a Happy New Year of The Dog, which I forgot that I was. And according to this also a Leonine and an Earth Dog, all of which seem good & I'm married to a Horse which is also recommended.

 

Back Home

Back Home, originally uploaded by johnygluebag.

nice postcard of the southern tip of Newcastle Island--I like that you can see so much of its shape under the water...

finally found a copy of the THOUSAND RECIPE CHINESE COOKBOOK by Gloria Bley Miller at Value Village last night. Recipes seem very clear and do-able...

"Pork and Seaweed Soup, Squab Soup and Ginseng Root, Abalone Soup, Ten Precious Soup, Cold Sherry Chicken, Pickled Mustard Cabbage, Basic Stir-Fried Pork, Stir-Fried Pork with Spinach and Carrots, Deep-Fried Roast Pork Squares with Crabmeat, Stir-Fried Curried Beef, Stir-Fried Beef and Rice-Flour Noodles, Braised Duck with Mushrooms, Red-Cooked Shanghai Duck, White-Simmered Roast Duck with Tangerine Peel, Stir-Fried Chicken and Bamboo Shoots, Stir-Fried Chicken with Pineapple and Lichee Fruit, Braised Ginger Chicken, Chicken Velvet, Drunken Chicken, Deep-Fried Fish Squares Szechwan Style, Simmered Crabs with Pork, Stir-Fried Scallops and Onion, Pan-Fried Bacon-Wrapped Butterfly Shrimp, Egg Foo Yung, Ham Egg Foo Yung, Pork Filling for Omelets, Steamed Eggplant, Stir-Fried Snow Peas and Mushrooms, Food of the Forest, Stir-Fried Peastarch Noodles with Shrimp and Pork, Rice-Noodle Nests with Poached Eggs, Fried Rice, Egg Roll Skins, Won Ton Skins, Sherry-Honey Marinade for Barbecued Pork, Stock-Soy Marinade for Barbecued Spareribs, Peking Meat Sauce for Noodles, Sugared Walnuts, Spiced Roasted Peanuts, Sweet Pineapple Tea, Bird's Nest Soup, Winter Melon Pond, etc."


 

end of an era--
Western Union -STOP- Ends Telegram Service


A history--

"The American public in its readiness to accept that which is novel, smart, modern, accepts the telegram as socially correct--something to be expected when one has friends who are up with the times. Invitations to social functions, greetings on an anniversary, best wishes of the season--all are delivered by Western Union on specially designed blanks which add a high note of distinction."




 

farewell Moira Shearer star of Powell/Pressberger's "Red Shoes" and "Tales of Hoffman"
 

Aki Kaurismaki update--

"It has been four years since the completion of Kaurismaki's last feature film.
"Has it really been that long?"
There is a telling pause.
"Back in the day, I used to make three films a year, now it is one in three years, or in four. The old vim and vigour of youth has been blunted."
That earlier pace was way too fast, Kaurismaki admits: all the "messages" have just about been passed. What is left is telling stories.
"Then again, it is better to do it when you are young, because later it is too late. You are only young once, as Henri Murger headed the final chapter of his Scenes de la Vie de Boheme." The book was the source both for Puccini's opera and Kaurismaki's own film from 1992.
Kaurismaki ponders long and hard in silence.
"No, it can't be four years. What's happened to all the years in between?"


 

(Katy Jurado)


fine, elegiac Charles Taylor on the new Peckinpah box--

"None is more affecting than Slim Pickens in what is perhaps the finest scene Peckinpah ever filmed. Gut-shot in a raid on Billy's hideout, Pickens' sheriff, Colin Baker, wanders off into the distance as Dylan's "Knocking on Heaven's Door" plays on the soundtrack. Following at a distance, his wife (Katy Jurado) is unable to bring herself to intrude on his final moments. As Pickens sits on a rock, he exchanges a fond look with her, but his eyes seem made anew, as if only in this dimming moment could they take in all the wonders of the world. What he sees--the darkening sky, the slowly rushing river in front of him--has the effect of life slipping through his fingers. This exquisitely lyrical sequence, maybe the screen's finest image of the passage into death, is one Peckinpah had been working toward since Ride the High Country. The respectful remove from which Katy Jurado watches her beloved husband die is the same distance from which Peckinpah had long given witness to the deaths of his aging heroes--not close enough to deprive them of their dignity, but close enough to make us feel the holes in the world where they were."


 

nice piece on John Fahey

"At these shows, everyone in the audience would be mesmerized, drawn in by that slow spiral of sound and transported elsewhere. It was like the tornado in The Wizard of Oz, with shards of recognized melodies suddenly separated and reconfigured in the space-time continuum, moving counterclockwise while unlocking the subconscious, spinning like swastikas do."


 

Scenes of Provincial Life--the wonderful Quicktime movies of Michael Szpakowski--in handy "vlog" form!
 

Steve Evans' "Baffler" essay on the Lilly endowment fracas, Free (Market) Verse, serialised excerpts on the web this week--

"There are several facts to hold onto here. First, the heartwarming story of Ruth Lilly’s handout to Poetry magazine was at least in part timed to draw attention away from the scandalous political payoff that had been snuck into the Homeland Security Bill and hurriedly signed into law by Bush. Second, the bequest itself was already, by the time of it was made public, the object of bitter litigation nowhere discussed in the press coverage..."

listening to beautiful Kantele music evokes hearing Betty Smith's psaltery in the mountains last spring...

"The kantele (or kannel) and rune-singing both symbolise ancient Finnish culture. In the Kalevala, Elias Lonnrot had constructed an image of a mythic kantele, made of the jawbone of a pike, as the typically Finnish musical instrument of the epic hero Voinomoinen. In the final stages of the work, the kantele is an essential part of the power of Voinomoinen's song. It was thus, through the Kalevala, that the kantele became, in the 19th century, the Finns' national instrument."




 

Rick Moranis (right), formerly of the 5 Neat Guys, has a country album out...
 

Canada's ex-prime ministers in reality TV gig

"Five young Canadians will endure public speaking and debate challenges to transform themselves into a possible national leader. The prize includes an internship in a Canadian public policy think tank.

TV reality shows have long depended on stage veterans like pop stars, supermodels and actors for celebrity judges. But this format will see former prime ministers Kim Campbell, Joe Clark, Brian Mulroney and John Turner passing judgment."


 

interview with Brian Jungen--

"But here, sometimes the media tries to be so poetic and it's embarrassing. Around Shapeshifter, [one local newspaper reviewer] did this awful piece about me being the whale. My friends were killing themselves laughing. Please, please don't compare me to whales in captivity!"


 

happy 250th Mozart!
 

Anthony Powell at the Wallace Collection in London--


"It's possible, for instance, to imagine Powell's Barnby enlivening a portrait session much as Henry Lamb did when he enlisted his sister-in-law, Lady Violet Pakenham, to talk to Powell while he was being painted. Lamb's portraits - of Powell, of Lady Violet, of Evelyn Waugh - are the most assured and historically significant in the exhibition. Perhaps there is some correlation between Powell's at times curiously subfusc prose and the sober Camden Town colour and gestural reticence of Lamb's portrait of him."

a fine new issue of onedit is up, with poems by Jean Day, Jonathan Skinner, Kevin Killian, Buck Downs, Brenda Coultas &c. including this one from Michael Gizzi--

Clouds Nine


The best way to become a cloud--a cloud one could be
proud of--is to have a father

who's a meteorologist. Yosemite Sam upbraids a dust devil.
What would he say about

the weather on Lesbos? Or on drugs, for that matter? Leave
it to Beaver Lamarck to

form a list of cloud types. These here blew in from the
French Revolution to stack up

over this canary yellow hum cover. One never knows, do
one? Would you believe a

cicerone in his cups under a claudicated anvil fixin' to
fulgurate a lunch loaf? Nosh on

this: The concupiscent curd of a former whirling dervish. Is
Rumi in the house?

Revenge of the Mutt People

"My point here is that we rural and small town mutt people by an early age seem to have a special capacity for cruelty, compared say, to damned near every other imaginable group of Americans. For instance, as a child did you ever put a firecracker up a toad’s ass and light it? George Bush and I have that in common. Anyway, as all non-whites the world round understand, white people can be mean. Especially if they feel threatened -- and they feel threatened about everything these days. But when you provide certain species of white mutt people with the right incentives, such as free pork or approval from god and government, you get things like lynchings, Fallujah, the Birmingham bombers and Abu Ghraib.

Even as this is being written we may safely assume some of my tribe of mutt people are stifling the screams of captives in America’s secret “black site” prisons across the planet. Or on a more mundane scale of cruelty (according to CBS footage) kicking hundreds of chickens to death every day at the Pilgrim’s Pride plant in Wardensville, West Virginia, just up the road from where I am writing this. Or consider the image of Matthew Shepard’s body twisted on that Wyoming fence. All these are our handiwork. We the mutt faced sons and daughters of the republic. Born to kick your chicken breast meat to death for you in the darkest, most dismal corners of our great land, born to kill and be killed in stock car races, drunken domestic rows, and of course in the desert dusty back streets at the edges of the empire. Middle class urban liberals may never claim us as brothers, muchless willing servants, but as they say in prison, we are your meat. We do your bidding. Your refusal to admit that we do your dirty work for you, not to mention the international smackdowns and muggings for the republic -- from which you benefit more materially than we ever will -- makes it no less true."

Emmanuel Todd via James Wolcott--

"American neo-conservatism is not alone to blame. What seems to me more striking is the way this America that incarnates the absolute opposite of the Soviet Union is on the point of producing the same catastrophe by the opposite route. Communism, in its madness, supposed that society was everything and that the individual was nothing, an ideological basis that caused its own ruin. Today, the United States assures us, with a blind faith as intense as Stalin's, that the individual is everything, that the market is enough and that the state is hateful. The intensity of the ideological fixation is altogether comparable to the Communist delirium. This individualist and inequalitarian posture disorganizes American capacity for action. The real mystery to me is situated there: how can a society renounce common sense and pragmatism to such an extent and enter into such a process of ideological self-destruction? It's a historical aporia to which I have no answer and the problem with which cannot be abstracted from the present administration's policies alone. It's all of American society that seems to be launched into a scorpion policy, a sick system that ends up injecting itself with its own venom."

Not So Bad, Eh?

"In the end, we have a Conservative government, not because Canadians want radical change, but because they could no longer stomach Paul Martin's decaying Liberals. They supported the Conservatives only to the extent necessary to rid themselves of Martin -- and no further. That is the message voters sent on election day. Canadians, as confirmed in every in-depth values survey done in the past five years, are in their large majority, progressive and tolerant, support activist government, are appalled by the level of poverty in this country and repelled by what is going on south of the border. Any party that ignores this fundamental fact of Canadian political culture will ultimately fail."