'79 Pirates captain & hall-of-famer Willie Stargell psyching out Pete Rose @ first...

"He doesn't just hit pitchers. He takes away their dignity." --- Don Sutton

 

for the summer mixtape-- Sister Sledge - We Are Family--familar song but had never seen this video, of a short single version which sadly leaves out sister Kathy's long extemporised fade (originally done in one take) but makes up for it with family photos...this one also goes out to fans of the '79 Pirates...
 

a "graphite rubbing of a landscape" from Anodyne
 

strong fifth issue of onedit features Clark Coolidge, Alec Finlay, Frances Kruk, John Landry, Alice Notley, Laura Sims, Matt Turner. Chris Vitiello, editor Tim Atkins & storms out of the gate with Anselm Berrigan's

"Comodesty In Advance

We are grateful to the victors
of the Cold War
who are not us. Leaning back
to begin the deep
soak. It was all abuse hidden
behind a good boy.
That he directed to gradually
shake out of those
around him the method of
interaction he preferred.
Believe what you say,
whatever it is. The phasing
out of complex thought
allows this to take place.
This is what I know, it is all
there has been. I was
born in 1972. I have no
memory of a peaceful
time. I keep writing. Fight
tonight, over a party
standing in for a ceremony we
completed privately.
Fuck it, I say, but the
complications persist. What
is the use of fragmented
engagement with other
people? I like moments that
cut through my brain
spasms of self-conscious
uber-pity. Drunk fuck.
Gully relations picket the fill
in, the dirt poured
to level the ground, scratch
numbers off to see
numbers, a book of prompts,
wear me like, got
away with straddles,
supertankers bearing the
consensus that is your name,
and a powerful ally
it is, a bummer to realize the
world might end
before you die, must head to
gym and be being
that person who will be being
me later than
a little later (sips Becks), it's
puppet serious
spur me along time. The index
cards make it be.
I should have ejected these
hideous clothes.
Fear of being the person who
looks normal
but is in fact a wack-job, then
acceptance. Looks
like we gotta do it again?
Protest fatigues keep
back the hordes. They scream
outside my window
they scream because they are
wasted and live
far away. Memo: could puke
any time.


4/16"

 

another one for the mixtape--Etienne de Crecy - Am I Wrong? (Promo Video)
 

historian Sean Wilentz asks: The Worst President in History?


"Bush seems to think that, since 9/11, he has been placed, by the grace of God, in the same kind of situation Lincoln faced. But Lincoln, under pressure of daily combat on American soil against fellow Americans, did not operate in secret, as Bush has. He did not claim, as Bush has, that his emergency actions were wholly regular and constitutional as well as necessary; Lincoln sought and received Congressional authorization for his suspension of habeas corpus in 1863. Nor did Lincoln act under the amorphous cover of a "war on terror" -- a war against a tactic, not a specific nation or political entity, which could last as long as any president deems the tactic a threat to national security. Lincoln's exceptional measures were intended to survive only as long as the Confederacy was in rebellion. Bush's could be extended indefinitely, as the president sees fit, permanently endangering rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution to the citizenry."


 

another YouTube for the summer mixtape--Herbert - Suddenly (Promo Video) with the great Dani Siciliano (above) on vocals...
 

History Ambushes the Bush Administration

"Domestically, there was the DeLay-style implanting of the Republican Party (and the ready cash infusions from lobbyists that were to fuel it) at the heart of the American political system for at least a Rooseveltian generation, if not forever and a day. This country was to be transformed into a one-party Republican democracy, itself embedded in the confines of a Homeland Security State. Abroad, there was the neocon vision of a pacified planet whose oil heartlands would be nailed down militarily in an updated version of a Pax Romana until hell froze over (or the supplies ran out). If in 2002 or 2003, these seemed like two perfectly fitted sides of a single vision of dominance, it is now apparent that they were essentially always at odds with each other. Both now seem at the edge of collapse."
 

amazing Derelict London

Derelict London is an unusual photographic portrait (of over 1000 pics) of the nations capital.

This is not a compilation of familiar tourist sights, as another of those is hardly needed, but a depiction of an (often un-picturesque) view of everyday life in London."




 

fire up that 303!--Famous Sounds of modern music, including the hallowed Casio VL-Tone--I still have mine!
 

a YouTube arrayed against this gloomy Thursday--Koop - Summer Sun (Promo Video)--a preview of summer's mixtape, with Yukimi Nagano on vocals...

 

Ancient voices recorded on pottery grooves? ...well no, but here's computer pioneer Charles Babbage--

"Let us imagine a being, invested with such knowledge, to examine at a distant epoch the coincidence of the facts with those which his profound analysis had enabled him to predict. If any the slightest deviation existed, he would immediately read in its existence the action of a new cause ; and, through the aid of the same analysis, tracing this discordance back to its source, he would become aware of the time of its commencement, and the point of space at which it originated. Thus considered, what a strange chaos is this wide atmosphere we breathe! Every atom, impressed with good and with ill, retains at once the motions which philosophers and sages have imparted to it, mixed and combined in ten thousand ways with all that is worthless and base. The air itself is one vast library, on whose pages are for ever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered. There, in their mutable but unerring characters, mixed with the earliest, as well as with the latest sighs of mortality, stand for ever recorded, vows unredeemed, promises unfulfilled, perpetuating in the united movements of each particle, the testimony of man's changeful will. But if the air we breathe is the never-failing historian of the sentiments we have uttered, earth, air, and ocean, are the eternal witnesses of the acts we have done."



 

two sections, out of order, from "An Ordinary Evening In New Haven" by Wallace Stevens, from "The Auroras of Autumn" (1950). I read these at the beginning of my last reading, being a rather better version of my Victoria walks than anything I managed!

*

The ephebe is solitary in his walk.
He skips the journalism of subjects, seeks out
The perquisites of sanctity, enjoys

A strong mind in a weak neighborhood and is
A serious man without the serious,
Inactive in his singular respect.

He is neither priest nor proctor at low eve,
Under the birds, among the perilous owls,
In the big X of the returning primitive.

It is a fresh spiritual that he defines,
A coldness in a long, too-constant warmth,
A thing on the side of a house, not deep in a cloud,

A difficulty that we predicate:
The difficulty of the visible
To the nations of the clear invisible,

The actual landscape with its actual horns
Of baker and butcher blowing, as if to hear,
Hear hard, gets an an essential integrity.

*

The plainness of plain things is savagery,
As: the last plainness of a man who has fought
Against illusion and was, in a great grinding

Of growling teeth, and falls at night, snuffed out
By the obese opiates of sleep. Plain men in plain towns
Are not precise about the appeasment they need.

They only know a savage assuagement cries
With a savage voice; and in that cry they hear
Themselves transposed, muted and comforted

In a savage and subtle and simple harmony,
A matching and mating of surprised accords,
A responding to a diviner opposite.

So lewd spring comes from winter's chastity.
So, after summer, in the autumn air,
Comes the cold volume of forgotten ghosts,

But soothingly, with pleasant instruments,
So that this cold, a children's tale of ice,
Seems like a sheen of heat romaticized.



 

answer to the movie question is that Harvey Keitel played Pontius Pilate in Damiano Damiani's underrated 1987 The Inquiry which features Keith Carradine as a detective sent from Rome to investigate the death of Jesus. Contains one of the all-time great Keitel lines--

"Well, he didn't just get up and walk away..."

next question is one Daph gave me that I didn't get--which two actors have been nominated for Oscars in each of the last five decades?


 

(with Buster Keaton)

Rediscovering Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle

Louise Brooks said of him: "He was a wonderful dancer. It was like floating in the arms of a huge doughnut."

another YouTube from 1990--Jan Svankmajer--The Death of Stalinism in Bohemia


(more info here)


 

today's YouTube--Sundays - Here's Where The Story Ends

"it's that little souvenir
of a terrible year..."


 

"RG Harris, McCall's April 1945" from Religious Illustration at the American Art Archives

 

from chapter 15 of David Copperfield


"Mr. Dick and I soon became the best of friends, and very often, when his day's work was done, went out together to fly the great kite. Every day of his life he had a long sitting at the Memorial, which never made the least progress, however hard he laboured, for King Charles the First always strayed into it, sooner or later, and then it was thrown aside, and another one begun. The patience and hope with which he bore these perpetual disappointments, the mild perception he had that there was something wrong about King Charles the First, the feeble efforts he made to keep him out, and the certainty with which he came in, and tumbled the Memorial out of all shape, made a deep impression on me. What Mr. Dick supposed would come of the Memorial, if it were completed; where he thought it was to go, or what he thought it was to do; he knew no more than anybody else, I believe. Nor was it at all necessary that he should trouble himself with such questions, for if anything were certain under the sun, it was certain that the Memorial never would be finished. It was quite an affecting sight, I used to think, to see him with the kite when it was up a great height in the air. What he had told me, in his room, about his belief in its disseminating the statements pasted on it, which were nothing but old leaves of abortive Memorials, might have been a fancy with him sometimes; but not when he was out, looking up at the kite in the sky, and feeling it pull and tug at his hand. He never looked so serene as he did then. I used to fancy, as I sat by him of an evening, on a green slope, and saw him watch the kite high in the quiet air, that it lifted his mind out of its confusion, and bore it (such was my boyish thought) into the skies. As he wound the string in and it came lower and lower down out of the beautiful light, until it fluttered to the ground, and lay there like a dead thing, he seemed to wake gradually out of a dream; and I remember to have seen him take it up, and look about him in a lost way, as if they had both come down together, so that I pitied him with all my heart."



 

my favorite Jesus movie Nicholas Ray's King of Kings (1961) with Jeffrey (Captain Pike) Hunter, Hurd Hatfield as Pontius Pilate, Siobhan McKenna & c. and a great subplot involving anti-imperial agitators Barrabas (Harry Guardino) and Judas (Rip Torn) was happily interrupted by the arrival of pink zinfandel, ham, scalloped potatoes, Nigella's corn pudding, pineapple/apricot upside down cake, not to mention Charles Alexander's first visit to South Wellington. The night before I'd similarly bailed on "The 10 Commandments" at midnight, right after the Red Sea came splashing onto the Egyptians. Hard movie question: Rip Torn and Harvey Keitel both played Judas--which actor went on to portray Pontius Pilate, and in what film?

new doc about Albert Ayler--

"We are the music we play," he told Downbeat magazine in 1966. "We keep trying to purify our music, to purify ourselves, so that we can move ourselves, and those who hear us, to higher levels of peace and understanding."
 

exercise your Darwinian prerogative with this Gorilla Cover Gallery

(via PCL LinkDump)
 

received this from our Baltic/Hanseatic correspondent "Kubrick"...