The Pelican Project
via Anodyne
Friday, February 08, 2008
The Ballad of the Man in the White Castle
The man in the high chair
is a critter sitter of the first order
granitic tics brush mercury hair
he folds his paper over & over
He reads with pleasure that the young
can trace their liminal state
to those distant peasant barbecues
that did not spare the great--
With unity & impunity sundered at the root
& goofs spared neither rod nor boot
the bearshit continues, deep & crisp & even
though the Lemon Hart contains no lemon
& of the Great & Good
there once was a Great Many
their shuttered doors & buckled floors
their moral miscellany--
CAN I HAZ A WITNESS TUESDAY
sd Miranda the original decider--
The Man in the White Castle
peels back paper from his slider
Corrugated as the fries he stuffs
as with deranged analgesia he puffs
a Zeppelinish tabloid in his fist
& on the board there is a list
The bus flew over the river
The bus flew over the river
Corduroy over the river
Corduroy over the river
For zombies swing a Pulaski axe
it's the standard global chopper
& if you have to ask how much
you ain't our kind of shopper
Rattle of Dew in a Coke cup
ice chew till you throw up
when you gonna grow up
stop pretending that you know us
Ride the bus discussion
FOR A HAMBURGER TODAY
phone it in from Vernon
double rainbow off Foul Bay
With nothing but an inset map
a phone voice and a head shot
slowly he peels back the wrap
slowly he peels back the wrap
Thursday, February 07, 2008
review of the big Lawrence Wiener retrospective--
"Weiner's conceptualism, if that's the right word for it, turns out to be a strange way of transcending the romance of ruins, his equivalent of his contemporary Robert Smithson's embrace of entropy as a basic principle for his work. But such strategies have a deep background. Artists have always held that something remains of the life they give to a work even after its inevitable physical decrepitude. Alberto Giacometti, in his day, questioned whether Modernist abstract art might not be too vulnerable to the ravages of time; one could understand classical statuary from a broken torso, or medieval painting from an isolated and cut-down panel from an altarpiece--but, he wondered, "How would a Brancusi statue look if it were chipped and broken, or a Mondrian painting if it were torn or dark with age?" For centuries, Greek artists like Apelles and Praxiteles were held up as models of artistic achievement even though their works were entirely lost; they inspired generations through verbal report alone. As Walter Benjamin observed, "The medium through which works of art continue to influence later ages is always different from the one in which they affect their own age." Turning his art into suggestive language no longer vulnerable to ruin, Weiner seems to be trying an end run around history--like the ghost at the funeral, seeing his own work in the form it might have some time in the future when some future civilization has displaced our own and he is at best a figure of legend like the masters of ancient Greek painting and sculpture..."
Leslie Scalapino's introduction to the Philip Whalen collected....
via Bookslut
EPC/Philip Whalen Author Home Page
from "Sourdough Mountain Lookout"--
Ptarmigan hunt for bugs in the snow
Bear peers through the wad at noon
Deer crowd up to see the lamp
A mouse nearly drowns in the honey
I see my bootprints mingle with deer-foot
Bear-paw mule-shoe in the dusty path to the privy
Much later I write down:
"raging, Viking sunrise
The gorgeous death of summer in the east"
(Influence of a Byronic landscape-
Bent pages exhibiting depravity of style.)
Outside the lookout I lay nude on the granite
Mountain hot September sun but inside my head
Calm dark night with all the other stars
HERACLITUS: "The Waking have one common world
But the sleeping turn aside
Each into a world of his own."
I keep telling myself what I really like
Are music, books, certain land and sea-scapes
The way light falls across them, diffusion of
Light through agate, light itself...I suppose
I'm still afraid of the dark...
Tuesday, February 05, 2008
Monday, February 04, 2008
ON THE CORNER
"So what is this most mysterious and outré of albums? The culmination of Davis's two-decade-long quest for the African roots of his music, On the Corner has a huge, extended rhythm section rotating around circular, one-chord bass riffs. But there were a number of other things that set the album apart. First there were the influences of Stockhausen, Paul Buckmaster, and Ornette Coleman's atonal "harmolodics". These were superimposed over grooves and bass riffs that were more tightly circumscribed than ever before. On the opening track, the bass plays the same few notes for 20 minutes. Inundated by an ocean of rhythm instruments, including sitar, tabla and three electric keyboards (played by Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock, among others), and without any harmonic development, the soloists had very little space, and became merely strands in a tangle of grooves and colours..."
The most hated album in jazz...
images from Clare Singleton, a new South Wellingtonian, often seen hereabouts, walking her handsome dogs
Bruno Schulz's Stories - translated by John Curran Davis (I like these much better than the published translations)
"THE YELLOW and thoroughly boring days of winter had come. An outworn and tattered, too-short mantle of snow lay on the russet hued earth. It did not stretch far enough for many of the roofs, which stood black or rust coloured, shingled, thatches and arks concealing the smoke-blackened expanses of the attics inside them—black, charred cathedrals bristling with their ribs of rafters, purlins and joists—the dark lungs of the winter gales. Each dawn uncovered new vent pipes and chimney stacks, sprung up in the night, scoured by the nocturnal gale—black pipes of diabolical organs. Chimney sweeps could never drive away the crows that perched in the evenings like living black leaves on the branches of the trees by the church—they took flight again, flapping, finally to cling each to its own place on its own branch—but at daybreak they would take to the air in great flocks—clouds of soot, flakes of undulating and fantastic lampblack smearing the dull-yellow streaks of the dawn with their twinkling cawing. Like last year’s bread loaves, the days hardened in the cold and the boredom. We cut them with blunt knives, without appetite, in idle sleepiness..."
The Art of Bruno Schulz (a flash site)
from the Giornale Nuovo archive
YouTube - Brothers Quay: Street of Crocodiles part 1.
YouTube - Brothers Quay: Street of Crocodiles part 2
Sunday, February 03, 2008
short, lucid take on William Blake's
London
I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.
How the Chimney-sweeper’s cry
Every black'ning Church appalls;
And the hapless Soldier’s sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.
But most thro’ midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot’s curse
Blasts the new-born Infant’s tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
landscape urbanism bullshit generator
At last a place where you can perforate your exurban pluralities while rectifying you extensible armatures!
Wider Roads Touted as 'Green'
"The provincial and federal governments have found a novel way to help Nanaimo fight global warming: spend money on roads.
"The City of Nanaimo will reduce greenhouse gases and vehicle congestion by improving a busy stretch of road," promises a Jan. 22 announcement. "New traffic lights, widened traffic lanes and improved access to the Swy-a-lana Lagoon Park... will improve traffic flow and reduce greenhouse gas emissions from idling vehicles."
The federal and provincial governments are spending $790,000 on the project, out of a fund dedicated to helping communities become "healthier, greener and more sustainable places to live..."
"Autumn Cabbalism" & "Purple Train" by Roy Arden from
THE WORLD ETC...
January 31 to March 1, 2008
Opening Reception:
Thursday, January 31st, 8-10 pm
"The Monte Clark Gallery Vancouver is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Roy Arden.
Following his mid-career survey exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Roy Arden’s exhibition will feature new graphic works and collages.
The World etc… presents Arden’s latest graphic works (archival pigment prints) that are essentially digital collages, as well as recent small paper collages made from printed matter.
Humans have a need to make images, which begets their collection, storage, ordering, interpretation, and re-use. Yet, there is always an element of folly to any archive, no matter how important or useful. What starts as a rational project invariably grows into a large problem if not an unruly monster. All archives are mirrors of human history.
Arden’s digital and paper collages derive from his archives of images taken from books and magazines as well as his immense archive of images gleaned from the Internet. He mostly collects vernacular (non-art) photo images and since photography is largely synchronous with modernity, his archive and the collages he makes from it reflect modern history. Arden’s sense of history has always been critical in the dialectical sense that Walter Benjamin neatly described in his famous dictum; “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism”.
In Arden’s new works, he plays with different ordering systems from quasi-scientific or simple scrapbook grids to complexly layered poetic collage. While each work focuses on a specific theme or subject, as with most of his art - history and modernity are the larger subjects. Many of the works pay homage to artists who have used retrieved imagery and so the history of collage is variously invoked from Picasso and Kurt Schwitters to Rauschenberg and Hans-Peter Feldmann.
Roy Arden's ongoing web project, The World as Will and Representation - Archive 2007 (viewable at royarden.com) presents his personal archive of images gleaned from the Internet..."
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Whiny Plutocrats
"If the market economy is looking peaky, then its accompanying free market ideology should be on life support. Behold the hypocrisy. The free marketeers have spent the past two decades preaching against the evils of state intervention, the dead hand of government, the need to roll back the frontiers, and so on. Yet what happens when these buccaneers of unfettered capitalism run into trouble? They go running to the nanny state they so deplore, sob into her lap and beg for help. The results of their own greed - "exuberance", they call it - and incompetence have caused more than 100 substantial banking crises over the past 30 years, yet time and again it is the reviled state which answers the call for help. Four times in this period, the authorities have had to rescue crucial parts of the US financial setup. If the banks make money, they get to keep it. The moment they look like losing it, we have to cough up. In Wolf's brilliant summary: "No industry has a comparable talent for privatising gains and socialising losses..."
review of Donato Mancini's Aethel--
"A gorgeous collection of concrete poetry, Aethel uses a variety of fonts and spatial layouts, contrasting and shifting between each piece. Each poem presents a new jumble of text, an arrangement of letters and fonts shaped into amorphous bursts on the page. Each work is imbued with a certain grace, a rounded beauty that leaks from one age of the page to the next. The more eye catching pieces are the ones like “Blood of a Concrete Poet” and “I Think Therefore I’m Not Sure” that use the American Sign Language hand diagrams and brief arrows as a unique way to portray movement and construct new phrases from visual matter..."
Monday, January 28, 2008
new books on Trees--
"A medlar smells of Pimms with cucumber, hawthorn of unwashed underwear, pollarded trees are “cruelly elegant”, big trees are terribly thirsty and can drink 9,000 gallons a year, gingkos are terrifying and Sitka spruce needs as much as thirty inches of rain per annum. Sitka is exquisitely light. The Wright brothers built their Kitty Hawk with it. “Surprisingly for such a dour tree, you can strike a jolly tune from its light wood and it is used in the sounding boards of violins and guitars...”
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