Dream Machine

In case you find yourself dissatisfied with your lighting arrangements: Brion Gysin had a nifty idea that should have made him rich. Iggy Pop swears by it.

Consult http://ubu.com/papers/Gysin-Brion_DreamMachine-Plans.pdf

Had the most ferocious dream last night about trying to buy a can of soda and a barbecue inside the equiv of the Titanic tearooms.

Some kind of antique wooden housing, like they housed fishermen in, that had fallen into ruin. You walked or rolled on some kind of trampoline material and it ended at a staircase where the sea began. Exactly the way that staircase ends in the Woodwards building. Beyond the trampoline fabric were the sinking and sunk houses/housing could be seen through the glass. The demarcation between inside and outside was vague.

The culprit clearly is the vending machine and the multitude of steps climbed and descended and the long hours spent reading on the 1930’s/ relief camps. What a combo. Pop meets the bunkhouse!

The other notable detail was the fact I could not hear anything in the dream.

Someone emailed me a message subject FYI this morn about some psycho analytic gathering Existential Pioneers in London. Wonderful. Telepathy. Bit of a commute tho’.

At 1.09am I made the first of several journeys to open the window and investigate the weather event. A rolling rain joined later by some rousing winds. The evidence they were rousing? They roused me to three further investigations. Scooby Doo has nothing on me.  The great thing about said weather event was it put paid to the ear drum blasting that had been going on for the previous seven hours.

Today however the hungover Halloween bangers continued. Who, at 12.19pm, on an average Monday has time and inclination to throw bangers (fire crackers) for more than an hour? Yesterday it felt the birds were dropping them. They land near your ankle, BANG, you take a stroke, and there’s no set of arms anywhere to indicate who threw them.

On the subject of .. yes they’re back again The Penguins. I discovered I’d missed a whole page in the NYRB article on The Great Penguin Rescue. I realized I’d missed it because I was discussing it at dinner with someone who’d also read it and raising the question of penguin nips and whether the volunteers had been nipped.  Yes he assured me they were nipped. I’d missed a whole page of the article! And boy were they nipped.  The piece also said the African penguin population has declined 95 percent.

Frances Boldereff is good company for insomnia. I turned to her correspondance after the Penguins and during the continued weathering. What a generous woman she was. Did she have an extra kidney full of generousity beans? How did she sustain this enthusiasm for the distant and negligibly interesting, in these snippets, O. I was trying to imagine a male doing likewise for a woman writer — one or two came to mind, and then I abruptly hit a blank. A highway of a blank.

***

The Razz!

Grandma Suzu rocks on the costume front again. Year 11! Ably assisted by Jer.

I was turning back flips during this production. My penance was guiding the Vending Machine or the Razz as I call him up and down the plethora of stairs Vancouver houses insist upon.

Plus two

Two more titles came my way this morning, care of a generous email correspondent and one who knows about such things:

Andrew Roddan wrote a book originally called God in the Jungles published in the 1930’s, recently republished as Vancouver’s Hobos (intro by Todd McCallum (Historian) who also I suspect had something to do with it being republished).

The man behind the box is Andrew Roddan in this photo (click to enlarge) from library and archives Canada

And Michael Denning’s The Cultural Front, another fascinating sounding book that I shall be tunnelling through when I obtain a copy.