Tourists of History

"The disavowal that we engage in today in the United States has reached new depths—a disavowal of the United States’s imperial project, a disavowal of the prison nation we have become, a disavowal of the bankrupt state of U.S. democracy, a disavowal of the ways that our political acquiescence has allowed for the reduction of our civil rights and an increase of our vulnerability to terrorist attack.

This disavowal is aided by many aspects of American culture, not only a belief in national innocence but also a comfort culture of kitsch patriotism and a consumer culture that sells security and comfort. National innocence must be actively, constantly maintenanced by narratives that reinscribe it—in order to be shocked when teenagers pick up guns that they have ready access to and kill their classmates, we must ascribe their acts to popular culture; in order to be shocked about the fact that our country sanctions and engages in torture, we must think it was the work of a few “bad apples.” Innocence is a position from which such acts of aggression are easily screened out..."

fine poem from Weldon--

"Shank's Pony

for Gerry Gilbert

what do you hear in the city
that gets very wet in a rising tone?

where the rain is falling in gusts
& you see the Fall in the gutters

in fact the blue & grey of the sky
comes out rather explicitly in the falling water

I take my shoe
& give it a fuckin good shake

if only I could keep
from moving this heap of limbs

I went for a walk in the Supply District
but all I could find were leaves & planets

the kinetic resurrection of
commerce has eroded the streets

the roads get stoned
the avenues come to visit

the stars twinkle like salted fish
the sun is a glittering lyric hibiscus"

another gem, Glen singing Jimmy Webb's Where's the Playground Suzie?--

Nanaimo trees

today's YouTube - Glen Campbell - Guess I'm Dumb written & produced by Brian Wilson...as good as it gets...

stumbled on this online version of
Victor Coleman's 1969 Light Verse--though find the book if you can, its one of the loveliest Coach House productions, squeezing our coastal landscape into a little Cornell box...



"...Now I sit to write the story
of the images we saw there

and the poem holds forth fantasy
that cries to be reality

so much so that the tears it sheds
become clear pools of water

which we look in to discover that
Mnemosyne's our daughter and

a memory's as real as
the food that we ingest each day

unless we take consumption now
to be a way of living

as the ever perfect fiction
rears its head up into lies







So when loving starts to fail you
and your truth begins to wander

put your mind into a motion
big as ocean or an instant

let the wandering become you
so that fashion is an instinct

and the flesh that is behind your mind
's all glowing and resplendent


It's not your eyes that take you there
because they are small cameras

of past things lost to interest
and images whose records tell

so little that's of use to us
as we lie down to die here..."

online viewing tip from KD of Brooklyn--Bill Moyers interviews Jeremy Scahill about Blackwater...

thanks to "Creatures of State" & "Virtual Clearcut" author Brian Fawcett for directing me toward Don Akenson's amazing An Irish History of Civilization

"Akenson, unlike Galeano, is in no hurry, perhaps because it is his discovery that civilization is in no hurry. Galeano, at least in Memory of Fire, is in the Marxist hurry, always, to prove injustice and to demonstrate the superior, poignant beauty of the victims of Imperialism. Even the most glorious and startling of Galeano’s portraits/historical tableaux are purposive: the Revolution is coming, and if not, why not?

Influenced by his understanding of Aggadah, Akenson plays his stories for what’s in them. They are thus less ideologically inspiring, but they are no less awe-inspiring, the brutalities are no less awful, and the ironies revealed are just as sharp. If Akenson has a political agenda, it is to get us to read smarter, and to lose our fear of history’s utter, uncompromising complexity. This is a step beyond where Galeano took the historiographic method he invented. Akenson goes straight for the wilderness of swirling causalities and opportunisms that he regards as the circulatory conduits of human enterprise. What’s amazing is that nearly always, he brings back something valuable, and more often than not, something surprising. There are hundreds of possible tracks to explore within this work, all of them revealing something about the Irish, and about you and I, that we didn’t appreciate fully, or didn’t know was there. And there are thousands of vignettes/anecdotes/ that will startle, educate and entertain..."

I really liked The Aura a moody thriller from Argentina & was very saddened to learn that its director Fabian Bielinsky died tragically just after completing it. Set mostly in the forests of Patagonia, its tale of a heist-gone-bad is unlike anything I've ever seen.

Andrew Moore | Photography | Robert Moses 2005-2006

via I like

Palm trees in Nanaimo - UBC Botanical Garden Forums

Mature Monkey puzzle tree in Nanaimo - UBC Botanical Garden Forums

"something at my window lattice..."



via Maud Newton this great Gustave Doré site...

today's YouTube - Panda Bear - Bros

though don't miss the 12-minute album version!

Maine trees from Mongibeddu