Local trees

"Nixonland" author Rick Perlstein's interesting list of Five Political Films...

COLTER JACOBSON
NARCISSUS BAY, CAMP CATARACT

Guest curated by Aaron Peck


31 July - 31 August, 2008
Opening reception Thursday, 31 July, 2008, 7 - 9pm


CSA Space
#5 - 2414 Main Street
Vancouver, British Columbia
V5T 3E2
info@csaspace.ca

See Pulpfiction Books, 2422 Main Street, for keys and directions.

Canadian Beavers & Vermeer's Hat

"In the case of the painting I have just described, that lovingly textured broad-brimmed hat opens a door which leads from Vermeer's Delft westwards across the Atlantic Ocean to Canada, where buccaneering adventurers like Samuel de Champlain - leader of a French mission seeking a northwest passage through the Great Lakes to the Pacific in the 1600s - exchanged beaver pelts for firearms with the Huron chiefs to finance their journeys. Back in Europe, the underfur of those much-sought-after pelts was stewed in copper acetate and mercury-laced glue to make the very best felt for the most fashionable hats..."

very kind review of my book "The Age of Briggs & Stratton" at Isola di Rifiuti

buy it here

I tot I taw a Creeley tat

"The Warning

For love – I would
split open your head and put
a candle in
behind the eyes.

Love is dead in us
if we forget
the virtues of an amulet
and quick surprise."

two views of Mt. Etna from Mongibeddu

Robert Pogue Harrison on gardens--

"Gardening, like art, can counter the frenzy of our age, which is characterized by an aggravated consumerism that entails as its necessary correlate endless production and endless productivity. The daily turbulence that today’s capitalist economy requires militates against the sanctuaries of repose that I discuss throughout the book, of which gardens are typically a figure. My last chapter is titled “The Paradox of the Age.” The paradox is that, while the system is in a complete frenzy, what seems to be driving it is a desire to re-create a passive Edenic condition in which all the fruits of the earth will be provided for without care, labor, or pain—as if we could be consumer enjoyers of endless bounty. But the stories and myths that have come down to us through the ages, and which I treat in my book, tell us that the true source of human happiness is not consumption but cultivation, is not passive gratification but the assumption of active responsibility. That is why it’s all the more important to revisit the myth of Eden and to relearn its lesson, which I take to be the lesson of care. In my reading, the Eden story tells us that we needed to get out of that sterile, deathless environment in order to realize our human potential as mothers, fathers, husbandmen, statesmen, artists, friends, and caretakers of the earth..."

Local & Ladysmith trees

farewell Jo Stafford, singer of warm, unadorned purity...

More sounds here...

obit

Local trees

Edwardian autochrome trees from George Eastman House's Photostream

Tom ("Remainder" "Tintin") McCarthy amongst many at Denis Cooper's extensive David Lynch Day

“Lynch’s latest film Inland Empire is stunning: completely literary, labyrinthine, regressive. It’s the best piece of art in any medium I’ve come across for years.

“In terms of now, I think some of the most interesting literary figures aren’t necessarily writers. The films of David Lynch, for example, have an extremely literary logic; his latest, Inland Empire, is structured like Finnegans Wake or the novels of Robbe-Grillet, with a set of repetitions regressing inwards, modulating as they repeat. He’s grappling with questions of narrative and representation and identity in a way that mainstream novelists simply aren’t, and is therefore much more interesting as a ‘writer’, even if he isn’t strictly speaking one.”

“In the ‘geological’ time of the arts, Finnegans Wake happened a few seconds ago: we’ve hardly even realized that it’s happened, let alone set up a coordinated response. The really good artists have realized and are responding: look at David Lynch’s films, or Alain Robbe-Grillet’s novels - but most of the players in the mainstream cultural industries are trying to pretend it didn’t happen, or doesn’t matter; and they’ll be washed away, forgotten, as a result...”

bored this summer? why not curl up under a big pile of stuffed toys with my grampy's book of poems The Age of Briggs & Stratton: Peter Culley: ISBN 9781554200399??

YouTube - CBUT Vancouver TV sign-off 1987--Gail Hulnick tucking in the province with her definitive late night reading off of British Columbia place names...

"Mended Spiderwebs" from Nina Katchadourian

"The Mended Spiderweb series came about during a six-week period in June and July in 1998 which I spent on Pörtö. In the forest and around the house where I was living, I searched for broken spiderwebs which I repaired using red sewing thread. All of the patches were made by inserting segments one at a time directly into the web. Sometimes the thread was starched, which made it stiffer and easier to work with. The short threads were held in place by the stickiness of the spider web itself; longer threads were reinforced by dipping the tips into white glue. I fixed the holes in the web until it was fully repaired, or until it could no longer bear the weight of the thread. In the process, I often caused further damage when the tweezers got tangled in the web or when my hands brushed up against it by accident.

The morning after the first patch job, I discovered a pile of red threads lying on the ground below the web. At first I assumed the wind had blown them out; on closer inspection it became clear that the spider had repaired the web to perfect condition using its own methods, throwing the threads out in the process...

little-seen Faulkner adaptation Tomorrow (1972),which contains an unforgettable performance by Robert Duvall, on TCM tonight at 2115 PST...

as a former anonymous Publisher's Weekly reviewer (I bailed long before they cut the fee from 50 to 25 bucks--my proposal was bumping it up to 200!) it was interesting to see these other Reviewers Come In From the Cold...

Steve McQueen : Memorializing Britain's War Dead

"The MoD [Ministry of Defence] wouldn't give us addresses of next of kin, so we used a researcher. We wrote to relatives saying what we wanted to do. I was a bit wary. I know grief. I didn't want to upset people. I was sitting on the edge of my bed thinking, blimey, this is up, no one is going to write back. Then slowly but surely all these letters came through the door saying 'thank you very much', 'this is a fantastic idea' and 'we're so happy that you want to recognise our son'. We had a book of letters and images. I remember seeing this book and I had to have a drink. I had to get a bit drunk. You feel the pain, the hurt of so many people. All these young guys who have died: they're 22, 21, 19, 18. But I was up for it," he says..."

Return of The Frontiersman, an interview with Rudy Wurlitzer, writer of manse faves "Two Lane Blacktop", "Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid" etc...

"These days, now that Two-Lane has become part of the
'Seventies', one is aware that the whole nature of aimless travel and being on the 'road' has changed. Given the current state of things, with fuel, cars, travel, freedom, exploration, the film is a more philosophical and melancholy experience. It's also a funnier film now, given its obsession with the unconscious, somewhat adolescent attachment to the myths of freedom and journeys and relationships that lead nowhere in particular..."

up at U B U W E B - Film & Video: Stan Douglas - Television Spots/Monodramas (1987-1991)

"TELEVISION SPOTS (1987/88)
In 1989, his first series of short works for television, the twelve Television Spots, were broadcast in Saskatoon and Ottawa amid regular programming, as if they were commercials. Unidentified, the short scenes depicting open-ended, banal activities baffled viewers.


MONODRAMAS (1991)
Douglas's "Monodramas," ten 30- to 60-second videos from 1991, conceived as interventions into commercial television, interrupted the usual flow of advertising and entertainment when broadcast nightly in British Columbia for three weeks in 1992. These micronarratives mimic television's editing techniques, but as kernels of a story they refuse to cohere. They are tales of dysfunction and dislocation, misanthropy and misunderstanding. When the videos were aired unannounced during commercial breaks, viewers called the station to inquire about what was being sold, their responses evincing how the media can refocus attention from content to consumption. -- Nancy Spector"

Amongst other things now the surprisingly textured record of a now-vanished Vancouver...

(thx JT)

trees from The Chicago Daily News 1902-33

The Cuckoo (She’s a fine bird)

"Oh the cuckoo
She's a pretty bird
I wish that she were mine
She don't ever drink water
She only drink wine..."