restored on the big screen in Seattle, maybe The Greatest Film of All Time

"Though it sounds like an urban myth, there are still people who haven't seen Chinatown--it's always a shock to discover them, often working right alongside you; they look just like regular people..." 

Climbing the Wall

Climbing the Wall, originally uploaded by biggfish.

My blog turns two today. Thanks to everyone looking, especially those that have written or linked to me.

"Scrap Iron truck" 2002 , by Greg Girard at Monte Clark in Vancouver--


"In 1994 Girard began photographing in Shenzhen, just across Hong Kong’s border with China, a city of millions that grew from a village in just a decade. Here he began to study the transformation of the Chinese landscape from agriculture to industry, farmland to city. In his series Factory Girls, Girard registered the exodus of young migrants, largely young women, from the countryside to the factories of China’s Special Economic Zones. Since 1998, Girard has lived in Shanghai. Shanghai had been little changed physically since Mao established the People’s Republic in 1949, but in the mid-nineteen nineties the city began an accelerated program of industrial and economic development. Girard’s ongoing photo series Phantom Shanghai depicts the effects of this transformation in a style that balances lyricism and anthropology. " 

n+1 on Hitch

" From its first days in office, the Bush Administration has made clear its determination to reverse as much as possible of the modest progress made in the 20th century toward public provision for the unfortunate; public encouragement of worker, consumer, and neighborhood selforganization; public influence on the daily operation of government and access to the record of its activities; public protection of the commons; and public restraint of concentrated financial and corporate power--not only at home but also, to the (considerable, given American influence) extent feasible, abroad. And from the first weeks after 9/11, as Paul Krugman and many others have documented, the Administration has found ways to take advantage of that atrocity to achieve its fundamental goals. The results, now and in the future, of this return to unfettered, predatory capitalism have been and will be a vast amount of suffering. Enough, one would think, to be worth mentioning in the second or third place, after the dangers of clerical barbarism. Not a word from Hitchens, however, at least in print. Perhaps he is whispering a few words about these matters in the ear of the "bleeding heart" (Hitchens's description) Paul Wolfowitz and his other newly adopted neoconservative allies."

Ed Dorn's Writing Cabin 

Mahler's Composing Cabin

"Mahler's summer residence from 1900 to 1907. 4th Symphony completed, 5th to 8th Symphonies, Rückertlieder and Kindertotenlieder. " 

Max Patch Wildflowers

Max Patch Wildflowers, originally uploaded by dougb61.

A view from the top of Max Patch.

View from the top., originally uploaded by dougb61.

"the mound America"

Breakthrough to Mantle Looms

"The Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) seeks the elusive "Moho," a boundary formally known as the Mohorovicic discontinuity. It marks the division between Earth's brittle outer crust and the hotter, softer mantle." 

from Isabelle Pelissier's notebook selections at onedit--

"In an alcove of her most recent solo exhibition (Buffalo Arts Studio, 2004), seven individual notebooks (bound in a rough, black vinyl) were chained to a central metal block, providing a clear indication of their connection to her sculptural pieces, literally affixed in a position of subservience to the more imposing steel forms and designs that filled the largest spaces of the gallery. The notebooks are, in her mind, a kind of background and foundational surface from which to realize her plastic and serial projects."  

last night's surprise "swept in on a speech" late ballot victory by "The West Wing"'s Matt Santos (Jimmy Smits) reminiscent of the 1896 convention and William Jennings Bryan's "Cross of Gold"--

"If they dare to come out in the open field and defend the gold standard as a good thing, we shall fight them to the uttermost, having behind us the producing masses of the nation and the world. Having behind us the commercial interests and the laboring interests and all the toiling masses, we shall answer their demands for a gold standard by saying to them, you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold."
 

poet Meredith Quartermain will be doing a "Transparency Machine" lecture in Calgary tomorrow night at 7--

from her new "Vancouver Walks" (please excuse the reformatting)--

"Frances Street- –

four miles of straw-sacks at Scutari
4000 soldiers lying in gore-stiff uniforms
packed into place for 1700 candles stuck
in empty beer bottles
open sewer under the floor
no water, no soap, no linen
no forks, no knives
four hours to serve a putrid meal
for soap, bandages, food, 2000 in Barrack Hospital
die

Brilliant Doors & Co
Anglo-Canadian Automotive Supply
Foo Hoo Enterprises

diakonia from the verb diakonien to minister or serve
St. Luke xxii 27: I am among you as he that serveth: diakonon
Romans xvi 1: Phebe our sister . . . a servant (diakonos)
refuge to orphans, aged and sick

to the Right Honourable millionaire
for 75 miles of track,
two million acres (one quarter Vancouver island)
all mineral and timber rights
and 750,000 dollars
as per the Settlement Act

miners living in two-room shacks
funny how settlers couldn’t get
lots under the Settlement Act
till the track went in
and they had to pay Dunsmuir'’s price..."

searchable archives of great CBC radio science show Quirks & Quarks

(thanks Boing Boing) 

the Tyee is on the BC Election like delicious on doughnuts...

Uncovered

"What is so maddeningly dismaying is the way the cynical media's pose of hagiographic respect for the Pope amounts to an ungenerousness to the religion and to the world he leaves behind. To hear these shiny, modern, thoroughly secular talking heads speak about the Pope as though they were all sheep in his flock, as though they did not use contraception, or fornicate freely for pleasure, or enjoy same-sex relationships, or worship Yahweh or Allah or no divinity at all, was dreamlike. Their sudden, staged belief made you want to rub your eyes in disbelief. Once again, as with Ashley Smith story and Terri Schiavo, a story that should have been reported was being treated like an opportunity that had to be exploited."

see the scary trailer for the Tribeca-bound Bad Blood, a short film starring Alan Cumming, which was adapted from Irvine Welsh and produced by my bestest pal Peter Cummings...  

Peckinpah's Major Dundee partially restored--

"The evening of April 7, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson appeared on television to explain the "war of unparalleled brutality," which had escalated dramatically during the past few months. "Simple farmers are the targets of assassination and kidnapping," he said, "women and children are strangled in the night because their men are loyal to their government. And helpless villages are ravaged by sneak attacks." "Major Dundee" opened in New York that day and, in characterizing Vietnam, Johnson might almost have been describing the torched, corpse-strewn settlement with which "Dundee" begins, just as the movie imaginatively prophesied the geopolitical debacle that the war became.

The film's most sympathetic review called it "ugly," "brutal" and "gory." Just as liberal intellectuals were reversing themselves on Johnson, the candidate they supported in 1964, so Newsweek, which had named "Ride the High Country" the best movie of 1962, turned on Peckinpah: "Think of Yosemite Falls or suicides from the top of the Empire State Building, or streaking meteorites downward toward the earth and you'll get some idea of the decline in the career of Sam Peckinpah." The magazine noted that Peckinpah had been fired from his next movie, "The Cincinnati Kid," after a week."  

jokes from the sadly departed comedian Mitch Hedberg, a stand-up I was always glad to see--

"I like to play blackjack. I'm not addicted to gambling, I'm addicted to sitting in a semi-circle. " 

Robert Creeley, from "Words", 1967

The Mountains
in the Desert

The mountains blue now
at the back of my head,
such geography of self and soul
brought to such limit of sight,

I cannot relieve it
nor leave it, my mind locked
in seeing it
as the light fades.

Tonight let me go
at last out of whatever
mind I thought to have,
and all the habits of it.

raw spring growth from Adam Harrison's evolving 365 Sketches, which can also be seen in printed form for ten days beginning 6-9 pm Thursday, April 7, at Space Gallery on 210 Abbott St. in Vancouver.  

cgi version of Raymond Briggs' immortal Fungus The Bogeyman begins on CBC tonight (script by the "Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime" guy)--

"Fungus and Mildew are worried that their son is starting to behave like a human--he is beginning to wash."

spring magnolia & assortments.

spring magnolia & assortments., originally uploaded by posterBoi.

Here's the actual magnolia...

spring magnolia & assortments.

spring magnolia & assortments., originally uploaded by posterBoi.

finally using Flickr & found these lovely Nanaimo flowers instantly...

looked in vain for "Tusk" among these numerous MP3's of Wind Ensemble Music, but there is Percy Grainger and a "Lord of the Rings" symphony. via metafilter.

The Pentagon's Secret Stash

"'The Pentagon realizes that it's images that sell the story,' Aftergood says. 'The reason that there is a torture scandal is because of those photographs. There can be narratives of things that are much worse, but if they aren't accompanied by photos, they somehow don't register....The Abu Ghraib photos are sort of the military equivalent of the Rodney King case....And I hate to attribute motives to people I don't know, but it is easy to imagine that the officials who are withholding these images have that fact in mind.'"

Robert Creeley 1926-2005


Water Music


The words are a beautiful music.
The words bounce like in water.

Water music,
loud in the clearing

off the boats,
birds, leaves.

They look for a place
to sit and eat--

no meaning,
no point.

quicktime movie with some cheering spring flowers of the peloponnese 

Lovecraft and Houellebecq?

"Few beings have ever been so impregnated, pierced to the core, by the conviction of the absolute futility of human aspiration. The universe is nothing but a furtive arrangement of elementary particles [particules elementaires]. A figure in transition toward chaos. That is what will finally prevail. The human race will disappear. Other races in turn will appear and disappear. The skies will be glacial and empty, traversed by the feeble light of half-dead stars. These too will disappear. Everything will disappear. All human actions are as free and as stripped of meaning as the unfettered movement of the elementary particles. Good, evil, morality, sentiments? Pure 'Victorian fictions.' All that exists is egotism. Cold, intact and radiant."

"Easter Morning" Caspar David Friedrich 1828-35

First Nations perspective on the Red Lake shootings--

"In the early 20th century, when the federal government once again tried to dissolve and diminish Indian control of Indian land, this time through the passing of a law that gave states criminal and civil jurisdiction on the reservation, Red Lake said no—even though that meant they lost the majority of their funding for schools, hospitals, roads, and police protection. The reservation then built its own schools, paved its own roads, and built its own court, police station, and hospitals. Red Lake has always been Indian land. The people there know it, and they act like it. If you're not born there, it is hard to make it your home. Red Lake is the reservation equivalent of Cuba: proud, poor, troubled, independent, never dominated by the United States, and indescribably beautiful."

U B U W E B, now with movies--

"UbuWeb announces the beta launch of its newest section of historic artist's films. In addition to the 37 short Fluxus films (see below), films can be viewed by Kenneth Anger, Luis Buñuel, John Cage, Guy Debord, Marcel Duchamp, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Robert Morris & Stan VanDerBeek, Isidore Isou, Man Ray, Robert Rauschenberg, Hans Richter, Harry Smith and Jack Smith."  

W.G. Sebald in Corsica--

"I watched the sand martins circling the flame-colored cliffs high above in astonishingly large numbers, soaring from the bright side of the rocks into the shadows and darting out of the shadows into the light again, and once that afternoon, which for me was filled with a sense of liberation and appeared to stretch endlessly away in every direction, I swam out to sea with a great sense of lightness, very far out, so far that I felt I could simply let myself drift away into the evening and so into the night... " 

"Strato Cumulus" from "The International Cloud Atlas" (Paris 1896) at Weathering the Weather: The Origins of Atmospheric Science 

Two juncos, giddy, drunk with display on what must be one of last available hookup days, fly in short, interlocking spirals until just short of the ground, then they pivot and with short hard wingstrokes ascend to some pre-arranged respiralling point. They are doing this in the lot of newly turned burnt topsoil ("loamy slash") where the little forest was, hard against a pale braided woodboard fence, so that everyone can see them. By the fourth or fifth repetition their spiral is tight--if they were eagles they could lock claws--until at the last moment, less than a foot off the dirt, they fly apart as if pushed, and instead of pivoting upward somersault into hard but perfect two point landings. After quickly shaking off the impact, the bird nearest the fence turns toward it, lowers its head and very quickly runs under it. The other bird follows and they footchase onto the lawn beyond the fence for several feet before flying back toward the big trees behind the house. An odd, rolling gait, but fast.

list of 500 best songs (sort of) won me over by putting Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers "Road Runner" at the top...