yeah, people will always come up with creative ways to take advantage of others, but surely the opportunity for them to do so would be drastically reduced.
Even if the entire concept makes me shudder, I can’t help thinking it would be more beneficial than not, since if that were how the world worked we wouldn’t have any hangups about being open. We would just be. And there would be nothing wrong with being.
I’m drunk on Shirley Temples, and intoxicated by proxy.
My cat used to take the most epic shits when she was younger and not so well. It was a smell like nothing on god’s earth, it was a smell that smelled worse than the vestibule outside the toilets at work, it was one fucking hell of a fucking smell. One day the worm turned; I found solid, scentless slag in her litter box and what was I? Imbued with joy. If we can find beauty in a cat taking a shit, who’s to say we shouldn’t be finding beauty in everything?
I do not often weep, but I wept when I first viewed a certain scene from American Beauty. A plastic bag floats over the dust on nothing but wind, transfigured into more than it never dreamt of being. It became cinema as cinema only sometimes dreams of being, of elevating the jejune to genius. Some genius set that scene up with transcendentally beautiful cleverness because they understood both beauty and cleverness, set it to music machinated to score a tender and lingering tristesse, and I said why not, and let them take the tears from me.
Nothing to do with anything in particular, everything to do with everything in general.
It’s not too often that I get the feeling I can say absolutely anything I want to someone. This has absolutely nothing to do with establishing bonds of friendship; it’s more like a detached celebration of banter. Bantering is a fine art. Some people wear self-confidence in such a manner that I pretty much know nothing I say is going to bring them down; some people, I think, like banter because they either understand it as a game, or because in a way it’s a form of acceptance, or acknowledgement.
I don’t know that banter necessarily brings me closer to people; it’s more a mental gambit where all the players are intent on playing at being dicktrees to each other. The trick, I guess, is to get away with pretending to be as much of an asshole as you can without actually being an asshole. (If you’re not just pretending to be an asshole, it’s not banter, it’s war.)
Banter is possibly only good in small, measured doses. I’m not sure how good it is for the soul.
Last night we were meant to be going to a colleague’s leaving dance. There have been far too many of these things lately. Let’s not get into that, it’s depressing as hell. We got to the venue and discovered that bouncers are dicktrees. You can’t even banter with them! Who knew! I didn’t care for the seamy glimpses I caught through their steamy windows, so!
Under the glass forest canopy we were reduced to …what? Animals, quailing from the rain. My animal friends and I went for crepes instead and talked about bullshit like existentialism.
I am high as hell on sugar.
I slept at 4 and woke at 9.30; morning comes too quickly these days. I lay indolent beneath cotton sheets and stared at a spiral of hair on my pillow, and played with the focus of my eyes. We have the latent power to do all this trippy shit we don’t usually bother thinking about. It’s as trippy as thinking about what it really means that light is just a wave (or a particle, yeah), or trying to imagine an eighth colour.
I popped different parts of the hair formation in and out of focus and then I realised; there’s the summation of my life at present. I can’t hold it all in focus all at once. Something must give.
A cat rolls into the hollows of my back. She seems happy. I seem happy. Beauty is the visual punch of a cat’s rosetted coat; beauty is the warmth of her sleek back, smooth against bare skin. Beauty is realising I’m only two minutes late for lunch.
Now here we are, sitting in the food court at the mall.
To my left I keep hearing snippets of the most boring conversation in the world. It makes me wince. I don’t think I need to describe it to you; we’ve all had our share of banal conversations. Perhaps all conversations start off as boring because they are rooted in the concrete; of this too, I’m often guilty.
Mired in concrete, people are unified only by the same interests; without commonality you’re regally fucked. Comparatively, a shared interest in abstraction is often enough to make topics cohere.
There’s an art to triggering viewpoints from other people, and it’s not always easy. Bringing a conversation round to an abstract bent usually requires some self-sacrifice on the part of the contributors. Concretions are safe, solid things that only exist and are; abstractions are often personal and revealing. We’re not talking facts anymore, we’re talking opinions. Those start wars, you know. Maybe we should just bring it all back to banter.
Onward, to duty. Tick tocks the clock, tick, tick tock, the lamp greens the light, and I go.
Now here we are in the time of rain, out in the open and from under the forest, and I ask you — what would you say the chances were of two raindrops hitting you in both eyes both at once? Here I am, in the lift, having a throwaway conversation with two strangers about how it’s the worst thing when the rain catches you naked and umbrellaless and lost, and then I realise my umbrella was with me all along, that it was always there.
at bay September 30, 2008
Posted by eatnorthamerica in onanistic bullshit, things that are not quite things we know, verbiage clusterfuck.add a comment
Home is how I keep the outside world at bay. My doors are almost never all the way open, save to a minute group of people who don’t have to read this to know who they are.
One of those people was over at my place this weekend; I’ve known her since we were 9, and hadn’t seen her for a couple of years. It’s a rare thing, being around someone who knows you for all that you are and accepts you in your entirety. I savour the novelty of not having to be a novelty.
It’s funny how you can not really talk to someone for intervals of months and years, and never need to; yet when you come together again, it’s all you do.
She arrived at noon on Friday; I did hardly any work from 12 onward:
a) I was ahead of schedule
b) so fuck it. see a)
c) we were having an extended conversation about life, the universe and everything
d) this conversation ran from 1.45 pm to 1.45 am in the morning
e) she lost her voice.
f) all of it.
It takes a different perspective to put your life into perspective. From her viewpoint my workplace was a haven of cushiness. I think it’s all too easy to assume that everyone has the right to a job that’s at least 60% enjoyable. Meaning: we all bitch too much about shit. At least we’re not working 8-2. Yet.
Sunday, it was Sunday. She was gone. I was standing on the peninsular Vancouver shore, filming my friends filming my germphobic friend crawling through hypodermic sand. One of them used to be a pornographer. They’re making a zombie movie, or something. I was there for the humanity of watching people around them watch them.
“I think I have AIDS,” my friend said, throwing his weight from foot to foot, sloughing the beach detritus from his skin. In his youth he was fed a diet of rice saturated with orange pop. Why any grandmother would do that to her grandchild, I don’t know.
I watched the watchers. You can surround yourself with all the people in the world and still not understand what it means to be known; to never know what people know about themselves, to only know that people will never know what you know about yourself. Sometimes we need to be known; sometimes we don’t.
Holding a camera that wasn’t mine, I pushed the trigger again, again. I stopped carrying my own camera around a while ago. It was too tempting to turn life into a series of beautiful, bastardised pictures that show everything and say nothing. Or show nothing and say everything. Either way. The camera is broken, anyway, or I am. I could never make it say what I wanted it to say, that in a picture of a hazy sky was a certain feeling I had about the world that day.
Nighttime. I lie umber and mellow on yielding cushions and think about that very small cluster of people that I hardly ever think about. I don’t need to. Some doors are always open to some people, even through this veiled impermanence called life. We don’t write, or call, or look, and yet our lives are always open to each other.
Sometimes you only ever need to know that you can choose not to be alone.
I’m only lying here, tossing out cheap phrases like “you can choose not to be alone” and murmuring to you that Google only knows two other people who chose to say “you can choose not to be alone”, that not till now did Google choose to know anyone who chose to say “you can choose to not be alone”, and now you are here, and I am gone.
synaesthesia September 20, 2008
Posted by eatnorthamerica in pseudo-informative bullshit, things that are not quite things we know, verbiage clusterfuck.3 comments
You’re a subtitle in my head.
You might have heard of the oddity known as synaesthesia, the merging of two or more senses. Some synaesthetes see colours when they hear sounds. I see you talking in monochrome text. The colour/sound association is such an archetype of the condition that I hadn’t realised what I experience is classifiably synaesthetic (not least because it seems prosaic to me, compared to gustatory synaesthetes who taste lemon when they hear ‘k’).
Well, I’ve finally found someone else who sees everything they hear in text.
http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/acronick/entry/how_do_you/
…which is top Google search for ‘when I hear people speaking I see subtitles’.
The trigger for this query stemmed from a joke my colleagues were running in the kitchen at work; they were getting passersby to ‘help them work out a code problem’ by saying it out loud and having them write down (there was a bit more to this) p, 3, n, 1 and 5. Most people get it after completing the word; some canny individuals get it after writing the p3.
“‘Penis’?” I said the moment I heard the sequence, and didn’t understand their surprise. I didn’t get why the joke would possibly work on anyone until I remembered that most people get direct aural input from speech. It wasn’t until late high school that I realised that having subtitles in your head isn’t a universal experience.
I know there are plenty of other people who are quite capable of converting the letters; but for me the association between sound and text is inexorable. I will see letters/numbers in print somewhere in my head. Usually in Arial, Helvetica or Times New Roman, white floating on a black field.
Perhaps another way of explaining it is that most people read by converting text to sound; for them reading is double the effort of listening. For me it’s the exact opposite.
There are some odd aspects to all this, like how it’s really hard for me to make out song lyrics (I’m fine with the actual pitches, just not with the speech aspect — most of the time the words don’t even exist to me), or how I used to have the worst trouble in school spelling the simplest words out loud. ‘C-A-T’ is a struggle. Breaking a word into letter sounds is an alien concept. Soldier is [soldier]. Cat is [cat]. It is what it is. Every word is visual gestalt, an indivisible conglomerate.
I have heard Japanese is processed similarly by fluent readers. Not because the characters are pictures – very few have any remaining pictorial root – but because of their necessary visual chunkiness.
I read by processing huge chunks of text rather than going word by word. I don’t remember ever not knowing how to read, so maybe this oddness is a function of that.
I had the most horrible time maintaining concentration in classes because extended amounts of speech are unbearably arduous for me to process while maintaining focus (too slow. Being impatient doesn’t help). I have to focus pretty hard on conversations to figure out what people are saying, especially if they have accents or are speaking softly.
I can’t play games with very slow text output, either. It’s unbearably frustrating to have to wait for word/sentence/paragraph chunks to drip onto my screen. It’s like having a conversation with someone who spells every single word to you instead of saying it. Somebody tell me how t-h-i-s i-s a-t a-l-l t-o-l-e-r-a-b-l-e.
Often I pronounce words the way they’re spelled (eg, salmon), which has led to my having gotten a lot of stick over the years. I’m still filled with a child-like pride when I remember how to pronounce a word that is phonetically counterintuitive. If I hear foreign words, I have to know their spelling system or it’s almost impossible for me to remember the words I’m learning. I ask people to spell out confusing names for me so that I can chunk the letters into meaningful units and then remember their appearances.
There’s only one word I’ve ever had serious trouble with, and it’s bizarre. It looks ’wrong’ no matter how I look at it. I have no idea why. I know how to spell it, but I don’t know how to spell it. It doesn’t exist as a natural [word unit]; it gives me a queasy feeling. Sometimes, if I concentrate hard enough, words start to look like text patterns rather than ‘words’; that’s how bizarre looks to me.
I don’t have eidetic memory, but I do have good general visual memory.
This isn’t exactly the same condition that the blogger linked above does; she can’t hear voices, pitches or accents in her head, but those aren’t an issue for me. I have a decent grasp of scansion in text and have no problems with music. Just speech. I often have trouble recognising voices. No, my hearing is neither damaged nor abnormal.
Is it useful? It’s not great that I have trouble with lexical-auditory functions, but I process text very easily; it’s just the way I’m wired. Hell, I don’t know any better.
See what I’m saying?
I glossed over the mainstays of synaesthesia because I didn’t want to tarry too far beyond my personal experience with it. Here are some links for additional pursuit:
http://otherthings.com/uw/syn/ <- a fascinating representation of the most commonly-known type of synaesthesia (or synesthesia if you must). Check out the flash demonstration at http://otherthings.com/uw/syn/flash/syn25.html. I definitely don’t experience that. Seems as though his synaesthesia doesn’t involve letters as text but as flashes of colour sensation.
specific ambition; a long foot September 11, 2008
Posted by eatnorthamerica in things that are not quite things we know.1 comment so far
I had a friend who always told me she envied me for loving what I was doing;
I loved it no less and no more than she did; she could never see the amount of willpower it took me to actually get anything done.
Hell is being lazy and ambitious. It’s taken me a hell of a long time to curb some of my inherent laziness. Someone told me once to constantly surround myself with people who were willing to give me a good kick up the ass from time to time. It’s funny, because that’s how I ended up where I am today. Encircled by ass-kickers. Not by design, but because I lucked out in terms of finding good friends.
If it’s obvious that everyone must suck at something they’ve only just started doing, why then are people so willing to claim false competence? Why not assume we all have at least 99% more to learn? Even if you are latently gifted at something, chances are you’re going to get much better at it.
People keep selling themselves short by settling, or maybe just not caring. Coasting is as seductive as any opiate.
Perhaps the problem is that good is such a subjective quality. Are we good only when we stand next to the least capable of people? Should we not compare ourselves to the best of the best, and strive to surpass them? Why not? You got hubris, might as well flip it into something worthwhile.
Mind you, when you have a lot of general ambition but struggle with specific ambitions, things get frustrating. Maybe that’s the problem; people don’t ever find something they want to do. Maybe people don’t find something because they don’t care to look. Or maybe they just don’t realise there’s something out there worth looking for. Or maybe it just doesn’t matter.
Probably the latter.
I am guilty of all this, and of lacking focus. Independence is learning the fine art of kicking yourself in the ass.
Stephen says:
hmm, well i think you should probably start with some goals that aren’t that concrete, like getting ___ done
start by doing some things that’ll increase your capacity to get other shit done, so you can take advantage of the snowball effect
Candice; says:
i want to own a planet
not a big one like jupiter, i think
just a little one. this one’s pretty good.
Stephen says:
then eat it?
Candice; says:
yeah.
Stephen says:
that’s pretty good!
Candice; says:
thanks
Stephen says:
i hear pluto’s crunchy, if that counts as a planet
wind, growth, bus August 14, 2008
Posted by eatnorthamerica in onanistic bullshit, things that are not quite things we know, verbiage clusterfuck.add a comment
We (in this place, at this time) live in a time and place where being considered liberal and open-minded has become a tenet to aspire to. Yeah, it would be nice if people would actually stop talking about being open-minded and just fucking be open-minded. Or just stump up some integrity and stop wasting my time. It’s taxing, dealing with some miasmic melange of the two; viz: ”I’m open-minded, but only about things I’m not narrow-minded about.”
I’d rather hear the words people aren’t saying when they say something they don’t really want to say. Maybe we just don’t always want to hear the truth even when it’s something we should hear. Well shit, you run, you hide, you lose your life. You could get hit by a bus. Keep staring into the sun; don’t flinch, don’t look away.
Spit and shake. I see you never; we can be professional about our mutual disregard. Let’s be polite. Let’s be honest. Is it more polite to be honest, or dishonest?
Sometimes I want to stand before the wind and hear what the wind shouts back.
What two people say to each other doesn’t necessarily make sense. It’s like a matching game; sometimes we learn to speak in pulses, with fluency. You keep stumbling along, keep guessing, and one day you strike the right notes. It’s all about congruency; hit counterpoint, pause, stop, unfurl the patchwork harmonies of the heart. The beats aren’t always what you thought they were. Better adapt before the melody breaks. You know it’s going to end someday. Better make the best of it.
Earlier this week I was walking for the sake of feeling the ground beneath my feet; across the street a man sobbed and wailed, a cadenza of rage that split the heavy black sky. I don’t know what the wind told him.
Perhaps the spectators standing by were looking for the same; perhaps we were just waiting for something to lurch us along, all of us overwhelmed by our own rhythm. Perhaps we were waiting for a conductor, waiting for a baton, for a wave to unify. Warbling alone, meandering along, looking for someone to syncopate the breaks in our souls, singing hello, hello, I loved you, goodbye.
On a different day, on a different coast, I opened up my mouth. Lungs filled with fragments, I flew emotion into the wind. The wind shrieked back; she took my words and twisted them and turned them into words I never knew were there.
There I was, and here I am.
Autumn was coming. Autumn was coming, sweeping last remnants of summer away, sweeping us into the dark. It was never about the getting; it was about the giving-up.
Night crackled, white sparks flared, blazing storefronts shuttered into sleep. The bus came battering down the road, hurtling, honking, reeking metal bolts and limits breaking, crashing forward with a great steel groan. I smelled the sharp acrid rage of it. I smelled it coming. A foot from losing skin and cartilage and life, I stood there and let the wind shred my face. And I didn’t bat an eye.
love in the time of gonorrhoea July 18, 2008
Posted by eatnorthamerica in farcical review bullshit, things that are not quite things we know, verbiage clusterfuck.add a comment
Everybody is reading that book about the pickup artist, Neil Strauss.
More than a mack textbook, it is a memoir, a study of the ins and outs of the social condition. The man who wrote it wrote also for the New York Times. Make of that what you will.
The book’s prevailing mantra is: Attraction is not a choice, and you and I and we can have everyone via hamfisted palmistry, spoon bending and ESP.
It’s not too hard to see why people buy into the mystique. We pretend to be a collection of on/off switches, unanalogue, discrete.
What a beautiful conceit, that you can reduce seduction into a set of techniques that will guarantee you entry into anyone in the world. Are we waves and tremors, or sticks and holes? There is nothing absolute about being human, about neocortical impulses that feed our hearts to head.
There is nothing human in the objectification of an adversary; the gaudy prizes of bars and clubs are just ticks on a list, 8s, 9s, 10s, 11s. The more you play the game, the more you realise the game means nothing. Strauss has no small dose of pity and revulsion for the creepers trapped in their own webs, not least himself. These are some of the unhappiest men you’ll meet.
Isn’t it strange, that certain truisms apply to all fields? Those who blindly follow preset routes rarely achieve greatness; he who only learns by rote never grasps the whole.
Seduction, one supposes, is all very well. Then comes a point where one thinks hard and long of love, in the time of gonorrhoea.
Not much has changed since we sat in school and wondered why some lead, and others follow. We make our way through life and find the game never changes; we want what we are denied.
To those who believe we can bypass the random variance of the human heart, note this and note it well: in the end, the only woman who stole Strauss’s heart was the one he could not snare with strings of theory. He played the game. She played him better.
Along Burrard after dinner, I watched a girl pose for a man, silhouetted by the splash of fountain spray. He said something that made her laugh; in the binary light of the camera, his smile seemed real. He blushed, or the red focus stung his skin. I didn’t know.
It’s for all of us to turn things over and around. The oldest friend comes out with the newest things; maybe we’re too fast to fix an image in our heads. Now I understand Cubism as never before; I see Picasso struggling, presented with the problem of presenting all sides all at once.
Irrational people do rational things, rational people do irrational things. All people are unknown quantities, now and forever.
Sitting in the semi-dark, bathed in the soft penumbra of the screen, I close the game and shut my eyes. I chase the awkward beauty that exists when we race toward a goal, unscripted, unfettered, unaware.
space: a cat, in a box July 17, 2008
Posted by eatnorthamerica in things that are not quite things we know, verbiage clusterfuck.add a comment
The way we dress the spaces we choose to inhabit says all we need to say about ourselves, in less time than it takes to take off our shoes.
What’s in your box? I keep a rug, a chair, a few cushions. It starts to feel crowded. I like it like a hollow shell.
Space, it’s relative; 12 Brazilian students crammed themselves into a one bed flat before they got booted out and I came. I can’t fathom this tub being large enough for two. 535 square feet for 12 people; that’s 45 square feet per person. I stand 5ft 1 and take up 535 square feet of living space. It seems a reasonable amount to me. I say that I don’t feel a need to have more space than this, but perhaps one day I will. In the style of Schrodinger I vacillate; yes or no, yes or no, and who can tell until the moment comes?
On a plane, someone takes up 200 dollars’ worth of your 600 dollar seat, and suddenly inches are a matter of insufferable magnitude.
Back to personal space; you’re not paying me any rent, so here’s an eviction notice.
My landlord drops in from New Zealand to take a look at my apartment. He’s thinking about finding a job in Vancouver. Either I find a new flat or I bring down the entire Vancouver VFX industry.
Webworked cells, blind windows. This is living, ant-style. A foot of wall, that’s all that spares me the indignity of shared rooming. I value my personal space enough to fight you for it, in a cage surrounded by half a million strangers.
You come into my parlour and you’re that much closer to me, threading through the cloistered chambers of my heart. You come into my closet and leave yellow leaking down the side of my lavatory bowl — what should we call that?
My landlord leaves. I slip on new shoes and teeter to the door. And I, five inches taller, pause.
At my height, I don’t see the dust on the top of my refrigerator, nor on the tops of doorways.
At 6ft 2 my landlord sees things I should have cleaned, had I realised space exists outside of my band of sight.
My cat, who inhabits my flat at 0ft 9, looks up and sees the dust that lies beneath.
It’s all relative, like with those Brazilians. They sat on a crate with wings for a few hours, then piled their mattresses into an even smaller box. You gotta envy that kind of gumption. You gotta wonder where they went. I gotta wonder where you’d go.
Writhing down wormholes, surfing past singularities, breaking time and space to get to where we want to be. Space, she’s a hard lover. I loved once but would not stay; continents always drift away.
Don’t, don’t think of that; today is here, today is now, skimming the sweet salt susurrus of sea, snow peaks slumbering by your sail, six knots in a lazy haze.
As you said first, as you said best. We were too different, though at our end I loved you, either way.
Wind rises, earth turns, sun sleeps. A speck on a speck in a deep blue sky, I stare hard at the night. The stars are smaller than I can see; summer fades to fall debris.
Kiss me before flying, baby. I’ll see you on the other side.
the gleaner July 17, 2008
Posted by eatnorthamerica in onanistic bullshit.add a comment
Uglyskins was like patchwork, stitched together from a hundred different types of skin.
I craned my neck to get a better look at him through the letterboxed window. The orderly fumbled with the key to the grimy door.
“All yours, sir,” he said, eyeing the neat cut of my coat and shoes, sleek against the pitted concrete floor. He stood aside.
I went through the doorway, and the door shut behind me. I looked at the man within. The unforgiving fluorescent light winked on and off and on again.
He had come to the stained soft walls of the cell nameless and silent, and he lay on the unyielding cot, arms and legs stiff in the restraints at his sides. His hands were balled into tense fists; they quivered occasionally, in perfect harmony with the tic of his pale blue eyes. I could not tell his age through the ruin that was his face. He was stitched together from a hundred different beings; I could not tell how many of them were human.
“I’m Doctor Sands,” I said, swallowing, and walked towards him. “What’s your name?”
Closer, he looked like nothing that should have walked on two legs, or four, or eight. The stitches were tighter around his eyes and mouth, but it made them none the prettier. His eyelashes were gone. It was impossible to tell how he might have looked in one skin.
The blue eyes kept blinking. His mouth was slack.
“I’m here to help,” I said, lowering my voice. “Tell me what happened to you.”
Last year, fresh out of my internship, I had seen a man who bathed himself in acid to rid himself of the invisible ants that crept endlessly over his skin. I had thought, for the first time, that a man should have the right to his death.
I had seen men who had performed arson upon themselves, men who had pared their flesh from bone, but I had never seen anything as hideous as him.
Perhaps it was the guilt that made me reach out and put my hand on his. Perhaps it was the warmth of my hand, and my pity, that snapped his livid gaze to mine.
“I ate them all,” he said. “I ate the girl in the red hood, her wolf, the swan boys, the girl with the goose, that giant man. The snow white girl, the rose red child. All of them playing their parts for centuries. Saying the same words over and again. I set them free.”
I turned the names over in my head. For a moment they seemed familiar, and then the feeling was gone.
“Why this?” I asked, and I touched the threads that ran through his hide.
“Someone must remember,” he said. He shook his head, and whimpered, and shook.
I caught sight of a dark mass on the underside of his shoulder, pushing his arm up from the cot.
Something clumped and ugly sprouted from his skin, breaking through a film of blood and pus. It was hard to see in the cell, but in the wavering light it shuddered and parted, like a clot of feathers.
years later December 10, 2007
Posted by eatnorthamerica in things that are not quite things we know, verbiage clusterfuck.3 comments
years ago, you were rattling down the railway with possibly one of the most beautiful people on the planet and the way the sun hit their face through the dust-smeared window told you, told you that all the proportional possibility of golden curves and judicious symmetry sat quivering on the gently-fraying seat before you; there it was, an ineffable display of human construction.
and then years later you met them again and realised that years later makes a difference, because time, time has a tendency to pass.
it’s exactly what facebook’s doing right now; throwing up pictures of people you never saw after the day you walked out of the gates of school, and maybe making you realise you never knew how old you really were until you saw how old everyone else really was.
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