Robert Mittenthal told me this was coming (& taught me to love the soon-to-be-a-memory Alaskan Way Viaduct...
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

On a Monday between now and the middle of August, the Seattle City Council is likely to approve a contract that gives the State of Washington permission to dig a 54-foot-wide tunnel under downtown Seattle. It will be the widest deep-bore tunnel attempted anywhere, ever...

All Tarkovsky Films Now Free Online | Open Culture

Isola di Rifiuti finds this Ed Dorn poem & much else...

The Mountains

(for the painter, Raymond Obermayr)

Like a distant rumble of undeclared war
the wind shakes all things on our ears
and it’s like the water treatment
or a willful cat how the nerves
don’t anymore fend for themselves.

The base of the mountains
are blue and flecks of moving brown
are there like a lingering image.
But above that base
comes the magenta higher mountains,
steps to green, a rise the eye
can only take, where again lingers yellow
and all runs to a high atmospheric orange
but cut
the deep black blue of
full day.

I know men have perished her
there and all around.

Thus in a cut of all of it
there is the inferno we forget,
descends to the only red of fire.
To go down there is the whole
tension of its mystery.

All lingers. All passes in those hills.

One tempts the perfect
with suggested birds and men
suggested toil, one is reckless
enough to say they are there and forget.
And enough to leave all growth aside.
There is no frame for blue
but blue, but this is a late time
after blue was made.

And the earth herself
lets no such recessions loose.
You can move in the shadows, in that
wild blue, small towns
like specks flourish and go out
there is no coming back from the space
you make.

local trees

remembering poet Paul Hannigan

PEOPLE, BE GOOD

was Ruskin’s first sermon,
Carlyle preached silence
In forty volumes.

Libraries creek and groan,
The beds where monsters
Are bred. This is the
Bela Bartok Memorial Shopping Center

And this is a whole tongue
Brown and green from the
Dirt and grass it licked and ate.

And here’s a sheep’s head.
Baa. And there, the Wolfgang
Amadeus Mozart Barbershop.

People, be good.
Just you try it.
How would you begin?

thanks Don Share

from Ben Friedlander--Gloucester Postcards - a set on Flickr

Pop Sensation examines old paperbacks...

Bookshelf Porn

documentary about Django Reinhardt

LP covers by Andy Warhol

review of Ten Walks/Two Talks by Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch

With a pulley-system someone dropped planks through an apartment window (no sound). With a tiny broom a custodian steered hissing water along the curb. Somebody else wrapped a deli display-case in blue plastic. Someone wiped the demonstration slicer he had whirring on the sidewalk. I wondered why everything in restaurant-supply stores looks dusty. A white truck double-turning (does that make sense?) stripped the fender off an old black woman's sedan. Pedestrians winced...

"An American Type": The end of Henry Roth

The fluorescents shone on the Hearst printing presses within the great square plate-glass windows of the Examiner Building, flooding the corner. He paused, the anguish within him seeking to cleave to anything,
whether purposive, fatuous, anything. Slowly, the great, black machines behind the plate-glass window started moving, reeling out a Sunday comic sheet ... Accelerating, they flew past, swifter still and swifter, until gone were Jiggs and Maggie, lost in a multihued ribbon of paper and a high-pitched hum. And banality was gone, triviality was gone, gone the strip's silly postures and problems. All had become a freshet of blended color, diving downward and leaping upward in strict angle, and again, as if the artist's palette had become a cataract...

nice close reading of Barney Miller, "Quarantine, Pts. 1 & 2"

There’s scarcely an episode of Barney Miller’s first three
seasons that doesn’t include multiple jokes about bathrooms and coffee. Still, those jokes are pretty smart. At one point, Nick brings hot coffee to the feverish Dupree because he’d read “on the back of a jar of coffee” that hot drinks cool people down. Later, Darryl instantly improves the station’s coffee when he scrubs all the mold and mildew off
the squad-room’s cups. (“I thought it was a pattern,” Nick mumbles.) And there are quirky touches to “Quarantine” too, as when Nick loans
Luger the toothbrush he uses to clean his typewriter. (“My breath smells like ink,” Luger complains. “Want to lick some stamps?” Nick replies.)

Happy Canada day!


Most think G20 police actions justified, poll finds

The Angus Reid poll, which surveyed 1,003 Canadians and 503 Torontonians, found that 73 per cent of Torontonians and two-thirds of Canadians believe police treatment of protesters was justified during the G20 summit.

BibliOdyssey: 1870s Caricatures

The Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71[W]
&
The
Paris Commune of 1871 [W]

lots of serious powered vehicles (amongst much else) at Roy Arden's blog...

YouTube - Stevie Wonder - Some Other Time

Gilbert Highet's wonderful book on the Latin poets Poets in a Landscape has been reprinted...(tho the old Pelican is easy to find)

“I have endeavored to recall some of the greatest Roman poets by describing the places where they lived, recreating their characters and evoking the essence of their work.”