looking forward to Nine Queens (2002), a one-off showing at Malaspina College this aft.

reading, with great enjoyment The Lunar Men by primo Hogarthian Jenny Uglow

Copps won't rule out move to NDP Sheila Sheila Sheila take a bow...

amazing homemade LP covers

Happy Birthday Don Van Vliet (Captain Beefheart)!

Hey Garland I Dig Your Tweed Coat: "Hey Garland, I dig your tweed coat. I'll trade you a domino this size, mothball-scented. The woman silk nude tie painting his chest. One celluloid stay exposed through his nibbled collar. Feet speckled the sidewalk. Faces gurgled through windows. Passing cars gum rubber streaks. Neon plants swim like green seaweed to a deep rhythm of blues. Red thyroid sunsets, flame in speckled chemistry. Pipes run off dark tubes. Erase into marks that pour the dye of darkness. Crystal comes together as silent as ink.
'I don't think I could let it go. I got it at the religious scene'
Teeth let go, tobacco juice, an oiled balloon, brown eye in an egg white, black tar bubbles and stripes. A straw hat squeaked on the brim of a feather. Newsprint thumbed through nicotine fingers, a dark olive was turned on. Its small pulp speaker burst into a scream. One large tomato was immediately peeled skin red. It bled into a red 'O' and smacked behind accepted fangs. Quick eyebrows danced cutely above a mole. The bridge held a large gold pair of spectacles. The front was smooth. It slightly gathered and wrinkled at the holes. A dark wooden moustache deposited below above Chinese red varnished lips that dented slightly into the evening.
'It's gotten quite cold. I've decided I can't sell you my coat.'
Honking, the wind puffed into the clumps above the lattice rows. And out looked Panatella, naked and not ashamed, without no clothes. Wiggle Pig went snout-first into a tree. The rubber turkey was gobbled up by the night's dark rubber mouth. A white phosphorous raindrop dropped in the sky. Hot silhouettes in a convertible gave this applause. And several white porcelain trays were rolled in by bumblebees. Their wings arranged with pictures out of the past. And the rainbow baboon gob."

new bios of Gould and Nowlan

Big points to August Kleinzahler for referencing the late Bob Kerr, greatest DJ ever--& Wednesday is organ day: "I have been sitting in the tub listening to Aldo Ciccolini play Satie for nearly 30 Januaries. I think all that really got going in earnest when I lived in Montreal in the mid-to-late '70s. There was an old fellow on CBC radio named Bob Kerr, if I recall, possessed of a comforting baritone and absolutely stuck on Ciccolini playing Satie's Gymnopedies and Gnossiennes. I had a little apartment, a little radio, and nowhere much to go; besides, it was colder than the moon outside."

Thanks Metafilter for these"Not fooling anybody" storefront conversions.

Nature books by kids

Logarithmic Maps of the Universe

looking forward to John Dos Passos: Travel Books and Other Writings 1916-1941.

memories of Brooklyn Hot Chocolate

the sequel to "Strange Brew": "Many of the plants were growing inside giant steel vats that were once used to brew Molson's most popular brands of beer. The vats were six metres wide and 30 metres long, with watertight doors. The vats provided an ideal growing environment, police said, since it was easy to control the humidity and temperature levels inside."

Stan Levey: "He still trains everyday. As he puts it, 'I still do my roadwork.'"

Denzil Best: "'The drummer, Denzil Best, sat motionless except for his wrists snapping the brushes.' "

Good news: it looks like the "outdoor" fish, a big carp who lives in a barrel on our porch--made it through the cold snap. Again, a little uncanny, the barrelwater had seemed frozen solid...

By popular request, Liam is "Waspinator Smurf"

Smurf Name Generator Bob is "Stoner Smurf", Jo is "Britney Smurf", Alister is "The Real Slim Smurfy" and I'm "Fatass Smurf". Uncanny.

Extraordinary Rendition--first US report I've seen on this case: "Our intelligence agencies have a name for this torture-by-proxy. They call it 'extraordinary rendition.' As one intelligence official explained: 'We don't kick the s -- out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick the s -- out of them.' "

ex-RCMP heads up RIAA goon squad: "'They said they were police from the recording industry or something, and next time they'd take me away in handcuffs,' he said through an interpreter. Borrayo says he has no way of knowing if the records, with titles like Como Te Extrano Vol. IV: Musica de los 70's y 80's, are illegal, but he thought better of arguing the point.
The RIAA acknowledges it all, except the notion that its staff presents itself as police. Yes, they may all be ex-P.D. Yes, they wear cop-style clothes and carry official-looking IDs. But if they leave people like Borrayo with the impression that they're actual law enforcement, that's a mistake."

Have You had Enough Yet? BC satire

A tale from Tommy Douglas: "Now if you think it strange that mice should elect a government made up of cats, you just look at the history of Canada for the last 90 years and maybe you'll see that they weren't any stupider then we are."

The Tyee: Premier Scrambles to Restore Trust

Altercation: "Now, it is true that the authors did manage to turn the tide at Foundation Ridge, that they managed alone to hold the ramparts at Thinktank Castle, that they organized the counterattack that swept the field at Buffet Flats, and that they only this week fought to victory in the Battle Of Charlie Rose."

from "When the Band Comes In" (1971)

Little Things (That Keep us Together)

It's on days like these
When your brother falls
You can read it all in the Times:
How a moving car
Stole a movie star--

Little Things that keep us together
While the war's going on.

It's on days like these
When your childhood cries
And you see it all on the news,
Little children starve
Growing tired of born--

Little things that keep us all close and warm
While the war's going on.

Find a place you can hide
And take what you can,
The time will arrive
When you need a friend--
Stop looking at us
We're waving good-bye.

There's a man
Shouting he's with me
When that morning comes
I can't wait to see
Just how high his eagle
On color screens
Is gonna fly
Going to fly--

It's on nights like these
That your neighbor dies
'Cos he put a gun to his head
He was so alone
He had nothing left,
Little things that call for a drink,
That bury a soldier's death.

It's on days like these
When your sister cries
And your brother falls from your hands
Jumbo jets can die
Killing 81
Little things that help us get by the why

Why the war's going on
Why the war's going on
Why the war's going on
why the war's going on
why the war's going on
why the war's going on

Happy Birthday Scott Walker!

Tilt by Scott Walker: "My background isn't Dylan and folk, but the chanson singers and they're grounded in drama. I felt I'd take the time with the words. I figured if I did that, the words would lead me, they'd tell me what to do.... If you get into their world far enough, they'll take you where you want to go. Whatever happens in any part of the album is led by the lyric."

Marginal supremacy: "I have a suspicion that, among some people who should know better, Coleridge is becoming seen as one of the deadest and whitest of European males; let's stop this nonsense before it goes too far. "

from Coleridge: A Book I Value: Selected Marginalia.: "This is the most defective Passage of the whole Treatise. It is not true, and it is of pernicious consequence, to represent Fortune as wholly mad, blind, deaf, and drunk. On the average each man receives what he pays for the miser gives care & self-torment, and receives increase of Gold--the vain give clamour, & bustle, pretensions & flattery, & receive a Buz--the Wise man Self-conquest & neighbourly Love, and receives sense of Dignity, of Harmony, and Content. Each is paid in sort--Virtue is not rewarded by Wealth, nor is the Eye affected by Sound."

MARGINALIA by E. A. Poe : " I know that indefinitiveness is an element of the true music- I mean of the true musical expression. Give to it any undue decision- imbue it with any very determinate tone- and you deprive it at once of its ethereal, its ideal, its intrinsic and essential character. You dispel its luxury of dream. You dissolve the atmosphere of the mystic upon which it floats. You exhaust it of its breath of fiery. "

Marginalia and Other Crimes

One sweet sales strategy: "The top seller for the Minneapolis Girl Scout Council last year sold 2,050 boxes. That's more than $6,000 worth of cookies. The seller, identified only as Danielle, still found time to encourage others.
'She wrote a letter to the other girls to not give up hope,' said Rosi Hewitt of Coon Rapids, whose daughter is a Girl Scout."

::: wood s lot ::: has a section on Canadian poet Alden Nowlan & much else of course

Paradise Lost, Has the Dean Campaign Reached Its Upper Limit of Support?, by Sandeep Kaushik (01/08/04) Tough numbers for Dean

via under the fire star--

from "The Hindu": "If I were to relinquish my passport, I would do so in favour of a country that I found superior to India. But while there is much to be admired in places like Denmark and England, there is also much to be ashamed of. The heart of whiteness is lit with lamps of blood.
And today the heart of whiteness is closing its arteries. It is doing to people with the wrong colour (of passport?) what it tried to do to its own poor in the 18th and 19th Centuries. Even the discourse sounds familiar: undeserving poor, accountability, violence, criminality, free market, etc, we have heard all this before. But this time the struggle will be longer and more bitter as the poor cannot be deported and settled in 'newly-discovered' continents, where they can get rich by their own sweat or the blood of the aborigines and slaves. Today the poor of the world can only be attracted like moths to the rich heart of whiteness. And hence the arteries of Europe and U.S. are being closed with new rules and regulations. "

The Journals of Lewis And Clark: "This traffic on the part of the whites consists in vending guns (principally old British or American muskets), powder, balls and shot, copper and brass kettles, brass teakettles and coffeepots, blankets from two to three points, scarlet and blue cloth (coarse), plates and strips of sheet copper and brass, large brass wire, knives, beads, and tobacco, with fishing hooks, buttons, and some other small articles. Also a considerable quantity of sailors' clothes, as hats, coats, trousers, and shirts. For these they receive in return from the natives dressed and undressed elk skins, skins of the seaotter, common otter, beaver, common fox, spuck, and tiger cat; also dried and pounded salmon in baskets, and a kind of biscuit which the natives make of roots, called by them shappellel. "

The Whale: "Lewis, at least, seems to have swallowed it with relish. 'It was white & not unlike the fat of Poark,' he judged,'tho' the texture was more spongey and somewhat coarser. I had a part of it cooked and found it very pallitable and tender, it resembled the beaver or the dog in flavour.' "

Cannon Beach: "The Kilamox although they possesed large quantities of this blubber and oil were so prenurious that they disposed of it with great reluctiance and in small quantities only; insomuch that my utmost exertion aided by the party with the Small Stock of merchandise I had taken with me were not able to precure more blubber than about 300 lb. and a few gallons of oil;

Small as this stock is I prise it highly; and thank providence for directing the whale to us; and think him much more kind to us than he was to jonah, having Sent this Monster to be Swallowed by us in Sted of Swallowing of us as jonah's did. "

The Lewis And Clark Rediscovery Project

Sacagawea |: "[T]he Indian woman was very impo[r]tunate to be permited to go, and was therefore indulged; she observed that she had traveled a long way with us to see the great waters, and that now that monstrous fish was also to be seen, she thought it very hard she could not be permitted to see either."

Jan 8 1806

Happy Birthday Albert Bierstadt

Frosted Windows 330 years of St. Petersburg through Western eyes

FBI: Potential Terrorist Use of Almanacs: "Almanacs, available both in print and online, provide comprehensive information on a variety of topics, including government, geography, vital statistics, the economy, health matters, science and technology, weather trends, and tourism. Information commonly found in almanacs that may be exploited for terrorist use includes profiles of U.S. cities and states and information on geographic and structural features such as waterways, bridges, dams, reservoirs, tunnels, buildings, and landmarks. This information is often accompanied by photographs and maps."

SQUISHED by books: There but for fortune...

The varieties of traumatic experiences good short review of new Vollman.

When Is Violence Justified? Big Question Gets Long Answer another review of Vollman

Epiphany

Twelfth Night

Joyce--"The Dead""A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

from Robert Pogue Harrison's new "The Names of the Dead"-- his 1992 "Forests: The Shadow of Civilisation" one of my favorites: "One's initial impression of the memorial wall from a distance is that of its dramatic horizontal extension, yet as one descends along the pathway toward the highest part of the wall the anxiety of the vertical gradually wins out over that of the horizontal stretch to infinity. Joyce's image of the snow, by contrast, works the other way around. The verticality of the snow's descent gives way, by the end of the last paragraph of The Dead, to a more sublime impression of its vast horizontal extension over all of Ireland. Yet the effect in both cases is similar. The tense relationship between extension and descension gives both symbols their sublime epic reach....The epic's vocation, as well as its burden, is to contain such excess in its narrative, ideological drive toward synthesis. We have seen, if only briefly and in passing, what moral strains and pressures this put on Virgil as well as Dante when it came to representing or accounting for the fates of history's plethora of victims. In the case of the memorial wall, the excess of names is uncontainable, not because the wall cannot accommodate them--it does--but because in its mute memory of the Vietnam War, it proclaims, or seems to, that each one of its inscriptions is one too many. The excess lies in the moral doubt raised in and by each and every name. The wall, in its conception and its material presence, is pervaded with the pathos of an early, sacrificial death reminiscent of Virgil's infernal scene of "high-hearted heroes stripped of life, and boys / and unwed girls, and young men set upon / the pyre of death before their fathers' eyes." Yet Rome--that "eternal idea in the mind of God" which would honor or redeem these deaths--is missing."

Mirages in Finland: " On the open sea, low waves may reach into the mirage-producing air layer, where they become vertically stretched into high columns: this produces a vision of dancing columns far out to sea. "

Happy Birthdays Sandy Denny

and Kathy Sledge!!

As well as the usual Towhees

there's lots of Grackles (the "parking lot bird" says Daph) enjoying my uncooked flaxseed oatmeal in the snow

PressThink: Horse Race Now! Horse Race Tomorrow! Horse Race Forever!: "
The origins of the term 'inside baseball' are in one writer's view of sports reporting during the 1980s. He's Bill James, now a famous scholar of baseball. The arguments he made then explain why the term migrated so easily to politics. The inside, said James, is a hall of mirrors."

Coffee, Tea or Handcuffs?: "“Oh, you’re a journalist,” he noted. “What are you here for?”
“I’m interviewing Olivia Newton-John,” Smethurst replied.
“That’s nice,” the official said, impressed. “What’s the article about?”
“Breast cancer.”
When Smethurst tells me this, she pauses and adds, “I thought that last question was a little odd, but figured everything’s different now in America and it was fine.” What she didn’t know was that her assignment and travel plans, along with the chicken soup and stroll through Central Park, had been terminated the moment she confirmed she was a journalist. Fourteen hours later, she was escorted by three armed guards onto the 11 p.m. Qantas flight home."

thanks Plep for

The Oxford Book of Ballads

jack kirby/brian wilson

the vaughn lounge nice Robert Vaughn site. Enjoyed him with Steve McQueen in both "Bullitt" and "The Magnificent Seven" lately.

The Tyee: BC Drug Raids: How Big a Scandal?

my pal Antti paragliding in southern Morocco (quicktime slideshow)

I like it ROAR! (animation)

great NYC photos

Happy New Year!

For many Americans, all the bad stuff comes from Canada these days

FBI urges police to watch for people carrying almanacs

B.C. legislature raid came after evidence turned up in drug probe: police This could be big....

The Lenny Bruce FBI File

Lenny Bruce

Reading & Writing: " I discovered Lenny Bruce in my late twenties--just out of grad school & dirt-poor in Seattle, I read How to Talk Dirty & Influence People with a growing realization that Bruce was my century's Whitman, a poet who took democracy seriously. I've since had the opportunity to listen to recordings of Bruce in performance & my initial reaction is confirmed: Lenny Bruce was our first performance poet. He's ahead of David Antin & Patti Smith. Whitman broke through, Bruce broke through. Neither spared himself embarrassment. I think, for myself, after a decade of intimidation by language poets on one side & new freaking formalists on the other, I may have found my way forward in this particular lineage. I won't call it a tradition. There is a radical middle in American poetry (& politics, by the way) that often is confused with middle-of-the-road, but the confusion is a symptom of sloppy thinking (& political manipulation): pray you avoid it. The dominant culture is busy turning the radical--or its images--into the mainstream; it has to be the business of artists to resist the process & to reinvent the images when they have been drained of their juice & pulse. What Whitman called urge. What Lenny Bruce called truth."

nice obit for Horst Buchholz

Gwynne Dyer: "The Bush administration is probably wishing quite hard by now that Saddam had waited a little longer and been killed in his hole. While others debate where he should be tried and by whom, and whether he should face the death penalty or not, President Bush's people will be realizing just about now that they can't afford to give him a fair trial at all"

Frank Rich: Napster Runs for President in ’04

Indian Mounds of Mississippi

Signage: "In what honor and dignity this art was anciently held amongst the Greeks and Romans, the old authors sufficiently testify; though afterwards all but lost, while it lay hid for more than a thousand years. It has now at length, only within the last two hundred years, by some Italians been brought again to light. For it is the easiest thing in the world for the Arts to be lost and perish; but only with difficulty, and after long time and pains are they resuscitated."

John Newlove 1938-2003

Ride Off Any Horizon

Ride off any horizon
and let the measure fall
where it may-

on the hot wheat,
on the dark yellow fields
of wild mustard, the fields

of bad farmers, on the river,
on the dirty river full
of boys and on the throbbing

powerhouse and the low dam
of cheap cement and rocks
boiling with white water,

and on the cows and their powerful
bulls, the heavy tracks
filling with liquid at the edge

of the narrow prairie
river running steadily away.

*

Ride off any horizon
and let the measure fall
where it may-

among the piles of bones
that dot the prairie

in vision and history
(the buffalo and deer,

dead indians, dead settlers
the frames of lost houses

left behind in the dust
of the depression,

dry and profound, that
will come again in the land

and in the spirit, the land
shifting and the minds

blown dry and empty-
I have not seen it! except

in pictures and talk-
but there is the fence

covered with dust, laden,
the wrecked house stupidly empty)-

here is a picture for your wallet,
of the beaten farmer and his wife
leaning toward each other-

sadly smiling, and emptied of desire.

*

Ride off any horizon
and let the measure fall
where it may-

off the edge
of the black prairie

as you thought you could fall,
a boy at sunset

not watching the sun
set but watching the black earth,

never-ending they said in school,
round: but you saw it ending,

finished, definite, precise-
visible only miles away.

*

Ride off any horizon
and let the measure fall
where it may-

on a hot night the town
is in the streets-

the boys and girls
are practising against

each other, the men
talk and eye the girls-

the women talk and
eye each other, the indians
play pool: eye on the ball.

*

Ride off any horizon
and let the measure fall
where it may-

and damn the troops, the horsemen
are wheeling in the sunshine,
the cree, practising

for their deaths: mr poundmaker,
gentle sweet mr big bear,
it is not unfortunately

quite enough to be innocent,
it is not enough merely
not to offend-

at times to be born
is enough, to be
in the way is too much-

some colonel otter, some
major-general middleton will
get you, you-

indian. It is no good to say,
I would rather die
at once than be in that place-

though you love that land more,
you will go where they take you.

*

Ride off any horizon
and let the measure fall-

where it may;
it doesn't have to be

the prairie. It could be
the cold soul of the cities
blown empty by commerce

and desiring commerce
to fill up the emptiness

The streets are full of people.

It is night, the lights
are on; the wind

blows as far as it may. The streets
are dark and full of people.

Their eyes are fixed as far as
they can see beyond each other-

to the concrete horizon, definite,
tall against the mountains,
stopping vision visibly.

Happy Holidays beloved readers, we'll be here on Mayne Island till Boxing Day...

Lenny Bruce granted posthumous pardon & Billie's cabaret card is in the mail

Plum Pudding Recipes

Finnish Christmas Cards 100 Years Ago

Monkey King or The Journey to the West, in comic form, thanks Plep

Sold Amazing Sea Monkeys, X-Ray Specs in comic books: "But von Braunhut's piece de resistance was Sea Monkeys -- which come from dried-up lake bottoms, not the sea, and are not monkeys but brine shrimp. His extravagant claims for the crustaceans -- for example, that they come back from the dead and that they can be trained and hypnotized -- are convincing because they are sort of true. "

Tartes framboises I'll stop now

Boulangerie: A Pocket Guide to Paris's Famous Bakeries

Parisian Bakeries

Lord Love a Duck & To Live and Die in LA out on DVD

Perfect Sound Forever- always lots here, this time including a nice long piece on Elvis in Memphis 1969...

Today is the 25th anniversary of Bernadette Mayer's "Midwinter Day"-- (please excuse reformatting)

"...Sophia's mittens come off,
The disappearing scene from a dream I'd remember is lost
To comparisons of past exertion for the slight Main Street hill,
I blink at seeing, being seen a little
I wonder why we write at all
These trees have seen this all before
But they are glad of an encore"

Radio News December 1947 Aging rack for radio tubes

The Digital Snow Museum

dec47: "The final week of the month and of the year of 1947, leads off with the announcement that 'Peg 'O My Heart' by The Harmonicats for the small independent label Vitacoustics is the largest selling record in modern history for an independent. Sales figures are put at more than one and a half million. . . . . . Other recent million sellers are 'Near You' by Francis Craig for the indie label Bullet, and Frankie Laine's Mercury recording of 'That's My Desire'. . . . . . . best bets of the last week of the year are 'When You Come To The End Of The Day' by The Inkspots (Decca), 'The Best Things In Life Are Free' by Jo Stafford (Capitol), 'Unison Riff' by Stan Kenton (Capitol), 'I've Got A Feeling I'm Falling' by Perry Como (RCA), 'Sierra Madre' / 'Don't Call It Love' by Freddy Martin with Stuart Wade-voc (RCA), 'My Old Flame' by Spike Jones (RCA), and 'Two Loves Have I' by Guy Lombardo (Decca). . . . . .John Hammond is named vice president of Mercury Records . . . . . .Jack Owens Tower Records artist is known as 'the cruising crooner' on ABC radio's 'Breakfast Club' . . . . . .new on the best seller list at year's end are : 'How Soon' by Dinah Shore (Columbia), 'I Can't Give You Anything But Love' by Rose 'Chee Chee' Murphy (Majestic), 'Serenade Of The Bells' by Sammy Kay (RCA), 'How Soon' by Vaughn Monroe (RCA), 'I'll Dance At Your Wedding' by Buddy Clark and Ray Noble (Columbia), 'How Soon' by Jack Owens (Tower), 'I'm My Own Grandpa' by Guy Lombardo (Decca), 'Civilization' by Woody Herman (Capitol), and 'You Do' by Vaughn Monroe (RCA). . . . . two albums hit the top five this week - 'Good News' the original cast (MGM) and 'King Cole Trio - vol. 3' (Capitol). "

December 1947 Snowstorm in Stamford and the Bronx

Charlie Parker and Red Rodney

Charlie Parker Sessions: "December 21, 1947 (11 items, 18:51)
United Sound Studio, Detroit
Commercial for Savoy
Charlie Parker Quintet
Charlie Parker (as); Miles Davis (tpt); Irving 'Duke' Jordan (p); Tommy Potter (b); Max Roach (d)

Another Hair-Do (C. Parker) (take 1 (inc))0:14
Another Hair-Do (C. Parker) (take 2 (inc))0:44
Another Hair-Do (C. Parker) (take 3 (inc))1:04
Another Hair-Do (C. Parker) (take 4 (master))2:37
Bluebird (C. Parker) (take 1)2:53
Bluebird (C. Parker) (take 2)0:03
Bluebird (C. Parker) (take 3 (master))2:49
Klaunstance (C. Parker) [The Way You Look Tonight]2:44
Bird Gets the Worm (C. Parker) (take 1) [Lover Come Back to Me]3:00
Bird Gets the Worm (C. Parker) (take 2 (inc)) [Lover Come Back to Me]0:09
Bird Gets the Worm (C. Parker) (take 3 (master)) [Lover Come Back to Me]"