backlash bonne fete

happy birthday to me. I am twenty-three on T3s.

(I should probably quit the rhyme right about here; I imagine it would turn out badly.)

I am actually on T3s right now though, given to me in prescription form by a new dentist. That and some anti-inflammatory pill which is enormous, red and yellow. this whole thing started with a toothache and now I am sitting here, bloated on one side of my face and in pain, on the eve of my anniversary and the advent of shira, princess of power.

timing is everything; perhaps this will be the inscription on my other foot.

its strange. I can remember my twenty one (forever young) very clearly; it was charged, it was change. twenty two was in two languages & I don't know what it really was trying to say, as a year in a life. new, confusing, half-verbal, I sort of stumbled through it. half-fluent about where or who I was.


existentialism to the max. pardon me, but I am on T3s.

The other day richard bars wrote me an email that was very symmetrical. I often wonder about the order of things, like he does. how words and items and people and things on a list will stack and prioritize themselves in an inner-hierarchy, chain-of-events, working itself out darwinian style. you know, those people, occasions. incidents. affairs. experiences.

then bam! chalk another year of life and reflect upon it.

---

it is a little pathetic that I am sitting here, high on T3s and red and yellow pills, blogging. there are definitely more important things to write at this point, but I am blocked. bloated and buoyant on foreign chemicals. jaw clenched, bun high, enclosed in dark and warmness of my place in montreal, I embrace a lucid evening turning into twenty three. I have decided to, momentarily, "fuck the backlash" but I know I will get back to it.


Is productivity even possible on T3s? non.

--- -- ok back to it.

tomorrow's my party; a party sobriety.

-
--
---
----
-----
------
-------
--------
---------
----------
-----------
------------
-------------
--------------
---------------
----------------
-----------------
------------------
-------------------
---------------------
---------------------
bisoux, the birthday girl.






post script:

my mother just told me the greatest story of my very own birth.

apparently, after a full night of no sleep and full-on contractions I came into the world at 10:01. this I knew. what I didn't know is that, once out, all the nurses stopped their tracks and commented to my exhausted mother that I was acting like a babe who had been out at least two weeks in the world; that I was aware of everything. for my brother and my sister (and many babies, I am told) there are lingering moments in a newborns disposition signaling great discomfort and annoyance to be out of the warmth of the womb. not I.

janis

is my karaoke wet dream .
the song: preferential women's studies study tune. Her, wailing. Me, solo. drinking, papers abounding, thinking about women & wanting to wail.

last minute art project

AMILENTATION (sic):
RÉMI COSNIER

Dans ces travaux récents, Rémi Cosnier tente de simplifier par la réduction à un répertoire de symboles cette surabondance visuelle contemporaine qui sculpte autant l’expérience de la nord-américanité que les habitudes quotidiennes de consommation.

Ces chips, ces triangles, ces mains, ces tables, sont d’évidents reflets de nos tendances post-industielles : manger mal et jeter ce qui reste.

Dans Amilentation, Cosnier construit une scène relationnelle entre ces représentations, créant ainsi entre elles un système multidirectionnel de communication.

Les seuls symboles palpables qui persistent sont ces emballages posés sur la table qui font office de repas.

Paradoxalement, on utilise « l’essaim » pour créer un sentiment d’équilibre. Cette nuée de triangles colorés agit à la fois comme principe associatif et comme forme antinomique aux éléments concrets.

Cette forme « essaimante », dans toute son ambiguïté, deviendrait synonyme d’action, d’information, de désordre, de relation ou de rédemption. Autant ces formes semblent mutuellement aléatoires, autant elles sont séquentiellement encodées; autant incarnent-elles un flot logique, autant ce flot n’a ni origine ni destination. En ce sens, la direction et le contenu de ces diverses connections restent irrésolues.

L’oeuvre de Cosnier demande que nous nous interrogions sur la coexistence d’une multitude de liens symbolique avec une perte généralisée d’information. Ainsi, les sens que l’auteur donne aux concepts de productions et de consommations sont dissimulés dans cet essaim de triangles colorés.

Dans Amilentation, il est possible de s’extraire de la critique simpliste du gaspillage inhérent à l’industrie de consommation, pour considérer plutôt les propriétés magiques de cette représentation comme une forme d’art.

En « esthétisant » ces sacs de chips, en exprimant de manière stylisée et avec netteté leurs contours, en les assimilant à la charge mystique de la forme triangulaire, ce n’est pas seulement la consommation que valide Cosnier, en un sens, cette œuvre est l’affirmation sans équivoque de son amour pour les chips.


--- --- --- an obvious translation by laura beeston.

ps: go here to see what I am talking about.

link me. link me harder.

old scoop

new scoop: currently I am writing about the new BA Major in First Peoples Studies at my school. This 42 credit hour program will be the first of its kind in Quebec, has taken 10 years in the making and is expected to triple the native population at Concordia.

I talked to the Native Students Association and the Native Student Center (along with their awesome Department Native Elder Morning Star) about the FPS and it was just wonderful. Quebec doesn't know enough about first nations, Metis or Inuit. period. Ask any separatist spewing the regular radical colonial crap and they won't know a damn thing about native history.

Thankfully, there is a critical mass youth generation across Canada nearing 2 million. although no one acknowledges it NOW the times, they are a changin'. Although they have been systematically removed from the history books (which is the fault of the limitations of a PROVINCIAL education) they're strong in demographic. As John Raulson Saul has said "this has the potential to be the most fabulous success story." I hope it is.

yesterday, when I sat in the Native student center reading materials, asking questions, meeting people, I have never felt so all the way back at the University of Winnipeg. I was stoaked. it was warm. I am going to eat heart-shaped bannok breakfast in the morning. yesss.

As for my story, we will see. The program isn't being offered until 2010, they predict, which doesn't exactly make it a 'timely' news story... whatever.

ANYWAYS, all my homework has gone by the wayside in place of le link. couldn't be happier nor more fucked for midterms, so I should get on it.

happy hallmark weekend, folks. loco.

debbie debutante

so there was a themed party last night, composed almost exclusively of ex-pats from winnipeg. Everybody knows kevin bacon. The original theme of the party (because parties always have a purpose in mtl & usually involve some type of costume) was 'gitch hat' but was then changed to 'debutante.' This is what I came up with. Finding inspiration from Brett Donahugh's old gitch elastic (the pure & simple bit), I combined the two thematically. The elastic was bestowed to me on another one of our red-wine-and-dine weeklies because, in the actors words, 'it is a waste to throw away perfectly-good gitch elastic' though the gitch themselves have become thinned & holey. whatever, I stitch ripped that sucker into a party costume, wore it as a bow, headband, and garter (white-wedding style. I will be proposed to come vday) & could not be more content. Brett, from this point forward, will save his gitch elastic for me forever; expect gitch crafts in the mail, friends.

(In addition to my gitch craft pics, I took a roll 35mm that will make its way on here ....apparently red attempted the splits)


god, what a ramble. but last night was crazy. my head feels in the same state as the eggs in my lap. I am a sorry excuse for 'breakfast as dinner.' time is meaningless at the moment. There were perhaps a few too many bevvies down the hatch heir soir, too much new information/drama about the various goings-ons of one great city (weddings! babies! divorces!), bountiful drunken french spoken, nay, drunken franco-manitoban french spoken, and SO many st viateur bagles to sop up poison in the last 48 hours. check those bags. I am going to be straight for the week...

or, not. "I went to harvard to become a lesbian" & I was not the first... (judith. judith butler everyone) but, straight or gay, I have a shit ton of homework to do. mostly of the reading and paper-writing variety. so I should probably quit wasting away on here and get at er.

but expect a link to the link on tuesday & pictures to follow; I am HOT for a clipping & britt splits, loco.

anticipation

in multiple forms and reasons:

a) shira bellan is coming for my birthday and nuit blanche.
b) I am being published on Tuesdays edition of the link after picking up a scoop. (my first break!)
c) linda kay called me 'my dear'

love this business, loco

the politics of location

so I lied, people. & although Adrienne Rich had nothing to do with the bluff, she provides the perfect anomaly to satisfy my sentimental predicament.

first: location. here I am, on maisonneuve, in montreal, in quebec, in canada, on the content of north america, the western hemisphere, the earth, the solar system, the universe. second (for my favourite virginia woolf addict) 'as a woman I have no country, as I woman I want no country, as a woman my country is the whole world,' the politics of the body. a convergence of contradictory impulses. lacking absolute conclusions. to stay? to go? to return? I don't think I can do it.

recently & as previously posted, I have been listmaking with the passion of a thousand swords. today it is thank you card, rent, adbusters, the link, Borough background info, print meeting agenda, group two readings and commentaries (my canadian icons were the famous racist five, unfortunately), NY times article Re: bonobo pornography and female desire (check it out) term paper(s): media and women, women and the media, advertising, objectivity v. subjectivity, activist media, culture jam, all of the above?, presentation: Brettell, CB 'Inside the Glass Box: Editing the Women's Pages'

also, unfortunately, the tempo looks like it will persist this way until reading week, with three papers PLUS journalism on the helm of things to write. I forgot what drowning in mental tasks felt like for a brief little year there, but now it is back full-throttle. I dig it. (total sidenote: I talked to Terrine Friday (news editor for the Link) about her job the other day and she told me, straight faced, that she hadn't slept in thirty four hours. This, for me, was a premonition. psyched.) so all is well.

or is it? (stage left: a contradictory impulse)

the essences of ambiguity, essential & non-essential love, double consciousness, institutionalized relationships, deconstruction of experience, the limit of linguistics, babies.

sdb is devouring me.
I'm not coming back.

---- pause

while we are on the subject of listmaking, I posted something I think is clever on the manstream; can we overcome?

anyways people, it is 2am and I'm still writing, fuck. I need a warm body & bed. bonne nuit.