from the Tyee, an excerpt from my book To the Dogs--

Some Promising Futures for Art Criticism

...But at the same moment that the old guard has been decrying the sorry state of "criticism" (a contested term that's come to mean everything from academic papers to exhibition reviews), something has been happening in art writing. While James Elkins, author of the doomsaying What Happened to Art Criticism?, claims that art criticism is "dying, but everywhere . . . massively produced and massively ignored," writers are pushing out in new directions, trying hybrid forms, and blurring the distinction between art writing and art making...

OBAMA COVER FOR THE NATION

1. Barack Obama

 2. Michelle Obama

 3. Martin Luther King Jr.

 4. Thurgood Marshall

 5. Rosa Parks

 6. Barbara Jordan

 7. Cynthia Wesley

 8. Carole Robertson

 9. Denise McNair

10. Addie Mae Collins

11. Emmett Till

12. Susan B. Anthony

13. C.T. Vivian

14. James Meredith

15. Homer Plessy

16. Harvey Milk

17. Ida B. Wells

18. Malcolm X

19. Bayard Rustin

20. John Lewis

21. Mahatma Gandhi

22. Abraham Lincoln

23. Frederick Douglass

24. Cesar Chavez

25. Sojourner Truth

26. Nelson Mandela

27. Stephen Biko

28. Oliver Brown (Brown v. Board of Education)

29. Chief Joseph

30. Lyndon Johnson

31. Medgar Evers

32. Rev. James Reeb

33. Fred Shuttleworth

34. W.E.B. Du Bois

35. Ralph Abernathy

36. Viola Gregg Liuzzo

37. Marcus Garvey

38. Andrew Goodman

39. James Chaney

40. Michael Schwerner

41. John Brown

42. Jackie Robinson

43. Dolores Huerta

44. Mary White Ovington

45. William Lloyd Garrison

46. Wang Dan

47. Stephen Samuel Wise

48. Harriet Tubman

49. Dred Scott

50. Booker T. Washington

51. David Richmond (and)
52. Joseph McNeil (Greensboro Four)

53. Martin Delany

54. The Little Rock Nine

55. William Still

56. Thomas Garrett

57. Elizabeth Cady Stanton

58. Samuel Burris

59. Thomas Paine

60. Abigail Kelley Foster

61. Jesse Jackson

62. Eugene V. Debs

63. Lucretia Mott

64. Paul Robeson

65. Henry David Thoreau

66. Shirley Chisholm

Local trees

Glenn Greenwald on Tom Friedman & the keyboard kommandos---

...The sociopathic lust of a single war cheerleader can't fairly be projected onto those who are actually prosecuting the war. But one can't help noticing that this "teach-them-a-lesson" justification for civilian deaths in Gaza appears with some frequency among its advocates, at least among a certain strain of super-warrior, Israel-centric Americans -- e.g.: Marty "do not fuck with the Jews" Peretz and Michael "to wipe out a man's entire family, it's hard to imagine that doesn't give his colleagues at least a moment's pause" Goldfarb -- who love to cheer on Middle East wars from a safe and sheltered distance...

The Making of THE SHINING (by Vivian Kubrick)

the great Merle Travis on the manse electrohome this morning--

Nine Pound Hammer

Cannonball Rag

Lost John

Dapper Dan From Dixieland

people who may be curious about my book of poems The Age of Briggs & Stratton but are either too hesitant or broke to actually fork out the dough can find it here for FREE in PDF as part of New Star's handsomely refurbished web site...

diggin' Kensington Market

The group mixed many clearly Canadian sounds and arrangements into a sometime psych-pop, sometime folk, sometime Cream-acid-rock format which was always entertaining.

Robert Fisk

I was in Toronto when I opened the right-wing National Post and found Lorne Gunter trying to explain to readers what it felt like to come under Palestinian rocket attack. "Suppose you lived in the Toronto suburb of Don Mills," writes Gunter, "and people from the suburb of Scarborough – about 10 kilometres away – were firing as many as 100 rockets a day into your yard, your kid's school, the strip mall down the street and your dentist's office..."

Getting the message? It just so happens, of course, that the people of Scarborough are underprivileged, often new immigrants – many from Afghanistan – while the people of Don Mills are largely middle class with a fair number of Muslims. Nothing like digging a knife into Canada's multicultural society to show how Israel is all too justified in smashing back at the Palestinians...

The Captivity and Restoration of Patty Hearst

One juror, reflecting on the decision to convict, noted that Hearst's postcaptivity interest in radical feminist tracts like Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex, which she read under the SLA's sway during her captivity, was "more important than some things" in arriving at the
verdict. The jury considered the intellectuals and their insistence on the limits of free will, and blanched; speaking for American culture as
a whole, the jurors had tired of elite discourse's flirtation with the complexities of the protean, overdetermined self...