not seen by this blogger, on TCM tomorrow night the 1921 Swedish silent The Phantom Carriage , directed & starring Bergman fave Victor Sjostrom, looks splendid...

Local trees @c.

Soul! October 4, 1972 Rahsaan Roland Kirk

AIG is chump change -- let's find corporate America's hidden billions

So rather than continue arguing over chump change, it is long past time for the United States, with its international friends and allies, to demand accountability from the long list of tiny countries and principalities, from Andorra and the Cayman Islands to Singapore and Switzerland, where corporations, wealthy clients and unrepentant evildoers hide their assets.

The big claw-back will reach into quaint islands and mountainous principalities, because the same banks, hedge funds and private equity firms responsible for the world financial meltdown keep their profits in those "secrecy spaces" -- alongside the ill-gotten gains of numerous drug dealers, dictators and delinquents of every description...

some South Delta trees from Peter Cummings

Antonia Hirsch
Anthropometrics Vol. I & Vol. II

April 24 to May 28, 2009

Opening reception Friday, April 24, 6 - 8 pm






Anthropometrics Vol. I & Vol. II is a suite of colour photographs that operates as an inventory of 'colloquial' methods of measurement using the human body as their base reference. The demonstration of these measurements results in the idiosyncratic gestures captured in the photographs. Anthropometrics Vol. I & Vol. II seeks to trace and document methods of measurement that remain in use parallel to standardized modes of measurement. These types of 'biometric' measurements have a kinship to oral history that is passed on by generations of families or other social networks, rather than through official institutions. They require face-to-face exchange, rather than abstract or remote forms of interaction.

This is the first presentation of Vol. II of the series.

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Antonia Hirsch is a Vancouver-based artist who has received critical attention for her work in Canada, Europe and Asia. Her work is currently on view as part of How Soon Is Now at the Vancouver Art Gallery and in the context of awashawave at the Blackwood Gallery in Mississauga. Double Blind, a new public artwork commissioned for the Vancouver Community College, will be inaugurated in late April 2009. Additional information on the artist is available at antoniahirsch.com.

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Anthropometrics Vol. I & Vol. II will be on show April 24 through May 28 with an artist reception on Friday, April 24, 6 - 8 pm. Regular gallery hours are 11 am - 4 pm, Thursday through Saturday, and by appointment.

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REPUBLIC GALLERY
732 Richards St, 3rd Floor | Thurs-Sat, 11am-4pm & by appointment
www.republicgallery.com | 604.632.1590

Knock on Wood

When his publisher insisted he contribute to a new children's weekly, Giornale per i bambini, he reluctantly delivered the first installment of "The Story of a Puppet," with a letter remarking: "Here's some childish twaddle, do what you want with it; but assuming you print, you'd better pay me well if you want to see any more."

The story would later be retitled The Adventures of Pinocchio. Collodi did not grow more fond of it. A third of the way into the book we now have, he left Pinocchio hanging by the neck from a tree, having apparently put a gruesome end to both the puppet and his tale. It took the magazine four months to convince him to press on. Later, he was so weary with the project that he took another six-month break. Very likely it was this irritation at writing in a genre he thought secondary that accounts for the story's extraordinary mood swings and unusually cavalier approach to such matters as narrative consistency...

After dinner, Sunday afternoons,
we boys would walk slowly
to the lots between the streets and the marshes;
and seated under the pale blue
sky would watch the ball game--
in a noisy, joyous crowd,
lemonade men out in the fringe
tinkling their bells beside their
yellow carts.
As we walked back, the city
stretched its rows of houses
across the lots--
light after light, as the
lamplighter went his way and
women lit the gas
in kitchens to make supper.

(‘A Fourth Group of Verse’, 17)

via Ron: Poems of Charles Reznikoff for 11 bucks!!

no one who cares about poetry should be without this...

preview

more about Charles Reznikoff

EPC Page

A Menorah for Athena

Edmund Hardy: Grass Anti-Epic: Charles Reznikoff's "Testimony"

'The Poems of Charles Reznikoff 1918-1975' - Joshua Clover

some of 'Testimony"

Images of a Lost World: East Germany, Up Close and Personal

On a nice day, I got up early and went to see the chalk cliff. There was no real path, and I couldn't see it at first. But I persevered, and suddenly, as I looked out at the sea, I saw it. I had to sit down and say to myself: This is it, you're really seeing it! It was a very moving experience. I sat there for about an hour, gazing at the big white cliff and the luminous ocean, and then I decided to look at it from a different perspective. There were some wooden ladders leaning eerily against the cliff, and I climbed down one of them and strolled along the water's edge. The beach became smaller and smaller, narrowing to only two or three meters, and suddenly the disturbing thought hit me that there might be high tides on the Baltic Sea.

I was euphoric as I walked back. I had seen the cliff and the fascinating color of the water, its greenish shimmer against the white chalkstone, with my own eyes. It was exactly as I had imagined! I was thrilled by the landscape, and I wanted to go back. In retrospect, my encounters with people were perhaps even more important than the feeling of having finally reached a destination. Nature would remain the same, as I had learned from Caspar David Friedrich's painting, but the people were about to face great changes...

(this blogger was lucky enough to visit Rugen in 1995)

The Flowering Genius of Maria Sibylla Merian

Rather than showing animal and vegetable at some celestially perfect moment, she combines the different stages of growth and decay, collapsing an expanse of time into a single image. Her flowers will appear on the same branch as buds, as new blossoms, full-blown, withered, gone to fruit. Leaves sprout, flourish, go brown, die, and drop, many of them half-eaten by caterpillars. The insects, too, are shown as they pass through every stage of their strange cyclical lives. Like Caravaggio before her, she registers the passage of time by documenting several of its phases, calling attention to the immanent imperfection of it all...

JG Ballard

Local trees &c.