Radio Free Flatbush
"He drives a cab by day. At night, he broadcasts Haitian gospel music somewhere between Flatbush and Crown Heights with the help of a used, low-power FM transmitter that he bought from a friend for $1500. Last Saturday night he was parked on 87.9 FM.

'My music is my ministry,' he says with a thick Creole accent and gravelly voice. 'But there's no one in Brooklyn who knows my place. Even my wife, I can'tt tell her. I am always traveling. I don't even get time to sleep.'"

Soup

Popsicle art

Fort Tryon

Van Cortlandt Park

did most of this between the bridges tour myself, but would still have been fun

Lunar Eclipse

Alfred Hitchcock mosaics

Michael Bracewell hosts Mark. E Smith: "I remembered too late that these kinds of events - 'In Conversations', bookshop appearances and so forth - are wholly bourgeois in their conception: they presuppose a complicity between the audience, subject and interviewer, in which a kind of broadsheet notion of edification is the predominant tone. And I was face to face with the man who had written Prole Art Threat in 1979 and thrown Courtney Love off a tour bus. A man who preferred to get arrested by the LAPD rather than put out his fag on a plane. Smith had lambasted all the institutions of middle-class popular culture, from open-air festivals to student vegans; and as his greatest hero was Wyndham Lewis, so he assumed his best-known public mask of being The Enemy. No matter that I'd seen The Fall maybe 20 times, no matter that I listened to the records with unceasing enthusiasm, and had written about them as vital works of contemporary art. I came across like Wilfrid Hyde-White trying to interview Eminem"

Purple frog delights scientists

Bellona Times: "Sofia Coppola wants to make herself look good the way Woody Allen used to make himself look good, but she's unable or unwilling to provide her stand-in with any distinguishing marks."

Allodox reviews overrated Lost In Translation: "Saw the movie at the crappy early 90s theater on Third Ave, around 11th St. 4 overlit floors. But the ticketseller back and forth courteous in an unforced way - pain reduction all around. On the way out, very humid, with fast thick fog passing across upper buildings and lights. Inflected greys and sharp whites. Some reflections from all the glass further uptown. Could just sort of glimpse the red-lit spire of a big gothic insurance building on Park South.

The new traffic signals and iconic pedestrian signage reduce the number of differences between Tokyo and New York."

craven realpolitik from Canada's national newspaper: "There is a larger issue. The United States has invited Canada to join in creating the so-called North American Security Perimeter. The success of that perimeter depends on close interdepartmental co-operation among the many police, intelligence, customs and immigration agencies in both countries."

Multi-intelligence matters: "Mr. Easter told reporters yesterday he did not know how the Americans obtained the lease, but said it did not come from the RCMP, and might have been obtained by foreign intelligence agencies.
'That particular document, there are multi-intelligence agencies involved in these matters,' he said.
'Just because it happens to be a lease does not necessarily mean it came from Canadian sources,' he said. 'Of course, I'm worried about it. I'm always concerned about illegal matters.'"

Diplomacy: "'I don't know if diplomacy blinds them to the obvious,' said Mr. McTeague. 'But it's pretty clear when a person is busted up and kept in those kind of conditions and he's trying to signal to you with three of his tormentors who happen to be around him, that there is something wrong.'"

The Soft Power Argument: "Sampson suggested that the Canadian government decided to take a soft approach to his case so as not to anger officials in Riyadh.
'I'm not convinced the soft power argument has worked in my case or other cases,' he said. 'If the Canadian government wanted to effect an earlier release, they have to be prepared to much more publicly declaim the government's concerns.'
'Because of the political clout that Saudi Arabia supposedly has, people were hiding behind the soft-power argument to do nothing.'
Saudi Arabia has rejected a formal Canadian request for an investigation into Sampson's imprisonment. They insist the torture did not happen and that Sampson is still guilty of the bombing."

NATIONAL POST: "Reporters asked Bill Graham, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, how this document came to be in the possession of the FBI, but he had nothing to offer but his own confusion.
'If I could answer that question, I wouldn't be Foreign Minister, I'd be the divine. There are many things that are unanswerable,' he replied."

Democracy Now! | Canadian Man Deported by U.S. Details Torture in Syria: "On Wednesday, officials told the Washington Post anonymously that the U.S. knowingly sends suspects abroad to be tortured. One official said 'The temptation is to have these folks in other hands because they have different standards,' while another said, 'Someone might be able to get information we can't from detainees.'"

Continues clear and cold here. The thick frost via the brushwork of Denzil Best w/George Shearing ca. 1951(thank you Rod) doesn't begin to budge before full sun hits it early afternoon.

A walk with Gilbert White (PDF)

Water proof: Dinosaur secret revealed: "This is where the mystery comes in. In many places, including Texas and Korea, researchers have found sauropod footprints -- but only from the front feet. Henderson, whose work combines paleontology with biomechanics, says the dinosaurs were floating, and were able to punt along the bottom with their front feet."

Baltic Light

Found the catalogue for this show on the sale table at the National Gallery bookstore in DC.

Deal for Nanaimo band is short on land, long on weasel words

Field's Chip Shop and lots more from the Amber Collective

Las Vegas sign graveyard

more on the Gunpowder Plot

"I am a Syrian-born Canadian. "
Canada's complicity with the appalling treatment of this man by US and Syrian officials is shameful and scandalous. I experienced an extremely minor version of this when I was "refused" at the border trying to get to Portland, Ore. last month--I was fingerprinted, photographed and interrogated for no stated reason--and it was trauma and humiliation enough. The anguish of this man, as innocent as I was but unprotected by whiteness, can scarcely be imagined.

The Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union: "36-G (Buffalo, N.Y.)-Cheerios, Kix, Total, Lucky Charms, Wheaties"

Found photos

Kind words on George and myself's St Mark's reading via THE PHILLY SOUND: New Poetry from gypsy queen bowling sensation Cori Copp...

Many thanks to everyone who organised and came to my readings, but especially to George Stanley and Bernadette Mayer, the poets I was fortunate enough to read with. Their shining models of sustained attentiveness could not help but flatter and enhance my efforts.

Home to this bright clear cold fall here after 80 Fahrenheit in Fort Tryon the day before yesterday. Not one Protestant firework last night, though a hundred years ago...

In Scotland (late 60's/early 70's) I remember huge bonfires, Bengal matches (which were regular matches with huge heads which burned in different colours--sold to children for thruppence literally!-- wrapped in a swatch of a provincial newspaper from the midlands, a red elephant on the yellow box) and being given cocoa and a baked potato. Helicopters would fly up and down the UK photographing the bonfires for TV. The implied assertion of the crown's legitimacy very much in the picture.