Local trees &c.

amiable memoir of a Summer with Empson...

Ancient rashers of fried bacon served as bookmarks in his disintegrating copy of Marvell’s Collected Poems. He stirred his tea with the sole remaining earpiece of his glasses...

Light Night

by James Schuyler

1

A tree, enamel needles,

owl takeoffs shake,

flapping a sound and smell

of underwing, like flags,

the clothy weight of flags.

A cone of silence stuck

with diamonds, the watch

she hunts, the frayed band

broke. It was a black night.

Dawn walked on it, the sun

set its heel. She won’t

find: a boundary of marsh,

the island in the wood.

2

Stoop, dove, horrid maid,

spread your chiffon on our

wood rot breeding the

Destroying Angel, white,

lathe-shapely, trout-lily

lovely. Taste, and have it.

3

In a rain-dusk dawn, the

clearing edge, the wood’s

fangs, the clear crystal

twist of a salival stream,

announce you hence. Tear

free of me, mountain, old

home bone, down sheer fear

tears mossed boulders

bound me, pool, deceptive,

trout-full, laugh and

chatter of finch and pecker,

gargle my liquor skin I

catch your face on. Scar

a look and leave. A rust

plush daycoach unfathers

me. A field of crosses. Let

iron clang iron.

more Schuyler at the November 2009 : Poetry Magazine

Happy Halloween kids!!

must see interview with the best American journalist right now--
Bill Moyers Journal: WEB EXCLUSIVE: Glenn Greenwald

Halloween Countdown 2009 - Flickr

thoughtful review of a new book on Arthur Russell

Russell allowed himself, helplessly, to be consumed with the process of music making, indifferent to the product. He recoiled from any final version of a composition for fear it would preclude all its other potential manifestations. As Lawrence puts it, a final version of a song “would become static and therefore experience a form of death.” According to the composer and writer Ned Sublette, Russell “couldn’t turn his back on the beauty of unexplored possibilities.” There’s a nobility to that, but it also helps explain the lack of recognition beyond his cult...

came across this review of the great Mary Heilmann show, which I was lucky enough to see (& sit down at!) in New York this time last year...

Free for the sitting—and for the scooting around, on speedy casters—they are rectilinear, with wooden frames, in a direct steal from the punitively strict furniture designs of Donald Judd. But their inserted bottoms and backs, of interwoven cloth straps in typically surprising colors, are canted at body-welcoming angles. To sit in one is to feel, physically, a quiddity of the Heilmannesque...

more on the collected Manny Farber reviews--

“All physical matter seems to be coated: buildings are encased in grids and glass, rooms are lined with marble and drapes, girls are sculpted by body stockings, metallic or velour-like materials. A subtle pornography seems to be the point, but it is obtained by the camera slithering like an eel over statuesque women from ankle across thigh around hips to shoulder and down again. Repeatedly the camera moves back to beds, but not for the purposes of exposing flesh or physical contact. What are shown are vast expanses of wrinkled satin, deep dark shadows, glistening silvery highlights. The bodies are dead, under sedation, drugged, or being moved in slow-motion stylistic embraces. Thus, there’s a kind of decadent tremor within the image as though an unseen lecherous hand were palming, sliding over not quite human humans.”

to celebrate the new issue of Capilano Review I'll post my poem from the last one:



FIVE NORTH VANCOUVER TREES

for Lary Bremner

Here and there between the pages a skeleton leaf conjured up those lost woods
    --Patrick Leigh Fermor

1.

The phylogeny of sleep
vs. the ontogeny of waking up

bunnybeard blankets
dewdrop the sleeping slutswool

drooled voices skitter
from the back of a tent (circus)

useless user fingers pinch
filched bodega grapes

awake in sheets so soft
you devour them in a dream

goosefeathers knuckle
a wet November no-hitter's

bloody stucco,
horseradish breezes

curl brown paint from gray lumber
in soft curls--

an August half-moon
teething at sixes & sevens,

in sheets so soft they squeezed
phantom pain out of real pain,

excuses thumbed a map's wet fold,
a ghost train fringe marked with

misty rivers, chenille fingers, flutter gulches,
cross-digging legends out of anthracite

shaded parks bunted for cornerboys
that flap & tumble & shamble.


2.

All is Loch Elsewhere,
Arcadian pancake & parkade,  

chewed venue, through potash
& slough

eelgrass aftertaste
past castle & ledge

where the blue bus humps
up & left, past the twinkling figurines

of a presumptive distance
even darker closer in & thickened so with

baronial fences & colonial hedges that
only from overhead can

the security corona be glimpsed
when cat-like you trip its cricket senses.


3.

All is Cantaloupe Causeway
a shrubbery of near attainments

half-rendered blossoms
a spider's tincture grown over

a monkey puzzle half-hardened with honey--
lichen overhangs the wavy cavy air

dream-flies sip hat-salt & eye-salt & sea-salt,
& in the inky truffle shade of a giant oak

plotters tip cordials, toast
Lost Illusions, lost dogs, lost wages--

a bubble is a mighty fine thing!
For about three months & change

the tulip was worth more
than the picture of the tulip!

& that tapioca backwash
wreathed in strawberry quik

was like childhood in reverse,
open to the nourishment but still

popping the air's envelope,
brakeless on a banana cruiser.


4.

The state couldn't catch a fucking cold
too cheap to keep the flow of piping hot

up just ask the bus stations
& movie theaters--

no fresh towels for popcorn paws
& foam alone won't disinfect

the coughed-on loonies & toonies
that insist into our minty mitts--

thus later asleep, drop in throat
half-lodged (eucalyptus), I missed it

when the Matrix dropped his
crystal set into the toilet tank

& so soap-bombed the Italian fountain
that the concrete fish

crested the foam all over downtown
scales glinting off the pebbles

in the giant bowl of the casino's
outdoor loser ashtray.


5.

In sleep so thick
the panels of the trucks

pivot through the birds & bricks
that flap above the viaducts

on downs as soft as poplar fluff
graders scrape off mossy stuff

revealing projects never needed,
zombie gardens never weeded

& ragged couches burning fleece
prompting no visit from police--

a hermaphroditic order
in the standing water

a kind of turbid flux
flaps above the viaducts.

Elly Ameling - Schubertiade

A wonderful record I had on vinyl, Ms. Ameling's first, containing my first & favorite version of Schubert's last song "Der Hirt auf dem Felsen" (The Shepherd on the Rock), the loveliest music I know of...

preparatory to watching "Vendredi Soir" tonight, a 2002 Claire Denis Interview

You know, I was twice asked to make films in the United States. I was even offered Boys Don't Cry. That was six years ago, but I didn't like the idea of making that film. I had just done J'ai pas sommeil (I Can't Sleep, 1993), I got the impression that they were offering me yet another news-in-brief item: “Oh her, she likes news items, that's her thing.” What further bothered me was to be forced to proclaim at the outset that because I was a foreigner I was going to see things more clearly. As far as that's concerned, I don't believe in it at all. I think that you can only feel yourself an outsider if you are part of a community. The outsider's view, I don't believe in it… Me, if I'd done it, that's how I would have seen these little Americans, these tragic communities, everyone is unemployed, people are living in caravans, girls of 14 committing credit card fraud, brawls every day and first babies being born to girls who are 13 years old. To come along in black jeans and make a compassionate film, I could not have done that...

Patti Smith's review of Todd rundgren's _A Wizard, a True Star_

I know, here is where I got caught. Not prepared for a transition like "Neverland." Brutally nostalgic. I got that era under my belt. All about toyland. Once you leave no turning back. Well, why did Todd pull us back? The terror of beauty makes one momentarily bitter. First star to the right and straight on till morning. "Neverland" permanently poisons and sweetens. Gives a subconscious aftertaste. Tinges the whole record with Walt Disney. Also torments and slides you into journey a little weak above the belt. As side one progresses you age. There's hair on your fingers.

Tic tic. Like the crocodile alarm that pleasantly ticked away Captain Hook's lifeline, goodie good is wearing off. The move is maniac. Screeching monotone which eliminates mouth, limb and crotch but exalts in brain power. MIT science fiction. The next religion.

Even more ear-itating is "Rock'n'Roll Pussy." Autobiographic as a brainiac. "I'm in the Clique" comes back as "Shove it up your ass, I'm the clique myself." Sexual power is moving up the spine into the skull. It's manic it's magnificent.

Am I getting abstract? It doesn't matter. Music is pure mathematics. And what is more abstract than trigonometry? Todd is further mystery than Greek. You can't plot out his journey so easy. Marco Polo was a natural. Electric exploitation is never predictable...




todd rundgren's "runt" lp

The runt in any good litter or legend always manages to rise up and above the limits imposed on him. Like Mozart, Todd Rundgren never wanted to be born; his mother labored hard to put him here and he's fought hard to singe his musical autograph in the progressive pages of rock & roll...

great blog Unmitigated England

the music's as good as the graphics--Ghost Box - Belbury Poly

Ghost Box had a defined aesthetic from formation; Julian House commenting "...the best way to put our stuff out was to start a label.. There was such a richness to the references we both shared, not just musical.. It made sense that we could put releases out which had this complete world attached to them.. A set of things united by a design identity, fragments of real or imagined books, collections of images, films, links... Something people can become lost in and want to be a part of.."^[2]The Focus Group, Eric Zann, Belbury Poly, and The Advisory Circle, and a rerelease of a Mount Vernon Arts Lab album) tend to share a common design aesthetic - all record covers so far have been by Julian House, with an acknowledged debt to the iconic design of sixties Penguin Books paperbacks^[3]. There are shared elements in sound, too; Ghost Box artists tend to draw heavily on influences such as musique concrète, library music, and 1970s soundtracks...(wik.)

hey kids, wanna score some free Zuk?

(in the Belkin Gallery at UBC)
judy radul - artforum.com / 500 words

When watching trials, we are aware that in the background there are numerous registers of power—the police, prisons, and the Law (with a capital l)—and that the trial itself is just the tip of a more invisible process. The trial actually has a kind of utopian dimension, a hope of bringing things into the public realm and the public record. But what strikes me is that the lawyers, the judges, the defendants, the guards, and the many, many clerks and team members are in a kind of fishbowl where some of them have been appearing, perhaps in the same trial, for several years....

A typo more mysterious that most

...our minds play tricks on us all the time — they positively excel at it — often for our own good. But mistakes, when caught, allow us a useful glimpse of the strange machinery within...

a collected Manny Farber...

The hard-bitten action film finds its natural home in caves: the murky, congested theaters, looking like glorified tattoo parlors on the outside and located near bus terminals in big cities. These theaters roll action films in what, at first, seems like a nightmarish atmosphere of shabby transience, prints that seem overgrown with jungle moss, sound tracks infected with hiccups. The spectator watches two or three action films go by and leaves feeling as though he were a pirate discharged from a giant sponge...

Local trees

La femme infidele (1969, Claude Chabrol)

While Chabrol’s cinematic mirroring of alienation borders on outright satire for the most part (Bouquet’s post-murder housecleaning is priceless), in the last act he pulls a startling about-face. He puts repression back on the mantle as a valid and virtuous mode of social intercourse, presenting a stony embrace between husband and wife as a sublime moment of genuine reconciliation...

David Bromige

They Gain Control of My Tongue





Which is to say, in lieu
Of playing the blue-tinted guitar,
A sociology of this process
Offers its studies of color.
The imagination
In complete autonomy
Disregards known outcomes
Now mounting into thousands
Because millions are incredible,
All those unwasted lives
Whose right companion , well....
Yes, a dead lion feeds bees,
Its rot is sweet, sweet

And unbreathable.
An objection
To test the hope eternal
In a prehistoric ploy
On the part of that great historian,
The gang. They sit there
Ordering the $3.99 breakfast
At three in the afternoon
(That terrible three in the afternoon
Standing for your incessant woe)
Chaired by Chuck Custer,
An obvious leader.
And history as tribes native

To a landscape all-too-familiar
In the Torah of Regret
Live on mistake, mistake
That doesn’t exist in California,
Whose holy ones banished it.
Yet the line at the DMV keeps shuffling
Toward validations
Required if control
Is to exist in a church spire.
Sit down I think I love you
That causes you to stalk out
Of every channel we click to.
Explode the car.



as ever

one of the great trio albums--
Paul Bley - Footloose (1963)