more bling (all trinkets and trade goods from Value Village junk jewelry grab bags which Daphne's sisters have already gone over)

"More than once, from this account, the First World War emerges not just as an inevitable clash between imperialist forces but as a great conspiracy of the rulers everywhere to rid themselves even if only temporarily from the intolerable demands of their subjects..."


from Paul Foot's review of the 1997 reprint of George Dangerfield's 1935 The Strange Death of Liberal England,long sought after & eagerly anticipated by this blog, acquired at Literacy Nanaimo yesterday along with Eric Bentley's "Thirty Years of Treason", a vast collection of testimony from the House Unamerican Activities Comittee--including those who named names (Sterling Hayden, Lee J. Cobb) and those who didn't (Lionel Stander, Zero Mostel) Walter Bagehot's "English Constitution" (with a 60 page intro by Richard Crossman) & vol 2 of "The Diplomats" featuring Moltke, Bullitt & the slide into WWll & a book called "The Pocket Venus" about a Victorian sex/horse-racing scandal...with change from a twenty!

lovely memoir of John Wieners

"Pain and suffering. Give me the strength
to bear it, to enter those places where the
great animals are caged. And we can live
at peace by their side. A bride to the burden

that no god imposes but knows we have the means
to sustain its force unto the end of our days.
For that is what we are made for; for that
we are created. Until the dark hours are done.

And we rise again in the dawn.
Infinite particles of the divine sun, now
worshiped in the pitches of the night..."

Capital

"What has happened is that a few very intelligent people (mostly advertisers, political consultants and assorted zealots) have, over a period of decades, figured out how to co-opt the ideals and enlightened thinking of both East and West and turn them into fertile ground for manipulative mischief that trumps the spiritual, emotional, intellectual and even material well being of the whole. While the enlightenment of the West becomes a pretext to justify a nihilism and hedonism used to promote a shallow, cynical, politically apathetic but shopping friendly populace (we can look back to the Marquis de Sade and advertising for the roots of this trend), the enlightenment of the East is used to justify an anti-rationalism that fixates on swarm politics and sacrifices critical thinking at the alter of individual conformity – all for the sake or social order, security and the prosperity of the whole (we can look back to Mao Zedong and advertising for the roots of this trend). Both bastardizations of the enlightenment agenda can be found in the rhetoric of globalization and the realities of a rule of capital that is fundamentally fascistic in its outlook. It is the rhetoric and rationale of advertising, pollsters and focus groups, of cynical linquistic manipulators for both the nihilistic hip and sound bite fundamentalists, of fear and desire quite effectively massaged in the mindless march toward material progress which in its wake leaves incredible waste and destruction to the planet and many of its inhabitants not only unfulfilled but in a blanket state of perpetual – and perpetuated – misery. And all of this to make a few hundred billionaires..."

Bling

Isola di Rifiuti

"Cold morning, rocketing in (bicycle), surly brakes keeping me honest, ur-reckless. I’m like a man digging out goutweed (Aegopodium), sifting the roots, seeing how it choked out the perennial columbines along the fence. The invasive runners shooting out under the pines, into the yard, snarling up my fleet traffic of avoidance. That faintish coffee color of the crow’s head, wary, bleeding into the landscape. That enormous blue housefly of work debilitatingly there. The mind’s train’d shoots and slips cast the ropes off of—thrust free of—all the inimical blunt caveat and guide-rail, goes its own furry way. Bishop’s weed. Snow-on-the-mountain. Surely there are many other names for it. I learn'd my history in a fruit cellar. Dud of dodged cogito."

YouTube - Arcade Fire "My Body is a Cage" nicely mash'd up with the climax of my favorite movie, Sergio Leone's "Once Upon a Time in the West"

The Things We Throw Away

"We climbed a ridge of brown sludge to reach the summit. Looking down from there was like staring into a crater of the moon, except that the colossal indentation was filled with rubbish. The sky was very blue above the ridge of sludge and the carrier bags strewn in the mud. The crater was 60 metres deep and a murder of crows swooped above us, followed by seagulls. At the near edge it seemed there were Tesco bags as far as the horizon; I looked down and saw a bottle of children’s bubble mixture, a squashed box of Typhoo tea, a tin of Dulux paint, a Capri Sun fruit drink carton: the recent detritus of an average life, and in the distance there were more plastic bags trapped in the branches of a copse of trees and blowing in and out like struggling lungs. Something in the scale of the rubbish and the size of the canyon dizzied one’s nervous system: a metaphysical smack came with the sight of the layers of used-up stuff, like the feeling that comes when sixty thousand people shout at a football match or a when a million supplicants crowd into Mecca. April walked off and I stood on the ridge of the landfill surveying the scene. A dumped bath, a heap of carpet, a thousand empty bottles of orange squash, a hundred thousand legs of lamb, a million bottles of shampoo: it was all the stuff of life and it was all evidence of death..."

Josephine K's Garden Spiral on Protection Island...

Local trees

YouTube - Briggs and Stratton 148cc motor

more Bucharest images from Peter Cummings

hopefully new doc on Alexander Hamilton (I wish I had an image of one of Tim Davis' agit-prop ten-spots with "IMMIGRANT" scrawled across them) won't have too many lame "re-creations". Longtime readers of this blog will remember my pilgrimage to the site of his fatal duel on the palisades of Weehawken...

"Before he died a notorious death--in a duel with Aaron Burr--Hamilton had been the most powerful man in America next to George Washington. He was a Revolutionary War hero and, after the war, a leading force behind the Constitution. As the nation's first Secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton built the American economy from the ground up, saving the nation's credit, creating the first national bank and laying the groundwork for Wall Street. More than any other founder, he championed the idea of a strong, centralized government. Under his watch, the newborn country quickly developed into one of the strongest economies in the world.

In many ways, Hamilton was the embodiment and prototype of the American dream. Born illegitimate on the Caribbean island of Nevis and orphaned when young, Hamilton was an immigrant and self-made man. Unlike his rival, Thomas Jefferson, he was an abolitionist, and he championed the idea that anyone should be able to rise on the basis of their talent, regardless of their birth.

"It's nearly impossible to overestimate the importance of Alexander Hamilton," says Alexander Hamilton's producer, Muffie Meyer. "Today we live in the political, social, and economic world that he created. But Hamilton's weaknesses prevented him from fully getting recognition for his achievements."

"Hamilton was filled with contradictions--he was both a political genius and a political disaster," says tpt executive producer Catherine Allan. On the one hand, Hamilton was a tireless champion of America's welfare, scrupulously honest and capable of great charm and persuasiveness. But he could also be vain, arrogant and uncompromising with his enemies. These qualities, in addition to a scandalous and well-publicized extramarital affair, dashed his hopes of ever leading the nation..."

Greg Tate on Björk--

"A lifetime of loving Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman prepares you to love Björk and the way she worries the notes, stresses tonality until it cracks not because she can't help it but because she lives to crucify a pretty melody with her own brand of wounded, buck-wild, Middle Earth dissonance. She has become this century's zeitgeist artist for that reason, that alarming sonic tongue she uses to zap her diversity-conference audience's sense of emergency, fragility, and pure animal panic. She also operatically exalts and exudes that most elusive and fanciful of human desires: untrammeled, untamable freedom, laid out to the pomo techno-tribalist beat all you earthbound E.T.'s now call home..."

Philip K. Dick, from Ace Doubles (I had the one pictured above) to the Library of America...


"If the Holy Bible was printed as an Ace Double," an editor once remarked, "it would be cut down to two 20,000-word halves with the Old Testament retitled as 'Master of Chaos' and the New Testament as 'The Thing With Three Souls.'"

interview with the creator of "fake" Pelicans & Penguins...

"Jarvis Cocker: And now Tate Modern sells mugs and posters of Penguin Classics, but at that time it wasn't an obvious thing to do.

Harland Miller: That merchandising misses the point, I think - it's too clean. What people really like about these books is the more visceral nostalgia - the smell, or the fact that some schoolkid has written abuse on the author's head in biro."

(via bookslut)

Vancouver trees

some images of Bucharest from Peter Cummings, whose there working on a film...

from Anodyne hq...

"Papers cover every conceivable surface, interspersed with books borrowed from friends and never returned, toothbrushes, shaving gear and assorted camping supplies, a can opener, anti-fungal powder, clean socks, artworks (mixed-media collages; c-prints; pencil drawings), emotionally tumultous letters from folks I no longer speak to, the same from folks that I still do, tent pegs, climbing guidebooks, topographic maps, loose CDs, bottle caps, rubber bands, mouse turds, an annotated list of income trusts worth less than 25% of their original value, carabiners, an empty Glenlivet bottle, Benjamin Buchloh's collected writings, a signed copy of The Climax Forest, loose Gasoline Alley dailies, a facsimile edition of Graham and Dodd's Security Analysis, photocopies of the Buffett Partnership letters, comic books, Barron's back issues, Nevada pebbles, oil pastels, eraser shavings and pushpins..."

of course, the big money's in the UNSIGNED copies...

out of Nowhere, B.C. via Queens, Buffalo & points west, the new blog of the tangy & enriched Billy Little...


oranginality

every word
of every lie
you'll ever tell
sails out of the cove
of the dictionary
every word
in every plaie
in every poem
every speech
every stage direction
shakespere ever rote
between the covers
of the dictionary
every word of
every love letter
you'll never get
whistles in alphabetic order

every worm in your obituary
wriggles out from the a for apples
of the dictionary

pick write worms
putem write ordure
virtilizem nuturem weedit n weep
maybe thumbday they'll
lock you up
in the dictionary
like Shakespeare