endangered trees from TreeWatchVictoria

farewell Richard Widmark

K. Silem Mohammed's notes on Manse favorite Night and the City

warm up with some Miami Funk...

Berliners celebrate Heinrich Zille

"Global culture, by its nature, focuses on big names and rankings, to our general impoverishment. Some years ago John Willett, a scholar of German culture, contemplating the Secessionists, wrote about the dangers of embracing “a national or parochial view of art — as even the most enlightened are sometimes tempted to do,” because “as you narrow your horizon in this way you no longer judge by the highest standards.”

That’s right.

But Zille reminds us of another lesson, that high standards are not the only standards that count when grappling with legacies like his. After all, the essence of his pictures was to show how monotonous life would be if we only cared about what’s great in the world and not about everything local and particular and even sometimes untranslatable that actually makes life rich..."

Kodachromes of homefront WWII workers, amongst much else at Shorpy :: History in HD | High-Resolution Historical Photos

some videos in memoriam Jonathan Williams--


YouTube - Bruckner 7th, Allegro - Jochum, RCO

YouTube - Frederick Delius--On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring

YouTube - Calling out Pan (solo trombone from Mahler's 3rd)

YouTube - Margaret Price sings Mahler "Um Mitternacht"

YouTube - Scott Ross--Scarlatti K209

YouTube - Stabat Mater (G.B. Pergolesi) - Emma Kirkby

New York on 99 Cents

(last sentence in the voice of SCTV's Harvey K-Tel--)

"Consider the Web site for the national chain 99¢ Only Store, which proudly displays an Andreas Gursky photograph of endless rows of candy and canned goods called “99 Cents,” taken at a franchise in Hollywood. The Web site informs us, “This photograph recently sold for over $1,999,999!”

director Anthony Mann and producer Sam (cousin of Trotsky!) Bronston's epic El Cid, a Manse favorite since I saw it as a kid & still the most convincing vision of medieval kingship ever put on film, gets a long overdue DVD release--& their excellent follow-up "Fall of the Roman Empire" in April...

Why won't phone books die?

"Left to pulp out in the rain and abandoned in mountainous mailroom piles, phone books don't get much respect anymore. They're having the most absurdly drawn-out death throes of any advertising medium ever known—and yet remain so poorly understood as social history that when they really are gone, we'll scarcely understand what we've lost..."

--Heavy Equipment--Euclid--Maine Psychedelia

"...a 'bad trip' spiked with backwards tape effects, darkly-phrased vocals, all instruments set to 'pummel' and an album title certainly eligible for the 'truth in advertising' award! Tread carefully dear listener..."

NDP Needs Some Class!

"If you were to go into a large public meeting anywhere in the country outside Quebec and assigned the task of finding out who the NDP voters in the room were but could only ask one question of each person -- other than how they voted in the last election -- it would be an easy assignment.

Just get everyone in the room to form a line in order of their income, with the richest person at the front and the poorest at the back.

Depending on what level of popular support the NDP had in that area, you could figure out within a relatively few percentage points the dividing line between likely NDP voters and non-NDP voters. If you were in B.C. with the NDP at its current 34 per cent, the one-third of people in the room with the lowest incomes would be highly disproportionately NDP voter...

It's that simple -- but try telling that to either the provincial or federal party..."

Tsawassen trees

diggin' Jeanne Lee/Ran Blake - The Newest Sound Around (The Legendary Duets)!!


YouTube w/ Mal Waldron doing "The Seagulls of Kristriansund" & "White Road"

Jeanne Lee Tribute

an obit



"As an improvising singer, there was always the option to scat, thus imitating the jazz instrumental sounds. There were also jazz lyricists who set words to instrumental solos. Neither of these options allowed space for the natural rhythms and sonorities or the emotional content of words…"

Local & Horseshoe Bay trees

Glenn Gould Plays Ten Brahms Intermezzi one of his "romantic" records; right up there with the Sibelius...

farewell Mikey Dread

Mikey Dread 1954-2008 - A Tribute...

farewell Paul Scofield

Guardian obit: "The critic JC Trewin once described Scofield's voice as 'sunlight on a broken column'."

Aaron Vidaver's online Flickr reproductions of a couple of 80's classics--Nancy Shaw, Affordable Tedium (1987) & Dorothy Lusk, Oral Tragedy (1988)...

terrific Marcela Valdes on Bolaño as Critic:--

"Brave" may well be the adjective that recurs most often in Between Parentheses, and bravery was indeed something of an obsession for Bolaño. "The figure of bravery is multiple and changing," he wrote in the starkly titled "Bravery." "For my generation bravery is linked with Billy the Kid, who risked his life for money, and with Che Guevara, who risked his for generosity, with Rimbaud, who walked alone at night, and with Violeta Parra, who opened windows into the night." Soldiers and poets, he liked to believe, were the bravest people on earth. He once joked that if he had to rob a bank, he'd choose five "true poets" as his accomplices.

Of course, courage is hardly an unusual fascination for an author. Writers love to glorify the difficulties of their line of work. They speak of wrestling with ideas and facing down blank pages, of battling with ham-fisted editors and triumphing over tin-eared readers. What makes Bolaño's preoccupation rare is that he associated bravery with failure, not triumph. Why choose to rob a bank with five poets? "No one else in the world," he explained, "faces disaster with greater dignity and clarity..."