Voodoo.

hot soup girl: I watch some crap on television. Last night I watched Pretty Woman, The Director's Cut and read the original screenplay at the same time. I conducted this experiment for the benefit of science, but did science thank me? No.

Signalstation: There was a director's cut? I hope it involved the director getting cut.
Signalstation: Tiny little cuts on the arms and legs that will get infected.
Signalstation: wait... I just realized you said you had the screenplay. Why?

hot soup girl: The director's cut addendum was the only reason I watched it. I was hoping for a gritty, unhappy ending.
hot soup girl: I'm joking.

Signalstation: Ah. Thank goodness.

hot soup girl: Well, sort of. Apparently the original screenplay was quite different to the one they ended up filming. In the original, Julia Roberts' character is a hypersexual drug addict, and ends up being rejected by Richard Gere. It ends badly.
hot soup girl: Mary Gaitskill says that when the director of The Secretary first approached her about adapting her short story, he promised her that he wouldn't 'do a pretty woman' to the original text.

Signalstation: The craziest I've done is watched the film while dressed all trampy and humming "Some Day My Prince Will Come" the whole time. I figured it might work like a magical love spell, luring a rich man to find me, see the movie and clothes, get the hint and whisk me away from all this.

hot soup girl: That sounds like voodoo.
hot soup girl: Did a rich man find you?

Signalstation: Not yet.

hot soup girl: Well, one can hope.

Signalstation: And this make-up is getting kinda crumbly.... it's been years.

I'm Not Alive.

Hey baby. What've you, uhm, been up to?

Right, right. Yeah, me too. Real busy, y'know how it is. Well, first I had to go on tour with the Billy Corgan Poetry Roadshow, giving him enunciation training and packing his mouth with dry ice between readings. Then I fell off a ladder while polishing the smoke alarm, plus the phone got disconnected so I had to communicate with the outside world using only my pheromones. Which was pretty exhausting, and frankly I don't think my glands have had a workout like that for ages.

So yeah. Nice to see you.

In other news, my housemate, K, stuck his head out of a first floor window yesterday and when he looked down, he saw Nicholas Cage and crew filming 'Ghost Rider' in a Melbourne alleyway. Highlights apparently included watching Nicholas ostentatiously 'prepare' for his role between scenes: chanting 'I'm NOT ALIVE! I'm NOT ALIVE! I'm NOT ALIVE!' (the titular character of 'Ghost Rider', for those who don't know, isn't alive) and loudly singing the intro to 'Surf Safari' by the Beach Boys between takes. K shared a clandestine eye-rolling moment with a member of the crew before leaving Mr Cage to it (where 'it' equals getting your wig fluffed by an assistant). Wish I'd been there. Lucky bastard.

Girlfriend in a Coma.

hot soup girl: Here's my idea: you pay a corporation to put you in an induced coma for a month or two, while they run your life for you. You wake up and everything's been dealt with - ex-partners broken up with gracefully, all messy loose ends tied up - and you just pick up where they've left off. Robots may be involved.

signalstation: maybe a robot duplicate of yourself?

hot soup girl: Sure, why not?

signalstation: I'm glad it was that easy to convince you. I was ready to weep hot tears of frustration if you weren't willing to concede.

hot soup girl: I'm all for the robot. I'm thinking it would look like a rough fascimile of you, with a plate printed on its chest letting people know that they're interacting with a proxy.

signalstation: A proxy that thinks nothing of extending a middle digit and telling someone on your behalf to "sit on it and spin, shit-eyes" while breaking up with them.

hot soup girl: Maybe. Personally, I'd like my facsimile to deal with the situation with grace, self-respect and compassion. It's just that I'd rather sleep through the accompanying suffering, while the robot glides through with emotional imperviousness.

signalstation: Ah. See, I want a two-fisted duplicate. One with a reputation so fearsome that people will plead with me not to enter that coma.

hot soup girl: That works.
hot soup girl: This idea reminds me of the induced comas that opera singers opted for in the 70s as a effortless weight-loss solution.
hot soup girl: That didn't work out too well. Probably because the appropriate robot technology hadn't evolved yet.

Do you like the internet?

Oh, I know, everyone says they do.

Three things:

1. Check out the amazing art of Ray Caesar, reminiscent of work by Mark Ryden (and Loretta Lux too, actually). I'm particularly in love with cat girl, supergirl, the girl with the eyeball and the girl with the unwieldy cranial protrusion and fibrous arms. Deliciously wrong.

2. I stumbled across a new word today: 'callipygian'. It is my gift to you, and to your perfectly formed buttocks.

3. And lastly, look, I am not kidding about this: clicking on the next link will take you directly to Batman and Robin porn. (I concede: this isn't going to work out for everyone, but I think it's neat, in an 'Oh dear' sort of way.)

Briefing.

Okay, thanks for coming in. We're running a little late, so let's jump to it and get the briefing underway.

Firstly: the goddamnest most funniest dinosaurs I ever did saw.

Secondly: Charlie White and Joshua.

Thirdly: blueprints of sitcom houses (and a map of Gilligan's Island) by Mark Bennett.

Fourthly: masks. Masks and masks and masks and masks and masks.

That's it. Please take your dossiers with you and follow Frank to the armoury, where you will be equipped with matching engagement rings that release an odourless knockout gas. Have fun, kids!

Feathers.

I did some calculations, and in the end, decided on a pelican. My first choice, a swan, appealed for romantic reasons, but lacked stamina. Geese, though stout, resilient and certainly capable of flying across whole oceans at a time - as I myself would need to - were too trapped by flock mentality. I mean honestly - who can be bothered with fixed migratory routes and V-formations? Pfft. It's a culture I have no time for, and frankly, that's why I dropped out of highschool in the first place. And so, a pelican: clumsy, sincere, beautiful in flight; ugly, so they say, in repose. Good at fishing. Longest beak in the world. I'd hoped you might like that.

Next thing you know, there I am, stumbling out of the library with an armful of books on feather chemistry and wind dynamics and maps of tiny un-named mid-Pacific atolls (just rocks really, but somewhere to rest along the way). With a scalpel, I cut out pictures and made a collage: a caricature, sure, but good enough for creative visualisation. Then I stole a bunch of graph paper from the art shop and spread it out on the carpet at home. For diagrams. I turned the laundry into the Coral Sea; the hallway runner into the Equator. Micronesia sprinkled across the kitchen floor like crumbs.

Abraham Ortelius drew the first map of the Pacific ocean in 1589, and these days they take photographs from satellites. But there's never been a map like mine: a bird's eye view, for reals. I've sent it to you in the mail, fifty sheets rolled up inside a gym bag. It'll get there before I do.

When I arrive, I'll come to you as you leave the office. I don't know what day, or even, really, what month, but I'll get there and I'll wait for you in the carpark at closing time, pectinated claws folded neatly beneath my soiled plumage. Perhaps I'll sit on the bonnet of your burnt umber Ford Escort and rest my wrinkled, scrotal neck pouch against your windscreen. I will preen, I will oil myself, I will run my tattered bill through my down, because I want to look my best, for you. But there will be broken feathers, injuries, a bleeding tongue. Lice, too, no doubt. I could almost fall asleep there on the hot metal, dreaming of the many times I considered drowning. I could have happily dropped straight into the sea - plummeted, pinions tucked to my sides - were it not for the memory of your soft seafoam skin, the white sandbar of your forehead, the coastal sweep of your receding hairline.

I will tuk-tuk my lower mandible in exhaustion, and wait. I'll be patient. I'll shut my eyelids and picture a nest: three plain, bluish eggs. I'll be patient, and wait for you to finish work and find me. What a surprise it will be. I'll be patient. I know how your boss likes to keep you late on Fridays. I can wait.