poems for Monsters #5: That Old Sith
» Monday, July 13, 2009

Palpatine has lost his lightning
Now he cons the Subway guy
For free sandwiches

Don’t even need my mind control he brags
Kid’s just a moron

He stoops to pluck a cigarette butt
smeared across the sidewalk

Six or seven babies like these
make a good smoke

Say he says
Want to split a meatball sub?
It’s on me

Labels: poetry

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Poems for Monsters #4: The Mummy
» Thursday, July 09, 2009

The Mummy
just downloaded Anchorman
Now he’s all “I’m kind of
a big deal” this and “rich mahogany” that

And we all have to laugh along
cause dude
he’s a mummy
he’ll rip your freaking head off

So let’s not let him watch
Knocked Up

or Blade 3

Labels: poetry

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Poems for Monsters #3: Zombies
» Wednesday, July 08, 2009

Attention all staff
Please stop with the shopping cart
zombie races

Shoppers have complained
of finding zombie pieces
in their groceries

Furthermore

Management asks that
staff cease pretending the heads
are promotional items

Heads are not promo
Items – they smell and they bite
and some of them curse

Some of you no doubt
have nothing better to do
with your coffee breaks

Than use company
property like spoiled children
Nice attitude folks

We do not accept
responsibility for
the unsanctioned dead

And we are tired of
hosing down the parking lot
during zombie hours

Thank you

Labels: poetry

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Poems for Monsters #2: Frankenstein
» Tuesday, July 07, 2009

Ten minutes left on our coffee break
But there’s no stopping Frankenstein's
Monster on a roll

Blah blah blah he says I was so misunderstood
Peasants and pitchforks and bolts in my skull
I just wanted my own set of Tesla coils
And a nice summer cottage
To play with children
And love goddamnit

Criminal tears trace scars on his face
Meanwhile the entire food court's gone quiet
They're wrapping and unwrapping sandwiches
Nesting birds at twilight
wondering if pine boughs and darkness will shelter them

Hey he says
Have you heard of dianetics?

Labels: poetry

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Poems for Monsters #1: Dracula
» 

Dracula stop rising
From the grave to steal
My girlfriends

Why

You gotta cockblock
Like that? Humans

Need game too

Who invited you
to Brad's party anyway

Labels: dracula envy, poetry

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because everyone else has written about michael jackson
» Thursday, July 02, 2009

According to a biographer - or maybe a parasite - Michael Jackson wore fake sideburns at his wedding to Debbie Rowe.

Think about that for a moment. Fake sideburns. Did you even know that such a thing existed? Reason tells me that they must, as pieces of theatrical gear. But not until now have I been forced to conceive of fake sideburns as real objects.

Once you start reading the news stories that have begun to flow from the wound of Jackson’s death, you run the risk of drowning in the endless, insane details. He wore wigs, he took 40 Vicodin per day, he spent sixty grand per month on prescription drugs, he fell in love with a restaurant waiter, he weighed 112 pounds at his time of death. He forbade his children, of whom he was not the biological father, from looking into mirrors. He threw away his childrens' toys every night. He was gay, he was straight, he liked to fuck little boys, he liked to fuck construction workers, he was repulsed by the thought of contact with human flesh. It goes on.

Here’s another crazy detail: the best man at Jackson’s second wedding was an eight year old boy named Anthony. Jackson called him his ‘nephew’. But it’s the fake sideburns that get me. It’s the unflagging commitment to artifice, to acting as the impresario to every detail of his life, to the transformation of that life into a perpetual costume drama. But even more than that, it’s the fact that he chose sideburns. A wedding is a mature, adult moment (even though children always seem to have the most fun at weddings), so Jackson must have thought sideburns were an appropriate piece of dress-up. Like cufflinks, or a decent tie clip. It was the zenith of the natural as artificial, as decoration. I’m certain that, had the technology been available, he would have popped on a nice wedding face.

I’ve been thinking about Michael Jackson over the last week, passing through the stages of reaction to his death, from the seismic strangeness of the news to some dutiful reflections on his talent, and finally to the recollection of who Jackson really was: a pedophilic drug-addicted freak with a monstrous face and a breathing mask, a living grotesque, a sport of choice rather than nature. He had vitiligo, lupus, schizophrenia, a damaged septum, a burnt scalp, an arrested emotional state and a high sweet voice.

I remember first seeing the album at a friend’s house, one of a pack of twelve year old boys. My friend somberly unfolded the cover and we beheld Jackson’s gauzy image in white. I was never a fan of Jackson – at that point I was only a year or two away from discovering The Smiths – but Thriller was impressive, with its long-form videos and inexhaustible supply of singles. I’m pretty sure they just released another single from that album last month.

Off The Wall was a good album. Thriller was a great album, a giant rock rising out of the rapids of pop culture. Everything after Thriller was just an embarrassment, a tacky quasi-religious musical played out in five-minute installments over the next two decades. I remember the horror of seeing Jackson perform “Earth Song” at the 1996 Brit Awards, extending his arms to suffer a crowd of shuffling children to come unto him like a space-age Jesus saving his pre-pubescent Elect. Given that Jackson performed his neo-Jesus act not long after the first allegations of sexual abuse were cropping up, Earth Song came off as a singularly tasteless piece of theatre that Jackson undoubtedly regarded as vindication. See? I’m rising on a column of light above a crowd of adoring children. I can’t be a child molester! I have staged a redemptive three-minute set piece on television that clearly exonerates me!

Check out this clip of Jarvis Cocker running up on stage during Jackson's 1996 performance and graphically miming his opinion of the whole affair.



I don't even know why Cocker bothered. This is from 1996. Kurt Cobain had pretty much smashed a Fender over the skull of this kind of bombastic fantasy-addled pseudo-rock five years before. But I'm betting that Jackson probably checked out of reality somewhere around 1985.

Labels: celebrities, music

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getting to Ontario
» Sunday, June 14, 2009

For the first hour or so of the 3 hour bus trip from Regina to Saskatoon I thought we'd gotten away with boarding a crazy-free bus, but then the man in the seat behind me began to talk to himself.

I'd seen him earlier in the ticket queue, a slight fellow in a white shirt and black shorts, a thatch of hay-blond hair sticking out from under his black baseball cap. He had an air of politeness, even deference, that probably came from living in and out of institutions. A white crust clung to the corners of his mouth, and the skin on one of his legs was a bright ham-like pink crazed with white markings. From his pores puffed a haze of cheap alcohol.

I'd met and struck up conversations with plenty of people like this one, and I could already map out the course of our acquaintance: a few innocuous remarks that would eventually get a reply from me, and then the chopped-up biography, rearranged and presented for maximum pity. Eventually he would ask me for a cigarette, which I would have to decline (being a non-smoker), and he would wind down our brief friendship and start up the show with the next person.

It's not quite accurate to say that he was talking to himself on the bus. At first I thought that some machine or system had developed an edge or started to heat up, because I could hear a strange humming sound that reminded me of the air conditioner in my office. Gradually the humming took on a kind of rhythm, pulsing with patterns that felt familiar but just out of reach. The sound reminded me of mumbled incantations, the buzz of far-off voices. And then I realized that the noise was issuing from the lips of the man behind me. Worse yet, I knew that the sound was meant partially for me, that it was designed to lure me in to a long and pointless conversation, a psychedelic retelling of all the wrongs done to him. I ignored the sound and turned back to my book.

After a while the mumbling fell away and he started in with individual words. Some of them were responses to a conversation going on in the rear seat of the bus between a young man and woman flirting with each other by trading a series of lies (he charged a hapless jerk six bucks for a cigarette, she was facing charges for beating up her stepfather), other words seemed meant to describe interactions between particles in the air. Cool, he said at one point. Hah at another. I kept my mouth shut. Even the least hint of a response would be an opening.

Halfway through the trip he leaned forward and addressed us directly.

"Excuse me," he said. That's when I caught the light fog of booze enveloping him.

"Yes, how can I help you?" I felt oddly secretarial saying that, but it seemed to formalize the situation.

"What highway is this? I mean, is this the Number One"?

I weighed my response for a moment. We were not on the number one highway, the East-West corridor that runs the length of the entire country. We were in fact over one hundred miles from the Number One, and rushing farther away from it with every moment.

"No, this is Number 11".

"Okay," said the guy, and sat back for a moment. Then he leaned forward.

"Because the Number One highway is the Trans-Canada, right?"

"That's right".

"Excuse me again, but will this bus take me to Ontario?"

This put me at a bit of a loss. Ontario is two provinces over, a solid twelve-hour drive to reach its western border. This was either the most graceless conversational gambit ever, or I was dealing with someone whose mind had been emptied or everything but a few sticks of furniture and some cryptic notes scribbled on the walls. I pictured a wall stripped bare, with the cryptic imperative "GET TO ONTARIO" scrawled in charcoal.

"No," I explained. "We're heading northwest to Saskatoon. Ontario is east of here".

"Okay," he said, completely unfazed by the news that he was heading in the entirely wrong direction, "so how would I get to Ontario from Saskatoon?"

"You can take the bus back to Regina, or just head straight for Winnipeg. Or you could hang out in Saskatoon. It's a nice city".

My shot at humour set him cackling. "Okay man, okay," he said. "Thanks a lot". He sat back in his seat and resumed his strange machine hum of a monologue.

I'm getting on the bus again in a few hours and I won't be surprised if he's sitting there, asking people how to get to Ontario.

Labels: autobio, conversations

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today is probably monday
» Monday, June 08, 2009

My office computer is labouring under the weight of my RAM usage (ye gods, Excel and Word at once!) so switching between windows is actually slightly time-consuming. What's more, windows don't pop up all at once, but instead paint themselves in sections on top of the previous window. First a frame goes up, then a title, then the main body goes in a glop, and finally the explorer bar and whatnot. It's kind of hypnotic and really pleasing. I feel as if the computer is really working. Because I'm not. I'm writing in my blog.

That's all for now.

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