the cave dwellers

too sick for all get out. scroll down a bit and read someone from over there.

a post without a title is like a...

why hello there. the photos in this post i did not take. they're by Sarah Small, one of the winners of the XTO Image Awards.



is this filler? i'm not sure, to be honest. i like putting some good, inspiring stuff i find on the internets here sometimes. for you, for me, for the internet, for the future looking back at the past. if i don't spazz out and in a state of frustrated sense of obligation to self and a partly imagined, partly real audience, where i let loose the sacred, the asinine, the angst, the naive childish mess of my present that promises to become the shudder of my future when i know more, have grown more, have developed into something new but more authentic than ever before, decide to stupidly delete this blog i will enjoy the record of who i've been, of what influenced and inspired, of what i knew, and i'll be compelled to read each post carefully for hints to who i really am right this minute and who i've been with the same relish that



those cardboard legal archival boxes hold over there next to the couch: my earliest diaries (the others live in all kinds of places all over this house... and some in storage that i need to rescue... and some in los angeles i need to reclaim... and some lost in the internet to urls i no longer remember... and some forever locked in the corrupted hard drives of computers past/passed) where the truth is spelled out sometimes openly on purpose, sometimes openly by default, oh the lies we tell ourselves. and the hunt will prove successful despite its unavoidable failures. i will still find it all fascinating and revealing even while aware of the glaringly obvious omissions, and the big pieces i know i must be forgetting that feel lost forever even though they happened and my brain has filed them away somewhere hopefully with the intention to remind me some sunny afternoon sitting under a windy tree still spry at 73. or maybe not.



i always hate the fact that to read all my diaries, and all the thoughts and ideas and histories i've recorded, would eventually take me years if not already. that to look at every photograph i've ever taken would take me decades. that in everything i accumulate and experience takes time that is forever lost at once and to review it all would steal even more away. i've always wanted to be rolling film of each second of my life so i can watch it later, for a better appreciation and understanding of what happened and how and why and especially to notice what i missed the first time around, to have it organized and easily accessible so i can review that specific moment of the past, that pivotal turning point, that conversation that changed everything and know, because it's recorded as it happened, with utmost certainty exactly how it all went down without any chance of memory distorting things, the future challenging the perception of the past. no such luck. onwards we go. too fast, too slow, some things so clear, some buried so deep below. the brain's seemingly random way of organizing and it's desperate clinging to slivers of the past. the inability to forget, and the frantic need to find what i can't remember. if our minds chose to remember different events and forgot some of the most important things we remember how different would we be i wonder. how much more a completely different person, identity built on a totally different set of rules and psyche-forming memories culled from completely forgotten events could we be? is our subconscious really in charge of the selection? is there any cohesive method of cataloging that makes sense? perhaps we're just overloaded. a scrambled offering of the past regularly warping the growth of identity creating someone else. someone not accurate or suitable enough to make sense. i just woke up with my laptop on my face. goodnight, goodmorning, see ya later. see? already i've forgotten most of what i was going on about. memory, the brain, they still don't really understand any of it. 100 years from now maybe it will all be figured out. a brain manual. operating instructions. a troubleshooting chapter.




Sarah Small, "The Delirium Constructions"

"Description: These images are from an ongoing body of work placing unlikely characters together in the same space. In this series, I explore the purest interaction I can find unhindered by environmental cues that could signify occupation, social class, or revealing context. While many of these scenarios are staged, the emotions that result -- uneasiness, curiosity, sensuality -- are spontaneously captured and authentically experienced. Though these moments may be disquieting, they are packaged in candy colors to disarm the viewer. I want to photograph the raw emotional underbelly of scenes both found and fabricated. Like an optical illusion, where the viewer shifts between opposing visual perceptions, my images reference emotional illusion, a rocking back and forth between projection and introspection, between thought and feeling, between darkness and hilarity. I imagine us all left unbalanced but not out of sync."

some photos of whose and where from only the internet remembers...





it's been 1994 again for a while now and i'm sick of looking at it, so then it became 1992 revisited, it's also 1997 not quite. thank god the eighties are over again, again. recessions fuck up fashion. recycling fads too soon, demanding it's over only to be born again, coma patients wake up confused and walk around staring at the pretenders only to realize it's not then, the same and always different. nothing ever perfectly executed slightly twisted old new thing all so you can tell the difference between a wannabe and a wannawere or a stillis. as soon as something's horrifying it's daring enough to be appropriated and celebrated, a visual history game we all can play, conforming to the newest old idea to buy more of the things we a long time ago once gave away. i'm all for inspiration and emulation and celebration of the past but when everyone looks the same and there are so many of them it's just creepy sad and lame. how many people are complaining this same way. how many people really don't give a shit and are just totally self-indulging, enjoying their own shit, an eclectic mix, an exactly accurate retroactive exclamation of public eyeball space for fun i totally get, but enough with this bullshit. it's too easy to buy, it's all premade, no imagination required, no real homage to anything... bullshit. almost as meaningless and a waste of time as reading this whole paragraph. i need a cigarette. i don't smoke anymore. confession: the other day i did. it was delicious and foul and guilty and illicit and i got a head rush like i was 15 and playing the specials on vinyl giggling inhaling BTs and getting ripped, piercing each other's ears with potatoes and ice cubes and similarly sharp sharp objects, skipping school, colour of your doc's stitches, shaving fat mowhawks slash skater undercuts safety pins and airwalks and vuarnet and flannel shirts and giant hoodies and brain breaking beats and basements of kensington market's SAC after parties raided forced to hit the floor covered in beer and butts and god knows what else no wonder i can't ever remember shit so many lifetimes fly by and i'm surprised i'm still here, not like i expected to die before 30 or anything so cliche but more like it just didn't occur to me that we'd all still be here (well, most of us) and have this collective memory of when we used to do that and do you remember when and clearly i've been spending too much time on evil facebook that records your every move along with google here amassing such a detailed profile to better sell to you, monitor you, make you write paranoid sentences like this. it's 8 in the morning and i'm finally ready for bed.



p.s. thank god for great friends in strange places and certain people's big brothers and is this font to small for your eyeballs? this blog needs a serious overhaul. the links, the design, the everything i don't have the time for despite so many hours spent pondering blemishes on the ceiling and the wind in the trees and how the sun hits the leaves and the neverending cups of good tea and the gifts of the CBC and the hottest epsom salt baths imaginable leaving a sharp line where the last inch of white became red and goodnight go to bed.

nobody trusts a black magician

one of the blogosphere's ultimate greats who goes by the alias, XTX, has recently published some seriously fucking ferocious literary fantasticness entitled, "Nobody Trusts a Black Magician," that you can either read or listen to or do both right here and FOR FREE. check her out. you won't be disappointed, i promise.

you should also visit her blog which is here.

i did not take the above photo and have no idea who did.

that's all for now, bye.