best thing on Scott McClellan's Wha' Happened?

"Bush loyalists have responded in three ways:

1) Scott, how could you? This conveniently ignores the issue of what Bush did or didn't know and do about intelligence on Iraq, converting the story line into that of wounded leader and treasonous former aide. (That canard was the sole focus of a CBS news radio report Wednesday night).

2) Invading Iraq was the right thing to do. Okay. When do Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, et al *not* say that? Dog bites man.

3) It was an intelligence failure. The CIA gave us bad dope on WMD and, well, they're the experts. More on this in a second.

The news media have been, if anything, even more craven than the administration has been in defending its failure to investigate Bush's case for war in Iraq before the war.

Here's ABC News' Charles Gibson: "I think the questions were asked. It was just a drumbeat of support from the administration. It is not our job to debate them. It is our job to ask the questions.” And “I’m not sure we would have asked anything differently."

Really?

Or this from NBC's Brian Williams: “Sadly, we saw fellow Americans — in some cases floating past facedown (after Katrina). We knew what had just happened. We weren’t allowed that kind of proximity with the weapons inspectors [in Iraq]. I was in Kuwait for the buildup to the war, and, yes, we heard from the Pentagon, on my cell phone, the minute they heard us report something that they didn’t like. The tone of that time was quite extraordinary.” And this: "“It’s tough to go back, to put ourselves in the mind-set. It was post-9/11 America."

So the Pentagon tells the media what kind of reporting is in- and out-of-bounds?

Hogwash. Hogwash! HOGWASH!"

round the manse this Caterday it's Cal Tjader...

(playing "Shoshana" here)

roundup of reactions to Stuart (Re-Animator, From Beyond) Gordon's new film Stuck...

interesting group show in Seattle

"Misako Inaoka’s moss piece, Untitled, is the only one that involves movement. A small sprout grows from an artificial moss cluster and swivels back and forth waving at passersby. The way the clusters are sporadically placed on the wall replicates the seemingly spontaneous and rapid growth of moss and algae, presenting the most convincing example of a living, multiplying organism..."

Local trees

Zombie Capitalism

"One is that for the most part the equity — the idea — is the only thing the company is interested in owning. River West acquires brands when the products themselves are dead, not merely ailing. Aside from Brim, the brands it acquired in the last few years include Underalls, Salon Selectives, Nuprin and the game maker Coleco, among others. “In most cases we’re dealing with a brand that only exists as intellectual property,” says Paul Earle, River West’s founder. “There’s no retail presence, no product, no distribution, no trucks, no plants. Nothing. All that exists is memory. We’re taking consumers’ memories and starting entire businesses.”

The other interesting thing is that when Earle talks about consumer memory, he is factoring in something curious: the faultiness of consumer memory. There is opportunity, he says, not just in what we remember but also in what we misremember..."

Charlie & Rubbercat say: if you want something you can really get your teeth into, why not buy The Age of Briggs & Stratton today??

"The London Nobody Knows" part one, with the great James Mason (hi Sara!)...the other parts are inside...

interesting notes on The Library of Charles Willeford

“The only real difference between the rock-and-roll of The Peanut Butter Conspiracy and the rock-rolling of the Burnt Orange Heresy is the serial consistency and orderly arrangement of movable type rearranged by an unmoving writer for an immobilized and highly literate reader...”

thoughtful essay by Eavan Boland discusses the still shockingly undervalued poets Hugh MacDiarmid, Charlotte Mew & Patrick Kavanagh...

excellent James Laxer on the decline of the CBC--

"Managers of publicly owed corporations have always made a killing in the transition to private ownership. Those who do a good job shedding labour, thereby appearing to raise productivity usually at the cost of lower quality, can expect to be hired on with a much fatter pay packet as the first managers of the new private company. Whether it's a railway, an airline, a water utility, a telephone company, or a petroleum company, in Canada and in Britain, the experience has been that the new shareholders do brilliantly, while the old owners, also known as the citizenry, get hosed. The same will be true if CBC Television goes on the block..."

Sydney Pollack 1934-2008, one of the last of the real Hollywood pros, talking about my favorite of his films "The Yakuza"...I also liked his "Castle Keep", "Absence of Malice, "Three Days of the Condor" & "Jeremiah Johnson"...

jimmy mcgriff 1936-2008

"cat and house with cherry tree in background" & "footpath in west london" among the new spring crop of films at Scenes of Provincial Life

Sunday morning wakeup--YouTube - Hector Lavoe "Mi Gente"

Local trees

Tasty Spam...

(303) 280-8689 / 3032808689

Just called and interrupted the "major essay"I'm supposed to be working on...
Glad I didn't pick up!

"I got a call from this number
and happened to answer it.

animal grunting
(believe it or not)

on a loop.
Out of morbid curiosity

I stayed on the line
as I too am on

the Do Not Call list
and wanted to find out

who it was so I could report.
After about a minute

and a half the automated voice
came on and stated

to press one for yes and 2 for no...
then the grunting returned."

check out this nice little film (via Adidas) about---YouTube - Theo Parrish - Detroit DJ / Producer---one of the most inspirational artists working in any medium right now...

The Blog of War--historian Anne Applebaum on Nicholson Baker's new book--

"Human Smoke, in other words, is not a conscientious pacifist tract. It is not a clever contribution to today's debate on warfare, and it does not add anything to what we know about World War II. It is a cheerful contribution to the movement against scholarship--a movement which has advanced so far, in fact, that I fully expect these observations, too, to be condemned as "elitism." As one who does contribute (it's pathetic, I know) to the mainstream media on a regular basis, I know that any author who expresses a sliver of doubt about the wisdom of amateurs risks bringing down a torrent of recrimination and insult upon his head. But if we have arrived at the point where a solemn and excited individual can cobble together anecdotes from old newspapers and Nazi diaries, and write them up in the completely contextless manner of blog posts, and suggest that he has composed a serious critique of America's decision to enter World War II, and then receive praise from respected reviewers in distinguished publications, then maybe it is time to say: Stop."

todays Youtube--Vivian Stanshall - Crank (Part One) a documentary about the English comedian & hero of mine since seeing him on UK TV as a lad, hosted by the late John Peel (the other parts are there)...

further study--Ginger Geezer

The TPM DOCUMENT COLLECTION - Excerpts from DOJ IG Report on FBI Role in Detainee Interrogations

at home, on the road or in the office--The Age of Briggs & Stratton...

terrific Alissa Quart onLost Media, Found Media

"It was always hard for nonfiction writers, but something seems to have changed. For those of us who believed in the value of the journalism and literary nonfiction of the past, we had become like the people at the ashram after the guru has died..."

Tsawassen trees

farewell John Phillip Law (on right)

Thirty Tables of Contents

Turner-prize winning artist Steve McQueen's film about Bobby Sands opens at Cannes...

"I'm not interested in left or right [wing politics]. I am interested in what happens to people in those kind of conditions. It is about the smell, the atmosphere, the texture of those events; about the things between the words in history books. These are things that have to be shown rather than written about."

Local trees, black slug, shrew

I warmly recommend the 2002 "To Be and to Have" a documentary set in a small school in the French countryside--unmissable for anybody connected with children or education...

farewell Robert Rauschenberg

The Godfather & foreign policy--

Tom Hagen, the liberal institutionalist: “We oughta hear what they have to say.”

Sonny, the neocon: “No, no more. Not this time, consigliere; no more meetings, no more discussions, no more Sollozzo tricks. . . . And do me a favor: no more advice on how to patch things up—just help me win alright?”

Ramp season is almost over...

a few ramp festivals left for devotees of this Smoky Mountain delicacy...

Bird-watcher

"Not long ago, I listened to him play a recording of “Okiedoke,” a tune that Parker recorded in 1949 with Machito and His Afro-Cuban Orchestra. Schaap, in his pontifical baritone, first provided routine detail on the session and Parker’s interest (via Dizzy Gillespie) in Latin jazz, and then, like a car hitting a patch of black ice, he veered off into a riff of many minutes’ duration on the pronunciation and meaning of the title—of “Okiedoke.” Was it “okey-doke” or was it, rather, “ ‘okey-dokey,’ as it is sometimes articulated”? What meaning did this innocent-seeming entry in the American lexicon have for Bird? And how precisely was the phrase used and understood in the black precincts of Kansas City, where Parker grew up? Declaring a “great interest in this issue,” Schaap then informed us that Arthur Taylor, a drummer of distinction “and a Bird associate,” had “stated that Parker used ‘okeydokey’ as an affirmative and ‘okeydoke’ as a negative.” And yet one of Parker’s ex-wives had averred otherwise, saying that Parker used “okeydoke” and “okeydokey” interchangeably. (At this point, I wondered, not for the first time, where, if anywhere, Schaap was going with this.) Then Schaap introduced into evidence a “rare recording of Bird’s voice,” in which Parker is captured joshing around onstage with a disk jockey of the forties and fifties named Sid Torin, better known as Symphony Sid. After a bit of chatter, Sid instructs Parker to play another number: “Blow, dad, go!"

Okeydoke, says Bird..."

thanks LB for this bit of Shakey news--Neil Young gets new honor -- his own spider

An East Carolina University biologist, Jason Bond, discovered a new species of trapdoor spider and opted to call the arachnid after his favorite musician, Canadian Neil Young, naming it Myrmekiaphila neilyoungi.

"There are rather strict rules about how you name new species," Bond said in a statement.

"As long as these rules are followed you can give a new species just about any name you please. With regards to Neil Young, I really enjoy his music and have had a great appreciation of him as an activist for peace and justice."

another gem--YouTube - Karen Dalton, It Hurts Me Too

this'll wake you up--Rahsaan Roland Kirk - Volunteered Slavery

also: a friend to poets--

"She got up and did a really dumb poem about her cat. It was really out of place, but the band tried to do something behind it. Some guy in the audience starting insulting her with half-sexist, half-racist hippie-dip comments. Rahsaan suddenly stopped the band and said, 'You can think whatever you want to about this lady's poem. But she's doin' somethin'! What can you do brother? You got an instrument? Bring it up here and play it! Can you sing? Come on up here and sing. Can you tell a joke? Come on up and tell one. Can you fight? Then come on up here and box with me!!!"

Local trees

Charlie sez: buy my Gumpy's new book of poems The Age of Briggs & Stratton today!

Fisk on T.E. Lawrence

"The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour," he wrote. "They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiqués are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows . . . We are today not far from a disaster."

from Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition by Robert Pogue Harrison--

"There is no doubt that Meneleus would opt for Elysium over Hades—any of us would—but would he gladly give up his worldly life prematurely for that garden existence? It seems not. Why? Because earthly paradises like Dilmun and Elysium offer ease and perpetual spring at the cost of an absolute isolation from the world of mortals—isolation from friends, family, city, and the ongoing story of human action and endeavor. Exile from both the private and public spheres of human interaction is a sorry condition, especially for a polis-loving people like the Greeks. It deprives one of both the cares and the consolations of mortal life, to which most of us are more attached than we may ever suspect. To go on living in such isolated gardens, human beings must either denature themselves like Utnapishtim, who is no longer fully human after so many centuries with no human companionship other than his wife, or else succumb to the melancholia that afflicts the inhabitants of Dante’s Elysian Fields in Limbo, where, as Virgil tells the pilgrim, sanza speme vivemo in disio, we live in desire without hope. As Thoreau puts it in Walden, “Be it life or death, we crave only reality” . If Meneleus took that craving for reality with him to Elysium, his everlasting life there is a mixed blessing indeed..."

farewell country crooner Eddy Arnold, a great favorite of my childhood...

YouTube - Eddy Arnold - I'll Hold You in My Heart--memorably covered by Elvis, who did a lot of Eddy's songs--both were managed by Colonel Parker...

YouTube - Elvis Presley's version of Mary In The Morning

Welcome To The Security State Of North America

"1) As FISA currently stands, U.S. security agencies can monitor phone calls, emails and whatnot outside of the U.S. without the need of warrants - this of course, includes Canada;

2) Similarly, current Canadian laws do not require that Canadian security agencies obtain court approved warrants in order to monitor phone calls, emails and whatnot outside of Canada - which includes, of course, the U.S.;

3) If anything, the Maher Arar affair has shown to which extent American and Canadian security agencies have been freely sharing information compiled into databases for quite some time now;

and 4) the Security and Prosperity Partneship of North America (SPPNA) aims at full integration/cooperation of security measures, police activities, anti-terrorism policies, and even use of armed forces domestically - including, of course, the complete sharing of intelligence databases, such as no fly lists, private citizen files, private citizen informations, etc. And by the way: the establishment of the SPPNA keeps on advancing slowly but surely ..."

from PC: Burnaby Youth Correctional Centre trees

a day late--YouTube - Liz Phair - Cinco de Mayo (1994)

Zombie Bush

"It's a beautiful place," the president discloses. "In the spring, the flowers are fantastic. In the fall, the -- it's just such a -- kind of a place that's so fresh. In the winter, of course, it's got a lot of snow. [Laughter.] Summer is real hot, but it's -- we love it out here. It's beautiful."

Mark E. Smith has written his memoirs--

"Despite the practised snarl of his publicity shots and a willingness to conform to curmudgeonly stereotype, Smith is no nihilist; far from it. He sings a song of common sense, decency, loyalty to your family and community. He writes that he “doesn't deliberate”, and this has meant that his art and vision has remained steadfast for 30 years. He seems to have understood, almost from The Fall's first practice, that the values a working-class background instils: graft, self-belief and honesty, are armoury enough to withstand any condescension or chicanery..."

Nanaimo's Harmac pulp mill, for many years (though not recently) the cornerstone of the local economy, seems to be on its last legs...

Anthony Mann's glorious The Fall of the Roman Empire--remade as the much inferior "Gladiator"-- is finally out on DVD...

just before toddling off to bed last night watched a bit of the 1943 Ann Miller 'B' musical "Reveille for Beverley", a great favorite of Dad's, full of wartime jokes about ration cards & saving your grease, just long enough to see Count Basie do One O'Clock Jump and Bob Crosby (with Ray Bauduc & Bob Haggart) perform Big Noise From Winnetka, whose awesome bass/drums/whistiling duet was memorably used in "Raging Bull"...

Local trees

my giant new book of poems The Age of Briggs & Stratton is now available from Amazon...

my friend Weldon Hunter is reading in NYC with Mike Hauser at Zinc Bar (90 W Houston) on Sunday at 700--

a jazz version of Homer's Odyssey...

review of Tom McCarthy's 'Tintin and the Secret of Literature'--his novel "Remainder" is well worth seeking out--

"McCarthy is telling us less about, say, what literature is than what it isn't. We come to a novel expecting it to tell us everything that it can, to be replete. McCarthy lifts the rug to show us that the more a story tells us, the more it hides. Channeling Barthes, McCarthy characterizes Tintin -- whose exploits so often involve misread missives, misunderstood map coordinates, misconstruction of another character's language -- as standing "guardian . . . at the heart of a noise." In all his adventures around the globe, Tintin is constantly trying to decode clues he's been given, constantly finding himself mired in perils, from which he inevitably escapes, only to compulsively reboot the fiendish cycle again and again. All his labors turn out to be frustratingly like those of Sisyphus -- unending. Whenever he figures out a particular enigma, it only unleashes more enigmas, sending him off on yet another quest. For McCarthy, as for Barthes, this is the "secret" of literature..."

(pssst!)