off to Hazelwood Herb Farm this a.m. to get a big jar of the best habanero jelly in the world...
Friday, May 20, 2005
from the peerless Ben Katchor's Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer
On Election Day, Mr. Knipl has a light supper...
Why Conservatives Should Thank Chuck Cadman
"But if you are talking about government functioning in the interests of ordinary Canadians, families, communities and the nation, Parliament functioned better yesterday than it has at any time in the past twenty years. Forget the lack of so-called 'decorum,' the name-calling, the opportunism of the Liberals and the motives of Belinda Stronach. Who cares? If you are keeping your eye on the prize, for the first time in a long time, Canadians actually got out of a federal government what they have been saying for over a decade that they want: a return to activist government which operates in their interests and not in the exclusive interests of corporations and the wealthy.
And they got it because the NDP's leader Jack Layton was able to leverage just 19 seats - a fifth of what the over-represented Conservatives have - to achieve a package of progressive funding arrangements for the environment, cities, affordable housing, child care and universities. All the machinations aside, that is what happened May 19th as the Liberal government managed to win a budget vote by the skin of its teeth"
"But if you are talking about government functioning in the interests of ordinary Canadians, families, communities and the nation, Parliament functioned better yesterday than it has at any time in the past twenty years. Forget the lack of so-called 'decorum,' the name-calling, the opportunism of the Liberals and the motives of Belinda Stronach. Who cares? If you are keeping your eye on the prize, for the first time in a long time, Canadians actually got out of a federal government what they have been saying for over a decade that they want: a return to activist government which operates in their interests and not in the exclusive interests of corporations and the wealthy.
And they got it because the NDP's leader Jack Layton was able to leverage just 19 seats - a fifth of what the over-represented Conservatives have - to achieve a package of progressive funding arrangements for the environment, cities, affordable housing, child care and universities. All the machinations aside, that is what happened May 19th as the Liberal government managed to win a budget vote by the skin of its teeth"
Thursday, May 19, 2005
"Intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana," by Edith Helena is a vocal imitation of a violin playing Mascagni's well known composition. It is one of the most novel and at the same time most clever Records so far made for the Edison catalogue. Miss Helena sings this on the vaudeville stage, playing a violin in pantomime the while. In our Record the final notes are sung just to convince the listeners that the violin is being imitated.
— April 1907 Edison Phonograph Monthly [announcing the June records] "
Baghdad Burning
"Now Newsweek have retracted the story- obviously under pressure from the White House. Is it true? Probably… We've seen enough blatant disregard and disrespect for Islam in Iraq the last two years to make this story sound very plausible. On a daily basis, mosques are raided, clerics are dragged away with bags over their heads… Several months ago the world witnessed the execution of an unarmed Iraqi prisoner inside a mosque. Is this latest so very surprising?
Detainees coming back after weeks or months in prison talk of being forced to eat pork, not being allowed to pray, being exposed to dogs, having Islam insulted and generally being treated like animals trapped in a small cage. At the end of the day, it's not about words or holy books or pork or dogs or any of that. It's about what these things symbolize on a personal level. It is infuriating to see objects that we hold sacred degraded and debased by foreigners who felt the need to travel thousands of kilometers to do this. That's not to say that all troops disrespect Islam- some of them seem to genuinely want to understand our beliefs. It does seem like the people in charge have decided to make degradation and humiliation a policy.
By doing such things, this war is taken to another level- it is no longer a war against terror or terrorists- it is, quite simply, a war against Islam and even secular Muslims are being forced to take sides."
"Now Newsweek have retracted the story- obviously under pressure from the White House. Is it true? Probably… We've seen enough blatant disregard and disrespect for Islam in Iraq the last two years to make this story sound very plausible. On a daily basis, mosques are raided, clerics are dragged away with bags over their heads… Several months ago the world witnessed the execution of an unarmed Iraqi prisoner inside a mosque. Is this latest so very surprising?
Detainees coming back after weeks or months in prison talk of being forced to eat pork, not being allowed to pray, being exposed to dogs, having Islam insulted and generally being treated like animals trapped in a small cage. At the end of the day, it's not about words or holy books or pork or dogs or any of that. It's about what these things symbolize on a personal level. It is infuriating to see objects that we hold sacred degraded and debased by foreigners who felt the need to travel thousands of kilometers to do this. That's not to say that all troops disrespect Islam- some of them seem to genuinely want to understand our beliefs. It does seem like the people in charge have decided to make degradation and humiliation a policy.
By doing such things, this war is taken to another level- it is no longer a war against terror or terrorists- it is, quite simply, a war against Islam and even secular Muslims are being forced to take sides."
Wednesday, May 18, 2005
Tyee Election Central Blog has a good round-up of news & views about the BC election. Very happy the Island is back to being a sea of NDP orange. (not pictured)
Tuesday, May 17, 2005
Aquatic Park, San Francisco
"Nature is a Haunted House--but Art--a House that tries to be haunted" Los Angeles, Trauma, and Orphic Anxiety in the Work of Jack Spicer, by Alicia Cohen
"Spicer's world is not spatially stable like the world we find represented in the poetry of Whitman. In the world of Spicer's poetry, things do not stay in their proper places. In a spatially stable world, not only does the road one walks have constancy; one doesn't hear voices calling out from the spirit world as one traverses it, nor suffer the traumas of a dead man's crucifixion long past. Spicer, as Orphic poet, remembers the death and vertigo of the murdered and disembodied by opening to alien voices not his own. The difference between visible spatial regularity--roads that "go somewhere"--which is found in Whitman, and an unrepresentable world of spatial irregularity--where you are lucky if you can even know the road is there--is the heart of the difference between the poetries of Whitman and Spicer. Whitman's work is obsessed with gorgeous vistas of an American landscape, and with the vital living bodies of healthy men and women of a democratic polis. Spicer can barely see a thing, but his landscape is loud with invisible voices. He loves too, but without the comfort of laying his eyes upon the beloved's beautiful, stable form. Only their strange and often incoherent voices are embodied in the language of the poem."
Monday, May 16, 2005
amongst much else at gmtplus9 is an mp3 (Sunday 8th) of one of my very favorite songs, "How Much I've Lied" by Gram Parsons.
The hollow double tonk--timbre somewhere between a Fender Rhodes and a child's knuckle on a picture window--of the raven overhead evokes the tart agnosticism of Dolphy on the Village Vanguard dates, each solo built up from a couple of notes like cell division, flipping like real estate, vocalic, a wet knot of material unravelling and then its the laces and then its a new knot again, a little tight which is good: meanwhile Coltrane has installed the drapes, driven you to the airport and won't shut up. An epidemic of scattered applause greeted the New Thing, as out of the cthonic mists of Hawthornian repression came the men whose beards had been struck by lightning. Wedding the iron control of Sousa with the prophetic indignation of John Brown they stood at the pillars of the Williamsburg Bridge blowing as if the very rivets would begin to loosen, the hinges of capital buckle and hesitate. And let us have a moment of silence before six punters look up in time to slap their palms twice against their wrists before resuming a loud-voiced, multi-pocket token search.
rich, interestingly illustrated essay on a sequence in Abel Ferrara's "Body Snatchers", which had BC's own Meg Tilly in an amazing performance--Come Into My Sleep
"The impassive stepmother waits for her spouse in the hallway, hoping to convince him to not resist --for life will be beautiful if, like everybody else, he just renounces emotion and individuality. And she recites the bewitching chant that "Body Snatchers" reworks from a tormented love scene in Budd Boetticher's "The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond" (1960): "Where you gonna go? Where ya gonna run? Where ya gonna hide? Nowhere. Coz there's no one ... like you ... left." "
(via GreenCine Daily)
Krugman--Staying What Course?
"But the American military isn't just bogged down in Iraq; it's deteriorating under the strain. We may already be in real danger: what threats, exactly, can we make against the North Koreans? That John Bolton will yell at them?"
"But the American military isn't just bogged down in Iraq; it's deteriorating under the strain. We may already be in real danger: what threats, exactly, can we make against the North Koreans? That John Bolton will yell at them?"
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