Of guns, roses and small fandoms
Thursday, October 30th, 2008Pyramid pimping! The first business of this post is to pimp the new small fandoms community for pimping your obscure, esoteric, tragically hip fandom in any medium. It started a couple of days ago and has mushroomed mightily already. Come along and proclaim your out-of-the-way love. (Do read the posting rules first - the idea is to keep posts brief and confine flailing to the comments.)
Speaking of the out-of-the-way, the other day while house-hunting I took shelter from a heavy rain shower in an obscurely located antique shop where I found, in a dingy glass case, some old guns, including a few flintlock pistols, one stamped “Madrid 1820″ — think highwayman or pirate pistols, with two barrels and two triggers, engraved metal, fancy side hammers and the whole sexy works. The asking prices were $100 for a cute stubby one and $120 for a serious long-barrelled number just made for waving at toffs with a cry of “Stand and Deliver! Your money and your wife!” There’s a chance they’re genuine; Thailand specialises in fake Buddhas, not fake European firearms. I also found, elsewhere, a bottle of Cannabis Rose perfume, which I had been looking for without much hope of finding it in BKK. Very nice, bloody expensive. However, Stu managed to find a bottle much cheaper in London, so I shall soon be smelling of dope and roses. I don’t know if I’ll get a gun, but I’m hopefully going back with a friend to fangirl over them, and I guess I might give in. What I would do with it, I don’t know, other than play dress ups. Sell it, probably, if it’s worth as much as the ones for sale online. If I ever want to bring it home I’ll have to get written permission from the police, which is less than I need if I want to bring home a sword.
After lunch I found a horse-shaped Swarovski crystal chandelier, probably a copy of this one designed by Stella McCartney. Here’s the one I saw:
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Ok, I’m not going to buy that. I also found some interesting trumpet flowers, orchids growing on a tree outside a Starbucks, and the jungle reclaiming a vacant lot near a station:
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A couple of days later, at a shopping mall, I was menaced by creatures of the night (uncommonly tall they were, too, for Thai creatures):
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Last, but not least, and speaking of the dead, I came across this news item from a few years ago. The American artist Shishaldin applied for permission to marry the late Isidore Ducasse, aka Comte de Laureamont, author of Maldoror. Yes, under French law you can marry dead people, apparently without their consent. I’ve been unable to find whether the nuptials ever went ahead. If they didn’t, or even if they did, I wonder if I could marry him too. Would it be bigamy to be married to a live man and a dead one, or for a dead man to be married to two living women? Could we still have a honeymoon in Vegas? At any rate, I hope Shishaldin did marry him. She sounds like his type, according to this article :
“She went on a high-fiber diet of Kashi to promote spiritual revelations, auctioned off her DNA on eBay, and subsisted on a regime of foreign-acquired lactation drugs so as to nurse herself with her own breast milk. That all three efforts failed (no visions were had, eBay deleted her auction, and the drugs just made her sick) is beside the point. In her world of artistic eclecticism, it’s the idea that counts.” (Or comtes?)
I’m down with it being the idea that counts. I think I’ll call my writing/non-writing of book#2 performance art — a five year long piece titled “She is Indisposed; She Flails; She Subsides; She Eats Chocolate”.