Charlie sez Happy Halloween!

fine appreciation of Churchill as historian--

"Churchill’s place in the great British narrative tradition of the 19th century is clear even from the titles of the volumes and their mottos. The omniscient narrator summarises effectively and allows us to understand how he thinks and interprets, how he views the course of events that is to be presented in all its fascinating detail and twists and turns. The first volume is called The Gathering Storm and has as its motto: “How the English-speaking peoples through their unwisdom, carelessness and good nature allowed the wicked to rearm.” The second volume is called Their Finest Hour and has the motto “How the British people held the fort alone till those who hitherto had been half blind were half ready.” The third volume is called The Grand Alliance and has the motto: “How the British fought on with hardship their garment until Soviet Russia and the United States were drawn into the great conflict.” The fourth volume is called The Hinge of Fate and has the motto: “How the power of the Grand Alliance became preponderant.” The fifth volume is called Closing the Ring and has the motto: “How Nazi Germany was isolated and assailed on all sides.” The sixth volume is called Triumph and Tragedy and has the motto: “How the great democracies triumphed, and so were able to resume the follies which had so nearly cost them their life.”

In Sweden we usually admire Strindberg’s short story, “Half a Sheet of Paper” for its evocative concentration. Can the titles and mottos of the six volumes of Churchill compare with Strindberg? Here too hidden depths open up; of implied meaning, of an implicit view on life and of concepts of reality..."

Nanaimo trees

farewell Porter Wagoner

good short review of Roy Arden's VAG show--

"To live in Western Canada is to live on landscapes transformed within living memory. Sometimes inured to it, we have all seen forest and field peeled back, and, within weeks, strip malls and subdivisions arrayed in their place.

There is an element of violence in nature transformed so wholly and quickly, but there is also wonder in it. No artist since Emily Carr has better captured these twinned and conflicting emotions than Vancouver photographer Roy Arden, subject of a major career retrospective just opened at the Vancouver Art Gallery..."

great clip of Andy Pratt, most famous for "Avenging Annie", in a 1993 (nice to see the falsetto somewhat intact!) performance of Treasure That Canary from his 1976 "Resolution", one of the all time great white soul/pop albums & along with "Royal Scam" & Todd Rundgren's "Faithful" one of the bright spots of my dismal 18th year...here is his earlier, rather more "prog" Records Are Like Life, which I named a poem after...

Local trees

Straitjacket Bush

"The U.S. is full of ordinary people with serious forms of mental illness -- delusional people with violent fantasies who think they're the president, or who think they get instructions from the CIA through their dental fillings.

The problem with Bush is that he IS the president -- and he gives instructions to the CIA and military, without having to go through his dental fillings.

Impeachment's not the solution to psychosis, no matter how flagrant. But despite their impressive foresight in other areas, the framers unaccountably neglected to include an involuntary civil commitment procedure in the Constitution.

Still, don't lose hope. By enlisting the aid of mental health professionals and the court system, Congress can act to remedy that constitutional oversight. The goal: Get Bush and Cheney committed to an appropriate inpatient facility, where they can get the treatment they so desperately need..."

via mefi--Jail finds - a photoset on Flickr

"These are things I find abandoned in books or stuffed on the book cart at the jail where I volunteer..."

& c.

Local trees

wasn't feeling too awful about misssing NYC this Halloween until they I read this NYPress "best of" & they started talking about Ballantine Ale...

Having e-mail trouble with my trouble-free mac so if you're out there & have written to me ever please drop me a line so I can get your address...

Thanks!!

getting time to rustle up a little Apple Butter...

from the Frieze "Art Fair" issue, interesting podcasts from critics Dave Hickey & Thierry de Duve

Deanna Ferguson, Dorothy Lusk & Bruce Andrews, from a set of early 90's polaroids by Lary Bremner which is just up at the Kootenay School of Writing site, along with the Music Issue of "W"...

a 2003 essay of mine on Roy Arden's Fragments, a version of which is part of his VAG show...

The Age of Rhetoric

"...all around us we've been hearing these last many months the sound of ice breaking, as the accumulated frozen scandals of this administration slowly crack open to reveal their queasy secrets. And yet the problem, of course, is that they are not secrets at all: One of the most painful principles of our age is that scandals are doomed to be revealed -- and to remain stinking there before us, unexcised, unpunished, unfinished.

If this Age of Rhetoric has a tragic symbol, then surely this is it: the frozen scandal, doomed to be revealed, and revealed, and revealed, in a never-ending torture familiar to the rock-bound Prometheus and his poor half-eaten liver. A full three years ago, the photographs from Abu Ghraib were broadcast by CBS on Sixty Minutes II and published by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker; nearly as far back I wrote a book entitled Torture and Truth, made up largely of Bush administration documents that detailed the decision to use "extreme interrogation techniques" or -- in the First President of Rhetoric's phrase -- "an alternative set of procedures" on prisoners in the War on Terror.

He used this phrase last September in a White House speech kicking off the 2006 midterm election campaign, at a time when accusing the Democrats of evidencing a continued softness on terror -- and a lamentable unwillingness to show the needed harshness in "interrogating terrorists" -- seemed a winning electoral strategy. And indeed Democrats seemed fully to agree, for they warily elected not to filibuster the Military Commissions Act of last October, which arguably made many of these "alternative sets of procedures" explicitly legal. And Democrats did win both houses of Congress, a victory perhaps owed in part to their refusal to block Bush's interrogation law. Who can say? What we can say is that if torture today remains a "scandal," a "crisis," it is a crisis in that same peculiar way that crime or AIDS or global warming are crises: that is, they are all things we have learned to live with..."

fine big essay by Richard Taruskin-- The Musical Mystique


"The discourse supporting classical music so reeks of historical blindness and sanctimonious self-regard as to render the object of its ministrations practically indefensible. Belief in its indispensability, or in its cultural superiority, is by now unrecoverable, and those who mount such arguments on its behalf morally indict themselves. Which is not to say that classical music, or any music, is morally reprehensible. Only people, not music, can be that. What is reprehensible is to see its cause as right against some wrong. What is destroying the credibility of classical music is an unacknowledged or misperceived collision of rights. The only defense classical music needs, and the only one that has any hope of succeeding, is the defense of classical music (in the words of T.W. Adorno, a premier offender) against its devotees..."

Robert Adams: Questions for an Overcast Day

"The artist likens the particular pattern of erosion on each leaf to hieroglyphics, reading in them a unique “calligraphy of disaster...”

(Matthew Marks 526 W 22 NYC till Oct 27)

checking out the Marimekko Cotton Fabrics

though pulling for the Sox (my bus trips through New England to Bangor--in which every tavern I passed still seemed to have its last World Series bunting still up--taught me how much New England truly needs it) best of luck to North Delta's Jeff Francis in the opener tonight...

via RS from Sotheby's (reg req.) "EUGÈNE CUVELIER (1837-1900) FORÊT DE FONTAINEBLEAU. SOUS-BOIS SOUS LA NEIGE, EARLY 1860S"

very much enjoyed the first night of the two-night Louis Malle season at TCM, watching the very good "The Fire Within" for the first time, and "Murmur of the Heart" & "Black Moon" after many years...am looking forward to the documentaries tonight....

"Its autumn in Gothenburg..."

Jens Lekman

video of Maple Leaves, the best new fall song I've heard in awhile...

nice to see terrific actor Amy Ryan (Beadie Russel from "The Wire") already getting Oscar buzz for her role in "Gone Baby Gone"...

Neko Case on autotune...

"When I think about Jackie Wilson or the Platters and then I think about modern, Top 40 music that's really horrible, it makes me mad. Singing isn't important anymore. I'm not a genius-- if I had been around during the time of Jackie Wilson or Rosemary Clooney or Patsy Cline, I would be shit. I would be singing in some bar somewhere for $5 a week and that's as far as I would ever go. But I'm living now and I write songs, it's different. There's some part about the craft of singing-- craft is too important of a word, I hate that word but I just used it anyway-- in a lot of places, it hasn't really made it. It's not to do with the people who are doing it as much as the people who are producing it. There's technology like auto tune and pitch shifting so you don't have to know how to sing. That shit sounds like shit! It's like that taste in diet soda, I can taste it-- and it makes me sick.

When I hear auto tune on somebody's voice, I don't take them seriously. Or you hear somebody like Alicia Keys, who I know is pretty good, and you'll hear a little bit of auto tune and you're like, "You're too fucking good for that. Why would you let them do that to you? Don't you know what that means?" It's not an effect like people try to say, it's for people like Shania Twain who can't sing. Yet there they are, all over the radio, jizzing saccharine all over you. It's a horrible sound and it's like, "Shania, spend an extra hour in the studio and you'll hit the note and it'll sound fine. Just work on it, it's not like making a burger!"

How Manny Ramirez led the Red Sox to another World Series





"It came at the end of a lengthy chat with the media, a rare enough occurrence over the past two seasons in which Ramirez has frozen them out. Already he had said that he would trade all his records for a chance at another World Series, which is exactly the right kind of thing to say to people who judge your dedication by the kind of dumbshow you perform in front of the camera. Then, he said that, if Boston were to lose the ALCS, it wouldn't be the end of the world. Which is exactly the wrong thing to say to those same people. He stood accused, on the front pages of America's finer tabloid newspapers, and all across the sporting airwaves, in between commercials for auto glass and male-enhancement nostrums, of insufficient grit, of Non-Moxie in the third degree, of Conspiracy To Convince America's Fans To Lighten the Hell Up. Guilty on all counts..."

local/Tsawassen trees

War and Deliverance

"You remember the scene in "Deliverance" where Lewis has shot one of the mountain men in the back with a broadhead arrow and he's convincing the other three that they should hide the body. The decent family man Drew (Ronny Cox) says no, they have to tell the police what they've done. After all, the law is the law.

"The law?" Lewis half laughs. "The law? What law. Where's the law, Drew?" And then Lewis goes on. "You believe in democracy don't you? Well, then, we'll take a vote." The terrified companions opt to hide the evidence.


Yeah, you believe in democracy, don't you?"

must-read--The Death of Canadian Journalism

"Led by CEO Leonard Asper and the powerful Asper family, the Winnipeg-based corporation now owns both of Vancouver’s daily newspapers (the Sun and the tabloid Province), the city’s top-rated television station (GlobalTV), 12 community newspapers, eight analog and digital television stations, and one of two national papers. For good measure, it also owns the only daily in the nearby provincial capital, Victoria’s Times Colonist. A throwback to the classic Company Town, CanWest has turned Vancouver into the single-most media concentrated city in the western world..."

Moths that drink the tears of sleeping birds

"This can be inserted under the bird’s eyelids, where the barbs anchor it, apparently without disturbing the bird. The team does not yet know whether the insect spits out an anaesthetic to dull the irritation..."

am off to the Roy Arden opening at the VAG tonight, see you there!

Between Two Worlds

Falling asleep's been a bad 40's play
a gâteaux of allegory
which means no war prophecy

(pending the pact) no Yalta
no mittens knitted for Winter War kittens
just Julie Garfield leering in quotes

a Popular Front cloud in trousers
(authoritarian impulse bitten tersely,
victimhood projected retrospectively)

smoking shorthands the era for tv
but the herbal version won't light
or won't stay lit, non-smokers indicate too much

(under unbunched alders pressed & tendrilled,
a clearing of caterpillars pavilioned
by calicos cotillioned)

Big Syd intervenes like the Coquitlam Queen
between the ball-bearing gaze & its object serene,
a half stop down his priestly collar glows

doublewide thus not washed out
by the ivory suit, while Eleanor walks backward
up black marble understandably but everyone's

moving toward that big Broadway tableaux
with feathered edges floating in a cloud
'twixt anschluss & Pearl Harbor

with a belated apologia for non-intervention
with every view expressed at length
until unlit papers smudge & slap the pavement.

"The Myth of the Counterculture" & "White Album No. 2972886"-- from Jamie Tolagson

review of Beechcombings by Richard Mabey

"Rather in the manner of a risk-taking actor, the beech can command a great presence, but may at any moment fall flat on its face."

farewell Deborah Kerr

thanks V for these trees

"Myoung Ho Lee separates subjects from their original circumstances to derange the difference between subject and image. His work reveals nature by twists and turns, a little fabrication and optical illusion."

The Genocidal Imagination of Christopher Hitchens

"In "Letters to a Young Contrarian", Hitchens urges his young reader to live 'at a slight angle to society,' which means to be idiosyncratic rather than tendentious. This contrarianism is a fetish, and it is one that encases in amber the burning polemical zeal of a former radical, a soixante-huitard. In the wake of a detumescent revolutionary fervor, and with the associated political vision largely gone, we are left with an opportunistic polemicising in which no matter how much one's opinion alters, it remains permanently in opposition, permanently contrarian. And this delivers the hammering Hitchensian irony in which the most consummately bourgeois opinion acquires the mould and fashion of resistance.."

catching up with the top American poet--The 77 Best Lil' Wayne Songs of 2007

new Common-Place (already!) has a great defense of Undisciplined Reading--

"Is it hard to imagine John Cotton at one of the monthly meetings of the OULIPO, reporting to Italo Calvino or Harry Matthews a constraint for literary production? Well, yes. Yet Puritan sermon dictates certainly sound Oulipian: "Take a fragment from a source work. Dramatize or contextualize it in five ways. Then develop three philosophical propositions from it. Then create three rules of behavior based on it. Do this every week for the rest of your life..."

trees from Impressed by Light: British Photographs from Paper Negatives, 1840–1860

JOHN FAHEY "Dance Of The Inhabitants Of The Palace Of King Phillip XIV Of Spain"--16 minutes at the height of his powers...

live from Portland Oregon in 1976--John Fahey--"Fare Forward Voyagers"



"When the train starts, and the passengers are settled
To fruit, periodicals and business letters
(And those who saw them off have left the platform)
Their faces relax from grief into relief,
To the sleepy rhythm of a hundred hours.
Fare forward, travellers! not escaping from the past
Into different lives, or into any future;
You are not the same people who left that station
Or who will arrive at any terminus,
While the narrowing rails slide together behind you;
And on the deck of the drumming liner
Watching the furrow that widens behind you,
You shall not think 'the past is finished'
Or 'the future is before us'.
At nightfall, in the rigging and the aerial,
Is a voice descanting (though not to the ear,
The murmuring shell of time, and not in any language)
'Fare forward, you who think that you are voyaging;
You are not those who saw the harbour
Receding, or those who will disembark.
Here between the hither and the farther shore
While time is withdrawn, consider the future
And the past with an equal mind.
At the moment which is not of action or inaction
You can receive this: "on whatever sphere of being
The mind of a man may be intent
At the time of death"—that is the one action
(And the time of death is every moment)
Which shall fructify in the lives of others:
And do not think of the fruit of action.
Fare forward.
O voyagers, O seamen,
You who came to port, and you whose bodies
Will suffer the trial and judgement of the sea,
Or whatever event, this is your real destination.'
So Krishna, as when he admonished Arjuna
On the field of battle.
Not fare well,
But fare forward, voyagers..."

(from TS Eliot "The Dry Salvages")

(from Onion Sunday Magazine covers)

Local/Ladysmith trees

terrific long piece on The Wire...

autumn with the Laugh-Out-Loud Cats

scariest movie ever Eyes Without a Face by Georges Franju on TCM at 1130 Pacific tomorrow night...

thanks SO for A Tree Grows Around It

"If you take the bus in Buenos Aires, which you should do sometime, you will have discovered that some of the bus stops are hard to find. Some bus stops, like for the #10, are indicated by no more than a little sticker slapped on a utility pole. Over the last year I’ve been observing this bus stop sign that is being slowed enveloped by a tree. Earlier this month I finally got around to taking a photo."

I really would like to take the bus in Buenos Aires sometime!

Ancient cedar falls in Vancouver's Stanley Park

"The top of the tree lies so deep in the forest it can't be seen..."

Curiosities of Literature: Secret History of Authors who have Ruined their Booksellers--

“I must be allowed my freedom in my studies, for I substitute my writings for a game at the tennis-court, or a club at the tavern; I never counted among my honours these opuscula of mine, but merely as harmless amusements. It is my partridge, as with St. John the Evangelist; my cat, as with Pope St. Gregory; my little dog, as with St. Dominick; my lamb, as with St. Francis; my great black mastiff, as with Cornelius Agrippa; and my tame hare, as with Justus Lipsius.” I have since discovered in Niceron that this Catherinot could never get a printer, and was rather compelled to study economy in his two hundred quartos of four or eight pages; his paper was of inferior quality; and when he could not get his dissertations into his prescribed number of pages, he used to promise the end at another time, which did not always happen. But his greatest anxiety was to publish and spread his works: in despair he adopted an odd expedient. Whenever Monsieur Catherinot came to Paris, he used to haunt the quaies where books are sold, and while he appeared to be looking over them, he adroitly slided one of his own dissertations among these old books. He began this mode of publication early, and continued it to his last days. He died with a perfect conviction that he had secured his immortality; and in this manner had disposed of more than one edition of his unsaleable works. Niceron has given the titles of 118 of his things, which he had looked over..."

more recent acquisitions

for his 100th birthday--Le site officiel de Jacques Tati, Les films de mon oncle, Tativille, Monsieur Hulot, Tatischeff, Playtime, Parade, Trafic:

today's YouTube - Cal Tjader / Clare Fischer - Guachi Guaro (aka Soul Sauce)

been listening to a lot more Tjader lately, mostly thanks to the efforts of this splendid person, & am continually pleased by how fresh & inventive his playing is--he even finds something new in Bacharach...

I'd missed Matt Taibbi's genius Friedman takedown--a must read--That's a Flattener...

"The baseline argument begins with a lengthy description of the 'ten great flatteners,' which is basically a highlight reel of globalization tomahawk dunks from the past two decades: the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Netscape IPO, the pre-Y2K outsourcing craze, and so on. Everything that would give an IBM human resources director a boner, that's a flattener. The catch here is that Flattener #10 is new communications technology: 'Digital, Mobile, Personal, and Virtual.' These technologies Friedman calls 'steroids,' because they are 'amplifying and turbocharging all the other flatteners.' According to the mathematics of the book, if you add an IPac to your offshoring, you go from running to sprinting with gazelles and from eating with lions to devouring with them..."

Brooklyn punters footloose on Friday should check out Bruce Conkle's new show...(don't know if Marne Lucas (above) will be there...)

Opening: Friday, October 12, 7–9pm
Dates:
Saturday, October 13–Sunday, November 11
Location:
487 Driggs Ave, bet N. 9 and N. 10

Hours:
Thurs–Mon, 12–6pm
Contact:
eva@JackthePelicanPresents.com 718-782-0183


"Jack the Pelican is pleased to present stalwart of the revolution, Bruce Conkle. De facto king of the Pacific NW eco art geeks and self-styled "misfit at the crossroads," he creates "Lament for Middle Kingdom Earth," a quirky eco-absurd installation that restages contemporary ideas about nature and community in a pre-modern world of fairytale landscape.


Conkle is the proverbial stranger come to heal the village with a whacky old prospector's assortment of things, mostly of the detritus kind, and mis-wired ancient magic spells that can never in a million years actually work.

He launches his exhibition at the opening by blowing his 12-foot Alphorn and playing with puppets. The show is laced with bits of meteorite. In the background are mountains of cardboard--Alps, if you please, where he comes from, being half Swiss by descent--and also 'them thar hills,' source of the lore of sasquatch and gingerbread houses and the like, all of which have been his mainstay of interest over the years. Rivers of Pepto-Bismol flow. A shovel dissolves in a decorative woof of fancy. A snowman drowns himself ( Suicide Snowman ). And dancing overhead are visions of a coconut planet spaceship with Superman crystal-colony cities..."

recent acquisitions

The Best Book on Mozart

"His categories assume unwarrantably that the composer always expressed his art more personally when transforming tradition than by conforming to it, that Mozart, in short, was most Mozartean only when most radical. That is particularly dangerous with this composer because it may prevent us from recognizing that Mozart could be as inspired when he conformed to tradition as when he was revolutionary. The refusal to acknowledge that Mozart often showed his genius when he was most conventional has inspired such foolishness as Theodor W. Adorno's rueful assertion that Mozart, unlike Beethoven, could not always write the way he wanted, or Glenn Gould's attempt, by performance as well as writing, to demonstrate that Mozart in his last years had become an inferior composer..."

a bunch of swell Django linkage...

via birthday boy ::: wood s lot ::: the new Common-place---an issue on money, including the Pine Tree Shilling...

missed the beginning last week but the second episode of Canada's best tv show Intelligence is on tonight at 900...

more on the Joy Division pic

"...at times, the studio sets and sluggish pace means the film could be a portrayal of the northwest of England anytime between, say, 1959 and 1979. In truth 1980, the year Curtis committed suicide, was actually as bleak and cold as the hole in the number ‘0’. The full onslaught of the New Right agenda, led by Thatcher, was becoming self-evident. This was the year that unemployment hit two million for the first time since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan. Nuclear war felt inevitable. We were all going to die - or so many people believed. In such a context, ramalama punk pop sounded increasingly flimsy and threadbare. All of a sudden, former punk bands evolved into something far more intense and foreboding, bleak and brittle, twisted and metallic: a soundtrack for the oncoming economic and social depression..."

fans of Bebel Gilberto should check out this rare & lovely 1989 album by her mom Miucha, which includes an early appearance by BG...

Thomas Gainsborough as a boy
The Shelleys & Frankenstein's
Sappho


via below, from excellent Look and Learn magazine, illustrations and picture library...

good article on "Children's Encyclopaedia" editor Arthur Mee--

"Mee's Children's Encyclopaedia is nothing like an encyclopaedia, or, rather, it is perhaps the prime and supreme encyclopaedia - an encyclical. There is no A-Z arrangement; indeed, there often appears to be no conscious arrangement to it at all; the material simply circles and circulates in and around itself, a vast labyrinth of facts, fancies, niceties, delicacies and wonderful minutiae. There are stories, and diagrams, and illustrations, and articles about animals, and history, and biography, and biology, and "Great Thoughts", and "Things to Do and Make", and "Plain Answers to the Questions of the Children of the World" such as "Why do I laugh and cry?" (Answer: "You laugh and cry because you are 'made that way'.") In any given issue you might find advice on how to keep a hedgehog as a pet, or how to make a fiddle from a cigar box, and examples of "The Jolly Pictures the Cave Men Made", and an essay on "How to Feel the Pressure of the Air", and musings and ruminations on Chaucer, Michelangelo and the meaning of beauty, distance and courage ("The Great Words that Stir the Hearts and Minds of All Mankind")..."

local fall flora & fauna

Joy Division's poor Ian Curtis gets dug up for the fascist kitsch version of the Jim Morrison treatment...

"This year, the U.K. Japanese restaurant chain Yo! Sushi began offering a boxed meal named in honor of Joy Division's most famous song. The Love Will Tear Us Apart salmon and tuna box set includes a selection of nigiri, maki and sashimi as well as a salad topped with a piquant sunomono dressing. And even more incongruously, in April, the sportswear company New Balance commissioned artist Dylan Adair to design two pairs of limited edition Joy Division running shoes, one featuring the iconic pulsar wavelength artwork from the "Unknown Pleasures' " album cover..."

::: wood s lot ::: reminds me that it's Wallace Stevens birthday...