Some more.

My father Tony was for most of his life an enthusiastic ham radio operator. That's him above, in his "shack" from 1976 on, which was my old room. Part of the protocol of the hobby was the postal confirmation of on air contact in the form of "QSL" (confrimed signal) postcards. I inherited a shoebox full of them, cherry picked from perhaps four times as many. Many of the most interesting ones (including a large number from the Soviet Union) come from the years 1968 to 72 when we lived in Scotland.

amazing Django Reinhardt playing electric bop on a train in 1952!!

Kraft Dinner With Privileges

"It is the pastoral idea, that there is a complete copy of the human world
among dogs, as among swains or clowns."
William Empson




At last the anger ascends,
like the forking branches of a Bic tattoo
or the Lochside Fleet's rampant cross of gold,

shimmering now with revolutionary impatience
as at the Hot Club, Pol Pot slides his capo
two notches up the ukelele's neck

& after shaking out the crumbs
Lenin dries his kazoo on the radiator--
those of us who confuse improvisation

with such overpreparedness
will never understand the role of menthols
in the downfall of the Romanovs--

the Scrabble hustlers of Zurich
played through the pain,
& every croque they buttered

grilled & quartered
for the class ring & cider set
was a bucket of thick sand

dredged from the harbormouth of history.
On tiny Tampere couches they slept,
pillows stuffed with discarded beards,

rode in sealed containers down the Chuckanut
& six decades later a burning rag
is shoved through a bookstore mailslot.

At last the anger ascends--the chicken cook
is tried in absentia, his instruments
scattered to the flames while at Joe's

the Shining Path smirk through
Americanos as though at the clack of the
pool balls, while Rockit on the jukebox,

the hiss of the Victoria bus, a dog's jaws
closing on a frisbee, bandana flapping proclaim
Victory! Victory! Victory!

Dog Eulogistics

"Few people nowadays observe their dogs to grin, and those who do
take it as a charming smile, but the grin of dogs seems then to have
been a part of their reputation for satire."
William Empson "The English Dog"

Never met a detour
it didn't like,
or that didn't have

a joke at the end of it--
rara avis strode the Rare Earth
born to wonder &

born to wander,
why trees refused pants
& cats umbrellas, why

the slave that made my T-shirt,
the slave that made my donkey chow
& the slave that melted my swiss just now

don't just walk barking
over the bodies of their symptoms
& out the door, like when

it turned out the witch's
kryptonite was water dig--
the clever flying monkeys

thought description sufficient
& didn't even have a plan A
thus found themselves a plant-mister away

from domination
by the Cowardly class--
still better under house arrest

in a postal facility
than dressed in brocade
and carried in a cup.

re-reading for the nth time (though as Larry Fagin observed a while back, not quite ever finishing) Ralph Berton's wonderful "Remembering Bix", about his teenage friendship with the immortal cornettist & was intrigued by his account of the overwhelming sensual impact of singer/dancer Bee Palmer (she wrote & sang "Please Don't Talk About Me When I'm Gone" & invented the shimmy!) Lots more info and some Realplayer sound files past the click...

A Letter from Hammertown to the Red Hook Public Library


"They wanted to hear 'Baby Elephant Walk' with new ears."
Stephen King "Cell"



Was wrong as usual
about acupuncture Mike

turns out torques 'twixt
the wobble & the "chi"

do decrease activity
in the limbic seat of pain

no thanks to me or thee--
the MRI looked like my Compaq's

halting defrag, blue blocks
dimming like the lites of Harewood

used to in the pre-surveillance
eighties, not "dark"

like coffee or a scary 45
but coalmines, hot subocean vents

the inside of MacDiarmid's beach
& everything either swept off the table

in an excess of joy or clung to
like an eyeless Teddy shuffling

thru a mezzotint snowstorm,
chewing the sweet caraway seed at the heart

of its trauma--
but when the needle enters the skagarrat

turns out the alpine red static that says "prick"
is the easiest to placebo,

it's a centimeter in where
the boggle hangs it shingle

and you wake up smiling
in the crotch of the loveliest plane tree

in the park, trunk waving
in a warm hurricane of bliss.

Cedar Road trees

just heard that one of my all-time favorite films, Ulu Grosbard & Dustin Hoffman's searing "Straight Time" (from Edward Bunker's "No Beast So Fierce) is finally coming out on DVD, with a commentary by the directors & this interesting-looking documentary...can " The Friends of Eddie Coyle" be far behind?

Area trees

the New Yorker's Anthony Lane has a long piece on the great Barbara Stanwyck in honour of her centennial retrospective...

An Atlas, Orange Crate Labels & more Pelicans than the Miami Vice credits at this great Found Things blog...(via I like)

New porchfish

really fine "Der Spiegel" article on Ravens

Friends

I need as many copies of Bob Dylan's LP "Self Portrait" as possible,
for a sculpture I am making.
i've been buying them on Ebay, but have artificially driven up the
price by buying so many.

If you have an old copy, no matter how poor the condition, please
send it to me at

Tim Davis
101 North Road
Tivoli, NY 12583

And I will be eternally grateful.
Please feel free to forward this to any interested party.

Thanks,
Tim

Tsawassen trees

was sad to learn that teacher/poet/critic Nancy Shaw had died on the weekend--though I'd seen little of her in recent years the photo above--taken during some KSW bash in the late 80's--brings back good memories of her warmth, energy, enthusiasm & fierce intellectual curiosity--

from "Busted" (w/Catriona Strang)(which is online but Blogger is being weird)

"What a messy, bloody, capricious business. Is lineage iced, or boarded, or unchecked? It’s said once our frontiers were immutable, or at least once some fathered rhetoric could skate, smooth and slamming, all over our boxy little realm. But exactly when did the lucid rink around our discourse? And for which shift did all our plays lace up with capital? Ever more distant, ever more expansive. Was there ever a simple goal?"