some trees from the magnificent & easy to use Library of Congress Flickr site...

"Unwanted Christmas Tree Blocking Sidewalk" from Mongibeddu in Maine...

interesting article on archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes--

"Was her bold attempt to make archeology sexy her downfall? The documents left behind offer fascinating clues, but it is a challenge to find the "real" Jacquetta. There are gems in the spoil heap: a table charting her child's height and weight; a poem begun on civil-service notepaper; a Newnham College shopping list heavy with biscuits and flowers; train times for clandestine meetings with Jack; educational postcards to Nicolas; studio photos; snaps of family pets; lists of bird sightings; excitedly shared purchases from New York department stores and pueblo gift shops; a single long silver-grey hair left on her dark cape in the wardrobe of her last bedroom..."


her magnificent A Land, which I've tried to be influenced by!

a Caturday tribute to the late great Ivor Cutler---

Shoplifters

Pussy On The Mat

The Dirty Dinner

Looking for truth with a pin

Go and Sit Upon the Grass

his Telegraph obit...

Bookslut has an interview with terrific poet Laynie Brown--

"Paradox is not synonymous with contradiction. Through this lens any separation, such as forest from sentence is illusory..."

via Ron a tough review of Alter's Psalms though nice to hear a good word for the underrated Jerusalem Bible (didn't know Tolkien did Jonah...)

two great movies finally out on DVD--The Naked Prey & Payday, with Cornel Wilde & Rip Torn, respectively...

The Triumph of Bush

"It’s assumed that the plastic fantastic alternative universe fashioned by the Bushies and the neocons—remember the famous boast to Ron Suskind from the unnamed Bush aide in The New York Times Magazine, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality”?—has ignominiously popped upon contact with brute reality, sending a former demigod such as Donald Rumsfeld crashing into the cornfield and ejecting Condoleezza Rice into an endless orbit of mortified futility. But perhaps we’re the ones living in Bizarro World, not the Bushies. Maybe from their vantage point inside the mother ship nearly everything’s worked out as intended, if not exactly as planned, and those in the highest circles have no more reason to examine their consciences or re-trace their steps than the perpetrators of a successful heist. For years, a few voices on the radical edges of the blogosphere have contended that sowing chaos in the Middle East, privatizing war to enrich their corporate sponsors, and letting things slide to hell at home were what the lords of misrule wanted—that the bungling and incompetence of the war and Katrina weren’t bugs, but features. After all, the post-Katrina diaspora has redounded to the benefit of the Republicans with the election of Bobby Jindal to the Louisiana governorship, his victory made possible in part by the dispersement of black voters displaced by the floods..."

and in related news--Forest Rangers Fan Site

"What Canadian kid growing up in the 1960's or 1970's could forget the immensely popular television series The Forest Rangers or the opening melodic theme. This ever-whistleable musical piece met the colourful backdrop of wilderness scenes set in Ontario's Great Outdoors. Here, a group of kids- Junior Forest Rangers- live, work and play in a large Hudson's Bay fort, while their older and wiser friends from the mythical town of Indian River look on. (Indian River lies just north of Algonquin Park and has a population of 317). The junior rangers were the envy of many kids the world over for they came complete with a fort, ham radios, walkie-talkies, horses, ranger t-shirts, a Smokey the Bear flag and most of all-- "ADVENTURE!!" "

for your consideration: Gordon Pinsent

“I was a boy who simply liked to see movies, living in a small town,” he says. “I had no idea at all that I would ever fly out of there. I wasn’t very useful to a family trying to put food on the table, and I don’t know how I might have looked to others, because mine was a useless dream to have in such a place. I would put on my own little plays in the woodshed — and in a larger sense, that woodshed was it for me.”

THE REALIST ARCHIVE PROJECT

"...an authorized and complete republishing of all 146 issues of Paul Krassner's Classic and Uncompromising The Realist Magazine..."


Krassner's most notorious piece--people throw that word Swiftian around, but....

evening of Val Lewton on TCM tonight includes Martin Scorsese's new doc--

much more Lewtonia .....

YouTube - Fred Frith & Evelyn Glennie - A Little Prayer

Zeva Oelbaum: Hand to Hand

"Manipulating imagery from her families’ books and others sourced from the Jewish community, Oelbaum creates a body of work that transforms markings written in multiple languages –– Latin, Russian, German, Polish, Aramaic, and Yiddish –– into a coherent visual story. With her camera, Oelbaum immortalizes the inherent lyricism in a word, a scribble, and even something as seemingly insignificant as an ink blot, as they dance across the page, transformed from language to pure form..."


Nextbook: Biblical Marginalia

Dr. Miller is a little more skeptical of the markings’ importance, and gently teases the photographer: “It’s scribbling, it’s scribbling!” Asked if anyone else had shown interest in the topic, he replies, “Not that I know of. It’s so common, it’s vokhedik, as we say in Yiddish, it’s everyday. I couldn’t tell you how many thousands of books we have here with that kind of little graffiti. Zeva’s attuned to it, she’s perceived it as art, the way Andy Warhol saw art in Campbell’s soup cans. Whenever I find something now, an endpaper that she’d think is yummy, I set it aside for her.”

some trees from Changing Times: Los Angeles in Photographs, 1920-1990

YouTube - Dusty Springfield - All Cried Out

catching up with great singer Shelby Lynne, whose just done an album of Dusty Springfield songs--

“I don’t have an iPod,” she said. “I have a computer that I turn on occasionally. I still have all my vinyl. Sisssy says she has no room in her apartment for records, but I’d keep mine even if I had to sleep on them. You can’t roll a joint on an iPod.”

YouTube - Shelby Lynne "I Only Want To Be With You"

YouTube - Dusty Springfield - Can I Get A Witness

"Sweet Bird of Youth" & "Summer and Smoke" make up a Tennessee Williams/Geraldine Page (she originated both roles on the stage) double bill on TCM starting at 500...

Local trees

from Robert Bolano's "Dictionary of Nazi Literature in the Americas"--The Many Masks of Max Mirebelais--

"MAX MIREBALAIS, alias MAX KASIMIR, MAX VON HAUPTMAN, MAX LE GUEULE, JACQUES ARTIBONITO

Port-au-Prince, 1941—Les Cayes, 1998

His real name was probably Max Mirebalais, although we will never know for sure. His first steps in literature remain mysterious: one day he turned up in a newspaper editor's office; the next, he was out on the streets, looking for stories, or more often running errands for the senior staff. In the course of his apprenticeship, he was subjected to all the miseries and servitudes of Haitian journalism. But thanks to his determination, after two years, he rose to the position of assistant social reporter for the Port-au-Prince Monitor, and in that capacity, awed and puzzled, he attended parties and soirées held in the capital's grandest houses. There can be no doubt that as soon as he glimpsed that world, he wanted to belong to it. He soon realized that there were only two ways to achieve his aim: through violence, which was out of the question, since he was peaceable and timorous by nature, appalled by the mere sight of blood; or through literature, which is a surreptitious form of violence, a passport to respectability, and can, in certain young and sensitive nations, disguise the social climber's origins..."