grampy will be away from the manse until next month--in the meantime why not check out his (fairly) new book of poems The Age of Briggs & Stratton (Hammertown) ?

Local trees

cover stars Billie Whitelaw, Rita Tushingham, Pat Phoenix and Yootha Joyce, from VulgarPicture.com - an illustrated discography of The Smiths & Morrissey

Crate Digging, Don't Do It!!

B.C. civil rights group says voter ID rules will disenfranchise thousands

"Federal election rules requiring identification to vote will rob thousands of Canadians of their right to cast a ballot in Tuesday's federal election and contribute to poor voter turnout, says the B.C. Civil Liberties Association.

Parliament changed the Canada Elections Act in the spring of 2007 to require voters to have proof of identity and a residential address.

The residential address rule was amended last fall over concerns that the new rules could disenfranchise some rural residents, aboriginals on reserves and students who don't have a proper street address.

But Rob Holmes, president of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, said the updated rules will still prevent people from voting.

"If you look at the homeless or people who are transients, how are they going to establish their right to vote when they show up?" said Holmes.

Holmes said the rules could also affect scores of people who don't have current ID with a new address, including students, seniors, those who don't drive and the disabled - which could drag already dismal voter turnout even lower..."

don't waste your vote!---Tyee's Strategic Voters' Guide

Paul Krugman Wins Economics Nobel

pictures of people sleeping

Marcel Broodthaers - Le Corbeau et le Renard (1967)

"I went back to La Fontaine's text and transformed it into what I call personal writing (poetry). I had my text printed and placed before it various everyday objects (boots, a telephone, a bottle of milk) which were meant to form a direct relationship with the printed letters. It was an attempt to deny, as far as possible, meaning to the word as well as to the image. When I'd finished shooting, I realized that once the film was projected onto a regular screen, I mean a plain white canvas, it didn't exactly give me the image I had intended to create. There was still too much distance between object and text. In order to integrate text and object, I would have to print on the screen the same typographic characters I had used in the film. My film is a rebus, something you have to want to figure out. It's a reading exercise..."

“Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown”

“I DON’T BLAME MYSELF.” Still Noah Cross talking, still back at the surrogate tide pool. He is talking about a lot of things: murdering his friend Hollis, making love to his daughter Evelyn. “Most people never have to face the fact that at the right time, the right place, they’re capable of anything.” Huston’s delivery of the line is superbly ambiguous; there’s almost a sense of relish in that “anything.” When everyone meets in Chinatown at last—the real Chinatown as well as the figurative country of guilty legend which, in one way or another, the best films noirs describe—he speaks a variant of the line to Evelyn. It’s almost as though he were impatient with a little girl who just wouldn’t understand adult imperatives: “You’ve never forgiven me all these years”—as though rebuking her failure of vision. I think Roman Polanski is speaking partly through Noah Cross: evil exists; corruption is in the nature of things. Accept it and you survive, after a fashion; the ending of Rosemary’s Baby, perhaps that of Dance of the Vampires, and certainty his very perverse interpretations of Ross and Donalbain in Macbeth all speak to that end. Try to deny your own flaws and you end up at an intersection not knowing which way to turn (Knife in the Water) or receding into your own murderous eye in a family portrait (Repulsion) or sitting on a rock at high tide calling for a vanished dream of an assuredly corrupt reality (Cul-de-sac). Evelyn Mulwray tries to destroy her father, but in her most desperate frenzy she cannot bring herself to shoot true; a moment later she herself is destroyed, her vulnerable beauty—almost hurtful to look upon in certain scenes—exploded as if from within. Noah’s pawing, pleading overtures to her (John Huston’s “Pleeease! Pleeease!” will haunt your dreams) combine rapaciousness and infantile wheedling inextricably; and who is to say that the titanic embrace which engulfs his daughter-granddaughter and shields her eyes from the horror on the car floor is marked any the less by compassion than by triumph?"