pleasuredome

Difficult Days Produce All Sorts of Art

2012-03-01T22:43:00.000-08:00

So I learned to use technology to alter my collages. But do you like them less knowing that? I like the way it looks.

"Aand What" - now with rounded edges.

a sad and stained little note card, 2012.

"Horses Are Prancing" - I admit although I love animals I didn't realize this was a mule and not a horse when I first collaged this (probably six years ago). I DO KNOW THE DIFFERENCE VERY DISTINCTLY NOW. Horses are monumental, beautiful and dignified, donkeys are smaller, adorable, fluffy, with longer eyelashes.

I am very happy to announce that my collage "Toothvalanche" will be included in an up-coming issue of The Hart House Review.

New pages from Tender Buttons

2012-02-12T17:32:00.000-08:00

"Fluid"

"HER FACE"

"Reaching, Reaching!"

Queer Parking

2012-02-10T22:49:00.000-08:00

Leigh Bowery

QUEER PARKING

An evening of art and booze for queers

and our lovers.

Phillip Cairns

Regina the Gentlelady

Fluffy Souffle

DJ Max Mohenu

DJ TBD

Friday, March 16th, 2012

The Parkdale Drink - 1292 Queen West

Dress-Up Encouraged

On The Construction of the Bauer Lofts, Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, 2002 - 2009

2012-01-19T19:55:00.000-08:00

The soiled roots of our sister-cities resistedgentrification by any means at their disposal, and their tactics proved highlyeffective. Secret societies of dirt beganthe good fight: asbestos vined its way towards God between steel girders anddamp drywall. Mould splatted spores like Pollock's paints, feeding on a blankcanvas. The old mattress factory spat outa young labourer fourteen stories down, back-breaking on the main drag, fortrying to transform it into tasteful lofts for the young urban professional.

Yes, the soiled roots of our sister-cities resistedgentrification at every step, it cost millions in delays, but progress and economy stepped on also. Now mymemories are all that remain of that 1980’s ghost-city – the bowling alley, thesmoke shop, my mother’s clear nail polish, the dollar store, the smell ofmattress factory fire, my father’s sense of humour – all thatanchors me to that by-gone time is my memory.

But oh, how those memories evaporate! See them float skyward like cottonseed caught in the wind! See them take flight from us like anunsecured helium balloon! And see me, shamelessly,jump and clutch at them in a desperate dance to recover them to my body.

And then when I see those elders so dear tome turn towards shadows - as they retreat within to ponder the corners of theirminds - I am forced to admit that it is not the slick lofts or the cute boutiquesof this new set-design of a city that want to hurt me. And outrage andresistance just take so much energy these days. In the end they are no match for entropy,anyway. Neither are draftsmen andarchitects and money and mortar. Nothingis.

It just gets so lonely living alwayssurrounded by construction. But at least therewas this one day - I saw the sunset squeal through the gaping metal mouths of thenew living squares, and I felt the giant crane loom its make-shift cross overthe city, and I felt that its arms connected the sidewalks between adultchildren.

Ellie Anglin, 2012.

Tender Buttons: Sneak Peek

2012-01-13T23:00:00.000-08:00

Hoi Gois, Please check out this sneeeeky peek at some of the pages I've done on my up-coming book, Tender Buttons. Let me know what you think because I still have a lot of pages to do! Thank you.

Cover

Frontispiece

(Note: the letters that I'm using are from a 19th century children's science book! How precious! When they are printed they won't have the same shadow, nor will the individual snipperdoodles. ie the line around the flies won't be visible)

Page 2: "Staggering Gems"

Page 12 "it's too hard"

Whodunnit?

2012-01-08T20:14:00.000-08:00

I can't remember who wrote this one! I think it was my BFF, Meagan Snyder. One of my fave lines from all of SoMM. Just genius.

Scared of my Mate!

2012-01-08T20:10:00.001-08:00

Kerry Freek

2012-01-08T20:09:00.000-08:00

Line from poem by Kerry Freek, 2006.

Lines from poem by Kerry Freek, paper and fabric, 2006? I don't even know when these things happened, I was high 24/7.

Another beaut from Kerry Freek.

A Searching Moral Inventory

2012-01-08T20:05:00.000-08:00

"Searching Moral Inventory" - Collabo with Kalim Baker, 2006.

Letter to Santa / Resolutions

2012-01-08T20:03:00.000-08:00

Collabo with Kam Baker, 2006.

Junktime

2012-01-08T20:01:00.000-08:00

This is part of one of my first collages i took seriously. It is about my alter-ego/persona Reba Jukes AKA Junktime. She's a pan-sexual single mom who's big into Wicca and RPG shit. I wrote a blog under her name back in 2004. I can't believe how nasty and offensive it is, but I love her! That's where Junktime comes from.

Now break bread with the moon

2012-01-08T19:52:00.000-08:00

A line from a poem by my dear friend Jake McGuirk.

Donkeys Are Prancing

2012-01-08T19:51:00.000-08:00

I guess I didn't know the difference between a beautiful donkey and a beautiful horse in 2006.

Handsome

2012-01-08T19:49:00.002-08:00

Our Favours

2012-01-08T19:49:00.000-08:00

What if our only favours really are five-and-ten-cent-store baubles?

Dance Against Death

2012-01-04T07:04:00.000-08:00

This was another magnet/sticker we created to pay for SoMM printing. We (myself and my SoMM co-creators, Caroline Wesley, Meagan Snyder, Amy Egerdeen and Eftyhia Lucas) used to just glue lines of poetry and other writing that our genius friends wrote on simple collages or just plain prints of famous art works.

These lines are from an incredible prose-poem/letter by my sister, Emmy Anglin, that was featured in SoMM. My sister is one of the most talented writers in the world! This poem was inspired by a period in which she was living in the first floor of this kind of bone-chilling house in a really creepy neighbourhood (near skeleton park!) of Kingston, Ontario in the dead of winter. She was doing her PhD at the time (which she has since finished! Hurray!) and there was a single guy living in the apartment above her. This guy worked in a kitchen and would arrive home from work every night at around 4am and would blast techno music, and he would pull her "from the leaf-covering of sleep with irregular pounds of a dance against death", at which point Emmy would get out her ceiling-prodding broom, and he would turn it down, and the next night they would do it all over again.

Dear Ryan,

Opposing futures fight each other in my mind, extinction against hope. I'm sorry your cat went pee-pee on you when he got out at 5:00 a.m. and you had to corner and grab him outside my window, but you shouldn't have gotten him declawed. Then he could safely go outside. Enough of my philosophies. You seem like a kind-hearted person, and I almost loved you in the breeze of what felt like the earth's last heavenly afternoon (a post-script, a nostalgic favour), when I dozed in my chair over my book, the door open, the shadows pressing their epigraph against the gold of street and grass. I heard your voice drift from the window above; you sang "Blowin' in the Wind" with such sincerity that I almost loved you. But then I remembered the night before, when you pulled me from the leaf-covering of sleep with the irregular pounds of a dance against death. The only shades in the house were the frail insights that hang invisible in the light but radiant as skeletons in the half-dark. Please give me back the illusion that our days are different, that they end with sleep and start again. We need new chances. Please, Ryan, or one of us will somehow have to go.

Have a good day.

Your downstairs neighbour,

Emmy.

Lucky

2012-01-04T06:55:00.000-08:00

This was created by me and my dear friend Dan Schickerowsky (who wrote the limerick) in 2006 (I think). We made magnets and stickers of them to fund-raise for Scared of My Mate.

Build The City of God

2012-01-04T06:51:00.001-08:00

flow-flows.

2012-01-04T06:29:00.001-08:00

For My Cat Geoffrey

2011-09-24T13:35:00.000-07:00

"For My Cat Geoffrey" Poem by Christopher Smart, Collage by me. 2008.

Every Body Dies!

2011-09-24T13:32:00.000-07:00

"Every Body Dies", 2009.

Britney Feelings

2011-09-24T13:31:00.000-07:00

"Britney Feelings", 2008.

Pussy Willow GPS

2011-09-24T13:29:00.000-07:00

"Pussy Willow GPS", 2010.

Neeed

2011-09-24T13:27:00.000-07:00

"Neeed", 2010.

crazed glass.

Kill All Artists

2011-09-24T13:25:00.000-07:00

"Kill All Artists", 2010.

I don't hold the opinions expressed in this collage. I think I had taken rage pills. Oh wait, I guess it's a joke.

Da Hood Luv Me!

2011-09-24T13:23:00.001-07:00

"Da Hood Luv Me!", 2010

Weekend Drugs

2011-09-24T13:22:00.000-07:00

"Weekend Drugs", 2010.

Join Us

2011-09-24T13:21:00.000-07:00

"Join Us", 2010

Keep Parkdale Weird.

2011-09-19T18:29:00.000-07:00

"Keep Parkdale Weird", 2010.

Flower Spectrum

2011-09-18T20:20:00.001-07:00

Flower Spectrum, August 2011. For my Mom's B-day - shhhh! Don't tell her!

Tiger Brand

2011-09-14T14:05:00.000-07:00

Argh, too small a size. But I did this cover for Tiger Brand, the second EP from Agile Like This. One of my faves - so freaking weird!!!

For Tim McLean (1985 – 2008)

2011-09-13T21:05:00.000-07:00

Were you dreaming that you were a greyhound? Did your ragged paws pound the road to Winnipeg? Did you dream that you were already at the carnival, letting the girls - even the ugly ones - ride the Twister for free? Were you were awoken by the man in the scratchy synthetic seat so close beside you? This man had made one too many deliveries on his paper route, and had a Rambo knife in the pocket of his wind-breaker. It was not your fault.

Rest in Peace.

The Pre-Menstrual Child Goes Trick or Treating

2011-09-13T14:44:00.000-07:00

Button, 2008

Neeed

2011-09-11T21:02:00.000-07:00

"Neeed", collage, 2010

Precious Moments

2011-09-11T15:12:00.000-07:00

Miss Hilda Grimbley entered her commode at 9 o'clock on a serene Saturday morning in the early part of the twenty-first century and sat down on her toilet as if it really were, as the colloquialism goes, a throne.

She was not a handsome woman, but she prided herself on being a lady; and that appellation, with its accompanying net of connotations, guided her every movement. And so, her knees modestly pressed together, her hiked skirt covering much of her lap and her cotton drawers pooled on the powder pink linoleum around her sturdy but comely ankle boots, Hilda was at ease regarding the worn but still-pretty hand towels on which she had embroidered delicate seahorses with gold embroidery floss.

She was at ease, that is, until she broke wind. A mouse-like “Oops!” escaped her lips as she clenched the gabardine of her skirt in her mortified fists, followed by an “excuse me!” She was, of course, addressing no one. Naturally, there was no other soul but her own in the lavatory. Hilda Grimbley lived, in fact, entirely alone. She had done so since she graduated from Smiles for Christ Bible College, moved out of her parent's bungalow and into the conveniently located apartment above Celebration, a religious gift shop where she had since been employed. Nevertheless, she had been bred by a woman of the 1950s through and through, and the “excuse me!” rose in her throat more instinctively than her completely unresponsive knee-jerk reflex -- a condition that doctors had recorded as “inexplicable”.

Hilda had almost entirely subjugated or made acceptable her every bodily function, so this lapse of control disturbed her deeply. She was, incidentally, menstruating on this day, a burden that she sought to mask with the old-fashioned menstrual belts she had to special-order that came in pretty packaging and had a powdery-fresh scent. She had never before experienced what she had heard some immodest women speak of as “P.M.S.”, but perhaps this slip of propriety had been a result of that disorder. When others chose to speak to Hilda about crude subjects such as these she would deflect their attempts by baring her long teeth in an approximation of a smile, batting her thin, light brown eye-lashes, and sort of jiggling her weird hair-do.

Hilda sat, recovering her composure, and trying to convince herself that there was no possibility that her neighbours down the hall, nor a passer-by in the street below, could have heard her, when a brassy jangling clamour ripped through the small room. It rang in her ears, it echoed boisterously off of the blush-pink walls, and her thoughts were drowned in a metallic din. This noise, much like that of a slot machine spewing its significant spoil into its tin receptacle after hitting the jackpot, but without the blinking lights and circus music, was being emitted, to Hilda's abject horror, from below her.

In a primordial, fight-or-flight panic, Hilda spread her legs and looked down. She would have immediately stood and ran from her home at the shock of what she now saw, if she weren't presently spewing a massive quantity of metal pieces from her vagina.

“Clangalangachinkchinkitychinkityclangjanglyclangachinka! Etc!” screeched through the small room as the metal hit the clean porcelain bowl, continuing their flow for what seemed like half an hour, as Hilda sat paralysed with fear and disbelief. Amazingly, her distress did not encompass physical discomfort – the coins slipped out of her birth canal painlessly.

In this shocking state, Hilda's flabby neck, no longer able to support its charge, folded her small head towards her chest. From this viewpoint, her watery eyes peered downward, and she spied something shiny laying on the bed of her feminine napkin. Focusing her eyes, she perceived what glinted there to be two coins: one Canadian dollar and two-dollar coin each, newly minted and slick with her own fluids.

As she attempted to comprehend the meaning behind this sight, the gushing stream slowly jangled to a stop. Gathering her considerable resources, she carefully wiped her feminine area clean. Then, touching her vulva directly for the first time in a very, very, long time, and finding it unchanged by its supernatural expulsion, Hilda stood, raised her underpants and left the room, notably forgetting to wash her hands.

In a daze, she lumbered towards her bedroom, and sat on the nearest edge of her bedspread. She stared at the bedroom wall, with her time-worn, beige-flowered wallpaper, taking nothing in. She was not yet processing what had happened to her on the toilet. Hilda was rather accustomed to strange, inexplicable things happening to her body. The day that she was visited by her first menstrual period her mother told her that she had probably just eaten too many beets -- still her favourite root vegetable. Hilda had done just enough research on her own to discover the unusual mail-order company that still produced her old-fashioned sanitary napkins and that was all she had needed to know.

She had never told her mother or father that although the hair on her head and most of her body was thin and brown, her pubic hair had grown in thick and golden – not blonde – but as golden as if Rumpelstiltskin had spun it. Her family did not welcome the sharing of personal feelings, private matters or aesthetic pleasures. Much of their contact consisted of sitting silently around the dinner table after a needlessly strenuous workday, as if the toil of their ancestors was genetically demanded of them, even as those around them accomplished as much playing solitaire or text messaging their girlfriends behind their desks. The sounds of the Grimbley bones creaking into a state of rest and the Grimbley teeth mashing food made conversation unnecessary to fill the silence.

Much of Mr and Mrs Grimbleys sparing conversation revolved around how decadently nonsensical the “kids” of today were, often while reading an account of a protest in the local paper, or seeing a segment on the evening news about an art exhibit. Little Hilda did not want to be a fool in her parents eyes, and so she had omitted to tell them that she had seen a unicorn behind a clump of yew trees while plucking potato bugs off of her mother's cabbage plant. Also left unspoken was the shuddering orgasm -- her first and last -- that she had experienced that night when she was barely a teenager, thinking of her impossible vision.

She did, however, draw up the courage to ask her mother to buy her a “Precious Moments” figurine for her bedroom. It was an adorable ceramic unicorn statuette that had, like all “Precious Moments” figures, oversized, sad eyes that suggested both innocence and shame at once. She had seen it in a Christmas catalogue and had felt a desire for it so powerful that she truly feared for her life if she couldn't have it. Her mother called Hilda a “flibbertygibbit” and hadn't even broached the matter with her father. Hilda wept hot tears in her bedroom that long night but by the next month she had convinced herself that only children coveted doo-dahs like that unicorn, while mature young women wanted sensible things like bus passes and Epsom salts. It was also around this time that she convinced herself that what she had seen in her backyard was probably just a figment of her imagination.

Hilda had never mentioned any of these fantastical events to anyone. Nor did she even think of them privately. She did not allow herself to indulge in these remembrances because, if brought to the forefront of her consciousness, moments so enchanting would be unavoidably spilling over her lips and into the ear drums of her parents, her pastor, and the thin gentleman Duane that managed the gift shop. This couldn't be. These were her private moments.

This latest experience, though, brought old memories gushing into her mind. Each on its own could be explained away by a genetic fluke, a trick of the eye, or a psychotic hallucination. But the ancient spell of the number three convinced her of what she had always suspected. Hilda shrugged her scrawny shoulders and accepted that she had been Chosen. God had provided, and she would now get what she wanted. She opened the top drawer of her bureau, retrieved a nylon trouser sock, and returned to the washroom.

Half an hour later Hilda was waiting in line at Horace's Drug Store. She had just had an irritable clerk unlock the showcase where they displayed the high-ticket items and remove the most beautiful little man Hilda thought she had ever seen. He was a little Aryan boy in a pastel blue suit, holding a sadly wilted bouquet of daisies, shyly hiding behind his friend, the equally bashful cream-coloured unicorn, on a grassy mound. The statuette was made of bisque porcelain, carefully painted with pastels then glazed and fired to a dreamy matte finish. Both figures had the adorably homunculean eye-to-face ratio that was the trademark of all “Precious Moments” pieces. The little man stood only five inches tall and the tag on it read $69.99. Hilda shivered with the pleasure of knowing that it would soon have a new home on her bedside table, and that she had acquired it with her own money. With tear-dimmed vision she read the little inscription in pink curlicue script at the base of the figure: “God Sent Special Things Our Way”.

With a heavy bulge in the left pocket of her navy overcoat, Hilda walked the little figure up to the checkout as if she were approaching an altar to receive communion. A young woman with an undercut hairstyle, standing behind the counter appraised Hilda from beneath her sparse eyebrows and then rang the prized item through -- “seventynineeight”. Hilda emptied her sock of coins onto the counter with relish. The sales girl rolled her eyes, “Oh you have got to be kidding me, lady... All change?!?” She clicked her tongue and started counting.

By Ellie Anglin, 2009.

Birthday Beats

2011-09-11T13:25:00.000-07:00

"Birthday Beats", for my Sister's birthday 2009 (?). All cut and paste. One of my faves! I like Jane Austen's attitude in the front.

I Work For Nasa

2011-09-11T13:20:00.000-07:00

Astronaut is the Latin translation of “star sailor”.

I think that’s very poetic.

I am not an astronaut but

I work for NASA.

My eyes follow blips across

the black void of a black box

and from my mouth into my headset

drip monosyllabic directives.

Still, I appreciate moments of poetry just like any other man.

Yes, I work for NASA

here in this place we call the Lone Star State.

Not so long ago there was a day.

not unlike this day

on a planet no bigger

in this ever-expanding universe

than the gravy stain on my work shirt.

And on this day there was a moment.

I have read that by Rabbinical reckoning

a moment is 43 milliseconds.

This moment may have been more.

But I made a note of this moment in my log,

because there was a big smile slapped on your face

and your teeth were shining with spit

and there were something like stars in your eyes.

Waterloo, January 15, 2009

i ok, you ok

2011-09-11T13:15:00.000-07:00

i ok, you ok

I made this collage in 2009. it is cut and paste, pencil crayon and embroidery. it is about self-help and the goodness of God.