sirens

a favourite of mine…

A mermaid found a swimming lad,
Picked him for her own,
Pressed her body to his body,
Laughed; and plunging down
Forgot in cruel happiness
That even lovers drown.

- w.b.y.

existence, action, or occurrence

today we called the police because our landlord seriously over stepped and threatened us, not with words, but through body language. well, he screamed a fuck of a bunch too as he tried to force his way into natalie’s bedroom. the police agreed that he was out of line and had none of the rights he was claiming to have. they have forbidden him from coming into the house until we leave. if he steps one foot in here he will be arrested for trespassing. our landlord has convinced himself that he has both the rights of the landlord and the tenant, and it appears that even law enforcement telling him, that he is in the wrong and not us, can’t shift his position on this matter. the toronto police officers who came to the house were very helpful, patient, and informed. it was refreshing to see this side of the police after the g-20. but, as luke said– the police are always great when they’re on your side.

hopefully we will never need to deal with him again and he can stop assholing us.

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toronto living

Things I have learned living in Toronto

1. Do not live on top of your landlord.

2. Do not live below your landlord.

3. It’s nice if your landlord doesn’t live in another country, you might get things fixed once and a while.

4. If you engage in 1 or 2 check the sanity of your landlord. A landlord with compulsive disorders or schizophrenia may direct their disorders towards you.

• I once had a landlord convince herself that my roommates and I had stolen her electric smoke detectors and replaced them with battery powered ones.  She nearly evicted us, but realized, thanks to her husband, that they had installed electric smoke alarms in one of their other apartments, but not in ours
• Denise was whole other kettle of fish. She even threatened to kill us in our sleep and forged documents to evict us illegally.
  Enforce your rights to personal space!

5. While renting an apartment it is your space! Landlords, that are not commercial landlords, view their properties subjectively, and will often, perhaps not purposefully, encroach on your personal space—letting themselves in without proper notice, overstaying their welcome, etc. Now, it is easier said than done.

• I currently have my landlord and his wife spending almost eight hours a day hanging out in my apartment. We have subletted a furnished apartment and with 8 days left on the lease they are already moving out the furniture in preparation for future tenants.

6. Keep it professional. You are not friends with your landlord. Sure, be courteous, but you don’t want to be involved in their melodrama.

• My landlord’s wife once showed up pregnant and claiming that her husband abused her, she asked us to hide both her and his documents. She assumed that since we were renting their personal house she was still entitled to live in it. They are now back together; they are the ones currently abusing our cordial nature.

7. When things get broke’d don’t wait till they accumulate, tell your landlord right away.

• Household wear and tear is their responsibility to fix. If you wait for the broken things to amass until the end of the lease they may try to extract money from you by refusing to return your damage deposit (which are illegal), or by suing you.
• Denise tried to sue us for 10, 000 dollars worth of water damage as we moved out. Luckily we had documented the flaws of the apartment when her craziness started to poke on through.  Perhaps if she had caulking around the walls of the bathroom and a proper waterproof floor there would be no water damage. We should have demanded a properly waterproofed washroom when we moved in. Lesson learned.

8. Paper trails! Don’t just e-mail your landlord, print things out and send them to them via snail mail, and keep a carbon copy.

• This can come in handy in a situation like 7 (with Denise & the water damage allegation). It may seem excessive, but if you start to smell something fishy it’s a good idea.

9. I’ve never lived in a commercial building, but it seems nice to have a law abiding, object repairing, faceless someone, who takes rent and respects your tenant rights.

10. A household requires a cleaning schedule.  Entropy is abound!

11. Be forward about what you expect from your roommates, don’t get passive aggressive. This might not work all the time, especially if you live with someone who is disrespectful. Typically, however, asserting that you are discontent and providing a solution is better than beating around the bush.

• A roommate once took the undone dishes of our third roommate and placed them around the apartment on the floor and in her room. This did not result in getting the dishes done, but in sowing the seeds of dissent.
• Living with someone more slovenly than you are can drastically improve your own propensity for cleanliness.

12. Everyone has different standards of clean. Some like things scrubbed to the pith, others are content with the appearance of orderliness, and some just don’t give a fuck. For your own happiness, try to live with people who mash up well with yours. You’d be surprised how much this affects your happiness level and your relationships with your roommates.

13. Not everyone will follow the cleaning schedule; someone is always likely to have to carry the slack.

14. Garbage—it’s gotta get out! A lot of the time we miss the garbage truck, either no one’s home, or it’s just forgotten. If you’re a keener, maybe putting a post-it on the door is a good method. “Garbage tomorrow at 9pm, please remember!”. Or something to that effect. We’ve never done that, but maybe I’ll give it a go in my next household.

15. Personal space—when you live with friends it can be hard to find time to think outside of your closed bedroom. And even then things like loud conversations and music can find their way to encroaching upon your space. That’s just living with roommates, find new places to read, paint, or think—try the library, park, or a café—or maybe it’s time to consider a one bedroom.

16. Sharing—we do all our shopping communally and often have family style meals together. I’m not sure how regular households work. I usually go by a if you use something that belongs to someone else replace it policy.

I guess that’s living with people though— you learn how to navigate around pushing each other’s buttons. Or you don’t and someone moves out.

still life

PHOTO OF THE DAY: 1979-1997, 6,697 Polaroids, dated in sequence

jamie livingston’s life in stills.

VISA is an adjective

V is for vexing
I is for irritating
S is for shit out of luck
A is for aggravating

getting my visa for the uk has been super trying so far. primarily due to the fact that the british embassy in canada has out-sourced their visa office to a for-profit company. i feel like a kafka character. i have a new empathy for joseph k,. every time i think i’ve figured it out i find another bit of information that voids what i previously thought was fact. the phone numbers lead to a variety of automated messages that refuse to allow me to speak to a human. i am now a top secret 11 digit number. i have an appointment to see a human this friday, but they fail to mention what i should bring. should i want to inquire about process i can call a 1-900 dollar and pay 4$ a minute to get some meager morsels of information! luckily i have a few people to commiserate with. a friend of mine, EG, is vying for the tier 5 visa– she actually called the flat rate number, where you pay 14 dollars via credit card and then you are supposedly able to speak to someone for an unlimited amount of time until you feel confident enough to slash through the barricade of red tape. But they kept hanging up on EG without ever putting her through to a real person. every time she called back, with her code, they would re-charge her credit card the 14 dollars. i didn’t even bother to try the 1-900 number, out of stubbornness mostly, but according to EG the 1-900 number didn’t even work. finally, she had to walk to the visa office and speak to the manager. they almost didn’t let her see the manager though, because she didn’t have an appointment.

and a pinch

i love to cook. since i was a child i had a natural knack for combining flavours in same manner that some children have a knack for numbers or colours. and a pinch is where i’ll be posting both my own recipes, reviews of other recipes, and restaurant reviews.

simple simon

vivisection

CDmGC

E                                        Em
Mothers will take  organs when
A                                C                        E
cumbersome, and lay them out in
C          A
the sun to dry.

C                     Dm   G                                        C
Modern mothers plant their petunias in neat
A                     G                                          C           Am
rows,  they cover rather than covet the earth.
G                   Am
Cover  the Earth   (X2)

Am                                            Em
Mothers will take these organs when
A                                C                        E
cumbersome, and lay them out in
C          A
the sun to dry.

C                                   A       Dm
Stretched thin like gum, you can see their
G                             C
organs, complete with diagrams:
C                             A                            Dm            G
there’s the pancrease, and the gallbladder,
C                       A            Dm        G
and the shy impotent appendix.

Am                                              Em
Mothers will take these organs when
A                                C                        E
cumbersome, and lay them out in
C          A
the sun to dry.

D        A         Dm   Am  C            G  D    G
Sometimes feral cats snatch intestines.
D         A        Dm     Am  C         G        D   D7
Sometimes  homeless wear livers as hats.

E                                              Em
Mothers will take these organs when
A                                C                        E
cumbersome, and lay them out in
C          A
the sun to dry.

C                                   A       Dm
Stretched thin like gum, you can see their
G                             C
organs, complete with diagrams:    Em A   Em A
C                             A                            Dm            G
there’s the pancrease, and the gallbladder,
C                       A            Dm        G
and the shy impotent appendix.

C                     Dm   G                                        C
Modern mothers plant their petunias in neat
A                     G                                          C           Am
rows,  they cover rather than covet the earth.
G                   Am
Cover  the Earth   (X2)

angsumnes

the air hangs heavily in toronto. movement is labored. the seams are wearing thin and i don’t think i keep darning these holes. perhaps it’s time to repurpose the fabric? hold it up to a light and cast some constellations onto a wall. i am confused, and i am tired , and i am frustrated. the bike ride will have to wait. the urge i had to sing seems to of petered out.

eliot once said that “anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity,” i pray he was onto something. i was beginning to feel inspired as the summer culminated, but now– maybe it’s the oppressive heat, everything feels strained.

post script. it’s midnight. i cleaned the mess amassed by my roommates. it was cathartic. and i did sing. not flying down the spit on my bike and belting– but softly with a train passing in the background. i sang ‘dark horse’ by julie doiron. the lyrics are as follows:

here goes the dark horse leaving the stage with my baby. and there goes the dark horse leaving this place without me. now i’m writing you from montreal to tell you that i don’t belong here. i’m writing you from montreal. bye bye.
well you’re a pretty nice kid and i wanna know what made you think you could make it in a place like this, a place like this. you’re feeding your kids among all these pirates. you’re feeding your kids the best that you can with what you’ve got. and now i’m writing you with all my heart to tell you that i don’t belong here. i’m writing you from all my heart. bye bye. bye bye.
so there goes the dark horse leaving my life forever. and there goes the dark horse leaving this life forever. and now i’m writing you with all my heart to tell you that i’m coming home. and i’m writing you from all my heart. bye bye. bye bye. bye bye.

secret bearing stars & gossiping waves

Every place has a cadence. Every phase of life a rhythm. Every step a beat. Every exhale a caesura. Right now, right this very moment, I am sitting on top of a section of rock that looks out , on one side, into the bay of the island of Sipan. Above me is an expanse of stars so clear that I can make out the Milky Way in its voluptuous glory. How animate the sky is! In front of me is the open sea, with a few boats blinking life in the distance. The sea licks the shore, the sky exhales—I have been suppressing my desire to sing out all night. To sing fearlessly as though no one were watching or listening or cared, but it is a small island and sound carries, especially with this wind; a wind that picked up as the sun set, a wind that swept the sun behind the silhouetted mountains and then continued to sing in the dark anonymity of night.

At this moment I am inclined to believe that the majority of a childhood takes place in summer. Maybe it is the heat that cauterizes those memories into a psyche, but I have always associated this island with childhood and as a place of tranquility. Mind you, I have never been able to look at this place with any hint of objectivity. Childhood is anything but serene and quiet: it is scraped knees, and social pecking orders that are constantly being constructed and reconstructed. It is talking too loud, and full fat tears that run down your face till you fall asleep from the exhaustion of the exertion. It’s cat scratches and bee stings. And so much new knowledge! This small island nestled along the coast of Ragusa is anything but tranquil. Just listen to that wind wail! Those crickets sing, that old clunker Posteria rasp along as she pulls her bulk into the bay to sleep.

I have always seen my upbringing as being polarized between the extremes of urban and rural. I have spent the last five years of my life in a city of five million souls, that is where I have laid down roots, perhaps for the first time. I consider my Toronto friends kin to family. We have lived together, we have breathed together, cried together, sang together, grieved together, grown together. And while this scene, here on Sipan, is Beautiful in a Kantian sense, I find myself missing the Sublime of the city. I am missing everything from the dissonance of urban noises clashing and playing against each other—  the hushed tones of a private conversation carried in public place, the cars with their start and stop stop and start, the grey city birds that coo like infants, and on and on. O, how I miss how the sounds that play on city streets.

I must keep this promise to myself, it is a desire that should not be sublimated. When I get home, yes, Toronto is home, I will take a night bike ride along the Leslie Spit and I will sing. Poorly and loudly, but I will sing.

Goodbyes have never been hard for me until this year. To say good-bye to Toronto in September will be, will be, will be… I like the French word for good bye “au revoir,” loosely translated: to the re-seeing. There is so much finality in life– I don’t think I want to indulge it right now.