Dreampepper

THAT1GUY
Originally uploaded by anialodz.

That 1 Guy's next ten tour dates:

October 15, 2007 - Columbia, MO - Mojo's
October 16, 2007 - St. Louis, MO - Billiken Club
October 17, 2007 - Iowa City, IA - The Mill
October 18, 2007 - Madison, WI - The Annex
October 20, 2007 - Minneapolis, MN - Cedar Cultural Center
October 21, 2007 - Chicago, IL - The Beat Kitchen
October 22, 2007 - Peoria, IL - Sop's on Main
October 24, 2007 - Hamilton, ON - The Pepper Jack Cafe
October 25, 2007 - Toronto, ON - El Mocambo
October 26, 2007 - Guelph, ON - Club Shadow

Chelsea and Scott are attending the Chicago gig, and Katie will be at the one in Toronto.

UPDATE: Karen will be attending the Madison show, Ben will be at the Vienna, VA, show, and I'm hoping to convince Gunn to drop by in Minneapolis. (Maybe, hypothetically, it could be a chance to hug her long-distance).

Also, I ran out of things to do at work yesterday, so now there's a Flickrpool.

help with what you can

My cats turned one year old Oct. 11th. I missed it, I was on set from 6 a.m. until 10:30, then had to be back at 6 again the next day, so stayed at a friend's house. This month, for the wonder that is TV-land, I have played a high-school student, a college student, an art teacher, a senator's daughter, (wayward, of course, complete with musician boyfriend, hah), and someone waiting in line at the DMV. Next week I'm to mock-attend an upscale banquet at an international embassy, a prom, and an Irish pub.

It's lovely-strange, the background work I've been doing. Like a low level hum, I've been reconnecting with friends, making new ones, and generally being paid to be social. Other things have been neglected, though, and I hope to rectify that soon. Chores littered with hyphens, mostly, (house-work, copy-editing, e-mail...), but there are legitimately important things too. I need to write copy for Foxtongue that I don't immediately delete with a sense of despair. Every time I read a finished newsletter out loud, I feel as if it should be crumpled into fish-wrap, and I promptly scrap it. I'm beginning to think I should have someone else over to write it, someone who could translate my nihilistic ranting on the project into something cohesive and actually useful.

As Vonnegut said so succinctly, "There's only one rule that I know of, babies — God damn it, you've got to be kind."

Me and my mother, Vicki. (photo by lung liu)

I was approximately four years old when my parents became involved with another woman, Sarina. My clearest memories of her involve cigarettes, dark hair, and a lean, shrewish voice. As the story goes, she met my mad father at a bar and found him interesting enough to follow home, pretending that her car had coincidentally broken down in front of our house. Apparently, somehow, this worked. She moved in soon after, bringing with her two little children – Daniel, age three, and Brianna, age two – from her marriage to another man. It was unexpected. Suddenly, not only did I have another mother, I had young siblings, the first children I had ever encountered.

All three of us were incredibly blonde. We were thin kids, the sort with exceedingly clever hands that like to climb bookshelves and get in behind furniture. (Once, in a fit of crackling genius, we gave Brianna a safety-scissors haircut coloured with our favourite smelly markers.). In the few photographs that survive, we look unquestionably related. It wasn’t official, however, until our parent’s decision to have children together - Robin in January then Blake in September.

My mother left soon after, young, worn, and tired, taking Robin and I with her. We moved out, (really it was more of a midnight raid as we ran away, with Daniel helping me out of the bedroom window), and settled into a nice apartment on the Drive above Nick’s spaghetti house. Silva lived across the hall, I began going to school. Life continued. Very rarely did I see that branch of family after we left. Not only did they move every year, Sarina became increasingly difficult, systemically explaining to we-the-children that everything we lived had been delirious make-believe, even to the point of raising Blake with a fictional name. Eventually, they became impossible to find. Vancouver Island swallowed them whole.

All of this was so long ago that I never expected any of them to remember - Blake certainly couldn’t, he was a tiny baby, maybe three years old the last time I saw him, and Daniel and Brianna had likely been quite thoroughly brain-washed by their unappealing mother – but I continued to hope I would find them again. Vancouver Island is vast, but population small, and Blake’s birth certificate, after all, had my father’s name on it. One day, eventually, he would need it, if only to apply for a driver’s license.

It turned out, however, that Blake found out he had a different father when he was seven years old. He and our sister Brianna were having an argument, and she burst out, in perfect cliché, “He’s not even your REAL daddy!” Way to go, girl. (Last time I saw her, she was extolling, very seriously, the various merits of My Little Ponies). From there, the facts began to trickle in. His false name was discarded when his CareCard came, (“My middle name isn’t James?”), and when that foretold moment with the Birth Certificate happened when he was sixteen, his mother threw a fit, refusing to tell him anything or sign anything until he legally changed his name from Holmes. Apparently it was a bit of a drag down war, complete with shouting matches and threats of cutting him from the will. Being a smart kid, however, he simply waited out three years and applied again when he was nineteen. At that, his mother, not relenting, but simply giving up, finally told him of my existence. That was six months ago.

Next time he was in town, he looked me up on-line in the phonebook. And that, my friends, brings us to yesterday. Tah-fiddle-dah. My long lost brother returned, remarkably undamaged and notably sane. I’m proud of him for struggling through our dubious genetic heritage, our intensely unstable parentage, and his obviously isolated upbringing. He could have gone away and come back a deeply unpleasant individual, but he didn’t. Apparently none of them did. I’m told our brother Daniel is currently scuba-diving in Thailand and our sister Brianna is living in Sweden with family. I never would have guessed.

My honest-to-mercy long lost brother Blake just called.

We haven't had any contact since I was, mm, twelve? Thirteen?

I turned my second alarm off, considered going back to sleep another twenty minutes, and the phone rang.

A voice surprisingly like Cale was there, "Is this Jhayne Holmes?"

Yes, it is."

"Is your father named D---?"

Unwilling to admit such a thing to any stranger, I ask, "Ah, why would that be, particularly?"

"My name is Blake, I'm looking for my family."

I've never actually leapt out of bed before.

"Jesus christ! How old are you now?"

"Nineteen."

"Where are you!?"

Turns out he's in town, visiting. I'm going to meet him ASAP at Waterfront Station.

"COILHOUSE is a love letter to alternative culture, written in an era when alternative culture no longer exists. And because it no longer exists, we take from yesterday and tomorrow, from the mainstream and from the underground, to construct our own version. We cover art, fashion, technology, music and film to create an alternative culture that we would like to live in, as opposed to the one that’s being sold or handed down to us. The result, in the form of articles, features and interviews, is laid out on our blog and in our print magazine for all to see. If our Utopia is your Utopia, then welcome! Anyone can contribute, and we encourage you to go to our submission page and get in touch..

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Tony, brilliant sweetheart that he is, was determined to get me a corset before he left for home back in May. In that entirely endearing way that only he ever managed, his first two tries were not-quite-disasters. The first one was an over-priced off-the-rack from one of those little gothy shops in Gastown, and didn't fit even a tiny bit. They couldn't even pretend it could be altered, so with after a bit of genteel kicking and screaming, the shop-girl took it back.

The second one was wicked, a black satin Vollers. Wonderful, delicious, but too tiny, bought in a rush as a store was closing, as we were running out of time, (we only had three days before he was due back in L.A.), not the way to buy anything so unique, permanent or expensive, especially from a store with a No Returns policy.

The third one was the money shot. It fit absolutely fairy-tale perfect. Not only was it 50% on sale, it was everything I'd always wished for, even purple, my hoped for, and black velvet, his.

So here, after it's lived months carefully rolled in a bag on my bookshelf, is the black satin Voller's corset. I've put it up on eBay for $100 less than he paid for it.

As both inamorata have already mentioned it in their journals, I feel it's finally safe to announce some lovely news:

I came up with a new movement yesterday while over at Duncan's, Woodcut exploitation. Line-art tramps in skirts like tiered bandages and hands full of guns. Seventies trash with Edwardian aesthetics. Wondermark meets Grindhouse. Lowbrow graphic poster art as intricately executed as comics from the turn-of-the-century Strand Magazine.

I'm wondering if I'm really the first to think of it. Currently, the hip uchronia is Steampunk, (Jules Verne punk-tech, the appealing, ironic union of Industrial Revolution and Victorian-era engineering re-mixed with post-internet technology), with the occasional dash of Raygun Gothic, (think Metropolis meets Buck Rogers, meals as pills, flying cars), or Space Cowboy, (Farscape, Firefly) - I haven't been seeing much else making the rounds.

Is there already a Woodcut Exploitation movement out there? Have I just been spending time in all the wrong places?

Actually - while I'm at it, I desperately want to know the name of the current design movement that's all wickedly baroque curlique in elaborately juxtoposed layers with vines, text, skulls, and absurd machinery. It's been all over clothing for almost a year and a half and yet I still haven't found anyone able to tell me what it's called.

Here's a good example - The music video Jonas Odell created for The Hours, (download here):