Local trees

Edwardian autochrome trees from George Eastman House's Photostream

Tom ("Remainder" "Tintin") McCarthy amongst many at Denis Cooper's extensive David Lynch Day

“Lynch’s latest film Inland Empire is stunning: completely literary, labyrinthine, regressive. It’s the best piece of art in any medium I’ve come across for years.

“In terms of now, I think some of the most interesting literary figures aren’t necessarily writers. The films of David Lynch, for example, have an extremely literary logic; his latest, Inland Empire, is structured like Finnegans Wake or the novels of Robbe-Grillet, with a set of repetitions regressing inwards, modulating as they repeat. He’s grappling with questions of narrative and representation and identity in a way that mainstream novelists simply aren’t, and is therefore much more interesting as a ‘writer’, even if he isn’t strictly speaking one.”

“In the ‘geological’ time of the arts, Finnegans Wake happened a few seconds ago: we’ve hardly even realized that it’s happened, let alone set up a coordinated response. The really good artists have realized and are responding: look at David Lynch’s films, or Alain Robbe-Grillet’s novels - but most of the players in the mainstream cultural industries are trying to pretend it didn’t happen, or doesn’t matter; and they’ll be washed away, forgotten, as a result...”

bored this summer? why not curl up under a big pile of stuffed toys with my grampy's book of poems The Age of Briggs & Stratton: Peter Culley: ISBN 9781554200399??

YouTube - CBUT Vancouver TV sign-off 1987--Gail Hulnick tucking in the province with her definitive late night reading off of British Columbia place names...

"Mended Spiderwebs" from Nina Katchadourian

"The Mended Spiderweb series came about during a six-week period in June and July in 1998 which I spent on Pörtö. In the forest and around the house where I was living, I searched for broken spiderwebs which I repaired using red sewing thread. All of the patches were made by inserting segments one at a time directly into the web. Sometimes the thread was starched, which made it stiffer and easier to work with. The short threads were held in place by the stickiness of the spider web itself; longer threads were reinforced by dipping the tips into white glue. I fixed the holes in the web until it was fully repaired, or until it could no longer bear the weight of the thread. In the process, I often caused further damage when the tweezers got tangled in the web or when my hands brushed up against it by accident.

The morning after the first patch job, I discovered a pile of red threads lying on the ground below the web. At first I assumed the wind had blown them out; on closer inspection it became clear that the spider had repaired the web to perfect condition using its own methods, throwing the threads out in the process...

little-seen Faulkner adaptation Tomorrow (1972),which contains an unforgettable performance by Robert Duvall, on TCM tonight at 2115 PST...

as a former anonymous Publisher's Weekly reviewer (I bailed long before they cut the fee from 50 to 25 bucks--my proposal was bumping it up to 200!) it was interesting to see these other Reviewers Come In From the Cold...

Steve McQueen : Memorializing Britain's War Dead

"The MoD [Ministry of Defence] wouldn't give us addresses of next of kin, so we used a researcher. We wrote to relatives saying what we wanted to do. I was a bit wary. I know grief. I didn't want to upset people. I was sitting on the edge of my bed thinking, blimey, this is up, no one is going to write back. Then slowly but surely all these letters came through the door saying 'thank you very much', 'this is a fantastic idea' and 'we're so happy that you want to recognise our son'. We had a book of letters and images. I remember seeing this book and I had to have a drink. I had to get a bit drunk. You feel the pain, the hurt of so many people. All these young guys who have died: they're 22, 21, 19, 18. But I was up for it," he says..."

Return of The Frontiersman, an interview with Rudy Wurlitzer, writer of manse faves "Two Lane Blacktop", "Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid" etc...

"These days, now that Two-Lane has become part of the
'Seventies', one is aware that the whole nature of aimless travel and being on the 'road' has changed. Given the current state of things, with fuel, cars, travel, freedom, exploration, the film is a more philosophical and melancholy experience. It's also a funnier film now, given its obsession with the unconscious, somewhat adolescent attachment to the myths of freedom and journeys and relationships that lead nowhere in particular..."

up at U B U W E B - Film & Video: Stan Douglas - Television Spots/Monodramas (1987-1991)

"TELEVISION SPOTS (1987/88)
In 1989, his first series of short works for television, the twelve Television Spots, were broadcast in Saskatoon and Ottawa amid regular programming, as if they were commercials. Unidentified, the short scenes depicting open-ended, banal activities baffled viewers.


MONODRAMAS (1991)
Douglas's "Monodramas," ten 30- to 60-second videos from 1991, conceived as interventions into commercial television, interrupted the usual flow of advertising and entertainment when broadcast nightly in British Columbia for three weeks in 1992. These micronarratives mimic television's editing techniques, but as kernels of a story they refuse to cohere. They are tales of dysfunction and dislocation, misanthropy and misunderstanding. When the videos were aired unannounced during commercial breaks, viewers called the station to inquire about what was being sold, their responses evincing how the media can refocus attention from content to consumption. -- Nancy Spector"

Amongst other things now the surprisingly textured record of a now-vanished Vancouver...

(thx JT)

trees from The Chicago Daily News 1902-33

The Cuckoo (She’s a fine bird)

"Oh the cuckoo
She's a pretty bird
I wish that she were mine
She don't ever drink water
She only drink wine..."

dazzle yourself with my grampy's new book of poems The Age of Briggs & Stratton (Hammertown)...

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's ‘The Leopard’ Turns 50

“From the ceiling the gods, reclining on gilded couches, gazed down smiling and inexorable as a summer sky. They thought themselves eternal; but a bomb manufactured in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was to prove the contrary in 1943...”

You are Invited to

the
Opening Party + Performance for

The MARSHALL AMPhitheatre

at

The French Broad Institute
(of Time & the River)


with an evening of short sets of

Poetry & Song

by Rod Bowling, Lee Ann Brown, Jeff Davis, Mary Eagle,

Laura Hope Gill, Erin O'Neal, Ted Pope, Nancy Roche

+
Other Surprise Guests

Friday
July 11th, 2008

8:30


COME early for 6:30
MERMAID & FAIRY PARADE

created by Miranda Lee Reality Torn & many others

Bring your friends & family! Please forward widely!

We are located in the former Methodist Church across from the firehouse, across the parking lot on the same side of the street as the French Broad Tacqueria.

For more information or to volunteer, please contact:

Lee Ann Brown: LA@tenderbuttons.net, 646.734.4157

Tony Torn: 646.391.8002, tony.torn@verizon.net

Land line: 828.649.1082

Free: Donations Encouraged

(Tax deductible donations under the auspices of the Solo Foundation)

"The sanctuary of Epidaurus provided was created in order to let citizens realign themselves & awaken to the full energy of the present."

—from Devotional Cinema by Nathaniel Dorsky

...A living river...

The MARSHALL AMPhitheatre

at the French Broad Institute of Time & the River

68 North Main Street, Marshall, NC 28753

Kent Mackenzie's "The Exiles" a lost-now-found film about Native Americans from the Southwest in late 50's Los Angeles...

"Inspired both by early documentary filmmakers like Robert Flaherty and Humphrey Jennings and by the social realism of Jean Renoir and Vittorio de Sica, Mackenzie strove to capture his subjects' lives in all their complexity, without pitying or exoticizing them. "I tried very hard not to be attracted by the strangeness of the environment as opposed to my own, and to avoid the 'romance of poverty,'" he wrote. He intended "The Exiles" as an "anti-theatrical" and "anti-social-documentary" film, which would pose problems for the viewer it did not resolve. Given that it has never had a commercial, theatrical engagement in the past 47 years, I suppose he succeeded a little too well..."

Cat Memoir from my Uncle Rod--

"I was at sea by the time that Judy left the scene, I know not how, and I came home to 57 Folkestone to find that a tabby tom by the name of Trevor (after Trevor Bailey of Essex and England cricket fame) was in residence. He was a bit of a snob, with a name like Trevor in East Ham –what else - and whilst he would come in by the back door, he insisted that he always left through the front door. Wally!! At the time, Dad was working night shift with the Blue Funnel Line and would walk home down Vicarage Lane each morning about a quarter past seven. Trevor would get up and stand by the front door about seven o’clock, demanding to be let out, and then sit on the gate post until about ten past seven, when he would jump down and disappear round the corner into Vicarage Lane and meet Dad a hundred or so yards up the street. I don’t know whether it was smell, sound or ESP that triggered his mad dash around the corner but he was spot on every morning and would trot alongside Dad, jumping up every few yards, all the way home and into the hall. Dad used to bring the cat home a little morsel of food each day – a bit of fish or meat – wrapped up in greaseproof paper. The cat could smell the food and would go bananas with frustrated hunger, while Dad would be telling him that there wasn’t any food today. Then a search of all his pockets until, much to his surprise, there was a package, which took agonising moments to unwrap , until finally the cat was able to gulp down this prime piece of manna from heaven.
After Dad died, Trevor would still go out every morning and sit on the gate post and wait for hours. I don’t know how long this lasted but I know that it hurt Mum and kept reminding her of the little scene that used to be enacted every morning. I don’t think Mum had another cat after that...."