Bring me to your leftovers

Oh yeah, and you thought Thanksgiving happened only once a year.



For the record, that's cranberry juice. Yep.

This is the dark part of the year. With Thanksgiving over and the next holiday being mass marketed to death, I find this time of year useful for one thing; hibernation. My cats don't care if I want to stay in bed all day, so why bother? If being a human didn't call for having a social security number and required a paycheck (in part funding my netflix addiction) at this time of year I would be positively bedridden. That's not to say I haven't been getting my fair share of things done. It's mostly just prep work though, and I am in a prep work induced torpor. Maybe it's all the starch and turkey I've been eating.

So, What is the Rainbow Vortex? Well, it's a land carved by a bike trail, near a county highway in Burlington, WI where you leave M&Ms for the faeries and the elemental guardian spirits that dwell there. There are giants, too big to be seen, and ghosts. There are also angels, aliens and sometimes, if you're in a state of rare luck, the devil stops by just to say hey. I know how this sounds. You think "a $25 flimflam fest into the woods so some hippy freaks can blind you with repetative camera flashes and shout at you while you freeze your holy parts off?" Well, skeptic, I say onto you, can you explain this?:

Lies, Decit, and Updates

Another notch in the unfinished category; I absolutely bailed on nanowrimo (or National Novel Writing Month as the gifted call it). It seems forcing myself to do something is no way to get it done. On the other hand, I've managed to post two blogs this month! (The first says it was posted Oct 26, but it was Nov 14, this being the second) Experiments with pace shall continue. I did, however, find an interesting relic yesterday while I was rummaging through my art stuff I found a notebook from about two years ago, full of intriguing ideas. Not much of it makes any real sense and yet, it's probably some of the best stuff I've written so far. Makes me think I should try poetry, except I hate poetry. And painting. But these things are beside the point. Here is a sample from the book:

Heat, buzzing and pulsing with streetlight and insect wings. Luke-warm beer, the unmistakable lake funk of algae and refuse. Surreal darkness beyond lamplight. Out across an unfathomable horizon a series of lights drawn together hovering in the darkness just before the vanishing point on the horizon. Sedate churning of waves. Occasional nocturnal disruptions. A conversation on the edge of not existing. Two characters in search of a setting. A moment outside of the self, reality, perception. Dreamlike. Metadream. The gross thickness of warm bitter beer. Two isolations waving at each other across the void, two people isolated in thought connecting in a dream-scape unobserved. Disconnected. Isolation breeds familiarity. And there's rocks.

Now, if I could only figure out what the hell I'm talking about and why I wrote this I might be able to claw myself out of this hole.

Ready! Set! ...

So, I realize I may have been a little hasty with my last deadline. Alas, I simply may never be able to adhere to a daily commitment aside from bathing but damnit, I've got to try. I did, however, mark some major accomplishments in my absence.

The first was that I entered a time sensitive art contest and coped with actual deadlines for the first time in a while. For this I was able to get up in two galleries. I was immensely stressed but after a while I began to enjoy the pace of my activities. The limitations of my ambitions I'm happy to report are healthy but fade in a matter of days without exercise. I'm devising a new plan for November. I'm very excited to be participating in National Novel Writing Month, and I'm sure to be a whiny incomprehensible b-word for a good thirty days.

The second is that I finally signed up for belly-dancing class. I'm so excited to be taking on another hobby but damn, do I ever have a lot of hobbies stored away in the closet.

Right.

So.

Here's a little overview of what I've been up to so far:

Ended October with a rash of awesome shows; Glasser, a harpie/she cat fronted jungle-indi act that goes well with the band they were opening for: Gayngs. The Minneapolis based indi super group is rumored to be too complex to tour often, which is too bad because they were awesome. This is after hours music for pot-smoking programmer freaks that can get dates to come home but don't stay awake long enough for the pay off. It's good, but the lyrical content describes more loss and longing than actual love-making. All the same, songs like "The Gaudy Side of Town" and "Crystal Rope" are undeniably sexy without crossing the threshold into utter spank rock. Also I developed an instant baby crush on Mike Noyce, who fronted the operation in a dinosaur hoodie. Thanks Mike. Here is my most favorite song: Faded High

Not one week after I also had the very good fortune to catch Murder by Death a longtime favorite of mine. It was an intimate show with a lot of older content and extras that left me satiated, but sad. I'd been anticipating the show for two months. Now what? Samantha Crain opened up, she was definitely awesome and worth a look if you're into acts like The Blow, Florence and the Machine, and oh I dunno, Cat Power if she was less dour?

Finally, the results of the Rainbow Vortex are being sifted and will be on display by the end of the week. Let me end by saying that Burlington, WI is quite a slice of Americana and if you have the impulse you should go check out the SciFi Cafe

Ah haha!

Score is 0 and 2 now. Feeling strong.

Today was a miraculous fall day, yessiree. The sun glasses the lady at the bus station gave me from the lost and found have just enough amber tint to them to really pick up the reds. I'll have to show you some how what it looks like to see things through those glasses, descriptions are paltry when it comes to these kinds of sights. Semi-successfully navigated the day. Saw friends and fed the plant-life. All nods to the affirmative. Tomorrow will be huge.

Love.

Time for Another Infamous Update!

And now for another installment of "Let's do this Shit!"

This life these days is a slow progression of bugs be we're not stopping for your melon rinds, no no. We're on to far bigger buffalo this time. A challenge! I have a friend at work, who has a friend, that paints two pictures a day and then posts them here (wait for link). So let's play that game. Let's do this everyday.

Here's my very opinionated review of a movie I saw recently:

The other day I watched The Horsemen with Dennis Quaid and Ziyi Zhang. Patrick Fugit and Peter Stormare also make (weird) appearances, as does the guy with a foot fetish from 6' Under. It was directed by Jonas Akerlund, who before this directed and worked on a host of music video collections for acts like; Metallica, Madonna, and Blink 182. This movie, for all intents and purposes, looks to be his directorial feature debut, which I don't think is the problem here, not totally anyway. The Director of Photography, is actually pretty good. He (I forget his name and really, this is a waste of time anyway) did an alright job creating atmosphere, (It's winter in Michigan) and had some lovely, though maybe a little canned, exposition shots. The tight close ups worked well with the soundtrack to push how the mind can freeze in moments of extreme tension, however, probably one too many of these moments where time slowed down just to show how overwhelmed Dennis Quaid's character is supposed to be. His character plays a hard-boiled detective type that recently lost his wife and is having trouble connecting with his kids. Classic noir archetype, but this is not a noir movie. This is a tale of horror! Of the psychological kind! With biblical references!! For at the same time that he is having trouble being a father (lo, even communicating in complete sentences), he is also trying to solve a series of murders in which the victim is suspended, bled to death, and then some sicko writes "Come and See" all over the walls.

Interesting side note: I was actually googling the Apocalypse when Netflix suggested I watch this movie. Fucking Algorithms.

The real core problem in this movie is the writing. This is what happens when the first draft goes to print. The script is terrible. Example:

Quaid:
"But Sir! The 4 horsemen of the apocalypse are here to bring HELL on Earth! And it's coming TOMORROW!"

Captain:
"OK! You have 24 hours!"

That is so on the nose it's a booger.

The plot scenarios and devices are obvious and crappy. Here's an example. A woman is found, dead, by one of three daughters. In the scene where we first meet them they are sitting on the couch together crying; two blond White girls in red and one older Chinese girl in black. Yes friends, she is adopted. Something about her just doesn't fit. You'll never guess why. It has nothing to do with her adoptive father either. Seriously. And speaking of weird parent/child relationships, there's the relationship Dennis Quaid has with his sons and how that stupid deal ties in with the climax of the movie.

I'd give it away, but I have some stony scruples about film etiquette.

What the hell, I hope nobody watches this movie.

So finally, Eighty-three minutes into this atom-bomb of a movie, we find out that Dennis Quaid's older son is having a teen-aged meltdown. A real, "I hate you dad!" tantrum and why not? All Dennis Quaid had to do was step into the dumb kid's room and this entire horror show wouldn't exist.

I'm done talking about this. Don't watch this movie.

play it again, Sam

So I lost one of my jobs. Circumstantial yet, disappointing. I thought I had a free pass to carry on my existence, selling things to people as a means of procuring my lifetimes supply of comfy, semi-worn couches and spacious 2-3 bedroom units with hardly any water damage and only a few in house pests (but appliances are included!). This has proven to be not so. Not only have a lost one peddling job, I've found it to be in my most dearest and fervent interest to be doubly enthusiastic about my first job, which holds its charm only so long. This is bad. Horrible in fact. I was getting used to the idea of becoming lazy, fat maybe. I stopped going to the gym because I was just going to work more and look great doing it. I figured that the spider-veins could tell me much about when it was time to stop moving and sit down to my netflix queue and while away the hours in between getting off work and having to go back. How suddenly disappointing. What an unforeseen slap in the face. Now I find myself plucking at the gentle sting as a stranger to these climates might dab at a water droplet that has just marked his or her's first introduction to snow, and posed an inaugural question: "what is this?". It may be so that I am not made for talking. I am an anxious speaker and a careless listener, but this has not always been the case. I have been crafted that way to make the interested buyer agree with me. This product is useful. It will help you become what you've been wanting to become. This will make you a better person for buying it. These ideas have been contrary to my experiences. Experience is almost always a better purchase. Items are made to be destroyed whether it be by consumption, wear, ill-fated accidents, or the un/just hands of fate. It will not make any difference if you have it or not because at some point of time in the future (or past) you will have had it and it will be gone or you will never have had it and never known the difference anyway.
So there. It is said. I have one job less and a few days more to spend less money on things I would have ignored if I had the time to look in to them anyway. A less superstitious person would be at a Lark's envy to tell you the things they would and will or maybe won't do but I feel strongly that turning points are to be studied as well as tested before a destination is sorted out. Most times you find that your first impulse is correct, you just had to conquer doubt before proceeding.