Thomas Bewick (1753-1828)

Big and Bad great New Yorker article about SUV's

Ageing punks' single stunt a hit: "Ageing post-punk band The Alarm have scored a top 30 UK chart hit - with a stunt disguising themselves as an unknown younger group. "

Malcolm Lowry murdered?

Rhythm is a vacuum
bruises are weapons

Bruce Andrews in the Brooklyn Rail

History of House Music

House is a Feeling freitag in Mannheim

What kind of techno music are you? No need to tell you what I am

let there be drums!! DRUMMERWORLD: The DrumSolo Collection

Sui Generis - The utterly new sounds of Dizzee Rascal, Britain's rising superstar. By Sasha Frere-Jones: "Dizzee's mentor, Wiley, a producer, MC, and architect of Dizzee's scene, calls his music 'Eskimo Dance,' abbreviated as 'Eski,' a term he explains as his idiosyncratic synonym for emotional coldness. There are few legato sounds and the reference points are the tools of digital life: cell phones, pagers, video games. Inorganic squawks fire around constipated, angry bass lines. Sounds enter and exit quickly, without explanation. Imagine a teenager slamming a door over and over. "

Andy Goldsworthy - Sheepfolds--Coleridge's walk

Christian Marclay atSAM through April

Christian Marclay shockwave site

Christian Marclay interview- Perfect Sound Forever

Maple Sugar Festival 2004: "Le Festival du Sucre d'Erable / Maple Sugar Festival de Nanaimo est de retour du 25 au 29 fevrier 2004 au village du festival du Parc Beban, 2300 Bowen Rd et au centre-ville de Nanaimo."

An exhibition of flower illustration in books since the Renaissance

Kierkegaard Manuscripts

CJR Campaign Desk excellent campaign overview blog

The Frank W. Tober Collection on Literary Forgery

New York in the 70s

oral history of William Vollmann's Rising Up and Rising Down

escape the CRIMSON ROOM & then let me out

The Secret Life of Maps

Trade Ephemera

The Esquimalt and Nanaimo Railway nice pics if you scroll down

Houston Press 1997-- Swangin' and Bangin' ... and getting to that other level with the disciples of screw:

"The master player himself (real name: Robert E. Davis Jr.) lives in the same worn South Park house in which he began mixing tapes four years ago. At eight o'clock almost every night, the privacy gate to DJ Screw's driveway swings open, and cars steadily fill up the street in front of his house. Teenagers and adults -- black, Hispanic and occasionally white -- line up at the back door's metal security gate to buy from the selection of $10 tapes Screw and his band of 20 in-house rappers (The Screwed Up Click) have just recorded."

Houston, Texas-- One Last Spin,Friends: "DJ Screw was perhaps the first person to make hardcore rap psychedelic. Now, you may say that artists like De La Soul and P.M. Dawn were the first to bring a creatively trippy, '60s-style mind-set to contemporary rap and hip-hop. But what they brought was a free-spirited sense of pacifistic liberation. Their music didn't really exhibit, or endorse, the hallucinogenic haziness DJ Screw created nearly out of thin air. It almost seemed like DJ Screw's mission was to make the definitive blotto music, something to pop in your tape deck and listen to as you slouch on your couch. "

Ottawa Citizen: "Rights enshrined in Canada's Constitution, such as protection against unreasonable search and seizure, and the country's generous social-welfare system have made it 'a favoured destination for terrorists and international organized crime groups,' says the report, which is titled Nations Hospitable to Organized Crime & Terrorism."

Counterspin Central: The unofficial "FIRST AMENDMENT ZONE." best asessment of Kerry rumors here

Land of a Thousand Dances: "It's a cover, but not an interpretation. Everything in the song about failed love gets cut, so what remains is a song about clowns, and since it's coming from a Krusty, a song about himself. He even gets to refer to himself in the third-person plural (a favorite trick of Hollywood narcissists) as being 'soulful and doleful.'"

Wapping '86: a photo essay by Nic Oatridge (PDF)

London Riot Re-enactment Society:

"Brixton Riots, 1981
Among other things, re-enactors will set fire to an abandoned police car on Atlantic Road, throw petrol bombs, setting fire to police cars and private cars, set fire to pubs and drive police out of Brixton for most of the night. Re-enacting will spread to other parts of London. Over 200 police officers will be injured, and 83 premises and 23 vehicles damaged, at an estimated cost of 7.5m.

Broadwater Farm, 1985
In protest at the death of a woman during a police search of her home, re-enactors will attack the police, eventually re-enact killing one of them. (The re-enactor who re-enacts the killing will look like someone other than Winston Sillcott, who was framed for the murder and is still in prison).

Wapping, 1986-87
Re-enactors will picket Rupert Murdoch's News International's Wapping site for a year, and have numerous clashes with scabs and the police.

Poll Tax riots, 1990
Re-enactors dressed in authentic 1990 clothes (start searching in cupboards, attics and charity shops now) will assemble in Trafalgar Square for a demonstration that turns into an all-out riot. The next day, most of the self-appointed leaders will condemn the riot. "

The Wapping Dispute 1986 : "Within two years all national newspapers had adopted the technologies News International introduced and had adapted their working practices accordingly, precipitating an exodus of newpapers from Fleet Street, largely to Docklands. After hundreds of years of ascendancy, Fleet Street was no longer the centre of the UK newspaper industry, no longer able to resist the influence of new technology, changing employment practices and the demands of a more competitive business environment. The Trade Union movement, and the printworkers unions in particular, found themselves in a spiral of decline, increasingly unable to muster a response to the changing industrial landscape. The Labour Party, after years of soul-searching, finally allied itself with Murdoch, and in power showed no appetite for repealing the legislation Margaret Thatcher had introduced to curb union power."

London's Industrial Heritage

THE FEELIES: GROWING UP "FEELIE" "The Good Earth" for me the sound of the view from our place on East Georgia 1986

50 coolest monkeys of all time my resemblance to "Bingo" much remarked on during the period of the Banana Splits' ascendancy--

Animal Yawns time to go back to bed

from Plep---THE BOOK OF NOODLES: "Perhaps the original form is found in the Philogelos Hieraclis et Philagrii Faceti, edited by Eberhard. A citizen of Cumae was selling honey. Some one came up and tasted it, and said that it was all bad. He replied, 'If a mouse had not fallen into it, I would not sell it.'"

There he goes again!: "Journalists must ask themselves why the rumor of a private peccadillo deserves their attention and resources in the 2004 campaign. The press faces a more important issue: learning from its own failure to report the false rationale and abused intelligence that drove the nation to war. "

Edward Ardizzone - Diary of a War Artist

kid's book reprint series from NYRB

happy birthday Eleanor Farjeon!

Atelier Cezanne (flash)

The Grey Album

download The Grey Album

CN named in reparations suit: "The amended suit will also likely contain accusations certain companies, including CN, continue to hide their complicity in slavery to 'maintain customer goodwill' and increase profits, said Diane Sammons, one of three lead lawyers representing the descendants."

The First Goddamn Week of Winter
--from Antarctica a review of Carpenter's "The Thing"

George Jones' 'Hayride' Recordings Surface: "A version of 'You Gotta Be My Baby' captured in 1956 opens the disc, which also includes 'Color of the Blues,' 'Nothing Can Stop My Loving You' and 'I'm Ragged But I'm Right' taped during a 1958 appearance at the show at the Shreveport Municipal Auditorium. "

1rpm--turntable geology (movie)

Jane Meyer on Cheney and Halliburton

The grove in this abandoned Georgia railways photo looks just like some of the old rail and roadbeds around here--less muddy, though.

Malachi Favors 37-04 r.i.p.

portraits from Downtown Music

Arto Lindsay

Rashied Ali

Derek Bailey

thanks Bifurcated Rivets for these Abandoned Railways of Georgia

Armond digs Shakey : "Two authentic moments stand out. On 'Sun Green,' Young sings, 'No one could explain it/It just got great reviews.' That sizes up the current tendency to praise superficial product regardless of its content or intention. Young critiques the political acquiescence that has infected every aspect of popular culture, replacing actual thinking, ever since the late-80s triumph of capitalism (what some people like to call the fall of communism). And the glorious 'Grandpa's Interview' offers a daring bromide: 'It ain't an honor to be on tv/And it ain't a duty either'--blessed curmudgeonliness. Greendale's a modest movie, but it's also heroic. "

Robert Johnson: What Is Wrong With This Picture?: "Christgau also observed that Elvis had many male acolytes, while Cooke was simply a 'heartthrob.' Indeed he was that, but he was also the biggest influence on his genre: All the soul men tried to sing like him. Out of such blithe error and dialectical conceit flows the received wisdom. That is, until an Elijah Wald simply looks at the music on its own terms, judging it by its own criteria. "

Lazy Sunday by The Small Faces (Interpretation by Matt Halliday) close my eyes and drift away...(flash)

Sleeping Girl by Denton Welch Pen and black ink on paper

Denton Welch: "Although Orvil's eyes still looked down at the page, they gradually came to focus far beyond it. He thought of ruins lost in wooded valleys; kittens with black faces; toast in a Gothic Revival toast-rack like the nave of some miniature cathedral; lovely uncut stones reminiscent of sucked jujubes; a top-heavy georgian coffee-pot shaped like a funeral urn; his mother's minute ring-watch, the face the size of a sequin, with little diamonds winking all round it. He saw it again on her little finger, and remembered how miraculous it had always seemed. "

from wood s lot--

BBC - Painting the Weather

Hawthorne--The Celestial Railroad: "The road now plunged into a gorge of the Delectable Mountains, and traversed the field where, in former ages, the blind men wandered and stumbled among the tombs. One of these ancient tomb-stones had been thrust across the track, by some malicious person, and gave the train of cars a terrible jolt. Far up the rugged side of a mountain, I perceived a rusty iron door, half overgrown with bushes and creeping plants, but with smoke issuing from its crevices.
'Is that,' inquired I, 'the very door in the hill-side, which the shepherds assured Christian was a by-way to Hell?'
'That was a joke on the part of the shepherds,' said Mr. Smooth-it-away, with a smile. 'It is neither more or less than the door of a cave, which they use as a smoke-house for the preparation of mutton hams.' "

Ives HAWTHORNE ["Essays Before a Sonata"]:

"If the same anyone happens to live in the 'Old Manse' near the Concord Battle
Bridge, he is likely 'of a rainy day to betake himself to the
huge garret,' the secrets of which he wonders at, 'but is too
reverent of their dust and cobwebs to disturb.' He is likely to
'bow below the shriveled canvas of an old (Puritan) clergyman in
wig and gown--the parish priest of a century ago--a friend of
Whitefield.' He is likely to come under the spell of this
reverend Ghost who haunts the 'Manse' and as it rains and darkens
and the sky glooms through the dusty attic windows, he is likely
'to muse deeply and wonderingly upon the humiliating fact that
the works of man's intellect decay like those of his hands'...
'that thought grows moldy,' and as the garret is in
Massachusetts, the 'thought' and the 'mold' are likely to be
quite native. When the same anyone puts his poetry into novels
rather than essays, he is likely to have more to say about the
life around him--about the inherited mystery of the town--than a
poet of philosophy is."

CHARLES Ives - "Concord" Sonata : "'Hawthorne,' the second-movement scherzo, is a phantasmogoria intended by Ives to depict the relentless of guilt, the elves in the forest, the Puritan past, and Hawthorne as the great national recorder of 19th-century American life. "

What people were overheard saying on the London Underground " Everything Morrissey predicted in the 80s is coming true."

from Jamie Reid--

A MEMORIAL READING for

JOHN NEWLOVE

will be held at the

VANCOUVER PUBLIC LIBRARY

TUESDAY FEBRUARY 24 7:30 PM

READERS/SPEAKERS INCLUDE

Colin Browne, Pierre Coupey, Steve Duncan,
Warren Dean Fulton, Gerry Gilbert,
Tamsin and/or Jeremy Gilbert
Bernice Lever, Mike Matthews, John Pass,
Jamie Reid, Robert R. Reid,
George Stanley, Fred Wah.

The Bohemian Index

Letter to the Guardian "Star-struck--
Thanks to Alan Hollinghurst for discovering Frederick Tuckerman's poetry ('Intimacy with a stranger', January 31), but is the quoted star-description really 'unsurpassed'? Here is Basil Bunting's, from 'Briggflatts' (1965): '... Aldebaran, low in the clear east, / beckoning boats to the fishing. / Capella floats from the north / with shields hung on his gunwale. / That is no dinghy's lantern / occulted by the swell - Betelgeuse, / calling behind him to Rigel. / Starlight is almost flesh ... Furthest, fairest things, stars, free of our humbug, / each his own, the longer known the more alone, / wrapt in emphatic fire roaring out to a black flue ...' Surely Bunting takes the garland.
Mark Thompson
Oxford "

Alan Bennett on Denton Welch: " Minor writers often convey a more intense flavour of their times than those whose range is broader and concerns more profound. Here the war is met with at every turn, but transmuted into an idyllic pastoral of soldiers bathing, prisoners harvesting and planes crossing the moonlit sky to the sound of distant singing from the pub. As drunken servicemen ride their girlfriends home on the handlebars his diaries sometimes read like the script for a documentary by Humphrey Jennings or notes for a film by Michael Powell."

Kurt Schwitters' Hannover Merzbau

Happy Birthday Robert Burton author of Anatomy of Melancholy

The Age of Dryden: "Besides, the double Rhyme (a necessary companion of Burlesque writing) is not so proper for manly Satir, for it turns Earnest too much into Jest, and gives us a boyish kind of Pleasure. It tickles awkwardly with a kind of Pain to the best sort of Readers; and we are pleased ungratefully, and if I may say so, against our liking."

Sir Hudibras and Ralpho in the Stocks

William Hogarth--"Hubibras Sallying Forth"

Happy Birthday Samuel Butler author of Hudibras!

Perle and Frum's Death Metal: "Indeed, every sad word of "An End to Evil" oozes Perle's and Frum's pained, wasted 60s youths: wasted in yellow sheet stains, wasted studying maps color-coded with spheres-of-influence, wasted memorizing German armaments, and college years wasted playing Risk in their dorms while the socially successful hippies frolicked and fucked all around them. Perle and Frum will never forgive America for this humiliation and therefore they want to egg it on to its suicide by prodding it into a multi-front apocalyptic world war. "

more nuanced take on Currin by Jerry Saltz " Currin is sincere the way pornography is sincere: The line between what's feigned and unfeigned is blurred. When he's on, Currin opens a fascinatingly disquieting psycho-visual space. As with pornography, when he's off, his work turns unintentionally silly. "

A Tragedy of Errors--Lind on Frum and Perle: "Not since Stalin ordered the US Communist Party to go underground has an American political faction pretended to dissolve itself in public like this. "

Now They Tell Us "Watching and reading all this, one is tempted to ask, where were you all before the war? Why didn't we learn more about these deceptions and concealments in the months when the administration was pressing its case for regime change—when, in short, it might have made a difference?"

Jed Perl opens a great big can of neocon whupass on John Currin--almost convincing until his way off base take on early vs. late Guston (blunt & anti-atmospheric? rosy sonatas? wha?) reveals his agenda as contrarian for its own sake--uninterested in painting per se

Homage to The Quiz: "Describing his style of play, he offered, 'Grass is a wonderful thing for little bugs and sinkerball pitchers.' "

whirling submarine delivery

Kansas City Star

NYT Obit for Dan Quisenberry

Quiz

Dan Quisenberry

"There is a telescope called Hubble
that can look so far into space
they say you can see thousands
of other galaxies and somebody said
they saw the face of Jesus if you
looked just right. But somebody else
said it looked more like Gene Shalit.
I don't know who is right. I don't see
anybody in the stars with these naked
eyes that turn red in the wind and itch
in the summer. I feel pretty good when
I can pick out the big dipper and its little
brother, but wonder sometimes when the
sky is laden black and those pinheads of
light seem to be winking at just me."

Dan Quisenberry, the poet

"I asked him if there was any relationship or metaphor in his poetry to match his side-arm style of pitching.

'To try to mix pitching and poetry is a stretch for me. In pitching, I was trying to win, beat the guy with the bat, do the team run-for-the-pennant thing. So much of that was physical; drive, win, beat, go. In poetry, I don't feel the competition; it isn't competition. It's mining, sifting, creative contemplation, more like swimming underwater and looking at stuff one doesn't see on the surface.' "

Happy Birthday pitcher/poet Dan Quisenberry!

"A manager uses a relief pitcher like a six shooter, he fires until its empty, takes the gun and throws it at the villain. "

"I found a delivery in my flaw."

Jack Nitzsche

Jack Nitzsche & St Giles Cripplegate

St Giles Cripplegate

Hard To Be Human Again by Michaelangelo Matos: "The part of the review where I suggest that Kylie should hook up with Luomo will have to remain on the cutting-room floor. "

Happy Birthday Kit Marlowe!

from the translation of "The First Book of Lucan"

All great things crush themselves, such end the gods
Allot the height of honor, men so strong
By land, and sea, no forreine force could ruine:
O Roome thy selfe art cause of all these evils ,
Thy selfe thus shivered out to three mens shares:
Dire league of partners in a kingdome last not.


O faintly joyn'd friends with ambition blind,
Why joine you force to share the world betwixt you?
While th'earth the sea, and ayre the earth sustaines;
While Titan strives against the worlds swift course;
Or Cynthia nights Queene waights upon the day;
Shall never faith be found in fellow kings.
Dominion cannot suffer partnership;
This need no forraine proofe, nor far fet story:
Roomes infant walles were steept in brothers bloud;
Nor then was land, or sea, to breed such hate ,
A towne with one poore church set them at oddes.

Gawker: "Lloyd's source says of the talk that 'It was the first time I've heard the word 'hermeneutically' used in Los Angeles,' to which I say: you need to spend more time getting stoned on the Chinatown gallery strip."

Jordan shakes it like a Polaroid picture--Ah I knew this would happen -- having to remind myself when in the elevator not to burst out into the chorus of track five from "The Love Below."

Oakland Sites of the Black Panther Party

Oakland Temescal storm tunnels

The Coup/Drug Warz:

"I bust the donut up in front of Wenchel's
Makin police state officials with fat bones
that's made of gristle test they torque to differential
Now it's essential, our problems ain't provincial
'fore a nurse call our bodies white chalk stencils
Broke as fuck, eatin lentils with no utensils
That type of struggle motivated my pencil
It ain't mental it's material
Police are the fist of the imperial, I'm spittin through your stereo
Babies need cereal, folks need currency
My job got a crowd wavin applications fervently
Some'll get accepted, most'll get rejected
Guess they gon' til the new prison get elected
and that'll solve they unemployment streak
They'll be makin microchips for two dollars a week
That's why they packin us in there in droves and fleets
And Channel Two gon' call it cleanin up the streets"