A Film Ravager's Lyrics

Quite so.

ERGON/LOGOS

Is an experimental video game. Is an animated choose-your-own adventure concrete poem with a franticly minimalist soundtrack. It's interesting. I like art games; they're a fantastic medium for addressing ideas of choice, time, and change, because they're essentially diachronic and interactive; they're also often much more engaging than lookin' at something on a wall.

But: the animation's just rough enough that it disorients me and makes my eyes feel weird if I go for more than a couple minutes at a time, and it's not as fun as frisbee.

Prose: Disjointed and abstract.
Cons: Currently wearing my olive high-tops.
Rating: ★★★☆☆

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Having a stock pot

Stock pots are good for making lots and lots of soup and chili and stuff. I pretty much can't get enough soup and stew, so this is good.

Pros: So long as I don't get sick of chowder, I won't have to buy lunch for the next two weeks.
Cons: Extra soup takes lots of room in the freezer, so I may need to find somewhere else to keep bodies.
Rating: ★★★★★

Ham and gruyere croissants

Okay, so these have ham and cheese on the inside, and more cheese baked onto the outside, all upons buttery flaky pastry. Seriously. My life span is probably shorter after eating that but much better.

Pros: Delicious. Exemplifies all the best violations of kashrut. Except for shellfish. Shellfish is also very tasty. Good heated or cold.
Cons: Sticks to your arteries. Have to wipe pastry flakes off your jeans. Unless you eat really tidylike, but what fun is that?
Rating: ★★★☆☆

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Mutant blue lobsters

Okay, so lobster shells actually contain red, yellow, and blue pigments, with the red pigment classically dominating. But some of them are born with a mutation that makes them develop the different pigments in different amounts. About 1 in 2,000,000 are bright freakin' blue.

Pros: It's blue! It's a lobster!
Cons: Too rare to go dippin' it in butter.
Rating: ★★★★☆

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Stash Chai Green Tea

I like having tea around at work for when I'm too tired to remember to get coffee. So I got a box of this. And have been filled with regret ever since.. The spices aren't strong enough to be delicious themselves, they cover up the subtle flavour of the green tea. Also, it makes my mouth feel dehydrated.

Pros: I just used the last teabag in the box I had so I don't have to drink it any more.
Cons: Well, I still have to finish this cup here. And it's cold.
Rating: ★☆☆☆☆

1. Hey! Nietzsche! Leave Them Kids Alone! (The romantic movement, rock & roll, and the end of civilisation as we know it) - Craig Schuftan

I was feeling left out.

On a list of hilariously lame things that have been posted on YouTube in the last 5 minutes, my entry in CFUV’s Leonard Cohen cover contest would almost certainly place.

“I’m better than this,” he says. ”I’m better than the mud.” His feet squelch with each step as the earth reaches up to his ankles to pull him down. He has been forcing his legs to move through pain and exhaustion because he sees sunlight ahead. They are cracked and misshapen from strain.

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“My intention,” he announces, clasping her delicate, slender hand tenderly between his own, “is foremost to allow us to mutually assess each other‘s suitability as mates (whether for a short-term or longer engagement). My secondary purposes include:

* gathering information about your interests, history, and connections;
* examining more closely some of my favourite works at this photography exhibition; and
* satisfying my craving for greek food later on.”

He smiles warmly.

She scowls. “Smooth,” she replies, dryly.

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The moral of the story is, the communication skills learned through an academic program in professional writing are not the ones that really matter.

In Mexico City, he hanged two men to save eight. In Berlin, he killed five men to save one. When his lover asked him what the difference was, he said there was none.

She asked him what law or principle he could have been upholding. He answered that he upheld no laws or principles.

She asked him how, if he upheld no principles, could he ever claim to treat other people fairly? He answered that it would be fair of him to treat all women as he treated her, but would she have that?

She answered that if he did so, she would kill him.

“Then I believe you understand,” he said.

“That anger makes murderers of us?”

“That principles make hypocrites.”

Also to be a t-shirt design by Anarchists: A Peril!, a division of On The Moon With Steve Artistic Collective or something.

Edit: Shit, I’d forgotten how fun cartooning was. I haven’t really done any of that since a 2003–2004 comic with far too clichéed a concept to publish. I still LOL when I read some of the stripts I bothered to save. For example.

The first serious question she ever asks him is, “What do you want? I mean, what drives you to do these things?”

He answers her, “I want to be wealthy. I want a couple houses, a statue of myself in the square—looking triumphant, like so—, a fleet of private aeroplanes, a rocket, a castle, and my own island. Then I will be a great man.”

She rolls her eyes. “You think small, but we can work on it.”

She next morning, she shows him how to make houses from cards, a statue from stones, aeroplanes from paper, and rockets from bottles; that afternoon, she shows him how to make castles from sand, and islands in puddles from handfuls of dirt. He grins and laughs and shouts that he has become a great man.

But that evening, they all come apart, and he says and he looks at the wreckage, “I lost everything.”

She shrugs. “That’s the way of things made from from stone, plastic, and dirt,” she says. “But do you feel so different now that they’re gone?”

He shakes his head. “Not much. Building castles and airplanes with you was better than having them was.”

“That is the way of things made from flesh and spirit," she says. "To lose and endure and become wiser.”

They each come alone to watch the fireworks from the top of an eight-story parkade. He sees that she is alone, and cuts through the crowd towards her, and as they introduce themselves—as the idiom goes—there are sparks.

The sparks start an explosion at an ESSO which is stoked by a flurry of delicate but frenzied kisses and emptied kerosene bottles into a raging block-wide fire in Chinatown. As they watch from the roof of a ten-story parkade, he holds her hand and asks her to promise him that they’ll never let the flame die.

She tells him that the flame is not theirs to keep, lose or control. “Every flame,” she says, “eventually turns to embers. All we can do is enjoy the heat; when it goes cold and still, to remember the warmth it gave us; and then, to go right back out and start another.”

I wake up to the sound of my childhood best friend’s voice. She says, “Wake up! It’s Saturday! No school today! C’mon, cartoons are on!”

It’s a lie, of course, but I’m awake before I remember that it's Monday, I’m 34, haven’t been to school in ten years and haven’t talked to Laura in eighteen.

Last Monday I woke up to the voice of a wise guy I used to know in Detroit telling me that he’d castrate me if I didn’t have all the money in cash in an unmarked bag by the side of Exit 21 by eight in the morning.

The week before that, I was woken up by air raid sirens. Not as they were, exactly, because I’ve never heard an air raid siren, but as I imagined them when my grandfather told me stories about being a kid during the war, shivering in the corner of a concrete shelter with his uncle and his sister and a transistor radio that buzzed and crackled as it listed, one by one, ground zero for each of the Russian bombers.

When a BEEP-BEEP-BEEP that’d drown out God doesn’t phase you any more, you need to change your alarm up. I don’t know what I’ll switch to when this doesn’t affect me, either. But for now, it works.

My prototype prints from Printfection came in this week. I am pleased.





Edit: Oh hey like four strangers complimented me on my awkward turtle prototype today which means given a sample of one day it's scientifically speaking perceived more awesomely than even my awesome threadless shirts.

(Short game.)

If you gaze into a black and tan long enough, I hear, the black and tan will gaze also into you. For a moment we are locked in a terrible mutual understanding, and in the shame we share we quickly look away.

My head snaps up, and I start to feel dizzy. I wince from the light that spills in from the door. But my pupils contract; I catch her eye as she turns her head and her slender hand and the dull, tarnished doorknob. For a moment we—

The moment passes, and I’m left grinning slyly past the infernal glow of an exit sign.

I only just knew her. I wasn’t ready to watch her walk away.

These are various writey things from September 2006 or earlier, before I made a habit of publishing such things to anyone except the dust bunnies in my hard drive. One or more individuals have inquired as to my history of authorship prior to the bits of gunk I’ve posted in the last few months; well, this is pretty much all of it.

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I help myself to another mocha. The barista is dead, cut down with a flaming sword. It’s bringing out the do-it-yourself attitude in me. I misjudge the amount of chocolate to put in; it’s rich and syrupy and much too sweet; the foam has no body. I sprawl in an overstuffed chair next to the news stand.

I feel her coming from behind me. She covers my eyes with her silver wings. “Guess who,” she says.

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In response to this here song challenge, inspired (quite loosely) by Marcy Playground’s Sex and Candy.