Marcel Broodthaers interviews a cat (MP3)

Doin' The Banana Split!

"The Forest Rangers"

another nice Charles Willeford site

Charles Ray Willeford, Sergeant, United States Air Force & United States Army

more Willefordiana: Susan Waggoner ("Pepper")'s Vinegar Pie Recipe from "Miami Blues"

pastry for a 9-inch pie crust
1 Cup seedless raisins, all chopped up
1/4 cup soft butter
2 cups sugar (granulated)
1/2 teaspoon cinammon
1/4 teaspoon cloves
1/2 teaspoon allspice
4 large eggs, separated
3 tablespoons 5 per cent vinegar
1 pinch of salt

Cream the butter well with sugar. Add spices and blend well. Beat in yolks with a beater till smooth and creamy.
Stir in chopped raisins with a wooden spoon. Beat egg whites with a dash of salt until they are soft, then slide onto sugar mixture. Cut and fold lightly but well. Turn into pastry-lined pan. Bake fifteen minutes in preheated 425 F. oven. Reduce heat to 300 F. and bake for twenty minutes longer, or until top is beautifully browned and center of filling is jellylike. Cool on a rack for two or three hours before cutting.

for Mina and Pete Cummings: Charles Willeford's "Cockfighter Journal"

The Italian Futurist Book

Bruce Sterling's "Ten Technologies That Deserve to Die"

Whitstable Museum and Gallery: Photo Gallery
Spent an odd melancholy couple of days alone on the Kentish coast after I'd done readings in London and Cambridge. Whitstable a grand little ship shape town, famous for big skies and various seafood/beer combos (oysters and Guinness, or what I had, potted prawns on toast with the local St. Augustine Ale) and paradise after the depressing and slightly scary Margate, where I convinced myself that I'd gotten Verlaine and Rimbaud's old room in the unfriendly, windows-painted-shut b & b.

Ander Monson road trips into Canada in "Bridge Trilogy"

Hollywood super-hunk Andrew Jackson: "In one of several joint marketing efforts between the Treasury and consumer goods companies, the bill's design will grace bags of Pepperidge Farm's Goldfish crackers, and the crackers themselves will be colored to match the new bills. "

i s h k u r 's guide to electronic music

Louis Menand on the Chicago Manual of Style: "The notion that the personal computer has eliminated the bone-crushing inefficiency of the typewriter, and turned composing The End Matter into a drive in the word-processing park, belongs to the myth that all work on a computer is “fun”—one of the Digital Age’s cruellest jokes"

Renewable Brooklyn good cause, great sounding concert Oct 4th

Guardian Unlimited reviews Buck 65: Talkin' Honky Blues

Canadian DJ/rapper Buck 65's flash site

more from David Perry: "We were meeting in the tree house to plot our escape from wage slavery at the pencil testing facility. We didn't know enough to keep the new kid away and he kept coming back.... "

thanks Metafilter for Tufts Perseus Digital Library, home of

Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor

Simplon Postcards Home Page

EXPO 58 beer mats

The Cleveland Press Shakespeare Photographs wonderful production stills

Daphne Oram, electronic music pioneer: Francis Bacon, New Atlantis: "Wee have also Sound-Houses, wher wee practise and demonstrate all Sounds, and their Generation. Wee have Harmonies which you have not, of Quarter-Sounds and lesser Slides of Sounds. Diverse Instruments of Musick likewise to you unknowne, some sweeter then any you have; Together with Bells and Rings that are dainty and sweet. Wee represent Small Sounds as Great and Deepe; Likewise Great Sounds, Extenuate and Sharpe; Wee make diverse Tremblings and Warblings of Sounds, which in their Originall are Entire. Wee rep resent and imitate all Articulate Sounds and Letters, and the Voices and Notes of Beasts and Birds. Wee have certaine Helps, which sett to the Eare doe further the Hearing greatly. Wee have also diverse Strange and Artificiall Eccho's, Reflecting the Voice many times, and as it were Tossing it; And some that give back the Voice Lowder then it came, some Shriller, and some Deeper; Yea, some rendring the Voice, Differing in the Letters or Articulate Sound, from that they receyve. Wee have also meanes to convey Sounds in Trunks and Pipes, in strange Lines, and Distances."

Delia Derbyshire: "'My most beautiful sound at the time was a tatty green BBC lampshade,' she recalled. 'It was the wrong colour, but it had a beautiful ringing sound to it. I hit the lampshade, recorded that, faded it up into the ringing part without the percussive start.
'I analysed the sound into all of its partials and frequencies, and took the 12 strongest, and reconstructed the sound on the workshop's famous 12 oscillators to give a whooshing sound. So the camels rode off into the sunset with my voice in their hooves and a green lampshade on their backs.' "

COCONINO-CLASSICS- Une ressource encyclopédique sur l'histoire de la narration graphique

new Raintaxi online

DJ!! (flash)

Edward Said: "The total rejection, the utter irrational condemnation, the blanket denunciation of complex phenomena such as Wagner is an irrational and finally unacceptable thing, just as in our situation as Arabs, it has been a stupid and wasteful policy for so many years to use phrases like 'the Zionist entity' and completely refuse to understand and analyse Israel and Israelis on the grounds that their existence must be denied because they caused the Palestinian nakba. History is a dynamic thing, and if we expect Israeli Jews not to use the Holocaust to justify appalling human rights abuses of the Palestinian people, we too have to go beyond such idiocies as saying that the Holocaust never took place, and that Israelis are all, man, woman, and child, doomed to our eternal enmity and hostility. Nothing historical is frozen in time; nothing in history is immune to change; nothing in history is beyond reason, beyond understanding, beyond analysis and influence. Politicians can say all the nonsense they wish and do what they want, and so can professional demagogues. But for intellectuals, artists, and free citizens, there must always be room for dissent, for alternative views, for ways and possibilities to challenge the tyranny of the majority and, at the same time and most important, to advance human enlightenment and liberty. "

Red House by Ray Dipalma, from faux below

Fauxpress presents Alan Davies, Douglas Rothschild etc etc

A Sight Which Can Never Be Forgotten archaeology of American massacres

Jurassic pot plants on sale soon

Lateral Science Tesla coils, radium clocks, galvanic experiments &c.

Laurable returns!

A missing Cash crop, from TV to Dylan

New Yorker essay on Eric Hobsbawm

Happy Birthday Dmitri Shostakovich

Bubbles by Bill Berkson (from the excellent Louise Brooks website)

Spirals in Nature: The Magical Number behind Hurricanes and Galaxies: "You can visualize the effect by imagining an old-fashioned record album spinning on a turntable. Suppose you draw a chalk line from the edge of the record to the center while it is spinning -- the line will be curved even though your motion is straight."

The Globe and Mail: "Under certain weather conditions, sound can refract, and the focal point may be many miles away from the source.
The sound may actually be louder at the focal point (many miles away) than it is in the immediate vicinity of the explosion.
'Today is a typical day, with clouds, when you'll get a temperature inversion,' he said Wednesday. 'This is a classic situation where you have a focusing of sound. It might be further out than you think. It might even be in Vancouver.' "

Nanaimo blast could have been an exploding meteoroid: Astronomer

Happy Birthday Glenn Gould : "The role of the forger, of the unknown maker of unauthenticated goods, is emblematic of electronic culture. And when the forger is done honor for his craft and no longer reviled for his acquisitiveness, the arts will have become a truly integral part of our civilization."

BOLLYWOOD VINYL

Why was I not informed of this?: "Some writers have genial relationships with their critics. Jilly Cooper responds to positive reviews by sending the reviewers thank-you notes and even presents. A colleague of mine received a bar of soap and a note thanking her for the 'darlingest' review, though she was later peeved to hear that the authors of some even darlinger reviews seemed to have got champagne. "

David Kipen: "This time around, according to Merriam-Webster's Wilkinson, the 11th edition bounced not just snollygoster but also microcopy, microreader, microreproduction, record changer, portapak, pantdress, pocket-handkerchief, poke bonnet, vitamin G, lantern pinion, frutescent, impudicity, wool stapler, long play, retirant, sheep-dip, ten-cent store and traffic manager. A few hundred more, too, but nobody keeps a special list. "

Sonnets galore at Metafilter

Bellona Times brilliant and right on as ever today. I didn't know Yeats had said that about Keats--he'd better not come around here.

Bellona Times : Modernist Class Post above led me to re-read this classic thread.

hi-tech voter fraud

The archives seem to be slowly coming back.

The day the sky stood still: "A contrail is not smoke, as I fancied as a child. It's not even an emission, really, at least not in the true sense of the word. Much of what you see when you look at a contrail is water that was present in the atmosphere before the jet came along. A contrail is a cloud, as surely as a thunderhead boiling up over a prairie on a summer afternoon. A cloud of ice, birthed by the happenstance of a passing jet."

Isabel from space

from New Years by David Perry (braincase c/o
Noah Eli Gordon PO Box 1471
Northampton, MA 01061) :

"CAT STOPS HER PACING in response to my glance. I thought I was being smooth. "

"Tuesday, September 23, 2003
We have had to take the archive pages for most Blog*Spot sites offline. We are in the process of gradually bringing them back and hope to do so as quickly as possible"

as of 11:41 Blogger time

Equanimity - if not a poetics, then what?: "Involuntary sensation this morning of biting into an immense powdered donut." And when he woke up, his pillow was gone!!

Straight down the line standard issue Elvis/Colonel Parker boilerplate ignores (as usual) '68 comeback, "From Elvis in Memphis", Vegas triumphs. I'll take "Elvis Country" over "Let it Be" anytime, thanks...

After Theory by Terry Eagleton: "Cultural theory as we have it promises to grapple with some fundamental problems, but on the whole fails to deliver. It has been shamefaced about morality and metaphysics, embarrassed about love, biology, religion and revolution, largely silent about evil, reticent about death and suffering, dogmatic about essences, universals and foundations, and superficial about truth, objectivity and disinterestedness. "

Officials unable to explain powerful blast that shook Nanaimo (CP WIRE) I think it was a meth lab personally...

Happy Birthday Ray Charles

and John Coltrane (flash)

End of line for Redbird subway cars-- I had one of these all to myself my first ride to Coney, except for some lazy pigeons who rode free for a couple of stops.

Robert Wyatt in the Financial Times

from Metafilter:

University of Glasgow collections

flash sight for Paul Greengrass' excellent BLOODY SUNDAY--those White House honchos who recently screened Pontecorvo's "Battle of Algiers" might want to check it out...

my Dad had about fifty mis-remembered versions of this song

for Steve and Jennifer: the lonesome passion of Lorenz Hart

I wanted to wait until it was actually in my hands before I said anything, so am pleased this morning to announce that my book of poems "Hammertown" is out from New Star Books. It costs 16 dollars in Canada, 12 in the US, and it's ISBN is 1-55420-000-8. It will be launched at KSW in Vancouver on the 18th of October. I will also be reading from it at St Mark's in NYC on the 22nd (with George Stanley), SUNY Buffalo on the 24th (with Bernadette Mayer) and Aerial Edge Books in Washington, DC (with George again) on the 26th. Anyone reading this within range of those spots is cordially invited.

NICK DRAKE: Exiled From Heaven : "Postmodern urban cynics will already be busy deconstructing this. A bourgeois fantasy of rural life that never existed; a dream; an evasion. Well, yes; up to a point. I've lived in the countryside for fifteen years and I can see what it 'really' is as I speed through it in my car. Certainly, it's as much a social construction as anything else is, or isn't. But after writing the previous paragraph, I went downstairs to make a cup of tea and, when I paused to look out of the window, the human-husbanded utilitarian landscape of interlocking lanes and fields and neatly-pruned woodland which I normally see was suddenly deep, suddenly enveloping. I'm living in the country, I realised, as if briefly coming awake. And it's magical. Minutes later, after the kettle boiled, my ecstasy had lapsed and the view had returned to normal. So was the experience 'real'? It arose through contemplation summoned by writing 'poetically' about the outer world as inner experience. And the fact is that if we could live in that state all the time, that enveloping, magical view would be reality. "

Fat Ninja of Love (flash)

Lots to see in NYC

A Bad Impression : " I don't blame Johnson for this train wreck of a show. If anything, I feel for him, since his money, and the splashy art it lets him make, get him public scrutiny that an Ohio butter sculptor doesn't have to face"

Happy Birthday Anna Karina

A sulphur plume rises above Io

Britain's drowned landscapes

Tribute to Prince Far I

By bye Galileo

Goreyography

Hellfire Nation: "Americans commonly attribute their economic advantages over a lethargic and decadent Europe to the fact that free enterprise in the United States does not find itself shackled to a bloated public sector. While social welfare provision is much more restricted than in Europe, the prison statistics qualify the notion that Americans dislike big government. America has more than six million citizens in jail, on probation or on parole, with an incarceration rate, Morone notes, five times higher than other industrialised democracies. Inside America's slimline government there's clearly a big state trying to get out: 'Only an unusually muscular state could push 3 per cent of the adult population into its criminal justice system.' "

Alexander Trocchi article in the Guardian: "'I am living my own personal Dada,' he would write. 'For a long time, I have suspected there is no way out.' "

My Cottage Unroofed By Autumn Gales Du Fu

"In the eighth month autumn's high winds angrily howl,
And sweep three layers of thatch from off my house.
The straw flies over the river, where it scatters,
Some is caught and hangs high up in the treetops,
Some floats down and sinks into the ditch.
The urchins from the southern village bully me, weak as I am;
They're cruel enough to rob me to my face,
Openly, they carry the straw into the bamboo.
My mouth and lips are dry from pointless calling,
I lean again on my cane and heave a sigh.
The wind soon calms, and the clouds turn the colour of ink;
The autumn sky is black in all directions.
My ancient cotton quilt is cold as iron,
My restless children sleep badly, and kick it apart.
The roof leaks over the bed- there's nowhere dry,
The rain falls thick as hemp, and without end.
Lost amid disorder, I hardly sleep,
Wet through, how can I last the long nights!
If I could get a mansion with a million rooms,
I'd give all scholars joy and shelter from cold.
Solid as a mountain, the elements could not move it.
Oh! If I could see this house before me,
I'd happily freeze to death in my broken hut! "

previous via Plep plus more

Autumn Poems

Sighs of Autumn Rain (3)

Sighs of Autumn Rain (2)

Sighs of Autumn Rain (1)

The Church Of Me:

"And then there is 'Telstar.'

Poor misbegotten bastards, the Tornados. Yes it's Thatcher's favourite pop record (which would have no doubt horrified Meek), yes it's been played to death, but ERASE all of that. Imagine you are listening to this for the first time. It is heartbreaking. The audacious intro (20 seconds of electronic crackle, interference and bleeps) which leads into a rapid ascent of a strange processed organ/guitar line (over the same 'Johnny Remember Me' galloping rhythm) which sounded like nothing else which had ever made the charts, or indeed like nothing anyone had ever heard (Sun Ra's records didn't start becoming available in the UK until 1965/6, and even then only as expensive imports). It imparts some awesome idea of hope, welcomes the future yet simultaneously realises its own redundancy. It is a future desired but transitory and unlikely to happen, underlined by the strange processed vocal which adds itself to the final refrain, and its ultimate disappearance into the electronic void (another 20-second fade-out). It was, as the sleevenotes state, already Joe Meek's epitaph. It was simultaneously #1 in Britain and America in October 1962, at the height of the Cuban missile crisis, and could quite easily have been the last song you ever heard. Think about that when you listen to this for the first time."

via Metafilter...

the Gram Parsons Notebook

wood's lot helps us celebrate Samuel Johnson's birthday with a lovely picture and a bunch of links

Do Not Pass Go: The Culture of Control

Bruno Schulz: "One thing must be avoided at all costs: narrow-mindedness, pedantry, dull pettiness. Most things are interconnected, most threads lead to the same reel. Have you ever noticed swallows rising in flocks from between the lines of certain books, whole stanzas of quivering pointed swallows? One should read the flight of these birds ... "

monkey

Sir John Soane's Museum

Flash Giacometti

Benson Bubblers: Cool Water for the People

Victorian Art - and water

The Bridges of Portland, Oregon

The-Incredible-True-Facts-Of-Space:
"time resonator perfected! just back from 1982, visited the Mobile Al, Sears store #1056, I actually smoked a cigarette while trying out their typewriters. The sales guy, who seemed very professional by the way, offered me a light. Oh and the Atari display was fantastic, played Space Invaders and a game I have never seen before, called Canyon Glider.

Will attempt to travel to 1979 later this week."

NPR : Stefanie Nagorka, Do-It-Yourself Sculptor

Autumn Almanac Ray Davies

From the dew-soaked hedge creeps a crawly caterpillar,
When the dawn begins to crack.
It's all part of my autumn almanac.
Breeze blows leaves of a musty-coloured yellow,
So I sweep them in my sack.
Yes, yes, yes, it's my autumn almanac.

Friday evenings, people get together,
Hiding from the weather.
Tea and toasted, buttered currant buns
Can't compensate for lack of sun,
Because the summer's all gone.

La-la-la-la...
Oh, my poor rheumatic back
Yes, yes, yes, it's my autumn almanac.
La-la-la-la...
Oh, my autumn almanac
Yes, yes, yes, it's my autumn almanac.

I like my football on a Saturday,
Roast beef on Sundays, all right.
I go to Blackpool for my holidays,
Sit in the open sunlight.

This is my street, and I'm never gonna to leave it,
And I'm always gonna to stay here
If I live to be ninety-nine,
'Cause all the people I meet
Seem to come from my street
And I can't get away,
Because it's calling me, (come on home)
Hear it calling me, (come on home)

La-la-la-la...
Oh, my autumn Armagnac
Yes, yes, yes, it's my autumn almanac.
La-la-la-la...
Oh, my autumn almanac
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Floodgates

I love late September; last night the lavender light through the tree spaces, this morning the sun came out and it started raining at the same time, and then a great cool apple smell drifted in, and I can re-readthis

ACE Doubles Image Library

The Mrs. Miller Story

Frank Sinatra Has a Cold

Federal Weed

josh blog: "I thought Geoff was talking to himself in the next room. But I forgot that I was playing a Glenn Gould record."

from Bellona Times...

Aaron D. Wolf on the legacy of June Carter Cash: "In a memoir, as she reflected on that “Ring of Fire” that brought her and John together, Mrs. Cash confessed: “Christ died for people like me. People who mess up their lives and stand shaking in their boots with guilt, wondering if they’re really going straight to hell. But he tells us to repent . . . That’s what I did.”"

PDF of Kreg Hasegawa on McCaffery's Uncollected

from Adorno's Minima Moralia (1944) via Ezra Mark and Daniel Comiskey:

OUT OF THE FIRING LINE. — Reports of air attacks are seldom without the names of the firms which produced the planes: Focke-Wulff, Heinkel, Lancaster feature where once the talk was of cuirassiers, lancers and
hussars. The mechanism for reproducing life, for dominating and for destroying it, are exactly the same, and accordingly industry, state and advertising are amalgamated. The old exaggeration of skeptical Liberals, that war was a business, has come true: state power has shed even the appearance of independence from particular interests in profit; always in
their service really, it now also places itself there ideologically. Every laudatory mention of the chief contractor in the destruction of cities,
helps earn it the good name that will secure it the best commissions in their rebuilding.
[...]

The total obliteration of war by information,commentaries, with camera-men
in the first tanks and war reporters dying heroic deaths, the mish-mash of enlightened manipulation of public opinion and oblivious activity: all this
is another expression for the withering of experience, the vacuum between men and their fate, in which their real fate lies. It is as if the reified,
hardened plaster-cast of events takes the place of the events themselves. Men are reduced to walk-on parts in a monster documentary film which has no
spectators, since the least of them has his bit to do on the screen.

Eric Alterman: Altercation: "The champion will have the honour, no, no, the privilege, to go forth and rescue the lovely Princess Fiona from the fiery keep of the dragon. If for any reason, the winner is unsuccessful, the first runner-up will take his place. And so on and so forth. Some of you may die, but it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make."

"We rented a garret, for which we paid (I think) 25s. a year, bought a few second-hand forms and desks, borrowed a few chairs from the people in the house, bought a shilling's worth of coals, had the gas (which was already in the house) laid on at the cost of a few shillings, and started our College."

1932-2003

More Bass

the everyday life of a coal mining town

all about the Wilsons

"Well, you wonder why I always dress in black,
Why you never see bright colors on my back,
And why does my appearance seem to have a somber tone.
Well, there's a reason for the things that I have on.

I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down,
Livin' in the hopeless, hungry side of town,
I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime,
But is there because he's a victim of the times.

I wear the black for those who never read,
Or listened to the words that Jesus said,
About the road to happiness through love and charity,
Why, you'd think He's talking straight to you and me.

Well, we're doin' mighty fine, I do suppose,
In our streak of lightnin' cars and fancy clothes,
But just so we're reminded of the ones who are held back,
Up front there ought 'a be a Man In Black.

I wear it for the sick and lonely old,
For the reckless ones whose bad trip left them cold,
I wear the black in mournin' for the lives that could have been,
Each week we lose a hundred fine young men.

And, I wear it for the thousands who have died,
Believen' that the Lord was on their side,
I wear it for another hundred thousand who have died,
Believen' that we all were on their side.

Well, there's things that never will be right I know,
And things need changin' everywhere you go,
But 'til we start to make a move to make a few things right,
You'll never see me wear a suit of white.

Ah, I'd love to wear a rainbow every day,
And tell the world that everything's OK,
But I'll try to carry off a little darkness on my back,
'Till things are brighter, I'm the Man In Black."

A Book of Old English Ballads

Historic Opera photos

essay of mine from October 2001

Archive of Screenshots of Online News Sites on September 11/12, 2001

Reaplayer audio doc. about Victor Jara

The Emma Goldman Papers

Deep Bass--Animations of the Perseus Cluster

Theodor Adorno 100 today
"Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate in real life get their thrashing so that the audience can learn to take their own punishment."

big pic of saturn's rings

Stan Persky on Robin Blaser

walking the Chelsea High Line

from metafilter...

badger (flash)

happy birthday Equanimity and Million Poems:

"What heavy joy
To feel rising in me
All the noise I've been dying to make
Now that I know it'll be heard"

Cobalt Jackets

Nanaimo record store zine, rightly urging shoppers toward downtown. Nanaimo, as new resident Elvis Costello (engaged to homegirl Diana Krall, and spotted in the great "Fascinatin' Rhythm" record shop) would be the first to tell you, is a book and record shopping paradise. Yesterday in this store I scored the Capitol Masters Merle Haggard, and wistfully gazed at the new Lyrics Born 12". The day before Bob got me "The Encyclopedia of Literary Theory" (well marked up, but...) for 50 cents.: "Can you imagine a day when the Woodgrove food court is desolate, the sweet and sour pork congealed and and orange julius unwhipped, meantime people are sunning themselves on the waterfront enjoying an ice cream or sitting with their dog sipping a latte at bocca. It remains a dream because here in Nanaimo the urban sprawl continues northward, last time I motored through 'Waples' I saw that many chain restaraunts were making new homes in the Woodgrove pit.

The constant and consistent growth leads me to believe that business is booming up there, while grapes wilt on the vine in the sun soaked south. We are watching the face of our city being scarred irreversably by folks looking for the 'best deal' or shortest walk from SUV to store. "

Leni Riefenstahl Though this obit from the Guardian is more informed than most, I wonder how many of the numerous eulogists and apologists for Hitler's last living toady have actually seen her awful films? Despite its historic importance "Triumph of the Will" is a barely competent piece of filmaking, and unless you're enthralled by the subject matter, palls after about five minutes. In thirty second clips on The History Channel--re-edited by professionals like Frank Capra--it works in a kind of sub-Lang way, but to discuss it as if it were a "masterpiece" of such stature that it demanded our attention is ludicrous. We have to deal with Pound, Celine etc. but the continuing sympathetic interest in Riefenstahl baffles me. I anticipate the Jodie Foster movie with a shudder.

MOSCOW CAT MUSEUM

from the excellent Coudal Partners...

Meeting of Frontiers

cable clock

Warren Zevon: the poet of Gower Avenue

"Conchology" causes classroom havoc--I hope the Hawthorne/Lichen folks don't come after me...

Life in Elizabethan England: A Compendium of Common Knowledge

Warren and Lew

nice PDF of a poem of mine

Pom Poko was just great, the Goblin Parade as good as anything in "Spirited Away".

Skeeter Davis wanders into a De Chirico

Brooklyn Storefront Houses Of Worship

Sample Chapter (in PDF) of Marginalia by H.J. Jackson, which I am halfway through and enjoying

fierce!

Homer to Lisa, who's ghosting his restaurant reviews: "Welcome to the humiliating world of free-lance writing."

"Jazz Sahara" by Ahmed Abdul-Malik on the hi-fi today

The peerless Daily Bleed notes the births of Ariosto and Joaquin Miller

dervala.net: "Still, though. National Film Board of Canada marathons. This is the X-treme sport of wholesome dorkiness."

Salon's take on Vancouver's safe injection sites

gargoyles

then put on some Antonio Carlos Jobim...

In Search of Tad(d) Dameron

Herbie Nichols: "'...anyone who plays or even contemplates playing a song of Herbie's is making this planet a better place. This music teaches many things, but most importantly the sanctity of our minds and imaginations --
the Third World that lives in each of us.' -- Roswell Rudd"

The Burryman: "This is a quite unique ceremony dating from around the 14th century that is still performed in South Queensferry. The Burryman, a native of the town, is wrapped from head to toe in flannel on which a thick matting of spikey burrs is stuck. He then processes slowly (for walking is difficult) and in silence for seven miles through the town. A number of theories exist about the origins of this strange custom. One has it that the Burryman is a scapegoat figure, carrying off the town's guilt and bad luck in his burrs. Another believes that the procession of the Burryman was meant to bring good luck to the town's herring fishermen, the numerous burrs representing fish caught in their nets. "

The Church Of Me: "If Scott Walker was the Dirk Bogarde of Brit (or honorary Brit) introspective troubadours - grandiloquent, immense, avant-garde - then Drake would be the James Fox; always apologising for breathing, so reticent that you feel that he perhaps would have been happier within a gated religious cult (as Fox later briefly was). But it's not quite accurate to assume that Drake's world is a blissful, asexual, even pre-sexual garden; in fact, if we take Barthes' identification of the 'grain' of a voice corresponding with its 'diction' - how the singer has assimilated the 'pheno-song' and 'geno-song' components, and how the singer renders them to the not necessarily passive listener - then Drake's voice is sometimes as carnal as hell. This is obviously more apparent on early things like his reading of Robin Frederick's 'Been Smoking Too Long' where his voice is surprisingly earthy, almost Hoagy Carmichael-ish; but take a real listen to his 1968 debut album, Five Leaves Left - hear particularly his Sinatra-derived habit of extending the final consonants/syllable of key words in his lyrics, sometimes with a barely suppressed growl; the 'love' in 'Time Has Told Me'; the 'time' in 'River Man'; even the 'slave' in 'Three Hours.' His natural baritone voice confirms that everything here is suggested/suggestive - Drake's voice is, more often than you might think, very sexy"

Eric Newby's travel favorites

Literary Review: God's Fugitive: The Life of C M Doughty by Andrew Taylor

Doughty and T. E. Lawrence

A taste of "Travels in Arabia Deserta": "The new dawn appearing we removed not yet. The day risen the tents were dismantled, the camels led in ready to their companies, and halted beside their loads. We waited to hear the cannon shot which should open that year's pilgrimage. It was near ten o'clock when we heard the signal gun fired, and then, without any disorder litters were suddenly heaved and braced upon the bearing beasts, their charges laid upon the kneeling camels, and the thousands of riders, all born in the caravan countries, mounted in silence. "

never mind

st. petersburg at night

kind comments on part one of my booklist from languagehat, who I may have persuaded to read Anthony Powell...

Louisiana - U.S. Hwy. 90 - The Southern Route 66

pre-abba

DCP: 49 degrees north, 124 degrees west (visit #4)

the Degree Confluence Project, from Antti in Helsinki

Singing Postcards

Dissent Magazine - Spring 2003: "Imagine a building in which political philosophers are debating, in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, the value and the purpose of participatory parity over against forms of authoritarianism or theocracy. Now imagine that this building has no access ramps, no Braille or large-print publications, no American Sign Language interpreters, no elevators, no special-needs paraprofessionals, no in-class aides. Contradictory as such a state of affairs may sound, it's a reasonably accurate picture of what contemporary debate over the meaning of democracy actually looks like. How can we remedy this? Only when we have fostered equal participation in debates over the ends and means of democracy can we have a truly participatory debate over what 'participatory parity' itself means. "

Delaunay's Windows

Edward Gorey's Martians

...from these War of the Worlds covers

from languagehat.com...

Suomalais-Ugrilainen Seura

Encyclopedia of Cajun Culture

Neu-York © 2000 Melissa Gould (Loading slowly)

| The big Bangs: "'Anne Murray is the real thing,' Bangs wrote in Creem. "

Waldemar Cordeiro: Computer Art Pioneer

Orwell Intentioned. by Michael Tomasky. September 3, 2003.: "I admire Orwell a great deal myself. But I always wondered, why him and not, say, Albert Camus? "

new moon

Mike Davis on the recall

75 of maybe 150 "Essential Texts" in No Particular Order and not including reference books

1. Life of Johnson--James Boswell
2. Last Lunar Badeker--Mina Loy
3. So Going Around Cities--Ted Berrigan
4. Curiosities of Literature--Isaac D'Israeli
5. Pandemonium--Humphrey Jennings
6. Collected Novels--Jean Rhys
7. Tristram Shandy--Laurence Sterne
8. Collected Poems--Hugh MacDiarmid
9. Ambit--Gerald Creede
10. Planetary Gear--Ted Pearson
11. You--George Stanley
12. The Relative Minor--Deanna Ferguson
13. Europe of Trusts--Susan Howe
14. Words--Robert Creeley
15. Journals--Gilbert White
16. Swedish Letters--Mary Wollstencraft
17. Midsummer Cushion--John Clare
18. Art Criticism--Denis Diderot
19. Lost Illusions--Honore de Balzac
20. The Cloister and the Hearth--Charles Reade
21. Polyverse--Lee Ann Brown
22. The Power Broker--Robert Caro
23. The Glenn Gould Reader
24. Charlotte Bronte--Villette
25. The Fire Next Time--James Baldwin
26. Notebooks and Marginalia--Samuel Taylor Coleridge
27. Tight Corners (and what's around them)--David Bromige
28. From Next Spring--Gerry Gilbert
29. Don Juan--Lord Byron
30. Collected Nonsense--Edward Lear
31. Moominland Midwinter--Tove Jansson
32. Fovea Centralis--Christopher Dewdney
33. The Dumbfounding--Margaret Avison
34. Travels in Arabia Derserta--Charles Doughty
35. Memoirs--Thomas Bewick
36. The Seasons--James Thompson
37. The Task--William Cowper
38. A Dance to the Music of Time--Anthony Powell
39. Autobiographies--Janet Frame
40. Reveries of a Solitary Walker--Jean-Jacques Rousseau
41. Stages on Life's Way--Soren Kierkegaard
42. Book of Magazine Verse--Jack Spicer
43. Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire--Edward Gibbon
44. Street of Crocodiles--Bruno Schulz
45. Collected Poems--Basil Bunting
46. The Mediterranean--Fernand Braudel
47. The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity--Aby Warburg
48. The Journal of a Disappointed Man--WNP Barbellion
49. Martyrology Book 2--bp Nichol
50. Midwinter Day--Bernadette Mayer
51. Collected Short Novels--Collette
52. Own Face--Clark Coolidge
53. Testimony--Charles Reznikoff
54. Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror--John Ashbery
56. Anatomy of Melancholy--Robert Burton
57. Journals--Dorothy Wordsworth
58. Voyage of the 'Beagle'--Charles Darwin
59. The Fur Trade in Canada--Harold Adams Innis
60. Archaeologist of Morning--Charles Olson
61. The Kalevela--comp. Elias Lonrot
62. Collected Poems--Lorine Niedecker
63. Memoirs--Hector Berlioz
64. Marcel Duchamp--Octavio Paz
65. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym--Edgar Allen Poe
66. Diaries--Cosima Wagner
67. Essays--Arthur Schopenhauer
68. Harvest of the Cold Months--Elizabeth David
69. A Place of Greater Safety--Hilary Mantel
70. The Wind in the Willows--Kenneth Grahame
71. Imaginations--William Carlos Williams
72. Harmonium--Wallace Stevens
73. Hymns and Fragments--Friedrich Holderlin (Sieburth trans.)
74. The Wanderer--Alain-Fournier
75. Up in the Old Hotel--Joseph Mitchell

Equanimity - if not a poetics, then what?: "The new bright traffic and walk lights: they make First Avenue look like an office hallway in a British detective serial. Whereas they give Gates and St James in Brooklyn the Hollywood wet-street effect."

How Rich Are You?

Maps of Scotland

Yoshitoshi 100 Moon

EAST COKER, Somerset, England, UK

East Coker

EAST COKER Petition

ozu

Magic Lantern Site

Towards a history of the cinema theatre

names of Ganesh

exclamation mark, with thanks for previous posting

more on Ganesha Festival and much else on this wonderful blog

Ganesha

Abodes of Ganesha

Space Needle on copper

Elongated Coins (I have several of these)

Exeter Cathedral Keystones & Carvings

Happy Birthday

Horace Silver

treatment of the ill in prison

Overlap: Drew Gardner's Blog: "What caught my attention in this group, though, was Milt Jackson. The tone of the vibraphone just shoots through the room. The speakers can't hold it back. I immediatly stopped what I was doing and listened. It was like some metallic fluid spilling over the speakers, carrying waves of information about life. "

Communist Store Windows by David Hlynsky

Complete Newgate Calendar