Ariana's Recent Posts

trixiebedlam posted a photo:

trixiebedlam posted a photo:

it depends on my mood

• Sandbaggers — Battle Order 3
  actual structure of SIS (brief)
  (tags: sandbaggers sis war spook)

Subject: Amazon is introducing a new account verification method.Plese renew ur account...

I'll get right on that, LOL.

------
For consideration: I CAN HAS EMAIL FRAUD?

It's as spare as one of the Childe ballads- a narrative pared of all connecting links. One moment you're distanced, the next you're up close. The dreams and visions are as real as the killings. You flounder about, trying to make connections. 

I've never undergone past life regression but I think it would feel a lot like this.

We're in the 13th century. Somewhere in Middle Europe. There's a robber baron called the Goat, there's a teenage bishop, there's a beautiful daughter who's been promised to God, there's a witch who seduces her brother, there's a fat old man with a woebegone army who schleps round the snowy waste trying to impose the King's peace.  People keep doing unspeakable things to one another.

Rape, murder, thieving, crucifixion.

On the plus side- courage, honour, loyalty.

There are castles- but they're more like fortified farmhouses. For all the raggle-taggle trappings of chivalry, this is the world of the Hatfields and McCoys.  You can be a baron but still in danger of starving to death in winter- or having the wolves eat you. Which is why you do a bit of bushwhacking on the side.  

The central characters are absent  from the action for long stretches of time- peripheral to their own tragedy. This is not a world in which the individual matters very much.

Until last week I didn't know this film existed. Not many people outside Czechoslovakia did. It was made -over a two year period in the mid 60s- during the  brief, golden age of Czech cinema.  The history of world cinema is going to have to be adjusted to make room for it.

trixiebedlam posted a photo:

The 4am is a mixtape file containing nothing but music donated directly by new and/or unsigned acts. The 4am is of no set length and is released on no set schedule. The 4am is mixed down to 128 of the kbps. The 4am has never been kissed. The 4am does not care any more.

7: Meditation In Ruined Temples

It’s 3am, not 4am, as I write this. But that’s close enough. It’s meditational noise tonight, with slight hints of whisky and cigarette smoke.

“Vilnius Colony” is a term found in my graphic novel TRANSMETROPOLITAN, but that’s not why I’m playing it. Texture says: “I’m heavily influenced by dubstep (Burial, Kode 9, Skream) and lo-fi guitar bands (Sebadoh, Pavement, Silver Jews), and am trying to find a way to fuse the two.”

“Helston Music Fair 1992″ is a new one from 4am regulars Kemper Norton, who have kindly offered me a CD but said “Don’t expect the luxurious packaging and gifts that those Ice Bird tarts have given you though… I happen to know that they keep a dosed and washed graphic designer chained in their bathroom.”

The Intelligence Community is but one of the outlets for the fevered brain of Thor Johnson, whom you can find doing lots of things, some legal, at http://www.thorrific.com. I appear to have lost the email from The Thing With The Stuff, whom I’m fairly sure is one of the aspects of Lauren Heckman.

And finally, Yoda’s House return with “Piamono,” which is, basically, the soundtrack for the end of the world.

I know this one’s another quiet one. I tend to go with the flow of the first track in the submissions pile that really gets to me. Next week I’ll make you listen to The Poxy Boggards instead. I hope you enjoy this. Good night.

(edit - the inline player might be freaking out a bit again. If it stalls out, best to just download it.)

Texture - “Vilnius Colony” (6:34)

Kemper Norton - Helston Music Fair 1992 (5:28)

The Intelligence Community - “Neutron Island BBQ” (4:06)

The Thing with the Stuff - Exhibition 24 (5:41)

Yoda’s House - Piamono (7:11)

The 4am needs music: If you want your music to be played on The 4am, email your 128kbps-plus mp3 files directly to [email protected].

4am broadcasts have been listened to 34261 times.

If you enjoyed The 4am, please spread the word, linking back to this post.

• Fantastika in the World Storm
  Possibly the best thing John Clute’s ever written: a lecture given in Prague on the subject of Fantastika
  (tags: sf)
• Spider Jerusalem cosplayer - Boing Boing
  Cory’s shot of a guy inking up as Spider at a convention
  (tags: transmet whathaveidone)

I graduated from college in 2025 and moved down to alphabet city where I shared the rent for a year with my friend Sena, then my other friend Caitlin. We rented a two bedroom place on East 7th street between ave B and C. It was a hole, frankly, littered with roaches and crazy people, but we didn't find that out for a few months, so we were alright. I was pretty sure I'd found my spiritual home; I was always meant to live out my twenties above a sake bar in alphabet city. (I still think this.) The next building East of ours housed (and still houses) a ground floor studio and gallery of sorts, called the Jacklight Gallery. The proprietor is one Walter Fields, and graceful, lanky white-haired man with large, intent eyes and a fat kittycat. When I was new to the block, one of the first things I did was go check it out. The door was generally closed, cat perched in the window, but if I stood there for long enough to spook the cat, he'd get up out of bed or wherever he was hiding and let me in. He paints, mostly, in heavy, glossy oils and acrylics on hunks of found wood panels. He has some nice quixotic screen printed tea towels and textiles, a funny portrait of his friend Kiki Smith riding a bicycle, and a series of paintings of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford and possible Shakespeare ghostwriter. What really drew me to the window again and again were the horses. He had several smaller pieces featuring horses, black shapes gliding through a murky bluish purplish brownish landscape like spirits.

There was one in particular, maybe the smallest painting in his studio, only a little larger than one foot square. It was in the window when I discovered the Jacklight. It was very dark, painted on a dark, stained panel (the top of a discarded wooden ice chest he'd found, so he said). The dark mossy browns faded into each other, into night's blackness. Thin suggestions of pale vertical lines, tree trunks, emerged from the wet dark, and in front of them, one white horse. Its legs were wispy, like a ghost, and raised as if in motion, galloping out of the darkness of that murky forest and coming out, escaping. The layers of slightly varied darks in the background piled up around the horse and the forest seemed to go on back there, forever, muffled and quiet as a tomb, those few trunks and the horses' back illuminated as if by stray moonlight. This painting enthralled me, I was in love. It was freedom, absolutely; I looked at it and I imagined the safety of the forest, then the suffocation, the fear of the dark and the welcome safety of the dark--it kept shifting. I was the night, I was the horse, I felt the wind one feels when getting away, the cool breeze of running, of being free.

All of this was a far cry from the 1970s conceptual art in which I had steeped myself over the preceding two years in college and in writing my thesis. There was little about Walter's paintings that I could say "radically subverted the institutions of art" or whatever other political rot I often look for in the art I liked and still do like to write about. I responded to the horses in a visceral way; they pulled on my guts. We all have motivations; mine is to be free, and I looked and I felt something. The panel was a perpetual play, perpetually night and damp and dark and moonlit and god damn it I wanted in.

Walter probably got a bit sick of me. His cat made me sneeze, and whenever I came by I wanted to see that one of the white horse, and he'd say, Oh god, you again and the horses, well, look at this new one I'm doing of Edward de Vere. Cocky, I asked the price of the one I wanted, but it was a little high for me and I sighed and resigned myself to just looking in the window everyday on my way home. It was almost like owning it, and one day when I made a little more money, I would come back and I'd buy it, maybe.

Except one day it wasn't there. I asked what had become of it. Oh that, said Walter. I have a couple very interested and I think they will buy it, but they are borrowing it for a little while to make sure they want it. Make sure! My heart quietly exploded. I could have screamed. Make sure! Who did these people think they were! How could they not be sure? Of course they would want it, it was perfect, it was beautiful, were they total philistines! And how dare they want it! How dare they, these people, whoever the hell they were, how dare they want it, my painting! Because already, my stupid heart thought it was mine.

I stayed away for a while then. Then I moved. I only moved one block, to East 8th Street and Avenue B, where I still live, but one block can change your world when you walk everywhere, and I didn't go check on the Jacklight much after that. The few times I did go, my painting wasn't there, and Walter didn't seem home, and I was too shy to knock. I let ashes fill in the space I had reserved for that painting. Some stupid yuppie had bought it, I decided, or maybe some damn tourist bought it to take home because it was the right size for their suitcase and they wanted a piece of the Village to show their friends. Who knew. Not me. Fuck them. Whatever the case, I would never see it again. I stopped thinking about it altogether because while the gallery had at first made me thoughtful and relaxed, happy and peaceful, it eventually just made me sad and wistful for what seemed lost, the painting that was growing fuzzy in my memory.

Last night, J and I lit candles for Hanukkah, something we've never done together before, and he gave me an early gift. We sat face to face on the bed and I pulled from the shopping bag something sturdy and flat, wrapped in a screenprinted pillowcase. I pushed aside the fabric to reveal it, glowing from within in the dimly lit room--my painting.

I didn't understand at first. It was there, in my hands. How could it be there when it had already been sold? It was slightly larger than I remembered, the colors more varied and subtle than they ever were through the window. J said: Don't cry on it! as I wept and wept and held him in my arms.

Yes, he explained, it had been sold already, but Walter helped broker a deal and J bought it back. Beginning to believe it was really mine, really ours, we hung it up on the wall.

So the other day those nice people from Ice Bird Spiral saw that I’d given them a mention here, and asked if I’d like a CD. I said yes, of course, what kind people you are, thankyouverymuch and etc.

This is what I received in the post today.

You may embiggen it if you wish.

Amazing. This is what I’m listening to tonight.

Gutterbreakz covered an Ice Bird Spiral gig here — worth reading.

It's that season again so I've been buying myself presents. 

3 movies and a book. And they all arrived in the post this morning.

OK, I've had my Christmas now. 

The movies are.....

Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend-  I saw this first in a neighbourhood cinema in Neuchatel when it first came out and the Paris evenements were playing in the background and what it said to me was, "Anything is possible; everything is permitted." I've had a lot of big experiences with a lot of movies but this was the biggest. 

Lindsay Anderson's If-  I went to an English public school and- forget Mr Chips- this is the movie that tells it like it is. I too had had that fantasy of stealing guns from the armoury and climbing on the chapel roof and shooting the bastards down. It's what kept me happy during the nightly ordeal of choral evensong. If is the only British movie of the 60s that belongs in the same company as Weekend, Belle de Jour and Persona.

Frantisek Vlacil's Marketa Lazarova- This is entirely new to me. It's a medieval epic that's been compared to The Seventh Seal and Andrei Rublev and that's all I need to know. The Czechs seem to think it's the best Czech film ever. 

And the book is...

Murakami's Wind-up Bird Chronicle. They don't have it at the library and I wasn't prepared to hang around while they ordered it for me. We'd built up a lot of credit at Amazon- so it actually cost all of �1.47.  

mouse pie

Originally uploaded by Fauxred.

“Mouse on toast, and or mouse pie- the remedy for some obscure ailment, not so long ago.”

How much do I love the fact that my phone already appears to have the word "Vandenberg" in its auto-correct dictionary? (Answer: "None more black.")

Oh, which is also to say: Folks in central-to-southern CA might want to find themselves outside this evening at 6:30PM PST with an unrestricted view in whatever direction Santa Barbara/San Luis Obispo might lie, to watch COSMO-2 on its way up. (Estimated 20% chance of scrub due to weather, though.)

------
For consideration: sadly, a little too late for the exhaust plume to get much sunlight

Sometimes I envy writers who work better when they've been drinking.

------
For consideration: one sure sign that I'd never make it as a full-time professional writer - one good scotch and I'm pretty much through getting anything useable down

Marc Johns posted a photo:

This is a drawing I did for the banner on Krissy's music blog, art is the new religion.
I like drawing cassette tapes; much more interesting to draw than CDs or iPods.

Decided on an exersaucer. Now: trying to decide between this one and this one. Any opinions/guidance?