11.02 : of colour

My most recent assignment for sound class; the voice is this girl from an island. This monologue gave breath to the idea of a series of audio portraits that I’ll be compiling for my final project for Advanced Sound, so I owe the girl thanks. I’ll probably buy her beers.

Ears required.

10.28 : google maps

heather st.

10.27 : yes

I’m so tired of no, of that barrier, that wall. People not getting excited. People not being vibrant.

This world isn’t about no, about black and white, about the condom of intense and uncompromising personal preference.

You too have a box from which to step. Get out of it. Say ‘yes’ to situations, to that little bit of excitement that often gets squashed by fear.

(on a personal note today : room is still messy. this is one of the best shirts I own and I don’t even know where it comes from!)

10.21 : the internet and cruelty

I’ve always been intrigued by the internet subculture that seems to feed on other peoples’ misery. Par exemple, a site I frequented back in its less defunkt days was ljdrama.org (which now shows up as an expired domain), a site devoted to the archiving of (and often, meddling into) flame wars on the diarysite (? the etymology of the thing escapes me even now) livejournal. It was generally mean-spirited and cruel, but the humour of these situations was too easy to understand; people on the internet seem to take themselves pretty damn seriously sometimes, don’t they?

I’m interested in what this can be taken to mean about the social structure of the Internet. Are we talking … roving bands of geeks, declaring war on each other, all for the sake of lulz?

Well, yeah. But the internet seems to run on a mix of sarcastic banter and outright cruelty with all kinds of shades of grey between.

I find that I can argue for both sides of this argument: I’ve been on both ends. People are effin’ mean sometimes, but most “victims” invite scorn by being totally nuts, or opinionated, or conformist.

I think that the chief problem with ridicule on the internets is that it doesn’t really see its embodied cause or its affective results; both the aggressor and the the aggressee (ha!) are on opposite sides of a screen that really portrays nothing more than language — and, even less than that, the language and symbol set of a specific situation. Neither party knows, nor arguably cares, where the other is coming from. There is merely the judgment, translated into insult, transmitted through the web of one-ohs to strike a person where it hurts.

(on a personal note today : room is still messy. i like headbanging to hawksley. the end.)

10.21 : hawksley

I enjoy Hawksley Workman. Lemme tell you why:

- Canadian folk indie (an underloved area)
- … alternately, Cabaret rock (think somewhere in between folk and glam rock)
- Poignant, sad lyrics (& I love me a good sad song)
- Believes our culture is in decay (a view I share)
- First instrument is the drums (resulting in a v. steady rhythmic sense throughout his work)
- Lots of piano (I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that I dig that)
- Experimentation and blending of genres (he’s all over, particularly in his earlier albums)
- He seems to twin a sense of innocence and cynicism
- He posed for with his hands on his tits for a good fifty seconds at the concert where I snapped this photo

Rock!

If you need somewhere to start with this guy, I’d recommend Last Night We Were The Delicious Wolves, which was the first album that garnered him major attention. You might recognize the singles.

My favourite is Treeful of Starling, mostly for the folksy vibe.

10.20 : polyamory

Perhaps one of the things that most informs my personal life (completely disregarding the influence it has on my work) is my commitment to the concept of polyamory.

As a younger teenager (o, the days!) I found I was, at times, upset at the limitations imposed upon me and my friends/parents/siblings/strangers in the traditionally embedded cultural notions of monogamy. Yes, of course, it has its positive aspects; you certainly aren’t spreading disease or breaking a string of hearts on your way through life, but you are limiting your own … knowledge of people. There is a certain intensity and intersubjectivity that comes from even the most trivial of physical intimacies, and I personally find it impossible to ignore these possibilities.

I spent many years unhappy, because my desires didn’t fall within common constraints of pathologized sexual discourse (see The History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault and/or The Ethical Slut by Dossie Easton and Catherine A. Liszt for er, additional deconstruction); in essence, I hadn’t found a mode of relationship that worked for me.

I began to date a man who was interested in the concept and, later on into the relationship, starting dating (as well as sexing) someone else concurrently.

The unfortunate part of the story is that I went slightly to pieces about the whole thing; upon further, better-visioned hindsight, I realized that at the time I still hadn’t broken free of a certain thread of Mormon discourse in my head. Going through the experience made me see that, although I was overwhelmed by a pretty immature jealousy, his other sexual relationship didn’t influence ours at all; we still had good times chilling out and taking walks, we still stimulated each other intellectually, and we still had mindblowing sex. The only issue was mine.

This was something I reflected on often after the relationship; I eventually came to the conclusion that I would commit myself to further exploration of this mode.

I’m a successfully practicing polyamorist now; I won’t bore you with the details. I believe strongly in it, though, which is a strange thing to acknowledge; it’s been a loooong while since I’ve placed even a toe on a soapbox about anything!

common myths about polyamory
a really excellent article on polyamory & its roots

Ok, end.

ps – Yes it is totally ironic that I’ve ended up a polyamorist coming from Mormons.

10.16 : panorama on flickr

Unfortunately, flickr resizes the damn thing ridiculously smallllll…

but there it is.

10.15 : introduction

Hi.

I do other things:

write
photo

Ok, bye.