Pop Sensation examines old paperbacks...

Bookshelf Porn

documentary about Django Reinhardt

LP covers by Andy Warhol

review of Ten Walks/Two Talks by Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch

With a pulley-system someone dropped planks through an apartment window (no sound). With a tiny broom a custodian steered hissing water along the curb. Somebody else wrapped a deli display-case in blue plastic. Someone wiped the demonstration slicer he had whirring on the sidewalk. I wondered why everything in restaurant-supply stores looks dusty. A white truck double-turning (does that make sense?) stripped the fender off an old black woman's sedan. Pedestrians winced...

"An American Type": The end of Henry Roth

The fluorescents shone on the Hearst printing presses within the great square plate-glass windows of the Examiner Building, flooding the corner. He paused, the anguish within him seeking to cleave to anything,
whether purposive, fatuous, anything. Slowly, the great, black machines behind the plate-glass window started moving, reeling out a Sunday comic sheet ... Accelerating, they flew past, swifter still and swifter, until gone were Jiggs and Maggie, lost in a multihued ribbon of paper and a high-pitched hum. And banality was gone, triviality was gone, gone the strip's silly postures and problems. All had become a freshet of blended color, diving downward and leaping upward in strict angle, and again, as if the artist's palette had become a cataract...

nice close reading of Barney Miller, "Quarantine, Pts. 1 & 2"

There’s scarcely an episode of Barney Miller’s first three
seasons that doesn’t include multiple jokes about bathrooms and coffee. Still, those jokes are pretty smart. At one point, Nick brings hot coffee to the feverish Dupree because he’d read “on the back of a jar of coffee” that hot drinks cool people down. Later, Darryl instantly improves the station’s coffee when he scrubs all the mold and mildew off
the squad-room’s cups. (“I thought it was a pattern,” Nick mumbles.) And there are quirky touches to “Quarantine” too, as when Nick loans
Luger the toothbrush he uses to clean his typewriter. (“My breath smells like ink,” Luger complains. “Want to lick some stamps?” Nick replies.)

Happy Canada day!


Most think G20 police actions justified, poll finds

The Angus Reid poll, which surveyed 1,003 Canadians and 503 Torontonians, found that 73 per cent of Torontonians and two-thirds of Canadians believe police treatment of protesters was justified during the G20 summit.