June 27, 2006

Flink: "Oh I shouldn't have said that, that was mean.."

Friend: "You're not being mean."

Flink: "I do, I think that was kind of mean.."

Friend: "You always say shit like that. You were just being no different than you always are - that's why I love you."

Flink: " That's not a very good point of analysis"

Friend: "Wait. So now you're criticizing me for loving you because you're an asshole??!!"

January 19, 2006

Well okay, three people in the Yukon really love me, three or four people are still waiting to hear how the gay bowling league story ends and the final 28, 982 have no idea who I am.

Whatever the case thanks to the incredible generosity of the Lera family I am heading up north again this summer, this time only for a week, long enough to spend at least 75% of my time at zolas wirelss internet cafe and the other 25% trying to get out of feeding the chickens.

Yippee. After that I am off to Blogher '06 in SF - this time I am not going anywhere near a greyhound bus it's planes all the way....

All this is great , except as a new dog oner I am experiencing significant gult levels because of all the trip taking - what shall I do, I am like a farmer with no wife. Who is going to take care of the animals while I am gone?

Oh and in an unrelated incident - the dog has made it clear that she hates hip-hop, whenever hip-hop is playing she leaves the room. Old dog.

Right, so attention all you urban gypsies free house-sit with dog for part of july ... come and get it.

August 30, 2005

Individualism was a mistake

I am feeling existential, went to see my cousins new baby. I am his, uhhh, cousin-aunt or something.

He looked at me with bemusement/sarcasm which is maybe some kind of genetic inheritence, but smiled at that cash machine in the restaurant. I told him he was only 7 weeks old, he couldn't be expected to know who his real friends were yet.

Went to see a friend who lives in the McGill ghetto and will be leaving shortly, she has started a blog, I stupidly forgot to send myself the URL.

Why are all the McGill kids getting so young, like little Gap goslings. This is, of course, not the case at all. They are approximately the same age they ever were. I however, am old as the hills but as rooted and stable as a piece of dandruff. Awesome. At least I am someone's cousin- aunt.

August 20, 2005

Rainy day. Somewhere in the courtyard La Isla Bonita is playing. I went to femme friday last night and had my head turned by not less than half the bias-cut stylers wearing flood pants.

The person who started the rumour that dykes are ugly and have bad style didn't spend any quality time in montreal. Unfortunately my own soon to be bombing 'do is taking longer to grow out than expected.

I actually started this post in the hopes of venting about this hopeless helpless web project I am already suppoed to be finished. Counter to my rules about blogging about professional stuff, I was gonna vent, but I am not going to vent anymore. It's a bad deal.

Let me just say that it can as long as 3 weeks to perfect the stylesheet of a really let's say "unique" site. However, if you do tweaking on your mac using firefox, and fail to check said unique site on your pc in explorer you can easily undo all that hard work in two measly Madonna accompanied hours in a poorly lit damp living room.

Luckily I also finished this the other day, and it is taking the edge of my recent defeat at the hands of a site that presently, due to my loving ministrations, looks like something 1996 horked up. That's so funny I can't erase it, but I should, oh how I should.

A funny thing happened on the way to the Gardens...

Another thing to cheer us all up...

Niki, Lauren and I found a Buttplug lying on Sherbrooke street on our way to the botanical gardens the other day. Which did in fact lead to hella-lot of punning on "Buttanical Gardens" I am sad to report.

Luckily Niki had just purchased a lovely little canon Digital Elph and we took a few photos to bring the laugh home with us. You can see them on my flickr account here.

Here's a teaser:

We did not actually touch the butt-plug, we only kicked it a few times with our feet and of course Lauren ran right over the thing on her bike and that's how she found it in the first place.

we debated bringing it to the gardens as a mascot/photo shoot subject but then again, that's filthy.

Instead, once we left the butt-plug to pursue its solitary course, we focused on helping Lauren steal lots of little clipping from the greenhouse. It was weird, one minute she was normal and the next she was bansheeing around with nail scissors and tearing up entire begonias to shove them in her purse.

I don't know why, of the three of us, I am considered the one with odd social habits.

I am going to eat dinner and mull over the solution to a rat-fucked peice of CSS.

June 26, 2005

So Julian, who is leaving back to Europe in about 4 hours, said he read my blog to see if I would mention anything about his vacation in Canada.

And of course I hadn't. I never have the foresight to imagine that my friends would read my blog to see if their name will appear...( I thought they read it for the amazing content....)

I should know that and conduct myself accordingly.

Here is a post for Julian.

Julian Diehn is my friend from way back in the undegrad days. He lives in Vienna and worked primarily in film but has taken a year off to devote himself to making very fastidious art.

I know his art is fastidious because when we were in Bill Vorns EART class together at school he spent the whole year working on a complex piece involving a rotary dial phone, some footage from various Jimmy Stewart movies, and a program written using MAX/ MSP. It doesn't sound very involving but it was. You try making digital art with a rotary dial phone.

This morning at breakfast he was going to eat my left-over brown toast and when I passed him my plate he held a peice of toast up in the air, made a very german face and said; "This toast is bullshit, why did you get brown toast and not white. it doesn't make a difference the colour when we are eating this bullshit toast you know.."

He was also wearing charcoal grey school-boy pants cut off into shorts and hemmed, which gave him an Angus Young ( careful this site autoplays bad australian hard rock) kind of look.

It is clear that I will miss Julian since he hasn't been to visit for three years and it will probably be another three years before he visits again. Remember what you said Julian, you should apply for a residency or something, put your money where your mouth is.

May 29, 2005

Invented Eden is a book by Robin Hemley about a "Lost Tribe" of indigenous peoples discovered in the Philippines in the 1970's. The above title is also a department at the Smithsonian that was used to study "short-lived hunter-gatherer tribes" as they were discovered and then almost as quickly went extinct.

From the Authors Introduction:

ABC's 20/20, britains Central TV, the BBC, and PBS all did documentaries on the Tasaday, some in support of the hoax proponents, others favoring those who claimed the Tasady were "authentic," though the word "Authentic" leads to the question, Authentic what?

This book then, is an investigation not only of the Tasaday controversy but of the language we use to describe others. the story of The Tasaday is as much about us (the industrialized world), who we perceive ourselves to be, as it is about a band of 27 souls in the Philippines, who became stand-ins for the worlds hope dreams and fears.

I can't say I am loving the writing but I think the idea really dovetails with this new meme I have been smelling which is that blogging sucks.

How does it relate? I suppose to me the question of authenticity in an analysis of blogging inherent value would have to take apart the idea of "truth" and "self-presentation" as it functions in the blogospheres environment of both total media saturation and also sort of "extreme" individuization.

I always question whether my writing is authentic in this forum, because I am constantly aware that I am being observed by someone. In fact I was thinking of trying my hand at fiction, so that a) I would be writing for an invisible audience and in not in a text entry field immediately. and b) I could experiment with voices not immediately associated with my own experience.

Invented Eden reminds me, that cultures will always create mythological spaces in which "truth" is a commodity and "true truth" is in shorter supply than what we want to hear. I wonder if the problem people have with blogging is that it's claim to authenticity and individuality threatens a meme about the impossibility of that kind of authenticity existing in a media saturated environment.

Or is it that no-one is authentic on the web? This is straight out of my po-mo art theory classes, but I think there is a grain of truth here. We create identities for our on-line selves that fit inside the frame of the tools we are using to create the stories (blogs rss the 400 word story sound bite) and have not as much to do with the reality of our lived experiences as we think. Kind of like the Tasadays story as it compares to the reality of the Philippines indegenous peoples actual history. Which is laced throughout with a history of colonization and control.

Which brings me to the next item on my list and my new category heading: from Ned. Things that come from Ned now have their own category, I feel he deserves it, he spends so much more time looking for the good stuff on the internet, while I just fuss about writing blog entries. This is my first post with a from Ned categorization but doubtless not the last.

So last night we watched this sad, scary and funny Flash animation about Googles eventual take-over of the entire world

And again it made me think of the Tasaday and this time about how they were thought to be "off the grid" and how that fired the publics imagination. Here was a band of people who still wore leaves and didn't have guns or sample size bottles of shampoos or burt reynolds, who were pure and unsullied and "Good". The public wanted to see authenticity on that level because they were already dealing with the vietnam war and watergate etc..

I am struggling to find words to explain why I see the discussion of bloggings political and cultural merits as naive like the Tasaday and also kind of a hoax, but without actually saying it that way because I truly do love this forum for human expression. I just can't look at it as the saviour of information politics.

En plus; now our choice isn't whether we want our experience of the world mediated through a giant living breathing syndication engine, it's what kind of media syndication and search universe we want... What's going to happen to experiences that don't fit into an RSS feed, or a pod-cast?