BIRTHDAY

Coming Soon....

Royds and ANITA

If one places a minute amount of liquor on a scorpion it will go mad, and sting itself to death



I'm here to report that Tom Waits new three volume album is good. My favorite is "Bastards", which has one of his creepy talking voice songs (like "What's he building in there?") except on this one he seems to be reading out of a bug book (hence the above quote). I have always found true song gems on B-side etc. collection albums, legit or no. I started out loving Tori Amos's bootlegs (where the excellent "Love Song" Cure cover can be found, as well as "Sweet dreams" and the one that goes "All the angels and all the wizards black and white/are lighting candles in our hands.....") and then moved on to Morphine's "B-Sides and otherwise" which has an amazing weird/cool talking track about someone driving and constantly having to "pull over the car" because of some paranoia,...then my almost-favorite Nick Cave song is "Opium Tea" is on "Call of the Caveman" which I am pretty sure was totally unauthorized when it came out, and didn't make Nick a penny...but GOD what a song.

" I 'm a prisoner here- I can never go home/
there is nothing here to win or lose/
there are no choices needed to be made at all/
not even the choice of having to choose....."

It' s a waltz too, which makes it better and you can dance with your grandfather to it.

Ok my little writing warmup excercise is over:


MY BIRTHDAY! and other exciting things that happened in Kai's possibly-undeserved weekend of fun and and SCIENCE!

A countdown of epic proportions:

Thursday: We won the costume contest, and we got a day off of work to go to the charmingly-named "Cape Royds", whihc is a penguin rookery. That means penguins mate and nest and bear eggs there, which turn into penguin chicks...
The Cast:
me: in a hat with animal ears which I made
Mykle: wanting to drive there, cause he has Pisten-Bully clearance
Michelle Ott: Was "Sandwich the person" for Halloween, Minnesotan, honey blonde and incredibly crafty, obsession with roosters, very excited.
Sandwich: a SF girl who carries a sandwich-shaped lunchpail, knows everyone, an epicenter of cool and fun, really excited.
Bill Jirsa: a genius with messy hair and incredible game face, sweet, always up for everything, funny, giant brain. Super fit! Climbs mountains and runs 15 miles for fun.
Ruth: Sweet, quietish, yoga teacher, the haircutter here on station, belly dances, Seattlite.
Craige: fresh-faced, smart and techie, has video cameras, cameras, plays music, wears a stingy-brim.
We also went with Lavonne, who won with her sister for a conjoined-twin costume!

Cape Royds is also home to another hut of Shackleton's, one named "Nimrod". (I haven't even written about the first one I went to...which was INCREDIBLE). We got to go in, and eventually "take pictures" in there, even while scientists where catatlopguing rearranging and relabelling the preserved contents of the hut).

I'm such a slow typer...oh my hands!

Anyhow, we went in Pisten-bullies, which are cute snub-nosed track vehicles...and the trip took about 2+ hours. We were banned from going on snowmobiles (called "skidoos" here) because of an accident on one involving German filmmaker Werner Herzog. Hah! BOOOO!
Anyway, we saw penguins...which hopped and wiggled and smelled really bad. They were Adelies...the small cute toddler-kind. Skuas circled (they eat penguin chicks), but had none to eat because it is penguin mating season instead.
We made a human pyramid, and went into Nimrod the hut, and saw crusty penguin scientists that lived in a tent, and had a great time.

We all wore bathing suits (except for me, who shockingly doesn't have one...and wore instead her bra and black hot pants over striped leggings and the aforementioned animal ear hood) and braved fierce arctic winds to take some group pinup photos. "Snow-bunny" if you will. Once you got out there it was pretty cold, but Big Red was your friend and kept you semi-warm. Michelle, Sandwich and Bill also took some in Nimrod the hut, which is definately a first for that historical monument!



So I had that day off.

Friday:
Little did you all know, but I entered a contest and won, and now my artwork will be raised on a GIANT balloon into the upper atmosphere! The project is called the LDB (Long Duration Balloon), which has "payload" (the stuff that it carries; mainly high tech science equipment) and which I won an opportunity to paint part of. Is this confusing yet? I painted a box on the payload for the ANITA project, which is a Nuetrino-detector. It's a thermal control unit that houses a battery, and they needed it painted at least 40% black to control the temperature as it rises to heights where it is 200 degrees in the sun and -200 degrees in the shade!!!
I went out to the LDB on friday (got PAID for this BTW), and sat on this priceless peice of equipment (it's very beautiful,...symmentrical with big antennas that look like white morning-glories...about 25 ft tall) and waited my design. I hade gone for the gusto and designed a joined image that would have coverd the three visible sides of it. I won "grand prize" so i got $100, a invitation to the launch, and the honor of leaving work to do art around REALLY SMART PEOPLE (who are actually awesome and really nice and (!!) in awe (!!) of my talent! Woah.
So that was Friday.

To be continued since my wrists are killing me.

Thank you for all of the Birthday Wishes; Rico, and Jess, and Aimee and Zina and Mom and I will try to write you all separately. Jordan, it's GREAT to hear from you.
Also Aunt Joia and Aunt Peggy- thanks for getting in contact, it really means a lot. really.

Love,
Kai

"This is Kai in Electrical Supply"

This is from a while ago, in my livejournal (which I almost never use):

I always say that I spend a lot of time "painting black on black". Which means, I spend an inordinate amount of time painstakingly and lovingly painting details that no one will see. This painting is a pefect example. Above is a close-up of the painting, but in the actual whole painting there is another flower silohuette (this time in dark blue-black instead of gold) upside-down to the right of the face. You can only really see it when the painting is tipped a certain way.

I look at it as another "task you have to perform for the Faery King" (like counting grains of sand on a beach or weaving sparrow's shirts out of spider's gossamer): meaningless in the human scheme of things, but dictated as essential for some greater and whimsical and more obscure good. I say this ruefully and humorously, of course. I'm probably just an artistic masochist.

This is now my job here in The Cold Place. Tedious and meaningless tasks that take up blocks of hours? I now know all about this.

It's ok, though, I'm a patient and generally upbeat person that can amuse herself while doing bullshit by singing or drawing on boxes or whatever. I take great pleasure in making labels for things and using different fonts. I really love my two coworkers and we are a little happy family unit. Sometimes I spent hours in the forklift attaching huge things with chains and dragging them around in the snow and ice. So these are all good.
But it would be more satisfying if this was done in the service of Beauty. Of course, then I wouldn't be getting paid for it.....

The most colorful things in Antarctica...

are Bill Jirsa's pants...

Fish don't fry in the kitchen/
Beans don't burn on the grill/
Took a whole lot of t-ryin'/
Just to get up that hill/

Now we up in the Big Leagues/
It's my turn at bat/
As long as we're livin'/
It's you and me baby/
And there ain't nothin wrong with that....

Sub-Zero Fun

Yesterday we watched from afar, as out on the sea ice (a land of brilliant distance littered with giant fissured ice chunks) silohuetted pirates kidnapped a seal. The wind was biting us something fierce and my fingers went past pain into that other painful numbness, but the sun was so bright and the end of the earth stretched before us, so we felt compelled to be witnesses. I kept saying "If this was Wisconsin I would be really scared". The two figures got off of their snowmobiles and approached a giant bulk of seal, threw a bag over it's head as it thrashed wildly, and then did something to it (we think they injected it with something or took some kind of sample from it) while crouching next to it, and released it.
The utter silence made it so eerie. The pirates were of course doing their piracy in the name of science, and the kidnapping also took place to further our understanding and open our minds, but to us perched on a bank of slick snow on the overlooking hill it seemed very exciting and malicious.

Singing loud and stomping, clapping our hands, rattling the tiny wooden stage we preformed at the "Freak Train" talent show last Saturday. It was our friend Sean's idea (Toofless Sean ), he being a legitimate and talented blues musician, to get together a ragtag bunch of people to holler and generally have fun and perform standards as well as hip hop songs about make-out parties. We formed the Pentacostal Painkillaz or Pillshakin' Beatboxin' Blues Chorus or whatever you want to call us, and got dressed up in ties and wigs and tutus and had a ball. Our song was an acapella medley of "Jesus Gonna Be Here" by Tom Waits, seguaying into "Movin' on Up" (the theme from the Jeffersons -Mom, that's a TV show from the 80's- that Mykle and I had to be taught since when growing up in the bottom of a well you don't have TV). We only made one mistake, and the verse was the one about drinking, so that made sense!
Later we did our other number; a hip hop, sort of moldy peaches-style song that Sean and Michelle's friend wrote. Michelle rapped, and we all "beatboxed" and shook our little rattles (which were all aspirin bottles and Advil bottles, hence the name "Painkillaz".) It was SO fun to rehearse and also pretty damn fun to sing on a stage in a low ceilinged bar while being filmed by famous German filmmaker Werner Hertzog. No, I am not lying. He's here, and going to make a documentary or something. Did I mention that the only real instrument in our band is a tuba? Yes, we are in Antarctica, I swear.

Saturday night was condensed Wonderful, probably because we only get one day off, and therefore the weekend night has to be super rad. The talent show was amazing and debaucherous and came with a side show replete with a Man-eating chicken and a fortune-teller. Our friend Ruth belly-danced wearing full belly-dance garb and a beard made from human hair, and the winner of the talent show ($300! What a prize) was a girl Etosha, who did absolutely picture perfect lip-sync to Tina Turner while wearing a giant fur St. Petersburg-style Russian hat. There was juggling and some chick did tricks with her tongue in front of a video camera (guess who), and whale jokes, and the fine poems of Ludacris, and two ways to shotgun a beer, and and handstand push-ups.
I love the freaks, I really do. Wow.

I realized halfway through the night (under a bright sun) as I was on the porch of a strangely suburban-house looking out on a frozen ocean with a crazily-dressed band of people taking pictures and playing the tuba.....

I came to Antarctica for the surrealism.

15 ft of pure white snow

We finally got out of town and went on a hike yesterday. The way at first was very steep, and I was totally out of breath and sort of amazed that they just let people climb up these crazy volcanic crags, when they are so intense about SAFETY.
(We have a safety meeting every morning at work for about 20 minutes. We are working our way through a binder of dittos about all sorts of safety, and today was tool safety. Each one is easily summed up by "Don't be a dumbass and you won't get hurt".)
Anyway, the hike was pretty magnificent, and we didn't get hurt, and my facemask froze solid, even though it was pretty warm by Antarctica standards. There is a Virgin Mary statue in a cage at one promentory, where people have left little votives and mardi gras beads (of course) and remembrances to other dead Catholics. That was very cool.
Did you know that there are GIANT golf-balls perched on the hills above McMurdo Station? Well, there are, a white one and a black one. They house giant satellite dishes, I'm told. I really wish they housed giant planetariums, like in The Dark Crystal, with spinning brass and silver and ebony and onyx balls that move in concordance with the planets. Oh well, a girl can dream.
And dream I do: the view of ANTARCTICA is pretty nice and also impossible to take a picture of. The mountains are SO BIG and the ocean is frozen with ice SO OLD. I don't know I'm just a speck on whiskey-drinking dust. Trying to stay warm in the face of UTTER EMPTINESS.i don't now. to really connect with a place I have to form my own mythology about it. Here it's pretty easy. Ice crevasses and far away mountains where Nothing lives can be the stuff of fairy tales. So that is comfortable for me. I'm not sure where this behavior came from. But the mountains are really East of the Sun, West of the Moon....


I should take a picture of my hands to show you what "the driest continent" means.


La Musica

I would like to recommend my new favorite band Beruit, and if I haven't gone off to you about them, er.....him, then I probably haven't seen you in about two months. During my brief stint at the record store I was shelving albums and read the little record blurb on the front of the CD (which also had a very intreguing cover) and straight up bought it. I've discovered some of my favorite music by reading, not listening. When I worked at Bookcafe I would read SO MANY music reviews that I would base all my music shopping on stuff that sounded in print like I would like it.
Anyway, Beruit is like a Balkan Brass band mixed with Neutral Milk Hotel. Fucking Fantastic. Upliftng and introspective at the same timereminds me of a place so vivid, but a place in which I never lived...

I also am in the midst of a Billy Idol renaissance. Before i left the Real World, Lucia let me burn her Billy Idol Cd (she has like every album) , and I am about to make an all-rockin' morning mix for work...