A Letter from Hammertown to the Red Hook Public Library


"They wanted to hear 'Baby Elephant Walk' with new ears."
Stephen King "Cell"



Was wrong as usual
about acupuncture Mike

turns out torques 'twixt
the wobble & the "chi"

do decrease activity
in the limbic seat of pain

no thanks to me or thee--
the MRI looked like my Compaq's

halting defrag, blue blocks
dimming like the lites of Harewood

used to in the pre-surveillance
eighties, not "dark"

like coffee or a scary 45
but coalmines, hot subocean vents

the inside of MacDiarmid's beach
& everything either swept off the table

in an excess of joy or clung to
like an eyeless Teddy shuffling

thru a mezzotint snowstorm,
chewing the sweet caraway seed at the heart

of its trauma--
but when the needle enters the skagarrat

turns out the alpine red static that says "prick"
is the easiest to placebo,

it's a centimeter in where
the boggle hangs it shingle

and you wake up smiling
in the crotch of the loveliest plane tree

in the park, trunk waving
in a warm hurricane of bliss.

Cedar Road trees

just heard that one of my all-time favorite films, Ulu Grosbard & Dustin Hoffman's searing "Straight Time" (from Edward Bunker's "No Beast So Fierce) is finally coming out on DVD, with a commentary by the directors & this interesting-looking documentary...can " The Friends of Eddie Coyle" be far behind?

Area trees

the New Yorker's Anthony Lane has a long piece on the great Barbara Stanwyck in honour of her centennial retrospective...

An Atlas, Orange Crate Labels & more Pelicans than the Miami Vice credits at this great Found Things blog...(via I like)

New porchfish

really fine "Der Spiegel" article on Ravens

Friends

I need as many copies of Bob Dylan's LP "Self Portrait" as possible,
for a sculpture I am making.
i've been buying them on Ebay, but have artificially driven up the
price by buying so many.

If you have an old copy, no matter how poor the condition, please
send it to me at

Tim Davis
101 North Road
Tivoli, NY 12583

And I will be eternally grateful.
Please feel free to forward this to any interested party.

Thanks,
Tim

Tsawassen trees

was sad to learn that teacher/poet/critic Nancy Shaw had died on the weekend--though I'd seen little of her in recent years the photo above--taken during some KSW bash in the late 80's--brings back good memories of her warmth, energy, enthusiasm & fierce intellectual curiosity--

from "Busted" (w/Catriona Strang)(which is online but Blogger is being weird)

"What a messy, bloody, capricious business. Is lineage iced, or boarded, or unchecked? It’s said once our frontiers were immutable, or at least once some fathered rhetoric could skate, smooth and slamming, all over our boxy little realm. But exactly when did the lucid rink around our discourse? And for which shift did all our plays lace up with capital? Ever more distant, ever more expansive. Was there ever a simple goal?"

Dawn in an old world garden (English songbirds awakening)

images from the Kansas City Sheet Music Collection

As of yesterday, I've been doing this blog for four years. Thanks to everyone who's looked in!

excellent new issue of Common-place on graphics and print culture in 19th cent. America...

Fats Waller

After theatre
is our usual time for relaxation,

and following dinner
I roamed restlessly

through the beautiful
park there.

At dawn the birds awakened,
and out of their lovely chirpings

one short strain stood out.
I went back to the hotel,

and by ten o'clock that morning,
with the aid of some delicious

Amontillado Sherry, we had finished
Honey Hush...

Two views (Reid Shier, cloudy; Sharla Sava, sunny) of the "Pine on the Corner" in its present state...

looking forward to maybe hearing Gaucho somewhere on the River Road tonight...

"But it’s not funny. None of it’s funny, really. It’s not funny, because they’re completely broken. The white picket fence, or penthouse, or whatever, isn’t enough to bring any glint of feeling into the couple’s lives; in fact, when wealth and perfection fail to bring them happiness, their spirit immediately faces a huge void. It’s Steely Dan having no fun at all, painted into their own tableau. The man, surrounded by granite countertops stacked with luxury goods, sort of wants someone real—the Gaucho. The Gaucho wants to escape his own drift. The third man tries to play up the Gaucho’s absurdity because he’s heartbroken, he’s been genuinely threatened; his partner has taken another man. Nobody wins. And Steely Dan plays it with cadences like an after-school special; there’s nothing..."

time to re-assess Robert Moses??

""Robert Moses and the Modern City" catalogues and illustrates Moses’s oeuvre in New York City - every pool, beach, neighborhood playground, city park, road and crossing, housing and urban renewal project, along with some miscellaneous ones, like the U.N. headquarters or the Queens Museum’s diorama of New York City - each with a lengthy explanatory and historical entry. (His vast projects on Long Island and upstate fall outside the scope of the book and exhibitions.) The cumulative effect is formidable, with more than 150 pages of projects. And not only are pools and parks redeemed, but highways, reconsidered from a technical-rational point of view, figure favorably. Thus, the Cross-Bronx Expressway, destroyer of urban fabric, becomes, according to the highway’s entry in the book, a “vital link in the city’s modern transport system.” And history strips Moses of authorial control: the road had already appeared in the 1929 Regional Plan of New York - if Moses hadn’t built it, someone else would have. The conflict over the “one mile” in East Tremont becomes representative not only of Moses’s power and inflexibility, but also of “the preeminence of three planning objectives: facilitating regional traffic flows, protecting parks, and reducing residential densities in low-income neighborhoods.” The importance of people, in this re-revision of Moses’s history, fades in comparison to the over-arching planning principles of the day..."