lovely mild if overcast today, was able to read all of the new TOLLING ELVES namely "Not Even" by Kit Robinson (w/ photograph by Ericka McConnell), walking it back from the mailbox, old skill, flipping the fragile newsprint pages, enjoying the hand-eye challenge, turning into from the breezes, here's one--

"THE SOUND OF CAR DOORS CLOSING

The sound of car door closing and voices from the street.
An engine starts up, revving to pull away. Down to the
corner and gone. In the silence that follows, train whistle
sounds. Who listens? Then jet noise over head. Who stays
behind to report? And who, in some other time and place,
quietly waits to hear word?" 

Rudy Burckhardt - An Afternoon in Astoria (flash)

(thanx Equanimity) 

The Charms of Duckweed

"an introduction to the smallest flowering plants" 

KOMPAKT KITTENS--a tribute to Minimal Techno 

Crystal Palace under construction, from Collect Britain, an absolute treasure trove of sounds and images from the British Library. Don't miss this! 

the continuing tale of Blair and his goons vs. the Magna Carta--attacks on liberty precede 9/11 

my little squib about "opening" for Rodney Graham last month is up at Terminal City 

Maximum pain is aim of new US weapon

"The contract, heavily censored before release, asks researchers to look for "optimal pulse parameters to evoke peak nociceptor activation" - in other words, cause the maximum pain possible. Studies on cells grown in the lab will identify how much pain can be inflicted on someone before causing injury or death."

No Beirut Spring

"The West is happy to champion the superficial talk of democracy from around the region. The New York Times also celebrated the President Mubarak of Egypt's announcement that he plans to allow opposition candidates to run against him. Good luck to them, but it is not clear exactly what they will be able to do differently in the unlikely eventuality of being elected. Long ago the Egyptian regime swallowed the bitter pill of IMF reform and depends on $2 billion of US aid per year - severe constraints for any leadership, democratic or not. And as the opprobrium toward the Lebanon's Hizbollah or the late Palestinian President Yasser Arafat shows, there are limits to how much democracy the West will tolerate in the Middle East. In democratisation, the West reproduces an image of its own system, in which the act of voting itself is what counts, rather than the content of the politics."

Third Factory Notebook

"Need, demand, and desire (or, Lacanian pop): It's easy enough to hear 'Prove My Love' as a less (or differently) jilted rewrite of 'Ain't No Mountain' (to which I was subjected in another enclosed commercial environment today). But the latter loses me with the 'valley low enough' line. A low valley doesn't fall into the category of sublime obstacle the overcoming of which demonstrates (proves) my equally sublime capacity for answering the beloved's every demand. In other words, it just sounds too doable--at least in my 'imaginary domain.'"

I always thought of the "valley low" as being filled with thickets, bogs, quicksand, snakes, etc--worse than the mountain, even. As in "so wide you can't go around it, so low you can't go under it".

a resource-filled blogging of William Vollman's Rising Up and Rising Down begins...

Reality (on TV) Reaches Art World

"Our intent with this show is to do something both credible and compelling," said Mr. Terkuhle, who helped bring "Beavis and Butt-head" and "Celebrity Deathmatch" to MTV. "Credible in the art world and, hopefully, compelling to a television audience." But he added that it remained "a television experiment and that's how we're approaching it, very openly."

from "The Birds" by Bruno Schulz

"ALONG CAME the yellow and thoroughly boring days of winter. A ragged, sparse and undersized cloth of snow was spread over the russet hued earth. On many of the roofs it was insufficient, and so they remained black or rust coloured, shingle or thatched arks concealing the smoke blackened expanses of the attics within them—black, charred cathedrals bristling with their ribs of rafters, cross-beams, and spars—dark lungs of the winter gales. Every daybreak revealed new chimney stacks and chimney pots, sprung up in the night, poking out through the night’s gale—the black pipes of diabolical organs. Chimney-sweeps could not drive away the crows that perched in the evenings in the form of living black leaves on the branches of the trees by the church; they took off again, fluttering, only to cling again at last each to its own place on its own branch; and at daybreak they flew up in great flocks—clouds of soot, flakes of lampblack, undulating and fantastic, smearing the dull-yellow streaks of daybreak with their twinkling cawing. The days hardened in the cold and boredom like last year’s bread loaves. They were cut with blunt knives, without appetite, in idle sleepiness..." 

Arthur Mee

"I give you, free for ever, with the right to take whom you will, the full enjoyment of the Natural Gallery of everlasting pictures, and the right to see the unveiling of all the sunsets, the covering of the heath with red and gold, the floating past of the clouds that ride like mountain peaks across the sky. I give you access to all the bushes laden with berries, to the daffodils and the violet beds, to the place where ferns and mosses hide, and to the tulips when they hang their heads at night." 

wonderful Quick-Time Movies from England, found while googling "Arthur Mee's Children's Encyclopedia"--

kingfisher
a found dance
in the yorkshire sculpture park
things past
pages from 'the childrens encyclopedia'
dream
This Is Just To Say
return to my native city
the red shoes
karina transfiguration
myth budapest
fragment triptych
on campo lane
shalesmoor
after ovid
the watcher
a self portrait in my father's house
shed
metamorphosis
the divine comedy
day and night in the garden
pentimenti
the neon pizza man VS. Busby Berkeley
the heart and what it does
orpheus
a walk to pins del bisbe
the king of magic
and then the devil appeared to the poor shoemaker
art
smile
walk
walk (version)
glance
through the looking glass
jo,dancing
cyclamen
song
everything you need for christmas
found poem
fruit machine
train entering liverpool street station
man with a pot of white chrysanthemums
nocturne
my secret garden
portrait of the artist in his studio
the firebird
time machine
walk from london bridge to liverpool street 22nd october 2003
poem
poem (version)
a self portrait with my father lukasz szpakowski
jump
a tiny opera for anna  

Curiosities of Literature: Poets, Philosophers, and Artists, Made by Accident

"La Fontaine, at the age of twenty-two, had not taken any profession, or devoted himself to any pursuit. Having accidentally heard some verses of Malherbe, he felt a sudden impulse, which directed his future life. He immediately bought a Malherbe, and was so exquisitely delighted with this poet, that after passing the nights in treasuring his verses in his memory, he would run in the day-time to the woods, where concealing himself, he would recite his verses to the surrounding dryads." 

images from rare books at Origins of Modernity