pigeons meditating in a temple courtyard.
Monday, January 27, 2014
Posted with BlogsySunday, January 26, 2014
sitwell--necromancers hybrid
black velvet apricots in the basket at the grocerie, not the black apricots sitwell wrote of though close enough for my tastes.
Saturday, January 25, 2014
spot garden
that small garden of moss and tree seedlings flourishing against a wall near the art-gallery-ontario.
shen fu--striking shape
"when flowers and trees are planted for the first time, it does not matter if they are set at an angle. let the leaves face where they will, for after a year they and the branches will straighten up by themselves. in fact, if a tree is planted straight up it will be difficult for it to grow into a striking shape."
shen fu, six records of a floating life; english by leonard pratt and chiang su-hui.
Wednesday, January 22, 2014
lurking pinwheels
a person attending a type of group therapy is coerced into volunteering for an extra curricular interview with student therapists, so they can practice their trade. before the interview starts they point out to him that the room the interview is in has a viewing mirror built into the wall so the teachers can watch the students from the room behind the mirror.
when the interview is over and as he leaves the head therapist reimburses him twenty dollars for the hour he spent with the students. for no apparent reason the bill is origami folded into a pinwheel and the therapist smiles strangely as he gives it to the volunteer.
as he is leaving the building and looking at the twenty dollar pinwheel in his hand he recalls an incident from thirty years ago in grade one, a similar incident with student teachers. the class had been taken to the university of saskatchewan where they listened to some student teachers read stories and they also folded a sheet of paper into a pin wheel and thumb-tacked it to the eraser of a pencil.
that room also had a large mirror built into one wall and an other student said something about how he had done this sort of thing in kindergarten and there were people behind the mirror watching, the person recalls how he kept looking over at the mirror while they were making the pinwheels and being scolded for it by the teacher from his school.
in the days after the interview with the student therapists he begins to notice a larger than usual number of people carrying pinwheels in their hands, some elderly, some younger and some children, and all of them looking at him like the head therapist did when he gave him the twenty dollars.
Tuesday, January 21, 2014
architecture--dome and pylon
the west side of the allen garden greenhouse complex, showing the central palm-dome and service court.
Monday, January 20, 2014
accidental townscape--landmark
as described in ivor de wolfes "the italian townscape," a landmark is a building that gives people at ground level a point of reference to where they are in the townscape. the steeple of the metropolitan united church at queen and church streets, visible not only above but also between the gap in the the false split pediment composed of the shed roofs of the buildings below and to the north of it. this accidental composition makes one of the most memorable landmarks of torontos skyline.
Tuesday, January 14, 2014
lurking doppleganger
one day a man his wife and a daughter goe downtown while their son stays at home. when they get home they are laughing and tell him that when they got to the main intersection by the mall, they saw him across the street with some other people and were about to call to him and ask how he got there before them, a closer look and then they realize it is not him.
not long after that while waiting for his father to pick his mother, sister and him up, an elderly man sitting near them asks him if his older sister is feeling better, he looks at the old guy wondering what he is talking about as he dosnt have an older sister, then the old guy looks again and says oh you wear glasses, oh I thought you were someone else, he dosnt wear glasses, oh my do you ever look like him, my mistake.
then one day again not long after the incident at the grocery store the vice principle at the separate high school he attends, says he was astonished to see him in a photo in the local newspaper, then he realized it wasn't him but a student from the other high school and wondered if he had a twin brother who went to the public high school, to which he replied no but it seems there is some one at the other school that has almost an identical appearance to him.
not long after that he begins to get strange glareing looks from other people as though they knew him and were angry with him for something.
Monday, January 13, 2014
Sunday, January 12, 2014
notes on a lurking gift-rape
a person is reading news articles about an alleged sexual assault in the cities othersex night-club district. in april a young man said he was offered a ride to his apartment by four older women, in lieu of that they drove to a nearby parking lot and allegedly sexually assaulted him before he could escape.
when the cities news media found the incident report on the police website it was made use of as a slightly offbeat situation that became the raw material for articles that were guaranteed to raise eyebrows and laughs. none of them addressed the underlying problem. the four alleged assailants were described as wearing skimpy dresses and stilettos, each woman weighing about two hundred pounds, having butterfly-cult tattoos on the back of their necks, and tie-dyed hair.
the tone of the articles were controversial. on one side were reporters who seemed envious of the four alleged assaultists and penned what when read closely were their private rape fantasies disguised as journalism. those that took the opposite view wrote articles akin to inspirational literature, claiming that rape is rape even when the recipient of the unwanted attention, physical or otherwise, is a male and the perpetrator female. they seemed more interested in using the incident to show how moral and sensitive they can be compared to other people.
as he reads the articles he becomes reminded of something that happened in the early nineteen eighties at the school he attended in northern alberta. one morning before the first class began another student was telling him she had gone on a date the night before with a friend or co-worker of her older brother. this guy bought her a steak dinner and then they went for a short drive, parked the car and talked for a while. if he recalls correctly she said her date then asked for a blowjob before driving her home. she refused and then he said good night, that he was going home now and did she want to say goodnight here or when they got back to his place. in short he wasn't driving her home, and so she got out of the car. rude of him but no assault or any thing like that on his part. sounded like he had a plan.
standing in the snow she decided not to call home and have her mother come pick her up because she didn't want her brother asking why his friend didn't bring her home. she didn't have money for a cab so she couldn't flag one down and have it drop her off down the block from the house and walk the last block and so a cab all the way to the house and get the money and pay the cabbie was no solution for the same reason as calling home.
the denouement of her story was that she had dressed skimply for the date and had to walk home some way through deep snow without boots or a winter coat. this was late november or early december in northern alberta's snowbelt.
why the news item on the guy who was assaulted by a quartet of women reminded him of the other students story was what happened several weeks later. the same girl and a friend of hers tried to sexually assault him one day as he was on his way to the mall for lunch. the two girls followed, caught up, and as the three took a short cut down a laneway they grabbed and pulled him down in the snow. they began to cackle about giving him a blowjob to teach him a lesson because he hadn't been sympathetic enough when one of them had told him about her date with her brothers friend-coworker.
first he thought it was a joke then some rope came out of a pocket, maybe some duct tape, looked like they had a plan. he thought they can't be serious. the one who told him about the date would sometimes come to school in the morning smelling of booze and her friend had recently moved out of her mother and step fathers house and was living with her bi-sexual hairdresser boyfriend, he thought to himself oh no this isn't going to happen.
and nothing happened, he began to struggle and as their combined weight was not eight hundred pounds he was able to escape from their unwanted groping. during the struggle while he was swinging his arms around as they were trying to get the rope tied around his wrists the one who told him the date story got a fist in her face and said something to her friend about " this isn't going the way you said it would, i told you we should of had at least one more on our side. ", her friend responded with," it worked with the other guy. "
he got up brushed the snow off and went to the mall for lunch while they scurried back in the direction of the school. later that day the one who had gone on the date with her brothers friend-coworker told the person she assaulted some story about how because he was moving away in the new year and she would probably never see him again she had only wanted to give him something to remember her by. " you know, like uh ah a gift, yeah a gift."
Thursday, January 9, 2014
Wednesday, January 8, 2014
architecture--triumphal
"perhaps even more instructive, grammatically, than the theatres were the triumphal arches of rome and other parts of italy ... now look at this arch. what does it consist of? it is a massive rectangular slab of masonry with three holes in it--the centre hole is the main arch, the other two are lower and narrower subsidiary arches.
"an interesting, compact and harmonious arrangement admirably fulfilling its symbolic function. in the fifteenth century this arch and the other roman arches had an enormous imaginative appeal both for painters and for architects ( who, of course, were often painters ) and, as a consequence, we find, over and over again, features and combinations of features which originated in the triumphal arches, being used in totally different sorts of buildings, all sorts of buildings, and used, once again, as grammatical expressions controlling the structure.
"there is much more I could say about triumphal arches and their contribution to the classical language. the most elementary fact of all about them--the division of a space by columns into three parts: narrow, wide, narrow--is perhaps also the most important."
john summerson, the classical language of architecture.
Monday, January 6, 2014
Sunday, January 5, 2014
still life
a collection of animal bones, reptile carapaces and some pickled fish specimens on display at the tommy thompson park.
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