cover stars Billie Whitelaw, Rita Tushingham, Pat Phoenix and Yootha Joyce, from VulgarPicture.com - an illustrated discography of The Smiths & Morrissey

Crate Digging, Don't Do It!!

B.C. civil rights group says voter ID rules will disenfranchise thousands

"Federal election rules requiring identification to vote will rob thousands of Canadians of their right to cast a ballot in Tuesday's federal election and contribute to poor voter turnout, says the B.C. Civil Liberties Association.

Parliament changed the Canada Elections Act in the spring of 2007 to require voters to have proof of identity and a residential address.

The residential address rule was amended last fall over concerns that the new rules could disenfranchise some rural residents, aboriginals on reserves and students who don't have a proper street address.

But Rob Holmes, president of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, said the updated rules will still prevent people from voting.

"If you look at the homeless or people who are transients, how are they going to establish their right to vote when they show up?" said Holmes.

Holmes said the rules could also affect scores of people who don't have current ID with a new address, including students, seniors, those who don't drive and the disabled - which could drag already dismal voter turnout even lower..."

don't waste your vote!---Tyee's Strategic Voters' Guide

Paul Krugman Wins Economics Nobel

pictures of people sleeping

Marcel Broodthaers - Le Corbeau et le Renard (1967)

"I went back to La Fontaine's text and transformed it into what I call personal writing (poetry). I had my text printed and placed before it various everyday objects (boots, a telephone, a bottle of milk) which were meant to form a direct relationship with the printed letters. It was an attempt to deny, as far as possible, meaning to the word as well as to the image. When I'd finished shooting, I realized that once the film was projected onto a regular screen, I mean a plain white canvas, it didn't exactly give me the image I had intended to create. There was still too much distance between object and text. In order to integrate text and object, I would have to print on the screen the same typographic characters I had used in the film. My film is a rebus, something you have to want to figure out. It's a reading exercise..."

“Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown”

“I DON’T BLAME MYSELF.” Still Noah Cross talking, still back at the surrogate tide pool. He is talking about a lot of things: murdering his friend Hollis, making love to his daughter Evelyn. “Most people never have to face the fact that at the right time, the right place, they’re capable of anything.” Huston’s delivery of the line is superbly ambiguous; there’s almost a sense of relish in that “anything.” When everyone meets in Chinatown at last—the real Chinatown as well as the figurative country of guilty legend which, in one way or another, the best films noirs describe—he speaks a variant of the line to Evelyn. It’s almost as though he were impatient with a little girl who just wouldn’t understand adult imperatives: “You’ve never forgiven me all these years”—as though rebuking her failure of vision. I think Roman Polanski is speaking partly through Noah Cross: evil exists; corruption is in the nature of things. Accept it and you survive, after a fashion; the ending of Rosemary’s Baby, perhaps that of Dance of the Vampires, and certainty his very perverse interpretations of Ross and Donalbain in Macbeth all speak to that end. Try to deny your own flaws and you end up at an intersection not knowing which way to turn (Knife in the Water) or receding into your own murderous eye in a family portrait (Repulsion) or sitting on a rock at high tide calling for a vanished dream of an assuredly corrupt reality (Cul-de-sac). Evelyn Mulwray tries to destroy her father, but in her most desperate frenzy she cannot bring herself to shoot true; a moment later she herself is destroyed, her vulnerable beauty—almost hurtful to look upon in certain scenes—exploded as if from within. Noah’s pawing, pleading overtures to her (John Huston’s “Pleeease! Pleeease!” will haunt your dreams) combine rapaciousness and infantile wheedling inextricably; and who is to say that the titanic embrace which engulfs his daughter-granddaughter and shields her eyes from the horror on the car floor is marked any the less by compassion than by triumph?"

Charting the Votes in Nanaimo-Cowichan

Nanaimo-Cowichan seems well on its way to becoming once again a New Democratic Party stronghold...

check out the cool sounds of the Novi Singers

"In late 1964 a young graduate of the Warsaw Conservatory, Bernard
Kawka, fascinated by the music of Bill Evans, whom he had met in
Scandinavia, decided to devote himself to jazz. In the Conservatory he
found others who shared his enthusiasm for this music. They considered
that the best way of expressing their jazz ideas would be to use their
own voices. Such decision led to the creation of Novi Singers, a mixed
vocal quartet with a truly incredible sound. In my opinion, NOVIS is
one of the best European vocal groups, of all time..."

Local trees

Half a Loaf - bread as intellectual property

"If nothing is new in food, as someone invariably points out in such discussions, think of the challenges that face anyone dedicated to the staff of life. Flour, water, and yeast are Old Testament elemental. The idea of patenting a bread seems antithetical to the generous spirit that moves most cooks and, I would add, nearly every baker. (To my mind pretty much everything besides bread is a dietary supplement.) Since The Italian Baker was published, in 1985, I have watched several of Carol Field’s recipes and techniques for previously unknown Italian breads spread across the land like the sloppy, barely yeasted, unmanageably wet doughs that, as her book taught, result in the lightest, best-flavored bread. She’s seldom credited, of course..."

Rewords: On the Multiplicitous Poetries of Lee Ann Brown by Laynie Browne

On the ballad form, Brown writes:

“Immensely flexible and with a
very long history, the ballad has been one of the backbones (and the source forms) for innovative, hybrid American art since the time of the first European settlers.

“The ballad is, quite simply, the link
between the written and the sung: it is the vehicle for children’s songs, hymns, lullabies, political anthems, folk songs, heavy metal “power ballads,” sweeping love ballads, movie soundtracks themes, and nearly every type of popular song.”

Silliman's Blog jumps the shark over harmless, funny online poetry spoof--

"I might note that the last time I felt ripped off by an on-line stunt, I sued – as a lead plaintiff in a class-action case brought by the National Writers Union. And while I can’t discuss the suit, as a condition of the subsequent settlement, I will note that we could have gotten a pretty good major league middle infielder for the final amount. Play with other people’s reps at your own risk..."

"Q. This is so liberating! Isn't it liberating?

A. No, Steve, it's forgery, a crime....

Q. Yeah, Ron, this is a crime. Like smoking pot. Or "sodomy."

A. "No, Nada, not like pot or sodomy in that in 30 years that text is likely to turn up on MY record. This is not some victimless prank. It's a world class Stupid Artist's Trick..."

Manifesting the Ineffable: A Conversation with filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky

"What’s important is that the film doesn’t break down into a dualism. It’s not a camera looking at something. It’s a unified movement: the screen is becoming something, as well as the camera is moving. It doesn’t break down into, “I’m taking a picture of that,” which is when cinema collapses..."

Local trees

Cheeta: The Autobiography

"What we have here is a showbiz memoir from a star whose gilded cage was no metaphor; who views the great days of Hollywood in zoological terms. It's a brilliant idea. Naturally, as befits the memoir genre, Cheeta defines himself as an actor (“I'm a comedian, not an intellec- tual”). Naturally, too, modesty does not prevent him from pointing out that, in his great middle-period work on the Tarzan pictures, he was a pioneer of “simian thespianism”. How much of his success in films was down to him being an animal? Cheeta will accept it's as much as 10%; the rest, however, was talent..."

very interesting new "politics" edition of historical magazine Common-place is online today, taking on everything from voter machines to sailor's hospitals to the hidden relationship of Aaron Burr & Washington Irving...

from Mad Men Illustrated - a set on Flickr

what can we do to help save the bees ??

Godard's "Contempt" on TURNER CLASSIC MOVIES tonight...

Local trees