New Habits

Hello Friends! I posted this a week ago on my top secret blog, but it occurred to me that some of you don't know about it (hence it being a secret), so I am reposting it here. I will endeavor to update this blog more, so it will become more like an online journal? Is that interesting to people? I will try.

Oh, also, I have this photo blog of all of the pictures I've taken so far: http://kikismontreal.tumblr.com/.

New Habits
Montreal so far is living up to all of my fantasies (childhood and otherwise). Seeing everything covered in snow and beautiful young woman bundled up. I guess my own idea of what it means to be Canadian (probably formed by beer commercials and children’s books and government/eastern media propaganda) is epitomized by this city more than Victoria or Vancouver. Montreal is much faster paced than Victoria. I do get the sense too that I am in the big city now.

I have just finished a latte that I would describe only as drinkable. I slept in and went to the Service Canada office to check in on the status of my EI application. Apparently they are working on it still; my claim had to be transferred and they have not received my ROE.

Today I am meeting some of Orly’s friends at a symposium of sorts. I was told that there would be drinks and I could wear a dress. :3 Kiki likes.

On day one, I had poutine and beer, day two I explored downtown and on day three I explored my neighborhood (mile end) and took pictures and I cooked a delicious dinner and dessert. I have many photos and I will begin to post them. Missing all of you! Xo

Cafe Myriade

I got a Valentine's Day Card!

Duo: It's Almost Valentine's Day

Leighton Meester in Allure Jan 2011

Allure Magazine Jan 2011

Amber Le Bon in A Nr. 1.2 Italy

UGH my transparent raincoat lust with my debilitating Leighton Meester crush TOGETHER is like crossing the streams in my insides. I'm so in love right now.

Glamour Ethics

The Ethics of Glamour
I have been contemplating posting this video for sometime, please watch it before continuing to read this post as much as that might pain some of you.



I saw this music video film in theaters with MChi when it first came out and this song in particular aroused strong feelings in me (and not just the kind of feelings that sparkly tits will arouse in any of us). What it speaks to quite beautifully, i think, is glamour. This scene occurs during the part of the film where the protagonist is dating the rich bad guy and she is receiving expensive gifts from him. Through this relationship, she becomes more independent (spends less time pining over less-rich good guy and actually gets out on the town), more confident (she is more assertive about her career as a dancer and the future of the club) and she adopts this beautiful, sexy new look. Indeed, this musical number opens with "where have I been all my life?" She sings about her alluring, expensive lifestyle and cheekily defends herself against rumours that she is a whore. She persists that she is a good girl. When she persists that she is good, I see myself persisting that a running away to LA to be a burlesque dancer is good. Good as the antithesis to unethical, imperfect, wrong.

Glamour:
hex: cast a spell over someone or something; put a hex on someone or something
glamor: alluring beauty or charm (often with sex-appeal)
http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=glamour

The question that I often come to is "how should I live?" (also "Can you tell me how to get the most out of life?") And to a certain extent, I understand the assertion that "desire is not enough."

But I very strongly desire is the spell-binding power and beauty that I perceive in videos like this one. I struggle with the idea that desire is not enough and that there must be some moral-ethical framework outside an endless cycle of wants. I struggle with the fact that one cannot live inside a music video or a lingerie advertisement (although I dream that I will one day move to Disneyland and disprove this notion by living everyday as a Disney princess - the height of a girlhood image of glamour). It torments me that the fantasy, even when lived for a few moments at a time, is not real. And not only is there conflict between fantasy and reality - but between fantasies themselves. How, exactly can I be a virgin and a whore at the same time? A powerful sorceress and a paper doll?

And what about carpe diem and cultivating my own garden? How are those philosophies opposed to a religious devotion to glamour? Why is this preoccupation vapid?

Although, I do recall my earlier aversion to effigies, which in a way, a fantasy is an effigy. An effigy can become a doppelgänger and I feel as though it begins to do violence to the person it is and image and reflection of. So where does this notion of violence fit in?

I fear I am not making much sense.
Anyways, here's to sparkly tits.
xoxo

Broken Promises

YEAH I KNOW
I totally failed at my new year's resolution of daily blogging. Things have been pretty busy. Well, not really. I mostly just hang out at home and watch Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt and various crime dramas. I have so much work to do packing up my apartment, selling my furniture, cleaning up and instead of actually making progress on all this I have been lying in bed lamenting how tough my life is.

WAHH MY BOYFRIEND LIVES IN MONTREAL. WAAAAAHHH I HAVE TO CLEAN UP AFTER MYSELF. WAAAAHHHH I AM SO BROKE AND MY CUSHY RECEPTIONIST JOB IS SO TOUGH! BOO HOO HOO THERE IS SO MUCH WORK TO DO.

Maybe someday I`ll have real problems. So, yesterday I went out for milkshakes with Kim and Joshua  and I managed to embarrass myself by saying incredibly lewd things within the first five minutes of our conversation. Luckily, Joshua topped me shortly after with a story about sexually transmitted blowfly. Kim and Joshua planned what films to see this year at the Victoria Film Fest and I am looking forward to this interview with Romero and screening of Survival of the Dead. Joshua also let me know that Canadian film maker Xavier Dolan, whose film J'ai tué ma mère I saw with Veronica and very much enjoyed, has a new film Les amours imaginaires  which is quite good. I am hoping it is available on dvd, maybe at Pic a Flic.

I think I will get some actual work done now, maybe make an attempt to clean up a little bit.

Chocolate, Butterscotch and Chocolate Milkshakes and Joshua at Pluto's

Neveryon

I just finished "The Tale of Gorgik" last night and I am so pleased that there are four volumes of this. It was sexy, humorous and well written. Maybe I have a soft spot for pulp and for short stories, but this is more than a sword and sorcery romp. I agree with The Quarterly Black Review of Books review on the back cover, "Cultural criticism at its most imaginative and entertaining best."

At dinner last night Orlando and I had a lengthy conversation about the publishing industry with our new friends Jack and Marie. Marie works for a self-publishing firm and she was very adamant about her dislike of e-readers. Orlando said that in the future some people will have ipods and e-readers and other people will have vinyl records and hard cover first editions.

It is my Dad's birthday today and we are watching the hockey game and sitting in front of the fire.

My Favourite Colour is Red (and other facts)

Freja by Patrick Demarchelier in Vogue February 2011

My Favourite Colour
is Red. This Red. Actually, I like a pinker shade also, a Cherry Red and the more orange-reds too. I like to think of a party with many beautiful young sirens dressed in black cocktail dresses and then me standing apart in a red satin number like the top center dress. Those photos above Freja are from Miu Miu's Spring 2011 RTW Collection and I couldn't be more thrilled with the colour choice. 


Miu Miu has been my favourite line ever since I first became interested in fashion. It has all of the sixties sensibilities of Prada, but it seems to be designed for rich school girls who like to look as though they are retro and modern and futuristic all at the same time. There are also some very playful neon accents in this collection, so it is worth looking at the whole thing (click the link above!) What I like best about this editorial shot of Freja is that they flipped the collar of the jacket. The jackets were not worn that way on the runway and I think it shows the wonderful shape of the collar.

HAH!

HAH

I bet you thought I broke my resolution only five days in, didn't you? Well there are fifteen minutes left in today and I am using them to blog. Today had many ups and downs. I received bad news this morning but then I was rather productive at work despite my worries. I had a delicious hot dog for lunch and a latte too but then work became suddenly stressful in the last half hour and I was very glad when the day was over. I went out for a delicious drink at Veneto but the conversation was not always light. We decided that trust is not concerned with doing the right thing; it is forgiveness for doing the wrong thing. One drink turned into two and then Nathan and I went to the Brass to have dinner and drinks and dessert. I said something I thought was harsh but probably no one else noticed and I felt embarrassed, which started me on a spiral of paranoia and insecurity that ended in tears a few hours later.

Finally, I spoke with my best friend and I felt a little foolish for being so frail and petulant all night.

All my Love,
K

Working is Hard. Blogging is Hard.

Faye Dunaway, Pamela Anderson and Bai Ling

Booking appointments and answering phones for a living is hard. I seriously feel like lying on this couch and watching crime dramas all evening, only rising for the amount of time it takes to reheat leftovers. I must be the laziest person on the whole planet. I only worked for eight hours today, and I've only worked like three days in the past two and a half weeks. Oh, and my job is not that strenuous either. I'm a client services representative. I work in an office. It is pretty much just like the show, The Office. Ugh. So tired. So lazy...

You can tune into the Kiki Show tomorrow. I'm sure I will have something interesting to say then. In the meantime, if you want to be entertained, I suggest reading the blog of my hero and style icon. Bai Ling: http://ling-bai.blogspot.com/

Coffee at Habit, Lunch at Pig, Victoria Hipster Cliche

I am 3 for 3, Dear Readers! Maybe I actually will fulfill my resolution of blogging every day.Today I slept in until 1:00 PM and then went to Old Habit for a latte, then to Pig for fried chicken and french fries (which I barely made a dent in! They give you so much food! :S) with Nathan and MC (pictured above).


I wonder what the secret is to writing a good blog. I like my friends' blogs very much. I am sad that Michelle is not blogging any more. I feel like the only news media I read was what she linked to and she always had interesting stories and intelligent commentary. I also like Veronica's blog because of her steadfast dedication to Caturday and the sophisticated, modern aesthetic she cultivates. I like Nathan's as well even though a lot of it is over my head and the parts that are about me I feel somewhat embarrassed about (like the title #^_^#) or, well, when we were broken up I felt like that effigy of me he created was doing metaphysical violence to the me... Bad Mojo. Joshua and Kim post about themselves but they also write great film and music commentary and link to good videos. Then there are people like Mandy who seem to have created a really engaging and specific persona through their blogs.

I'm thinking I will have to adopt some regular features to keep it going. Artist's Renderings of Kiki in Japan are a very particular thing so I don't think I could make that a weekly occurrence. I will start with just rambling about my thoughts and see how long it takes me to run out of material or what kind of regular features develop.

Remembering 2010/Better know a Kiki

I have enjoyed the of the recollections and best/worst lists of 2010 that I have read so far. I appreciate that this time of year makes people so introspective. The season and these posts by my friends are causing me to take stock of my life and I find that very daunting.

I am currently waiting at the drop-in clinic on Yates street (I realize that mentioning the street name doesn’t add anything to this narrative except to spark a feeling recognition in those of you who are familiar with Victoria, but Tom Waits does so frequently and I find it so endearing).

I am here because of chronic severe lower abdominal pain that I have suffered for weeks at a time on and off for several years now. I have seen several doctors about it but it remains a somewhat mysterious colon disorder and all I can do to combat it is to maintain a healthy diet and exercise regime, the kind of regime that is very antithetical (is that the right word?) to the holiday season.

I’m sure my health is uninteresting to you (especially those of you following me because of a shared love of hentai) but it is relevant to this recollecting 2010 business because it fuses my mind and my body together.

I use the word visceral a lot but this is precisely what I am feeling when I am naked on the floor sweating and puking and shivering: a visceral transcendence. My sinuses throb. My eyes water. My nose starts to run. My belly becomes bloated. And pain comes over me. All of the ways people describe pain that is what erupts in my belly: burning, stabbing, searing. I actually feel like a baby alien monster could explode out of me.

I cope by attempting yoga, positive visualization and deep breathing. Although I try, I cannot turn away from my body in these moments. As Nathan would say “I cannot fly from my feathers”. Although I recite the litany against fear, I feel as though I really am an animal that would fail the test by recoiling from pain unto death.

In my everyday life however (even and especially when doing physical activity) I am at odds with my body. I do not recognize myself in the mirror or in photographs. I feel precisely what Satre describes in The Wall, that my body is a great sweating rat that I am tethered to.

And so in these moments of incapacitating pain, when I feel acutely that I am an animal that walks on its hind legs, if I could think, I would think that it is absurd to take stock of the year 2010 and of my work, my education, my true love, my friends and family and triumphs…

When I was a child I had a pet rabbit and whenever I held it I could feel its heart beating impossibly fast. Its whole body thumped whether I was gentle or excited to have caught it. It seemed that it was not an animal but a great heart wrapped in fur, pulsing in my hands.

So rather than list my experiences I will recall that last year, and at this moment, I am alive. A heart beating inside an animal that walks on its hind legs.

HAPPY 2011

Happy New Year Friends!

 

As per my resolution, I am posting again today. These are some photos my boyfriend Nathan took of me before my coworker Kerry's Christmas party on the 23rd, but I have worn this same dress to all of the holiday events I've attended. I am also wearing the classy satin choker that Nathan had especially made for me by Sandra of fait avec. What a beautiful Christmas gift! Thank you Nathan :).

How did you ring in 2011?

I celebrated by attending Robyn's New Years Eve party with Nathan and our friend Brennan. I have been feeling under the weather from over eating so many sweets over the holidays - so I was sipping some delicious ginger peach tea while the gentlemen were drinking bourbon Manhattans:

And for those of you who are curious, in the above video we are referring to the Japanese Iron Chef television show, where you can hear in between dubs that the floor announcer Ota Shinichiro is prompting the commentator Kenji Fukui, by saying "Fukui-san?". Which I learned here and elsewhere on the internet this morning. So Nathan was correct!


Until Tomorrow!
xoxo