Drummer Billy Hart on the day

Lee Morgan died...

an evening of Anthony Mann films on TCM tonight, including a couple I haven't seen--

The Last Frontier (1955)

The emotionally jittery and sublimely scenic The Last Frontier (1955) is the old west picture I speak of here, but what is it exactly? A Cold War commentary of military belligerence? A post-war noir confronting
the emotional disorder of returning soldiers seen through the front of a rugged mountainous setting? It is all of the above, with the added effect of what appears to be handheld camera movements, and demented if
not animalistic character plots and behavior—particularly from the movie's lead actor, Victor Mature, as the highly conflicted Jed Cooper....
"He's all id," my movie mate blurted out mid-show, a keen statement about a man unshaped by manners, motivated by drink, and prone to
irrational outbursts—childlike tantrums really—by the provocations of men in authority who contradict or disapprove of his ways...

Cimarron (1960)

Mann wasn't the obvious choice to shoot an epic film in 1960, and the suits at MGM, rightfully or not, would eventually be sorry they hired him...

A Letter from Hammertown to Robert Dunsmuir

Screw you
Scrooge McDuck,
Born near Kilmarnock,
You built Craigdarroch
but preferred a Hammock...

...how else


given the militarization of one's home space
but to reply in kind &

tactically, to return
smug valuation with superiority

& punch for punch,
till over each great crime is grown

a grove of alder
till over each great crime

grows a shade-spreading lime
that on a brown bench curled

I can sleep beneath until
two years after 2012 when it'll have been

a century since the bunch of us
last addressed our masters thus

in tones of such insolent rue
that their empire bled black & blue &

was forced to re-colonize
in forms a voortrekker

would recognize:
towns until then

bereft of a copper's tread
now patrolled by one of meathead

Bowser's "specials"
dredged up & barged over from Vancouver

pointed Maxim Guns to & fro
(to derision & innuendo)

but when you're in that corner trapped,
squared by someone else's map & no one

downhill to pass it along to anymore
& beyond that only Pasta, Saskatcha.

or Chimera, Alaska
that string of smoking islands

where Vico's giants
have dug condos into the sandstone

or a street in Honolulu
named for a nurse

from where Dick the mines inspector
& Farquhar his deep-pocketed admiral

return richer via Surrey's
crosswords & curries, their ship-in-a-bottle

aesthetic still operative
among the locals today

subject to arbitrary poking,
driving hummingbirds into the house

of your head, driving out
religion & solidarity

picnics on Shell Beach
on the islands off Shell Beach.

Local trees & Charlie

farewell to Gerry Gilbert 1936-2009, the great poet of Vancouver in the second half of the twentieth century. When David Bromige died last week I remembered that I'd had a number of conversations with him & Gerry in the kitchen of Gerry's place, called the "New Era Social Club", which consisted of a small two story house with warehouse space above, in a narrowish alley in the Japanese section of the Downtown Eastside, a couple of blocks off the water. This was in the early 80's, when Rob Johnson took the above portrait. The other photo is of how it looked last winter. Gone is the pear tree and the ivy-covered fence, gone too the hole through which one had very carefully to retrieve the key on a string. I stayed there a lot during that period, helping & hindering his work on his own poetry, his magazine BC Monthly & radiofreerainforest, his show on Co-op Radio. Whatever literary community I've ever been a serious part of had him at its center. I remember little (tennis? Ava Gardner? ) of the content of the conversations with David & Gerry but recall with great clarity David opposite me at the table, still-longish hair, a patterned shirt under a patterned vest, Gerry making pancakes, a pony-tailed short order cook, his vest limp pinstripe with a little bit of satin in the back. I forget thin men need that little extra warmth. Both men had bright, translucent eyes & used a lot of neat quick motions to both do & describe things & their exchanges had a musical, bantering, ping-pong lightness to them, a quality I used to call "zen", but with their neat beards & underlying toughness of wit it could sometimes be a bit Jacobean too...

Mike Scharf @ sustainable aircraft ...

Second Schädel

The land’s a pocket mirror; you like to hold it down

and catch flashes of yourself.

It’s teeming. Greenpoint burns off its relations.

It’s a rimless procession: the sun, unbound but forced to sphere,

tentacles marble, an absorptive French blue, with particles

rising and falling in tandems, lolling in arcs.

Walking past the plant on Meserole, foot

blanket tangles and lips come down, calcium white.

Steam comes out the windows. It smells of perc...

The stag cook book...

paprika, tablespoonful, Worcestershire sauce, onions, Welsh Rabbit, baking powder, parsley, teaspoonful, round steak, tomatoes, Mazola oil, double boiler, demi-glace, flour, deep dish, American cheese, cayenne pepper, skillet, burgoo, clove...

YouTube - New Age Steppers - Guiding Star

Op-Ed Contributor - Too Poor to Make the News - NYTimes.com

News | Peter Culley 2009 Mini-World Tour dates announced | New Star Books Publisher, Vancouver British Columbia Canada, Newstarbooks, catalogue

(above right, in Bangor, Maine with Kevin Davies)

Omnivoracious: Neither a Contract Nor a Promise: Five Movements To Watch Out For (Guest Blogger China Mieville)

Though this might look like apocalypse fiction, it will in fact be not about any implied catastrophe, but about scobbing together of culture from the refuse (and implying that all culture is and always has been so scobbed). An art of making-do, tool-use and ingenuity. A fiction infused with a militant amnesiac uninterest about cultural memes' origins and 'pure' 'original' 'purposes' - which chimeras its adherents will derisively and polysemically render 'pUr(e)poses' - this will be literature that celebrates reclamation, and/but forgets that prefix 're-': so, clamation fiction, ignoring the fact that ruins are ruined, were ever anything else.

If Benjamin warns that history is a buffeted angel staring at a giant pile of debris, Salvagepunk ignores the angel and roots around in the debris looking for a car to hotwire.

facebook page of some of Donald Alexander Dingwall's Paintings

Local trees, Charlie &c.

RIP Hugh Hopper , of Soft Machine, one of the Hughs who inspired my poem "The Book of Hugh", Soft Machine member & writer of "Dedicated to You (Hugh) But You Weren't Listening" & "Out-Bloody-Rageous", has died. The most melodic electric bassist I can think of, even more so than Steve Swallow, whose place in the Carla Bley band Hopper took on more than occasion...

To Be a Baby

Both Piaget and Freud thought that the reason children produced so much fantastic, unreal play was that they couldn’t tell the difference between imagination and reality. But a lot of the more recent work in children’s theory of mind has shown quite the contrary. Children have a very good idea of how to distinguish between fantasies and realities. It’s just they are equally interested in exploring both. The picture we used to have of children was that they spent all of this time doing pretend play because they had these very limited minds, but in fact what we’ve now discovered is that children have more powerful learning abilities than we do as adults...

Local trees

couldn't we all use a little more Dinah Washington?

farewell to the wise, lovely, peerlessly funny poet David Bromige



more here

this is very well done--On the Creepy Alluring Art of the Follow Shot

"Following" is a montage of clips illustrating one of my favorite types of shots: one where the camera physically follows a character through his or her environment. I love this shot because it's neither first-person nor third; it makes you aware of a character's presence within the movie's physical world while also forcing identification
with the character. I also love the sensation of momentum that following shots invariably summon. Because the camera is so close to the character(s) being followed, we feel that we're physically attached to those characters, as if by an invisible guide wire, being towed through their world, sometimes keeping pace, other times losing them as they weave through hallways, down staircases or through smoke or fog...

For further information and press materials please contact the Monte Clark Gallery.
You can reach us by email at info@monteclarkgallery.com or by phone at
604-730-5000

Hemingway, Roethke, Plath & Ahab, from Literary Minifigs - a set on Flickr

Seattle trees