Chinese trees from Sidney D. Gamble Photographs

"From 1908 to 1932, Sidney Gamble (1890-1968) visited China four times, traveling throughout the country to collect data for social-economic surveys and to photograph urban and rural life, public events, architecture, religious statuary, and the countryside. A sociologist, renowned China scholar, and avid amateur photographer, Gamble used some of the pictures to illustrate his monographs. The Sidney D. Gamble Photographs digital collection marks the first comprehensive public presentation of this large body of work that includes photographs of Korea, Japan, Hawaii, San Francisco, and Russia. The site currently features photographs dated between 1917 and 1932; the 1908 photographs will be digitized and uploaded as part of future additions to the site."

went to the handsomely-beamed 1958 Brechin United Church in Nanaimo last night to hear the Ellerhein Girls Choir from Estonia, on our shores as part of the International Choral Kathaumixw Festival, Powell River, BC . Estonia is a very choir-centric country & the Ellerheins are one of their best, appearing on lots of albums & c. so it was a top show, especially the avant-garde Estonian stuff with shrieks, bird sounds & swirling stereo effects, but they could handle the lump-in-your-throat melodic Ave Maria stuff too. They're appearing tomorrow in Victoria at the First Metropolitan United (Quadra & Balmoral) at 730 & on Friday in North Van at St. Andrews United 10th at St George's, same time...

Local trees

sex in The Age of Nixon

"Sometimes I felt like I was writing a book about the history of sexual neuroses in the American ’60s. You had cops saying about antiwar protesters, “You pull down their pants, and they ain’t got no pecker.” You had a janitor after the march on the Pentagon being quoted in Time saying this absurd, impossible thing, that all the garbage was panties. You had Richard Nixon saying in 1971, when these brave anti-war Vietnam veterans are encamped in the Mall, “They’re just screwing chicks in their sleeping bags.” On the other side, you have one of the leaders of the Columbia University strike in 1968 telling women that the cops are so sexually screwed up that if you “pick up your shirt, they won’t know whether to jerk off or go blind.” You have people like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin describing their ideological adversaries as “menopausal men.” Basically you have every side accusing the other side of sexual dysfunction because of their ideological disagreements.

Sex was a weapon. Everything was a weapon. During the Kent State situation, which ended with four students being shot by the National Guard, part of the provocation these National Guardsmen felt was that women were looking up their names on their nameplates, calling their wives in Akron, and saying, “Guess what? I’m screwing your man over here at Kent State!”

Even putting a flower in the barrel of a gun is to a certain degree an act of cruelty. If you have someone whose job it is to follow orders and do their duty, and you taunt them for not being able to respond on a human level to an act like that, you’re basically just lording your superiority over them. Love can be a hateful thing..."

a book about Glenn Gould's piano & its tuner

"Having grown so sensitive to sound, many piano tuners couldn't cope with the noisy world. "In the early 20th Century, piano tuners outnumbered members of any other trade in English insane asylums," Hafner tells us."

know what else is the berries? my grampy's semi-acclaimed new book of poems The Age of Briggs & Stratton (Hammertown)...

Noise pollution is killing us...

"We got our half-acre lots, and now we have our weed whacker, our leaf blower, our hedge trimmer, our riding lawn mower, and then we hop in our car and drive on four- and six-lane highways past thousands of other suburbs to our place of work, noise -polluting every place we pass."

"LUIS HERNANDEZ from the State of Veracruz works in demolition in New York. He sends 200 dollars a week."

Superheroes

a series by Dulce Pinzon

in NYC a William Holden retrospective--

"They came too late and stayed too long," observed the tagline
introducing Peckinpah's "Wild Bunch." Having arrived at the dawn of a new fatalism in American movies, and inadvertently bowed out as the '70s and the age of the anti-hero ended, Holden's tragic timing was perfect both on-screen and off..."

The Boys and the Subway

from poet James Liddy's

Autobiography

"I am an exile, I am not an exile. "Exile" has enough alienation in it to be a real condition yet it can be read as part of the flashy itinerant supernaturalism of the voyageur. The spirit wandereth whence it is employed or patroned. The artist type is outside the first social force of Mammy and friends; distance beckons new interruptions, and maybe memory spins into backlash.

Writing can seem the activity of alcoholic and
workaholic ghosts; the famous never tired ones, Wilde, Auden, Isherwood used
new domicile and flirtatious cafe in a more exuberant mode than they would at home. Do not dismiss the soldiering in far foreign fields where the battle cry is: do not tire.

The books on the table are piled-up differently: if I had stayed would my life have been changed by John Wieners, Lorine Niedecker,
and above all Jack Spicer? Sitting by a great lake stung by the idea: your
Ireland is dead, clarify your mind..."

via Ron

Ed Ruscha's best shot

"That's the one thing I regret about any photograph: that eventually it becomes historical, nostalgic, out of date. It begins to look like the age it came from...I'm interested in glorifying something that we in the world would say doesn't deserve being glorified. Something that's forgotten, focused on as though it were some sort of sacred object. That's the mystery of it all: what it is that will catch my attention..."

Local trees

Hats banned from Yorkshire pubs

"There have been incidents both in pubs and other establishments when it has not been possible to identify offenders captured on CCTV because hats were hiding their faces."

Local trees

Isola di Rifiuti

"Summer’s work is to ease away under the cover of frantic light and the confluence of gassy hysteria and quid pro quo ombudsmanship, and ease back in with a pout and a boater. That’s summer’s work. An anti-method. A voluntary voluptuousness without realm or target..."

happily grabbed at random the sharp, sad, beautifully written Tender is the Night, by F. Scott Fitzgerald for the first time in a couple of decades...



"With Nicole’s help Rosemary bought two dresses and two
hats and four pairs of shoes with her money. Nicole bought from a great list that ran two pages, and bought the things in the windows besides. Everything she liked that she couldn’t possibly use herself, she bought as a present for a friend. She bought colored beads, folding beach cushions, artificial flowers, honey, a guest bed, bags, scarfs, love birds, miniatures for a doll’s house and three yards of some new cloth the color of prawns. She bought a dozen bathing suits, a rubber alligator, a travelling chess set of gold and ivory, big linen handkerchiefs for Abe, two chamois leather jackets of kingfisher blue and burning bush from Hermes— bought all these things not a bit like a high-class courtesan buying underwear and jewels, which were after all professional equipment and insurance—but with an entirely
different point of view. Nicole was the product of much ingenuity and toil. For her sake trains began their run at Chicago and traversed the round belly of the continent to California; chicle factories fumed and link belts grew link by link in factories; men mixed toothpaste in vats and drew mouthwash out of copper hogsheads; girls canned tomatoes quickly in August or worked rudely at the Five-and-Tens on Christmas Eve; half-breed Indians toiled on Brazilian coffee plantations and dreamers were muscled out of patent rights in new tractors—these were some of the people who gave a tithe to Nicole, and as the whole system swayed and thundered onward it lent a feverish bloom to such processes of hers as wholesale buying, like the flush of a fireman’s face holding his post before a spreading blaze. She illustrated very
simple principles, containing in herself her own doom, but
illustrated them so accurately that there was grace in the
procedure, and presently Rosemary would try to imitate it..."

Nanny State Nanaimo

"Now every patron must agree to have their identification recorded and photograph taken before they can enter Club 241, Spice Lounge, the Globe or the Queens Hotel.

Their name and photo is kept on a computer hard drive and used to track them, in case they try to pass their ID on to someone else, or if they are ejected from the bar for misbehaving.

Media got a demonstration of the new system at city hall on Friday, where Queens manager Jerry Hong used Coun. Merv Unger as a mock nightclub patron. After swiping Unger's ID in a card scanner, information appeared on a screen.

Software captures a patron's name, licence number and expiry date, age and sex from their drivers licence. Data is added to track the patron's status, including when they last entered the club and if they were barred from re-entry. If the patron misbehaves and gets thrown out, they will find himself barred for anywhere from a week to a year. And since it's linked by a network, that ban will be in effect in every bar in North America connected to the Barwatch system..."

Literary note: The Globe was visited by Malcolm Lowry while he waited for his "October Ferry to Gabriola"...

No Magna Carta please, we're British...

"But Britain's small band of civil libertarians has bigger problems than a recalcitrant prime minister and careless civil servants. Despite Benjamin Franklin's famous advice, the public seems happy to trade a little liberty for a little security. Surveys before the 42-days vote consistently showed public opinion in favour. More recent polling for The Economist shows broad public support for many liberal bugbears (see chart). Women tend to be more authoritarian than men, Labour supporters more relaxed about infringing civil liberties than Tories and Liberal Democrats, and richer folk more worried than the poor (full details can be found here). Half of the respondents were consistent in their answers to most questions; this, says YouGov's boss, Peter Kellner, is rather high.

The poll suggests that people are vehement in defence of civil liberty and privacy when considered in the abstract. Confronted with specific situations, their resolve wilts, especially when specific security gains are promised (although administrative benefits can overcome libertarian instincts too). Trust in private firms is much less than in the government—odd, since more than half of all consumers are voluntarily enrolled in data-tracking supermarket loyalty schemes..."

four fives from de-noted