and in addition

you have to ask yourself, "will this emu egg fit into this cigar box?"***





***It will!

the girl with the packing tape and the Sharpie

One day you go through your possessions and you realize that you are a person that owns both a power sander and a unicorn hobby-horse.
You actually have to label a box : "tools and hardware" and a box: "dolls, skulls, and magical doodads". You wonder what kind of person this makes you. You then realize that this is what people mean when they tell you (and have been telling you your whole life), "Oh Kai, you're so artistic!"
duh.

Antarctica returns

small donkeys
Originally uploaded by noxious nick.

Mykle is back in the Deep South, and posting pictures to his Flickr:
Mykle's Adventures in COLD
Go look at them, comment, and make him feel loved. Or shun him, either ways cool ;)

Novacaine rots the brain

The Master of a good soundbite and my enduring literary crush
I was reading the Anthony Bourdain article on being stuck in Beruit during the start of the bombing, and was going to link it, but despite the subject matter being not as crucial and intense, this intervew is better.



On Sunday nights the bookstore is usually quiet. I don't read at work, as I get too deaf towards the outside world, so I usually post to my blog, check art sites online, and read the paper. People usually assume that booksellers read books at work. Not me who regularly misses MUNI stops from reading on the train.
Half of my face is numb and slack from getting 3 cavities filled right before I got here. I thought my lopsided smile might be sexy and ironic put I just look paralytic and chipmunkified. I'm spooning Yoplait into my mouth in order to have some semblance of dinner before I start fasting towards my doctors appt. tomorrow. You can't eat anything but water starting 10 hours before you show. "What is this?" you ask. "Kai Smart is taking CARE of herself even in the face of no health care plan whatsoever?"
Yes it's true. I have been inspired to fix my teeth before they all fall out and only one avenue of employment is left open to me*. I get two more cavities filled on Thursday. Tomorrow is a visit to the doctor. I can't remember the last time I went. I never get sick (I probably shouldn't talk about it, in case God wants to strike me down for my presumptive attitude...) and only visit Doc in the Box for internal bruising and the gyno for an occasional uplifting pap smear (God, what a term that is! Can they get any more disgusting?) I think I'm getting a TB test, which is exciting, because all of my favorite artists perished of it. Also because of my almost-favoritest Van Morrison song TB Sheets, which he starts with the epic opening lines of, "Now Julie-baby it ain't natural for you to cry in the midnight." Talk about a non-sequitur. Wait...is that the right word? I mean the word for starting to talk to a person as if you were in the middle of a conversation already?
I need to know that word, as it is a tactic I use often, making me the pro at talking to strangers at bars and parties. I just start in the middle of a thought and pretend I have known the person for years. Another part of the trick is being next to the person and not looking at them as you start to speak. Then you look at them as if you expect an answer but aren't too worried about it. I promise this will not make you seem crazy, but the effect is ruined if you start the thought in the middle of a sentence. Haha.
Example:
Kai sits down next to random person at the bar. Slams shot glass on the bar. Says (without looking), "Do you think they INTEND to make you go blind, or is that just an innocent side-effect? Jesus."

Works every time (and not just at making me look like a blind lush. Haha)

Scarily enough, my manager at work (Carl) was obsessed for a while with this book by Neil Strauss (ghostwriter to the stars including Jenna Jameson and Marilyn Manson) called "The Game" which is where he infiltrated the sociaty of pickup artists who use nuero-linguistic programming and other top-secret-unless-you-give-them-money-over-the-internet techniques to pick up girls, and wrote about his experiences. This book is a guilty pleasure, but made me (after reading passages at work) second-guess my interactions for everyone that came up to the front counter for about 2 straight days. I was hyper aware of my body language, ways I talked, and how I tried to make the other person comfortable, convey my authority, or whatever. I was also aware of how many of the innocent ice-breaking techniques I used to meet people and make small talk were also used to "wrap any woman around your finger in less than 30 seconds" and "sleep with whatever girl you wanted no matter how shrewish and bland you look". Horrors, you know? Including the technique I detailed in the above paragraph. I told Carl all of this, and some other ways I have of meeting people, and he helpfully said, "Kai, you could have written that book!" Great.

I went to a party with Jessica (my tattoo teacher) on Friday and realized (in comparison to her friendliness- yet natural reticence) again how I seem probably like a party-girl floozy sometimes. This happens when I am in a social situation that makes a lot of people nervous and shy and I barge right in and start dancing on the bar and making out with the host of the party. Kegstands!!! Just kidding. I am serious though, that I get embarrassed now at being rather outgoing. Embarrassed because of everyone else is sticking with their friends or cowering in a corner like normal folk and I have trained myself not to do that, so be the one who offers her throat up to the axe of public opinion. Thank goodness I usually go to parties with swell kids, so I don't usually get cut down.

I was formerly outrageously shy. Ask my parents. It was debilitating to my childhood. Around 14 years old I began a program with myself to rid myself of shyness, and after a while I did it. It was a conscious, concentrated effort. Weird, eh? I have to say though, the bulk of this was done in one day, one Tuesday, when I was 14 and just starting higschool (I didn't go freshman year)- just discovering my wildness and with a host of new people (probably the wrong people according to most) to become friends with. I simply realized in one afternoon that just as I wasn't better than anyone, no one was better than me as well. We are all on equal playing field, so you might as well just be friendly and kind to everyone, and expect the same in return.

Small talk at parties though, is a bit more of a learned art. You're all there, you all want to have fun, but there ain't nothing happening. You don't know each other. You have nothing to connect to other than you all know the people whose porch you are on (maybe). You have to make connections and MAKE something happen or else it's all very uncomfortable. It may as well be me to break that ice and jump into the cold water. It will knock the breath out of me, but perhaps it wll be fun.

I rambled long enough so now that I have feeling in my face. Wow. Enough to know that I have blood in my mouth. Yum.




*That was lewd, and I apologize, but I think it was vague enough to not offend.

two ends of time are neatly tied

I did this acrylic (!) painting when I was a whopping 20 years old! Look how amazing I used to be!


I take pleasure in clean sheets, and fabric patterns, and the encrusted wooden spirals of the Victorian houses.
I take pleasure in the open cheerfulness of Michelle's face, in children and how their eyes snap with curiosity, in the last days in the apartment.
I take pleasure in luxuriously taking naps and doing a focused nothing after 7 straight hours of alphabetization.

I look at each thing as if it has it's own mystique, lose myself in movies and books and delicious vampire TV shows.
I busy myself with trips and transportation and the connection and reconnection of friends and rides and dates to keep.
I do not feel inspired to paint or draw.
I do not feel inspired to send the books I want to send, to make the musical tapes I want to make, or to work towards the completion of my upcoming art show.
I do not want to examine my own life right now, except to feel textures and see colors and anchor myself briefly to the moment I am in.

I want to live as if the future does not exist.

The day of leaving

Las Touristas!
Originally uploaded by kai smart.

Him (this morning):
"The power of your love evry day causes me constant pain."
Me (in reply):
"You're a brat-and-a-half."


Goodbye Mykle.
See you next year (2007!!!!!), when I am living in a different house in a different city, when I am 27 and you are 25, when I will still love you and you will still love me.

Skirting the issue

Just to let you know: I will probably be merrily talking about things that have nothing to do with my personal life for a while. Mykle leaves in a day for his next six-month sojourn, and I have a policy about talking about upsetting, personal things on the internet, which is; don't do it. It's generally a bad idea. I know lot's of bloggers don't hold to this. I try to. If you care about how everything is going, write me an email and I will reply.

I must amend my earlier post about David Mitchell losing the Booker prize to John Banville. It was actually to Alan Hollinghurst, who wrote the book "The Line of Beauty", which I have not read.
This is David Mitchell:

I sense another author crush about to start. Soon crushes will take over. Having been a cheating, philadering girlfriend before, and gotten only pain out of it, I highly recommend a good strong crush on someone entirely unreachable. Notorious bad-boy chefs who write books, for example, or a gay guy who plays a handsome vampire on TV.

You can also have a crush on Paul Davis, my friend whose birthday it is today. He is smart and funny, and a hell of a writer and musician, and I am just sorry that I only REALLY became friends with him after he moved to Chicago. Damn. You can read his good words here.

And for your weird internet pleasure I give you two things I have been interested in lately:

Tattooed Animals from Andy Feehan and Wim Delvoye (mostly pigs).
Also an online database of feral children at this place. I am mainly interested in animals raising children on their own. I am disgusted and saddened by the feral children that are made so by child-abuse of epic proportions.

flexing the literary muscles

There are some low points that come from being surrounded by literature for 8 hours of the day. I have been a bookseller now for 7 years (!) and though I am still intoxicated by books and most things about them, I have become a bit of a picky reader*. This, of course is natural. When you are exposed and educated about a lot of one thing you become educated and therefore your taste begins to refine and narrow and suddenly one day you realize you are a snob.
I don't consider myself a snob in terms of some kind of high-minded canon that I follow, but I do consider myself a snob in terms of the high entertainment standards that I set for my books. It is rare now that I find a book that I actually "can't put down". I put down lot's of books, no matter how good they are supposed to be or how people rave. For instance; I have recently put down Nabokov (Ada) and Stephenson (Cobweb), both writers who I have immense respect for. However, I recently became physically attached to a really long book that was one of those rare unputdownable masterpieces.
So I want to talk about The Cloud Atlas.



This book says NOTHING about the plot on the back. There is no synopsis, just some weird kind of generalizations about the book's scope; "Souls drift across time like clouds in the sky." I have come to really respect blurbs, because they are written by people even more picky about books than me, and not to trust the writing on the back, which is often fluff cooked up by the publisher. On the back of The Cloud Atlas the first blurb, from the New York Times, says "Mitchell is clearly a genius." Damn.

The Cloud Atlas also almost won the Booker, which is the English Big Book Award. I tried reading the one that did win the other day (The Sea, by John Banville) and was bored to tears immediately. I mean, it was beautifully poetic writing (which I love), but it was one of those "stodgy old writer guy remembers his boyhood by the sea after the death of his wife" things. I HAVE READ THIS BEFORE. Even though I cannot describe the plot of The Cloud Atlas, I assure you that you have never read this book before. There are about six (I'm not going to count, sorry) different voices that Mitchell writes in in T.C.A., all of which he does with perfect pitch and bravado. His turns of phrase, imagination, and plot intricasy are positively intoxicating. You have no idea where this book is going, but you keep reading because it is so goddamn exciting. There is not one high point in this book, because the book is actually about 6 seperate books, with so much adventure and mystery and poetry that there is a little something for everybody. This book renewed my faith in books, again (last one to do so was Possession by A.S. Byatt, before that my dear dear Pattern recognition by William Gibson. You should read both these books.) I had a conversation with a totally random customer today;

Him: Have you read the Cloud Atlas?
Me:Yes. How totally ass-kicking is that book?!
Him: Oh, god, I haven't been able to read anything else after I finished it! Nothing stands up to it!
Me: I know, I know. It's brutal.
Him: I'm trying to get all my friends to read it.
Me: yeah me too.

My favorite storyline in The Cloud Atlas is "Letters from Zedelghem." I came to realize that I was actually in love with the protagonist about halfway through the first installment, and them fell horribly out of love with him at the end. I'm doing fine now, thanks. When you read it you'll know what I mean.


*this is a massive understatement.

Advice

Don't gold leaf with the window open. All the gold flakes will immediately take flight like tiny gold dragonflies, and leave you all alone.

My new gold-leaf inspiration (I usually depend on Russian Orthodox icons for this):


Miriam Wosk