Six Fonts That Piss People Off | Design & Innovation | Fast Company

(thanks DS)

local trees @ c.

Max Ophuls The Earrings of Madame de…
on TCM tonight...

Evanescence is an integral part of cinema, and no other director captured it as lyrically and yet as savagely as Ophüls. His tracking, dollying, gliding camera was never more mellifluous, or his visualization of life's inexorable flow more tangible, than in The Earrings of Madame de…: The dissolving ballroom twirls between the Countess and the Baron form possibly the most graceful invocation of the passage of time ever depicted on screen, while a transition from the fluttering pieces of a love letter to snow falling outside brilliantly conveys the slender line separating the incandescent from the sepulchral in a world marked by transience...

Book Review - 'Inside of a Dog - What Dogs See, Smell, and Know,' by Alexandra Horowitz

A human being experiences a rose as a lovely, familiar shape, a bright, beautiful color and a sublime scent. That is the very definition of a rose. But to a dog? Beauty has nothing to do with it; the color is irrelevant, barely visible, the flowery scent ignored. Only when it is adorned with some other important perfume — a recent spray of urine, perhaps — does the rose come alive for a dog.

Rainfall Is Likely to Occur: a report from Michael Scharf

The weather forecast invariably appears in the bottom left-hand corner of The Shillong Times's front page, always in a little green-tinted box, always with the same lack of specificity: "Rainfall is likely to occur over most areas in Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram and Tripura in the next 24 hours."

Basil Bunting on Jonathan Williams

Perhaps it was one of my suggestions, though no doubt I told Jonathan that North Tynedale was even lovelier, besides chance—since cottages are not often empty in such a landscape—that fixed him here to the great advantage of Dent and Sedbergh, overlooking the extravagant meanderings of the Dee and patterns of bracken on the fellside opposite, without close neighbours unless you count the natty red weasel that lives at the side of his waterfall or a score or so of monosyllabic sheep. What better neighbours could a laconic poet wish for?

(thanks Don Share)

a Grandville thistle from Les Fleurs Animées

"Your Majesty, the flowers here present beg you to accept their homage, and to lend a favorable ear to their humble complaint.

"For thousands of years we have supplied mankind with their themes of comparison; we alone have given them all their metaphors; indeed, without us poetry could not exist. Men lend to us their virtues and their vices; their good and their bad qualities; and it is time that we should have some experience of what these are.

We are tired of this flower-life. We wish for permission to assume the human form, and to judge, for ourselves, whether that which they say above, of our character, is agreeable to truth."

rare showing of Seth Holt's UK noir

Nowhere to Go (1958) on

TCM tomorrow afternoon...

Among the many pleasures of watching the film is the evocative black and white cinematography of Paul Beeson which gives us a crook’s tour of London complete with back streets, dive bars, shabby flats and seedy neighborhoods. A downbeat mood of desolation and overwhelming loneliness is further driven home through the film’s score which is composed and performed by jazz musician Dizzy Reece and his quintet; it remains the jazz trumpeter’s only film score to date. In addition, James Bond fans will get a kick out of seeing Bernard Lee – four years before his appearance as “M” in the series beginning with Dr. No (1962) – as the ruthless and
completely loathsome villain of the piece...

rainy sunday

The Exploding Kinetoscope: For Bravery: Das Unheimliche and INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS

The common accusation that the artist shows no evidence of having lived in the real world with other human beings is kind of offensive but largely baffling. What I see pouring out of Tarantino's films is a great love for people, the arts, stories and life itself. His is a profoundly uncynical cinema; even the artifice is completely sincere. I'm looking at my DVD shelves, trying to think of another filmmaker more in love with people, their speech, their faces, their reasons, and the list is miniscule; Tarantino's films are just so jazzed about spending time with their characters (and his actors) that the screen is crowded with affection...

LAUGH ALONG WITH DOM DOT COM

YouTube -Shirley Henderson "The Sun Whose Rays Are All Ablaze" from Mike Leigh's "Topsy-Turvy"

YouTube - Johnny Burnette - The train kept a-rollin

A Flapper's Dictionary (1922)

The Vehicule Poets

For the Vehicule reading, Gerry pasted pages of poetry across the wall of the space. As the poems were pasted at eye height, he walked along the wall, reading. His poems were... recordings of his thoughts, inner conversations, reflections, self-centered but always in the moment, always coming back to the poem he's thinking, writing. Many of his poems are only a few words, a phrase, out of context, comic aphorisms, a "translation" of Basho's haiku, or the "independently coined" phrase PRONDL, from the "automatic gearshift on your car". His reading is sometimes conversational, sometimes forced out one syllable at-a-time. He was suave, with silk scarf, moustache and sideburns. 1978 and very much alive. Gerry Gilbert...

Basil Bunting: Briggflatts in a new edition with audio/video...

YouTube - Basil Bunting reading from 'Briggflatts'

free mixes from Buck 65

Bears in the Adirondacks Defeat BearVault Food-Protection Container

“She’s quite talented,” said Jamie Hogan, owner of BearVault, based in San Diego. “I’m an engineer, and if one genius bear can do it, sooner or later there might be two genius bears..."

Damien Hirst in vicious feud with teenage artist over a box of pencils

He was told by custody officers that the pencils were valued at £500,000 and that he had damaged "the concept of a public artwork titled Pharmacy ... valued at £10,000,000". Cartrain is on bail and, if convicted, his actions will feature among the highest value modern art thefts in Britain. The box of pencils – a very rare "Faber Castell dated 1990 Mongol 482 Series" – will be put back by Hirst, although the installation is no longer on public display.

But that is not the end of it. Police also arrested Cartrain's 49-year-old father, who they suspected of harbouring the pencils...

LRB · Walter Benn Michaels: What Matters

American universities are exemplary here: they are less racist and sexist than they were 40 years ago and at the same time more elitist. The one serves as an alibi for the other: when you ask them for more equality, what they give you is more diversity. The neoliberal heart leaps up at the sound of glass ceilings shattering and at the sight of doctors, lawyers and professors of colour taking their place in the upper middle class. Whence the many corporations which pursue diversity almost as enthusiastically as they pursue profits, and proclaim over and over again not only that the two are compatible but that they have a causal connection – that diversity is good for business. But a diversified elite is not made any the less elite by its diversity and, as a response to the demand for equality, far from being left-wing politics, it is right-wing politics...

RED ZONE – Coming Soon! « Pig Squash Press



By official estimates, three hundred people live and sleep on the streets of Nanaimo, British Columbia. On any given day, a percentage of these people are barred from a 40-block area of the city core known as the “Red Zone.” Kim Goldberg has spent the last three years verse-mapping and photographing Nanaimo’s back alleys, graffiti galleries, underpasses and homeless encampments...

Gee Gerry G . . .

Keep it personal, I tend to think—so, lovely flashes of memories, of this dear person. Like time he was doing TV children's program, the loping monster spider they could hardly freak out at it was so benign. Viz., himself. I love the shy excitement of his voice, the particularity with which he catches to consonants. Likewise his eyes, of a faded flashing blue. He's got a great beard now, reddish, a kind of Anglo-Scots Santa Claus.

He's always been good to me, god knows. Times he was restless and couldn't sleep nights in early days Vancouver, he'd drop in and we'd drink and talk, round and around. He told me once that something like two generations of his family had had the same English teacher in grammar school—grounds for life in one place, surely. He's often a bird who seems to be sitting on the roof for awhile, just looking down with bemused regard for those below.

When he moves, language, body, mind and eye, I get a sense, even a whiff, of some post-gun-powdery smell. Which is so good, quick, to the nose. He's a very fast, sweet perceiver, the sweet Jesus of local streets. No cross ever finally necessary. Or, as he would say, "save the postage & come yourself!"

Well, standing here in the wings, so to speak, could put it, "Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the greatest show on earth," which is , after all the distractions, human , and right here and now. You're going to love it, because it loves you. So—ticket's in your hand, eye's in your head, ear's in your body. Let's go.

Placitas, New Mexico
August 22, 1976

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from The Collected Essays of Robert Creeley

Ed's Blog City: The Bombing of PanAm Flight 103 - Case Not Closed

"We are aware that in relation to certain aspects of the case there are a number of uncertainties and qualifications," the judges wrote. "We arealso aware that there is a danger that by selecting parts of the evidence which seem to fit together and ignoring parts which might not fit, it is possible to read into a mass of conflicting evidence a pattern or conclusion which is not really justified."

Local trees &c.

on TCM tonight: Crime of Passion (1957)

“There you are deserted by him in whom you have placed all your faith. We are alone. Women tortured by fate, betrayed by all men. Where can we turn except to the heart and the understanding of another woman who knows what you are suffering? I feel for you. I suffer with you. I want to help you. Let me stand by your side in your fight for justice and compassion in a world made by men and for men...”

it's Miriam Hopkins night on TCM , including three by Lubitsch...

Augustus Saint-Gaudens at the Met

Willowy and taut, she rests the toes of one foot on a sphere and leans forward a bit, into her shot, with athletic allowance for the coming recoil. Good luck deciding what she symbolizes. “Diana” seems to me sui generis, embodying sheer, somewhat mad inspiration in a manner that wasn’t uncommon in the era of Art Nouveau but was realized nowhere else with such Apollonian aplomb. It affects me as one of those moments—certain sentences by F. Scott Fitzgerald, say, or the better turns of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers—when an oxymoronic American dream of aristocratic democracy comes suddenly, briefly true...

George WS Trow's classic NYer profile of Ahmet Ertegun:

Eclectic, Reminiscent, Amused, Fickle, Perverse

In 1956, at the age of thirteen, I went into a suburban record store and bought a copy of “Since I Met You Baby,” by Ivory Joe Hunter. This was an Atlantic record. I had heard “Since I Met You Baby” sung over the radio, but I had not seen a copy of the record. It was my sense of the situation, when I saw the record in the suburban record store, that to buy and then to own it would be a potent experience. I looked at the record jacket. On one side, there were depicted little stick people playing little stick instruments. On the other side, there were sketched portraits of Atlantic’s principal artists. There was a portrait of Ruth Brown (her eyes slightly slanted, her hair in a mysterious upswept arrangement I had never seen on any living woman), Joe Turner (mouth open, full mustache, little black bow tie), LaVern Baker, Clyde McPhatter, Ray Charles (a small pencil thin mustache and dark glasses), and the Clovers. Ray Charles, in his sketch, had been given the suggestion of a neck. The heads of the others floated on the jacket. The heads of the five Clovers floated together in a way that suggested no possible physical grouping. The names of the artists were printed in red under the black sketches. Black and red were at that moment the Atlantic colors. Across the top of the side of the jacket where the sketches appeared, there was the name “ATLANTIC,” in big black type. Under that was “Leads the Field in Rhythm & Blues,” in black type of a size slightly more modest. Under the sketches, at the bottom, in red script, were the words “And Many Other Exclusive Artists.” There was nothing on this record jacket that did not excite my interest. I was interested in the strange upswept hair of Ruth Brown, in the dark glasses of Ray Charles, in the little black bow tie of Joe Turner. I thought it would be a very strong thing to Lead the Field in Rhythm & Blues. I was interested in the Other Exclusive Artists. I felt, with some poignance, that this record—not just the song but the record, and not just the record but the jacket of the record—held some information that I needed to have. I felt, in fact, a certain pain, and even a certain anger. I felt pained that there was important information of great power of which I had no idea. I felt anger because I sensed that this information had been withheld from me deliberately...

Gerry Gilbert 1936-2009

Like the population of Nanaimo, the population of poets has just about quadrupled since I came on the scene in the mid 1970's. It's a lot tougher out there, the suburbs are full of rocks & unfriendly stares. Years of Creative Writing degree programs, MFA programs, workshops, boot camps, festivals & glittering awards nights have swelled the population of poets and their retainers at the same time as both quantity & quality of attention have palpably declined. The organised world of poetry has become entirely subject to the same codes of deference, decorum, complicity & conformity as the academy where it now mostly resides. And however opposed various schools of "quietude" & "post-avant" might be in matters of style & technique their approach in most other matters is indistinguishable--one hand still washes the other, the forelock is still ritually tugged. Caste systems & contests, 25 dollar bribes paid to poets you wouldn't read to read you. Gatekeepers on both sides squat imperiously; as remote, arbitrary in judgement & drunk on power as any CEO, surrounded by office seekers and supplicants, dispensing favours and punishing dissent. The trickle-down, the hidden hand, the arm's length. In the past couple of decades this state of affairs has become so total and so deeply entrenched within the larger decline of all democratic forms & institutions that one could safely assume that this is the way it must always have been, so best set up another tent among the ruins & hope that some one uses your ghazal for a toilet paper commercial or something. Internalize your oppression. Or better still, set up a revolutionary cell within the English department & wait for the pillars to start dropping. Describe but don't prescribe. Or wait around for a quick huff off the American oxygen tank while no one's looking. The market is the universal gravy, poured over every dish. Dissent is the sand at the picnic, the fruit fly swallowed with the wine. The price of doing business. Doing more with less. If good poetry can & does still get written, it is under a steady, morbid & undesired constraint.


The proof I can offer that this was not always entirely so is the life & career of the man we have gathered to celebrate today.

For what Gerry was able to offer to me as we became friends in the early 1980's----which included amongst other things publications, introductions, a trip to New Hazelton, the privilege of denouncing Expo 86 on CBC Montreal's Brave New Waves the month it opened, a roof (if sometimes leaking) in the heart of the city at any time & under any circumstance (insert anecdote here), Woodward's Food Floor Peanut Butter & Vancouver Vocational College wheat germ Loaf, a fried tofu & potato with vinaigrette thing I've been trying to reproduce for decades, access to the Vancouver airwaves on any Sunday at 9 pm , 45 rpm pancakes, the thrift shop 8-tracks of "Fear" & "TV Eye" &c &c--depended on a number of circumstances far beyond the undoubted generosity of Gerry's nature, the fragility of which were only to become apparent later. At the time for me it just seemed the normal way of things, something to which I was entitled. I never thought about it much one way or the other. How could Gerry be wrong? But from the grim vantage of 2009 the early 80's in BC now seem a time of comparative enlightenment, the reviled Socreds Medicis in comparison with the thugs now in control. And would an NDP victory, nay a string of NDP victories return the welfare rates to their former levels? Never. Who do I vote for to get the cars & cops off the street, to shut down the Olympics? No one.

Federally, the repressively tolerant arts policies of the Trudeau era were by the early 80's a battered but still effective conduit of cultural energy: one way or another enough money flowed so that a poet like Gerry could survive as an independent artist. Honest poverty, it shocks me to remember, was once considered an equal ground from which to address the pretensions of authority--Gerry's legacy is offered as proof once again. In return for some acts of mildly benign state intervention (not really a pension as would have been proper & persuasive, but grants & welfare which were arbitrary & meagre & thus purchased no potentially befuddling loyalty) Gerry acted as would any of God's natural anarchists, any true modernist, he took the money where he could & made a full time job not only of his art, but of biting the hand that fed him deeply, loudly & at every opportunity. An air force cadet as a teen, Gerry was a patriot all his life, which for him meant both due gratitude for whatever freedom & tolerance he enjoyed but a mandate, a duty to call things as he saw them, to place the power of his expression at the service of the polity. And always from a position of complete equality, equality always a more active & fruitful principle with Gerry than difference.

Such a practice categorically refused both the comforts and protections of marginality. Gerry's generosity--& on this I can speak with authority--came without any sense of quid pro quo. Beyond clumsily collating a few pages of BC Monthly from time to time & helping out with radiofreerainforest Gerry didn't let me lift a finger; I have no recollection of so much as making coffee at New Era. I wouldn't have done it right anyway, for if Gerry was as open & clear as a window in argument, in the managing of domestic & professional details he was of the wrong way & my way school. But again, he was never really wrong about such things in any way that I ever saw much indication of. You get a lot of advice as a young poet; Gerry taught me how to cut up an onion. He always treated the vaguely sordid networks of favors & debts that bind up & marinade the literary world as a bit beneath him, which might have been a mistake. Gerry's undimmed pride & iconoclasm--never cantankerous or ornery but always pitched hard & at worst a little arrogant--did not allow him to think necessary the cosy fallback plans or exit routes that undergird bourgeois life: he mistook his natural ebullience & optimism for the fact of the world's incremental improvement, as if the immense service he had rendered his city & community took some permanent form, as in a culture worthy of the name it would. Time will reveal that permanence, I think--for we have, in a run of activity that began in the early 1960's & didn't halt until the last months of his life, the record of an acutely perceptive & observant human's journey through space & history unequalled in our literature--but this will occur much too late for his city & community to indicate to him its profound debt. For when calamity & misunderstanding overwhelmed Gerry's life that community for the most part turned away and the city whose most communally active poet he had been could barely rouse itself from Olympic dreams to notice his death. Long before Gerry died the powers that be decided that the kind of check against arbitrary power & irrational judgement his practice represented was something it could do without. Vancouver has been deeply diminished by its repudiation of what Gerry stood for, another indication (if one were needed) of the moral deterioration that has accompanied its financial ascension. But we needn't be, and this gathering is start.

it's Dirk Bogarde day on TCM ...

Ed Dorn in the Summer of 1968

“If you went to the Sorbonne, which we did, and, you know, saw the situationistes spilling over the balconies and explaining the L.A. riots, it all made some kind of sense. It was beautifully intellectual and feasible and containable, embraceable … and now it’s so cheap, you couldn’t give it away...”