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bill bissett - Awake In Th Red Desert (Canadian Psych Concrete Poetry 1967)

This is one of the most out there Canadian records of the late 60s. bill bissett is a one of the first concrete poets from the 60s who to this day is still writing and performing. In the late 60s he lived in Vancouver Canada and made these far out recordings with friends jamming in the background over top of his poety. There are also some tracks that where done with the help of a Buchla System 100 Synthesizer. The first Modular System made by the man who created the surround sound system at Kesey's trip festival in the late 60s. It was a age where electronic where being freed into the musical cosmos and experiments with poety and music where being done by people and not just academics...

...tableware & more at the The Kitchen of Dr. Moreau

terrific bird writer Bernd Henrich has a new book out--Can birds fall in love?

For about 97 percent of the year, most birds are not having sex with
each other. But again, with birds of paradise, if females keep arriving
that window might be extended for months...

I liked this "Raven Wonders of Bird Life Limited Edition Book Print"

The Polari Bible

1 In the beginning Gloria created the heaven and the earth.
2 And the earth was nanti form, and void; and munge was upon the eke of the deep. And the fairy of Gloria trolled upon the eke of the aquas.
3 And Gloria cackled, Let there be sparkle: and there was sparkle.
4 And Gloria vardad the sparkle, that it was bona: and Gloria medzered the sparkle from the munge...

re-visit Aestheticism and Loyalty: Basil Bunting's Response to World War II

I criticize a machine by nearly the same criteria as I do a work of art. A Lee-Enfield rifle, a Hotchkiss machine gun, have nothing superfluous nor fussy about them. They are utterly simple - having reached that simplicity via complication and sophistication galore. The kind of people who, if they had literary minds at all, would like euphemism or trickiness, prefer Lewis guns or Remington or Ross rifles. My machine-gun is a Hotchkiss and I feel toward it something similar in kind to what I feel for Egyptian sculpture . I think Holbein or Bach or Praxiteles, as well as Alexander, would have appreciated a Hotchkiss gun...

Fleetwood Ghost, 2009 from Photographs, 2005

"Online presence of Canadian photographer Christopher Brayshaw"

Law & Order gets cancelled just before breaking Gunsmoke's on-air record...

Rim Pine, Bryce Canyon National Park,
2010
at Anodyne

Solitude, Exile and Ecstasy--interesting transcript of a "radio music-drama" (from original sources) devised by Bruce Charlton, about solitude, Thoreau, Hugh MacDiarmid & Glenn Gould...

'I have a commonplace book for facts
And another for poetry,
But I find it difficult always
To preserve the vague distinctions I had in mind
- for the most interesting and beautiful facts
Are so much the more poetry,
And that is their success.
- I see that if my facts
Were sufficiently vital and significant,
Perhaps transmuted more
Into the substance of the human mind,
I should need but one book of poetry
To contain them all!’

Nathaniel Mackey at Isola di Rifiuti

“To poetize or sing is to talk like a bird, a way with words and sound
given rise to by a break in social relations, a denial of kinship and
social sustenance, as if the break were a whistling fissure, an opening
blown on like a flute.”

How Conny Black and Izzy Asper Plotted to Control Canadian News Biz

"This isn't the end of a deal, it is only the beginning of the real
deal," Asper enthused in a fax to Black days after his CanWest Global
Communications bought Southam. "The possibilities are truly awesome and
infinite..."

fine essay on HUGH MACDIARMID, SCOTLAND’S REVOLUTIONARY POET

We must be humble. We are so easily baffled by appearances
And do not realize that these stones are one with the stars.
It makes no difference to them whether they are high or low,
Mountain peak or ocean floor, palace, or pigsty.
There are plenty of ruined buildings in the world but no ruined
stones.
No visitor comes from the stars
But is the same as they are...

Local trees & c.

good piece on David Simon's terrific/exasperating Treme

A main message from this sultry pageant of a show is that New Orleans is an occult matter that you can never truly “get” unless you’re a native or pretty close to it. The perky, hopelessly “white” tourists from Wisconsin with their nasal voices, the ones who get schooled by the street musician, can be taken as stand-ins for the viewer. Which makes the whole enterprise strangely unwelcoming...

ACL Kodachromes

sedimentary rock ceiling from Nanaimo's Old Mine Shafts

We are trying to establish some kind of visual record of how the remaining mines look in and around the 2010 era. We can't say how much red tape or the funding one would have to endure in order to do this 'properly', so we have decided to locate a number of abandoned coal mines in Nanaimo on our own and obtain our so called visual record by ourselves. We will take the necessary precautions to ensure we have enough oxygen and that no harmful gas may be present, we will ensure that the walls and ceilings of the mine are sound and will only continue if we feel it is safe enough to do so, and we will seal the mines back up the best we can afterwards to prevent the public from getting hurt...

Danny Trejo

I remember a director handed me a shotgun and he said, “Kick in this door and take control.” There was a poker game going inside, and the director said there would be a couple of stunt people inside. He said to improvise. So I kick in the door, somebody jumps up, I bash them with the shotgun, and I ask this guy, “Oh, you wanna die, huh?” This lady starts screaming, and I put this gun right in her face. So the director yells, “Cut! Cut! God, Danny, where did you study?” I said, “Let me see. Von’s. Safeway. Thrifty Mart...."

What Publishers Today Can Learn from Allen Lane: Fearlessness

Lane’s other invention, alongside the cheap, quality paperback, was the Penguincubator, first installed outside Henderson’s (the “Bomb Shop”) at 66 Charing Cross Road, which signaled his intention to take the book beyond the library and the traditional bookstore, into railway stations, chain stores and onto the streets. It is worth noting, given publishers’ frequent timidity in this area, that this really annoyed booksellers...