songs for time!

!!!

can you beeee-lieve i've had a blog for almost a year!! well not really, but we're nearing the end of the year in which i started this blog. and it was certainly winter when i began. which makes me feel like representatively, a year. right?

so i am pretty excited about 2009. 

for one, i will get to use my camilla engman calendar! finally.

i didn't have a calendar last year. but for 2009, i have two. and they hang side by side on a little panel (i don't know what the panel conceals. isn't that funny? i just realized that now. and i can't check because i'm at my parents' house. later.), and they've been there for about a month.

the other calendar is art from cape dorset. it's really gorgeous and a totally appreciable size. seriously. the size definitely influenced my purchasing of it, one frivolous afternoon. 

the camilla one i have had since at least september. but it's been just sitting looking exciting, yet perpetually and mournfully closed on my bookshelf. a couple of weeks ago (i think probably when i bought the other calendar. that was a mistake actually. a mistake. i brought lunch to work, because i really can't afford to be buying all that food at lunch, but i got hungry at 10 30 and had brought something to eat, so ate it. but then i had a half hour for lunch, and no food. forgot a book so i thought i'd just walk up roncesvalles. accidentally drop way too much cash on unnecessary additional calendar from Another Story Bookshop [but they give you POINTS! towards new books!!]), i decided it was reasonable to start displaying the beautiful painting for january. maybe i can find it. 

this is it! 

at least as far i as can remember. if i was at home, i'd be sure. but i'm not. 

for two, what's not to get excited about. a year to designate and commit and design and observe and something something something you'll mistake as profound. 

so, x's and o's brothers, friends and lovers! to time! 

hahaha 

toasts' are lame.

and often uncomfortable. 

always so goddamn sentimental. getting at me through the same angle as a standing ovation to make me burst into tears. 

keeping everyone warm

some

here's a bit of that article

"That said, what I find most exciting about what is going on right now - beyond just getting rid of Harper, which is exciting in and of itself - is that we have this opportunity to show what proportional representation (PR) would look like, because all of this talk that this is a coup is a joke.

What is being proposed by this coalition is much closer to representative democracy than what we have right now, which is a government that has [slightly more than] 35 per cent of the popular vote in a turnout that was historically low, of 59 per cent of Canadian voters, which means that even though the Tories won more seats they had fewer actual votes than in the last election.

I think it is really important to talk about democracy, about what it actually means in this period. In some ways I think it is even more important than talking about the policies, because our electoral system is broken. Because of the Tories' extraordinary opportunism and terrible calculation we now have an opportunity to see a better version of democracy and see more people represented in government.

To me the best case scenario that could come out of this is, one, you get the coalition, and, two, the NDP uses this moment to really launch a national discussion about why we need PR and that that becomes one of the things that comes out of this crisis.

Now, they don't have the mandate for that right now, but we could come out of this with a national referendum on proportional representation. People might actually like it, which would be really, really exciting."

more excitement

read this article by naomi klein for an actual informed opinion on what's happening with all of this (versus my emotions)

a note from our sponsors

in light of the exciting and rather unprecedented (only in the sense that who woulda thought any of those old guys would actually have the gall to make a move on the Conservative's sad minority government) rallying behind our, remember, parliamentary democracy up on the Hill in Ottawa, i invite you to watch this incredibly wicked documentary on Hugo Chavez & Venezuela called The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.

to me it's like all of a sudden it seems that democracy here has managed to retain a shred of meaning despite the 8 year appropriation of the word by all nations, including this one, subscribing to the rhetoric surrounding the "war on terror". i'm wondering right now if the hijacking and subsequent attempts at redefintion of the term has moved people to forget that it has come along way since Plato. the brand of democracy we accede to, courtesy of Her Majesty (!!), is based on a document constructed in order to maintain a certain degree of fairness and representation in the supreme ruling of this country. which is where this very formal 'vote of non-confidence' procedure and possibility of a coalition government taking over the House is coming from. much to our surprise. or mine at least, because i'm fairly certain i've never even read the constitution. so sad. have you?

my roommate and watched a lot of news tonight, the best line was maybe Rex Murphy's nod to the 'separatists' being what holds together the propspective federal government.

though we are sort of not into this label for the Bloc. could we move on, please?

but seriously, this could be the smartest thing Gilles Duceppe ever does for Quebec; gaining the support and trust from Canadians still unnecessarily nervous about a separation that will likely never reach a number of yes-votes even close to the support garnered in 1995. all the while still maintaining the integrity of Quebec as a unique nation. maybe this is a unifying move!

and really. i cannot believe how Stephen Harper's slick move to get himself re-elected before people started getting really riled up about Obama being chosen as P.E. of the U.S and our own potential for 'change', is actually, actually and seriously, backfiring on him. eat that.

slow sunday snow storm

apparently a big one is coming.

i'm finding too much to share today! thus requiring this additional post. so here are some MORE AWESOME THINGS!!!



aoyama hina.

yes! go look at more.

still on paper & knives; remember when i wrote about ed pien? accidentally stumbled into an opening of his last weekend when my parents were visiting and wanted to go to the birch libralato. and there he was! and so many of the things i like. he looked graceful. that was nice.


and THIS!

eric eley

oui oui oui oui oui

i have a great deal of familiarity with the universal transverse mercator system

this is so awesome.
mario feese made 'air lines' using daily worldwide flight paths

chris harrison made this map of internet use & city-to-city connections

then they got put together at the ministry of type



you can buy a poster of mario feese's work. i think i would like one. i would stare at the delicate tip of chile and search for a faint outline of baffin island from my bed.

trees by mistake

claire sherman

this is okay. it is in progress and so is everything you might find there.
edit #3: yes, you may click that this. i'm all over the place.



hanna konola

postscript

you all liked this too, right?

the third night in three where the moon was full

and nothing was still, and everything was happening, and all we thought we knew was only an image of what it may have been (if someone could remember properly)

**.**.***.**.**



kevin sayshi

i'm making a film about electricity

olaf nicolai


break it down, sweethearts
electron concept orchestra - grazin' in the grass

and if you're like me, you want to continue to dance and be your hip self all night long; so see wfmu

eaten by the sea

click.

unity of opposites and the associated systematic ambivalence in the nature of things gestures towards the importance of interpretation, i read and copied out of my encyclopedia.



photooftheday.hughcrawford.com

she worked at the factory because her mom did too

and that's why she came over to my house with the secret ingredient for shortbread in December of 2001.

did you ever think that red and white might represent coming and going in this day and age. this way of gage.

i've melted 100 times already and the night's not even close to over. will we record in our histories that time began when we realized the potential for revolution? and hairspray? and packaged meats?


in norway i rode slow on trains and several ferry rides woven around fjords. i'm being swallowed whole.

the idea was to patch together a book

i'm not gone yet. prepare to have your socks knocked off. these are from this post on the bittersweet art of cutting up books, to which i was directed to by drawn! and wow. magical. some very special things happening. i'm not going to say anymore because that blog already did such a good job.


Jacqueline Rush Lee


Brian Dettmer


Cara Barer

p.s. - the title of this post is a line from a poem worth reading by david berman called The Night Nurse Essays. forgive me if you consider this a spoiling but these are the last few stanzas of it:

In that case his final words may have been damaged,
dormant expressions clambering out of their graves
with dust on the unstressed syllables,

before he was rudely shoved into the lake.

Pulled down through the cool green chambers,
we like to imagine him struggling awake
and suddenly realizing
he was seeing rain
in its original uncut form.

waxing and waning and waxing again

the other night i had this dream where someone pointed out how huge the moon was and somehow i knew even though i could see the whole thing that it was a new moon and not one about to wane. it was the opacity of the clouds in front of it that made me so sure that what i was seeing was trying to hide. it was big, low and seemed to be lit only slightly from the back. the next morning i woke up at 7 and tried to go for a hike in a grove of silver birches. i read the directions wrong and ended up at a provincial park on the escarpment that i traipsed through with soft feet because of the sign at the entrance that showed red circles around fires and tents but a big green one around a guy with a double barreled rifle. it seemed too early in the season to walk with such trepidation though i really wasn't sure. nothing happened. i did see a lot of quiet bees nestled under blossoms. so in related news, i've decided to start a new blog. time passes and sentiments change and somehow it doesn't seem right to be writing under the guise of apples and insects. not that it was ever really a guise. more like a particularity. in any event, the new blog is a project blog and less a vent space, which means i'll probably resurface around these parts now and again. it's a work in progress so i'll let you know when it's ready to go. i can't get that moon out of my head. my dreams have been so vivid lately.

100 things

a few of them:

1. can you believe they want to make more cuts to the funding of Canada's arts & culture sector? while i was away this summer i met this really lovely Berliner in Dingletown (yes...), Ireland who helped me brood over what makes the Americas so unique. she called it 'pulling from the white,' the opportunity to actively be a part of our own history...we're so new. what helps more to unite a community or maybe even aid the creation of a cohesive national identity than arts & culture? maybe you should think about signing this petition or talking to your local representative of parliament.

2. here's a life artist i currently am really enjoying and laughing with. his name is marc horowitz and i like the things he does. i am not so sure about the library vandalism, but mostly just because i'm more often than not worried that some computer might murder the public library system.

3. today i played something on the piano that made me emote all over the keys.

4. i am going to canoe down this river in a year

dreamland

sonja ahlers

sweet thing

i can't lie, like a lot of other crafty people right now i really really would love to save up for a piece of Wiksten clothing. probably the Orchard House dress (see the sweet red thing below). realistically, the chances of me having that sort of expendable cash at the exact right moment another one of those goes on sale are slim to none. i very much love all of Jenny Gordy's designs. i want to sew so detailed! she inspired me to order the autumn Toast catalogue (all the way from the UK for freeeeee) which i am happy about because it is just the perfect combination of melancholy and pretty. and printed with vegatable ink on recycled paper. little things, right? little momentary recognitions of feeling happy.

hrmhrm.

in other news i just fixed up an old serger and i'm having a creative FREAK OUT!!!!

autumn in iceland

i might drown in rain and falling maple leaves listening to this song by Ólöf Arnalds which you can hear too by clicking on the 'this' and downloading the first song by her off this other blog i have linked to the 'this'. but listen with caution; otherwise come spring there will be dozens of half frozen music lovers thawing with the snow and poking through the paritally rotten ruffage.

in other news, i wanted a piano picture for the last post and i wish i had found this one earlier
"salt & sea piano keys" - evan b. harris

i would write a song

if i could do it so that i could start conversations about things i've known forever but rarely remember. should i release them one at a time or just put together a big list right away? one at a time would probably deliver a little more punch. though they're mostly soft things so such an aggressive turn of phrase is sort of an inaccurate way to speak about them.

1. sitting down at the piano and tired of playing but stay just touching and looking at it. you go to shut it but hold the key door (what are those things called?) hovering just above them so that you can see the numbers at the top of each key. yup, 88 just like there's supposed to be. someone said eighty-eight this morning and i remembered each key's red stamped number.

2. here's another because that was maybe a bad one to start off with. when was the last time you remembered that bears actually sleep for six months of the year!

3. i've now officially decided against the original gradual-release plan. what about caterpillars wrapping themselves up in a homemade cocoon and becoming something entirely different two weeks later.

4. blue whales are so so big.

5. there are cougars in southern ontario. this is not really supposed to be on the list but i forget the rest right now and just remembered about the cougar sighting in lindsay a couple of days ago.

self-portrait (I tried to leave you on the plane)

instead i had a new friend look at my energies and take all that was left calcified on my diaphragm and kidneys with six shudders and a weird sort of smile.

where do all the birds go to die

i wonder. all the urban critters really. it's not too often i glance down a montreal alleyway to see a bloated raccoon belly up between the garbage and recycling. where are they all hiding?

i had a lot of thoughts on death on my 15 hour train ride to croatia a couple of days ago. there's been more death around me then ever before recently...how can i help to not think about it so much? what an absurd response to life. but i've decided not to write about it anymore. maybe another time. 

in other news. i wanted to clarify the rather flippant europe-is-so-europe comment. what i meant was, traveling europe on a budget is so traveling europe on a budget. a hostel in any city could be the same one somewhere else. same people as far as you can see, really. and once you've used up all your friendly european resources and have started to regret your methods of traveling (unplanned and random, limited opportunities to couchsurf) you are stuck with second rate hostels and people trying to get you on pub crawls. all the time. i would move to berlin or budapest but please, no more hostels. 

going to a wine and brine

yes, pickled cheese is available as a side dish to your pilsner urquell in the Czech Republic. and it is delicious.

liz you sure are hilarious and i wish you the best of luck with all your upcoming food endeavors. note: i probably am a liar with regards to toronto. second note: may live in sweet loft in montreal. won't that be a nice place to stay when you visit me? sub-second note: how sweet would it be if i transfered my skills to aux vivres?
i could whip up some vegelox for us when you stay with me. eh? eh? aux vivres miso gravy might trump fresh's if i may say so. if i may.

third note: i am ready to stop being in europe. it is so europe, you know what i mean? i am tired of defending and undefending canada, dispelling myths and all of that, taunted by americans with regards my accent, too many 18 year olds, etc. etc.
4th: going to croatia should be fun though. will avoid hills and all hidden land mines present.
5th: may pick berries on the west side of our-home-on-native-land for august + septemberish...any one looking for work? come with!
6th: swimming in confusing sentiment most of the time, i am. will anything ever straighten out. i sure wonder.

i've seen so much nathalie djurberg this summer.

change of title

doing this today

rotozaza's: etiquette


carpe noctem

the beautiful blue danube

budapest

...

i am a fool! in heightened emotional states it would probably be beneficial for me to not attempt to do things like public writing. parce que

1. i wrote robert hopper? what the f. clearly meant edward.
2. i am not singing harmonies with john k.'s wife, i'm just getting old
3. obviously the doppler effect follows you around. you can't run away from physics. what i meant is that i've become really aware of it and it somehow keeps coming up in conversation and dreams.
4. fuck the big dipper. it's everywhere.

out of breath or out of key

...i've been thinking about this post for maybe weeks but i just got some news that has sort of dampened my spirits - tied a stone to my heart and placed a water trough for elephants on my chest - so i'm not sure it will be quite as i planned, but i have 16 minutes to kill on this computer so this seems as good at time as any. better than most actually, given the fact that i'm actually on a computer.

there are some things that seem to be following me through all of this moving around. here's a small list:
- Edward Hopper
- the Doppler effect
- the ''space-time problem''
- the Big Dipper (this is not a new discovery)

there are others, but that will do for now. things just keep connecting themselves to others - i keep being surprised to find something i thought i just left behind in one place, right in front of me in another. maybe 16 minutes isn't very much time to get into all of this. last night some mancunian boy actually had the GALL to ask me, ''hey, what's your favourite thing?'' my favourite thing?? what a ridiculous question. well, i know but it really couldn't sound more new age or cliche. but it's definitely experience. i've just realized i'm addicted to every second like espresso. it's like i'm rubbing up against every moment, not like it's the last, but just for what it is exactly. i saw john k. samson in copenhagen - he's getting older and singing the harmonies for benediction with his wife now, which means i probably am too. and feeling all of these things for not the first time isn't disappointing, it makes me smile so hard and feel completely comfortable regardless of my situation in situ or transit. and we're dying we're dying we're dying, but it seems okay when you're living 100% life and not moments past or plans to come.

can't get this straight right now. everything the day's too small to hold seems like it might currently be residing just behind my hears or something.
oh well!
kiss my nose
and crack my toes
it's worth a try
to ignore my ennui

************

following up up up

/LANDREFORM/






Rykestrasse (!)





orangutans fucking

'

at the Berlin zoo, which also had the best playground known to man including 3 (!) different extraordinarily bouncy and unsupervised trampolines and other fun things. see -






this computer is about to die, so no more except this one. i found budapest very supportive.

ber-rake my body, hold my bones, hold my bones

alright so i spent a lot of yesterday in my own little flurry of thought provoked by finally gaining access to the weird feelings brought on by the \LANDREFORM\ piece (which was put on by KUNSTrePUBLIK e.V., fyi) i saw at bb5 the other night and i'm feeling really excited by most of it.



what do you think about this

yesterday while i was having a little nappy (after round 3 of really provocative kunst) i all of sudden thought about how much a part of the whole 'spectacle' the spectators were. hm okay let's see if i can really say what i want to here. i mean in a sense, we were all being mocked. the whole thing was so ridiculous, but you really couldn't help but want to be a part of it all as well, especially since you were being given the opportunity. i mean, certain parts of me really wanted to get in a car (the parts that were a bit cold and lonely, the parts eyeing cute artists, you know) and i definitely do not think that i'm in any sense better than the people who did gleefully ride around the circle over and over again. something about what went on there upon reflection seems to have made me feel like attention was being drawn to in the face of useless economic determinism and destruction how we are often too attached to our subjective experience to be conscious of the ways we are maybe bound first by apathy or something. hmm, that sounds like garbage. what am i trying to say.

well in the little artist's statement for the event it says, ''Bored by the wasteful tedium ofeconomic determinism, their exhibition project'' aims ''to generate hypothetical stratgeies of action,'' - hypothetical strategies of action. well, one strategy would be to continue participating and thus condoning corporate privatization of public space, like we did the other night, and do all the time when we decide to ignore when signs go up on old land in fallow, ''rezoned for commercial use.'' and since it made me weird and angry to see people so willing to be a part of it, it also left me alone to question why (besides really obvious reasons like the fucking nasty and unnecessary combustion going on).

desperately searching for meaning has kind of lead me to feel like it was maybe really good art. sneakily interactive and participatory, we became a part of the exhibition and perhaps gave it the meaning that was sort of implicitly intended.

holy shit, imagine i had spent this much time thinking about aristotle and kierkegaard.
honestly, though how could i. the whole brilliance of very bizarre contemporary art is that it comes to you from all sorts of directions, not limiting your intake to something too often limiting as language.

ALSO,
more exciting Berlin news. if anyone caught the hanne hukkelberg ref in the last post (probably only A. J.(e)R.C. would...haaaaa...) they might also be interested to hear about how i was strolling through what i think is my favourite neighbourhood in this sweet, sweet city, Prenzlauer Berg, when i glanced at my map to see that i was almost at the intersection of Knaackstrasse and...Rykestrasse!! then i remembered that the first song on that album is called Berlin and i though, ah hah! where is 68! so i trooped up and down the street, for no particular reason really because what could i do? knock on the door, ''Hello, Hanne? It's me, Emily,'' but alas, the numbers only went to 51. still, though. i hope she recorded the album around there, that would make it even better.

i have photos of both of these things but i can't be bothered to do any uplodading at this point.

plus, i'm about to run out of ti

dive into infinity

after numerous (hem hem) requests, i've decided to write a quick little thinger on the w.w.w. from my current location in Berlin to provide an update for those who want to know but also! because i want your opinions.

first order of business! i love Berlin. knew i would. want to move back here. though i have to say, all this city jumping is really making me appreciate montreal and toronto because they are (in some, not necessarily aesthetic, sense) pretty comparably interesting and exciting places to live. with lots of bikers. not as many as in holland -

sidenote: was in south-east holland visiting my old roommate last week (fun and funny for a number of reasons, one being we ate with her quite-conservative-old-world-euro parents twice, where they alternated between carefully distanced sentences in english and gabbering in dutch, and her dad told me very important things like 'north americans are too stupid to work (with martine, at the university)' and vegetarianism is dangerous; perhaps that's why i look so 'peaky'...i suggested it had something to do with not sleeping in the same bed for more than two nights for close to a month.) but also! martine and i did quite a bit of biking and i made note of some important facts that contribute to holland having a larger population of bicycles than people - 1. they are huge, heavy, easy riding machines there - no one locks them to anything, they just lock up their back wheels and assume no one would be so silly as to exert the effort to carry such a machine very far, therefore finding a parking spot is not too difficult, - 2. biking is favourable because it is a seriously social activity - they ride very close to one another and chat and laugh and chat and chat and chat. i found this very stressful especially since i was using martine's roommate's bike which was of course much, much, much too large for me (tall dutch girls - it's not just a stereotype), my feet barely stayed on the pedals while i was riding.

- but still a lot.

anyways. i want your opinions, not on cycling through rural holland (which looks convincingly like southwestern ontario, actually) but on this ahem, performance piece i suppose, i went to my first night in berlin

so the whole point of me being in germany at this particular time is because the berlin biennale is on just until sunday, which i really wanted to come to so i could pretend to be a part of the international art community (can i be? i have been to a remarkable number of galleries in the past month) and see some hopefully interesting work. the biennale is being curated by adam szymczyk & elena filipovic and is called 'when things cast no shadow'. it's supposed to have this sort of day-night dichotomy thing, but i haven't really been feeling much of that besides the fact that things are going on both in the day and in the night.

i've been really enjoying myself, but blah blah i don't really want to go into too much detail about the good stuff because i want to talk about this thing i went to a couple nights ago! i got into the city around 5 30 and had planned to go to this opening at the Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum, an area between the old east and west of the city that is an 'urban wasteland,' if you will. broken pieces of wood and cement in a dry and sandy little bit of land, shoved between new high-rises and old duplexes. i guess it's been at the centre of a lot of property right discrepancies since the fall of the wall and now has been claimed by a small collective of Berlin artists who are using it during the biennale as an "ambiguous site [that] exemplifies specific dialectices of change and standstill in post-unification Berlin...an odd urban void that will stand as a temporary space of possibility and a test site for research," a "reminder of a dramatic past and also a monument to failed urban development in conditions of sluggish economic growth and as a locus of investor fantasies."

i'm really excited about it, i love the public movement to reclaim supposedly private space, i love how interactive this particular space is, however! this thing i went to was just ridiculous! and it was put on by the guys from the collective so i was un poco disappointed. it was called \LANDREFORM\ and was supposed to "resort" to the Woody Guthrie song 'This Land is Your Land' to generate hypothetical strategies of action. this is what it was. in the middle of this big useless field was a wooden teepee. around the teepee were 8 black BMW sedans attached to one another by white rope with red flags hanging from them in a circle delineated by pieces of broken cement. from the car radios was a sample of the song broken up about every three minutes by a buzzer or a voice counting down from 5. for probably 4 hours the BMWs drove around the teepee stopping every three minutes and idling while the people in the cars (observors like me) got in and out, taking turns riding around and around and around. gleefully hanging out of the windows and taking photo after terrible photo, waving to their friends, waving to strangers, drinking their 2 euro beers, smoking lots of cigarettes. being very excited when it was their turn to ride. about an hour and a half in, two of the artists lit the teepee on fire. and the cars kept driving around. and more people took bad photos.

and i stayed for a very long time, a little bit grossed out by it all. it was strange and egotistical and, i thought, an incredible wasteful use of the wasted space. 8 huge cars were running for like 5 hours, just driving around a fire (which was a beautiful fire, i have to say, and something about it was appealing with regards to this whole reclamation of public space thing), and everyone there felt a little bit famous when it was their turn to get in a car...strange. sick?

hm. actually i'm having some positive feelings about it all of a sudden.
maybe my reaction is sort of useful.
oh man.
i've actually been dying to talk about this for days, but haven't really met anyone that i thought wouldn't run away once i started moving my hands and shouting in a very excited manner about it all.

okay, actually, seems that i need to sit on this for a little bit longer.
please leave comments!!

postscript - need to write more later about the luxury of the body, performance art and the matthew barney "drawing restraint" exhibit i went to at the Kunsthalle Wien. i essentially had to be taken away by security guards when the gallery was closing. there's such a fine line between arrogance and originality in creative work like he's been doing for years. i have to say, i think you're probably just jealous if all you see is self-indulgence in his art. me lo gusta mucho.

miss most of you, but don't really have any desire to come home. come to me!

at the fork of the thames

i am in the town i grew up in for the first time in a long time as if i'm here to stay. i moved out of my apartment in montreal and now have a two-year collection of stuff moved from rue de bullion and into my childhood bedroom. it's a little cramped. i'm not staying here, but i guess it's where i'm starting from again. i just drove my sister downtown and drove home along the only main street in this giant sprawling town a little nostalgically, looked at all the things (every one on that single street) i made sure to tell a friend about when he was coming to london for the first time. he said he felt close to me being here, which is funny and sort of sad to think about as i drive down the same street now with the radio off feeling more removed from my surroundings than a geographer should ever.

the other night, my last night in montreal sort of by surprise (moving was a complicated ordeal on a number of levels including when we actually intended it to happen), i sat on a couch in a new friend's place talking really closely and enthusiastically with emma. akua watched until she couldn't take it any longer and with a short laugh yelled, "You guys talk about yourselves so much!!"oh do we. we do we do. i do! so much. it never really occurs to me that's what's going on, sometimes my experiences are overwhelming and i can't stop to think about any thing besides how i'm feeling. how obnoxious.

you know what else is overwhelming right now? everything. the news. dusk. sickness. and i can't slow anything down to grab a hold of some, any, thing. i am living so much in the moment that i've hardly had a chance to sort out where anything goes. take my crowded crowded bedroom for one. my swollen heart and cold fingers for two. i don't really want this right now; that's what's whelming me. i really would've preferred to feel sure about something this May. i had kind of settled to let that be a boring job and expensive apartment in toronto, but now i've been given another opportunity to keep moving and how could i let it pass? experience! i just don't know if my rib cage is large enough to love more people fundamentally out of reach because of the spaces between us. meeting a person on the move requires so much of a commitment to being good with leaving them behind and i just really don't know if i want to do that anymore. i'm tired. i miss every person i've met and not been able to tuck into my pocket. if you are one of those people, please come over and we'll have some of the tea i bought to improve my circulation. i'll only try to steal you away if you want to come.


laura fayer

i went back to wipe it clean

sometimes it's almost too much to see how long it does take to inch inch inch out of some assumed or more likely pretended bit of assurance. trust is so fickle, there might be more than one catch tied up in being sure of someone else. especially if you're not so sure yourself. don't you think? it hurts a little bit sometimes.

and my life became risky

i am seeing everyone in these cracks.


i am pressing my hot hot chest against the cool tiles in the shower
i am leaving that him curled up comforted in my warmed bed and
letting my ears be grated by the electric violin in the metro
maybe thinking about how this
could have should have
been, not like this!
but how else.
supported by a base upon which i let the gin stand,
i am seeing

everyone

in these cracks.


benicia gantner

it's the morning!

the keys, please

"triple threat!" i licked my lips and ran my tongue across the scars left behind from the two times i have let someone pierce my lip for the sake of spontaneity and her friend (surprise!).
"we are," i savored each consonant, "cha-wri-pu-lee threatening."
i can feel all my motivation and creativity bursting from each crack between my pores, non-directionally and so, rather unproductively. i need a focus! to focus. phoe-kuss. locusts.
in large numbers they're triply threatening to some sorts of trees.
even the blazing breeze
and brazen bees aren't able to do much about that.

late nights

just off the corner of my street is a street where just off the corner of it construction is beginning again. after 8 or so long months and 12 or so store closings we had a nice break of about 8 to 12 weeks where the street was full of snow and free of trucks. alas, the sun returned beckoning to forgotten projects and misaligned pipelines and this i walked along tonight wondering about the changes it had seen. the main! the Main! i get to live off of the main in this country's most curiously creative city. where no one works and spring is real dirty, and there are eyeglassed guys hanging off their balconies on your walk home, plaid shirts undone shirtsleeves rolled up yelling down to probably you, "we're all losers! we're all beautiful fucking losers!"


claire ellen oswalt

summer in the city

i like the murmur project. neato mosquito.


jen corace

"naked with summer in your mouth"

things i will miss about university: watching people write

seriously! i'm not really sure there are going to be a lot of opportunities to look at people's handwriting from here on in. no one writes anymore. sure, i am a letter sender and have letter sending friends, but i know them and it's not quite the same as being in a giant examination room watching the idiosyncractic ways people throw themselves into putting thoughts on a page. i really like people who hold their pens 'wrong'. i hold my pen wrong, it's nice to see other people who have refused to give in to all the people who claimed there was only one way. my dad paid me $20 when i was maybe 8 or so to write an entire page of one sentence holding my pencil between my thumb and forefinger on my right hand. i got the $20, but the incentive wasn't enough to change my habits forever. what did he expect? i am a performer, not a reformer.

there's a boy who sat in front of me during my exam this morning who's also sat near me in class a few times; he grips his pencil (only pencils, sharpened at his desk) in a fist. and he writes this way. i experimented, it is extremely taxing on your ligaments to grip with such force for so long.




so anyways. i have some things to say sort of in nostalgic retrospect of being done this degree (!!). geography and philosophy was a good combination...becoming familiar with ideas and the space where they might be applied...or something to that effect.

for me; i'm so interested in expression and identity - expression of identity. starting from what i'm going to dare to call 'first principles' and Ficte-ian pespectives on where i end and everything that's not-me starts; to the material embodiment of certain forms of identity in the landscape, e.g. ethnic identity, sexual identity...it's an incredible perspective to have gained to be able to (kiiiiiind of) start from the smallest most conceptual bits and extend outwards to what is tangible and 'real'. or at least sensational. sensations are a funny thing though because they're such a fundamental part of the smallest and largest bits.
the experience of sensational effects, expression of their affects.

i'm excited to put some time in thinking about canadian identity. notoriously undefinable - why are you canadian? there's a plurality so pervasive within the notion of a coherent canadian identity that it's even indescribable beyond saying that it is just that - a plurality. i'm especially especially especially interested in the expression of canadian identity through art. i'm going to spend some time with this now . that . i . am . done . SCHOOL!

to start, on a recommendation, i'm spending some time with al purdy.

________________________________

that's by emmanuel polanco

heavy

make something feel good again
balint zsako

my friend emma

has got an extraordinary voice
and a really good new song that she produced with my other friend kweku

let me tell you my friends, it warrants a listen:

emma frank

i am a-struggling with some aristotle right now, my mymy my. get me out of here.

un cadeau, la vie

i am struggling to try to stay present these days. i think i've said that three times to the same people in the last 70 hours or so. present present present.
i've at least got a handle on how managing nostalgia, which seems like a start. things just happen so fast in the immediate, getting sucked into fantastical scenarios usually implausible is seeming more and more like giving in & up. it would be really great to sort out a way to be adequately detached but not running or pushing the wrong things away.

being present also means letting go of feeling like an agent it seems... i have an Inuit friend who told me to forego planning since more often than not things spring up, there's a snowstorm or the ice melts earlier than you expected, and nothing goes the way you thought it might. why go looking for disappointment?

my friend anthony took these photos on clarke when he was in montreal a while back. we had breakfast and went for a walk. walking seems to be the thing i know best how to do with people visiting this city, likely because it's easier for me to think and be my most charming while on the move. i know it was a long time ago because we talked over eggs about the possibility of a conservative prime minister. oh, those were the days. it was anthony's birthday recently and he told me he'd been reading this. i remembered this here montage and thought i might show it off. hope that's okay.

anthony boronowski

comfort

i walk home alone past the dozens of people thankful for the warmth and asking for money, turn the corner onto my street and stop to have the most sensual experience, burst into tears seeing the crescent moon as big as in the movies, east at the top of my street.
in a city, nothing you touch is real, the ground is constructed and the sky can move you to cry.

oh to see us melt into all the cracks.

au coin de st-urbain

100 things


but first! there are two doors on the balcony off my bedroom, the one that swings in just sort of rests against the one that swings out, which doesn't really close very well it just sort of shuts and hooks closed. it's usually pretty chilly, but now! it smells like spring and air! always! even with the garbage in the downstairs hall.
soon, i'm going to take that inside door off. and sleep with feet outside
and get cold and maybe wet when that big rain that needs to fall finally comes and washes montreal.

nathalie daoust

today's a divisble day

where were you February 4/04?

oh god

there are about 6 zillion other things more worth being sad about

purge of my purge

trying to let go of a few feelings right now and finding this requires meeting them one last time as they escape my sensational lexicon, float away, dry bits of history left behind. it's like slow swelling warm light followed by hollow chest and upset stomach and me silently saying 'oh god this is sad'. should i look forward to or dread seeing the last one go? the answer is yes. which doesn't make sense, and is precisely the point. things are verrrry muddled these days, let me tell you. oh god this is sad.

chewing winter

"I'm going to fucking kill someone tonight,"
he spoke loudly. His voice was heavy with poutine and I ignored him and kept walking home from the bar I felt removed from but had a good time at. I had thought, it's the funniest thing that I am here and stuck thinking about the things that make me feel bad although they're far away. And this time I'm not even sure of how to run. I had thought I thought and then I left because it was time and I was about to become obnoxious, speaking too loud. Everything seems off. I am on and not doing the right things. I don't understand the feelings I should use to create. Run run run run. Seriously? I am, too easy, once again. And it leaves me without very much.

kelly lynn jones

her work is beautiful, i'm on the ground still dissecting the details

sentimentality is a vortex

"Emily," my voice said warningly.
I know I know, my mind replied, my heart sighed.


bertrand sallé

tell me anything you want

kelie bowman