Common-place: Round Table Discussion of "The Crucible of War" I'm halfway through the book.

The Electric Company Digital Archive

Rogue cattle are causing big problems for Mayne Island : "'They're like hippies -- they sleep all day and roam all night,' said Robson on Friday. 'I got to keep an eye on them. They go quite a ways at nighttime. I spend quite a bit of time looking for them.'"

Where did all the (Edinburgh) Italians go?

some West Coast jazz from Drew

"The cliff line looks like a turkey on a slicer. The Red-winged Blackbirds doing legato notes with a curious timbre. Bright orange shoulders. The sound a combination of machine and cat. Excellent group riffing.

Sparkling early evening sunlight on ocean waves."

more pet sounds @ Million Poems:

"MONO/STEREO

Wouldn't it be nice
Be nice if we were
Were older then we
We wouldn't have
To wait to wait so long

And wouldn't it be
It be nice to live together
In the kind of world
Of world where we belong

You know it's gonna
It's gonna make it
Make it that much better
Much better when we
When we can say good
Night and stay
And stay together

Maybe if we think and wish and hope and pray
Maybe be then there wouldn't be a single thing

And then we'd be happy
You know it seems the more
The more we talk about it
It only makes it worse
It worse to live without it
But let's talk about it
But wouldn't it be
Good night baby sleep

Nice
Stay
Morning
New
Spend
Close
Through
Times
Kiss
Maybe
Run
Then
Single
Do
Could
We'd
Be
Seems
Talk
Worse
Without
But
About
It
It
It
It
It
It

Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba"

If a Dissertation Proposal was like Bush's Articulation of Foreign Policy...

"This is an important dissertation I will write. It will be long. It will use words. My wife knows books, and knows words. She is an asset. This will be an important dissertation. It has far-reaching consequentialisms. It will be difficult, but the department must continue to give me fellowship support. I cannot predict how long it will take me to write this. I will use a computer. First I will write notes. I may read a few books. I will take breaks to bale hay (at least when the press is around), and to go jogging, since a Mens sans corporatam fiduciam ... I can't remember how the whole Latin American version of that healthy body healthy mind thing goes. Its unimportant. What is important is my dissertation. I am determined to write it. I will remain determined to write it. Those who doubt my resolve only give aid to my doubters. This is too important a dissertation for there to be doubts. Let there be no doubt. I will write this dissertation. This will be an important dissertation. God bless my undertaking."

Get Out the Led : "Here Bonham captures the true sound of the drums he hears in his head, and not the 'biscuit tin' sound of drumming in a studio, by moving the microphones away from his kit so that 'what you hear on 'When the Levee Breaks' is not just the sound of Bonham's drumming, but the way in which the drums react to the acoustics of the room they were in.' "

big review roundup from The News includes nice words about "Hammertown"

Moribundia: "This is where England most truly excels: in all the characterful shabbiness of its drizzled parks, soiled launderettes, frayed tailors, abject chemists, sparse barbers, bare foyers, dun pubs, weary Legion halls... and cowed solitary cafes."

Coach House Books has reprinted Gerry Gilbert's 80's classic Moby Jane, for which I wrote a blurb (my only one so far) that was printed on a bookmark!

Hepster's Dictionary--comes on like gangbusters, creeps out like the shadow...

Great character actor Victor Argo ( After Hours/Bad Lieutenant/Crimes And Misdemeanors/Ghost Dog: The Way Of The Samurai/King Of New York/Last Temptation Of Christ/Mean Streets/Smoke/Taxi Driver/True Romance) 1934-2004

(thanks drew's blog-o-rama)

Ancoats, Manchester's Little Italy

(thanks Plep)

Mexperimental "Culture is to the beginner a karoake. The beginner just came in. What's old is new to him or her. Even him or herself. He or she is innocent. He or she can afford going into stage fright. The karoake makes this possible. A culture that has ended but that we barely know. This is our first time experiencing it or how we show we came to be one with it. The beginner sings, close enough to the real lyrics, close enough--giggling--to the original voice, its harmony. To the beginner culture is pure joy. Karoake helps when we know the culture we live in is no longer ours. We transform this alienation into a fun pain, an adventure into being seen by others, a funny shame or a singer's security; how we perform how we would behave or look life if this culture we live in was ours."

Bush's necktie produces TV wardrobe malfunction: "His selection, navy with small white dots, produced a moire (pronounced mwa-RAY) effect. Simply put, that's when a pattern being photographed interferes with the grid pattern on television screens, creating an eerie, shimmering visual. "

thanks languagehat for these Corporate Etymologies

Talking Points Memo: "I saw a man on autopilot, and a pretty crude autopilot at that. "

from the archives of the Coach House Press---The Pre-Linguistic Heights/ Golders Green/ The LSD Leacock/ Borders/ Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada

(thanks ::: wood s lot :::)

Wonkette: "Short Bush News Conference: If my answers cannot distract you from the miserable failure that is the Bush foreign policy, perhaps my tie will.

Apparently, Bush and Gorelick have the same wardrobe consultant. How can we trust people to run the country if they can't dress for television?"

kudos to 2003-2004 BCHL Champions, Nanaimo Clippers Junior A Hockey Club: "On April 10, 2004, the 2003-2004 Nanaimo Clippers captured their first BCHL title in 26 years with a 3-2 victory over the Salmon Arm Silverbacks in Game 5 of the BCHL Finals. " Last time they won it, Kev was still in town!

Rumsfeld Looking Forward To Secretary's Day: "'I know it's just a silly Hallmark holiday,' Rumsfeld said of the annual event now formally known as Administrative Professionals Day. 'Even so, I have to admit that seeing that bouquet of flowers on my desk... Well, it makes me feel real good.'"

The Early Days of a Better Nation: "The uprising could fizzle. Already, however, it has revealed that the US-led occupation of Iraq is built on sand. The Fallujah insurgents and the Army of the Mahdi, few in themselves, have drawn mass - not necessarily majority - support. What must be far more worrying for the US is what props to its rule the insurgents have kicked away. The IGC puppet government, to which a very nominal 'sovereignty' is supposed to be handed at the end of June, is scurrying to dissociate itself from the US military's handling of the situation; hence the IGC negotiations with the insurgents. Given how unwelcome to the US military these negotiations must be, one can imagine what pressures the IGC must have brought to bear. Perhaps the whole arrangement might have been on the point of collapse. The IP, ICDC, and even the Iraq Armed Forces, built up over the past year, are not just unreliable but in many cases actively hostile. Of the allied troops, the least reliable are the ex-commies, with the possible exception of the Poles, who were never very commie in the first place. Bulgarians, Ukrainians and Kazhaks are unlikely to be called to the imperial colours again any time soon. Gestural allies with symbolic contingents are vulnerable to hostage-taking and other casualties, and therefore a liability. Second and third tier imperialist forces - Spain and Italy - are militarily solid but politically weak. Their troops will fight until they're withdrawn. The Spanish are leaving in a month or two. The Salvadorans are basically US colonial troops, blooded in occupying their own country for decades, and therefore sound. And then there are the Brits, reliable militarily and politically but privately shaking their heads, if not holding their heads in their hands, at the sight of a counter-insurgency strategy derived from that splendid positive role model of a winning approach: Israel.
"

Matt Taibbi--The real Vietnam Syndrome is amnesia. : "While Democrats and Republicans fight over who best to stick with the blame for our Southeast Asian ass-whipping, both sides remain completely blind to the fact that Vietnam was not really Johnson's or Nixon's Vietnam, any more than Iraq is Bush's Iraq. Vietnam was, first and foremost, Vietnam's Vietnam--and the current absurd debate about the comparison between the two wars has proven that the vast majority of Americans still have trouble grasping that fact"

Equanimity: "It's leaf-casing-on-the-sidewalk day in Between the Uptown Parks."

Corot A&A: Three landscape sketches

Constable Sketch (undecipherable, possibly hills or clouds) (verso)

A Break in the Road - Luke Whittaker download and mix the sounds of the city....

how come no one told me about this terrific Daniel Nester poem?

"ARRAIGNMENT OF A BEACH BOY

Mike Love has ruined America. He has made ours a primitive boring land,
Censoring Brian Wilson, our country's only attempt at art song.

And now Mike Love rests comfortably in California, hawking Kokomo burgers
With his orangutan eyes, orange Republican beard, and fake west coast Alan Watts Buddhism.

He has deprived us of songs beautiful enough to mark our conception,
Thus making us all less intelligent. He has exiled our Mozart to a room with quarts of chicken fried rice.

Mike Love, who blundered Beach Boy harmonies all his life,
Who toured the world with comb-over hairdos and Andy Cap hats.

I condemn him for slurring this century's only true melodist,
Now writhing at a piano with a stroke victim voice.

Mike Love, who sang exactly what he was told for five years, then rebelled,
Exiled his god to a quarter century of carbohydrates, mind control, air filters,

This is the traitor to the state, this is the war criminal who rhymed vibrations with the excitations,
Ruining a symphony, who fucked up the theramin part in Germany,

Mike Love rests comfortably, like some dictator in his dotage.
Who will accuse the happy goat on the cover of Pet Sounds

For not serving its country, biting the hands off the second guy from the right?
These were the hands of a man who turned the knobs down in the studio,

Who asked a genius, What's the bottom note? What's the bottom note? What's the bottom note?
And now Mike Love rides the gravy train to state fairs, Desert Storm rallies,

Endless Summer greatest hits packages, duets with The Fat Boys and John Stamos.
For ruining America, I summon the spirit of William Carlos Williams,

Who endured Eliot, the wasteland that set American poetry back 20 years.
I summon Santayana, who exposed our fake gentility with queeny aplomb.

I order every long-haired Englishman who jacks up the price of vinyl
To repent. I call Mike Love to a tribunal, assembled to condemn his quashing sins,

All the songs that could have been written after Mike Love, all the babies born stupid after him,
All those fallen asleep to his misdeeds."

jane dark's sugarhigh!--Down with the quickness
"By editing out the human pauses of theatre, of mise en scene, and cutting relentlessly from one creaturely burst to the next, the moments in which the human gathers itself, composes itself, are excised from the screen and disallowed for the audience. As a film, it is absolutely filmic; of its viewers, it requires total creatureliness. This may explain its multiple nods to Sam Peckinpah (particularly Pat Garrett), or why the only character allowed much characterization ('Steve Marcus') is pointedly the creep. Nothing, I fear, can explain the Richard Cheese lounge-against-the-machine version of 'Down With The Sickness' mid-film (genius) or do justice to the apparition of Jim Carroll's 'People Who Died' (weepingly le choix juste) during the closing credits, before it dissolves into the original of 'Down With The Sickness' and the last burst of speed overtakes the tale entirely."

Carrie Snodgrass, 1946 - 2004

Will I see you give more than I can take?
Will I only harvest some?
As the days fly past will we lose our grasp
Or fuse it in the sun?

Hey, What Happened to My Jesus?: "Although I choose not to attend the Christian church anymore, I'm still culturally Christian; it's hard to shake. I know all the stories and the names of the characters from my time reading the Bible as a child. A personal favourite was Taylor's Bible Stories, a weighty tome given to me by my grandmother, where bearded, ZZ Top-esque dudes could be found herding sheep in their 900th year.

If I find my fantasy version more comforting than Mel Gibson's blood-soaked interpretation, please, Lord, forgive me."

<$Xvarenah$>: "Von Trier is a true Gnostic; & he is just as disagreeable as one of them would be if transported to the 21c."

Started this blog a year ago today.

MARSHMALLOW PEEPS IN OUTER SPACE!