(Rod Steiger (see below), equally unrestrained, in "Duck, You Sucker!")

from Greencine a witty essay on cinematic guilty pleasures has a lot of my favorites, including "No Way to Treat a Lady", "Road House", "Gator Bait" (and "Point Break"), oddly omits "Extreme Prejudice" and "The English Patient"--

"Credit director Jack Smight for turning Rod loose on the scenery and letting him graze like the Tasmanian Devil, and credit Rod for gulping down as much at one time as he does, for his thespian gluttony here is truly remarkable to behold."

Hotel Point

"To read Kevin Davies is begin to see all language usage caught in the Swale of Irony, a low meadow'd depress aiming for the rad heights, the protuberant Swell of Sincerity, or Sublimity, or something. The form is there, and generally "correct" but one gets a hell-hound feeling that that beatific and washcloth-scrub'd Sunday schoolboy up in the front row's busy goosing the minister's girl mid-recital, and that such goofery'll likely rearrange the neural synapses of both, and for some lengthy period to come." 

'One huge US jail'

"He was taken to Bagram, where US military doctors had to amputate his leg. Afterwards, he said, 'an American woman appeared. She said the US was sorry. It was a mistake. The men in the car were Special Forces or CIA on a mission. She gave me $500.' Sardar showed us into another room in his compound where a circle of children stared glumly at us; their fathers, all policemen, were killed in the same incident. 'Five dead. Four in hospital. To protect covert US prisoner transports,' he says. Later, US helicopters were deployed in two similar incidents that left nine dead."

CHARLES DARWIN HAS A POSSE -- free bookmarks and stickers 

"Boys are at play on the future route of the Golden State Freeway near Griffith Park" from the Los Angeles Public Library Virtual Gallery

(thanks Exclamation Mark)

via Plep, from a searchable Blaeu Atlas of Scotland, 1654,

(my home town 68-72)

"AYR, or AIRY
A small city, but a large spirit clings to its strong people,
Inferior to none in the nobility of its men.
Most pure, it draws its climate from the plains of the air
And a lighter breeze rests on its gentle soil.
Hence I believe it was called Airy before Ayr,
For what right does lightness have with harshness?
But if one may compare lower thing with higher,
Perhaps it should have been first called Aureate.

[Arthur Johnston depicts it thus:
City content with the goods of heaven, either from the pure air
Or from the bronze by which you may be called, you draw your name.
Indeed you are small in size, but you increase size with gifts,
And you are in front of large cities in nobility.
You look at huge stones, at gems of little body.
Yet the little gem has more lustre.
And Jove’s oak rises from a little seed,
And the seven mouths of the twin river are hidden.
Increase in spirit: she who subjected to herself lands and seas,
The city of the Tiber was once no more than a villa.] "

tracklist for the Fall Peel Sessions Box

">> Disc One:
01 Futures and Pasts (15.06.78)
02 Mother-Sister (15.06.78)
03 Rebellious Jukebox (15.06.78)
04 Industrial Estate (15.06.78)
05 Put Away (06.12.78)
06 Mess of My (06.12.78)
07 No Xmas for John Quays (06.12.78)
08 Like to Blow (06.12.78)
09 Container Drivers (24.09.80)
10 Jawbone and the Air Rifle (24.09.80)
11 New Puritan (24.09.80)
12 New Face in Hell (24.09.80)
13 Middlemass (31.03.81)
14 Lie Dream of a Casino Soul (31.03.81)
15 Hip Priest (31.03.81)
16 C'n'C-Hassle Schmuck (31.03.81)

>> Disc Two:
01 Deer Park (15.09.81)
02 Look, Know (15.09.81)
03 Winter (15.09.81)
04 Who Makes the Nazis? (15.09.81)
05 Smile (23.03.83)
06 Garden (23.03.83)
07 Hexen Definitive - Strife Knot (23.03.83)
08 Eat Y'self Fitter (23.03.83)
09 Pat Trip Dispenser (03.01.84)
10 2 x 4 (03.01.84)
11 Words Of Expectation (03.01.84)
12 C.R.E.E.P. (03.01.84)

>> Disc Three:
01 Cruiser's Creek (03.06.85)
02 Couldn't Get Ahead (03.06.85)
03 Spoilt Victorian Child (03.06.85)
04 Gut of the Quantifier (03.06.85)
05 L.A. (07.10.85)
06 The Man Whose Head Expanded (07.10.85)
07 What You Need (07.10.85)
08 Faust Banana (07.10.85)
09 Hot Aftershave Bop (09.07.86)
10 R.O.D. (09.07.86)
11 Gross Chapel-GB Grenadiers (09.07.86)
12 U.S. 80's-90's (09.07.86)
13 Athlete Cured (19.05.87)
14 Australians in Europe (19.05.87)
15 Twister (19.05.87)
16 Guest Informant (19.05.87)

Disc Four:
01 Deadbeat Descendant (31.10.88)
02 Cab It Up (31.10.88)
03 Squid Lord (31.10.88)
04 Kurious Oranj (31.10.88)
05 Chicago Now (01.01.90)
06 Black Monk Theme (01.01.90)
07 Hilary (01.01.90)
08 Whizz Bang [never broadcast]
09 The War Against Intelligence (23.03.91)
10 Idiot Joy Showland (23.03.91)
11 A Lot of Wind (23.03.91)
12 The Mixer (23.03.91)

>> Disc Five:
01 Free Range (15.02.92)
02 Kimble [the Creators cover] (15.02.92)
03 Immortality (15.02.92)
04 Return (15.02.92)
05 Ladybird (Green Grass) (13.03.93)
06 Strychnine [the Sonics cover] (13.03.93)
07 Service (13.03.93)
08 Paranoia Man in Cheap Sh*t Room (13.03.93)
09 M5 (05.02.94)
10 Behind The Counter (05.02.94)
11 Reckoning (05.02.94)
12 Hey! Student (05.02.94)
13 Glam Racket - Star (17.12.94)
14 Jingle Bell Rock [Bobby Helms cover] (17.12.94)
15 Hark the Herald Angels Sing [traditional Christmas carol] (17.12.94)
16 Numb at the Lodge (17.12.94)
17 He Pep! (22.12.95)
18 Oleano (22.12.95)
19 Chilinist (22.12.95)
20 The City Never Sleeps [Nancy Sinatra cover] (22.12.95)
21 DIY Meat (18.08.96)
22 Spinetrak (18.08.96)
23 Spencer (18.08.96)
24 Beatle Bones 'N' Smokin' Stones [Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band cover] (18.08.96)

>> Disc Six:
01 Calendar (03.03.98)
02 Touch Sensitive (03.03.98)
03 Masquerade (03.03.98)
04 Jungle Rock (03.03.98)
05 Bound Soul One (04.11.98)
06 Antidotes (04.11.98)
07 Shake-Off (04.11.98)
08 This Perfect Day (04.11.98)
09 Theme From Sparta FC (13.03.03)
10 Contraflow (13.03.03)
11 Groovin' With Mr Bloe [Mr Bloe cover] (13.03.03)
12 Green-Eyed Loco Man (13.03.03)
13 Mere Pseud Mag Ed. (13.03.03)
14 Job Search (12.08.04)
15 Clasp Hands (12.08.04)
16 Blindness (12.08.04)
17 What About Us (12.08.04)
18 Wrong Place, Right Time
19 I Can Hear the Grass Grow (12.08.04) 

"A Cloud and Landscape Study by Moonlight" 1822 by Johan Christian Dahl, from the Moonwatchers show. 

"Rear View", a nice North Shore cloudbank alignment moment from 365 Sketches by Adam Harrison 

"Two Men Contemplating the Moon" c. 1830 by Caspar David Friedrich, from the Metropolitan Moonwatchers show.  

thanks Chris for this Esquimalt & Nanaimo Railway
link, the cross tie stroll and the first skunk cabbage detection of the season.

PBS NATURE special on Ireland might be good. You can never have too much stoat and puffin footage.

What a lovely idea--a John Clare weblog--

Young Lambs

The spring is coming by a many signs;
The trays are up, the hedges broken down,
That fenced the haystack, and the remnant shines
Like some old antique fragment weathered brown.
And where suns peep, in every sheltered place,
The little early buttercups unfold
A glittering star or two--till many trace
The edges of the blackthorn clumps in gold.
And then a little lamb bolts up behind
The hill and wags his tail to meet the yoe,
And then another, sheltered from the wind,
Lies all his length as dead--and lets me go
Close bye and never stirs but baking lies,
With legs stretched out as though he could not rise.
 

Patrick Kavanagh

Wet Evening in April


The birds sang in the wet trees
And I listened to them it was a hundred years from now
And I was dead and someone else was listening to them.
But I was glad I had recorded for him
The melancholy.

Flann O'Brien

"Having considered the matter in -- of course -- all its aspects, I have decided that there is no excuse for poetry. Poetry gives no adequate return in money, it is expensive to print by reason of the waste of space occasioned by its form, and nearly always promulgates illusory concepts of life. But a better case for the banning of all poetry is the simple fact that most of it is bad. Nobody is going to manufacture a thousand tons of jam in the expectation that five tons may be eatable."

Of course they would!

annotated Pogue lyrics at The Parting Glass. I saw them twice, once with Joe Strummer subbing for Shane. When they encored with a rollicking, knees-up "London Calling" there wasn't a dry eye in the house. Waving here is Spider Stacy, the man who made the penny whistle rock. 

Daph remembered some of this poem by Rupert Brooke when I told her about possibly scaring the goldfish on the porch into leaping out of his water-barrel.

HEAVEN



FISH (fly-replete, in depth of June,
Dawdling away their wat'ry noon)
Ponder deep wisdom, dark or clear,
Each secret fishy hope or fear.
Fish say, they have their Stream and Pond;
But is there anything Beyond?
This life cannot be All, they swear,
For how unpleasant, if it were!
One may not doubt that, somehow, Good
Shall come of Water and of Mud;
And, sure, the reverent eye must see
A Purpose in Liquidity.
We darkly know, by Faith we cry,
The future is not Wholly Dry.
Mud unto mud! -- Death eddies near --
Not here the appointed End, not here!
But somewhere, beyond Space and Time.
Is wetter water, slimier slime!
And there (they trust) there swimmeth One
Who swam ere rivers were begun,
Immense, of fishy form and mind,
Squamous, omnipotent, and kind;
And under that Almighty Fin,
The littlest fish may enter in.
Oh! never fly conceals a hook,
Fish say, in the Eternal Brook,
But more than mundane weeds are there,
And mud, celestially fair;
Fat caterpillars drift around,
And Paradisal grubs are found;
Unfading moths, immortal flies,
And the worm that never dies.
And in that Heaven of all their wish,
There shall be no more land, say fish.  

(not only one of favorite album covers, but also contains the amazing "Excursions on a Wobbly Rail", almost the name of this blog)

happy birthday Cecil Taylor!

"Obviously I'm fascinated with words. And without thinking of rhythm in language, but knowing that it's there, and reading a lot of different people, finally what happens is the same thing that happens when we are involved in music. I listen to a lot of different music. For instance, today I listened to Chinese Classical music--which I really didn't dig too much, but I'll listen to it again--I listened to Islamic chants that really knocked me the fuck out. And just single voices. I listened to Duke Ellington's Orchestra circa 1945-- there was one piece that was just amazing. I listened to Victoria de los Angeles singing Purcell's 'Dido and something or other...' and then I listened to Gary Grafman playing the first movement of the Brahms piano concerto. Brahms, boy I tell you--then I listened to Leontyne Price singing the last movement of Richard Strauss' 'Salome.' Boy--what what a-- wheeew--boy, that guy--I have to go to see that guy. A lot of shit was up. And then, of course, of course--I listen every day to something by Ligeti. Today I heard 'Ramifications' and this choral piece, and 'Atmospheres.' Then I listen every day to [he chuckles] Marvin Gaye, of course. Then I put on Sarah Vaughn, then I put on Xenakis--oh, this fucking guy--this orchestra piece, and then I'm--god, I mean I practiced the piano four hours today. I spent two hours completing another section of this poem this morning. I cooked, I mopped all the floors in this house, and I've done all this stuff. And not one cigarette I can't understand it. No champagne, anything... "

Enough Appeasement

"Americans these days don't respond to rational argument. Now that I think about it, I don't think they ever have. They respond to the brute who picks up the biggest stick and beats it hardest on the ground, which is why the Right has had so much success over the past 20 years. The Right is merely playing catch-up with the base nature of Middle America, populated by the descendents of the same mob feared by Alexander Hamilton.

After My Lai broke, even after Americans knew exactly what had happened, an overwhelming majority supported the leader of the unit that carried out the massacre, Lt. William Calley, practically forcing Nixon to intervene and soften his sentence. Indeed, if Americans had their way, we'd probably still be bombing Vietnam today. It took the Vietnamese whipping our asses to bring some sense into the nation--not rational argument.

That's why the Iraqi insurgents are saving us from ourselves. My own sense is that the Times, like so many other media, trumped up the war in Iraq not so much because they believed in it, but because they knew that their brutish, bloodthirsty consumers--the American newspaper-reading public--wanted war, any war."


(via <$Xvarenah$>)

On "repeat" today a new recording of the Sibelius Violin Concerto by young Norwegian Henning Kraggerud wonderfully playing a violin made for his countryman, the 19th century virtuoso Ole Bull, who was also an ardent patriot and promoter of Norwegian culture. The CD also has a concerto & a "romance" by Norwegian composer Christian Sinding, of whom I hope to hear more on this. But I like Romantic concerti generally lately--they all seem to be so unaffectedly about me.

among the caribou last night I met couple of the guys from Analog Blues, prarie transplants making things happen in the Hub City.  

Being Caribou

"April 8, 2003: Karsten Heuer & Leanne Allison left the remote community of Old Crow,Yukon, to join the Porcupine Caribou Herd on their epic life journey. For 5 months the Canadians migrated on foot with the 123,000-member herd from wintering to calving grounds in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and back again -- 1500km across snow and tundra. They completed their journey on Sept. 8, 2003 and headed straight to Washington, DC to tell politicians & activists what they found."

Going to see this big screen this evening, after being amazed by parts I saw on TV--caribou swirling fractally like sandpipers or bugs. It's playing at the old Fiesta Theatre--mostly closed now, for many years the only and then one of only two in Nanaimo--that I haven't set foot in for years.

Hotel Point

"Oh March, it's March when
My self-absorption matches that
Of the great coastal cities
And if I call you
"Boisterous and Dutch," a cabinet
Of curious grief-canisters, you' ll
Know it's Jimmy Schuyler talking
Confusedly about the color green."

Arm wrestling robots beaten by a teenaged girl in Turing test turnaround tussle--

"Despite her lack of strength, training and technique, she was able to conquer the first arm, developed by Environmental Robots Inc. from Albuquerque, New Mexico, in just 24 seconds. Following this, and a pep talk from an arm wrestling expert, it took her just four seconds to beat the second arm and three seconds for her to win the last match.

Two champion arm wrestlers oversaw the matches to ensure that standard arm wrestling rules were observed. The three robot teams are now trying to work out what went wrong."

fine beard-fluffing poem by Jason Bredle in the new "Shampoo" means there's one less I have to do!

"I am in the bathroom fancy beard fluffing.
Fancy beard is growing in stunningly,
ask anyone in the park. As I fluff beard
in summer sun, goose feeding youth
and goose feeding elderly all stop
to receive its glory shower. When I am camping,

I need only brush minimal amounts
of worms and ticks from beard come morning,
then I allow the soft dewy breeze
to have its way..." 

Violent New Front in Drug War Opens on the Canadian Border...or not--

"In British Columbia, a once-quiet province in a country that has long enjoyed a low crime rate, the murder rate has soared in the past two years, Canadian officials say, because of killings linked to warring drug gangs."

"Correction: March 10, 2005, Thursday:

A front-page article on Saturday about violence related to marijuana trafficking from the Canadian province of British Columbia misstated the murder rate there. Although the police say drug-related violence has risen greatly in the last two years, the overall murder rate has remained stable; it has not soared."

Never mind!

Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash--mp3's from their 1969 collaboration 

last night in the Value Village finally scored mint copies (1981 paperback) of the two volumes of Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking", a Peanuts card taped on the inside front page wishing the newlyweds a life "filled with laughter, happiness and plenty of good food", which I hope it is and was but it was never from this unstained book (maybe they were a "Joy of Cooking" or "Fit for Life" couple). One of my all-time favorite blogs was the The Julie/Julia Project in which "one girl and a crappy outer borough kitchen" valiantly tried cook her way through it's 538 recipes in a year. I thought they would have made a movie of it by now. Daphne found an unopened and troublingly Richard Dadd-ish 1000 piece jigsaw and a battered church basement panorama of Jersualem.  

great interview with singer/writer/Teddy Bear Carol Connors--

""But I do namedrop, because that's who I hang out with! They are my friends as I am their friend. I remember when I went with David Janssen a lady came up and said, 'Oh, Carol, you're so lucky to be going out with David Janssen,' and I looked at her and said, 'Excuse me - David Janssen is lucky to be going out with me!'"

(via gmtPlus9, who also hosts an mp3 of "To Know Him is to Love Him")

this photo of the concrete dragon at the Gyro Park in Cadboro Bay from Big Things in Canada nicely catches Victoria's dreamy light, its homely colonial hyperreality, as if you've overslept and don't know if its morning or evening. The site is good though it lacks a certain local Giant Head. Thanks RM! 

Disappeared In America

"Since 9/11, approximately 3,000 American Muslim men have been detained in a security dragnet. To date, none have been prosecuted on terrorism charges. The majority of those detained were from the invisible underclass of cities like New York. They are the recent immigrants who drive our taxis, deliver our food, clean our restaurant tables, and sell fruit, coffee, and newspapers. The only time we see their faces are when we glance at the hack license in the taxi partition, or the ID card around the neck of a vendor. Already invisible in our cities, after detention, they have become "ghost prisoners." "