BETTER LIVING THROUGH PLASTIC EXPLOSIVE - ZSUZSI GARTNER

Better Living Through Plastic Explosive - Pg 170 : We Come in Peace

   To err is human, to forgive divine. That old trout. We can tell you now that it's the other way around; a complex vice versa.

Better Living Through Plastic Explosive - Pg 162 : Mister Kakami

   And Syd is thinking not now the picture will never be finished, or I'll never see Kakami again, but that he will never hear him. Because the kid was right: Kakami is a voice--ebullient, believing, his vision persuasive. It has led Sydney Gross this far, to an ending befitting the hero of a quest. A death in Technicolor, by the sea, by the hand of a mythical creature. 

Better Living Through Plastic Explosive - Pg 158 : Mister Kakami

   This is the darkness and dank not of night, but of a daytime basement, with the nearest source of light far away at the top of the stairs. 

Better Living Through Plastic Explosive - Pg 157 : Mister Kakami

   In a movie this would be the point where one of them spots remnants of their old campfire and loudly exclaims that they've been travelling in circles, upon which the two wanderers commence squabbling about what an idiot the other guy is and smack each other around and either make up or storm off in opposite directions only to meet up again later to dispatch a common enemy. But there are, of course, no campfire remains here, no here here, and all the trees look the goddamn same to Syd, so they may or may not have been going in circles. 

Better Living Through Plastic Explosive - Pg 155 : Mister Kakami

   Syd, who hasn't slept outdoors since a mismanaged bar mitzvah camp-out in the ravine behind his grandparents' Rosedale house when he was thirteen... hears all manner of amplified and unidentifiable sounds in the surrounding night. Flesh-eating plants busily masticating the remains of rodents; antean beasts lying in wait; the long-lost auntie, now spectral and gone feral, watching, as if watching could be called a sound. Here be monsters. Porgie refused to light a fire, saying it would disturb the balance in the forest. 

Better Living Through Plastic Explosive - Pg 153: Mister Kakami

   Because   Because here is the movie, all around us. Here is the never-ending story. Patrick shoots and edits simultaneously as he moves through the rainforest, effortlessly synching sound with picture. Here there are no cuts, no retakes, no stopping to powder the immobile brows of Botoxed beauties, to reload film, to change a light gel, to wait around all afternoon for an all-too-brief magic hour in order to score the money shot.   The layers of sound this deep in the forest are phenomenal. Even the mushrooms sing their song, in dozens of fungal dialects all eager to be heard. The lichen and the tree moss, hanging like Triton's beard, fizz and whisper. Here filtered light colludes with leaf and fern, evoking a sensation akin to being in the womb. Here is the green force that drives a fuse through every flower--both redeemer and destroyer. 

Better Living Through Plastic Explosive - Pg 153 : Mister Kakami

   Somewhere, far from shore, a glistening chinook salmon twists in a neat double helix through the water. Singing about oceans. Singing about love. 

Better Living Through Plastic Explosive - Pg 133 : Mister Kakami

   What he was, in fact, was a man struggling to remember why he was here in this island rainforest, surrounded by all this slurry of activity, in the first place.   Because. Because the low hum of his parents' voices, whenever he had drifted off to sleep in the back seat of the car on the way home from the movie theatre, was the greatest soundtrack ever made. Because, once upon a time, Jessica Lange's face had been the closest thing to looking straight into the sun and not going blind. 

Better Living Through Plastic Explosives - Pg 124 : Someone is Killing the Great Motivational Speakers of America

   I was once young and I was wild--but refused to let it eat me up.   Winners are not sentimental. Winners look forward, not back. And still, the tears begin to fall. 

Better Living Through Plastic Explosives - Pg 122 : Someone is Killing the Great Motivational Speakers of America

   We hold hands, because there is nothing equivalent to the holding of hands to pass on currents of self-generated electricity and intensify our energy fields. 

Better Living Through Plastic Explosives - Pg 118 : Someone is Killing the Great Motivational Speakers of America

   In truth, darkness is something I have never feared. I have the eyes of a cat. I have little use for Tony's glowing teeth, but could use some of his advice right about now. I simply try not to even think about his hands. 

Better Living Through Plastic Explosives - Pg 116 : Someone is Killing the Great Motivational Speakers of America

   If our energy fields don't exist--what is this? This luminous face turned skyward, pale irises, the flecks in them wildly kaleidoscopic, her skin, that way of looking. Pudding has such an intense aura. There are times I have witnessed static crackling blue from her scalp, her fine hair rising and quavering like the tentacles of a sea anemone. It is as if she is communing with the unseen particles in the air around us, decoding them into her private language somewhere deep in her hermit kingdom, in her Arkadia. 

Better Living Through Plastic Explosives - Pg 107 : What Are We Doing Here?

   One of her hosts appeared in the doorway of the bedroom, wide-eyed, naked, just as she was pretending to toss her hat into the air Mary Richards-style, and closed the door in her face, loudly, but she caught the pretend hat anyway just to prove she didn't need other people around to have fun.

Better Living Through Plastic Explosives - Pg 106 : What Are We Doing Here?

   She thought she was a redhead this week, but the person staring back at Didi has this black hair and these terrible chunky bangs. When did she dye her hair black? When did she have it cut? This whole time she's been acting like a redhead, doing red-headed things with her hands, saying red-headed things, trying to think red-headed thoughts, and her hair has been black? Was it black last night?

Better Living Through Plastic Explosives - Pg 74 : Investment Results May Vary

   Unlike those who act as if they're on speed-dial to the Earth goddess--those men on recumbent bikes and those women who rub baking soda into their fuzzy armpits and think fetal-monitoring machines are the work of the devil--rationalists who've always harboured a secret penchant for Greek mythology know full well that Gaia is in fact the daughter of Chaos. 

Better Living Through Plastic Explosives - Pg 71 : Investment Results May Vary

   It's only much later, when she's trying to get back to sleep around four A.M.--the time she often wakes and can't remember which side of her chest houses her heart, even though it's thrumming so violently she fears the landlady will start pounding on the floor above her bed, yelling, "I thought I told you to keep it down!"

Better Living Through Plastic Explosives - Pg 63 : Investment Results May Vary

   The single orchid in an intentionally crooked raku vase on the edge of a spotless table screams wabi-sabi pretensions with twice-weekly maid service. 

Better Living Through Plastic Explosives - Pg 61 : Floating Like a Goat

   I can grant you any wish you want, he told her that night she burnt her fingertips. Did he actually say this or only imply it? Had she invoked him, her demon, like Theophilus or Faustus, or even poor Robert Johnson down at the crossroad? She had been content living blind, eating fermenting plums, breathing deep, the world just brief flickering shadows on the moist walls of a cave when he lit his bong. What was left that she could wish for?    To be an artist or to be a muse - that was what tore her in two. The spell she was under led her to believe being his muse would be the more fulfilling of the two. And they lived happily ever after. Or so it would seem, for a time. 

Better Living Through Plastic Explosives - Pg 60 : Floating Like a Goat

   Once upon a time a young woman encountered a man. It doesn't matter how they met. One moment she was up in the air, the next she was falling to earth but didn't care. 

Better Living Through Plastic Explosives - Pg 60 : Floating Like a Goat

   Have you ever had a demon lover, Shayana?   Forget bad-boy musicians or beautiful vampires. I'm talking about the kind of man who turns his dirty dishes over and, when both sides are used, throws them out in a way that is both ceremonial and completely nonchalant, and has you utterly, utterly convinced that this is a "philosophy." A man who adds not one but three umlauts to his name for a devastating Teutonic effect. I'm talking about a terrifying and destructive charisma. 

Better Living Through Plastic Explosives - Pg 59 : Floating Like a Goat

   I had an advantage over my fellow students at the art college - I could see voices as colours and shapes, and without the aid of any psychotropic. As long as someone was talking, I had a palette to work with. The nasal Upper Canada monotone of my life-class instructor produced oddly compelling anorexic oatmeal-streaked buttocks and breasts (you may imagine how this annoyed the model, who was rather voluptuous and rosy hued, but the sketches earned me instant recognition as an iconoclast). My roommate's throaty smoker's laugh gave me a series of large canvas magma flares in reds, oranges, and basalt. The melancholy-flecked sound of my Estonian landlady talking to her daughter over the telephone, a small umbral gem.    Recorded voices, digitized voices, mediated voices didn't have any effect. This synesthesia only worked "live." Walking along a crowded street was quite literally a psychedelic experience. "Your voice is damaged swimwear," I told a stranger waiting for a bus, a pimply-faced teen whose girlfriend poked him in the ribs with her pointy little elbow before he could respond. "You sound like fresh cement," I said to a waitress midway through her recitation of the daily specials.

Better Living Through Plastic Explosives - Pg 58 : Floating Like a Goat

   There was a time, Shayana, when I wore my era's equivalent to your dreamcatchers and rebellious T-shirts. I had aspirations. I was giddy with my own sexual power - a simulacrum of power fed by the illusions of youth and a type of wan beauty, but power of a kind nonetheless.