Legalizing Torture

Manhattan from Jackson Heights, 1938

received these lovely books from
Insurance Editions
35-48 80th Street #52
Jackson Heights, NY 11372
USA


from "Knowledge Follows" by David Perry

*

The baslilisk tracks led to the Department of Anthropology
The professor's mouth formed a stone O
He stood in treated grass, the flute effects of afternoon wind
piched angle and forced right
so beautifully unlike life

He's still alive inside
soft and hot in the sun



from "Reticular Pop-Ups" by Carol Szamatowicz

Diary of Dr. Malmude

Any second now the pelts will fall off the rack,
the serpent soap its bedroll.
I dare not part from my assigned parts--
frequentor of solitide,
devil-may-care sister-mommy,
slice of light in a barque for two.
You're a real bright warm-up,
dashing through your smoke,
lights on your heels.
I dream a cold snap in the tropics,
sun slant uncertain, clock fucked
though we seem to be on time.
I scribble in the hay,
loll around in a bed of potulaca.
Got my thermos to keep me warm.
We stick to vegetable medicine,
never read the news,
ripen open the window,
vote the old city ticket
from nineteeen ought something.
All our shocks are furrowed,
above the psychic mechanisms of trash,
the economy of the few, far too few
have saved their eggs for us.



from "Daydream" by Kostas Anagnopulos

The sky employs many today
People benefit from it
They'd rather horse around
In the new addition
Too hyper for me
There's a kink in the system
They lock the loaf in the freezer
No further instructions
They mourn the day
Ultimately, they take a nap
For the better part of it
Oxygen is delivered
Cars peter out
Ramps are shut down
We need a speaker system
Minus the thunder
The sky is spoken for
The yellow-bellied sapsucker
Sings for its supper

 

The Tyee: Tyee Subscription Drive sign up for BC's best online news, it's free!

Ornette Coleman (ts) with
Don Cherry (pocket trumpet); Jimmy Garrison (b); Ed Blackwell (dr).
TRACKS:
[1] Cross Breeding
[2] Mapa
[3] Enfant
[4] Eos
[5] Ecars
Total Time: 41:05
Recorded in New York City on 22nd and 27th March 1961.
 

Robert Frank Coloring Book

(thanks Bifurcated Rivets) 

'Europe's biggest mushroom' found
"The Swiss fungus is considerably smaller than another Honey Mushroom growing in the US.
Found in the Malheur national forest in Oregon, that fungus covers 890 hectares (2,200 acres) - making it the largest living organism ever discovered. " 

Neil Young Joins a B.C Air War or "Do you do that often, or is this Crofton?

"Crofton and the mill are just a short ferry ride across Stuart Channel from Vesuvius on Salt Spring Island. An exclusive, 851-acre residential development is to be built to the north of the sleepy island hamlet, making the 405 new homes and 1,200 residents at Channel Ridge by far the largest development on the Gulf Islands. The selling of the island as a bucolic paradise is not made easier by the presence of a pulp mill to the southwest."
 

Michael Beschloss recommends some books about US presidential campaigns, includes my favorite "What it Takes", but omits "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72", "The Selling of the President", "American Melodrama" and "The Boys on the Bus", still...

History's Notable Films, Reconsidered.

"Seriously: Who names a sled?"

"Shadow Artforms"

"Once favor has shifted away, an artform may continue on pretense, like deposed royalty in exile; at the same time the culture at large may still go through motions of respect, without anymore having any contact with the living artists. Then, the image of the artist in that medium acquires a different, shadow-power. The artist becomes a symbol, & carries the weight of dreams that more mainstream art-heroes (whose lives are all too visible) cannot. "

much on Bill Daniel's sunset scavenger including Texas Punk, houseboat days and "the world's most mysterious boxcar artist"... 

Skeeter Davis 1931-2004

Why does the sun go on shining?
Why does the sea rush to shore?
Don't they know it's the end of the world,
`cause you don't love me anymore?

Why do the birds go on singing?
Why do the stars glow above?
Don't they know it's the end of the world?
It ended when I lost your love.

I wake up in the morning and I wonder why
ev'rything's the same as it was.
I can't understand, no I can't understand,
how life goes on the way it does!

Why does my heart go on beating?
Why do these eyes of mine cry?
Don't they know it's the end of the world?
It ended when you said good-bye. 

from Inkblot Record author Dan Farrell a look at San Francisco Sewer Air Vent Covers with a brief history--

"One "well-known" member of the elite women's California Club asked "What is the use of putting up fine houses when on stepping to your very door in the finest residence quarter you are greeted by such odors as one meets on Pacific Avenue? We must cleanse ourselves inwardly before we can have a beautiful exterior or properly enjoy it." To cleanse "inwardly" seems to refer to both moral character and one's bowels. It is common after all to refer to the "bowels" of the city when speaking of the underground. A purgative is a physical cleansing and a moral or spiritual purification. Would a new, scientific, sewer system bring a moral purification? If the social problems of the city were reduced to the dysfunction of a body, science could be relied on to cure it. A modern sewer system, like a healthy body, should carry sewage "rapidly to its outfall outside the city, so that no time would be given to decomposition . . ." and should be" . . . flushed at intervals. . . ."" 

"Swimming Pool, Welch, West Virginia" O. Winston Link 

halcyon, n. and a.

("h&lsI@n, "h&lSI@n) Forms: 4 alceon, alicion, 6 alcion, halsion, 6-7 halcion, 7 alcian, 6- alcyon, halcyon. [a. L. halcyon, more properly alcyon, a. Gr. 2kjtÝm kingfisher.
The spelling 3k- hal-, is supposed to have arisen out of the fancy that the word was f. 6k-| sea + jÊxm conceiving, connected with the fable that the halcyon broods upon her nest floating on the calm sea in the ‘halcyon days’.]
A. n.
1. A bird of which the ancients fabled that it bred about the time of the winter solstice in a nest floating on the sea, and that it charmed the wind and waves so that the sea was specially calm during the period: usually identified with a species of kingfisher, hence a poetic name of this bird.
1390 Gower Conf. II. 106 (Bodl. MS. 294) Hir briddes Šit+Of Alceon þe name bere. 1398 Trevisa Barth. De P.R. xix. lxxix. (1495) 910 In the cliffe of a ponde of Occean, Alicion, a see foule, in wynter maketh her neste and layeth egges in vii dayes and sittyth on brood+seuen dayes. 1545 Joye Exp. Dan. Ep. Ded. (R.), Thei saye, that in the+coldest tyme of the yere, these halcions (making their nestis in the sea rockis or sandis) wille sitte their egges and hatche forth their chickens. c1592 Marlowe Jew of Malta i. i, How stands the wind? Into what corner peers my halcyon's bill? a1631 Drayton Noah's Flood (R.), There came the halcyon, whom the sea obeys, When she her nest upon the water lays. c1750 Shenstone Elegies v. 22 So smiles the surface of the treach'rous main As o'er its waves the peaceful halcyons play. 1819 J. H. Wiffen Aonian Hours (1820) 104 The brilliant halcyons+fluttering upon azure wings, appear Loveliest above secluded waters. 1867 Contemp. Rev. VI. 252 The alcyon sits her floating nest. a1649 Drummond of Hawthornden Poems Wks. (1711) 39/1 Makes Scotland's name to fly On halcyons wings+Beyond the ocean to Columbus shores. 1880 Goldw. Smith in Atlantic Monthly No. 268. 200 The halcyons of literature, art, and science were floating on the calm and sunlit sea.
b. In Zool. a kingfisher of the Australasian genus Halcyon, or of the subfamily Halcyoninæ.
1772-84 Cook Voy. (1790) V. 1805 We found the halcyon, or great king-fisher, having fine bright colours. 1802 R. Brooke's Gazetteer (ed. 12) s.v. P. William's Sound, The birds found here were the halcyon, or great kingfisher [etc.].
†2. Calm, quietude, halcyon days. Obs.
1647 Trapp Comm. Matt. ix. 15 Our halcyons here are but as marriage feasts, for continuance. 1654 I Comm. Ps. ii. 4 By this means the Church had an happy Halcyon. 1748 Richardson Clarissa (1811) II. 4 'Tis well one of us does [want courting], else the man would having nothing but halcyon. 1797 A. M. Bennett Beggar Girl (1813) IV. 144 All, therefore, was halcyon with Mrs. Woudbe.
B. attrib. passing into adj.
1. Of, or pertaining to, the halcyon or kingfisher. halcyon days [Gr. 2kjtom¬de| ™lŒqai, L. alcyonei dies, alcyonides, alcedonia]: fourteen days of calm weather, anciently believed to occur about the winter solstice when the halcyon was brooding.
For the allusion in quot. 1605 see kingfisher.
[1540 R. Hyrde tr. Vives' Instr. Chr. Wom. (1592) Pj, Wherefore those daies be called in Latine Halcionii, that is as you would say, the Halcion birdes daies. 1545 Joye Exp. Dan. 2a (Stanf.), I remembred the halcyons dayes. 1591 Shakes. 1 Hen. VI, i. ii. 131 Expect Saint Martins Summer, Halcyons dayes.] 1601 Holland Pliny x. xxxii. (R.), They lay and sit about mid-winter+and the time whiles they are broodie, is called the halcyon daies: for during that season the sea is calm and navigable, especially in the coast of Sicilie. 1605 Shakes. Lear ii. ii. 84 Bring oile to fire, snow to the colder moodes+and turne their Halcion beakes With euery gale, and varry of their Masters. 1839 Penny Cycl. XIII. 230/1 The fable of the floating cradle in which during the Halcyon dayes the bird was said to rear its young.
2. Calm, quiet, peaceful, undisturbed. (Usually qualifying days.)
1578 Chr. Prayers in Priv. Prayers (1851) 464 It hath pleased thy grace to give us these Alcyon days, which yet we enjoy. 1631 Gouge God's Arrows v. xvii. 429 Were our daies more halcyon, more quiet and peaceable. 1641 Evelyn Mem. (1857) I. 12 Fortifications (a great rarity in that blessed halcyon time in England). 1665 Sir T. Herbert Trav. (1677) 11 When two are seen, they foretel Halcyon weather. 1841 D'Israeli Amen. Lit. (1867) 250 Peace and policy had diffused a halcyon calmness over the land. 1878 Masque Poets 218 The bird of love, in days so truly halcyon, Upon the billows well might build her nest.




Z"halcyonine, a.

Of or pertaining to the subfamily of kingfishers (Halcyoninæ) of which the genus Halcyon is the type.

†"halcydon

[An incorrect form of halcyon, prob. influenced by L. alcedo kingfisher.]
= halcyon 1. Hence †halcy"donian a. [cf. L. alcedonia the halcyon days], calm, tranquil.
1611 Coryat Crudities 389 It enioyeth great peace and a very halcedonian time. 1647 A. Ross Muse's Interpr. viii. (1675) 145 The Halcyons or Halcydons were said, I think, to be begot of Lucifer.


†halcyonian, a.

(h&lsI"@UnI@n) Also 7 halci-. [f. L. (h)alcyoni-us of the halcyon + -an.]
Of or pertaining to the Halcyon; calm, quiet, peaceful; = halcyon B.
1617 Drummond of Hawthornden Forth Feasting, What halcyonian days thy reign should give. 1650 A. B. Mutat. Polemo 11 Halcionian quiet times at Sea. 1659 Hammond On Ps. xciv. 15 The halcyonian dayes that the Christians had.
 

A lonesome slow September bee
could let out of a lightbox be
(like me) and with some comfort
say "It's evening"--
Friday even--
intermitent interminable
cotillion of horse trailers,
logging trucks, watertank trucks,
oil trucks (a dry, cold fall they
nodding wish to one another)
ATV's ridden by little boys
in Ninja suits, horse
and riders, bicycles with
third wheel kid extentions
hinged off the back (traffic vests,
pennants, but no
working pedal--the passengers,
tufts of hair poking out
from under their helmets
abstractly regard their
mother's pumping flanks)
a digger arrives
with ceremony (still here the
next 10;04 but idle) on
the back of a big trailer,
cab airbraking with a tired
grumpy hiss, cough
of oil smoke dead stop and then
the grader swings around,
drops its big jaw
to the ground, pivoting
on its forehead
a breaker's spin
off the trailer
and onto the dirt
with a recovery
that becomes a flourish,
and like that the trailer
snaps back, is turned
and up the hill and out
the trailer truck
as it rounds (too fast) Scotchtown
onto Dick is close enough
to shear the house
like an egg
a foot below the windows.



 

back in in April, blog of UK number 1's Popular on the Lonnie Donegan/George Formby paradigm--

"The music-hall was dying if not dead by 1960, having hit a steep decline with the rise of the cinema. Shorn of the audience's boozing and flirting, the ribald style of music hall was kept alive by light entertainment - the winking not-quite-naughtiness you hear on this record was still a going concern when I was a child, showing up every time some interminable, deferential Royal Variety Performance reached a musical number. When I first heard 'Dustman', that was the context I immediately fitted it to - its roaring audience for me will perpetually include a gin-pickled Queen Mum.

In 1960 it would hopefully have seemed fresher - surely the million owners of the record will have given the thing more plays than I can stand to (An unbridgeable cultural gap is summoned up in the delighted squeal from one audience member when Donegan says 'flippin'' at 0'31'). Unlike, say, George Formby's big hits, 'Dustman' in 2004 is a remorselessly unfunny record. Donegan was a natural showman but his sledgehammer timing here is pretty excruciating - the pause before every punchline which is further telegraphed by i) being sung in a 'dirty' voice that sounds a bit like Roland Rat, ii) gouts of audience hysterics. Formby, to continue the slightly unfair comparison, delivers his punchlines straight, moves smoothly into the next verse and leaves the audience a split-second to work out by themselves just how filthy he's being." 

Jack Kirby/Brian Wilson... 

(the artist working on "Office Baroque" 1977)
gymnast vandalises two Matta-Clark works

"The 35-year-old woman, who was not identified but was known to police for causing disturbances, attacked 'Office Baroque,' a cutout section of wall by American artist Gordon Matta-Clark. She did a series of head-over-heels flips before landing on the work in a handstand, punching both her arms through the drywall, said Klaus Dieter Lehmann, president of Berlin's Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. She then ran across the large room, pushing over a section of a spray-painted truck called 'Graffiti Truck,' also by Matta-Clark, bending back the metal roof." 

time tales "is a collection of found photographs. found at fleamarkets, thriftshops, some are scooped up from streets and alleyways, fallen from an overstuffed bag or torn pocket. others turn up in a cabinet's hidden compartment, found while wandering the rooms of an abandoned house. "

(thank you obliterated) 

Cor! free Wind in the Willows for Brummies!

(thanks Bookslut) 

visit the Cat Cabinet 

cylinders from the pulpstone quarry, from Newcastle Island by Mr. Taylor's class 

nice Granite Water Tank near Austin 

Worse than Vietnam

" 'I've never seen it so bad between the office of the secretary of defence and the military. There's a significant majority believing this is a disaster. The two parties whose interests have been advanced have been the Iranians and al-Qaida. Bin Laden could argue with some cogency that our going into Iraq was the equivalent of the Germans in Stalingrad. They defeated themselves by pouring more in there. Tragic.' "

lots new at the peerless UBUWEB, including Larry Rivers on tenor and a classroom of Oakland kids performing Gertrude Stein, Duchamp on musette and Braniac on banjo doing "Malaguena", etc but the prize is Edward Dorn reading "The North Atlantic Turbine" in 1967. Hearing the tape of this at Gerry Gilbert's New Era Social Club in the early 80's set me on my heels and I'm still wobbling, o aklavik...

and this goes double for any of you young poets out there! 

the examined life

"People who keep diaries are more likely than non-diary-keepers to suffer from insomnia, headaches, social dysfunction and 'generally feeling crappy,' a British study shows.

The longer people keep diaries, the worse they feel. And worst of all are those who go back and re-read old entries."

good mail from England; a plush set of Moominpapa (my hero and role model) and Moominmama (with a wee functioning purse) from newly-hitched cousin Rob and Judith, and issue 19 of the elegant, pocket-ready Tolling Elves featuring the opening sections of "Ballyhoo" by Deirdre Kovac ("timeline launder glasshouse bowler'd tin got me/coming all sucker grin gone up country pleasures' out box") and art by Erin Wade. Kitoos! 

Bill Moyers

"One of the biggest changes in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. How do we fathom and explain the mindset of violent exhibitionists and extremists who blow to smithereens hundreds of children and teachers of Middle School Number One in Beslan, Russia? Or the radical utopianism of martyrs who crash hijacked planes into the World Trade Center? How do we explain the possibility that a close election in November could turn on several million good and decent citizens who believe in the Rapture Index? That's what I said--the Rapture Index; Google it and you will understand why the best-selling books in America today are the 12 volumes of the 'Left Behind' series that have earned multi-millions of dollars for their co-authors, who, earlier this year, completed a triumphant tour of the Bible Belt whose buckle holds in place George W. Bush's armor of the Lord. These true believers subscribe to a fantastical theology concocted in the l9th century by a couple of immigrant preachers who took disparate passages from the Bible and wove them into a narrative millions of people believe to be literally true.

According to this narrative, Jesus will return to earth only when certain conditions are met: when Israel has been established as a state; when Israel then occupies the rest of its "biblical lands;" when the third temple has been rebuilt on the site now occupied by the Dome of the Rock and Al Aqsa mosques; and, then, when legions of the Antichrist attack Israel. This will trigger a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon during which all the Jews who have not converted will be burned. Then the Messiah returns to earth. The Rapture occurs once the big battle begins. True believers will be lifted out of their clothes and transported to heaven where, seated next to the right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores, locusts and frogs during the several years of tribulation which follow.

I’m not making this up. We’re reported on these people for our weekly broadcast on PBS, following some of them from Texas to the West Bank. They are sincere, serious and polite as they tell you that they feel called to help bring the Rapture on as fulfillment of biblical prophecy. That’s why they have declared solidarity with Israel and the Jewish settlements and backed up their support with money and volunteers. It’s why they have staged confrontations at the old temple site in Jerusalem. It’s why the invasion of Iraq for them was a warm-up act, predicted in the 9th chapter of the Book of Revelations where four angels “which are bound in the great river Euphrates will be released “to slay the third part of men.’ As the British writer George Monbiot has pointed out, for these people, the Middle East is not a foreign policy issue, it’s a biblical scenario, a matter of personal belief. A war with Islam in the Middle East is not something to be feared but welcomed; if there’s a conflagration there, they come out winners on the far side of tribulation, inside the pearly gates, in celestial splendor, supping on ambrosia to the accompaniment of harps plucked by angels."

British libertarian take on Super Size Me

"On both sides of the Atlantic there's a large portion of moralising in the panics over obesity, school dinners, junk-food-guzzling and the rest. What is presented as straightforward medical concern for our health and wellbeing is often really a judgement on lifestyle and behaviour - and especially the lifestyle and behaviour of a certain class of people. In debates about 'bad' foods (McDonald's), fast foods (microwave meals), and fat mums in clingy leggings who make their kids fat too by feeding them 'junk', there's a barely concealed contempt for the working classes, who are presumed to be lazy, feckless and not sufficiently concerned with healthy cooking and fitness. It's there in the terminology: they are seen as 'junk' people."

Algernon Blackwood
"His admirer, H. P. Lovecraft, wrote of him in his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature: 'Less intense than Machen in delieating the extremes of stark fear, yet infinitely more closely wedded to the idea of an unreal world constantly pressing upon ours is the inspired and prolific Algernon Blackwood, amidst whose voluminous and uneven work may be found some of the finest spectral literature of this or any age. Of the quality of Mr. Blackwood's genius there can be no dispute; for no one has even approached the skill, seriousness, and minute fidelity with which he records the overtones of strangeness in ordinary things and experiences, or the preternatural insight with which he builds up detail by detail the complete sensations and perceptions leading from reality into supernormal life or vision. Without notable command of the poetic witchery of mere words, he is the one absolute and unquestioned master of weird atmosphere; and can evoke what amounts almost to a story from a simple fragment of humourless psychological description. Above all others he understands how fully some sensitive minds dwell forever on the borderland of dream, and how relatively slight is the distinction betwixt those images formed from actual objects and those excited by the play of the imagination.' " 

Algernon Blackwood's eerie tale The Willows : "They first became properly visible, these huge figures, just within the tops of the bushes -- immense, bronze-coloured, moving, and wholly independent of the swaying of the branches. I saw them plainly and noted, now I came to examine them more calmly, that they were very much larger than human, and indeed that something in their appearance proclaimed them to be not human at all. Certainly they were not merely the moving tracery of the branches against the moonlight. They shifted independently. They rose upwards in a continuous stream from earth to sky, vanishing utterly as soon as they reached the dark of the sky. They were interlaced one with another, making a great column, and I saw their limbs and huge bodies melting in and out of each other, forming this serpentine line that bent and swayed and twisted spirally with the contortions of the wind-tossed trees. They were nude, fluid shapes, passing up the bushes, within the leaves almost -- rising up in a living column into the heavens. Their faces I never could see. Unceasingly they poured upwards, swaying in great bending curves, with a hue of dull bronze upon their skins. " 

listening to a ton of Charlie Feathers 

new Lenny Bruce box set

"Most young people today don't know a thing about Lenny Bruce or why he's important," says Willner. "The thing that's not widely understood about Lenny is how much he influenced mainstream comedy. Lenny was the first to do 25-minute routines using five different characters--something that was later picked up by Bill Cosby and many other comedians, and that's where his genius was. Forget all the controversy. He had the ability to completely transport you as a monologist. You just want to listen to him talk."  

the Sept 3rd entry at Hotel Point is a most helpful and intelligent consideration of my book "Hammertown"

statue of Frank Ney, our former mayor, Protection Island in the background... 

Wendy Robson "Shack Island ll" (private tidal islands across from Piper's Lagoon in North Nanaimo, still inhabited occasionally, had a seventies reputation (probably unfounded) as having been some kind of drug party free trade love zone in the sixties. Our mayor wore a pirate suit and encouraged such rumors.)  

new restoration of Samuel Fuller's The Big Red One 

truck-driving lab

"Police said a resident was out for a walk when a truck with a Labrador retriever at the wheel passed by.

When RCMP arrived, the truck was in the middle of Thompson Road in Granger, blocking traffic. The dog was still behind the wheel. "

"El Mirador apartments, 1929" from Los Angeles architectural photo gallery 

nice Todd/Bjork analysis 

Robert Smithson--Map of Broken Glass 

The "Miami Rock Buoy" at the top of this map (click on it) is the islet Robert Smithson intended his Island of Broken Glass be executed on, before being thwarted by hippies. It would have been visible from Yellow Point, just off the top left hand corner of the map and about 10km south of where I am. Being so visible--a little viewing height is easily gained on Vancouver Island, not to mention ferry traffic!--it would certainly have been better known than the Spiral Jetty, a true Island tourist attraction--until about five years ago there was a "glass castle" on the highway. too. The glass on Smithson's island would have smoothed out a lot by now, but when the light hit it... The excellent catalogue for the Vancouver/Smithson show (where I found out the location) tells the whole story. this is my 2000th post!  

Robert Smithson in Vancouver

" Smithson contemplated his first permanent outdoor work in Vancouver -- Island of Broken Glass, which he sought to create on a bare patch of rock off the shores of Thetis Island. "

The Old San Francisco Mint

"Sandstone from Newcastle Island (off Nanaimo) in British Columbia was shipped in by three schooners for the facing of the upper floors and for the six colossal columns on the portico. " 

the Ogden Point Breakwater, on calm days one of Victoria's best lounging areas, featured among many other structural feats at Canadian Civil Engineering History & Heritage 

Hardy Island Granite, from which was made the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Ogden Point Breakwater in Victoria. 

"What If Bush Wins" by a panel of 16 experts cheery, cheery

Kevin Drum in The Washington Monthly

"Now, I happen to agree with Tomasky that Republicans generally go for the jugular more effectively than Democrats, but it's a big mistake for us liberals to kid ourselves into thinking that Republicans win elections solely because they fool people into voting for them. It's not just that this is a debilitating mental attitude--although it is--but it's also not true. Our main problem isn't that this year's campaign has ignored the issues, our main problem is that the #1 issue in this campaign is national defense, and on that issue--like it or not--the majority of Americans favor the Republican position. If John Kerry wants to win, he should focus on the issues, but he has to focus on the issues that matter most in this campaign cycle.

It's all about 9/11, Iraq, terrorism, and national security, baby. This election is going to be won on that issue, and Kerry needs to convince the country that he can handle it better than Bush. And really, considering the botch Bush has made of national security, that shouldn't be all that hard.

Bottom line: Republicans aren't avoiding the issues. It's just that their signature issue happens to be the one people care most about this year. Democrats had better figure that out pronto."

Anodyne on Mina Totino's "Reading Marx"

4. Capital, the Marx text from which the series takes its title, never appears in the drawings. I remember Mina's own copy, an oversize Penguin, well-thumbed, with little pieces of yellow Post-It stuck in the margins, which the used bookseller in me immediately started pulling out and then guiltily replacing. " 

nice review of the Core Sample catalogue...

"The country is full of virtual centers. Such impermanence and uncertainty is the antithesis of the art establishment's fetishization of preservation and collection. Core Sample embraced a center on the move and worked like disappearing ink. "

Annelise Kretschmer 'Portraits 1920s to 1960s'

(thanks gmtPlus9) 

The Likudization of the World

" It has happened in Gaza, in Grozny, in Sadr City. Mr. Sharon says terrorism is an epidemic that "has no borders, no fences" but this is not the case. Everywhere in the world, terrorism thrives within the illegitimate borders of occupation and dictatorship; it festers behind "security walls" put up by imperial powers; it crosses those borders and climbs over those fences to explode inside the countries responsible for, or complicit in, occupation and domination.

Ariel Sharon is not the commander in chief of the war on terror; that dubious honour stays with George Bush. But on the third year anniversary of September 11, he deserves to be recognized as this disastrous campaign's spiritual/intellectual guru, a kind of trigger-happy Yoda for all the wannabe Luke Skywalkers out there, training for their epic battles in good vs. evil.

If we want to see the future of where the Likud Doctrine leads, we need only follow the guru home, to Israel--a country paralyzed by fear, embracing pariah policies of extrajudicial assassination and illegal settlement, and in furious denial about the brutality it commits daily. It is a nation surrounded by enemies and desperate for friends, a category it narrowly defines as those who ask no questions, while generously offering the same moral amnesty in return. That glimpse at our collective future is the only lesson the world needs to learn from Ariel Sharon. "

theo parrish these days and times

Part 1

01. Those Guys feat. Ras Baraka - "An American Poem"
02. Theo Parrish - Unreleased
03. (Sounds like Larry Heard) - ?
04. ? – "Just Another Lonely Night" [majorIV ?]
05. Theo Parrish - Unreleased
06. Round Four feat. Tikiman – "Find a Way"
07. Blakk Society "Just Another Lonely Day"
08. Lil' Louis "War Games"
09. Theo Parrish – "China Trax (Sound Signature 012)"
10. ? (very nice!)
11. New Sector Movements – "The Sun (Dwele's Motorcity Remix)"
12. ? - (Sounds like Herbie Hancock)
13. Dinosaur L – "Go Bang! (Francois K mix)"
14. Fela Kuti - ?
15. Tony Allen – "Afro Disco Beat"
16. ? - (Sounds like Fela Kuti)
17. Roy Ayers – "Running Away"
18. Donald Byrd – "Lansanas Priestess"
19. Dexter Wansel "Life On Mars"


Part 2

20. Ashford & Simpson "One More Try"
21. ? – "keep on doing what you do, cause it feels so good"
22. ? – "never let you go"
23. Eddie Kendricks "Goin' Up In Smoke"
24. ? - "family"
25. ? - "why don't you spread love"
26. ? - "high on your love/mean to be so free"
27. Charles Earland "Leaving This Planet"
28. ?
29. Jill Scott – "Slowely Surely (Theo Parrish rmx)"
30. Fela Kuti – "Who No Know Go Now"
31. New Sector Movements - "The Sun (Dwelogy remix)"
32. ? - "precious love" (sounds like Larry Heard)
33. ? – "trying to prove my love" [ned doheny ?] (I know Al Hudson & The
Partners have a song called Prove My Love...)
34. Fela Kuti - ?
35. Theo Parrish – "Dirty Rhodes (Sound Signature 015)." 

an essay I wrote about Swarm 2 in 2001...

"No economic force compels this vice of amiability. It springs from a faintness of the spirit, from a convention of pleasantness, which when attacked for the monstrous things it permits to enter the mind of the world, excuses itself by protesting that it is a pity to waste fierceness on things that do not matter."

Rebecca West, November 1914 

big multi-gallery foofaraw SWARM starts tonight in Vancouver 

blue syrup pour 

Moss Man (flocked Beast Man figure)  

Pantaloons: Tykes on Poetry on Geof Huth and in general--

"The imaginative confines are the world outdoors: 'mossbark'; 'tadfrogs'; 'hawkspeck'; 'pondsun'; and so forth. The lyrical context, then, is remarkably parallel to Stevens's poem, and the conscious battle waged complements as well the younger Huth's analytical concerns over 'pace,' 'predicates,' and 'switching place.' Here now the basic shapes of the portmanteaux do the heavy lifting for the imagination -- 'dewweb' switching place, moving left and then right of the particle / wave debate; 'echowoods' predicating a place and a sound; 'shadowl' (my favorite) pacing and compressing what might be some gagged, sorrowful tone, but in fine what is only natural." 

short but good list of Favorite Kids' Films 

Buffalo grain silo by Mike Schultz, from Industriekultur-Fotografie 

"Ayalik shoots RCMP Constable Lelliott, 1960" from the Sissons/Morrow Collection

"Justice Sissons became an avid collector of Inuit art during his decade in the North. His collection of carvings dealing with the outstanding trials of his northern career began when one of the accused coming before him, Kaotak, a man found not guilty of killing his father, presented him with a carving in 1956. It gave the man's impression of being on trial. This first carving launched the Justice Sissons' carving collection.

From that day on, on completion of a particularly noteworthy case, Justice Sissons would seek out local carvers whom he commissioned to depict the events in stone, ivory, caribou antler, soapstone and metal. Sometimes he would enlist the local priest or store manager to explain what he wanted; other times he would talk to the carver himself. Justice Morrow succeeded Justice Sissons in 1966. Justice Morrow continued to collect carvings of notable cases and added 3 carvings to the collection. Upon Justice Sissons' death in 1969, the collection was given to the people of the North, deeded in trust to the Northwest Territories Bar Association." (thanks RS)  

subterranean cinema

"Today, visitors can take guided tours around a tightly restricted section, Les Catacombes, where the remains of up to six million Parisians were transferred from overcrowded cemeteries in the late 1700s.
But since 1955, for security reasons, it has been an offence to 'penetrate into or circulate within' the rest of the network.

There exist, however, several secretive bands of so-called cataphiles, who gain access to the tunnels mainly after dark, through drains and ventilation shafts, and hold what in the popular imagination have become drunken orgies but are, by all accounts, innocent underground picnics.

The recent discovery of three newly enlarged tunnels underneath the capital's high-security La Sante prison was put down to the activities of one such group, and another, identifying itself as the Perforating Mexicans, last night told French radio the subterranean cinema was its work. " 

happy birthday Ludovico Ariosto!

from Orlando Furioso canto 34, Astolpho goes to the moon...

LXX
The chariot, towering, threads the fiery sphere,
And rises thence into the lunar reign.
This, in its larger part they find as clear
As polished steel, when undefiled by stain;
And such it seems, or little less, when near,
As what the limits of our earth contain:
Such as our earth, the last of globes below,
Including seas, which round about it flow.



LXXI
Here doubly waxed the paladin's surprize,
To see that place so large, when viewed at hand;
Resembling that a little hoop in size,
When from the globe surveyed whereon we stand,
And that he both his eyes behoved to strain,
If he would view Earth's circling seas and land;
In that, by reason of the lack of light,
Their images attained to little height.



LXXII
Here other river, lake, and rich champaign
Are seen, than those which are below descried;
Here other valley, other hill and plain,
With towns and cities of their own supplied;
Which mansions of such mighty size contain,
Such never he before of after spied.
Here spacious hold and lonely forest lay,
Where nymphs for ever chased the panting prey.



LXXIII
He, that with other scope had thither soared,
Pauses not all these wonder to peruse:
But led by the disciple of our Lord,
His way towards a spacious vale pursues;
A place wherein is wonderfully stored
Whatever on our earth below we lose.
Collected there are all things whatsoe'er,
Lost through time, chance, or our own folly, here.



LXXIV
Nor here alone of realm and wealthy dower,
O'er which aye turns the restless wheel, I say:
I speak of what it is not in the power
Of Fortune to bestow, or take away.
Much fame is here, whereon Time and the Hour,
Like wasting moth, in this our planet prey.
Here countless vows, here prayers unnumbered lie,
Made by us sinful men to God on high:



LXXV
The lover's tears and sighs; what time in pleasure
And play we here unprofitably spend;
To this, of ignorant men the eternal leisure,
And vain designs, aye frustrate of their end.
Empty desires so far exceed all measure,
They o'er that valley's better part extend.
There wilt thou find, if thou wilt thither post,
Whatever thou on earth beneath hast lost.



LXXVI
He, passing by those heaps, on either hand,
Of this and now of that the meaning sought;
Formed of swollen bladders here a hill did stand,
Whence he heard cries and tumults, as he thought.
These were old crowns of the Assyrian land
And Lydian -- as that paladin was taught --
Grecian and Persian, all of ancient fame;
And now, alas! well-nigh without a name.



LXXVII
Golden and silver hooks to sight succeed,
Heaped in a mass, the gifts which courtiers bear,
-- Hoping thereby to purchase future meed --
To greedy prince and patron; many a snare,
Concealed in garlands, did the warrior heed,
Who heard, these signs of adulation were;
And in cicalas, which their lungs had burst,
Saw fulsome lays by venal poets versed.



LXXVIII
Loves of unhappy end in imagery
Of gold or jewelled bands he saw exprest;
Then eagles' talons, the authority
With which great lords their delegates invest:
Bellows filled every nook, the fume and fee
Wherein the favourites of kings are blest:
Given to those Ganymedes that have their hour,
And reft, when faded is their vernal flower.



LXXIX
O'erturned, here ruined town and castle lies,
With all their wealth: "The symbols" (said his guide)
"Of treaties and of those conspiracies,
Which their conductors seemed so ill to hide."
Serpents with female faces, felonies
Of coiners and of robbers, he descried;
Next broken bottles saw of many sorts,
The types of servitude in sorry courts.



LXXX
He marks mighty pool of porridge spilled,
And asks what in that symbol should be read,
And hears 'twas charity, by sick men willed
For distribution, after they were dead.
He passed a heap of flowers, that erst distilled
Sweet savours, and now noisome odours shed;
The gift (if it may lawfully be said)
Which Constantine to good Sylvester made.



LXXXI
A large provision, next, of twigs and lime
-- Your witcheries, O women! -- he explored.
The things he witnessed, to recount in rhyme
Too tedious were; were myriads on record,
To sum the remnant ill should I have time.
'Tis here that all infirmities are stored,
Save only Madness, seen not here at all,
Which dwells below, nor leaves this earthly ball...  

we can only hope

"'At the current rate of loss,' the report yells, 'literary reading as a leisure activity will virtually disappear in half a century.'

Really? To answer this question, let's look for a moment at the photograph of NEA chairman Dana Gioia displayed in the report's introduction. He's a trim-looking fellow: I'd guess about 165 pounds. Now, let's say that Dana's been hitting the maple scones lately, and gained four pounds in the last month. By applying Reading at Risk's statistical model of linear progression, I hereby predict that in 50 years time, NEA chairman Dana Gioia will weigh 2,565 pounds. " 

lucid Chechnya backgrounder

"So, what does al-Qaida and international Islamic terrorism have to do with any of this? Probably very little. Chechens have plenty of reason to do what they do without outside inspiration."

Young Marble Giants

"Parrish is dancing, his feet are a bIur
Comes to a standstill,
I ask him a question
He doesn't hear
Wurlitzer jukebox
Fingers are pointed in my direction
Words fly around me,
everyone's chanting..." 

still one of the best almanacs on the web--The Daily Bleed: A Calendar Better Than Boiled Coffee! Timeline, Chronology, Labor, Radical, Arts, Literature, Authors, Poets, Anarchists...

Niall Ferguson in the WSJ

"In my view, the Bush administration, too, does not deserve to be re-elected. Its idee fixe about regime change in Iraq was not a logical response to the crisis of 9/11. Its fiscal policy has been an orgy of irresponsibility. Given the hesitations of independent voters in the swing states, polls currently point to a narrow Bush defeat. Yet Mr. Kerry, like Mr. Kinnock, is the kind who can blow an election in a single sound bite. It's still all too easy to imagine George W. Bush, like John Major, scraping home by the narrowest of margins (not least, of course, because Mr. Bush did just that four years ago)

But then what? The lesson of British history is that a second Bush term could be more damaging to the Republicans and more beneficial to the Democrats than a Bush defeat. If he secures re-election, President Bush can be relied upon to press on with a foreign policy based on pre-emptive military force, to ignore the impending fiscal crisis (on the Cheney principle that 'deficits don't matter') and to pursue socially conservative objectives like the constitutional ban on gay marriage. Anyone who thinks this combination will serve to maintain Republican unity is dreaming; it will do the opposite. Meanwhile, the Dems will have another four years to figure out what the Labour Party finally figured out: It's the candidate, stupid. And when the 2008 Republican candidate goes head-to-head with the American Tony Blair, he will get wiped out."

Laurable's Poetry Weblog is back!!

readers of Spanish might enjoy this translation of an essay on Stan Douglas that I wrote a number of years ago, which talks about Ayler, Glenn Gould etc...

excellent Albert Ayler site--pics, info mp3's, the works--Spirits rejoice!

(Ayler playing at John Coltrane's funeral)

I must have this new Albert Ayler box!! 

Signs of fall--the wind is up and this recipe for Toad in the Hole in New York Press, of all places... 

Lee Konitz


"As soon as I hear myself playing a familiar melody I take the saxophone out of my mouth. I let some measures go by. Improvising means coming in with a completely clean slate from the first note. The process is what I'm interested in. You can turn the most familiar standard into something totally fresh. The most important thing is to get away from fixed functions."

 

(Roosevelt with John Muir, Yosemite 1906)

The Party of Lincoln

"The death-knell of the republic had rung as soon as the active power became lodged in the hands of those who sought, not to do justice to all citizens, rich and poor alike, but to stand for one special class and for its interests as opposed to the interests of others." Theodore Roosevelt, Labor Day speech at Syracuse, NY, Sept 7, 1903
 

An Irving Wallace novel, thickly furred with blue mould...

"Books We Didn't Buy

� The BC Health Guide

� Windows 95 user's manual

� Word 95 installation guide

� 300 Silhouette romances

� Advanced Colon Cleanser's Workbook

� Baby 'board books' -- fat cardboard pages for little hands -- covered in bite marks

� An Irving Wallace novel, thickly furred with blue mold. Little cloud of spores exhaled as I picked it up and set it ever so quickly back down

� The wet, dog-eared books that failed to sell at someone's garage sale and were then apparently left out overnight in the driveway"