not-even-the-vaguest-thing-to-do-with rock & roll EVER (even on the album Spector produced) Leonard Cohen gets in the Hall of Fame but somehow the Guess Who doesn't? Burton Cummings is a better poet, too...

Castro's Long Run... in U.S. Presidential Politics

"After all these years, only one "superdelegate" undoubtedly feels no pressure at all. Fidel Castro is the Methuselah of U.S. presidential politics. He is the only survivor among the major players from the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon election, not to speak of playing a role in every presidential campaign since. As Greg Grandin, the author of the indispensable Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism, tells us, like a horn of plenty that never stops flowing, Fidel's aura never stops giving when U.S. presidential candidates need to outflank each other on the right..."

terrific Miles Champion poem in the new Brooklyn Rail--Typical Umbrella Fiasco

"capsules release time in stages/
endings pause to re-load more space..."

RM pointed out my hometown of South Wellington sort-of name-checked on p.125 of the 1961 Penguin of S. H. Steinberg's Five Hundred Years of Printing:--

"Every book or newspaper printed in the English language is immediately intelligible to the Cockney, the Canadian, and the Californian, and to every inhabitant of every Wellington, whether in British Columbia, Ontario, Cape Province, Shropshire, Somerset, New South Wales, New Zealand, South Australia, Western Australia, Kansas, Ohio, Texas--regardless of the variations of speech, local, regional, and national."

Ali Smith on Carson McCullers:--

"It's always wrong to sentimentalise McCullers - even on her own invitation - since her work is always an unexpected, uneasy combination of miraculous and brutal, always concerned with the marginalised and with social hierarchies, and is always more astutely and contemporarily political than it might on the surface appear to be..."

via Maud Newton & from out of Gowanus--the Reanimation Library

"The Reanimation Library is a small, independent library based in Brooklyn. It is a collection of books that have fallen out of mainstream circulation. Outdated and discarded, they have been culled from thrift stores, stoop sales, and throw-away piles across the country and given new life as resource material for artists, writers, and other cultural archeologists..."

sounds like the Manse!

Also: someone's splendid collection of ephemera...

Sarkozy & The King's Two Bodies:-

"When Sarkozy's situation is examined through this prism, his case is quite simple: Too much of the profane body and not enough of the sacred. The profane body is in fact dominant, taking over, swallowing up the sacred one.

Somehow, in his romance, his penchant for jogging, his displays of impatience, there is too much flesh, an overexposure of ordinary passions and pleasures, something never before seen in other presidential administrations: an unexpected eclipsing of the sacred body, which does not experience pleasure or passion, and demands both distance and respect..."

Local & Denman Island trees

nice to see EJ Hughes' great painting of Nanaimo Harbour made over into a jigsaw puzzle by the local Cobble Hill Puzzle Company in their "Canadian Artist" series...

Sunday songbird Bea Wain...

YouTube--Heart and Soul

Youtube--"Dancing in the Dark" with Larry Clinton Orchestra

a few seconds of YouTube - "Get Happy" with Larry Clinton Orchestra

an interview

Local trees

Local trees

Satan is Real

"Ira built that set. The devil was twelve feet tall, built out of plywood. We went to this rock quarry and then took old tires and soaked them in kerosene, got them to burn good. It had just started to sprinkle rain when we got that picture taken. Those rocks, when they get hot, they blow up. They were throwing pieces of rock up into the air..."

more...

YouTube - Country Brother Duo's : The Louvin Brothers (after a minute....)

great band I'd never heard of--Dolly Mixture - Demonstration Tapes (Dead Good, 1983)

youtube--Been Teen

farewell Buddy Miles


Down by the River


Electric Flag - Drinkin' Wine

it's a steel guitar, Speedy West kind of morning round the Manse...

Nicholson Baker on The Charms of Wikipedia

"The thesis procrastinators, the history buffs, the passionate fans of the alternate universes of Garth Nix, Robotech, Half-Life, P.G. Wodehouse, Battlestar Galactica, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Charles Dickens, or Ultraman—all those people who hoped that their years of collecting comics or reading novels or staring at TV screens hadn't been a waste of time—would pour the fruits of their brains into Wikipedia, because Wikipedia added up to something. This wasn't like writing reviews on Amazon, where you were just one of a million people urging a tiny opinion and a Listmania list onto the world—this was an effort to build something that made sense apart from one's own opinion, something that helped the whole human cause roll forward.

Wikipedia was the point of convergence for the self-taught and the expensively educated. The cranks had to consort with the mainstreamers and hash it all out—and nobody knew who really knew what he or she was talking about, because everyone's identity was hidden behind a jokey username. All everyone knew was that the end product had to make legible sense and sound encyclopedic..."

huge benefit for Scott Harding Order Tickets

A Benefit for the Scotty Hard Trust :: March 19, 2008 :: Highline Ballroom :: New York

Featuring:
Scotty Hard
John Scofield
John Medeski
Billy Martin
Bill Laswell
Eric Krasno
Neal Evans
Marco Benevento
Joe Russo
Antibalas
Sex Mob
DJ Logic
John Ellis
Michael Blake
Vijay Iyer
Tommy Hamilton
Kevin Kendrick

Music producer Scott Harding has recently been partly paralyzed in a car crash in New York. Without any health insurance he is facing very large medical fees.

100% of proceeds will be going to the Scotty Hard Trust.

Vancouver native and longtime New Yorker Scotty Hard has a long and varied list of production credits, including New Kingdom, Positive Black Soul, Charlie Hunter, Barney Bentall & the Legendary Hearts, Tricky, Crooklyn Dub, Dubadelic, Bailter Space, DJ Logic, Badar Ali Khan, Sex Mob, Medeski, Martin & Wood, Material, Soul Crib, Michael Blake, Chris Brown/Kate Fenner, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Metabolics, and Organ-ized. He also engineered and mixed pioneering music by Wu-Tang Clan, Gravediggaz, Jungle Brothers, Vernon Reid, Chris Rock, Ultrmagnetic MC's, Salif Keita, Dirty Dozen Brass Band, PM Dawn, De La Soul, Boogie Down Productions, Brand New Heavies, Prince Paul, Biz Markie, Chubb Rock, Teo Macero, and others.

March 19 at the Highline Ballroom :: New York, NY

$35 GA / $50 VIP Balcony / $65 VIP Floor. VIP tickets include reserved seating and an after show meet & greet with many of the musicians.

Concert starts @ 9PM
Doors open @ 8 PM
Tickets $35.00

SUBWAY UNDER BYZANTIUM by Maxine Gadd :: BOOK LAUNCH
Friday, February 29, 2008

Time: 8 PM
Location: Spartacus Books 319 W. Hastings St.
Contact: Carellin Brooks
Website: www.spartacusbooks.org/

Join New Star Books, the Kootenay School of Writing, and Spartacus Books for a reading and launch to celebrate the publication of Maxine Gadd's great new book SUBWAY UNDER BYZANTIUM.

Free admission! Refreshments available.

ex-Vancouver now NYC hip-hop producer Scott Harding was very badly hurt in a traffic accident recently. Like many self-employed people in the US he had no medical insurance & he is going to need a LOT of financial help, which can be sent to

The Scotty Hard Trust
c/o Heesok Chang
970 Kent Ave #401
brooklyn ny 11205


much more info from his Jazzmanian Devils partner at Condensed Milt

today's YouTube - P.P. Arnold--The First Cut Is The Deepest (rare)

a version with better sound

Cat Stevens' original

Keith Hampshire's Canadian version

trees from the "Wilderness" series Paul Raphaelson

via

farewell Teo Macero, producer & one of Miles Davis' most effective collaborators. It's sad that the release of all the unedited sessions from which he sculpted such classics as "in a Silent Way" & "On the Corner" upset him, for they vindicate his taste & acumen at every turn...