this Monet & others at the Portland Art Museum until Aug 22 

(Limestone Seacaves, Tobermory,Ontario)

Christopher Dewdney

"Transubstantiation

Devoid of perception the
blind form of the fossil
exists post-factum.
Its movement planetary, tectonic.
The flesh of these words
(as the words must be placed together
in light of theiyr skeletons)
Or rather the motion ascribed to
becomes a vehicle (for Paraclete).

What rises.
From the visible altar
to the altar sublime. Is
Is what we wish to inhabit
just the bread, just the wine.

Erosion unites with process to reveal
form.
Complies with laws
independent of vision.
In formation.
Mirrors.
(a photograph of the author photographing themselves)
At any given moment
moment is solid.

'Generation' of the Son.
'Procession' of the Holy Spirit.
A unicorn
white from existence in the underworld.
Gold is sprinkled on a fossil or
administered intravenously.
(in the late 4th century
the Arians released the unicorn in a cavern
to the thin leathern applause of bats)

'Generation' of Logos.
'Procession' of the Holy Spirit.")  

(Jimmie Rogers, Maybelle, A.P. and Sara Carter) the lyrics of all the Original Carter Family songs--

"Don't Forget This Song

My home's in old Virginia among the lovely hills,
The memory of my birthplace lies in my bosom still.

I did not like my fireside, I did not like my home,
I have a mind for rambling so far away from home.

It was on one moonlight evening the stars were shining bright,
And with an ugly dagger I made the spirit fly.

To friends I'll bid adieu to parents I'll bid farewell,
I landed in Chicago in the very midst of hell.

Twas then the sober struck me as plain as you can see--
I'm doomed I'm ruined forever throughout eternity.

I courted a fair young lady her name I will not tell,
Oh why should I disgrace her when I am doomed for hell?

But now upon my scaffold my time's not very long,
You may forget the singer but don't forget this song." 

The Outcrops of Prehistory
"Ahead of his own time in weighing the balance between nature, commerce, and art, Smithson was also prescient about conflicts over a park's social function. He included the general ideal 'Central Park is a ground work of necessity and chance, a range of contrasting view points that are forever fluctuating, yet solidly based in the earth.' But he deleted the more polemical 'All parks or 'recreation' sites should be able to absolve modifications, but not to the point where Disney-type kiddy villages subvert the organic dialectic, and cover the outcrops of prehistory. The new subway excavations in Central Park are probably more interesting to kids than big plastic Dumbos.'" 

(Seattle's Denny Park, 1903)

Happy Birthday Frederick Law Olmsted! 

Resisting Left Melancholy

"In short, the Left has come to represent a politics that seeks to protect a set of freedoms and entitlements that confronts neither the dominations contained in both nor the limited value of those freedoms and entitlements in contemporary configurations of capitalism. And when this traditionalism is conjoined with a loss of faith in the egalitarian vision so fundamental to the socialist challenge to the capitalist mode of distribution, and a loss of faith in the emancipatory vision fundamental to the socialist challenge to the capitalist mode of production, the problem of left traditionalism becomes very serious indeed. What emerges is a Left that operates without either a deep and radical critique of the status quo or a compelling alternative to the existing order of things. But perhaps even more troubling, it is a Left that has become more attached to its impossibility than to its potential fruitfulness, a Left that is most at home dwelling not in hopefulness but in its own marginality and failure, a Left that is thus caught in a structure of melancholic attachment to a certain strain of its own dead past, whose spirit is ghostly, whose structure of desire is backward looking and punishing. "

(thanks to wood s lot) 

Illinois Jacquet 1928-2004 

Delacroix's Faust 

lots of updates--new work, reviews--at Portland artist Bruce Conkle's site... 

Third two and a half buck movie--"The Hit List"
"Considering that Scott and I did not receive credit, everything we put in the script stayed there and is in the finished film. When we meet Jan Michael Vincent he is doing carpentry on his house and he's a Vietnam vet. Scott and I also added the main gag of the picture -- Lance Henrickson being dragged by a car toward the Severe Tire Damage spikes in a parking lot -- which became both the film's poster and video box. And, of course, the classic 6 swinging around and becoming a 9. "

The great Michael Rooker (here as William Quantrell) of Brown's Requiem, from James Ellroy's first novel, which I also purchased for two and a half bucks. We may be entering the golden age of VHS--like that period when 8-tracks were being phased out & they were giving them away. The flotsam of technology, the jetsam of content.  

William Smith in Run, Angel, Run purchased for $2.49 at the video store 

overegged and overlong but welcome tribute to Chris Penn, which makes up for a lot by correctly identifying his finest performance, in Abel Ferrara's "The Funeral", the only movie about the Mafia that avoids any trace of exculpatory romanticism. The similarly underused Annabella Sciorra was also very fine in it. (salon) 

Jerry Goldsmith, composer of the scores for "Chinatown". "Planet of the Apes" and many others, died. 

Jim Kalb's Palindrome Connection: "A Dan, a clan, a canal - Canada!"

took this sub-sophomoric Expatriate Manifesto as either the working notes of 9th grade debate champion or a knowing parody of the hysterical NYPress house style, but I really think he might be serious...

"(American decline) stalks the parapets of our crumbling democracy, howling at our low voter turn-out and groaning at a republic of television-entranced morons with little knowledge of or interest in the world outside their cycles of compulsive consumption."

Another reason for Canadians to fear a Bush victory--an invasion of smug backpackers. At least in the 60's they might have read a little Marcuse.

Running scared
"To live in America now - at least to live in a port city like Seattle - is to be surrounded by the machinery and rhetoric of covert war, in which everyone must be treated as a potential enemy until they can prove themselves a friend. Surveillance and security devices are everywhere: the spreading epidemic of razor wire, the warnings in public libraries that the FBI can demand to know what books you're borrowing, the Humvee laden with troops in combat fatigues, the Coast Guard gunboats patrolling the bay, the pat-down searches and x-ray machines, the nondescript grey boxes, equipped with radio antennae, that are meant to sniff out pathogens in the air. It's difficult to leave the house now without encountering at least one of these reminders that we are being watched and that we live in deadly peril - though in peril of quite what is hard to say. "

George Romero " Zombies ain't supposed to move fast. They're supposed to be dead, man. " 

It's Delightful, It's Delicious--It's Wrong
"But the worst thing "De-Lovely" does to Porter's music isn't musical, precisely; it's interpretive. After a few bars of 'In the Still of the Night,' the angel Gabe says, 'You wrote that for her, of course.' Porter responds, reasonably, 'A song doesn't have to be about someone.' The rest of the movie ignores this caution, and makes Porter out to be a kind of proto-James Taylor. It shows Porter jotting down a love song upon waking beside Linda, and generally suggests that his lyrics closely tracked his personal life. This is to impose a rock 'n' roll--or perhaps singer-songwriter--aesthetic on a prerock mode of production. Notions of sincerity and self-expression have little direct application to songsmiths of Porter's era, who produced romantic, rueful, or raucous material according to the needs of a given form, be it stage show, film, or the individually marketed song. " 

Germaine Greer--this goes for Canada too of course.
"'Australia doesn't owe whitefellas (including me) a living. They should stop ripping its guts out for a pittance, and sit on the ground. Sit on the ground, damn you, and think, think about salination, desertification, dieback, deforestation, species extinction, erosion, suburbanisation, complacency, greed and stupidity. As if.'" 

Robert Wyatt's "Cuckooland" nominated for Mercury prize: "'I think it would be a disgrace if anything came of it,' the 59-year-old told The Daily Telegraph. " 

LBJ's scar and the King's two bodies: "Trying to allay suspicions that Johnson was seriously ill, press secretary Bill Moyers 'snowed [the White House press corps] with details,' including full-color anatomical slides, and the news media duly carried daily reports of Johnson's convalescence, including such minutiae as how well the president slept on particular nights, Lady Bird planting a tree outside the hospital room window, and his viewing of 'Hello, Dolly!' on television. Unfortunately, Moyers had no idea how far the president was willing to take the full disclosure policy. On October 20, Johnson was holding forth to the press as he sunned himself on the Bethesda Naval Hospital grounds. 'Apparently feeling words to be inadequate' in describing how he felt, the Baltimore Sun's Muriel Dobbin reported, 'the President whipped up his blue knit sport shirt,' and, as Time put it, 'let the whole world inspect the ugly twelve-inch seam under his right rib cage' where the surgeons had done their work. Many newspapers and both major newsmagazines carried a photo that week of a squatting, squinting LBJ exposing his flesh for the press." 

Interesting looking doc on PBS tonight: "But 'Last Man Standing' meticulously delves beneath the surface--the filmmakers shot 200 hours of footage over five months--and stereotypes of Texas politics fall by the wayside. For one thing, Texas itself is on the cusp of a sweeping demographic change that threatens to unsettle the state and nation's political landscape."

(Later: this was rather good. Seeing the young (24!) Democrat
Patrick Rose--bucking a statewide trend--narrowly defeat his predictably sociopathic rival made for gripping TV. And early on, there were great colour shots of a white-suited LBJ doing some fancy walking horse dressage...) 

The Drunken Silenus, 1628
Jusepe de Ribera (Jativa, Spain 1591-1652 Naples)

from The Metropolitan Museum of Art - Special Exhibitions: Poets, Lovers, and Heroes in Italian Mythological Prints
(thanks again Plep) 

free tunes by STEREO TOTAL and many others at Kill Rock Stars mp3's 

Like the one early last Thursday, the quake was centred off the west coast of Vancouver Island in the Nootka Sound area. The biggest one I ever felt was a couple of years back, and it was like a big truck going through a violent gear change right outside the room. With lots of giant cheap subwoofer action. Any memory of these two recent quakes sadly to be found in the file folder marked "misc. unsorted responses to false alarms; see cats, porch umbrella..." 

from Seven Oaks Magazine, an Alberta NDP candidate detects a whiff of change in the Hinterland. Our experience in Nanaimo-Cowichan certainly bears her out.

"Alexa McDonough, a former leader of the NDP states that winning takes three elections.

The first election shows who and what you are. The second election reinforces the trust that was built in the first election. The third election drives home that the NDP is really the best choice for the constituency.

In the Hinterland, we have begun to build that trust. That we are willing to work so hard for what seems to be a lost cause is already beginning to pay off. "

The Flying Yankee: " The Flying Yankee is a three car articulated train that was said to be the first streamlined train east of the Mississippi. "

No longer runs of course, but travelled between Boston and Bangor.  

Trouts and Seasons of The Mountain Village--papercraft and fishing stories...

"The river's summer come around with cicada after the rainy season.
I'm soaked with sweat and go up the river
but there isn't good fishing though I got so tired. The Japanese proverb says
"There's only one trout for every 2.5 miles in summer".
I give up and take a nap in the shade of the tree." 

all of Maud: A Monodrama

Then I rise, the eavedrops fall,
And the yellow vapours choke
The great city sounding wide;
The day comes, a dull red ball
Wrapt in drifts of lurid smoke
On the misty river-tide.