group show (including poet Lisa Robertson and named after her book) The Weather opens in Vancouver at the Charles H Scott tonight

Extraordinary Rendition: "While the nation focused on Richard Clarke's allegations last week, CIA director George Tenet let slip other revelations in his testimony to the 9-11 Commission, admissions that sharpen the contours of the shadowy intelligence practice called 'extraordinary rendition.'
The policy, codified in the late 1980s to allow U.S. law enforcement to apprehend wanted men in lawless states like Lebanon during its civil war, has emerged in recent years as one of America's key counterterrorism tools, and has now expanded in scope to include the transfer of terrorism suspects by U.S. intelligence agents to foreign countries for interrogation�and, say some insiders, torture prohibited inside this nation's borders. "

Niagara Falls freezes and stops, 1848

Frame Enlargements from Stan Brakhage films

Birdsong albums fly off the shelves

"Willows" abridged too far
"But the Disneyfication of "The Wind in the Willows" is more insidious. Because, as Evil Clones are wont to do, Disney's Toad has gone back to wipe out the original, replace it with himself and cover his tracks. Only those who know to poke around will discern the plunder, and by that time the real treasure may be long gone. When our library's vintage copies of "The Wind in the Willows" finally wear out, the Great Illustrated Classic, with its sturdy library binding will be all that's left. And the only hint of the desecration will be the ambiguous but friendly "adapted by" bit on the title page. We'll find Mole sick of cleaning. Toad flinging horrid little wagons. Mole sitting in his chair with a bubble of Badger over his head. Cleansed of "divine discontent and longing," bereft of "poetry of motion," with Mole never taking time out to smell Home, Little Portly neither lost nor found, and no Pan pipes to be forgotten by Rat or reader. Greatly diluted and poorly illustrated "classics" will be the literary legacy left to our children."

Dictionary of the Scots Language Crivvens!

The Fight Against Shostakovich Revisionism: "What motivates these flat-earthers? It's hard to say without putting them on the couch, but what Taruskin, Fay and Brown have in common on their CVs is a halcyon student period in the old Soviet Union where life was spartan and Shostakovich was a secret language which no-one in the west had yet cracked. They cannot forgive Volkov for his unmasking, nor can they retract their own theories without looking like idiots. And so they flourish, these red-rimmed nostalgists, fighting a Cold War from tenured positions, heedless of the discredit that they heap on the indiscipline of musicology and on the reputation of the Soviet era's greatest hero, Dmitri Shostakovich."

No Rock&Roll Fun: "Julie Burchill believes that we're all children of Thatcher and McClaren, but this misses that they're actually one and the same: she came from a grocers, he came from a trouser shop; they built their position on the back of the working classes preaching the virtues of self-interest, while making sure they got more than their share of the spoils. And none of them have done anything decent since Jubilee Year."

The Canadian Empire "'From there, we could have shipping to Cuba, the Bahamas, even touching the north of South America ... this represents two billion a year in exports for Canada.' "

Bernie Worrell's prepared piano on Funky Dollar Bill .

FUNKENTELECHY

Smoking Dope with Thomas Pynchon (thanks Metafilter)

Banned Music

thanks Exclamation Mark for these cat's eyes!

Talking Points Memo
"Anyone who has ever been young -- which, I suppose, includes everyone -- remembers some shameless whippersnapper who had an older brother, or older sister, or some other sort of protector. And from under the wing or shadow of that protector they'd hurl all manner of taunts and insults and boasts at all the other little kids, confident that none of them could fight back or do anything about it.

Which brings us to Condoleeza Rice. "

Paul Krassner on the "drug war"
"Dr. L. had been convicted for what he sardonically describes in an essay on the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons' website as 'the heinous crime of prescribing Tylenol codeine for the treatment of migraine syndrome in a couple of ladies.' They turned out to be undercover operatives for the Medical Board of California. "

scroll down for a boo at the amazing looking Bollywood album that E l s e w h e r e failed to get at an ebay auction--the same thing happened to me with Jamieson's Scottish Dictionary.

Guess "Hammertown" didn't make the cut at the BC Book Prizes...

Happy Birthday Cecil Taylor!

"Obviously I'm fascinated with words. And without thinking of rhythm in language, but knowing that it's there, and reading a lot of different people, finally what happens is the same thing that happens when we are involved in music. I listen to a lot of different music. For instance, today I listened to Chinese Classical music--which I really didn't dig too much, but I'll listen to it again--I listened to Islamic chants that really knocked me the fuck out. And just single voices. I listened to Duke Ellington's Orchestra circa 1945-- there was one piece that was just amazing. I listened to Victoria de los Angeles singing Purcell's 'Diedere and something or other...' and then I listened to Gary Grafman playing the first movement of the Brahms piano concerto. Brahms, boy I tell you--then I listened to Leonard T. Price singing the last movement of Richard Strauss' 'Solome.' Boy--what what a-- wheeew--boy, that guy--I have to go to see that guy. A lot of shit was up. And then, of course, of course--I listen every day to something by Ligeti. Today I heard 'Ramifications' and this choral piece, and 'Atmospheres.' Then I listen every day to [he chuckles] Marvin Gaye, of course. Then I put on Sarah Vaughn, then I put on Xenakis--oh, this fucking guy--this orchestra piece, and then I'm--god, I mean I practiced the piano four hours today. I spent two hours completing another section of this poem this morning. I cooked, I mopped all the floors in this house, and I've done all this stuff. And not one cigarette I can't understand it. No champagne, anything... "

Guy Davenport reviews the new Pound editions.

new from Vancouver--Seven Oaks: A magazine of politics, culture, and resistance

Gillian Slovo on Anna Karenin
"We were all sitting ducks, then, for Dostoevsky. "

Snackspot: " As sickly sweet as you can imagine. The caramel is encased in its own chocolate section atop what is essentially half a KitKat Chunky, so caramel and wafer do not actually meet. Imagine, if you will, a giant rectangular shaped Rolo merged on top of the bottom half of a regular KitKat Chunky and you get the idea. Nice when you are eating it, but you get the idea pretty quick that this will make you feel nauseous five minutes after finishing it. Your instincts are correct. "

Chaplin and Crane

"Taking his courage in his hand, Crane had mailed a copy of Chaplinesque to its subject, who had, surprisingly, written back a nice letter about it. To Crane's immense gratification, Chaplin recalled the exchange and the poem on the evening they met. Chaplin later wrote in his autobiography that when he said to Crane that poetry was a 'love letter to the world', Crane had replied, 'A very small world.' "

<$Xvarenah$>: "Capitalism wouldn't work if it was a 100% rip-off. But 90%--and people praise it unstintingly."

R E W I N D - R E C O R D S great d 'n b downloads--cruelly exposing the subwoofer deficit at the Manse, however...

Salmon Label Art

Third Factory Notebook faintly damns Alice Munro with a Johnny Depp comparison worthy of Armond White at his most contingent-- "I read the one and watched the other in a perfectly amiable and receptive state of mind, hoping for the best, but Munro's even competence was no more compelling than "Secret Window"'s steadily-worsening stupidity and both, I suspect, will pass from memory with very little trace in the coming few days. "

While the mild condescension toward Munro shown here is far from the misogynistic fury displayed by the likes of Brian Fawcett, I've never understood (or had satisfactorily explained) why she raises the ire of so many gatekeepers of the avant-garde. A clue here, though, might lie in the gap between a panglossian model of memory (from which the expendable and regrettable are immediately purged) and a natural overvaluation of one's essential amiability and receptiveness (hoping for the best!), neither of which get you much traction in Munro's universe.

(This post restored since yesterday, removed for crabbiness but no one seemed worried. Last night I tried to read the Munro story and I'm afraid the Factory was pretty much on the money, though Munro has certainly earned her present "filling in the corners" evenness of tone. But I kept nodding off. I'll wait for the DVD of that Depp movie, though.)

Save Women's Centres in BC. Read and then sign the petition.

Remnick on Liebling

"In the light of what Proust wrote with so mild a stimulus, it is the world's loss that he did not have a heartier appetite. On a dozen Gardiners Island oysters, a bowl of clam chowder, a peck of steamers, some bay scallops, three sauteed soft-shelled crabs, a few ears of fresh-picked corn, a thin swordfish steak of generous area, a pair of lobsters, and a Long Island duck, he might have written a masterpiece."

new oed entries are occasionably
Occitanic

under the fire star has Akuri, a lovely sounding egg dish

gmtPlus9 has a rockin' Moon Mullican Mp3 this week

Happiest of birthdays honey.

a very nice little Coleridge dictionary

"glory-- a ring or spot of light (a natural phenomenon during misty weather in the mountains of the English Lake Country)"

Douglas Wolk on the Fleetwood Mac re-issues.

Haven't seen it yet, but any movie that gets its title from"Eloisa to Abelard" by Alexander Pope can't be all bad--

"How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd;
Labour and rest, that equal periods keep;
'Obedient slumbers that can wake and weep;'
Desires compos'd, affections ever ev'n,
Tears that delight, and sighs that waft to Heav'n.
Grace shines around her with serenest beams,
And whisp'ring angels prompt her golden dreams.
For her th' unfading rose of Eden blooms,
And wings of seraphs shed divine perfumes,
For her the Spouse prepares the bridal ring,
For her white virgins hymeneals sing,
To sounds of heav'nly harps she dies away,
And melts in visions of eternal day. "

but it may have to wait until after I've seen Hellboy...

pdf's of earlier issues of ecopoetics can be found here.

Out inspecting the storm damage. Yesterday started out clear with a howling gale which brought in the big rain. When the power came back on I went out for the mail, the sky blue overhead, thin yellow cloud southeast through which the sun shone, big gun-metal grey stormcloud over downtown. The effect of the wind on the mild spring shower droplets through the blue sky and the bright low sun was to bathe everything in a super sharp platinum light, with distortion where the stormcloud met the horizon. Sometimes under similar conditions one sees crisp vignettes of normally smudged distant hills, those days when you can see Mount Baker but not Mount Benson.

Ecopoetics arrived from Buffalo, stuffed to the gunnels.

Found (as authentic storm jetsam) a flyer (with a picture of a wrecked bungalow) for a company (with 24/7 & within a half-hour service) specializing in:

. Nuisance Home Clean Ups
. Fire & Flood damage
. Grow-Op Rebuilds
. Impact & Vandalism
. Pet Odours
. General Contracting
. Furnace & Duct Cleaning
. Death Scene Clean Ups
. Carpet Repairs/Installs
. Mold & Mildew Abatement

thanks Glosses for LEOPOLIS, beautiful photos from L'viv in the Ukraine

the great John Hurt profiled in Salon. I bummed a Camel from him once.

<$Xvarenah$>

"It takes a peculiar skill to drive an old car fast over bad roads: & this is the kind of writer i've become."

Hannah Weiner--Clarivoyant Journal

many photographic collections at the George Eastman House

Julia Margaret Cameron's Idylls of the King photographs

Johnson's Chair

Cowper's Summer House

Rumsfeld Hosts No-Holds-Barred Martial Arts Tournament At Remote Island Fortress

"Rumsfeld, wandering among his collection of antique torture implements and feeding candied figs to his golden langur, said he remains unmoved.

'See here,' Rumsfeld said, indicating a gold-encrusted Minoan iron maiden. 'It is difficult to associate horrors with the proud civilizations that created them: Sparta, Rome, the knights of Europe, the Samurai. They worshipped strength, because strength is the fundament for all other values. I shall find the strongest of all, and together, we shall shake the world to its very foundations.'"

Dani Siciliano - Likes you may know her from her vocals on Matthew Herbert's records

The New Auterism

"Nothing like this is done in Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle. Here is a film that works with a space that is nearly incoherent and where the quick changes of locations (and the visual impact that comes from those quick changes) are far more important than is a need to explore them. And yet McG makes wonderful use of this strategy, creating a space/time relation that has nothing to do with any of the usual norms of probability, but from an idea of immediate meaning that exists in a constant flux according to how its characters experience whatever is happening on the screen. Many lazy critics write this film off as another by-the-numbers blockbuster, but truth be told, we never know what will happen in the next shot, even if after a while we start to expect something both silly and in bad taste."

The poetics of babytalk

"'Babytalk is full of poetic features, such as metrics and phonetics,' Miall said. 'I was surprised by how systematic it is, and how it works to shape and direct attention.' "

Gandalf Gets Swivey on the Wheels by Sasha Frere-Jones
"The hometown crush is crunk, our own version of dancehall: full of fire, committed to staying local, and not all that interested in moving from A to B. Consistency puts trunk salesmen on the red carpet and asses between windows and walls. And yes--I discount your beats if your MC is a jerk who asks a woman to do anything against her will, including but not limited to adjusting her purple Lycra bicycle shorts. Call me uptight, feminist lite, or Dionne Warwick's water bearer, but people have no right to treat other people like Kleenex. Do Tim and Magoo get a pass here? A thousand times no. 'Cold Cutz' is the least appealing sexual metaphor in a pretty bad month, and the video for 'Indian Flute,' from Tim and Magoo's current Under Construction Part II, is a sexist (and racist, bonus beat!) piece of shit, but, hey, they're not Lil' Flip, whose work I cannot debase any further than he has himself. AnD--please lower the neon 'get out of jail' sign from the rafter--Tim works with Missy. Tim works with Missy. Add 4,000 points. Not fair? Did I leave the text behind? Go on any hip-hop video set and ask a woman shaking her butt into a fish-eye lens what the fucking text is. "

NYPress on Craig Baldwin and Jon Mortisgu :

"They might be pretentious or insufferable were it not for two factors: Baldwin's George Carlin-ish sense of the absurd and his supple cutting, which marks him as one of the most skilled and surprising editors in American cinema. "

Sugar, by Marshall Sokoloff--pictures of rusty boats (thanks kottke.org)

The Tyee: A "Terrorist" with Lots of Local Fans

"The Plum Tree"

"The Romance of Zion Chapel"

"Little Pilgrimage Among French Inns"

19th cent. American pictorial book covers

way detailed review of upcoming SCTV on DVD

On Hearing That a Friend Has Attained a Position of Influence in the East (for RS)

How fortunate
the riders arrived
just in time,
silhouetted against the pink sky
as they closed the gap.

What a stroke of luck
the signatures remained legible
when every other word
was streaked
with our unreadable tears.

But if proof were not demanded
so much the better,
these bus locker keys
the ragged index
of our faces
slipping on the cobblestones
as we land face up
in each others arms.

In the shielded cities of limestone
such paper cuts
are public policy,
so how fortunate it was
that our full immersion
in their stagnant waterparks
protected us from their ravines
full of hungry ghosts,
rattling and flapping
the torn bunting of their suits,
gnawing at their watchbands,

or Wendigo himself, barely crawling--
but what a good thing he did--
out of Erin's bonfire
during the harmonic convergence,
the end of ironic Elvis
immediately
preceding the end of history--
Scheider snowballing Prochnow
in "The Fourth War", the green cigar
of Chavalas, Donald Sutherland's
Christ, the apotheosis
of Don Rickles---

So what great good luck it was
that the tanks arrived
before I was forced
to invoke the holy turbines,
the hoodoos of Airdrie,
or the famous last night
when the place that never closed
closed, the Lux
the Marine Club, the Pofi
Bar...

sending us blinking
into the silty membrane
of a mackeral spring shower.

Scottish Fairy and Folk Tales Index
THE TWO MICE.

THERE was a mouse in the hill, and a mouse in a farm.

"It were well," said the hill mouse, "to be in the farm, where one might get things."

Said the farm mouse, "Better is peace."

(thanks Plep)

Julianne Swartz in the Whitney: "Standouts in this piecemeal kingdom are David Altmejd, Eric Wesley, Mark Handforth, possibly Christian Holstad and Matthew Ronay, and certainly Julianne Swartz, whose stairwell installation fills the air with the sounds of 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow.' "

Dim Sum Cart

ambrosial Dim Sum with Harlan, Eli & co. @ Sun Sui Wah Seafood Restaurant on Sunday

eat cheap in NYC but beware the Bisquick naan

Overlap: Drew Gardner's Blog

"Poetry has the capacity to deal with the nonevents of life in a way that other art forms couldn't possibly manage."

Photos of Toronto Ravines

Petting Cafes!: "It is tempting, on the evidence of this book, to compile a list of disgracefully honest answers to the question: 'What did you do in World War Two, Daddy/Mummy?' These could run: 'I inspected housewives' larders to make sure that they had no more than a week's food'; 'I drove young women round town, sending them into shops to see if they could trick the assistants into supplying goods off ration'; 'I was sent to jail for hiding my Canadian Army lover in a wall cupboard for a month'; 'I blew safes in the Blitz, relying on bombs to drown out the noise'; 'I blew safes for the Army, in North Africa and Italy'; 'I flogged coffin lids from the crematorium to cabinet-makers and shrouds to the underwear workshops'; 'I reported publicans for decorating their premises without a licence'; 'I was a tart, under orders to badger my clients for petrol coupons'; 'I was in Army Intelligence and was loaned to the police to help stamp out crown and anchor games'; 'I was a policeman trying to stop people sending flowers from Cornwall to London by rail'; 'I worked for the London County Council making sure that fan-dancers gave nothing away, and that comics were not corrupting servicemen with dirty jokes.' "

Underwater Times is just what it says! thanks as always to the mighty Metafilter

body in my neighbourhood goes undiscovered for 3 years: "Gyger had watched since the spring of 2001 as the high plywood fence around Ekonomides' bramble-covered land weathered and greyed. He'd noticed the gate never opened any more, and that the Ford pickup truck and Lincoln Continental inside the compound were caked with mould."

Lost Brooklyn

Al Qaeda bombed Madrid trains, claims email

Terry Southern reports from the 1968 Democratic Convention (thanks ::: wood s lot ::: )

"I wonder what can be in the mind of a politician," someone mused. Seaver translated it for Genet, but he was not intrigued. "I wonder," he said, staring at the dashboard of the Ford car we were in, "what can be in the mind of someone who names an automobile Galaxie?"

Scores die in Madrid bomb carnage:
"The Basque regional president, Juan Jose Ibarretxe, stressed that Eta does not represent the Basque people.
'When Eta attacks, the Basque heart breaks into a thousand pieces,' he said. "

Film Comment: Joseph Losey

blissbog hits a nerve on "record collection aesthetics":

"Sonically, it's a movement that isn't really moving: people scrabble around to shuffle together some fresh-seeming (meaning slightly-less-stale) combination of established elements from the last 20 years of electronic dance music's rich history(probably the most disheartening dance experience last year for me was watching Luke Vibert live dusting off the 303 again--acieeeeeeeeezzzzzzzzz). With all the period sounds being juggled and obscure archival sources coming in and out of favour, it's at the point of there being a 'record collection dance' just like there's been 'record collection rock' since the Jesus & Mary Chain. Retro-Dance to match Matt's Retro-Rock TM. (For what it's worth, I think electronic non-dance is probably in even less impressive shape--when was the last really head-rearranging new sound to come out of IDM?). "

Sub-Masters at the Anthology "Trippy fact-fiction remixes, Baldwin's movies play with history by plundering the celluloid dumpsters of decades past, and embracing seemingly outre frameworks for understanding existence and power: Spectres of the Spectrum (1999) grooves on fringe science; Sonic Outlaws (1995) documents copyright fighters Negativland via Baldwin's own poaching from The Wizard of Oz; and Tribulation 99 (1992) links alien invasion to American meddling in Latin America. Each took years to make; Baldwin begins from massive accumulations of ideas and footage around a central topic, then whittles down his materials into episodic collages of sound and image. 'My movies are very much like pulp serials,' Baldwin notes, 'because there's cheap special effects, starts and stops, graphic interludes, and no pretense to realism.' "

for the Vinegar Hill demographic, The Note's take on what Kerry can learn and not learn from Dean

"Unknown Soldier" Speaks Out To Bring Troops Home :

"What did you think about President Bush's Thanksgiving visit to Iraq?

--I was there when President Bush came to the [Baghdad] airport. The day before, you had to fill out a questionnaire and answer questions, that would determine whether they would allow you in the room with the President.

What was on the questionnaire?

--"Do you support the president?"

Really!

--Yes.

Members of the military were asked whether they support the president politically?

--Yes. And if the answer was not a gung-ho, A-1, 100 percent yes, then you were not allowed into the cafeteria. You were not allowed to eat the Thanksgiving meal that day. You had an MRE."

More on Arthur Russell

"It sounds balmy but provisional, with its cheap synths and half-swallowed guide vocals. Russell's singing always seemed to be mostly for his own enjoyment (when it creeps into 'Is It All Over My Face,' late in the song, the effect is like Glenn Gould humming along with The Goldberg Variations), but hearing it here almost feels like eavesdropping. 'Wild Combination' and 'Arm Around You' could have been demos for much-better singers' pop-soul hits around 1985--but we don't have those hits; we only have these sketches, thin with erasures and additions and re-erasures. Sometimes there's nothing more to them than a pitter-patter drum machine, a fluttering keyboard, Russell's tentative murmur. It's imperfect. Live with it. "

Russell is a terrific singer though--his "half-swallowed guide vocals" closer to John Martyn than Glenn Gould.

Not Coming To a Theatre Near You terrific movie site (via Metafilter)

more Julianne Swartz, w/ more little Quicktime movies

excellent site (with movies!) of NYC artist Julianne Swartz --I was luckily able to live among her work for a week while staying with Lee Ann in Williamsburg a couple of years ago.

Happy birthday Ornette! (flash)

sad to hear about the passing of Paul Winfield but good to see a recognition of his moving and memorable performance in the underrated Mike's Murder

lovely images of The Art of Reading, including the Virgin Mary reading to the toddler Jesus. Made me think of Mina, who's been photographing & painting everyone reading her worn-out & yellow post-it buntinged Penguin "Capital".

no looking at this until you try the quiz below--

Peter Quartermain posts some Basque Zukofsky on the Poetics list--

"Zatoz itzal, zatoz, eta jaso itzal hau gora,
Zatoz itzal itzal, zatoz eta jaso hau gora,
Zatoz, itzal, zatoz, eta jaso itzal hau gora,
Zatoz, zatoz itzal, eta jaso itzal hau gora,
Zatoz, zatoz eta itzal, jaso itzal hau gora,
Zatoz, gora, zatoz itzal eta jaso itzal hau,
Eta gora, zatoz, jaso itzal, zatoz itzal hau,
Eta gora, zatoz, zatoz itzal, jaso itzal hau,
Eta zatoz itzal, zatoz gora, jaso itzal hau,
Zatoz gora, zatoz hau itzal, eta jaso itzal,
Gora, hau itzal, zatoz eta jaso itzal, zatoz
Hau itzal, jaso eta zatoz gora itzal, zatoz
Jaso eta zatoz, itzal, zatoz gora, hau itzal,
Gora, zatoz eta jaso itzal, zatoz itzal hau,
Zatoz gora, jaso itzal, eta zatoz itzal hau,
Zatoz eta jaso itzal, zatoz itzal hau gora,
Itzal, itzal zatoz, zatoz eta jaso hau gora,
Zatoz, itzal, jaso, eta zatoz itzal hau, gora,
Zatoz itzal, zatoz, eta jaso itzal hau gora,
Zatoz, itzal, zatoz, eta jaso itzal hau gora."

Audrey Brown & much more at <$Xvarenah$>:

"'What were his thoughts, as in the meagre room
Poured full of waning lilac-silver air,
He strove to cheat the velvet-fall of gloom?
What were his thoughts, as she, her glowing hair
Latticed with trembling pearls, her joyous feet
Buckled and shod with gold,
Trod cream-whitre marble nine good centuries old?'"

thanks ::: wood's lot for Colin Piquette's "The Haiti Coup Coalition"

"It looks like Paul Martin is already putting his mark on foreign affairs, with a shameful pandering to America in this. It was interesting to watch the hesitation in Foreign Affairs as the old hands working to save democracy in Haiti got the rug pulled out from under them by what Jamaica is already calling 'new Canadians' - not meant to imply an improved version. I guess the business at any price types in the Liberal party have finally gotten their way."

Jacket 25 - Leo Edelstein reviews "Memoir 1960-63" and "Nine Immaterial Nocturnes" by Tony Towle:

" Hudson and Worth

As the car alarms disconcertingly
respond to each other's pitch
I look down the former Anthony Street,
a former Anthony myself, where the moon
is full on the ears of Leon the donkey
and the hibiscus tree remains untamed
but picturesque and leaning a little forward
as if to peek between the curtains to the asphalt below
where a diagram of the 1943 Battle of Kursk has been laid out
in myriad notations of red and orange.
Notice the arrows near the parking lot. They
are Rossokovsky's T-34's, which will pierce the German salient.
At sunrise, faculty from the military college
will utilize jackhammers to simulate the clamor of battle
and trace the route of the attack. We ruminate in our bunkers
until the lesson is complete."

Polls Show Electoral Map Favoring Kerry

MONTAGUE TERRACE

Scott Walker

A 'Shocking' Stumble

"Another less-publicized aspect of the ad flap: the use of paid actors--including two playing firefighters with fire hats and uniforms in what looks like a fire station. 'Where the hell did they get those guys?' cracked Harold Schaitberger, president of the International Association of Fire Fighters, which has endorsed John Kerry, when he first saw the ads. (A union spokesman said the shots prompted jokes that the fire hats looked like the plastic hats 'from a birthday party.') 'There's many reasons not to use real firemen,' retorted one Bush media adviser. 'Mainly, its cheaper and quicker.'"

The Surrealist Compliment Generator

Haiti in perspective - CBC's Counterspin

Franz Kafka Selected Shorter Writings fine translations of a Nanaimo teacher

Bonzo and George Studdy

Ginger Geezer

Nostalghia

Art News

"The danger isn't over when the art emerges from its package. Skluzacek remembers the damage to a valuable canvas caused by a King Charles spaniel. "The dog attacked a 19th-century British landscape painting that had a hunting scene with a rabbit in it," says Skluzacek, who was asked to appraise the damage. "The dog ate the rabbit," she explains. One of heiress Doris Duke's dogs walked through a painting, according to Charles von Nostitz, a New York restorer, but it wasn't clear what the dog was after.

Cats can be destructive, too. Dorit Straus, vice president and worldwide fine-art manager at Chubb, received a claim for a large Abstract Expressionist painting that had been damaged when a cat urinated on it while spinning in the air in an epileptic fit. Von Nostitz once worked on a Roberto Matta painting worth several hundred thousand dollars that had been knocked into a lamp and torn to pieces by a cat. "This was one of the cats in the Friskies commercials," von Nostitz adds, in recognition of the temperamental nature of celebrities. "

"Ordinary Canadians"

"The American People"

The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War (from Metafilter)

Sasha Frere-Jones on the "Goodbye Babylon" gospel box: "The idea of blood as somehow cleansing when it's outside your body is a terrible and powerful idea. Walking up from New York's Bowling Green subway station last week, I became aware of the big hole to my left--Ground Zero--as I listened to Joshua White sing 'I Don't Intend To Die in Egypt Land.' His performance is low-key, less hysterical than much of Goodbye, Babylon. He sings, 'I don't intend to stop till I reach the promise land/ I don't intend to die in Egypt land.' The words jolted me and made me look up. The site is covered with American flags--some official placards welded to the fence, others homemade tributes made from flowers or bits of paper. And there, inside the perimeter fence, is the only visible relic of the two towers: two steel beams welded together to make a cross. Goodbye, Babylon makes the agnostic in me want to jump and shout. The empiricist in me can't help but notice the road out of Babylon is paved with sorrow and blood, usually someone else's."

act fast and download The Kleptones present..."Yoshimi Battles The Hip-Hop Robots" "This is not Art- This is a mixtape."

Beau Dick

at Vancouver's CAG--Supernatural--Beau Dick and Neil Campbell --Curated by Roy Arden
Exhibition Dates: March 12 – April 25, 2004:
"Traditional Northwest Coast artists have almost entirely been excluded from exhibiting in a contemporary art context, usually exhibited with other First Nations artists or within the context of the anthropological museum. Supernatural aims to question this aesthetic apartheid, producing another opening for serious consideration of the relationships between cultures and their traditions. "

Picture Sheffield

mysterious, semi-permanent rainbow over Sheffield University

kudos to Altercation's Charles Pierce for coming up with not only "The Avignon Presidency" but "C Plus Augustus".

thanks gmtPlus9 for Rudy Burckhardt - An Afternoon in Astoria (flash)

more great Brooklyn sights at Satan's Laundromat--
"New Kantacky Fried Chicken and Eleven-Seven are across the street from each other and SUPPOSEDLY under the same ownership."

lovely Smiths article:
" There was one devotee in particular, a young man who spent his recreational periods at our school thumping first-years and selling single cigarettes, and I watched as he paid homage to this camp bedazzler onstage and danced around with unfettered joy wearing his mother's beads. I had no choice but to recognise that the world was suddenly making itself available for improvement, and it was all Morrissey's fault."

Eric Alterman on our friends in the press:

"'a massive array of evidence,' 'a detailed and persuasive case,' 'a powerful case,' 'a sober, factual case,' 'an overwhelming case,' 'a compelling case,' 'the strong, credible and persuasive case,' 'a persuasive, detailed accumulation of information,' 'the core of his argument was unassailable,' 'a smoking fusillade... a persuasive case for anyone who is still persuadable,' 'an accumulation of painstakingly gathered and analyzed evidence,' 'only the most gullible and wishful thinking souls can now deny that Iraq is harboring and hiding weapons of mass destruction,' 'the skeptics asked for proof; they now have it,' 'a much more detailed and convincing argument than any that has previously been told,' 'Powell's evidence... was overwhelming,' 'an ironclad case... incontrovertible evidence,' 'succinct and damning evidence... the case is closed,' 'Colin Powell delivered the goods on Saddam Hussein,' 'masterful,' 'If there was any doubt that Hussein... needs to be... stripped of his chemical and biological capabilities, Powell put it to rest.'"

Gustavus Myers, A History of Canadian Wealth, ch 16: "There was," he said, "a little line of railway--I passed over it since --along the sea coast from Victoria to Nanaimo, a distance of 70 miles, the construction of which was scarcely necessary ; and to promote the construction of that railway nearly all of the coal lands of the Island of Vancouver were granted to a syndicate, the greater proportion of the capital being held in San Francisco by the Southern Pacific Railway magnates. I pointed out this fact at the time but the lobby influences here, the backing here, were too strong ; the grant was made, the coal lands have gone ; and the other day we were informed, in discussing the militia estimates, that the reason coal was so high when purchased in Vancouver Island, was that there was a monopoly, and we ourselves created that monopoly by the grant of the Nanaimo Railway Company."

Nanaimo 1892: "The nomenclature of the streets and squares is an interesting study which affords a clue to some of the distinguished and enterprising capitalists who promoted and have fostered and developed the coal industry of Nanaimo until it has arrived at its present immense proportions: there are Roberts street and Lubbock square (1), after the well known bankers of London, and Fitzwilliam(2) and Milton(3) streets, in honor of the scions of the noble Earl of Fitzwilliam, who have in early days made the tour of the province, notable, Lord Milton, whose travels in the upper country are part of Colonial history. The memory of the late Justice Haliburton, a former chairman of directors of the Vancouver Coal Company, and of world wide renown as the writer under the nom de plume of 'Sam Slick,' is perpetuated by one of the longest streets. And the honorable directors of the company, Galsworthy(4), Tendron(5), Prideaux(6), Selby, Irwin and Fry, Campbell, Young and other supporters of the company's adventure with other celebrities, such as Robins, Finlayson, Robson, Dunsmuir(7) and others, are handed down to posterity as familiar household words." 1. Absorbed in the last decade. I think my friend Rob might have been the last person to have had it as a postal address. 2. The old library was on this street. 3. Always identified with the poet in my mind. 4. Gone 5. Gone 6. I lived on this street. 7. The muddy truckpath at the bottom of our yard is still called "Dunsmuir Avenue" on the maps, a joke well into its second century.

thanks Coudal Partners for the splendid Chicago's grid mile by mile

I hope that "Cold Mountain" at least causes a few people to pick up the incomparable William Bartram, 1739-1823. Travels Through North & South Carolina, Georgia, East & West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges, or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws

From the alligator attack chapter, which must have given Coleridge many a sleepless night:

"I now prepared for my return to camp, which I succeeded in with but little trouble, by keeping close to the shore, yet I was opposed upon re-entering the river out of the lagoon, and pursued near to my landing (though not closely attacked) particularly by an old daring one, about twelve feet in length, who kept close after me, and when I stepped on shore and turned about, in order to draw up my canoe, he rushed up near my feet and lay there for some time, looking me in the face, his head and shoulders out of water; I resolved he should pay for his temerity, and having a heavy load in my fusee, I ran to my camp, and returning with my piece, found him with his foot on the gunwale of the boat, in search of fish, on my coming up he withdrew sullenly and slowly into the water, but soon returned and placed himself in his former position, looking at me and seeming neither fearful or any way disturbed. "

Panoramic Photography | Shipbuilders at the Gray`s Harbor Yards of the Grant-Smith-Porter Co., Aberdeen, WA

Lotte Jacobi portraits

Hilary Mantel : Some girls want out:
"Rudolph Bell's book Holy Anorexia (1985) concentrates on Italian saints, and is especially rewarding for connoisseurs of the spiritually lurid. St Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi lay naked on thorns. Saint Catherine of Siena drank pus from a cancerous sore. One confessor ordered Veronica Giuliani to kneel while a novice of the order kicked her in the mouth. Another ordered her to clean the walls and floor of her cell with her tongue; when she swallowed the spiders and their webs, even he thought it was going too far. Scourges, chains and hair shirts were the must-have accessories in these women's lives. Eustochia of Messina stretched her arms on a DIY rack she had constructed. St Margaret of Cortona bought herself a razor and was narrowly dissuaded from slicing through her nostrils and upper lip. St Angela of Foligno drank water contaminated by the putrefying flesh of a leper. And what St Francesca Romana did, I find I am not able to write down."

Dream Anatomy

all of Calvin and Hobbes apparently

amongst a bunch of Metafilter stuff on Seattle kid's show hosts this profile of clam house eccentric Ivar. I remember his Acres of Clams sponsored Monty Python for the local PBS affiliate.

By request, I have added a search feature to this blog. It lives at the bottom of the scroll where the archives are now too.

Delmore Schwartz on Wallace Stevens, Master of Reality:

"Finally it would be wrong, in thus emphasizing his original genius, not to speak of how traditional his poetry is, how Stevens continues and renews the greatest rhetorical mode in English, the mode of blank verse in which Shakespeare and Milton wrote. Here, from the conclusion of Academic Discourse in Havana is a passage which representative at once of Stevens' eloquence, his possession of poetic tradition, his conception of the poet's role and conviction that poetry may be 'an infinite incantation of ourselves':

... Is the function of the poet here mere sound,
Subtler than the ornatest prophecy,
To stuff the ear? ...
As part of nature, he is part of us.
His rarities are ours: may they be fit
And reconcile us to our selves in those
True reconcilings, dark pacific words ...
Close the cantina. Hood the chandelier.
The Moonlight is not yellow, but a white
That silences the ever-faithful town.
How pale and how possessed a night it is,
How full of exhalation of the sea. ...
All this is older than the oldest hymn,
Has no more meaning than tomorrow's bread
But let the poet on his balcony
Speak and the sleepers in their sleep shall move
Waken, and watch the moonlight on their floors.
This may be benediction, sepulcher,
And epitaph. It may, however, be
An incantation that the moon defines
By mere example opulently clear...


How, reading such passages, which are a multitude, can we fail to understand the poet's triumphant affirmation: 'What more is there to love than I have loved?' and lived? The Hoon--the human alone--which he calls himself in a number of poems became in his recent work Jocundus; his poems became 'the auroras of Autumn'; Peter Quince "at the clavier" became "Professor Eucalyptus," declaring that "the search for reality is as momentous as the search for god," making continual "addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas," and once more reporting, in the last poem of his collected volume, on "the thing itself"; a bird's "scrawny cry," in the first morning, is that of a "chorister whose c preceded the choir," it is a part of "the colossal sun's choral rings" and it is truly "a new knowledge of reality": Prince of the realm and of English, majestic voice, sovereign of the mind and of light, master of reality."

Yawning Animals

"Fourth Term"

"Trade Barrier"

FDR Cartoon Collection Database

Happy Centennial Dr. Seuss!!:
"Geisel had a contract to write a children's book. The purpose of the book, initially, was to build and rehearse early reading vocabulary. He was told that he could write whatever he wanted so long as he only used words from a list of some 250 very simple words. That was it. He could not use any word that was not on that 250 word list. Well, he kept getting stuck, starting a story line using words on the list and then finding himself unable to advance the story or even back out of the plot because he would have to use a word not on the list. Eventually, he switched strategies. He stopped thinking in terms of plots and characters and started with the words themselves, finding rhymes and rhythmic combinations and playing with associative linguistic slides from one word set to another. "

Dr. Seuss' War Cartoons

Metafilter has this detailed how-to for Russian Tea--

so why not bust out some Lower East Side cupcakes?

"On a recent afternoon, I watched the girls ice in tandem. The flick of the wrist, the descending wad of butter cream that doubles the size of the tiny cupcake, it all looked so familiar.

'Certain colors sell better,' says Williams, auburn-haired in a do-rag, mixing a moody shade of blue. The best-selling color, she says, is pink. 'Male, female, they all want the pink. Peach never really sold so well--'"

Ginger & Fred in the TLS
"Still holding her, but now with one hand moving surely to the back of her waist, Astaire leads Ginger into a walk. It's a don't-you-remember walk, until, at the end of the phrase, he arches right back, pulling her with him, so that they tip together, enough to make it a matter of risking her balance and his. From here on,though there remains a rich didn't-we-used-to-have-fun subtext, we're in the present tense, fast and funny. The stops and starts, the hesitations and sudden spurts, the fun of finding how well they work together again, the little mime/dance quarrel, a whole series of suddenly-tipping-over steps, the rapid side-by-side hops and tap phrases, the whirling spin-turns: the alchemy of dancing with a partner has never been made more immediate. "

Breaking Out Vancouver Hip-Hop: "Such an estimation was confirmed for me on a recent excursion to East Van's Butchershop Floor, a space where a gaggle of tragic hipsters had gathered to watch a band of art-school ironists skewer rock 'n' roll conventions. Revolted by a surfeit of sarcasm, I stepped outside, where a trio of teenagers calling themselves Main Offenders were peddling copies of their debut EP (The Upper Hand) for $10 to passersby. At one point, a stranger toting an accordion stepped up and started playing a riff, over which MO's beatboxer ILL-Literate laid a drum pattern, inviting his mate Aspire to spit a freestyle. Over the next two minutes, the spindly teenager hurtled passionately along, wowing a dozen onlookers with his spur-of-the-moment rhymes. If it's always darkest before the dawn, Aspire's astounding improv suggested that the sun may soon rise on Vancouver hip-hop. And as for The Upper Hand, it was worth every penny. "

Sleeping by the Mississippi--photographs by Alec Soth
"Over and over again I fall asleep with my eyes open, knowing I'm falling asleep, unable to prevent it. When I fall asleep this way, my eyes are cut off from my ordinary mind as though they were shut, but they become directly connnected to a new, extraordinary mind which grows increasingly competent to deal with their impressions."

Charles Lindbergh, writing about the twenty-second hour of his transatlantic flight in The Spirit of St. Louis.

* Dusted Reviews - Arthur Russell *: "It's too late, though. There is only this music, an open, rolling form that saturates all physical space not designated by architectural limit. It is something palpable everywhere, an excessive sensual immersion: the doorways, the inner ear, in the narrow area between pant and legs. All over your face. Preserved by its wax entombment, but ultimately contextually destroyed. Here are the records we listen to at home alone. That Alicia Bridges 12" that you found at your local thrift store. This work may lack the socially definitive answers and clues, but ultimately it points to the city. It's like the complete field recordings of Alan Lomax, minus the carefully compiled tomes on Folk and World music. Beautiful, moving work that sings of social interaction and lifestyle, but not quite enough clearly to explain it all on its own. "

The Happy Poster Project print 'em

elegant S F-J on Arthur Russell : "The gray scrim of irony that settled over the nineties shortly afterward would not have been a nurturing environment for their art, either. Russell and Haring both saw that dance music was the avant-garde's silent partner. History and hip-hop have proved them right. "