last night greatly enjoyed Canadian director Fletcher Markle's The Man with a Cloak (1951) with Louis Calhern as the dying roue, Leslie Caron as the ingenue, Barbara Stanwyck as the scheming servant, Jim Backus as the friendly barkeep, a raven named Villon & Joseph Cotten as (spoiler alert!) Edgar Allen Poe...


 

"Shelley's Body (England)" from Benny's Postcards
 

re: Jordan's "428"-- "a cross between a Spy and an Empire" this "Red Canada" from The Apples of New York

Saturday will be the centenary of the birth of actor Joel McCrea (Ride the High Country, Sullivan's Travels) & TCM have been showing many of the movies mentioned in this just-over series from the LA County Museum, including the Sturges & Peckinpah films, but the big revelation for me has been Jacques (Cat People) Tourneur's incredible 1950 "Stars in my Crown", with Dean Stockwell, about a small town parson (the situation depicted in the poster omits the Bible he lays on the bar between his pistols!), never before seen, like one of Ford's "domestic" films, but less sentimental & tinged with eeriness...

(Captain Hook)

...by hook
or by crook...

john cale's
big career move ca. mid-80's:

a majestic parade-float of
procol harum-ized

punk, but recorded live
real brittle-like--

a metallic board mix
chunky metal cassette mix

irritating
irritating

the "loudness" button
remember that

it was for this
not the cushion

of even that heimlich distortion
re: chris thomas' pistols

even motorhead--
if your ear accepts it

as other than assault
at any volume

irritation is just
ideological,

dont tell me
you can fit

the stray gators
into your helmet

and keep on riding!--
so in the midst of this

12 minutes of mock-epic opening
side 3 of the imax thunderdome w/

bowery ambience
subbing for the edmonton symphony

and cale has come in character
dick burton in iguana

with a miner's lamp
and a fistful of arthur janov

overmatched it proved
against the punks in their red brigade pyjamas

for who remembers bobby sands
and frederick forsyth paperbacks

with walken
in the snow:

the mercenary chic
is what stuck.

 

big Odilon Redon show at MOMA...
 

Barbellionblog from October, 1912--

"Under the oak where I sat the ground was covered with dead leaves. I kicked them, and I beat them with my stick, because I was angry that they were dead. In the coppice, leaves were quietly and majestically floating earthwards in the pomp of death. It was very thrilling to observe them.

It was a curious sensation to realise that since the last time I sat under the old oak I had been right up to the N. of England, then right down to the S.W., and back once more to London town. I bragged about my kinetic activity to the stationary oak and I scoffed at the old hill for having to remain always in the same place.

It gave me a pleasing sense of infinite superiority to come back and see everything the same as before, to sit on the same old seat under the same old oak. Even that same old hurdle was lying in the same position among the bracken. How sorry I was for it! Poor wretch--unable to move--to go to Whitby, to go to C------, to be totally ignorant of the great country of London. "

hey! they just added Turner Classic Movies to our cable package! This is just great esp. as old movies get harder and harder to find on regular channels...Tonight: Misfits, Sierra Madre, Red Badge, Asphalt Jungle...
 

Spring Forward, Fall Back--

"H.O.W.


I can treat you to visit
to coastal pillboxes
I like to delve in destruction,
lust and debauches
And I am the one who stamps on all ages
From 16 to 40,
over and under
I'm monolithic,
and the black ice on the corner


Hiss...hiss...hiss


As all is as one,
as all damp on all stone
I hold all time and
can induce at once
Jet trains, lead paint,
stamps on border forms
Misread Easter Island,
put butter on plague style
Spin complete revolutions
and not bat an eyelid
And alter tree-rings
so that what you are after
You will not ever find
with a surfeit of lumber
And make you imagine from hunger
Bread trees spinning,
dripping with butter
Just 6 inches higher
than your upstretched middle finger


History of the...


I place minute dust
in your microchip vessels
For daring to think
all science is immortal
I am the one
who'll strike you down at once
For stretching time-bracket,
and assuming that what is
Can be maladjusted.
A rigid adoption
Of codes you had concocted
I can treat you to visit
to coastal pillboxes
And show you all hideous
microscope thingies
And Hovis set-up
in London's psoriasis

Stockings, jokings, 1780's


History of the wo...


I like to delve in destruction,
lust and debauches
And I am the one
who stamps on all ages
From 16 to 40, over and under


History of the world..."

 

let me concur with Rue Hazard's call for more oafishness--


"And breezing that against so many poesies pures, in the issue of "No" at hand, frankly, what I long for (in the "scene" generally) is more oafishness. Not the recombinant superior gleaming machine-oafishness of flarf-generators, but the droopy drawers, stumbled-down, anything goes inheritors of the Biotherm-esque O'Hara, Berryman's big mess, and Ammons's barrages of garbage. Or Bernadette Mayer's dishevel'd junkyard dog opus, or Alice Notley's sass in the filigree. Ain't there a chill despotic cleanliness, a shard-preciosity, all around now? More splendid piss-burn and rags and jags! More guffaw and betises! More spilt Willies!"

Wisconsin Tabby Travels to France