today's YouTube one of my favorite songs Ronnie Lane and Slim Chance--Debris (I had the Faces version on the B-side of "Stay With Me")

I left you on the debris
At the Sunday morning market,
You were sorting through the odds and ends,
You was looking for a bargain

I heard your footsteps at the front door
& that old familiar love song
Cause you knew you'd find me waiting there,
At the top of the stairs

I went there & back
Just to see how far it is
And you tried to tell me
But I had to learn for myself

There's more trouble at the depot
With the general workers union
& you said they'll never change a thing
shook for head & and they're not working

Oh you was my hero
Now you are my good friend
I've been there and back
and I know how far it is...

But I left you on the Debris
Now we both know you got no money
And I wonder what you would have been
Without me hanging around...

a nice version by Billy Bragg (who says that Lane wrote it for his father)

more

Solaris is on TCM tomorrow night...

2 of 14 Rare Color Photos From the FSA

Six Questions for Juan Cole

To tell you the truth, I cannot understand what the mission is in Afghanistan any more. It is not to fight Al Qaeda there. I haven’t seen anything about U.S. troops engaging or capturing “Arab Afghans” for years. It appears that the U.S. and NATO are just trying to shore up the government of Hamid Karzai, which only controls thirty percent of the country. And what do we expect? That someday rural Pashtun Muslims will wake up and say, “I don’t mind foreign troops patrolling my country, I’m happy to be ruled by Tajiks and Hazara Shiites, and I’m not that interested in living by Islamic law anymore”? President Obama has spoken about fighting defeating the “Taliban,” but there seem to be four or five distinct groups now being called that, only one of them is Mulla Omar’s “Old Taliban.” And, I have a distinct sense of dread that some of the Pashtuns attacking NATO checkpoints are just disgruntled poppy farmers whose crops we burned down...

if I had my own country, Tadd Dameron's luminous 1956 Fontainbleau would be its anthem...

more info

Tom Clark on Caspar David Friedrich and the Interior Dictation of Landscape, Captain Cook & the Nootka, etc...


He had a special interest in the moon
He used to say
that if after death men were transported to another place
then he would prefer one less terrestrial than lunar
in order to allow the beings inside him to feel at home...

another opportunity to discover Karen Dalton (1938-1993) if you haven't yet...

Poor South Wellington barely gets a "with coal mines", but Nanaimo comes off rather well in the 1922 Baedeker Dominion of Canada, with Newfoundland and an excursion to Alaska. Handbook for travellers; it's "pretty rose-gardened cottages are very unlike the grimy abodes of coal-miners in England", and there are "pleasant excursions to be made"....

inspiration tale of Surfers vs. the Superferry--

It all started in 2001 as a purportedly modest "local" effort to offer inter-island ferry service to "help local people more easily visit their relatives on other islands, and carry their farm produce to market." Most locals liked the idea but soon found that this ferry, the gigantic Hawaii Superferry, was an environmental nightmare. It uses far more fuel (in total and per person) than big planes. It races at high speed (40-45 miles per hour) through zones teeming with endangered humpback whales, dolphins and rare sea turtles. It could transport dangerous invasive species to pristine islands. And it carries hundreds of cars to tiny places already choking on traffic...

"Who moved Garfield?"


...lots of good links @ Silliman's Blog today...

Meredith Quartermain on David Bromige

“There is nothing ambiguous about our double entendres,” Bromige tells us in “Typicality Enthralls with its Particular Failures,” and then continues with “The poet, having no identity is continually informing and filling some other body, and who isn’t a poet, if by that this case means scorned, spurned, feverish, headed for death, name writ on water, way with words, incapable of not noticing all this and more upon occasion?”

Isola di Rifiuti's reading Kerouac:--

Beyond the joys of pure rhythmic clatter and shift, isn’t there in Kerouac a breeze willingness to come spoutingly close to nonsense, as if the present American vernacular simply cannot contain what he’s saying. I love the moments—kin to a blues guitarist stretching a string, pulling out a long blue grace note, or air-thrashing amp-tight in full-feedback, making the electronic overload do the talking—where Kerouac simply makes up the words, little splurges of talking in tongues. Phrases like “spluttrous inheld explosions of dont-laugh” or “lamplit oil house flimmered in a glub of night trees” or “incarnate dirt behung in drapes of grain by level deep doop dung” or “spermatazoing in all directions” or “a rosecovered cottage flat on the dreaming lurps and purls of the Merrimac” or (swimming in that Thoreauvian stream now bedung’d):

—where regularly you saw lumps of human shit floating—I have nightmares of swallowing a cud of crap when I get up on my half rock and point hands to dive, by God I learned to dive by myself by half submerging to my waist—but there’s these turds floating in the river of time and I‘m ready to sprowf myself one up, flubadegud—

Think how precise “half rock” is, and “point hands to dive” and how “sprowf” rejects the thing it ingests, a visceral gag-reflex of a word: it’s the all-assault precision of Kerouac that allows in things like “river of time”—just another springboard (abstract) cantilever’d out over the all, another dive into it. Does it—Kerouac’s racing pulse, picking up whatever sound-confab comes along the ear-ways—fit in against Clark Coolidge’s sense of Free Jazz—“these guys made a time where there was no strong or weak beat. It was all like one-one-one-one-one-one-one to infinity. In other words you could play anything at all over that time, you could go anywhere and not worry about how to come back”?

time to check in with the Laugh-Out-Loud Cats ...

more Serpent Power info here--Clark Coolidge in conversation with Tom Orange

on TCM tonight, unseen by me THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK (James Whale, 1939)

But the Spanish princess to whom Louis is engaged, but who is in love with Philippe, steals the key to the mask that Louis wears around his
neck. In a wonderful shot, Louis’s back is to the camera and Maria Theresa’s arm, rendered immense by the camera proximity, reaches around...

Clark Coolidge (drums) & The Serpent Power - 1967

Theo Parrish- The ugly edits compilation

amazing, essential 2002-2005 series of singles refashioning soul & disco hits...which doesn't adequately describe them or what they do...