cool sounding movie late tonight on TCM--"Mafioso" starring the great
Alberto Sordi:--

"I found myself transfixed first by his face -- an expressive, pliant, not-quite-handsome face, whose eyes have the mischievous promise of question marks -- and then by the fine hand-stitching on the lapel of his jacket. I caught myself, ashamed: I should be looking at this wonderful actor's face, and not at the stitching on his jacket. But then I realized that for Sordi, the stitching is part of the seduction. The way he wears those lapels is key to his command of the screen. His Antonio is a fine man, a proud man, worthy of respect: Sordi might think that if you haven't noticed the stitching on the jacket, he hasn't done his job..."

J. Hobermans review...

Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 Diary (excerpts)

May 28, 1964. Suggested to Stanley that "they" might be machines who regard organic life as a hideous disease. Stanley thinks this is cute and feels we've got something.

May 31. One hilarious idea we won't use. Seventeen alien, featureless black pyramids riding in open cars down Fifth Avenue, surrounded by Irish cops.

June 20. Finished the opening chapter, "View from the Year 2000," and started on the robot sequence.

July 1. Last day working at Time/Life completing Man and Space. Checked into new suite, 1008, at the Hotel Chelsea.

July 2-8. Averaging one or two thousand words a day. Stanley reads first five chapters and says "We've got a best-seller here".

July 9. Spent much of afternoon teaching Stanley how to use the slide rule -- he's fascinated.

July 11. Joined Stanley to discuss plot development, but spent almost all the time arguing about Cantor's Theory of Transfinite Groups. Stanley tries to refute the "part equals the whole" paradox by arguing that a perfect square is not necessarily identical with the integer of the same value. I decide that he is a latent mathematical genius.

July 12. Now have everything -- except the plot.

July 13. Got to work again on the novel and made good progress despite the distraction of the Republican Convention.

July 26. Stanley's birthday. Went to the Village and found a card showing the Earth coming apart at the seams and bearing the inscription: "How can you have a Happy Birthday when the whole world may blow up any minute?"

July 28. Stanley: "What we want is a smashing theme of mythic grandeur."

August 1. Ranger VII impacts on moon. Stay up late to watch the first TV close-ups. Stanley starts to worry about the forthcoming Mars probes. Suppose they show something that shoots down our story line? [Later he approached Lloyd's of London to see if hc could insure himself against this eventuality].

August 6. Stanley suggests that we make the computer female and call her Athena.

August 17. We've also got the name of our hero at last -- Alex Bowman. Hurrah!

August 19. Writing all day. Two thousand words exploring Jupiter's satellites. Dull work.

September 7. Stanley quite happy: "We're in fantastic shape." He has made up a 100 item questionnaire about our astronauts, e.g. do they sleep in their pajamas, what do they eat for breakfast, etc.

September 8. Upset stomach last night. Dreamed I was a robot, being rebuilt. In a great burst of enorgy managed to redo two chapters. Took them to Stanley, who was very pleased and cooked me a fine steak, remarking: "Joe Levine doesn't do this for his writers..."

from 1860--the Phonautogram

"Scott’s device had a barrel-shaped horn attached to a stylus, which etched sound waves onto sheets of paper blackened by smoke from an oil lamp. The recordings were not intended for listening; the idea of audio playback had not been conceived. Rather, Scott sought to create a paper record of human speech that could later be deciphered..."

Ange Mlinko excellent on Helen Adam

"The avant-garde needed Adam not only because she was Romantic, authentic and transgressive. They needed her example to unite their own fractured poetics, their own wounded demos. Despite herself, Helen Adam showed them how to be one again; she exerted authority, and they recognized it..."

Kristin Prevallet on her collages...

her appearance on Susan Howe's radio show...

Aaron Peck's Vancouver art round-up at AKIMBO

endangered trees from TreeWatchVictoria

farewell Richard Widmark

K. Silem Mohammed's notes on Manse favorite Night and the City

warm up with some Miami Funk...

Berliners celebrate Heinrich Zille

"Global culture, by its nature, focuses on big names and rankings, to our general impoverishment. Some years ago John Willett, a scholar of German culture, contemplating the Secessionists, wrote about the dangers of embracing “a national or parochial view of art — as even the most enlightened are sometimes tempted to do,” because “as you narrow your horizon in this way you no longer judge by the highest standards.”

That’s right.

But Zille reminds us of another lesson, that high standards are not the only standards that count when grappling with legacies like his. After all, the essence of his pictures was to show how monotonous life would be if we only cared about what’s great in the world and not about everything local and particular and even sometimes untranslatable that actually makes life rich..."

Kodachromes of homefront WWII workers, amongst much else at Shorpy :: History in HD | High-Resolution Historical Photos

some videos in memoriam Jonathan Williams--


YouTube - Bruckner 7th, Allegro - Jochum, RCO

YouTube - Frederick Delius--On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring

YouTube - Calling out Pan (solo trombone from Mahler's 3rd)

YouTube - Margaret Price sings Mahler "Um Mitternacht"

YouTube - Scott Ross--Scarlatti K209

YouTube - Stabat Mater (G.B. Pergolesi) - Emma Kirkby

New York on 99 Cents

(last sentence in the voice of SCTV's Harvey K-Tel--)

"Consider the Web site for the national chain 99¢ Only Store, which proudly displays an Andreas Gursky photograph of endless rows of candy and canned goods called “99 Cents,” taken at a franchise in Hollywood. The Web site informs us, “This photograph recently sold for over $1,999,999!”

director Anthony Mann and producer Sam (cousin of Trotsky!) Bronston's epic El Cid, a Manse favorite since I saw it as a kid & still the most convincing vision of medieval kingship ever put on film, gets a long overdue DVD release--& their excellent follow-up "Fall of the Roman Empire" in April...

Why won't phone books die?

"Left to pulp out in the rain and abandoned in mountainous mailroom piles, phone books don't get much respect anymore. They're having the most absurdly drawn-out death throes of any advertising medium ever known—and yet remain so poorly understood as social history that when they really are gone, we'll scarcely understand what we've lost..."

--Heavy Equipment--Euclid--Maine Psychedelia

"...a 'bad trip' spiked with backwards tape effects, darkly-phrased vocals, all instruments set to 'pummel' and an album title certainly eligible for the 'truth in advertising' award! Tread carefully dear listener..."

NDP Needs Some Class!

"If you were to go into a large public meeting anywhere in the country outside Quebec and assigned the task of finding out who the NDP voters in the room were but could only ask one question of each person -- other than how they voted in the last election -- it would be an easy assignment.

Just get everyone in the room to form a line in order of their income, with the richest person at the front and the poorest at the back.

Depending on what level of popular support the NDP had in that area, you could figure out within a relatively few percentage points the dividing line between likely NDP voters and non-NDP voters. If you were in B.C. with the NDP at its current 34 per cent, the one-third of people in the room with the lowest incomes would be highly disproportionately NDP voter...

It's that simple -- but try telling that to either the provincial or federal party..."

Tsawassen trees

diggin' Jeanne Lee/Ran Blake - The Newest Sound Around (The Legendary Duets)!!


YouTube w/ Mal Waldron doing "The Seagulls of Kristriansund" & "White Road"

Jeanne Lee Tribute

an obit



"As an improvising singer, there was always the option to scat, thus imitating the jazz instrumental sounds. There were also jazz lyricists who set words to instrumental solos. Neither of these options allowed space for the natural rhythms and sonorities or the emotional content of words…"

Local & Horseshoe Bay trees

Glenn Gould Plays Ten Brahms Intermezzi one of his "romantic" records; right up there with the Sibelius...

farewell Mikey Dread

Mikey Dread 1954-2008 - A Tribute...

farewell Paul Scofield

Guardian obit: "The critic JC Trewin once described Scofield's voice as 'sunlight on a broken column'."

Aaron Vidaver's online Flickr reproductions of a couple of 80's classics--Nancy Shaw, Affordable Tedium (1987) & Dorothy Lusk, Oral Tragedy (1988)...

terrific Marcela Valdes on Bolaño as Critic:--

"Brave" may well be the adjective that recurs most often in Between Parentheses, and bravery was indeed something of an obsession for Bolaño. "The figure of bravery is multiple and changing," he wrote in the starkly titled "Bravery." "For my generation bravery is linked with Billy the Kid, who risked his life for money, and with Che Guevara, who risked his for generosity, with Rimbaud, who walked alone at night, and with Violeta Parra, who opened windows into the night." Soldiers and poets, he liked to believe, were the bravest people on earth. He once joked that if he had to rob a bank, he'd choose five "true poets" as his accomplices.

Of course, courage is hardly an unusual fascination for an author. Writers love to glorify the difficulties of their line of work. They speak of wrestling with ideas and facing down blank pages, of battling with ham-fisted editors and triumphing over tin-eared readers. What makes Bolaño's preoccupation rare is that he associated bravery with failure, not triumph. Why choose to rob a bank with five poets? "No one else in the world," he explained, "faces disaster with greater dignity and clarity..."

Man with Timbits, local trees

Physicists Successfully Store and Retrieve Nothing

"So storing a vacuum might sound ridiculously simple: Follow the same procedure but leave out the pulse, and you store nothing. However, Alexander Lvovsky of the University of Calgary in Canada and his colleagues and Mikio Kozuma of the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan and his group have stored a very peculiar type of nothingness called a "squeezed vacuum..."

We're in it with Bush

"In "The Unexpected War: Canada in Kandahar", Janice Gross Stein and Eugene Lang use precious insider knowledge to reveal just how much Canada's involvement in Afghanistan is about Iraq. We didn't go there out of concern for a poor, beleaguered people, not even to prevent terrorism, but because of an obsession with America. "Washington's reactions tended to be the exclusive consideration in almost all of the discussions about Afghanistan. ... The political problem, of course, was how to support Washington in its war on terror without supporting the war in Iraq. The answer to the problem was the so-called 'Afghanistan solution.'"

Without appearing to support the war in Iraq would have been more precise, because, in fact, our commitment to Afghanistan was very helpful to the Iraq war. In 2003, "Rumsfeld was aggressively looking for countries to commit troops to Afghanistan to free up U.S. forces for the coming invasion of Iraq." When we later volunteered for some "heavy lifting" in Kandahar it was, once again, because "the Bush administration wanted to concentrate its military resources in Iraq and Rumsfeld clearly wanted NATO allies to relieve American troops in the south."

As far as the Bush administration is concerned, Afghanistan and Iraq are one war, and we're in Afghanistan, under American command, to help them fight it..."

farewell Tarheel poet, publisher, photographer Jonathan Williams:--

"Every day I wrote a postcard to Jessie McGuffie, a friend of Ian's in Edinburgh, and these cards were later collected as a small book, Lines About Hills Above Lakes. One of the entries was a poem, "A 75th Birthday Maze," for Dame Edith Sitwell. It was an acrostic, and the impetus had come from visiting the ancient topiary maze gardens of Levens Hall, near Kendall. The notion was naturalistic, then, in one obvious sense-as form has been said to be nothing but an extension of content. However, cowbells in a Mahler symphony don't stay cowbells-there is the new, second formal content of art-and letters in a poem are not made out of clipped, shaped yews and beeches. One cannot be a man of letters, as we say, without coming to a recognition of
their look, as well as their sound and their various notations. Note, for example, that in the title, Lines About Hills Above Lakes, each word contains five letters, and that their initials make another five-letter word, LAHAL, of which I am very fond. Poets are happy with such simple pleasures found in the language's substance..."

more at Ron's

Don Akenson on St Patrick

"Converting the Irish was not a difficult business, Padraig soon realized, as long as one made it through the first three minutes, and he always did, God be praised. Padraig, steadfast soldier that he was, nevertheless swithered through the first sixty breaths in the presence of any king or aristocrat whom he had not previously encountered. Those were the moments when the Celtic warrior aspect of the Irish personality was dominant and that is a very binary sort of mind. Either the eminence in question practices his backhand and sends ones head rolling, to the great amusement of his retainers, or he turns into an overbearing host, laying on the crackling pig and homebrew in military quantities and spends the next seventy-two hours exchanging stories of heroes and gods. That's when you hook him..."

A Paper Joy


"He envisioned the print volumes living on as a niche, luxury item, with high-quality paper and glossy photographs — similar to the way some audiophiles still swear by vinyl LPs and turntables. “What you need people to understand,” he said, “is that it is a luxury experience. You want to be able to produce a lot of joy, a paper joy...”

War is Good for Business

"For all our northern bravado, we've always been a rump nation, first of Great Britain, now the United States; but foremost and ever lairded over by a wafer thin elite, the inheritors of a colonialism that never died. The sons and daughters of privilege in this country have survived atop the frosty pyramid of Canada's power elite by following one guiding principle: Adaptation. Tomorrow's vote in the House is more about a choosing up, in the face of an election pending only a single failed motion.

Pictured best perhaps as a gathering of rats upon a burning forecastle, readying for a stampede, jockeying now for the best line to reach the safety of the pier, tomorrow's vote in Parliament is about which will be the new Master of the White House, and how best to position one's self to serve?

Today, the prime minister exudes a smirking confidence, daring the Liberals for months to bring it on, and overturn just one of a series of nation-changing Bills already enacted, triggering an election. So far, the Liberals have played possum, no-shows for the most part, poking their heads up every now and then to take pot shots at more trivial Harper failures, and those of his ethically-challenged coterie, to little effect. One of the Bills allowed recently to pass adopts U.S.-style law and order reforms that initiate odious 'mandatory minimum sentencing,' (a complete disaster for the hundreds of thousands inmate-Americans, and the taxpayers burdened with the bill for private, for-profit prisons) and a generally hard-line approach to social management foreign for decades in liberal Canada.

The next vote failing will see billions upon billions more devoted for years more of the occupation of Afghanistan, and a quiet continuance of the smaller garrison patrol of 'Insurgent Haiti.' More importantly, if passed it will confer on the nation the dedication to a corporate military state for at least the next generation.

The bipartisan agreement between the controlling parties of the House of Commons for several decades on foreign policy, already a mirror image of the climate in Washington through all vagaries will remain despite the occupant of 1600 Penn. Ave., because the consensus among the similarly veneer-like elite in America is again agreed:

War is good for business.

So war it will be..."





via ::: wood s lot :::

Local trees

from Yann Arthus-Bertrand

Russian Mobster Tombstones

How Google Earth Ate Nanaimo

"I think it's pretty cool we're the Google Earth capital of the world," said Jakob Brzovic, 25, who works in a local electronics retail store. "I just wish somebody would have told me."

"For people who live out of town, it would be a great resource and tool," he added. "But, to be fair, if you've been living here your whole life like I have, you don't need to use Google Maps. You just use your brain."

not-even-the-vaguest-thing-to-do-with rock & roll EVER (even on the album Spector produced) Leonard Cohen gets in the Hall of Fame but somehow the Guess Who doesn't? Burton Cummings is a better poet, too...

Castro's Long Run... in U.S. Presidential Politics

"After all these years, only one "superdelegate" undoubtedly feels no pressure at all. Fidel Castro is the Methuselah of U.S. presidential politics. He is the only survivor among the major players from the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon election, not to speak of playing a role in every presidential campaign since. As Greg Grandin, the author of the indispensable Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism, tells us, like a horn of plenty that never stops flowing, Fidel's aura never stops giving when U.S. presidential candidates need to outflank each other on the right..."

terrific Miles Champion poem in the new Brooklyn Rail--Typical Umbrella Fiasco

"capsules release time in stages/
endings pause to re-load more space..."

RM pointed out my hometown of South Wellington sort-of name-checked on p.125 of the 1961 Penguin of S. H. Steinberg's Five Hundred Years of Printing:--

"Every book or newspaper printed in the English language is immediately intelligible to the Cockney, the Canadian, and the Californian, and to every inhabitant of every Wellington, whether in British Columbia, Ontario, Cape Province, Shropshire, Somerset, New South Wales, New Zealand, South Australia, Western Australia, Kansas, Ohio, Texas--regardless of the variations of speech, local, regional, and national."

Ali Smith on Carson McCullers:--

"It's always wrong to sentimentalise McCullers - even on her own invitation - since her work is always an unexpected, uneasy combination of miraculous and brutal, always concerned with the marginalised and with social hierarchies, and is always more astutely and contemporarily political than it might on the surface appear to be..."

via Maud Newton & from out of Gowanus--the Reanimation Library

"The Reanimation Library is a small, independent library based in Brooklyn. It is a collection of books that have fallen out of mainstream circulation. Outdated and discarded, they have been culled from thrift stores, stoop sales, and throw-away piles across the country and given new life as resource material for artists, writers, and other cultural archeologists..."

sounds like the Manse!

Also: someone's splendid collection of ephemera...

Sarkozy & The King's Two Bodies:-

"When Sarkozy's situation is examined through this prism, his case is quite simple: Too much of the profane body and not enough of the sacred. The profane body is in fact dominant, taking over, swallowing up the sacred one.

Somehow, in his romance, his penchant for jogging, his displays of impatience, there is too much flesh, an overexposure of ordinary passions and pleasures, something never before seen in other presidential administrations: an unexpected eclipsing of the sacred body, which does not experience pleasure or passion, and demands both distance and respect..."

Local & Denman Island trees

nice to see EJ Hughes' great painting of Nanaimo Harbour made over into a jigsaw puzzle by the local Cobble Hill Puzzle Company in their "Canadian Artist" series...

Sunday songbird Bea Wain...

YouTube--Heart and Soul

Youtube--"Dancing in the Dark" with Larry Clinton Orchestra

a few seconds of YouTube - "Get Happy" with Larry Clinton Orchestra

an interview

Local trees

Local trees

Satan is Real

"Ira built that set. The devil was twelve feet tall, built out of plywood. We went to this rock quarry and then took old tires and soaked them in kerosene, got them to burn good. It had just started to sprinkle rain when we got that picture taken. Those rocks, when they get hot, they blow up. They were throwing pieces of rock up into the air..."

more...

YouTube - Country Brother Duo's : The Louvin Brothers (after a minute....)

great band I'd never heard of--Dolly Mixture - Demonstration Tapes (Dead Good, 1983)

youtube--Been Teen