CRAWLSPACE BOOK LAUNCH READING & CD RELEASE PARTY
Featuring: Seattle poets DANIEL COMISKEY & C.E. PUTNAM


Where:

RENDEZVOUS JEWELBOX THEATER, 2322 2nd Ave Seattle, WA
Located in the historic Rendezvous Bar & Restaurant
This venue is age 21 & over


When:

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 2, 2007—7:30pm. One night only


Tickets:

This event is FREE. No reservation required, but seating is limited to 60
persons


Merch:

BOOK & CD PACKAGE available for the first time on the night of the performance
$12 special night-of-reading price (regular $14 retail thereafter)
Book cover features original 3-D graphic art (3-D glasses free with every
purchase)



CRAWLSPACE is a collaboratively written book-length poem by Seattle writers
Daniel Comiskey & C.E. Putnam, originally commissioned by Doug Nufer for
presentation at OseoO Gallery’s Leg to Stand On reading series. A bonus
compact disc, the Crawlspace Audio Companion, comprises a reading of the work
by the authors, set within an innovative sound collage conceived and produced
by C.E. Putnam and featuring the voice of Stanley Shiebert, Librarian in the
Arts, Recreation & Literature department of the Seattle Public Library.

DANIEL COMISKEY was pretty good at the dodging part in dodge ball, was coeditor
of Monkey Puzzle, a magazine of poetry and prose, and worked as literary
manager for The Poet’s Theater. His translations of Hu Xudong, produced in
collaboration with Chinese scholar Ying Qin, appear in Another Kind of Nation:
An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Poetry. His work is also included in the
Seattle Writers Issue of Golden Handcuffs Review.

Seattle born, C.E. PUTNAM has stopped the Space Needle with his foot. He also
maintains P.I.S.O.R. (The Putnam Institute for Space Opera Research;
http://www.pisor-industries.org). Recent works include: Manic Box (2001);
Didyou ever hear of a thing like that? (2001); Things Keep Happening (2003);
Frolic: Selected Cosmic Sex Earthly Love Poems (1994-2007).


For more information, and to view the groovy trailer for the poem, please visit:

http://www.pisor-industries.org/crawlspace

the over the flu ::: wood s lot ::: has a bunch of excellent links for William Blake's birthday...

magnificent YouTube - Bob Dylan - Restless farewell at the Sinatra 80th in '95...

Obey or Die

"If the authorities believed he had to be "subdued," they had any number of other means of achieving that end -- means that would not have been fatal. But for the state, such calculations are irrelevant. Dziekanski was too much trouble; easier to eliminate him. The fact that he had become "too much trouble" as the DIRECT RESULT of the state's own criminal incompetence is forgotten..."

fun quadruple bill from film editor Thelma Schoonmaker on TURNER CLASSIC MOVIES tonight, including her late husband Michael Powell's "Colonel Blimp" and the more rarely seen "Edge of the World" & "Age of Consent"...

review of Alexander Watson's Marginal Man: The Dark Vision of Harold Innis which I've just started reading. Here's another one & the Wikipedia entry is very good...

Ezra Pound at Expo '67?

"Pound’s appearance at Expo may have been one of the great non-events in Canadian literary history but it would be an ideal subject for a speculative novel, one that would feature high-level politicians like Pearson, Diefenbaker and Trudeau, Quebec neo-Nazis and fans of Lionel Groulx, and a host of dithering writers and poets..."

bye-bye John Howard

"Remember that heading in the Herald a few weeks back, after one of the opinion polls bumped up the Government's lousy standing a point or two? "Lazarus stirs", it said optimistically of John Howard. Wrong. It was just the flies moving..."

soon-to-turn-one Belle sez: Time for Toast!

good essay on The Leopard

"Partly because Lampedusa took the opportunity to vent his spleen against Italian opera, Sicilian indiscretion, political corruption, greed, and a whole host of other shortcomings he associated with his native place, The Leopard has been viewed by many of his countrymen as anti-Sicilian or even anti-Italian. Its politics have also been disparaged as right-wing or reactionary, though Louis Aragon, the French Marxist, interpreted it instead as a left-wing critique of the right-wing aristocracy. Such views strike me as severely inadequate. If The Leopard manifests doubts about the Sicilian character, it does so very much from the inside, and if it has any politics at all, it is neither of the right nor of the left, but rather a politics of irony.

But can there be such a politics? Fervid electioneers and dyed-in-the-wool adherents of the various ideological isms would say no. On the other hand, slyly dissident satirists of the Soviet system, German-speaking Jews like Karl Kraus, and the helpless, hopeless critics of the present American administration might all say yes. To see the local with the distance of the astronomical and at the same time to feel its tragedies locally: That is politics, surely, of a very useful sort..."

Enabling Martin Amis

"Though he was forced to squirm a little, Amis refused to recant or apologise. His demeanour throughout was the ostentatious weariness of the unfairly traduced, and he called for an end to the whole dull business. "Can I ask him [Eagleton], in a collegial spirit, to shut up about it?" he wrote in a letter to this newspaper.

Do we let the homophobe off the hook just because he tells his critics to shut up? Do we pass over the rantings of the antisemite just because he did not commit the poison to the page? To judge from the response of most liberal commentators, the defence seemed to work, and Amis's wish to have a line drawn under the affair was granted. While Eagleton was attacked as a clapped-out marxist, Amis was commended, by a writer in the Observer, for "owning up - bravely, as it turned out - to what amounted to a revenge fantasy". His "thought experiment" was the incautious but challenging musing of one of the most vivid and verbally energetic modern writers in English. In the Guardian, one writer concluded that although he was often irritating, Amis had raised important questions, while among the rhetorical questions asked by Professor John Sutherland was whether Eagleton's - Eagleton's! - position at Manchester University was tenable after labelling a colleague a bigot and a racist..."

glad I was able to make it to Evan Lee's beautiful new show--

"At Monte Clark Gallery, Evan Lee’s Drawing, Photography juxtaposes small graphite drawings of elderly Chinese women with two large scale black and white photographs, one of a woman working in a backyard garden, the other a portrait of the artist’s frail grandmother shortly before her death, reclining on a bed surrounded by framed family photographs of her children and grandchildren.

Much of Lee’s work plays, like Gergley’s, with double meanings. Lee has previously photographed cardboard boxes that look like smiling cartoon faces, ginseng roots resembling exotic birds, and transparent plastic drafting tools that imply flamingos or cartoon snakes. In this new exhibition, the “doubleness” of Lee’s work is put aside in favor of the direct representation of his subjects. His pictures’ apparent lack of a straightforward message, moral, or theme is actually the result of Lee’s deliberate decision to represent his subjects as they are, paying careful attention to each woman’s gestures, clothing, and physiognomy, thereby representing their individual specificity and avoiding the temptation to convert them into symbols or representatives of a “class.” Lee’s show is not flashy, and lacks the dry wit characterizing much of his recent photography, but the work is solid, brave and nakedly biographical..."

Fortress Canada


“This is our future,” he said of the rising incarceration rate. “I sometimes think this agenda is about building more prisons.”

Jones said he’s been told some prisons already hold 40 per cent more inmates than they were designed for.

On any given day in 2005-06, an average of 33,123 adults and 1,987 youth were in custody in federal and provincial jails and federal prisons in Canada.

Although Canada tends to jail people at a higher rate than most western European countries, it is far behind the United States.

Sweden posted an incarceration rate of 82 per 100,000 population in 2005-06, and France, 85.

By comparison, the U.S. adult rate was 738.

Jones said the Conservative government’s proposals for more minimum sentences, tougher bail and an end to conditional sentences are following a U.S. lead.

“There’s a definite American cast to this,” he said. “They’re just going to focus on security.”

The Labyrinth Scored for the Purrs of 11 Different Cats

"The labyrinth at Chartres is a unicursal path winding in 552 steps through 11 concentric rings into the center. In order to hear the sound of this path I have changed the steps into cats purrs. The 552 steps have become 5,520 seconds of purring, each step being equal to 10 seconds of sound. The 11 concentric rigns then become 11 different cats, each cat representing one complete ring with all its steps. The stereo balance of the tape corresponds to the directional movement throught the labyrinth. The tape begins with 10 seconds of the 1st cat (ring), 10 of the 2nd, 10 of the 3rd, 10 of the 4th then turns left for 130 seconds (steps) of the 5th ring (cat), overlapping into the 6th ring for 140 seconds and so on winding through the labyrinth into the center which is represented by the simultaneous purring of all 11 cats..."

Tangled Up

"The problem for “I’m Not There” is not one of credibility (after all, these tales are meant to be tall) but of what authority a movie retains when its component parts fly off in different directions. Dylan, to judge by the ardor of his admirers, is indeed inexhaustible, in his gifts as in his changes of tack, and one quite understands why Haynes—who co-wrote the film with Oren Moverman—should have scorned a plain bio-pic. To come at a stubborn subject from multiple angles was a smart move, but Haynes is so enthralled by the stylistic opportunities that his plan affords, as he was in the fifties-hued “Far from Heaven,” that he ends up more interested in the angles than in anything else, leaving the elusive Dylan, once again, to slip away..."

more Vancouver trees

Vancouver trees

another YouTube - Gabor Szabo and band, Breezin'--the original...

two songs I have always assumed were "about" Nanaimo, having no proof otherwise...Tom Waits - In The Neighborhood - 1983

YouTube - The Go-Betweens - Streets Of Your Town

LRB · Slavoj Žižek: Resistance Is Surrender

"Shouldn’t the Left draw a distinction between the circumstances in which one would resort to violence in confronting the state, and those in which all one can and should do is use ‘mocking satire and feather dusters’? The ambiguity of Critchley’s position resides in a strange non sequitur: if the state is here to stay, if it is impossible to abolish it (or capitalism), why retreat from it? Why not act with(in) the state? Why not accept the basic premise of the Third Way? Why limit oneself to a politics which, as Critchley puts it, ‘calls the state into question and calls the established order to account, not in order to do away with the state, desirable though that might well be in some utopian sense, but in order to better it or attenuate its malicious effect’?

These words simply demonstrate that today’s liberal-democratic state and the dream of an ‘infinitely demanding’ anarchic politics exist in a relationship of mutual parasitism: anarchic agents do the ethical thinking, and the state does the work of running and regulating society. Critchley’s anarchic ethico-political agent acts like a superego, comfortably bombarding the state with demands; and the more the state tries to satisfy these demands, the more guilty it is seen to be. In compliance with this logic, the anarchic agents focus their protest not on open dictatorships, but on the hypocrisy of liberal democracies, who are accused of betraying their own professed principles.

The big demonstrations in London and Washington against the US attack on Iraq a few years ago offer an exemplary case of this strange symbiotic relationship between power and resistance. Their paradoxical outcome was that both sides were satisfied. The protesters saved their beautiful souls: they made it clear that they don’t agree with the government’s policy on Iraq. Those in power calmly accepted it, even profited from it: not only did the protests in no way prevent the already-made decision to attack Iraq; they also served to legitimise it. Thus George Bush’s reaction to mass demonstrations protesting his visit to London, in effect: ‘You see, this is what we are fighting for, so that what people are doing here – protesting against their government policy – will be possible also in Iraq!’"


Baader-Meinhof: Gerhard Richter

from Volume 2 of Don Akenson's "An Irish History of Civilization"--

"PARIS, FEBRUARY 1884

Terror as a means to a religious, political or ideological goal has only one articulated justification, and it stays the same no matter what language expresses it.

The Chester Castle mastermind, American Irish Captain John McCafferty, out of prison on amnesty, continues his campaign. His methods are now more ruthless.

He is the untraceable "No. 1" who puts together the invincibles. Their hacking to death of T.H. Burke and Lord Frederick Cavendish in the Phoenix Park in May 1882 was intended to be the start of a program of political assassinations in Ireland and England. They would bleed the enemy like a butcher sticks a squealing pig. Cut short after the Invincibles' first mission leads to his operatives being caught, McCafferty coolly slides away, and leaves a bogus "No. 1" in his place. As far as the authorities are concerned, McCafferty no longer exists.

Yet, in Paris, planning and raising funds, he gives an interview to The Irishman.

"Terrorism," McCafferty declares, is the lawful weapon of the weak against the strong." "


from The House of Commons in 1874

"When turned loose from Portland, McCafferty went down on his knees outside the prison gates, cursed the Governor, the prison system, the British Government, and vowed revenge on all.

The Governor forced him back to his cell, and wired the Home Office for instruction. McCafferty, in consequence, had to spend many more years in Portland. Ultimately he was set free, and when he arrived in America, so secretly did he work, that his name does not appear in the list of 'Parnell's American Auxiliaries,' prepared for The Times by its experts at the Forgery Commission of 1888.

He was not even mentioned by the spy, Le Cron, in his evidence at the Commission. McCafferty never attended a public meeting in America, or identified himself with the Irish movement. Whispers, however, reached us that he was thought to be an inspirer of the "Invincible" Society, which brought about the murder of the Chief Secretary, Lord Frederick Cavendish; and the Under-Secretary Burke in the Phoenix Park on the 6th May, 1882.

The Times in 1887-8 aimed at saddling Parnell with these murders.

The brief of Attorney-General Webster, endorsed by "Soames, Edwards and Jones, solicitors, 58 Lincoln's Inn Fields," mentions as "Parnell's American Auxiliaries" all released prisoners active in America, viz., T. F. Bourke, E. O'M. Condon, John Devoy, T. C. Luby, Mackey-Lomasney, O'Donovan Rossa, and Stephen J. Meany. (The last-named in the Crimean War wrote "The Red, White and Blue," once a popular chant in England.)

No one thought of McCafferty, the silent Confederate soldier. His name is unspoken and unknown. Yet, like the Persian cobbler who, with his awl, brought down the Shah's Ministers, he may have been the chief pursuer of revenge..."

from Joyce Images

"That was why they thought the park murders of the invincibles was done by foreigners on account of them using knives." (U16.590)

On May 6th 1882, Thomas Henry Burke (Permanent Under Secretary for Ireland) and Lord Frederick Cavendish (newly appointed Chief Secretary for Ireland) were murdered in Phoenix Park by members of the Invincibles, a radical Irish nationalist secret society. Cavendish had just arrived in Ireland, and the two men were on their way to the Viceregal Lodge. The killers used surgical knives: rather than stabbed, the victims were slashed with long cuts all over their body. Dr. Thomas Myles, surgeon at the nearby Steevens's Hospital, was summoned -to no avail- for medical assistance to the victims..."

Phoenix Park Murders - Wikipedia

Marc Edge on Aspers and Harper, A Toried Love

"The bridges they had been building to the new Conservative government would thus be more important than ever to CanWest. That in turn suggested mutual admiration would continue to be expressed between the federal government and Canada's largest news media company. Whether the result would be the news coverage Canadians needed seemed less likely than Davey's prediction it would be the press they deserved for failing to demand better..."

local trees

yet another YouTube - Soft Machine-Moon In June-Bilzen Festival-August 22, 1969 Hugh Hopper bass Mike Ratledge organ Robert Wyatt drums vocal

MySpaceTV Videos: Brian Auger, Julie Driscoll & The Trinity- Save Me more Joolz, cause it's my blog!

Charlie sez: easy on the Vitalis, this is my first haircut!

via mefi--Vietnam 1967-1968: Darrell Hill, Photographer - a photoset on Flickr--these Ektachromes & Kodakchromes were tossed into a dumpster, later recovered & sold, then put on Flickr where their photographer re-discovered them...

find myself in rare concert with both Ron & Hitch today, who helpfully seize some of the gems from Norman Mailer's highly variable landslide of prose--especially interesting to see Ron on the brilliant beat pastiche "Why Are We in Vietnam?" & Hitch on "Harlot's Ghost", which to my mind beat LeCarre at his own game. I would add "Of a Fire on the Moon" his epic on the Apollo 11 mission, which is not only one of the few times an important writer attempts to actually come to detailed terms with the technology of our time, but then uses it to undergird his bad faith--"The Wrong Stuff", perhaps---

The Grand Inquisitor

Weekly Web Mini-Series Premieres November 11th
Original Score by DJ Spooky Screenplay by Ruth Margraff Multi Image Design by Julie Talen Directed by Tony Torn
Produced by Lee Ann Brown and George Norfleet Executive Producer Michael McCartney

"...a five part film updating Dostoevsky's mystical fable to a future, Fox network style reality. The second coming has arrived in the form of a radical African-American messiah, and the Network/Church/Government is seen in the teaser looking through auditions for a more acceptable replacement Jesus that they can rush into the marketplace to offset the disruptive influence of the 'false prophet'. In the original story, from Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, Christ returns at the height of the Inquisition, to great celebration, but when The Grand Inquisitor orders the people to throw Christ into jail, such is the authority of the Inquisitor that the people instantly turn on Jesus. The Inquisitor visits Jesus in the cell and in a nutshell, he tells him he recognizes him as the true Christ, but will nonetheless burn him as a heretic, to protect a Church which has vastly improved his original, flawed message. In response, Jesus kisses the Grand Inquisitor on the lips, and the GI lets him go. ‘The kiss burned in his heart’ writes Dostoevsky, ‘but he held onto his opinion’.

The film begins in and sustains an aggressively satirical mode, but dovetails with the original story until the final episode which follows the source very closely. As director, it's my attempt to claim a personal perspective on Christianity after being confronted by the powerfully presented, yet soul killing version presented by The Passion of The Christ. The danger of our approach is scaring folks away with the viciousness of the initial satire, before they are able to access the deeper allegory we are trying to present. But the piece is finished now after three years of development and fifteen months of editing (it has a very complex visual style), so it is what it is.”

another video--Retro: Mailer and McLuhan--the Tussle in Toronto? The K.O. in Etobicoke?

today's YouTube - I'm a Believer - Micky Dolenz and Julie Driscoll

from the same Monkees special--Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger & The Trinity - Come On Up--the outfits have to be seen to be believed!

CBC Caves in to China

"The truth is that Chinese diplomatic officials had contacted CBC and had employed at least one long-known Chinese Communist Party agent to orchestrate a campaign against showing the film, which they denounced as "all lies." How they could know this is unclear since no one has yet seen the film. CBC itself has acknowl-edged the intervention by China, but has said only that it decided to ask for further editing..."

Similar to what happened in Vancouver last year when the Falun Gong had their protest site removed...