wildcat

New Year's Eve was pretty good; had a few people over to the townhouse and tried a wild variety of martinis. I think I had six different kinds. It was calm, and goofy, just chatting and having a good time. As if to say something, the song "Is that all there is," by Peggy Lee, came on at midnight - while in the background the neighbours on either side caused a ruckus. I kissed the wonderful boyfriend and we went to bed, all drunken and silly. The next morning we went for brunch and then ran around all day, had hot sex, watched Family Guy, and ate pasta.

And today? Reading comic books, writing, and eating gyozas. Klezmer tonight at Pagliacci's. Should be good.

The impoverished afternoon, shower-clean and absorbed by various minor, petty obsessions. If only there were five of me, each one exacting, cruel, and focused on one task. Instead, there's only one of me and I can't remember what I wanted to do.

I plan on seeing A Very Long Engagement sometime this week. Sonia mentioned at work on Friday that she's seen it and it isn't nearly as good as Amelie was - story-wise - but the visuals and sense of design are parallel and at least it's a beautiful movie to watch. I think I'll go to it without expectations if possible, much like I did with The Life Aquatic. In the meantime, I'm going to write nonsensical stories and not show them to anybody. Cowboys, I say!

Went downtown at six this evening, wandered around for forty minutes and petrifying freeze. Something to do? I felt a sharp pang for bigger cities, for Montreal in particular, because it was Sunday night and there was nothing to do. There should, I feel, be at least one bookstore open on a Sunday night, especially with a small coffee bar or something. So I walked around and looked at closed antique stores, and debated stealing an oddly constructed driftwood chair sitting outside a store going out of business. Then eventually I went to Serious Coffee.

A middle-aged man asked me if my name was Justin the second I walked through the door. "No, sorry," I said before ordering a strawberry smoothie and a hedgehog (with fogged glasses and a frog in my throat that led to me sounding like a spazz). The man asked another young guy coming in the same question and I pondered if he was some daddy-type waiting for a blind date with some little twinkie number (something about the name Justin implies youth and nubile flesh), but then some other middle-aged man came in and it turned out to be a business meeting of some variety. I read Raymond Carver's stories "Boxes," and "Whoever was using this bed." I liked the second one better, about a couple sleeping at three in the morning who are woken up by some drunken floozie calling three times looking for someone named Bud. Bud, they kept repeating with contempt. Bud. They end up smoking cigarettes by four while the wife describes the dream she just had and the husband grows angry that he wasn't even in her dream, when her ex-husband was. I'm still in the middle of it, actually.

Anyway, Michael showed up and we headed off to Pagliacci's for dinner and Klezmer music. Robbie and Ayla were supposed to join us, but they didn't - without any word or warning. We eventually decided to just order, and had these weird rice ball appetizers. Michael had "the Sophia," which is pasta with shrimp and smoked salmon; I had the "On the Beach," which is mushrooms and roasted garlic on linguine. There was too much oil in mine, but it was good.

We drank iced tea and wondered where our dining companions were. It got to that point where they needed to be in the restaurant with us, which was very much a Woody Allen set with the Yiddish music in the background and the weird couple next door (he was smashed out of his brains and being rather rude). They needed to be sitting beside us but illuminated by a spotlight, dim but bright enough to indicate that they were not actually with us - but merely projections, internal imagery. The projections would explain their absence to us while waitresses floated by and inquired about how we were doing. It was worrying, but the evening hit the point where the explanations could be summed up by "Sorry, we've been mauled by bears," or "Robbie's been kidnapped by a roving Argentinian circus in need of acrobats without formal training." We worried a bit, they didn't answer their phones, and after we ate, we left - as the slide-whistle surged in the background.

Now I'm at home and my belly is full, my breath is garlic, and my lava lamp is lit. I'll probably do some futzing about on the internet, update my links lists at the side to reflect Caroline's new blog. Maybe I'll slide into bed early with several layers on because it's cold, and read more Carver. I could probably just turn the heat on, but I've always been a bit of a Scrooge and opted for sub-arctic temperatures and a systems of sweaters and long-sleeved shirts.

No. No. No, but you see, the thing is. The thing is, is that we had no choice. They were the Argentinian Circus, world-renowned. From Buenos Aires. They drove by in covered caravans painted purple, blue, chartreuse - and they jumped out, all these acrobats in green tights. They grabbed us around our waists and hoisted us into the air. We were paralyzed, stock-still, they could have been hoisting two-by-fours for all the movement. And what do you say to something like that? "Help, help? Save me? I'm being ransacked by Argentinians?" They shoved us into burlap sacks - burlap, I mean, who uses burlap nowadays? Have they never heard of canvas, or light-weight polyester? Chucked us in the back and drove right off. Right off! Apparently, they'd run out of lion tamers. I know, I wasn't expecting that either. We tried to bargain with them for our freedom, offered typewriters and HAM radios. They'd have none of that. We offered lint, pennies, and bits of string. Their last lion tamer ran off to Guatemala with a mannequin he named Galatea. Their clowns were all raving lunatics, somebody said they use lead-based grease paint. Kept trying to sell us rubber noses. They went on and on about their longstanding feud with the Mexican circus. We were lucky to find this payphone in Zapala; luckily, we had enough pennies left for a phone ca---

(c) 2005 Ben Rawluk all rights reserved

It's been one of those absolutely beautiful days where it looks amazing but if you go outside, all your skin freezes to crystal. Really. I was out of the house in time to see the bus rush by, so I waited for the next one. After that I got downtown and accidentally went shopping; ostensibly to buy presents, but I ended up getting a couple Fantastic Four back issues and A French Affair, by Mary Blume - newspaper columns that Blume wrote from Paris between 1965 and 1998. I bought a little something to cheer up Michael, and went to Hime Sushi for lunch.

Gloriee seems to still be sick, so her brother was serving tables today. I'll have to give her a call in the next day or so and find out how she's doing. I had the hot special, a seafood bowl. It was very good, the rice was well-cooked and the seafood a delight to the tongue. Something like teriyaki, but not quite - I should really just ask one day. Anyway, it was crab sunomono with mushrooms, crab, noodles, and I love the bit of egg on the side, with piping hot miso soup. I appreciated the miso after the cold.

Jimmy gave me a haircut for twelve bucks at the barber shop, I mused that it was weird I go to a barber shop. I was also glad that he didn't talk to me overly much, which I always find annoying. Haircuts are intensely meditative for me. Cutting away the old to reveal something underneath. Ran into Ally and Marc after that, at Munro's - it was nice to see them, but Ally was bummed out by her cat dying a few days ago. What a horrible thing for the opening of the New Year. We exchanged the usual pleasantries and then seperated.

Talked to Michael on the phone from the midst of his bad day while my bus headed for home. I look forward to giving him his present. I even wrapped it.

My current incidental five-minute obsession is this weird Scandinavian pop band called Alcazar. The music is crap Europop dance music, nothing particularly special, but if you go to the "Media Room" section and watch the videos? An ubergay revamp of ABBA or Ace of Bass threatens to end the world in an endless cycle of Pornocalypses! It's like watered down pop culture Esque propaganda films. The obsession with weird costume play - bellboys and french maids - combined with knife-throwing and obscenely-huge furcoats worn over their shoulders? The videos stroll into weird nightmare territory with men wearing animal masks, or strange applications of eyelasher curls that use a jumpcut and weird framing for the shots. And the eyebrows! Fascist Drag Queen Metaporn!

Matthew and I have been extravagantly busy on Esque Matters: 1, 2, and 3. I'm particularly proud of that last Meringue post, and Matthew continues to astonish me with his skill. Anyway. We want to do a bit of design work with the rantbook blog, make it both stylish and gaudy. Shall work on that later.

Halfway through Mary Blume's A French Affair. Brilliant. At first I was skeptical; surely these would be ridiculous society page columns, fluff-work for those back in America? Surprisingly, the book covers a lot of different subject matter and while Blume's prose is straightforward, it's also quite sophisticated and while at one moment you might be reading about the extravagant costumed galas held in the Nineteen Thirties, the next one might be about Paris's last soup-kitchen. Or the French's proclivity for forming protest groups about virtually anything. The range is what I like the most, she doesn't stick to one subject or tone, and it made me hungy for more creative non-fiction.

Sweet and sour soy balls for breakfast! The Lotus Pond by eleven-thirty, my hand thoroughly banged this morning from a stumble (and assorted cranky snapping at somebody special, sigh). I devoured: soy balls, three turnip cakes, chow mein, spiced tofu, and stir fried brocolli. Gyozas. A glass of water. Each and every piece of ever morsel consumed in record time while I read the Blume book. Apparently, before the late eighties virtually no one had a private telephone in France? That public phonebooths had to be everywhere and were something of an obsession, with phone box fairs? That you could wait up to two years to get a private line?

My loan has not yet come in, I wandered around and around Chapters for half an hour, secure in a bubble. Magic. Operating the entire world with my skinny little brain.

Why is it that you always run into someone on the bus that you've never really been more than an acquaintance with but has followed you down to your new city anyway? And you run into him on the bus and you have that painful period of conversation with somebody that you don't really care about, that you sit there and annihilate with your thoughts even though he still continues to exist? And he wants to see the comic book you're reading? I'm sorry, I am sorry, but we never shared anything more than a momentary parlay or two at a rave in Prince George before Matthew and I took off on some adventure to get away. It's like that repetitive reminder of your past in snippets of people you never particularly cared about. I mean, really. You could be made entirely of mahogeny and I wouldn't notice.

Just watched Lynch's Mulholland Drive all the way through. Processing. Oz, Oz, Oz; we're off to see the wizard? There's a lot of collapsing probabilities. Probabilities? I need to reconstruct my thoughts. Consider this later. I enjoyed the "Silencio" club most of all, and the nods to Bergman's Persona.

Well, it's snowing. Which means that Michael got his wish. Apparently Christian's been up since five, taking pictures. I slept comfortably and then uncomfortably and then eventually got to take a shower. Now I'm eating gyozas before I rush out the door to get to work. In the snow. Everybody else is going to be all goofy and incapable of functioning in this weather.

Best transition from Mulholland Drive: Rita repeating the word "Maybe," and then cut to the director character Adam's house with the soundtrack wailing "Baby, Baby!" It was odd and incidental.

Just returned from what amounts to a perfect evening out - went to Le Petit Saigon with Michael, Natasha, and Dan. I ate crispy noodles with seafood (calamari, prawns, scallops, halibut) and drank iced tea. The service was as usual perfectly surreal. After that, we headed across the street - literally - to Temple, which apparently has been open in Victoria for some two years. I debate this, have only heard of it recently, and maintain that someone has carefully edited people's memories. Dan, for example, clearly has extensive telepathic scaffolding implanted into his brain to prevent cognitive dissonance. Regardless, I had a chocolate mousse with a kind of cookie on top, and orange sorbet over top of that - a sprig of mint flurried through the sorbet. The blend of flavours and textures was complicated and enticing. I nearly had a martini by accident, but Michael reminded me that I'm not drinking until February.

I'm not sure that I like the Wizard of Oz reading of Lynch's Mulholland Drive; I think I tend to favour it as a complicated web of stories, with a Nancy Drew remix followed by an E! True Hollywood Story narrative, and that's just the simple bits. It follows that shrapnel narrative concept that I named in my fiction workshop this year: stories like broken pieces that are never solved. I think even that's overly simplistic. It should be noted that I overuse the following words too often in my day-to-day life: "sequence," "narrative," and "character arc." It should be noted that The Big Leibowski is on Showcase right now, but Michael flipped past it. Where the fucking money, Leibowksi?

Aritha Van Herk's novel Restlessness is rocking my world with a delicate weave of sex, death, and stories. Travel. It reminds me a lot of Jeanette Winterson, but I fear at times that it slips out of having direct scenes and goes into faux philosophic exposition that retreads a lot of the same material; while a certain amount if acceptable and positive, it floats too often into that particular pool.

The other big art thing at the moment is Rick Veitch & Tommy Lee Edwards's The Question #3. I bought the first issue of this comic from DC and was really surprised by how much I liked it; by the second issue my faith wavered as it became muddy and teetered between incoherence and over-exposition. But #3 has restored my faith. The big deal with this comic is that it's getting a lot of criticism and discussion in the hideously-named blogosphere because it's an example of a new writer taking over a long-time character and doing a new take on it; the Question was originally a bastion of Ayn Rand's Objectivism and now Veitch has remade him into a mystical figure with a perchance for Ginsberg-esque discussions with the city around him. I like this more recent interpretation a lot, and with #3 Veitch has cut down and tempered the Ginsberg word play narration so that it's not overwhelming. The art by Edwards is brilliant, and whole comic sizzles with this Pop Art Comic Book Beauty, orgasming photo-realistic flares through a haze of industrial colour. Which means something, I can't really explain beyond that and I quake with pretension. Anyway, I'm loving this comic again. It also has the angle of taking place in Metropolis but having Superman only in the distance, in discussion; he's treated as a fact of life for the criminal element who have learned to operate in ways that get around his fascist approach. The Question approaches things from a different direction. The Art: the Question is reporter Vic Sage, who dons a trenchcoat and a blank faceless mask; Edwards succeeds with the mask because he uses shadow and colour to give the silhouette of features under the mask, so it doesn't look over-exaggerated but merely present.

Tomorrow's plan: Floyd's Diner for Brunch at 11:30 with Samara and her crew, followed by a gang-bang-style shopping spree; we're going to Flavour on Johnson Street so I can root through their cheap-ass pinstriped suits and select one that suits me (pun, pun). I have wanted one since I was very long; I have always considered a man with a well-cut pinstriped suit to be the HEIGHT OF STYLE. I also think it's a good idea to have a goodlooking suit for the flurry of interviews and media opportunities I'll inevitably be involved with as a art pundit and Sex Bomb Literati.

What a difference a day makes? Just twenty-four little hours? Last semester I wanted to commit some kind of ritualistic suicide to get out of the horrors of my Technical Writing class every Monday and Thursday morning at 8:30. This semester? I have to scramble up to campus for Brian's "Art and Technology" class and I have absolutely no problem with that. Some of the content will be pretty much a retread of my earlier film studies classes, but the music and photography sections are all-new, and all-different. I'm looking forward to going tomorrow morning. This is strange and different. This is a queer sensation, which opens like a butterfly unfolds its wings just inside the backdoors of my skull.

Woke up this morning with a plumber in Michael's house, followed by a fast shower and a drive to Floyd's Diner. Wicked food, but the place was packed! Met up with Samara, Tara, and Crystal - we drank juice, coffee, ate brunch. After that Michael went off to rescue his wallet from his bedroom and drive Tara to a friends house in Cadboro Bay, while Samara, Crystal and I headed downtown: shopping! I walk a fine tightrope between enjoying the opulent consumerizing of clothes-shopping, and feeling guilty and indignant toward myself. Michael bought two sets of pants! In between bouts of North American guilt, I ended up with a flouncy collared striped metrosexual shirt and a nice brown turtleneck. But more importantly? At Flavour, after one was too large and made me look like the Incredible Shrinking Man (or, rather, the shrinking fellow from Talk to Her's movie-within-a-movie), and the other one doing weird things to my ass - I found a pinstriped suit for fifty bucks! A culmination of dreams!

Anxious bodies, anatomically correct but misaligned. Random interlude on Hillside in the 6:40pm dark, ice underfoot, while I help a man who fell on the slippery slope of winter and broke his ankle. Acted as a crutch around the corner to his apartment building. Then I walked on home, and slipped on the ice myself - my neck hurts as a result. Michelle went to a ritual, Mike slept, and I watched Mulholland Drive (again), with Christian.

This time I focused my attention on the lesbian content, the unrepentent sexual innuendo of every single gesture and motion. Also, the terror inflicted by the everyday things. An apartment complex's gate at noon, under the hot sun - horror! The music was the great destroyer. David Lynch could shoot a film of someone making a sandwich and make my knees quiver. I'm absolutely enthralled, and want to track down Twin Peaks at Future Shop soon so I can, you know, watch that.

Presented Christian with the Doom Patrol graphic novels and now I consider the disjointed midnight mutterings of a new short story. A rejection and celebration of the house as metaphor, as allegory-- with my usual experimentation over narrative voice and points of view.

Picked up a copy of Walker Percy's The Moviegoer for three bucks at Second Story on Johnson Street. I'd been looking for the book for a couple weeks and attuned myself to the vibrations of the city - or something. The graffiti's been telling secrets, and it isn't along the lines of "Buy War Bonds." I also ended up with a copy of The Early Works of Winsor McKay, the artist who created the Little Nemo in Slumberland comic strips around the beginning of the Twentieth Century. While his politics were a little odd by our reckoning, he was a brilliant graphic artist for his time.

Napolean Dynamite was great - watched it with Michael and Steff last night, at Cinecenta. It was the kind of comedy that makes you painfully aware of your own awkward behaviours. Ended really well, fought against expectations.

That short story has hiccuped into something. I don't know. I'm going to go work on it it for a while.

1. I'm actually doing pretty well with the lack of booze. One month, January 1st to 31st, without my sweet lover Gin, or wine, or beer, or any alcohol at all. Mostly to see if I can do it. Also to see exactly how often social engagements really require it. Not to say I'm not going to run right out on the first of February and down a bottle of something-something. You know. Because I can.

2. The facial hair debate is split - do I keep the goatee? It's growing on me - ha - and hair poems spring from my fingertips while I sit through three-hour workshops that aren't yet workshops. Similarly, I'm finding facial hair more attractive on other people, a weird kink in my sexuality that I wasn't expecting; I've always liked the soul patch but otherwise prefer only the most clean-shaven of men. Not full-out beards, but a little bit can be quite attractive. But then, I've always been a narcissist.

3. Had the second video production class tonight and I'm stoked. I'm really looking forward to working with Steff and Myla, and I think things will be brilliant once we've got our first script set out - by Sunday - and start the actual shooting.

Perhaps I require a deep-dream diving apparatus - that compulsive, throat-closing sensation of stranglehold dream overwhelms. At around 5 this morning, I'd guess, I received a phone call on a Nokia cell phone that I don't have, using a ringtone I'd never heard before. It was somebody named Ruth. I didn't answer the phantom phone, but flailed inside brain-cell. Prison-cell. Things collapsed. I don't know what Ruth was trying to tell me: maybe that I was going to wake up an hour late with no time to shower or do anything but rush out the door and have four buses pass me by. I think the most disturbing thing is that I know what brand of cell phone showed up in my dream, and that amounts to product placement.

I keep wasting time on Weboggle.

The queer reading of Rebel Without a Cause is almost too easy, especially because of what we know about James Dean and Sal Mineo. I'm more interested in Natalie Wood as Judy. She struggles to express love to her father, but he'll have none of that - he's clearly too paranoid about the roiling sexual miasma under all that cliché Fifties repression, he's too concerned that his daughter has an Electra Complex and wants to get it on. He doesn't know what to do, and is consequently a Bad Father; when the movie opens, Judy's at the police department and describes a scene where her father yells at her for looking like a "tramp" before he tries to rub off her red-red lipstick. She's there in her new dress, bright red with red lipstick and complains that he nearly "rubbed [her] lips away." The struggle between the Fifties nuclear family ideal and the abject fear of sexuality (he's afraid of hers) propels Judy into chaotic behaviour, she runs with the usual fast crowd and generally wanders around being horribly existential. Nothing means anything to her because her feelings (regardless of their sexual content - generally she's never presented as being overtly sexual toward her father) are rejected. I'm not quite sure what to say about that, but I certainly stick on it when I watch the film.

Natalie Wood might look from the vantage point of the present like a conservative paragon, but she spends the film spouting angstful one-liners up until she actually lets herself go with Jim (James Dean) and emotions are encouraged and expressed. Consequently she becomes more maternal (especially toward Sal Mineo's Plato), but I think that's just a product of its time and in this case I'd call it a positive attribute of the character - once she is allowed to actually express something, she begins to find herself; she becomes more equipped to deal with things than Plato, who's struggling with all kinds of anger (and, ahem, sexual desire) but wasn't yet at the point of self-actualization. Or something.

But anyway, I'm going to do some freewriting for a few minutes, see if there are any Chinese food leftovers from last night, and then I'm going to work on that screenplay I need to scrap together for tomorrow. The Fifties pre-liberation "popularity" jingo is at the centre of our film, so I think that's why I ended up watching James Dean act drunk and prone to violent outburts.

I'm not used to waking up and being coherent on a Sunday morning. I'm trying to pack in a little procrastination and then get to work. The sad thing is, the screenplay section has be about a page and a half - that's it. That might even be too long. I hate that part: trying to figure out the timing, how much monologue needs to be present, how much time=pages I need to worry about. It looks moderately miserable outside.

Also have a few ideas for that horror story I was trying to write. The sad thing is, it probably won't end up being horror by the time I'm finished.

I'm also not used to sitting around listening to trance, anymore. I don't know what that's about.

The big deal is that after I go to this script meeting, I'm going to meet up with Michael at Cinecenta - for the third time this week - and go see I Heart Huckabees. Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman as existential detectives? Brilliant.

Tossed off the screenplay fragment and now I'm going to write some prose, just something random. Don't know. Listening to trance is weird, rhythmic, and entirely mechanical. I spend most of my time feeling entirely mechanical. Does that seem drastic? I ate a bowl of tortellini and I'm going to the script meeting shortly, say in an hour or so, but I have to wait for laundry to finish in the dryer so that I have pants. Pants. I can't believe I need to wear pants. Everything is limitless and electric.

So I've decided that I want to be an existential detective. Michael and I went to see I Heart Huckabees tonight at Cinecenta, jacked up on After Eight chocolate bars and bottles of SoBe. I can't even remember what flavour of SoBe. I can't understand this momentary flare up of consumer behaviour. There was also popcorn involved, but I don't like to admit that. Collapsing down, collapsing down.

I really grooved on the film. Jason Schwartzmann of Rushmore and whatever that cracked-out movie about meth-heads was called? He's a poet and environmentalist who suffers from a string of coincidences, and goes in search of the meaning. And from there it's existential crises a-plenty: Jude Law, Naomi Watts, and Mark Wahlberg. Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman were the existential detectives, along with their opponent, played by Isabelle Huppert - but, really, do they find meaning in meaningless lives, or do they find meaninglessness in meaningful lives or do they actually make the person in question realize something else? I loved that it completely obliterated the whole "epiphany" moment concept by having everybody have them every three seconds. Michael wasn't hot on Wahlberg's character, Tommy, who was pretty much an uncultured character in the process of becoming cultured (a fool finding wisdom, which is a bit obvious) - but I don't know. I actually found Wahlberg worked with the script to make a human character who wants to believe in all the philosophy but is still very human and actually has feelings. I can understand why Michael didn't like him, at times the dogmatic aspects of philosophy were just sort of SPEWED out of Tommy's mouth without much attention to the meaning, but at the same time - I don't know. He felt honest, when you got right down to it, even if that one moment with Naomi Watts was more goofy than anything - well - unglamourized.

There were definitely weak moments - Schwartzmann's acting at times felt a bit flat, and there were points in the film where - I don't know - the tone felt off. There was some wonderful moments where everybody's just talking-talking-talking and it built up that rhythm even in the face of meaninglessness, but it kind of broke down and didn't gel for me. At the same time, it's illustrating it's point (or one of its points, or something masquerading as its point). The search for meaning and the search for meaninglessness worked very well, and I think for the moment the scene where Schwartzmann's mother and father are brought in and exposed for who they were and their part in their son's life? It was brilliant. It felt like it was Freudian but at the same time it admitted that that's just one small piece of a bigger thing.

The Existential Detectives - Caterin, Vivan, and Bernard - really made the picture for me. Brilliant character work with the three of them, and the careful seperation between the three styles of analysis and detection. They lacked what you might call decorum, but really just viewed it as a needless social structure. They were in the "know," but didn't exposit about it - even as it appeared that they did. They were just trying to initiate the whole big brain meltdown (okay, so Jude Law having his crisis was the other best part).

The cinematography could have been improved in places, it felt really solid at times and sort of pedestrian at other times, which is maybe an important facet (variety - every shot can't be mind-blowing), but other points just seemed dull. The film depended on a lot of visual effects and CGI at unexpected moments, and it led me to expect more from it - which wasn't always delivered. But there was enough decent work being done that I can forgive.

Actually, this feels entirely "laudatory" (you know, praising). I'm going to go lie down and complain about things for a while.

The acclaimed pianist, bedecked in blue pinstripes for the occasion, alights now in front of his instrument with a coolling sigh at the back of his throat. He has donned the appropriate harlequin's mask and silk piano gloves. Note his delicate gestures as he nods to the audience and reveals the piano keys. Our pianist chooses to perform for you now without the aid of a safety net; any fall from the bench could kill him. Any disturbance could explode him. An errant cough could shatter ivory. But now. Watch. Listen. His fingers hit the keys---

I awoke this morning in bed with my lover, dripping savage dream poems from my dusted eyelids and we dove deeper, deeper into the underworld of covers, blankets, pillows, limbs. Did not want to get up. Did not want to be an automaton clockworking through Victoria with little gear-shift dialogue. Michael headed off to class and I headed downtown to have sushi for lunch - well, brunch - with Christian. I accidentally bought some comics and Thomas Pynchon's V (as a result of reading Alan Moore's V for Vendetta which the Wackowskis are adapting for what will probably be a reprehensible film).

Lunch was good, I had a Bento Box with a salmon cutlet, and miso soup. It was the green salad rather than the crab sunomono, with the weird ginger vinagrette. I think I like it as an exploding change for my tongue. Got to chitter-chatter with Gloriee for a while and then we took off for home.

The main thing of the day, the focus if you will - was filming. The first day of filming for our runaway hit film of the future, How to be Popular. I used Christian as an actor, we took over SUBText, and we flounced around Cincenta for a bit before we ended up OBJECTIFYING WOMEN at Steff's house. Lots of revealing clothes and wild dances. Editing might be a pain, but I'm actually looking forward to splicing shots together and making it work.

...the seething bitter angry vibes I exude. I have an email in my UVic account from McSweeney's. Yes, McSweeney's - in response to the story I submitted perhaps a year ago? The story I'd left for dead. I'd heard that they just don't respond if they reject your story. But? But of course webmail has decided to not allow me access to that one message due to some kind of crazed fuck-up in the system. I do not know if it's a rejection or an acceptance. I wonder which it is. I will not find out until webmail works again.

I want to shoot a muthafucking cap in its ass...

And then I want the Coen Brothers to shoot a film about my life.

Home, finally, in one piece, at last, all the bits and bobs correct and accounted for. I even know where my head is. Prince George was - how do you say - almost devoid of meaning; saw a couple people, visited my parents, but mostly missed Victoria. There comes a point when going to visit your parents isn't the same as Going Home, you know? I have emerged from the wasteland. Michael couldn't stop complaining about the awful smell of pulp mills, which is new to somebody raised in the island's subtle air. I could feel the dryness in my eyeballs when I tried to sleep. It wasn't a waste of time, caught up with Eric Martin and hung out with Matthew. My parents are getting old and the divorce is definitely solid and real, as real as you can get with all the worldly things of my old house being split between them into two seperate domiciles. Anyway, I had my baby with me.

Tomorrow morning we shoot some more after my Hendricks class. Okay. I hope my cinematographic skills actually come back and start to improve again, because I wasn't terribly pleased with them the last day the three of us worked on a shoot together. And in the evening I'm meeting up with the Renegade Poets to write, write, write.

Am I too fargone? In between hopelessly coming up with a list of possible shots for the footage we're shooting this morning, and watching the Visions of Light cinematography documentary we're watching in my Art & Technology course? All I could think about was the phrase "freon orgasm" and how it didn't sound right in the passage of prose I scribbled before Brian finally turned down the lights in class. Maybe I should just cut the entire sentence (or it might be a run-on, in which case I'd delete the clause). I have to add the insect's buzzing anyway, and does the fridge really need to climax? What about "freon climax" (too momentary) or "freon crescendo" (the rhythm is off and it sounds too musical for an already musical sequence)?

I'm in the lab doing that thing where you ignore somebody you knew once or are at least acquainted with because it's too awkward / time-consuming / superficial to stand there and have a conversation when both of you know you'd rather just skip it. She's doing it too, I know, because we had that eye contact moment when I came in and then that moment followed where we back-pedalled with our eyes and scrabbled to look like we hadn't registered anything. It's too early for panic.

Read Chapter 1 of Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 this morning - doesn't seem as confusing as everybody else has implied, but I could just be getting the references without stopping to consider, or glazing over the ones that don't add up. I enjoyed the inclusion of Lamont Cranston, the Shadow. And of course this is only the first chapter - Chapter 2 could be out of my league. It could be in another solar system. I could be - above and beyond me. Anyway, Chapter 1 was well-executed; it had a pretty solid build-up for the rest of the novel, with a few hints of foreboding. The pace was jaunty and suitably compressed. I noticed that there were no white space scene breaks, which I always find interesting when I encounter it.

JUST GOT HOME ABOUT TEN MINUTES AGO from a night on the town with Joy and Matt, we went to Big Bad John's. I got drunk, for the first time in three and a half weeks. What? What? What? Anyway, we tried to write but instead spent three hours talking to this man, this seventy-three-year-old guy who was at one time a member of the Hitler Youth. What? He spilled beer on me and spouted off his whole crazed life story. A member of a fascist organization at twelve! It went on and on. There was also this guy on the street who complimented me while Joy and I RAGED ABOUT RELIGION and the comparison of meditation to prayer.

There will probably be more, but I'm all wavering and drunk!

Superman said it so it must be true.

The Phoenix Theatre's production of Hippies and Bolsheviks was NOT about hippies or bolsheviks, not really - it was about my desperate Seas-of-Despair need to piss. For forty minutes while the play meandered through various cliches about the Nineteen Sixties I was possessed by a Urinating Desire, an unfufilled dream of free toilets and toilet paper. It did not help that they drank tea poured loudly from a tea pot, or that it was supposed to be raining outside with a leaky roof and it kept drip-drip-dripping into pots around the stage. It did not help that they talked about water so much. I muttered "Oh GOD" to Joy over and over, every sound they made surged through my bladder, Steph thought I hated her armpits because I hunched over so vehemently! So I gave up, I gave up waiting for that porno close-up shot or that final fade to black and just WENT FOR IT, stumbling over people People PEOPLE and their endless bags, and I went to the bathroom and I sat on the toilet and I monologued on my own, which is what I do when I'm hunched forward with my pants around my ankles and my digestive system in FULL SWING. Afterward, sated, I watched the rest of the play standing up and didn't care about the weakness in my knees, because my bladder was finally irrevocablly EMPTY.

The play itself was badly written, but the acting was decent and the male lead had a brilliant hot ass displayed in a pair of ridiculous hip-hugger jeans. It's hard to do a period piece when the clothing is STILL IN STYLE. Fuckers. I hope they burn.

We tried to start editing "How to Be Popular" today, but technical errors plagued us and we ended up in Felicita's drinking several pitchers of beer. I wonder about that. Tomorrow afternoon we will return in earnest to FUCK THAT SHIT UP and produce some high quality art. We will take no prisoners. We will accept no substitutes.

RJ on about religion: "Many existing in the one and the One existing in the Many". I'd heard references to Zeus-Ammon before, but need to a do a bit more research into that phase of combining foreign gods - Thoth-Hermes being my favourite example. He meanders over the topic but it raises certain interesting questions about the socio-political implications of early religions. And, you know, I've been thinking about Christianity subsuming the Greek Pantheon and sending them to Hell, or the Greeks subsuming the earlier, Chthonic Goddesses and characterizing them as gigantic snakes that need to beaten up by young gods on the rise.

So, really, the thing is. I have to go pay my tuition now and be a good boy and fall down on my knees and give over cash for knowledge. Knowledge? Knowledge?

Thinking about poetry. Expect a revised poem posted soon, once I have time to sit down and do it.

I arrive early far too often. I'm in the Fine Arts lab now, waiting to get started on the log and capture of footage and then the splicing and general dismemberment and Frankenstein flail of film edits.

THREE NAMES YOU GO BY:
1. Ben
2. Benny
3. Baba (...)

THREE SCREEN NAMES YOU HAVE HAD:
1. Wildcat
2. darlingwildcat
3. chaosmonkey1

THREE THINGS YOU LIKE ABOUT YOURSELF:
1. My treasure trail. Dark hair against pale, pale stomach.
2. My humour, even when inappropriate (ok, ESPECIALLY when inappropriate).
3. My imagination.

THREE THINGS YOU DON'T LIKE ABOUT YOURSELF:
1. This tendency to be negative by default about everything. Cynicism.
2. The way I jump to conclusions.
3. The feeling in the pit of my stomach when I fail to be productive.

THREE PARTS OF YOUR HERITAGE:
1. Ukrainian.
2. Irish
3. Scottish.

THREE THINGS THAT SCARE YOU:
1. Hurting the people closest to me.
2. Embarassing public-speaking situations.
3. The moment it stops being sleep and starts being death.

THREE OF YOUR EVERYDAY ESSENTIALS:
1. Words.
2. A shower.
3. Michael.

THREE THINGS YOU ARE WEARING RIGHT NOW:
1. A brown turtleneck.
2. Blue Superman T-shirt.
3. Silver thumb ring.

THREE OF YOUR FAVORITE BANDS OR MUSICAL ARTISTS (at the moment):
1. Belle & Sebastian.
2. Massive Attack.
3. Neutral Milk Hotel.

THREE OF YOUR FAVORITE SONGS (at the moment):
1. "Is that all there is," by Peggy Lee.
2. "Teardrop," by Massive Attack.
3. "Parklife," by Blur.

THREE NEW THINGS YOU WANT TO TRY IN THE NEXT 12 MONTHS:
1. A month without chocolate.
2. Abstinance from the words "I'm sorry," more than once a day.
3. Not being a humbug about major holidays.

THREE THINGS YOU WANT IN A RELATIONSHIP (love is a given):
1. Wit. Debate. Banter. Discussion of all the little things, the big things, etc.
2. Kisses. All day long. Kisses.
3. Mutual showers.

TWO TRUTHS AND A LIE
1. I was once friends wiith a large Hungarian girl who referred to me only as 'The Little Red Headed Homo.'
2. I was Garfunkel's original partner.
3. I love comic books.

THREE PHYSICAL THINGS ABOUT THE OPPOSITE SEX (or same) THAT APPEAL TO YOU:
1. Nice, round, boyish faces.
2. A little bit of a tummy.
3. Brilliant eyes.

THREE THINGS YOU JUST CAN'T DO:
1. Arrive late.
2. Criticize art, film, etc. - much to people's chagrin.
3. Reading William S. Burroughs novels. I just can't!

THREE OF YOUR FAVORITE HOBBIES:
1. Judgement.
2. Dancing, dancing, dancing.
3. The Gin.

THREE THINGS YOU WANT TO DO REALLY BADLY RIGHT NOW:
1. Kiss Michael, because he's so beautiful.
2. Get all my poetry workshop crud done.
3. Shower.

THREE CAREERS YOU'RE CONSIDERING:
1. Fiction writer.
2. Writing comic books. I know. I know.
3. Screenwriter.

THREE PLACES YOU WANT TO GO ON VACATION:
1. Venice.
2. Prague.
3. Paris.

THREE THINGS YOU WANT TO DO BEFORE YOU DIE:
1. Best-selling novel or short story collection.
2. Sex in the Louvre. Not in front of Mona, that's done.
3. Have a studio apartment.

THREE WAYS I AM STEREOTYPICALLY A BOY:
1. I have a penis.
2. I suppose I write with a certain aggressively linear, penetrating style (?).
3. I can set up a VCR?

THREE WAYS I AM STEREOTYPICALLY A GIRL:
1. I always inquire about people's feelings.
2. I'm boy-crazy.
3. I like sarongs. Men in sarongs.

Editing the film has been a source of great excitement and great frustration. Technical problems dog us, as well as the lack of competent lab technicians. They're all very friendly and mean well, but they can't always answer the questions. But Myla, Steph and I have all worked together quite well and I'm looking forward to our next two projects, where we'll have a better understanding and can cut through the bullshit. Some of our sequences are absolutely beautiful, though.

Bought a couple more books yesterday on a random impulse spending spree with Michael and Steph. It's really remarkable to think about my rocky past with Ms. Bowen, because lately she's been absolutely essential to my circle of friends. We flounced around, had pub food, and Michael indulged in a confectionary book, which always benefits me as well as him.

The piles of books taking up space and waiting to be read:
V (Thomas Pynchon), The Manifestoes of Surrealism (André Breton, translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane), Sorcerer's Apprentice (Tahir Shah), The Impressionist (Hari Hunzru), The Cloud Forest: A Chronicle of the South American Wilderness (Peter Matthiessen), The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe (E.A. Poe), The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (E.A. Poe), The Black Veil (Rick Moody), 10 Love Poems (Pablo Neruda), The Book of Illusions (Paul Auster), Portrait of an Eye (Kathy Acker - have to finish), The New York Trilogy (Paul Auster - I've read part 3, The Locked Room, but not the first two parts), The Moviegoer (Walker Percy), Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (Douglas R. Hofstadter), A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry), The Baron in the Trees (Italo Calvino), Captain Scott (Sir Ranulph Fiennes), Survival: Species Imperative #1 (Julie E. Czerneda), The Third Policeman (Flann O'Brien), Columbus and the Fat Lady (Matt Cohen), Deadeye Dick (Kurt Vonnegut), Oryx and Crake (Margaret Atwood), The Cameraman (Bill Gaston), Other People (Martin Amis), The Dark Tower (C.S. Lewis), The Man who was Tuesday (G.K. Chesterton), An Erotic Beyond: Sade (Octavio Paz), The Secret Agent (Joseph Conrad), Leafstorm and other stories (Gabriel Garcia Marquez), Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories (Franz Kafka), Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (Gregory Maguire), Giles Goat-Boy (John Barth - my dad had a copy and I've always been intrigued by the title), Unless (Carol Shields), We Were the Mulvaneys (Joyce Carol Oates), A Lifetime of Wisdom: Essential Writings By and About the Dalai Lama (edited by Clint Willis), Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley (Lawrence Sutin).

That's right. Thirty three (33) books, waiting for me to read them. I'm on Chapter 4 of The Crying of Lot 49 by Pynchon, and then I think I'm going to either pick up The New York Trilogy or The Third Policeman after that. Probably the NYT, because I'm on an Auster kick right now.

Seem to be on a postmodern detective kick lately, between I Heart Huckabees, all the Paul Auster, and other things. Last night, Michael and I tried to eat pizza during Keith Gordon's The Singing Detective, a film about Dan Dark (played by Robert Downey Junior), a pulp noir writer who is horribly burned in an accident, and flickers between the overexposed sterility of the hospital and the pitch black noir of his fiction. It subverts and critiques the sexual/gender issues of noir fiction and exposes Dark's misogyny, which is at the heart of his detective fiction and his inability to have any kind of meaningful interaction with women (and then relates that the good girl / femme fatale "fallen women" ideas inherent in a lot of 40s/50s noir). The cinematography absolutely popped for me, even if at times it threatened to be gimmicky; the worlds mixed, collided, and spewed into each other (and there was like three or four worlds going at once). Characters from his novel sprang free to question their author about who they were (because he never fleshed them out or got to the point in the story where he knew if they were, say, cheap hoods or federal agents). It was completely without strict linear plot, and Michael complimented it by saying that he honestly had no idea where it was going, which was kind of a thrill. Some of it disturbed, provoked, and was hard to watch - and it had Mel Gibson in it, which I am edgy about - but used those images and ideas, critiqued them, and subverted them.

I'm afraid that I didn't have time to eat this morning and ended up editing on an empty stomach. Twitchy, I think, and banging my head against the inpenetrable façade of Final Cut Pro. We're mostly done, really down to the nitty-gritty work of putting the sound in, making sure the volume for each piece is audible, and fine-tuning the edges of things. It is a maddening psychodrama played out between the Perfectionist side and the Desperate side. The desire to splatter electronic guts everywhere--

But otherwise, the film is shaping up. Steph and I toyed with a concept for the music video, centred around my long time desire to do a "rotating shot" at a Chinese restaurant, with the camera on one of those rotating table platforms. I think they have them at Ming's.

And tomorrow is Michael's birthday!

Listening to "A Supermarket in California," composed and chanted by Allen Ginsberg on a Media Player. I want to write poems, but I must edit other people's poems and try not to wince at line breaks, or poor verb choice, or the thousand little deaths that flesh must withstand each day, flaking off and gaining soft distance from its one-time home.

Oh, no, wait. Now it's the Clash.

In other news, I decided to buy white grapefruit juice this morning so I could try and broaden my culinary horizons again. It's so bitter it's practically a cynic. It's so bitter it's practically me. It's milky white-yellow and sits on my desk and I should drink some more of it. I rather enjoy torturing my tongue with new flavours which maybe don't mesh in the traditional sense, and what I really want to do is sit down with that Pablo Neruda book, Love and wander through it again. The poem I really like, "Walking Around," was translated by W.S. Merwin and Christian remarked that it was a translation of the sonic variety - it makes sure that the number of syllables and the line lengths remain the same, so the heat of the poem stays the same.

With tangible respect to C.S.

Body? Body? Are you listening?
I sneeze you from the ends of my follicles,
your sponge fuses and your pores swelter open.
I build genitals dry, and then a face, chest, armpits.
A neck unfurls long and uneven, and I want to scrape it off.

But I can't. I can't control your political growth;
my bodysedan, my bodyshack, my bodybody.

But you? You shuck me, bodyoyster.
You snap my threads off, toss me to the floor.
You have outgrown me. Fucking bodybody –
well, I hate you.
I hate your smooth articulation.
I hate the glopping belly that swells from my treasure trail.
I hate those toes sprouting from my lowest strands.

You cake me in foam, hot sugar, and other chemistries. Slice me away.
I am not sandwich meat, bodybaloney. You are relentless in your plucking!

Night, I kink myself into other hair
and compare bodyportfolios -
the experimental nails and incidental groins.
Unpredictable, an accompaniment. We call this art.
This incident.
This parallel.
This rustling intake.

(c) 2005 Ben Rawluk, all rights reserved