they fight the invisible bears

My new journal is at shadowsandform. :)

Happy birthday to Jean Harlow, who was born 98 years ago today!
( VERY image-heavy! Possibly NSFW as one image features a barely-noticeable breast. )

Bad Girl
by Kim Addonizio

She's the one sleeping all day, in a room
at the back of your brain. She wakes up
at the sound of a cork twisted free
of a bottle, a stabbed olive

plopped into gin. She's prettier than you
and right now you bore the shit out of her,
sitting there sipping when she wants
to stand on the rim of the glass, naked,

dive straight to the bottom and lie there
looking up, amazed at how the world
wavers and then comes clear. You're not
going to let her. You've locked her in

with her perfume and cheap novels,
her deep need for trouble. She's the one
calling to you through the keyhole,
then sneaking away to squirm out

a window and tear her silk dress.
You can't guess where she's going,
or who you'll wake up with
when you finally wake up,

your head throbbing like a heart.
She's the one you're scared of,
the one who dares you to go ahead
and completely disappear. It's not

you the boys are noticing, not you
turning toward them and throwing off light.
You're crouched in a corner, coming undone.
She's in love with you now. She's the one.


Fuck
by Kim Addonizio

There are people who will tell you
that using the word fuck in a poem
indicates a serious lapse
of taste, or imagination,

or both. It's vulgar,
indecorous, an obscenity
that crashes down like an anvil
falling through a skylight

to land on a restaurant table,
on the white linen, the cut-glass vase of lilacs.
But if you were sitting
over coffee when the metal

hit your saucer like a missile,
wouldn't that be the first thing
you'd say? Wouldn't you leap back
shouting, or at least thinking it,

over and over, bell-note riotously clanging
in the church of your brain
while the solicitous waiter
led you away, wouldn't you prop

your shaking elbows on the bar
and order your first drink in months,
telling yourself you were lucky
to be alive? And if you wouldn't

say anything but Mercy or Oh my
or Land sakes, well then
I don't want to know you anyway
and I don't give a fuck what you think

of my poem. The world is divided
into those whose opinions matter
and those who will never have
a clue, and if you knew

which one you were I could talk
to you, and tell you that sometimes
there's only one word that means
what you need it to mean, the way

there's only one person
when you first fall in love,
or one infant's cry that calls forth
the burning milk, one name

that you pray to when prayer
is what's left to you. I'm saying
in the beginning was the word
and it was good, it meant one human

entering another and it's still
what I love, the word made
flesh. Fuck me, I say to the one
whose lovely body I want close,

and as we fuck I know it's holy,
a psalm, a hymn, a hammer
ringing down on an anvil,
forging a whole new world.


(Stolen from greatpoets).

This is one of the funniest things I've seen for a long time:




An episode of The Magic Roundabout, for those of you who haven't seen the series before:




This is also quite classic. "I've come to repair the 'arpsichord."

Bill Bailey is a demented genius.

( Five more under the cut. )

You can view more of Patrick Winfield's composites here.

can you guess what it is,
the "what is" of the squid?
many try, but they fail
for it shows throughout history
that when questioned, haranged
as to what is its quiddity,
alas, the beast, it stays silent!
so we merely postulate squiddity.

Giant Squid.

Le Cochon danseur, France, 1907.

patsy cline - walkin' after midnight
sam cooke - summertime
marissa nadler - dying breed
marissa nadler - i was your little girl
the tear garden - romulus & venus
the smashing pumpkins - obscured

these songs are special to me at the moment.



&
sonic youth - diamond sea

( Here's a short story that I really like. )

[Taken from the Classic Short Stories page.]

( Photographs from a visit to Whatipu last month. )

I'm visiting again this weekend!

The state between sleep & waking can be the best time to listen to certain music. Every time I listen to Victorialand, I'm happy that a band like this ever existed. They made perfect woozy, swoony, shuddery songs to dream to. I put this album on before I went to sleep last night, & it worked weird, half-waking wonders almost as well as Godspeed You! Black Emperor.
cocteau twins - throughout the dark months of april & may
cocteau twins - how to bring a blush to the snow
cocteau twins - little spacey
cocteau twins - whales tails
[Buy Victorialand here].

Rodriguez is a fantastic folk singer from the 1970s. I don't know if you could call his style psychedelic, but it seems like a fair description- he reminds me of both Donovan & Love (especially Arthur Lee). There's an interesting article about him here. I've played "Sugar Man" about twenty times since I first heard it last week.
rodriguez - hate street dialogue
rodriguez - sugar man
rodriguez - rich folks hoax
rodriguez - crucify your mind
[Buy Cold Fact here].

( hello )

( there's no place like home )

I've not been up to much. Muddling through the days. I spent most of last week at work, but some lovely things happened too. Recent adventures include:
- driving all the way up to Piha beach last Saturday evening after I finished work so that Jet & I could watch the sun set. Romantic, yes, but we wound up discussing how earth sounds would sound very different on other planets, and speculating about the likelihood of everybody spontaneously throwing up if they were flung from the planet when the earth stops spinning- so it wasn't quite your typical white tablecloth and candles kind of romantic way to spend an evening.
- The Veils gig last Thursday.
- The Phoenix Foundation gig last Friday.
- Jet, Andre & I went to the Grey Lynn Festival on Saturday. The sun was beaming, everybody was smiling, and hippies were flogging trinkets in tents under the trees. Excellent. My loot included a silk scarf with a moths & butterflies motif, a pristine white petticoat, dinky striped earrings & handmade soap (cinammon, & strawberry). Jet carted home a Ravi Shankar LP, a book full of beautiful, psychedelic illustrations of prog rock album covers, a frosty blue camouflage jacket, and a British Airways hipflask.

This week I am:
- working.
- learning to play "Moon River" on the harmonica & the guitar (not simultaneously). Which of my flatmates will throw something at me first? Bets are on now.
- frantically searching for furniture. I'm moving into a bigger room in my flat, as one of my flatmates is moving out, but I don't own a stick of furniture apart from my bed.
- stocking up on polaroid film. It's damned expensive stuff, but this site is full of beautiful polaroids that have inspired me to take A Polaroid a Day throughout December.

More polaroids by CDR can be found here.
- writing.
- sewing.
- going to the beach at least once. Hopefully to Whatipu or Karekare. I want swim in the ocean, do cartwheels on the sand, & very possibly get sand in my fish and chips.
- have a picnic under the oak trees on Sunday afternoon. Everybody's welcome.


An awesome shop on Ponsonby Rd. The place is full of cute vintage furniture & retro lighting, but because of where the shop is, those red chairs are about $200 - 300 each. Ouch. They're in great condition, but you could probably score them all for twenty dollars in a tiny town Salvation Army shop.

Joy!

I've found the Return to Oz soundtrack online. You can download it here for free.

The catch?

The file format is .wma!
What's the best way to convert these files to mp3s? I've never needed to do this before and am flailing about a little, trying to figure out the best approach. I don't have sufficient privileges on this machine to install any new software. Is there another way to go about it?

Anyway, happy listening. This was one of my favourite movies when I was a child (aside from the obligatory Labyrinth, The Goonies, The Land Before Time, The Princess Bride, The Neverending Story, The Dark Crystal and this spectacularly awful animated version of The Three Musketeers.) The soundtrack is lovely. "Dorothy Remembers / Home / The Ride to Dr. Worley's," "Mombi's Hall of Heads" and "Jack Pumpkinhead" are particularly beautiful.

Oh! & all of L. Frank Baum's Oz books are now part of the public domain and are available free through Project Gutenberg.

<1> The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
<2> The Marvelous Land of Oz
<3> Ozma of Oz
<4> Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz
<5> The Road to Oz
<6> The Emerald City of Oz
<7> The Patchwork Girl of Oz
<8> Tik-Tok of Oz
<9> The Scarecrow of Oz
<10> Rinkitink in Oz
<11> The Lost Princess of Oz
<12> The Tin Woodman of Oz
<13> The Magic of Oz
<14> Glinda of Oz

World’s First Tree Reconstructed.

NZ fishermen land colossal squid.

Photographs at National Geographic.


Dear Steve O'Shea:

You're the bioluminescent squid at the bottom of my ocean,
Oh! Not even Jacques Cousteau in submarine could plumb the depths of my devotion!

I usually prefer mad scientists, but for you I'll make an exception.

Love
Samantha.

A few days ago I made a list of all the random things that are making me happy at the moment. It makes me smile when I read it.

list~
- Happy old married couples who still hold hands and wink at each other.
- Seeing the pohutukawa trees in bloom, & the grass beneath them carpeted in fuzzy scarlet needles.
- Old ladies whose purses match their earrings, shoes & lipstick precisely.
- Old ladies who get dressed in the dark.
- Grandpa hats and trousers.
- This song. (Super Numeri's use of the Fairport Convention track "Autopsy" in their sound collage, The Enochian Way.)
- Bus rides over the Harbour Bridge on sunny afternoons, especially when I see a pukeko stilting its long-legged way along the shore beside the mangroves.
- Early morning tui calls.
- The Wine Cellar.
- Nectarines, banana-flavoured milk, cinnamon toast, green olives, feijoa juice, strawberries, blueberries & chocolate-covered coffee beans.
- Successfully making my first vegetarian stir-fry. (Successful = nobody got food poisoning.)
- Rubbing waxy leaves against my skin.
- Walking barefoot over the grass.
- Lying under trees in the early evening, watching the sky through the branches.
- Tree shadows.
- Cloud-shape interpretation.
- The scent of nagchampa incense.
- My wonderful boyfriend.
- Pretty girls with colt-thin legs in summer dresses.
- The scent of old library books.
- Eating ice cream & reading comics on the beach.
- Japanese maples, oak trees, roses & orchids.
- Hiding behind my huge sunglasses.
- Planning future road trips in minute detail.
- Making proper use of the swings & slides in playgrounds.
- Being three kilos closer to my weight-loss goal.
- The fact that writing my morning pages every day & clearing my head of all the mental graffiti that distracts me has actually led to more clarity and focus when I'm working on my writing projects.
- An end to my writer's block.
- The lumberbeast of a laptop that my father lent to me. I still need to source coal to power the damned thing with if I want to use it for anything other than writing or budgeting, but it's been really useful for those two things so far.
- Dancing barefoot.

Hashima Island (端島; meaning "Border Island"), commonly called Gunkanjima (軍艦島; meaning "Battleship Island") is one among 505 uninhabited islands in the Nagasaki Prefecture about 15 kilometers from Nagasaki itself. The island was populated from 1887 to 1974 as a coal mining facility. The island's most notable features are the abandoned concrete buildings and the sea wall surrounding it. ...



Here's what I've found so far:

- Cabinet Magazine's Hashima: The Ghost Island.

- Urban Exploration Resource's Gunkanjima profile.

- Gunkanjima Odyssey, which is in Japanese. Their gallery contains video clips of what I can only assume is a documentary project about Hashima.

- Several photo galleries: To a Silent Island.

- Another photo gallery.

- And another.


I'm also searching for galleries of photographs taken of London ruins during the Blitz. If you have any bookmarked, please let me know!

Electric tiki in a window on Ponsonby Road:

"... I have a Chamberlain I bought from some surfers in Westwood many years ago. It's an early analog synthesizer, it operates on tape loops. It has 60 voices-- everything from galloping horses to owls to rain to every instrument in the orchestra. Including the human voice [Waits sings a scale in "synthesizer voice"]. Eleven-second samples! I like primitive things. I've used that a lot over the years on different recordings. ..."
Interview continued here.

I want that synthesizer!

musty old books, crayons melted on to the classroom heater, extinguished matches, gardenias, resin, lemons, fresh paint, oranges, driftwood, raisin bread toast, vegemite, baking bread, hot chocolate, good coffee, oil puddles outside a mechanic's shop after rain, damp earth, basil, nutmeg, bay leaves, paprika, vanilla, cinnamon, ginger, frangipani, typewriter ink ribbons, hot fish and chips, freshly ironed clothes, cloves, peaches, Queen of the night, libraries, pine forests, apples, second-hand bookstores, strawberry milk, a rose named Brother Cadfael, new boots, jasmine, the original Swarfega gel (used to remove oil & abrasive material from hands), nail polish remover, lemon polish, wood smoke, the sea.

+ magnolias, baked apples full of caramelized brown sugar and cinnamon, stock (the flower), lilacs, wet paint, garlic, lipstick, gingerbread.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _