a night in august

met up at the dairy queen parking lot on bicycles; bump over the curb up on to the sidewalk.  concrete.  yellow line.  transcend.  the gallery is behind. on the top floor. industrial district. should have been a motel; a cheap apartment complex. ghetto.  still can’t afford to live.  it is a place where Thelma and Louise hide out.   where Julia Davis fucks brad pit.  inconspicuous location for your clandestine dealings.

smoke against the chipped paint wall. sit on the pavement, legs stretched out long. rolled cigarettes between lips.  wander upstairs into the gallery. eight people in middle ages sit on chairs, quiet, attentive.  John stands in the middle of the room.  the projector he paces around buzzes ambient, under noise, light beaming. two machines sit on either side; dormant.  this is dream.  perhaps i am not awake.  in class but the words are incomprehensible, incongruous with each other or the concept or John’s poem. projected backwards translucent.

my right hand takes notes:   

is the grass dreaming?
dreaming conversations with familiar strangers?
eclipsed by  shadow 
three old machines, two dormant one glowing.  
responsible for shadow

John assures us we will fall down a rabbit hole from which we will never get out
so i close my eyes and listen proper
sounds sort of familiar,

“we’ve been here before”
only the wrong way,
but the bones are reassuring,
the bones are here to reassure
road signs bidding us to sit still

narrators of the wasteland
singing copulating serpents
imagining post coital chats of the gods
blind to our singularity  

so you turn, cross out words, vandalize

“who is the you?”
“you who drew parodies across ceilings?”    just to find us.
you, you and you and us.

it is a question of intimacy.  

taking notes.  a lecture.  dreaming.  hallucinating? sip water from a mason jar.

the night progresses.  we stomp through poem.  i draw a ram.  inadequate.  fallen short.  Andy and Nasstassia enter.  it is over.  exit.  gather.  walk.

we happen upon Chris and Thomas.  warm hug. swoon and buy a nectarine and dried fruit and french beer and carry on.  to Whitsteen X.  the last.  last at the ritz.  walls covered with whitsteen, marcus hastings, serina zapf, absorb.

itallian version of star wars buzzes on a screen.  our art is on the walls. or in our hearts.  or broken on the walls.

womyn talk about oppression and bleeding.  it is what we talk about.  we also smoke on the deck and Thomas tells us visions of the diamond planet.  of dinosaurs and symbols. signets of demons.  symbols of beings.  consciousness.  abstract manifestations.  not like diamonds planets or the dark planet.  not things we want to know about.  not things we want to be involved with.

exit.  i ride my bicycle.  slow circles in the street.  play CCR on a dumpstered tape deck.  music to march to.  noise to dance in streets by.  the boys make jokes.  we smoke jokes. “car!”   arrive at Logan’s.  and have no cover.  go in the back parking lot. play with clothes. play with kitchen pots left for the thrift store.  dress up.  a womyn sits amidst the rubble distraught. uses my cell phone.  throws my cell phone.  at me.  catch it.  she has a fever.  catch it. out front. we sit on cars not our own.  and then we storm the entrance.  spontaneous manouver.

dance wild to cobras cobras cobras cobras cobras cobras cobras cobras…. drink beer.  Nasstassia plays piano.  one joins in.  one joins in.  Karres  dances.  I clang Andy’s newly acquired cooking-wear-noise-maker. others join in.  we howl and growl and clang and piano.  cacophony.  bar tender turns off the background music and we howl.  fucking wild beasts.

canned music returns.  we eat blueberries.  we leave for the street.  we listen to CCR.  we smoke.  we move arms and legs and hair waves back and forth.  there is a glow stick.  drunken milling.  there are others around us. tape deck tunes.  and wanna date?  wanna date?

good night richard.  good night kris. good night andy.  good night karres.  good night brynne.  good night nasstassia.  good night chris.  good night chris.  good night kyle.  good night chase.  good night ian.

who coxed sweet easy laughter with incongruous antics.  poetic laugh.  everyone gets a high five.

ride to the couch at Ashley’s. whose mum slumbers in the guest room. whose new born son sleeps in her bed while she folds laundry.  eat cheerios pilfered from cupboards and almond milk. and type on lap top.

Arts for ears and eyes ears and eyes ears and eyes

I write this story on abdomen reflected on the screen of  laptop.  I am on the greyhound bus.  It is too expensive, but I am lazy and do not feel up for hitchhiking to Nanaimo.  I leave from Duncan.   Afternoon sun makes for a hot ride in a tin can.  The night needs documentation; thus I am writing.  Serves to pass the time too.

/// KKKHHH \"

Art For Ears and Eyes spring party into the night.  We ride boyfriend in the waning sunshine my arms wrapped tight round Megan’s waist I’m beaming ear to ear while stiff with fear.  Fear and pleasure are not mutually exclusive.  I think I’m also pleased in my awareness of what foxes we are in cherry lipstick, skinny jeans, doc martens and biker helmets on the Honda.  Foxes.  necessary character subscription-check.

Car Pet Land is flooded with diy punks, beatnik hipster cats in flannel, shades and neon, freaks with psychedelics and leather leashes, hip hop teenagers crawl the yard in small murders.  It’s a beautiful thing and before long I am swept up in this tide.  Tide washed down with a bottle of 9.99 Spanish red aiding in sloughing off the nuisance of my shyness and with my installation complete all that is left is to enjoy the journey of the evening.

The installation.  Approximately fifteen hours of curses, small triumphs, impatience, cardboard paper cuts (the worst kind), hot glue, duct tape.  Most of creation I fucking hate.  Why do I do it?  It’s probably the glory.  Oh how my delusions stroke me.  The Queen stands tethered to the ceiling with her superfluous stand in the dining room next to ghosts, sperms from the doorway of dream emerging with swollen eyes to behold the parade of youth.  My poetry hangs scrawled on poorly cut pilfered matte board.  The excrement left after waking from dream.  I drew the ghosts after.  I’m a fucking vegan.  I mean why was I eating fried chicken?

Breakfast nook bares the scrawlings of malcontents or the  clinically insane or the holy and blessed; who knows?  Rainbow lude fantasies having fantasies of you and the orgy you are about to begin with the people all around you.  Women as animals, drawings, close to neon hip constructs: totems to a rave where we dance with our morning cartoons amidst piles of distended entrails collaged in perpetuity.  “I am not seeing this”, we would whisper.  “You were a social experiment”, he tells us.  And we believe him.  And we wonder at the forms before us records of people we know and do not.  Cast simply into being.  And from the balcony through the glass we look on to the broken visual cacophony of keyboard chandelier smashed sweetly by the sturdy hands of women.

The basement room where the bands play has a low ceiling covered with patches of carpet carefully arranged into failed quaker quilt.  I enter late as white ribs begin their noise set.  I enter into dark, I know the tiny space is filled with bodies, but all I can see are the small flashing lights of mixers, or synths, or pedals.  I don‘t know which.  The sounds are disturbing, grinding, rumbling robotics.  White Ribs have always disturbed me in the best of ways, but this is a new kind of freak out.  The sound corrodes into bodies and reverberates through our proximity.  Small, broken, melodic, distorted; whistling tuneless.  Then Richard screams; a raw scream that climbs from stomach pits where souls die.  Screams that reach our ear drums without distortion and their terrible clarity contrasts with the electronics in an unsettling miasma.  Apes and humans; we are drowning.  My eyes are adjusting and I see a figure emerge from the dark before the crowd, between the two men crouched on the floor over their equipment.  Two crouched figures I can just barely see by the glow of their technology and this new man standing between them.  I may be hallucinating.  A gentle terror takes my hand; clammy child hand, like tickle games, I rationalise her away, but am impressed by the experience.  What ghosts have we conjured?  The figure out of place, moves wrong, shifting with the noise, shifting with the noise and the screaming.  I feel screams rise in my own throat, but I‘d feel stupid screaming along so I don‘t.  The noise the noise the noise and Kris exits.  Out the door.  Richard continues.  The lights turn on.  Hernandez stands at the front.  Apparition materialized as a familiar face.  We are safe after all.  Sometimes we must play theatrically in our minds.  Fun fear.  Everyone is clapping.

We pile through the door, past the leggo pieces and outside into the grassy yard.  A thirteen your old Michael Jackson has started his blond haired lipsync gig on the deck.  A mass of hardcore kids and hip cats jamming out to the King of Pop reincarnated in the body of a small white boy.  Shouts and laughter.  Who can resist such sweet absurdity?  We chain smoke and eat watermelon.  After the set onion heads resumes his spray paint muralling dodging those wandering between house/gallery and yard.  We watch Coyote, a film by Joey Chaos screened on the breeze blown sheets suspended between two trees in the yard.  Driving, hardly working, barely audible, existential awakening from bored meanderings.  Apple dominoes and smarties organized by colour; counted; facebooked.  Locked out of cars to beaches and conversations with beautiful hippie crow women.  Hundy Thou brings us back to the basement for crusty punk moshing to hip hop in one breath hoser another Dostoyevsky.  It feels like being in a meat grinder powered with our own limbs.  I miss Funner.  Room too crowded.  I listen from the outside imagining the mantric shaking of plywood robot garbed shamans.  Men conjuring spirits of now.

fucking pigs arrive.  They line the steps.  Squeal hello as I pass.  Six of them.  Maybe four.  Hooves grasp lights, flash lights into our decadent faces.  Slurred plans are devised; plans to head for the bleachers.  We relish in the irony of being kicked off private property where it is legal to drink; told to chug our beers before leaving–it is illegal to drink these beers across the mystical line delineating private from public–we are being exiled from private.  Disallowed from drinking among ourselves inside, we will find mischief elsewhere.  Two maybe four blocks away.  Thank god for the scabby arm of the law.

We are raucous street bound nomads.  Beat boxing to harmonica songs.  Dancing mystic messiahs, priestesses of psychedelics and beer.  Electric drill harmonies.  Tight rope bleacher shimmies end in saving falls by wonder woman.  Hippie finger paint puddles on concrete school grounds.  We gather for the violence of witch doctor performance.  jody: gold sequenced rage caught on film.  Amor de Cosmos.  The fence rattles like bars to a too small cage.  This rage cannot be contained. We draw on the walls.  Spray paint and sharpies.  Monsters and women and tags and ass trumpets; the records of our existence; the jubilation of our lives handed down to the future to be lost in the painting over of our stories.  How many stories are lost for us today due to the white paint of the authority?  Our imaginations know better.  And so we play make believe.

The night is beautiful.  We regroup with the hospitality of friends before wandering into the night, Megan and I, for spooning, drunken slumbers.  If there were a way to capture the wonder of evenings such as these adequately… but these nights., these nights of community and festivity…

These nights of laughter and dancing of freedom and play.  These nights and days where we forget ourselves in remembering what we really are under the skies.  This is to live.  Nights of graffiti, spontaneous music making, dancing, joking, painting, drawing, hugs, food, friends, fucking, madness madness madness.  We are the panicked living as much as we can in the best way we know how.  We are the shoeless dreamers creating existential sureties of joy.  We are rapture realised in harmonies of conflict and loving.  We are the dancers of ancient ritual awakening in times of technology to share our souls with each other and eat with the hearts of our every lover.  We are the builders of leggo legacy and legend.  We are the broke.  We are the rich.  We are the underbelly triumphant. We are the every generation of dreamers relishing in the night, who wander the streets; drifters wondering how many in the quiet houses around us are fucking.  We are the bodhisattvas of Kerouac.  We are the dykes of Sappho and Bast.  We are aphrodisiac.

Beautiful Kay, thank you for opening your ghost charmed home to all of us hooligans.  We love you.

With the return of the sunshine we fall into the streets.  Clamour forth prodigal children of Sodom.  Resourceful bearers of light.  We eat the hearts of our mothers and fathers and love them in our menace.  We trip on our shoelaces and sing into nights like coyotes on cliffs of celebration.  We need no excuse for our gaiety; for we are divine.

the line up

H U N D Y * T H O U
—–> FUNNNER <—–
WHITE RIBS
M E D U S A
(( Cynical Cypher ))
j ODY f RANKLIN
Serina = Zapf
W H I T S T E E N

Short. film. by. JOEY. CHAOS.

Live? mural? painting? by ONIONHEADS

^ M O N S T E R P A R T Y ^
Th0mas D1n1n0
A B S O R B
+ David GrannemaN +
/// KKKHHH \\\
13 – year – OLD Marlon David Jackson Impersonator