Local trees &c.

tomorrow on TCM a Tribute to Morris Engel, including three of his features & two new documentaries--

"Truffaut said that without Little Fugitive we wouldn't have had our French New Wave. We have to take that comment seriously. As a film historian I can say that LF was the first of its kind. It was really, truly the first American independent film. John Cassavetes and Shadows [1959] often get credit for that but that's not true. It's Little Fugitive, seven years before. It was the first American independent film that had worldwide screenings..."

all you lucky folks in the tri-state area still have a couple of weeks to catch the Pierre Bonnard show at the Met--

For all the apparent softness of things, their blurred and smudged edges, they have been fitted together with a will, worked patiently and hard so as to be pressed into the pictorial grid. The paintings are disquieting and enraptured all at once, but they never want to tell you why...

Destruction of Grain Elevator at Milton & Hecate, Nanaimo

I remember when this still operated as a grain elevator, but it must have shut down in the early 80's. Since then it has been a warehouse mostly, a series of increasingly suspect thrift stores, more recently abandoned & then a crack house, which probably accounts for its destruction. Broken windows & all that. Though not photographed by me, people were scavenging wood on the site. For readers of my poetry, this building is from the block of Milton discussed in the first book of Hammertown & is rich in association for me. I lived a half-block up Hecate (on Prideaux) in the apartment mentioned in my poem Gin & Lime. I had always wanted to build a scale model of Tatlin's "Monument to the Third International" using the grain elevator as a base....I suspect the site will become a vacant lot; that blue perimeter fencing is not a good sign, another piece of the old town gone...

On "Creative Writing"

Emerson’s plea for creative reading and writing -- no matter how tin our ears are to it now -- had nothing to do with writing stories or poems. We come closest to what he meant by it only when we attempt, clumsily and inconsistently, to distinguish good writing from bad...

Bob Dylan on Barack Obama, Ulysses Grant and American Civil War ghosts

He’s like a fictional character, but he’s real. First off, his mother was a Kansas girl. Never lived in Kansas though, but with deep roots. You know, like Kansas bloody Kansas. John Brown the insurrectionist. Jesse James and Quantrill. Bushwhackers, Guerillas. Wizard of Oz Kansas. I think Barack has Jefferson Davis back there in his ancestry someplace. And then his father. An African intellectual. Bantu, Masai, Griot type heritage - cattle raiders, lion killers. I mean it’s just so incongruous that these two people would meet and fall in love. You kind of get past that though. And then you’re into his story. Like an odyssey except in reverse...

a lovely mix from Singer-Saints:

Instrumentality (In Memoriam Helen Levitt)

a lot of readings added to the Segue at the Bowery Poetry Club site, including the one I did with Carla Harryman on Oct 25th of last year...

REVISITING SAM PECKINPAH'S CONVOY

This is one of those wonderfully tactile films from the ‘70s, like Charley Varrick or Electra Glide in Blue, that seems kinetically, electrically connected to the landscapes on which its dramas take place. The soaking up of the spectacular Panavision vistas, deepened by darkening clouds, a line of trucks skating across the bottom of the frame silhouetted in the dusk, is as dramatic as any action set piece in the movie, many of which are shot and edited with an identifiable precision and poetry that is clearly derived from Peckinpah’s sensibility (this despite testimony to the effect that James Coburn and others were called in to direct shots and sequences when Peckinpah arrived on set too drunk and/or deranged to do the job himself). Convoy is a pedal-to-the-heavy-metal, meat-and-potatoes Hal Needham action flick directed by an artist, or a man still enough of one to elevate even its deadliest, hoariest conceits-- Ernest Borgnine’s mustache-twirling devilry as evil sheriff Dirty Lyle, who rides Rubber Duck’s ass straight to hell; Rubber Duck’s populist-Christ resurrection that occurs five minutes after the movie should have ended; and the entire nostril-flaring presence of Ali McGraw-- into classifiably forgivable sins, so spectacular is the movie’s milieu, its dusty testimony to the desperate beauty of the road, of trucks, of desperate, disillusioned men...

Helen Levitt

"The artist's task is not to alter the world as the eye sees it into a world of aesthetic reality, but to perceive the aesthetic reality within the actual world, and to make an undisturbed and faithful record of the instant in which this movement of creativeness achieves its most expressive crystallization..."

James Agee

Tree Featured In 'The Deer Hunter' Dies | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

After shooting to stardom in the late 1970s with its scene-stealing turn as a stately old-growth conifer in The Deer Hunter, the tree soon cemented its reputation as one of Hollywood's most dependable character actors.

According to its publicist, the woody plant and beloved fixture of nearly 40 feature films died of complications relating to adelgid beetles and lightning.

"It will be missed," Deer Hunter costar Robert De Niro said. "We took a shine to each other immediately. That tree taught me a lot about acting and about life..."

Singer-Saints:

Pandit Pran Nath - Midnight: Raga Malkauns

"The midnight raga Malkauns is traditionally said to describe a yogi beset by tempting demons while meditating. Recorded in 1976 in a SoHo studio in New York, Pran Nath's version is unspeakably moving as he slowly chants the composition "Hare Krishna Govinda Ram" over and over, his voice winding in stretched-out, subtly nuanced glissandos that leave you begging for the next note. The 62 minute recording sounds completely traditional in its adherence to the slow, minimal style of the Kirana school of Indian classical music which Pran Nath belonged to, while containing in the sound itself everything that was happening in the city that year, the same year that Scorsese's Taxi Driver hit the movie houses. Pran Nath's voice and Young's production turn the city into a sacred modern hyperspace, full of tension and beauty, in which anything, from Krishna to Son of Sam, can manifest..."

though not seen by this blog, tomorrow night on TCM a UK jazz version of "Othello", All Night Long--with the late great Patrick McGoohan as a drumming Iago!--seems well worth catching...

much to see & ponder at New Star Books' refurbished website, also (FREE) PDF's of my book "The Age of Briggs & Stratton" & George Stanley's stunning "Vancouver: A Poem", which is nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Prize...

great essay on Warren Oates:

All of this is Andy Kaufman's fault.

Remember how square, how innocent, we used to be? We were sad when movie characters had nervous breakdowns. It made us sick when Travis Bickle shot that guy's fingers off, or when Divine ate dog mess. We didn't know if Kaufman was for real or not, which is why he was so great, and why his comedy worked.

But finally, Andy Kaufman won. He conquered comedy. He vanquished performance. He murdered entertainment. That great, strange feeling you had the first time you saw him can never be recaptured, because eventually he educated you and made you too smart. You bit the apple. The scales fell from your eyes.

Who can bring us back to Paradise? Who can purge us of our sins? Who can put us right? Who can remind us what humans were like, back when there were humans? Who can turn us into an audience, rather than a bunch of actors playing the part of an audience?

Only Warren Oates. Warren Oates will give you the willies, and there is no theory that can explain him away, or tell you what you're feeling, or how you're supposed to feel, when you're watching him work. Warren Oates transforms the most ironic, knowing docent into an utter square...

Once Upon a Time in the West (2-Disc Special Edition)

greatest movie ever made--for six & half bucks!