excellent new issue of Common-place on graphics and print culture in 19th cent. America...

Fats Waller

After theatre
is our usual time for relaxation,

and following dinner
I roamed restlessly

through the beautiful
park there.

At dawn the birds awakened,
and out of their lovely chirpings

one short strain stood out.
I went back to the hotel,

and by ten o'clock that morning,
with the aid of some delicious

Amontillado Sherry, we had finished
Honey Hush...

Two views (Reid Shier, cloudy; Sharla Sava, sunny) of the "Pine on the Corner" in its present state...

looking forward to maybe hearing Gaucho somewhere on the River Road tonight...

"But it’s not funny. None of it’s funny, really. It’s not funny, because they’re completely broken. The white picket fence, or penthouse, or whatever, isn’t enough to bring any glint of feeling into the couple’s lives; in fact, when wealth and perfection fail to bring them happiness, their spirit immediately faces a huge void. It’s Steely Dan having no fun at all, painted into their own tableau. The man, surrounded by granite countertops stacked with luxury goods, sort of wants someone real—the Gaucho. The Gaucho wants to escape his own drift. The third man tries to play up the Gaucho’s absurdity because he’s heartbroken, he’s been genuinely threatened; his partner has taken another man. Nobody wins. And Steely Dan plays it with cadences like an after-school special; there’s nothing..."

time to re-assess Robert Moses??

""Robert Moses and the Modern City" catalogues and illustrates Moses’s oeuvre in New York City - every pool, beach, neighborhood playground, city park, road and crossing, housing and urban renewal project, along with some miscellaneous ones, like the U.N. headquarters or the Queens Museum’s diorama of New York City - each with a lengthy explanatory and historical entry. (His vast projects on Long Island and upstate fall outside the scope of the book and exhibitions.) The cumulative effect is formidable, with more than 150 pages of projects. And not only are pools and parks redeemed, but highways, reconsidered from a technical-rational point of view, figure favorably. Thus, the Cross-Bronx Expressway, destroyer of urban fabric, becomes, according to the highway’s entry in the book, a “vital link in the city’s modern transport system.” And history strips Moses of authorial control: the road had already appeared in the 1929 Regional Plan of New York - if Moses hadn’t built it, someone else would have. The conflict over the “one mile” in East Tremont becomes representative not only of Moses’s power and inflexibility, but also of “the preeminence of three planning objectives: facilitating regional traffic flows, protecting parks, and reducing residential densities in low-income neighborhoods.” The importance of people, in this re-revision of Moses’s history, fades in comparison to the over-arching planning principles of the day..."

Kenneth Burke (above right), from "Negative Emphasis: the Elegy, or Plaint" in "Poetic Categories" (1937)--


"William James, for instance, complained that Schopenhauer was CONTENT with his pessimism. He wanted a world he could bark at. And unquestionably, once a man has PERFECTED his complaint, he is more at home with sorrow than he would be without it. He has developed an equipment, and the integrity of his character is best upheld by situations that enable him to use it. Otherwise he would have to become either disintegrated or reborn. As a child, Augustine said, one learns to "avenge oneself by weeping"--and if one matures the same device by the use of adult material, one may paradoxically be said to have found a way of "accepting" life even while symbolizing its "rejection." In such cases, "acceptance" does come very close to "passiveness." The elegiac, the "wailing wall," may serve well for individual trickeries in one's relation to the obligations of struggle--but if it becomes organized as a collective movement, you may feel sure that a class of people will arise to "move in on" it, exploiting it to a point where more good reasons for complaint are provided, until the physical limits of the attitude are reached. Like humor, it is a frame that does not properly gauge the situation: when under its spell, one does not tend to size up his own resources accurately--but in contrast with humor, it really SPREADS the disproportion between the weakness of the self and the magnitude of the situation."

thanks JT for this better scan of "Pine Tree on the Corner"--his favorite Wall. too. Elsewhere, CB offers a reminiscence...

Saw on the news last night that the big ponderosa pine on the corner of Salsbury & William, subject of Jeff Wall's epochal "Pine on the Corner" (1990), has been chopped down, the excuse the usual "stability" issues. All the trees that fell on people's houses and cars in the storm last winter have made the remaining big trees easier to get rid of--they're all potential criminals now. I lived very near this corner in a couple of places for a number of years & Wall's photograph (& I wish I could have found a better version of it) felt like a gift when I first saw it & still does, if in a sadder register.

Canadian dictionary getting full overhaul, two Tims with & two sour-cream glazed...

"Sometimes, though, a word is so new it hasn’t even been published. It may just have been passed around verbally.

Like “timbits.”
“I’m not talking about the doughnut holes, but used in the sense of children: ‘All the timbits were running around in the yard making a lot of noise,’” Dollinger says.
“It’s something that is just now being created. So the link between timbits and children that is not in a hockey domain isn’t documented in writing, but that’s where it comes from —the Timbits League.

“But it’s spoken language. I got that from a friend and it’s not that we’re making that up, it’s just not in print data (yet).”
Brinton adds: “Things come into print pretty quickly. If you think of when ‘loonie’ arose, that was a really interesting one. Within a very short time after the coin came out, it was universally used.”

Dollinger struggled for a few moments before agreeing to let us use “timbits” for this story because the usage is so new he’s sure his rivals at Oxford don’t have it.

“But they will as soon as your article is out,” he says..."


via my heroine Erin McKean's Dictionary Evangelist

Bolaño in Mexico

"The Infrarealists stood firm beside "the barrel of pulque we had brought, and a twenty-five-kilo Mennonite cheese we had lugged from the market at La Merced.""

devotees of small-town newspapers should enjoy the lively and attractively archived Sayward Compass, which I came across researching a possible trip up-Island...

a big thumbs up from ARMOND!

"Their big chase scene remains an exercise in shrill excitation."

website for huge South Nanaimo Lands project, around a km north of us--


"Northwest Properties and Snuneymuxw First Nation have jointly purchased approximately 726 acres of vacant freehold land located in the south of Nanaimo on Vancouver Island. The land straddles the Island Highway and Duke Point Highway.

The overall project contemplates the development of the land into a complete and integrated master-planned community consisting of residential, retail, recreational, commercial, educational and industrial uses. The development is expected to be phased over a 10 to 15 year period relative to market demand.

This project is in the initial planning stages, and the partnership will be actively engaged in community consultation through the City of Nanaimo's Official Community Plan amendment process."

enjoyed the great Philip Baker Hall in Robert Altman's Secret Honor tonight--

"In order to find another performance like it in cinema you have to go all the way back to the full-bore theatricality of a Charles Laughton or John Barrymore; actors who thrived on the knowledge that, whether on stage or on film, every eye in the house was trained on them. There is, in fact, a more than tiny resemblance between Hall’s Nixon as he rages maniacally from one end of his study to the next — as though trying in vain to outrace his thoughts — and the feral performances Barrymore gave in films like Twentieth Century or Hold That Co-ed. It’s not a species of camp or old-school hamminess of the George Arliss variety that Hall engages in. What he recaptured through his Nixon was a spirit of luminous madness that had been refined out of screen acting (generally replaced by more dour histrionics); crucified upon a cross of joyless nuance by otherwise fine directors like Elia Kazan — and many more not-so-fine ones. By taking Nixon to both comic and tragic extremes, by playing him to that proverbial hilt, he achieves the rhetorical truth Freed and Stone were aiming for, that they knew was there all along..."

happy 3rd to toddling Anodyne, Chris Brayshaw's peerless blog conflation of walker, bookstore owner, photographer, critic, investor and hopelessly besotted Nanaimophiliac...

Tsawassen trees

Stanley Cavell's 2000 review of Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project--

"Why (according to what allegories) make a work that cannot be read through? Perhaps to remind the reader that his and her work must perpetually find its own end. Why make a work that cannot be written to an end? Perhaps to remind the writer of a reason to suffer awakening without end. It is work that is capable of recognizing, in a response to Nietzsche, "suicide as signature of modernity." Then The Arcades Project, constructive, modernist, and unending, is not so much an argument against suicide as it is an attestation, so long as the work can continue, that deprives suicide of its point..."

Robert Smithson--Strata, a Geophotographic Fiction

"MUNDUS SUBTERRANEUS. PUTTING FACTS TOGETHER LIKE A JIGSAW PUZZLE. LANGUAGE AND SOIL BLOW AWAY. FLOODS. BILATERALLY SYMMETRICAL CREATURES. AN ILLUSTRATION OF THE AUSTRAL SEA (BLUE ON GRAY DOTS). A FRAGMENTARY THEORY. EXCAVATIONS AT DINOSAUR NATIONAL MONUMENT IN NORTHEASTERN UTAH. PALAEOZOIC ERA SHOWN ON AN OLD CHART. LITTLE IS KNOWN ABOUT THE LAND AREAS. THEY PLOUGHED THEIR WAY THROUGH THE MUD. WORMS AND MORE WORMS TURN INTO GAS. SEA BUTTERFLIES FALL INTO A NAMELESS OCEAN. PLASTER RESTORATIONS COLLECTING DUSTIN THE MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY. THE TRACKS OF TRILO BITES HARDEN INTO FOSSILS. ACCUMULATIONS OF WASTE ON THE SEA BOTTOMS. JELLY-FISH BAKING UNDER THE SUN. DIGESTIVE SYSTEMS SHOWN IN DIAGRAMS.... A TENDENCY TO AMORPHOUSNESS... (HEINRICH WOLFFLIN).... SCABBY TOPOGRAPHY ON SOLFATARA PLATEAU (C. MAX BAUER). MAY HAVE LOOKED LIKE THE PLANET VENUS. LIMP-LOOKING CRUSTACEANS, DYING BY THE MILLIONS. WILL YOU FOLLOW ME AS FAR AS THE SARGASSO SEA? (GIORG1O DE CHIRICO). CONGLOMERATE THOUGHTS. MOLLUSCA. BREAKING APART INTO PARTICLES. SOMETHING FLOWING BETWEEN THE CARIBBEAN AND NEWFOUNDLAND. THE EQUATOR OVER NEW MEXICO MADE OF DOTS AND DASHES. (PORIFERA). BELTS OF SCATTERED ISLANDS. LLANORIA SOUTH OF LOUISIANNA. MOUNTAINS OF JELLYFISH. THE DIMENSIONS OF AN UNKNOWN SLIME. LIME-SECRETING COLLENIA. A GLOBE SHOWING THE APPALACHIAN TROUGH. GALLERIES FULL OF ODD NAMES AND MODELS. CLOUDS MADE OF PAPER. A DRAWING OF CASCADIA DRAWN PARALLEL TO THE PACIFIC COAST. A GUIDE TO GRIT..."

Area trees

Once Upon a Time...

"Take the lesson: murder hundreds of thousands of people for no reason at all, completely destroy a virtually defenseless country, and do everything possible to begin what could turn into a nuclear Armageddon that would murder millions -- and the worst that will be said about you is that you are an incompetent and stupid bumbler. That we are well on our way to becoming one of the most monstrous nations in history is the thought that cannot bear serious contemplation by our governing class, or by those bloggers who serve as its ignorant and/or corrupt apologists. But threaten the prerogatives of the privileged ruling elites themselves, and hellfire shall devour your soul. Never mind the suffering and death of "ordinary" people: trampling on the inalienable "rights" of those who already possess immense power is the unforgivable sin. Priorities, indeed. The final destruction of the American republic may be almost upon us, and the Republicans and Democrats and their respective blogger-enablers fight like disease-infested rats over the rotting, bloated, already stinking flesh of the doomed, permanently corrupted corporatist state..."

on "repeat" at the manse this morning the teenage Mozart's "Jenamy" Concerto #9 K.271--

"K. 271 bears another kind of significance. Its name "Jeunehomme Concerto", to which audiences grew accustomed during the twentieth century, is a product of pure fantasy and of wilful invention. It is a musical nickname created by Mozart scholarship in a fit of total blindness. For the last ninety-two years this famous concerto has been performed under a wrong name..."

"The aesthetic of the painter, the poet, en etat de surprise, of art as the reaction of one surprised, is enmeshed in a number of pernicious romantic prejudices. Any serious exploration of occult, surrealistic, phantasmagoric gifts and phenomena presupposes a dialectical intertwinement to which a romantic turn of mind is impervious. For histrionic or fanatical stress on the mysterious side of the mysterious takes us no further; we penetrate the mystery only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world, by virtue of a dialectical optic that perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday. The most passionate investigation of telepathic phenomena, for example, will not teach us half as much about reading (which is an eminently telepathic process) as the profane illumination of reading will teach us about telepathic phenomena. And the most passionate investigation of the hashish trance will not teach us half as much about thinking (which is eminently narcotic) as the profane illumination of thinking will teach us about the hashish trance. The reader, the thinker, the loiterer, the flaneur, are types of illuminati as much as the opium eater, the dreamer, the ecstatic. And more profane. Not to mention that most terrible drug--ourselves--which we take in solitude."

Walter Benjamin "Surrealism--The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia" 1929

Beaver Creek Road

No need to get
into the stewpot
with the sacrificial horse

these days of course more
a stain of Bovril hot
from a tartan thermos

but the battle of the trees
or the battle of the letters
or the battle between the

forest & the letters & the trees
has got me losing sleep
& repeating past dawn--

I am the falcon
I fly blind
through a progressive sky--

crisp as Hampton Hawes circa 1955--
Hermosa Beach,
my tiny harmonium gently weeps

a pastel streak
down a marble cheek
while the evening refuses

to abandon its swatches
& come in out of the rain,
a lighthouse in trousers passes

sans eagle-eye motif
but a copper moon dangling
over a heap of crushed felt

between his ass & the saddle,
loaded with six empties
& the cooler cooler cooler

the Fargo's likely to buck
so switch to premium
for the Parkway--

a circling bird
I cannot help but overhear
your hesitations

what's said's
a hammer falling
on an empty chamber

old furniture
unlikely to remember
I refuse to look--

Joanna to Goldfinch
a row of Specials
nestled in a ravine

a set of hoops
in every 45 degree driveway
where the sun don't crest

till one at least
but no trash utopia
blackberry the stream

tended to such a goatproof-bridged
fare-thee well
that coming out onto

Shenton the residual
good will had sanded
the industrial off the park

before the looming
crystal waterwork mini-lake motel
put it back in.

devotees of obscure gangster films & Henry Silva shouldn't miss Johnny Cool (1963) on TCM tomorrow at 1500hrs, with a smokin' pre-Samantha Elizabeth Montgomery as "Dare Guinness" & a host of Rat Packers (inc. Sammy Davis Jr. as "Educated" who sings "The Ballad of Johnny Cool") A great favorite locally in the late 70's...remade as "Ghost Dog"...

via Plep these Painted Houses of Borovsk

more on Roberto Bolano & The Savage Detectives--

"Madero’s narration comes in the form of clipped, kinetic diary entries: “Depressed all day, but writing and reading like a steam engine”; “I’m reading the dead Mexican poets, my future colleagues.” Not since Rimbaud has the world of verse seemed so criminally seductive. Madero’s entrance into the poetry underground resembles the heady initiation of Ray Liotta’s fledgling mobster in “GoodFellas.” The visceral realists not only shoplift (Madero boasts that, in his “tenement room, a little library has already begun to grow from my thefts and visits to bookstores”); they fund a magazine, Lee Harvey Oswald, by trafficking in Acapulco Gold marijuana. Yet the purpose of this illicit activity couldn’t be purer. “We were all in complete agreement that Mexican poetry must be transformed,” Madero proclaims..."