missing something? fill that yawning void with the post-industrial stylings of my book The Age of Briggs & Stratton...and whoever took that guy's pressure washer....

today's youtube a Scopitone of Lesley Gore singing "Wonder Boy", which I can't get out of my head--almost a Northern Soul thing going on with Quincy Jones' "Heatwave" arrangement...

meet the new boss....

"Today, we have immense information moving capabilities at our fingertips and new movements like Conceptual Writing or Flarf are the correct responses for our time...Christian Bök seconded that notion by saying that the genre has evolved from something invented by three guys drinking beer in a bar in Buffalo a decade ago to widespread way of writing poetry today, reiterating that conceptual poetics is, in fact, the right poetry for the right time...."

languagehat on CORBETT ON URQUHART on Rabelais--

"By God," said Pantagruel, "I will teach you to speak. But first come hither and tell me whence thou art". To this the scholar answered, "The primeval origin of my aves and ataves was indigenerie of the Lemovick regions, where requiesceth the corpor of the hagiotat St Martial". "I understand thee very well," said Pantagruel, "when all comes to all, thou art a Limousin, and thou wilt here, by thy affected speech, counterfeit the Parisiens. Well now, come hither, I must shew thee a new trick, and handsomely give thou combfeat." With this he took him by the throat, saying to him, "Thou flayest the Latine? By St John I will make thee flay the foxe, for I will now flay thee alive". Then began the poor Limousin to cry, "Haw, gwid Maaster, haw Laord ma halp and St Marshaw, haw, I'm worried; haw, ma thrapple, the bean of ma cragg is bruck! Haw, for gauad's seck, lawt ma lean Mawster, waw, waw, waw!" "Now," said Pantagruel, "thou speaks naturally," and so let him go, for the poor Limousin had totally be[w]rayed, and thoroughly conshit his breeches."

Or Gallery: Hold On: Aaron Carpenter Steven Hubert Kathy Slade

"Kathy Slade’s film Tugboat (2007) pictures a tugboat “wrapping doughnuts” in Vancouver’s industrial harbour. The 16mm film loop is both playful and melancholic, as it is unclear whether this workhorse of BC’s resource and shipping economies is caught in playful abandon or if the boat is revolving in a momentary lapse of agency..."

via Ron, Bolano--The Caracas Speech

"Frequently, our way of praising it is to curse the hour in which we decided to become writers, but as a general rule we tend to clap and dance when we’re alone, for this is a solitary occupation, and we recite our own pages to ourselves, and that is our way of praising ourselves, and we don’t need for anyone to tell us what we have to do and much less for a poll to elect ours as the most honorable of occupations. Cervantes, who wasn’t dyslexic but who was left crippled by the exercise of arms, knew perfectly well what he was saying. Literature is a dangerous occupation..."

Local trees

Frank Capra's fascinating The Bitter Tea of General Yen on TCM at 2245 Pacific tonight as part of their series on the depictions of Asians in Hollywood...

"Barbara Stanwyck plays the fiancee of a missionary and finds herself captivated—in both senses of the word—by an Oxford-educated warlord (Nils Asther). The then-unthinkable romance between a Chinese man and a European woman made the film notorious; director Frank Capra even claimed that it was banned in England. It wasn't, writes Capra biographer Joseph McBride (The Catastrophe of Success), but the racist reaction to Bitter Tea can't be exaggerated: Variety noted, "Seeing a Chinaman attempting to romance with a pretty and supposedly decent young American white woman is bound to evoke adverse reaction." It's the best Von Sternberg movie Von Sternberg never made, and so very unlike Capra because of its sexuality..."

new at Ubuweb--Glenn Gould--Prospects of Recording crucial for me in the print version---


"Broadcast on CBC radio in 1965, this unique recording is positioned between Glenn Gould's last live concert performance in 1964 and his seminal publication 'Prospects of Recording' for High Fidelity magazine in 1966. In a proto-tapestry of sound, music and voice, which came to fruition in his experimental radio documentary Idea of North (1967), Gould counterpoints the opinions of those celebrating the imminent ubiquity of recordings with those lamenting the loss of the live concert. As the host of the show, Gould explicates on how recordings are made from different geographical regions, while arguing for the superiority of the recorded performance. Marshall McLuhan is one of the many interviewees, providing his usual insightful and at times 'far-out' theories. The transcripts of the broadcast were later published by McLuhan in his Explorations column and were to provide the foundation for the High Fidelity text. However, with this broadcast one can ingest the ideas while listening to some classic examples of recordings that bolster Gould's argument."

Ladysmith trees

farewell Bo Diddley--saw him open (with the Dishrags) for the Clash at their first North American show at the Commodore in January 1979...

best thing on Scott McClellan's Wha' Happened?

"Bush loyalists have responded in three ways:

1) Scott, how could you? This conveniently ignores the issue of what Bush did or didn't know and do about intelligence on Iraq, converting the story line into that of wounded leader and treasonous former aide. (That canard was the sole focus of a CBS news radio report Wednesday night).

2) Invading Iraq was the right thing to do. Okay. When do Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, et al *not* say that? Dog bites man.

3) It was an intelligence failure. The CIA gave us bad dope on WMD and, well, they're the experts. More on this in a second.

The news media have been, if anything, even more craven than the administration has been in defending its failure to investigate Bush's case for war in Iraq before the war.

Here's ABC News' Charles Gibson: "I think the questions were asked. It was just a drumbeat of support from the administration. It is not our job to debate them. It is our job to ask the questions.” And “I’m not sure we would have asked anything differently."

Really?

Or this from NBC's Brian Williams: “Sadly, we saw fellow Americans — in some cases floating past facedown (after Katrina). We knew what had just happened. We weren’t allowed that kind of proximity with the weapons inspectors [in Iraq]. I was in Kuwait for the buildup to the war, and, yes, we heard from the Pentagon, on my cell phone, the minute they heard us report something that they didn’t like. The tone of that time was quite extraordinary.” And this: "“It’s tough to go back, to put ourselves in the mind-set. It was post-9/11 America."

So the Pentagon tells the media what kind of reporting is in- and out-of-bounds?

Hogwash. Hogwash! HOGWASH!"

round the manse this Caterday it's Cal Tjader...

(playing "Shoshana" here)

roundup of reactions to Stuart (Re-Animator, From Beyond) Gordon's new film Stuck...

interesting group show in Seattle

"Misako Inaoka’s moss piece, Untitled, is the only one that involves movement. A small sprout grows from an artificial moss cluster and swivels back and forth waving at passersby. The way the clusters are sporadically placed on the wall replicates the seemingly spontaneous and rapid growth of moss and algae, presenting the most convincing example of a living, multiplying organism..."

Local trees

Zombie Capitalism

"One is that for the most part the equity — the idea — is the only thing the company is interested in owning. River West acquires brands when the products themselves are dead, not merely ailing. Aside from Brim, the brands it acquired in the last few years include Underalls, Salon Selectives, Nuprin and the game maker Coleco, among others. “In most cases we’re dealing with a brand that only exists as intellectual property,” says Paul Earle, River West’s founder. “There’s no retail presence, no product, no distribution, no trucks, no plants. Nothing. All that exists is memory. We’re taking consumers’ memories and starting entire businesses.”

The other interesting thing is that when Earle talks about consumer memory, he is factoring in something curious: the faultiness of consumer memory. There is opportunity, he says, not just in what we remember but also in what we misremember..."

Charlie & Rubbercat say: if you want something you can really get your teeth into, why not buy The Age of Briggs & Stratton today??

"The London Nobody Knows" part one, with the great James Mason (hi Sara!)...the other parts are inside...

interesting notes on The Library of Charles Willeford

“The only real difference between the rock-and-roll of The Peanut Butter Conspiracy and the rock-rolling of the Burnt Orange Heresy is the serial consistency and orderly arrangement of movable type rearranged by an unmoving writer for an immobilized and highly literate reader...”

thoughtful essay by Eavan Boland discusses the still shockingly undervalued poets Hugh MacDiarmid, Charlotte Mew & Patrick Kavanagh...

excellent James Laxer on the decline of the CBC--

"Managers of publicly owed corporations have always made a killing in the transition to private ownership. Those who do a good job shedding labour, thereby appearing to raise productivity usually at the cost of lower quality, can expect to be hired on with a much fatter pay packet as the first managers of the new private company. Whether it's a railway, an airline, a water utility, a telephone company, or a petroleum company, in Canada and in Britain, the experience has been that the new shareholders do brilliantly, while the old owners, also known as the citizenry, get hosed. The same will be true if CBC Television goes on the block..."

Sydney Pollack 1934-2008, one of the last of the real Hollywood pros, talking about my favorite of his films "The Yakuza"...I also liked his "Castle Keep", "Absence of Malice, "Three Days of the Condor" & "Jeremiah Johnson"...

jimmy mcgriff 1936-2008

"cat and house with cherry tree in background" & "footpath in west london" among the new spring crop of films at Scenes of Provincial Life

Sunday morning wakeup--YouTube - Hector Lavoe "Mi Gente"