In addition to the Christmas Cookies pictured in yesterday's post, the young cooks prepared more Christmas treats. Seen here with the Gingerbread Houses they made are my daughter, one of my granddaughters, and my great grandson.

posted Tuesday, Dec 17, 2024 at ~11:20 AM #QNDEC2024

En novembre je plie des feuilles de papier je couds des cartons colorés je choisis des modes d'impression je tape sur des imprimantes je parle tout le temps pour combler chaque seconde de quelque chose car je sais que bientôt je vais avoir mal et je suis une

chochotte j’adore saint sébastien j’adore jeanne d’arc j’adore la passion la joue tendue et tous les martyrs mais pour moi non vraiment, dès que j’ai de la fièvre je chiale si je me cogne je jure je sais que c’est pas très original je le partage avec plein de gens

un soir, dans une librairie, une dessinatrice queer en vogue a dit, en passant nonchalamment sa main dans les cheveux : si les hommes de suicident plus c'est parce qu'ils encaissent moins la douleur en fait on peut dire que ce sont vraiment des chochottes

les gens ont rigolé

je sais pas ce que voulait dire ce rire si c’était du mimétisme, une ambiance nous-sommes-les-filles-des-sorcières-que-vous-n’avez-pas-réussi-à-brûler ou juste parce qu’il est marrant ce mot

chochotte

je le répète à tout le monde médecin-copain-infimière-amies-radiologue-chauffeur je dis bonjour je suis une chochotte on me dit ‘mais non’ je dis

j’y tiens

j’y tiens car je sais que la douleur isole et que tenir en silence ça isole encore

alors je dis chochotte et ça fait marrer et mes amies passent à la maison et m’envoient des memes de souris-garou et des photos de leurs chat et m’accompagnent pour des balades de pépés

et je rentre progressivement à la maison de mon corps qui a mal mais qui va bien

mon corps de chochotte.

I'm again very exhausted but I feel better today. I got a lot of cute stuff and I found myself constantly buying small little presents for A, and thinking about her. As sweet as that is I think it's a little bit interesting how little I bought thinking for myself but I guess it's because whenever I see this really cute stuff it reminds me of them. I don't know if that's a bad thing that I don't get this for myself also.

That make me feel great

We all have them, those useless things. We see them and we cannot help ourselves. So we buy the thing or we pick the thing up and we love it and it becomes part of the detritus of our lives. Rocks, toys, junk, cars, you name it… we all find things that are irresistible.

A few years ago I found myself in an antique shop in North Carolina. Not one of those hoity-toity places with crystal and display cases with internal lighting, it was one of those two story jobs with wood floors that dated back past two turns-of-the-century with dust older than my great grandmother. And it was glorious. Chock-full of old farming implements, defunct radios, piles of photos from families that just didn’t love them anymore. So much human ingenuity and energy collected into one space and everything was for sale.

Some things are easy to pass by: the 14’ long hutch full of china, where would it go? or the slate-top pool table for $1,971 that squeaked a little if you leaned on it, a handmade wood kayak too brittle for water. But most of those treasures just cry out ‘take me with you’ like puppies at the pound. But what would we do if we indulged every whim? A lot of these treasures came into their original owners lives just because of that. And so reason overcomes emotion and a discriminating shopper takes note, or a photo, or maybe a drawing, and just walks on by.

But some items you know the instant you see them that they will be coming home with you. Like the plastic toy robot from 1981, the Life magazine from 1956 with Julie Andrews immortalized on the cover, or the pile of nautical maps.

I have LONG been a sucker for maps of all kinds. But nautical maps in particular are like a bright bulb and I, a moth. Never a sailing man, nor even very aquatic, you would think those huge broadsheets with lines and depth notations in fathoms and contours showing the slope and falloff underneath that briny surface would go unnoticed. But those very mysterious nautical scratchings are like catnip. Like Sanskrit carved into a cave wall, they hold untold mysteries if only I could decipher them. Then too, there is the siren’s call of the sea that these paper masterpieces so tangibly represent.

What man doesn’t dream of mastering the sea at the helm of his 40’ yacht with nothing but the power of the wind and God pushing him forward via mainsail while his keel keeps the vessel stable and upright? Jibe to tack and back with his face to the wind!

My God, what a beautiful sight it would be.

So, home they came. The maps did inspire a few art projects, but mostly they just lie fallow in the flat files, serving their REAL purpose:

To put a smile on my face every time I see them.

So it was today when I slid that file drawer open and saw this beautiful sight.

So let’s hear it for useless things. Some, it’s true, have no actual use… but others have a utility that may not at first be apparent. Treasure is in the eye of the beholder after all.

---

nature at her worst, made by man #story #travel

wrinkled pages

▽

I've had a foot in and out of the cultural scene in many cities around the world, and still no place compares to Cairo in that regard. The energy, enthusiasm, and genuine interest is simply unmatched.

Above photo from a series of talks related to Egyptian and Lebanese film history at Cimatheque in downtown Cairo a few days ago.

#journal

I sit beneath the shadiest tree in Peckham Rye Park

Oak canopy reaching twenty metres in diameter

Full leaf boughs ornamented with noisy parakeets

I'm dressed all in black despite the sun

Across the lawn three generations of friends and family chatter in contact fusion, barbecuing beef and catfish in sticky brown glazes

Everyone marinating together in the fragrant smoke

I watch as X____ stretches her arms around the two-hundred-year-thick trunk, enveloping as much of the knotted stem as she can

Blackberry lips reflected in the fridge-freezer section. Our something at first sight superimposed over a packet of tofu. A dozen oranges tumbling down the market aisle. A tributary of citrus orbs confluxing with a delicate phalanx of phalanges. The performance of her femur and pelvis in orchestration with these appendages. Bending and scooping. Flexing. Extending. Rotating. The fruits passed in sleight from hand to hand.

Heat ripples from the dewy skirts around the burst of ornamental beds

Azalea, magnolia, rhododendron

***

I sit in the recovery lounge and, if you've seen one, you've seen them all

The same clinical sterility with an underfunded NHS grubbiness collecting in the cracks and crevices

The click slurp of antibacterial gel dispensers

The paper half-cup of cooling vending machine coffee

X____ sitting next to me with the woozy indifference of general anaesthetic wearing off

Waiting for a taxi because nobody in the city owns a car and certainly not us

To pass the time X____ tells me everything her doctor told her about idiopathic disease

Which is, “any disease with an unknown cause or mechanism of apparent spontaneous origin”

click

I peer down into that still black coffee pool

slurp

***

I read about how oak trees hollow themselves out as they grow, to conserve energy and stabilise their massive weight

How populations of oak stag beetle are declining globally due to the loss and fragmentation of their habitat

“Even in cases where oak woodlands remain they are often broken up into smaller, isolated fragments. This fragmentation makes it hard for beetle populations to connect and breed, reducing genetic diversity and species resilience”.

I lay back on the grass and indulge my pareidolia in the clouds, daydreaming about leaving the city

Clouds as forests, as lakes, as mountains

***

Down to underwear we give the bedroom a chance, suffering the viscous humidity of an attic conversion in a Victorian housing stock

Draughty rooms somehow mouldering year around

After half an hour we're voiding an over-cautious contract and making our escape through a hallway window, climbing onto the flat extension of X____'s partitioned townhouse

We take turns flicking lit matches off the roof and counting the seconds before they blink out, picturing a rural night sky dark enough to watch trailing rock and dust ignite in the atmosphere

Kids shoot a grime video in the stairwell of a newbuild up the street, our neighbour sits in the gutter playing guitar

He croaks folk songs in familiar Brazilian Portuguese and we decide he misses some part of something he used to call home

While writing this I have the not-entirely-unpleasant sense memory of melted tarmac fumes

Me and X____ talk until late but I can't remember a single thing we talk about, and looking back I can only imagine the things we might have talked about, because I've realised the whole point of memory is the forgetting

In a photograph I find on a usb stick our faces are obscured by digital artefacts, conjured by a phone camera struggling in low-light

I remember that, “technology has made us all ghosts”

The night curls up around us like a ribbon, the roof floating on updrafts, on steam

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Do you ever send money to friends and family?

If so, you need to know about Zelle, my current favorite option.

What's wrong with PayPal and Venmo? I'm glad you asked!

In Episode 43, I share my concerns about these other services, why I prefer Zelle, and how to get started.

Today the moon was big and shone with gold tinted silver and it was a full moon. I saw it with my own eyes.

It was s big.

I’m having the best life and yet there’s something which isn’t quite right inside. Like a small stone in the shoe. Like I’ve been running my own company for years but now instead I’m employed like a regular person.

I used to be my own boss, answering only to God and the tax agency, but now I’ve got managers everywhere. Everywhere I turn there’s a manager wondering why I didn’t attend that monthly meeting, why do I never go? Or another reminding me to fill in the time sheet. Yet another asking me to fill in this other time sheet. It seems I’m in a room full of people, and they are all my managers.

Don’t know if I’ve ever been this managed before. That’s what’s been nagging me at the back of my head lately.

It’s still a bit of shit, the economy. There are many unemployed individuals. My friends. Some of them have huge mortgages and shit. It’s a bleakness of the world.

If WWIII doesn’t start next year, and the economy takes a turn for the better, then I shall once more venture into this world like my own boss.

This is an ongoing list – includes older movies I watched for the first time in the kinos. Making this is still in progress and will keep adding any other movies that I missed this year in this list over time.

• Longlegs: A measure for a good horror movie is for how long your butt stays planted in the seat after the curtains come down and Longlegs ensure that time is longer than the end credits sequence. The first words that came out of my mouth were, “wtf did I watch?”. And indeed, wtf did I watch? The horror is the kind that breathes on your neck in the shadows and makes you look at the corners of the screen and away, the tension simmering and managing to persist even after the screen fades to black. Nick Cage delivers a performance of the lifetime, a literal crawling under the skin of the character. One of 2024's favorite watches, going to see this again to deconstruct it's making because it wasn't apparent at all in the first viewing.
• Love Lies Bleeding: Rose Glass takes her inspirations seriously and crafts a taut romantic thriller of two lesbians played by dependable Kirsten Stewart and the absolute force of nature that is Katy O’Brian in this movie. Doesn’t waste any time in setting up the characters and gets the story on fire till the last frame. A thriller to revisit again the coming years.
• The Substance: Demi Moore is Margaret Qualley and Margaret Qualley is Demi Moore in this extreme body horror thriller from Coralie Fargeat. With a pulsating soundtrack and eye searing effects, chicken legs aren’t the same after this movie. Saw it slinking sideways and with one eye open in the kinos, not for the weak hearted but if you aren’t, the reward is fantastic.
• La Chimera
• La Cochina
• The Holdovers: The early January release seemed a bit off considering the movie is a perfect Christmas movie, part happy and part Paul Giamatti tearing you up, this movie is going to be my Christmas trump card for 2024, has a lot of rewatch value. Can Paul Giamatti stop being the Patron Saint of Adorable Losers? It’s getting a bit too much.
• Zone of Interest
• Poor Things
• Challengers: For two months in the summer, the OST by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross was on repeat all day, everyday. Watched the movie itself four times and the story gets even richer with every subsequent movie. A near flawless tennis threesome, this is the movie I think I’ll remember well into the future when I think of 2024.
• Ghost in the Shell (1995)
• Kismet, Kismet (1987)
• Anora: Sean Baker refines his form further and presents a chaotic comedy with almost surgical skill. I find writing about Anora hard (and have another longer essay on the way) because the movie had me absorbed for its entire duration and made me want to watch it again and again. My top choice for 2024 with Challengers coming a close second.
• All We Imagine As Light (AWIAL): During my first viewing the film flowed over me, with its complexity of structure and character a dizzying experience. Payal Kapadia is a poet with a camera and extracts so much from her characters and the movie’s lead, the City of Bombay. A treat for the eye, the soul and the ear, the praise for AWIAL is well deserved. Needs another rewatch to deconstruct the full meaning of the movie and for me to form an opinion.
• The Outrun

#movies #bestof

I got a bit older over the weekend. The past few years I had been feeling the age creep up. Professionally, I am comfortable where I was but personally there were issues. People were coming and going in my life more and more. There was this fear of growing old – alone.

This year, the feeling wasn’t as strong. It is because I found someone who may stick around a bit longer. It is someone with whom I feel I can build something. I have been hesitent at the beginning but he has won over my trust and feel I can build a future together more and more. It’s a good feeling.

There are other worries. The older I get, the older my mother, my grandmother and the other important people in my life get as well. They say old age is not for the weak. The more I grow the more I am under,standing this idea. It is getting harder it feels but it’s also rewarding.

I am lucky to have someone to share the challenges and joys.

My thoughts have been on something that happened the other night. I was practicing isometric drawing on the iPad, and for some reason I just couldn't get a shape to look like what I was seeing in the YouTube video I was following along with. Even despite undoing and attempting it several times, I couldn't wrap my mind around it. I thought I was using the same grid measurements but things looked vastly different (to me).

I sometimes have this perfectionist trait to me where if I can't get something exactly the way I imagine it, I get pissed off and just don't want to do it anymore. I've seen it with games like Cities: Skylines where if I don't get the roads precisely how I want early in the game, I stop playing the game. And now again last night with the drawing.

I think to a large degree that it's prevented me from even attempting many new things in life because of this pre-emptive self-told narrative of how I'll fail, how I'll get really pissed off, and why even bother doing it in the first place?

I don't want to find yet another thing I suck at. I finally want to be good at something, you know?

I need to be better about reminding myself when this happens, that it's okay to not be an expert on the first, second or even third attempt at something. It's okay to fail, and learn from the experience. Nobody is expecting instant greatness. Well, nobody except myself.

I recently watched Life off the grid—a film about disconnecting on the public library streaming service Kanopy. It tells the stories of people across Canada, from BC to PEI, who for various reasons and in very diverse ways opted to live off the electricity grid. That meant of course solar panels and small wind turbines, and storage devices, but also adapting all energy consumption to the low-power and small-scale generation of electricity. Necessarily it meant that electricity is no longer something that magically comes out of a couple of little holes in the wall and all you need to know is how to plug something into them and how to flick a switch.

This in turn caused significant changes in lifestyle. But that's the whole point. You move some place remote, you build a house with very little capital, you generate your own electricity, you grow your own food or most of it, you pickle and can and make jam, and you find yourself working for yourself instead of working for someone else to make money to buy all those things.

One common characteristic of all these people was their willingness to learn whatever was needed to make their systems work. It's not that they knew a lot about electricity generation or battery storage or water pumps before they started. It's more that they were generally curious and willing to try out new things. They learned as they went along, and their systems grew organically as needed.

Now the reason I'm telling you this is that there is something in me that always likes to generalize new ideas and push them further, and in this case it occurred to me that the electricity grid is not the only one we are hooked up to and that we might consider going off.

My previous post about smart tvs is an example of this. I put it to you that the vast majority of us are plugged into a consumer technology grid, and all we need to know is what aisle in the store the thing is that we're looking for, and how to tap a credit card on a screen.

The problem is that increasingly the thing costs way too much, it spies on you and it feeds you advertising and propaganda to entice you to buy even more stuff. See also smart phones, smart cars, “artificial intelligence”, and anything with the word Google in it.

Let's continue with the example of TVs. Television takes off shortly after the end of World War 2, when all the electronic technology was ready. The business model for commercial television was simple: advertising. The primary purpose of television programming was not to provide entertainment or information; it was to hook the viewer and capture their attention long enough in order to feed them advertising. The world's first TV ad appeared in 1941, just before a baseball game, and it was just ten seconds long. You like baseball? That's great; here's a game, which in return will greatly increase the probability that you will go out and buy a Bulova watch.

(By the way, if you want to avoid all the surveillance and the ads that come with watching something on Youtube, here's a great desktop app with which to watch that ad.)

This has been the business model for television from day one. Now for this to work, the technology has be cheap enough, but no cheaper, for a large number of people to afford it, and the technology must satisfy two requirements:

• It must be so simple that absolutely anyone can use it without any training; and

• it must be incomprehensible, so that you have to buy it in order to use it. It must be, in engineering jargon, a black box. Like the electrical supply.

Returning to the question of whether we can disconnect from the (corporate) grid: yes, we can, if we are able to overcome those two requirements for successful, i.e. profitable, consumer technology. Just like the off-grid folks learning to set up solar panels, we have to be open to learning new things. The good news is that you don't have to go and live in the Yukon to do it, it's not incomprehensible, there is actually a lot of information out there, and a large and friendly community. Also, it's not all-or-nothing: every time you liberate yourself a bit from the corporate grid counts. Rest assured I will be writing a lot more about this in the future.

Thoughts? Do drop me a line at leastaction.rescuer598@passmail.net.

#ConsumerTechnology #OffTheCorporateGrid

#fotoensayos #fotos2017 #fotos2015 #calles