Local trees & c.

The Rise of Dog Identity Politics

In another way, the animal-rescue movement is an offshoot of the civil-rights struggles of the sixties, a final frontier for universalist ideals. Animal rescue is also one of the opportunities of ordinary Americans for real heroism—and more and more, they’ve taken it. The dog’s innocence amplifies empathy, because there’s no ethical static, no human otherness to contend with. It’s less complicated to love a pet than a person. The risk and conflict and cloak-and-dagger swagger that some of these missions entail can give lives a life-in-wartime meaning they otherwise wouldn’t have. There’s selflessness here, but just as in wartime, there’s also addiction, the oxytocin mixing with adrenaline.

Some of the most vivid images in the aftermath of Katrina were of dogs—on roofs, in the water—awaiting rescue or struggling to survive. After the catastrophe, Barack Obama spoke of an “empathy deficit,” but there was no deficit when it came to the animals. An army of animal rescuers descended on the city, and their work is legend in the animal-rescue community. But among some locals, their intervention was further proof, if more was needed, that not enough value had been placed on human residents...

scary-looking 1971 UK horror film on TCM tonight, The Blood on Satan's Claw

3.

Dig & tug
where it's soft
& not drained off.

South from Alaska
a Rockford smog bomb
digs its own tomb.

Fill's chewed up & gone over
Fill's gone off
Fill's gone fishy.

A vacant lot's
a mountainside
to which you're tied.

Parked at an angle
parked with struts
the runoff runs through the ruts.

A softball meteor
redly sat when it
couldn't be brought back.

Magnetism's a tip off
the iron fillings
of the rent-a-cop.

Why did U.S. aid focus on securing Haiti rather than helping Haitians?

So what happened? Why the mad rush to command and control, with all its ultimately murderous consequences? Why the paranoid focus on security above saving lives? Clearly, President Obama failed to learn one of the basic lessons taught by Hurricane Katrina: You can't solve a humanitarian problem by throwing guns at it. Before the president had finished insisting that "my national security team understands that I will not put up with any excuses," Haiti's fate was sealed. National security teams prioritize national security, an amorphous and expensive notion that has little to do with keeping Haitian citizens alive...

The Secret History of Typography in the Oxford English Dictionary

:—

Citing usage from 1949, the OED calls this mark the dog’s bollocks, which it defines as, “typogr. a colon followed by a dash, regarded as forming a shape resembling the male sexual organs.” This is why I love scrounging around the linguistic scrap heap that is the OED. I always come across a little gold. And by “gold,” I mean, “vulgar, 60-year-old emoticons...”

James Carr-THE COMPLETE GOLDWAX SINGLES

John Huston's underrated 1970 espionage film The Kremlin Letter on TCM tonight...(watch for Vancouver's Barbara Parkins as a woman who can open safes with her feet...)

The new gentrification package for Vancouver's Downtown Eastside

To be certain, residents do not need to guess at what the effects will be, since a gentrification prototype already exists in the form of Woodward's. A recent year-end study by the Carnegie Community Action Project has shown that rents have spiked in the low-end hotels surrounding Woodward's, in addition to increases in double-bunking and homelessness. Once Woodward's opens, the neighbourhood will experience all of the customary facts of condo presence: widespread NIMBYist opposition to new social housing projects, increased property values and rents, increased non-rent costs of living (upscale chain stores and bankrupt local businesses), poor-bashing, and self-segregated gentrifier areas that add heightened police presence and increased private security and surveillance in the community...

a small Flickr album devoted to Pyrex, restaurant ware, ashtrays & other interesting objects...

The Comic Book That Changed A Nation

double bill with the beyond cool Jean Gabin at the manse last night:

Pépé le Moko

Touchez pas au grisbi

YouTube - Céleste Boursier-Mougenot

Finches play electric guitar!

Letter from a Birmingham Jail

There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all..."

The Guantánamo “Suicides”: A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle

Nearly 200 men remain imprisoned at Guantánamo. In June 2009, six months after Barack Obama took office, one of them, a thirty-one-year-old Yemeni named Muhammed Abdallah Salih, was found dead in his cell. The exact circumstances of his death, like those of the deaths of the three men from Alpha Block, remain uncertain. Those charged with accounting for what happened—the prison command, the civilian and military investigative agencies, the Justice Department, and ultimately the attorney general himself—all face a choice between the rule of law and the expedience of political silence. Thus far, their choice has been unanimous...

Brian Eno has a point here, I think--

...Pop was all about the results and the feedback. The experimental side was interested in process more than the actual result – the results just happened and there was often very little control over them, and very little feedback. Take Steve Reich. He was an important composer for me with his early tape pieces and his way of having musicians play a piece each at different speeds so that they slipped out of synch.

But then when he comes to record a piece of his like, say, Drumming, he uses orchestral drums stiffly played and badly recorded. He's learnt nothing from the history of recorded music. Why not look at what the pop world is doing with recording, which is making incredible sounds with great musicians who really feel what they play. It's because in Reich's world there was no real feedback. What was interesting to them in that world was merely the diagram of the piece, the music merely existed as an indicator of a type of process. I can see the point of it in one way, that you just want to show the skeleton, you don't want a lot of fluff around it, you just want to show how you did what you did.As a listener who grew up listening to pop music I am interested in results...

The Dogs of Moscow

“There are dogs living in the city that are not socialised to people. They know people, but view them as dangerous. Their range is extremely broad, and they are ­predators. They catch mice, rats and the occasional cat. They live in the city, but as a rule near industrial complexes, or in wooded parks. They are nocturnal and walk about when there are fewer people on the streets...”

YouTube - D.J. Screw: The Untold Story Part 1 Of 11

Old Dryer Abandoned By Train Tracks Now A Vital Part Of Ecosystem | The Onion

firmuhment

farewell Goh Poh Seng, who I spoke to at Gerry Gilbert's memorial...

The Poetry of Goh Poh Seng

And when my time comes,
it will be westward
to be engulfed by the sea,
like Hinerangi over the glittering
pathway of Tane
to the realm of
Hine-mui-te-po,
benign protectress
of Rarohenga,
the assembly place of souls,
where old Ra, the Sun God,
presides golden over a cloudless sky:
just like this late afternoon,
the way he set, spilling gold
over Anawhata...

interesting slice (among many) of Northwest Coast History:Wilson Duff and Michael Kew: 1957 article on SGang Gwaay

Duff and Kew describe in full the environment and setting of Anthony Island, the town site and associated archaeological sites, and also gives a full account of the early period conflict between Haida and trading ships. In particular, vivid detail is given of the rise and fall of Chief Koyah and the serial raids he led on trading ships...

Rare etchings by William Blake discovered in railway timetable

In among a box of second-hand books bought from a North London dealer in the late 1970s was a thick international railway timetable...

farewell Teddy Pendergrass

YouTube - The Love I lost (Theo Parrish Ugly edits)

YouTube - The Love I Lost

2.

A newly formatted
raven's tongue
pops digitally out & in

through trombone beak
Texas jug band style
but overhead no newscrawl

no basslines from inland terraces
or hoots from hominid heights,
offroad daytrippers drop

from arbutus cloudtops
like badgers into a crevasse
their midwinter cushion full stop tree

bent under their towhee obesity;
the tread of a groundwater smeller
rumbles through the cellar.

from Marianne Moore, in Isola di Rifiuti

“Fear of insufficiency is synonymous with insufficiency and fear of incorrectness makes for rigidity. Indeed, any concern about how well one’s work is going to be received seems to mildew effectiveness."

Rebecca West 1914  The Duty Of Harsh Criticism

There is now no criticism in England. There is merely a chorus of weak cheers, a piping note of appreciation that is not stilled unless a book is suppressed by the police, a mild kindliness that neither heats to enthusiasm nor reverses to anger. We reviewers combine the gentleness of early Christians with a promiscuous polytheism; we reject not even the most barbarous or most fatuous gods. So great is our amiability that it might proceed from the weakness of malnutrition, were it not that it is almost impossible not to make a living as a journalist. Nor is it due to compulsion from above, for it is not worth an editor's while to veil the bright rage of an entertaining writer for the sake of publishers' advertisements. No economic force compels this vice of amiability. It springs from a faintness of the spirit, from a convention of pleasantness, which, when attacked for the monstrous things it permits to enter the mind of the world, excuses itself by protesting that it is a pity to waste fierceness on things that do not matter...

pancakes with Stephen Shore

It's a very different thing to have the food in front of you and take a picture with a 35 mm—just like that. With the 4 x 5, I was standing on a chair, and the camera was over here, and the food was cold by the time I took the picture...

The Americanization of Mental Illness

If our rising need for mental-health services does indeed spring from a breakdown of meaning, our insistence that the rest of the world think like us may be all the more problematic. Offering the latest Western mental-health theories, treatments and categories in an attempt to ameliorate the psychological stress sparked by modernization and globalization is not a solution; it may be part of the problem. When we undermine local conceptions of the self and modes of healing, we may be speeding along the disorienting changes that are at the very heart of much of the world’s mental distress...

Boudu Saved from Drowning on TCM tonight...

Getting Away with Torture

Arar's claims were simple: to forcibly send him to Syria to be tortured violates the Constitution's due process clause, which the Supreme Court has interpreted as forbidding conduct that "shocks the conscience," as well as the Torture Victim Protection Act, which allows torture victims to sue those who subject them to torture "under color of foreign law." Courts have long held that torture is the paradigmatic example of conduct that "shocks the conscience" and violates due process. And Arar alleged that the US defendants sent him to Syria for the purpose of subjecting him to torture under Syrian law. These allegations were largely confirmed not only by the Canadian investigation, but also by the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general. In twenty-five years as a lawyer, I have never had a clearer and more egregious case of abuse...