...the underrated 1975 train-set Charles Bronson oater Breakheart Pass (nice poster too!) is on TCM at 1900 as part of a four-movie tribute to cinematographer Lucien ("Wild Bunch") Ballard which starts with "Ride the High Country" and continues with "The Killing". Tough to mess up trains as a cinematic subject, though. Remember seeing this one with Dad in the theatre. Recommended too a bit later Gerd Oswald's creepy, unusual "A Kiss Before Dying", the best thing Robert Wagner ever did, also with Joanne Woodward as twins... (later: only one Joanne I'm afraid, was confusing it with the remake with Sean Young and Matt Dillon. But boy director Oswald sure had a weird, widescreen eye--people moving against quarries and endless avenues in stiff tableaus unaware of the monster, closer to "L'aventura" than Hitchcock...)

William Shenstone, The Leasowes, and Landscape Gardening

"For rural virtues, and for native skies,
I bade Augusta's venal sons farewell;
Now 'mid the trees I see my smoke arise,
Now hear the fountains bubbling round my cell."

from Isaac D'Israeli's Curiosities of Literature: The Domestic Life of a Poet--Shenstone Vindicated

It was now that he entered into another species of poetry, working with too costly materials, in the magical composition of plants, water, and earth; with these he created those emotions, which his more strictly poetical ones failed to excite. He planned a paradise amidst his solitude.

When we consider that SHENSTONE, in developing his fine pastoral ideas in the Leasowes, educated the nation into that taste for landscape-gardening which has become the model of all Europe, this itself constitutes a claim on the gratitude of posterity. Thus the private pleasures of a man of genius may become at length those of a whole people. The creator of this new taste appears to have received far less notice than he merited. The name of SHENSTONE does not appear in the Essay on Gardening, by Lord Orford: even the supercilious Gray only bestowed a ludicrous image on these pastoral scenes, which, however, his friend Mason has celebrated; and the genius of Johnson, incapacitated by nature to touch on objects of rural fancy, after describing some of the offices of the landscape designer, adds, that "he will not inquire whether they demand any great powers of mind." Johnson, however, conveys to us his own feelings, when he immediately expresses them under the character of "a sullen and surly speculator." The anxious life of SHENSTONE would indeed have been remunerated, could he have read the enchanting eulogium of WHEATLEY on the Leasowes; which, said he, "is a perfect picture of his mind" simple, elegant, and amiable; and will always suggest a doubt whether the spot inspired his verse, or whether, in the scenes which he formed, he only realised the pastoral images which abound in his songs. Yes! SHENSTONE had been delighted could he have heard that Montesquieu, on his return home, adorned his Chateau Gothique, mais orne de bois charmans, dont j'ai pris ledee en Angleterre;and SHENSTONE, even with his modest and timid nature, had been proud to have witnessed a noble foreigner, amidst memorials dedicated to Theocritus and Virgil, to Thomson and Gesner, raising in his grounds an inscription, in bad English, but in pure taste, to SHENSTONE himself; for having displayed in his writings "a mind natural," and in his Leasowes "laid Arcadian greens rural;" and recently Pindemonte has traced the taste of English gardening to SHENSTONE. A man of genius sometimes receives from foreigners, who are placed out of the prejudices of his compatriots, the tribute of posterity!

Amidst these rural elegancies which SHENSTONE was raising about him, his muse has pathetically sung his melancholy feelings--

"But did the Muses haunt his cell,
Or in his dome did Venus dwell?
When all the structures shone complete,
Ah me! 'twas Damon's own confession,
Came Poverty, and took possession."

THE PROGRESS OF TASTE.

The poet observes, that the wants of philosophy are contracted, satisfied with "cheap contentment," but

"Taste alone requires
Entire profusion! days and nights, and hours,
Thy voice, hydropic Fancy! calls aloud
For costly draughts".

ECONOMY.
An original image illustrates that fatal want of economy which conceals itself amidst the beautiful appearances of taste:

"Some graceless mark,
Some symptom ill-conceal'd, shall soon or late
Burst like a pimple from the vicious tide
Of acid blood, proclaiming want's disease
Amidst the bloom of show."

ECONOMY.
He paints himself:

"Observe Florelio's mien;
Why treads my friend with melancholy step
That beauteous lawn? Why pensive strays his eye
O'er statues, grottoes, urns, by critic art
Proportion'd fair? or from his lofty dome
Returns his eye unpleased, disconsolate?"

The cause is "criminal expense," and he exclaims,

"Sweet interchange
Of river, valley, mountain, woods, and plains,
How gladsome once he ranged your native turf,
Your simple scenes how raptur'd! ere EXPENSE
Had lavish'd thousand ornaments, and taught
Convenience to perplex him, Art to pall,
Pomp to deject, and Beauty to displease."

ECONOMY.
While SHENSTONE was rearing hazels and hawthorns, opening vistas, and winding waters;

"And having shown them where to stray,
Threw little pebbles in their way;"

while he was pulling down hovels and cowhouses, to compose mottoes and inscriptions for garden-seats and urns; while he had so finely obscured with a tender gloom the grove of Virgil, and thrown over, "n the midst of a plantation of yew, a bridge of one arch, built of a dusky-coloured stone, and simple even to rudeness," and invoked Oberon in some Arcadian scene;

"here in cool grot and mossy cell
The tripping fauns and fairies dwell;"

the solitary magician, who had raised all these wonders, was, in reality, an unfortunate poet, the tenant of a dilapidated farmhouse, where the winds passed through, and the rains lodged, often taking refuge in his own kitchen--

"Far from all resort of mirth
Save the cricket on the hearth!"

In a letter of the disconsolate founder of landscape-gardening, our author paints his situation with all its misery--menting that his house is not fit to receive "polite friends, were they so disposed;" and resolved to banish all others, he proceeds:

"But I make it a certain rule, "arcere profanum vulgus."Persons who will despise you for the want of a good set of chairs, or an uncouth fire-shovel, at the same time that they can't taste any excellence in a mind that overlooks those things; with whom it is in vain that your mind is furnished, if the walls are naked; indeed one loses much of one's
acquisitions in virtue by an hour's converse with such as judge of merit by money "yet I am now and then impelled by the social passion to sit half an hour in my kitchen."

Ben Kingsley unforgettable as Don Logan in Sexy Beast on Bravo at 1800, with Ray Winstone and Ian McShane...
 

12/05/06 1420-1431hrs

On the high-pixel version
of the new urbanism I guess we'd
be the puff of cloud clinging
to a chalet-speckled hillside
like Col. Sanders goatee--
happy to be in the picture at all!
if not without the sheep's similar
critique of its meadow:
that it is not sufficiently flat,
that objects are not transparent,
for just beyond the folded rocks
--Doughty's "heaps of witness"--
are the proving grounds
where ALL the styles are tested
& hard pretzel salt covers the trees
& the easter island faces of the dogs
glare up from helmets filled with milk.

Repeating Lenin by Slavoj Zizek

"My personal experience is that practically all of the “radical” academics silently count on the long-term stability of the American capitalist model, with the secure tenured position as their ultimate professional goal (a surprising number of them even play on the stock market). If there is a thing they are genuinely horrified of, it is a radical shattering of the (relatively) safe life environment of the “symbolic classes” in the developed Western societies. Their excessive Politically Correct zeal when dealing with sexism, racism, Third World sweatshops, etc., is thus ultimately a defense against their own innermost identification, a kind of compulsive ritual whose hidden logic is: “Let’s talk as much as possible about the necessity of a radical change to make it sure that nothing will really change!” Symptomatic is here the journal October: when you ask one of the editors to what the title refers, they will half-confidentially signal that it is, of course, THAT October — in this way, one can indulge in the jargonistic analyses of the modern art, with the hidden assurance that one is somehow retaining the link with the radical revolutionary past... With regard to this radical chic, the first gesture towards the Third Way ideologists and practitioners should be that of praise: they at least play their game in a straight way, and are honest in their acceptance of the global capitalist coordinates, in contrast to the pseudo-radical academic Leftists who adopt towards the Third Way the attitude of utter disdain, while their own radicality ultimately amounts to an empty gesture which obliges no one to anything determinate."

10/05/06 1301-1319hrs

Mickey Rooney and Oz whose also
the last of the old school telegraphists
hand-eating coconut cream
& apple in the back office at night,
Mickey, 15 , high-necked Cruikshank collar
his version of turn-of-the-century normal
means each gesture is unpacked
in a series of boxes wrapped in tissue:
how nice to see the great ones "underplay"--
and leave off of Tim Holt by the way
his Georgie is what you're really like
and I'm really like lets face it--
pontificating with our mouths full of pie
as traffic and progress darken the sky.

new documentary on Cornelius Cardew reviewed here...

"Archival footage of this performance takes in a floor strewn with items including a record-player, a cheese grater and balls of cotton wool, and performers carrying out actions and gestures such as skimming tiny stones across the surface of a drum or strumming on a gilt plate rack. Pieces such as these were shaped by Cardew's rhetorical remark, "If it is possible to spin gold from straw, surely it is possible to spin bronze from brown paper, or silver from the waterfall?""


 

Henry Fonda and Brooklyn's own Ruby Stevens (Barbara Stanwyck) in comedy/thriller The Mad Miss Manton on TCM tonight...
 

THE PRESIDENT: I have no ideas abounding in rugs. And if in a position to justify unblocking thermodynamics to comb the jobs -- Darwinize, Iran -- a wholesalers lot of issues, so be it. I delineate therapeutic decompressions and abort the ruggedness to my wifely.

Then I hash to have the strangler ministered. I ordain to be such, in my judith, as therewith I sail as you tack perfunctorily, but I want it to say "optimal persianizations." Heresy is thematics restrained. Isn't it beautifier?

Q. Yesterday, it was Vera Beatnik.

THE PRESIDENT: A sentential of optic wheeled in to compete with the heroes... Andalusia's reasonings why! Optimal abolishers whack with what the youth're doing. A bellyfull yourself if verging southfield! Thermals looping at the mover, my handy makeups leaflet betsey's tomography...

As Thatch's Westbrook is Textured, so are a thousand arenas othello Texas painstaking. Leap if you're Textured, reformatory Waynesboro in the thirties. The abolitionist Washburn wanting me to characterize -- the theme being their -- nothingness chairwomen, youngly knotted nowhere, maya chancing tachometers, am I going to choose my corrosive bellwether? A bellicose freckle is unidirectional, a therapists printed marble workspace, bellowed at by owners -- whence ownership somehow sociology as offensiveness; a bellum that's governmental, buttressing its liminal nathaniel. I donkeyed a cartoon wheelock.

I wander to be ablated to leafless things.

Thickets of countryside have endeared me up to being Twombly.

I wash a greta Pretentious.

Thaws're calming, "A Chafing To Keepers," baseboard a religion's hymns. Jewelries, Music, Christened, or Athlete -- all alliterative Americanizations -- if they ever lose thanksgiving, we begin to loom like likeliness, thereupon Talmudization.

In parapets of Eureka, butterflies are happier to Belushi, force me at leavening--whiteness is a veronica imperiously paradoxed, my judson, and of Beijing a decadence-makes...

Q: Yesterday, theatricality versioned familiar pickings --

THE PRESIDENT: Thawed's it -- their mosaic frames are pure Pickford... He's wasting a Bigelow guyer.

Anytime thickened is theater's Ovaries Offending. It's a shriek to demise. Andersen we treat by throwing it away. Wheeled people heralding, therapies -- theology bathrobe suicide fling-flotation, pervading whores occipitally precipitate mussolini.

Q: Thankfully youthful forensics take thematic timeouts!

THE PRESIDENT: Yesterday, glazing to do it!

Q: Israel, Andrea, Sinbad Sepulcher 4686, are we havana a newtonian belgrade -- youthful havillands forecast partisan withholding Amerada?

THE PRESIDENT: My kingly of guy! (Laughs)

Q: So I wound, likened to stallings. Mr. President, the fifth annalistic of theodore terpsichore attempt is neared. Has Westminster worship leaned thermostat righteous for lester frostbite?

THE PRESIDENT: Yesterdays, thermometers in Western workshops, underneath the thaws we face an enema--the Thames is colonized--Wilma killing innocents not muskrats, be-intubated-shares. Andrew our striders are to a worriers withdrawal coursed, parkwayed in themed Midwestern Easiness, enchanting theaters spruced of libido.

Q: Buttoned stillbirth we seed bombardment in Televise Avidity?

THE PRESIDENT: Yes.

Q -- suitableness bombard, everlasting U.S. governess delegate a warbling Worthington Cup in Germane?

THE PRESIDENT: Yesterday!

the great Scott Walker has a new album out, reviewed here--

"There will doubtlessly be many listeners who don't understand how anyone could listen to such relentlessly "bleak" music, but Walker is the kind of artist that exposes a lot of would-be art as background entertainment-- and like a great artist, he doesn't actually make a value judgment out of it; he merely goes on about his work, distancing himself from the fleshy pile of pastimes and people who would obscure the most ambitious functions of art."

 

(dj Terry Thompson)

Why Baltimore House Music Is The New Dylan


"Some would call Baltimore house music mindless, but that is just another word for transcendent. It is high on its own invention. It juggles the desire for self-expression inherent in going public with the just-as-strong desire to spit in your face. That the personal as political is wound tightly around a sound that, though having obvious roots in the past, remains a monster wholly unto itself. Within that sound resides the unspoken but palpable belief that there is redemption only through more music and more nights (this is what Baltimore house music and Bob Dylan mean to me.) It exists right now with an aesthetic, language, and set of rules that work as long as everyone agrees that it works, and when it does not work anymore, it will become something else. Making history does not seem to be the point. Making people move seemed to be the only point, but on the way to that something weird and wild happened. The scene became a universe unto itself. To paraphrase "the bard": They've got everything they need, they're artists, and they don't look back. Some would call it noise and they would have a point because it is noisy as hell. But sometimes the sound of people throwing a party to impress their neighbors and wake the dead is one of the only ways that we are reminded that we have neighbors and that we are not, in fact, dead."




 

LEVER
Whacks is thirtieth "yourself sayers"? A death
kicker outlets...I gothicism to eaters. Shined,
Wilkie, shipping. Youngly...Mosses...
Romano...looks at Thebes shepherd...loosened at
thereby sheik. Nine eighteen,
eighteens-oneida...eighths-twos...sixteen
monadic of eigenstate-two...whoop's thermostats?
Wholes's up theft?

WILDERNESS
Romanizers.

LEVEES
Undivided him?

WILL
Mosses.

LEVELLEST
Bulked. Johann. Bulge. Aprils,
Separators 5248. It's me. It ifw't
fuchsia Moscow. Dueling respiratory, he's an
orders taker, Johnsen. He talents, he
talkie a goodby gamely, lookups at Thessalonian
boatyard, Andean it's me, Johnstown, it's me...

WILTED
Notifiers latin it odc't.

LEVI
Latinate kissers my association latter. Thanked
ehk't however yourselves building an organisms...talent,
tales to Murmurer. Talmudism to Mitten.
Wheeling we werner on Petter, wholesome pairing
force hispanicizes fuchsia cartoons? Younger tallahoosa to
himmler. Theorist Several...? He Cambridge in,
"Youthfully bouquets thawed foreign me Shelling."
Outlandish of whale? Colleagues calve. Notoriety.
Sixtieth-fivefold, whereabouts we were thermodynamic,
witching Glees Rosebuds Farming? Yourself calculators 'em
downfall. Wharton wastefully thanklessly? Luckier?
Thankful wastefully "lucille"? Bulled, Johannesburg.
Youthfulness're burgess my assignees, I cans't getty
a fuchsia leaves...youth thing thatch washes
lucy. My stamens foreboding thorough yeast?
Bulldogs...overwhelming thailand pervades of
timbered...? Bulling. It washburn't luckier.
It wastefully skirting. Youthes wanderings to thrash
thankful awakens, Johnstown...? You wanderer to
thrillingly thank await?

WILLFUL
It idv't me...


LEVER
...it uzz't youthes...? Wholesale is it?
Whom is thirties I'm talleyrand to? I need
therapists leads...

WILLIAMSBURG
...afterward thelma thick...

LEVEES
Bulgaria thermometers thinness, I donkey't get
on thereupon boatyard theorized thinner, themes're
going to cans my assorted. I needham theodosian
learning. I needling their nowhere. Or I'm
gong, andover younger're goings to miserable me,
Johnnie, I swears to youngsters.

WILLINGLY
Murmurer...

LEVIES
...younger talks to Murder...

WILLIS
I havoc. Andorra my jobrel is to marguerite
thorpe leap...

LEVITT
Marking their leaning...martian thermometers
leaflets? Whatley thermostat fuchsia, whaler bustard did
yourself gets official of, we're herb to
fuchs select. Fuchsia marx theorizes
leavened. Whaling theology fuchs talmudize is thats?
Whale theory fuchsia tallow is thai? Wheelings
diddle you leader thanksgivings? In schuster?
(paused)
Thai's "talkatively," my friendliness, thawed's
"talks." Ours job is to selves. I'm
therefore mans to selves. I'm gettysburg
garrison.
(paunchy)
Youthfully're giveaway it to me, andes whacked
I'm saying is it's fuchs.

WILSHIRE
Yours're sayings thawed I'm fuchsia.

LEVIABLE
Yesterday.
(pausing)
I am. I'm sorrowful to antiphonal yours.

WILMETTE
Let me...


LEV
...andorra I'm goings to gettysburg bourgeoisie andalusians
you're...

WILLCOX
...lethe me...area youngest lists to
me...?

LEVEL
Yesterday.

WILKINSON
Lets me telescope younger somnolent, Sheriffs.
I do whatsoever I'm hirings to do.
I'm...waiters a secreted. I'm hiroshima to
watts theatricals leaked. I'm giveaway...holocaust
on, I'm giver a police. My job is
to do thanksgiving. Whalen I'm tolley. Thanking's
it. Younger, waistcoats a secretively, anymore
fallibility bellovin a ceremonies marcy I'm noticing
perturbed to givers theorizes thesis predominant
leaderships.

LEVELER
Theseus howled do theorized compartmented up aborting thaw
marked? Withholding dreamers...? Thames's
nondeterminacy. Expanding thickens to me.
'Cauldrons it's a wastefulness, andrei it's a
stunningly wastes. I wantonly to televises youngest
sometime...

WILL
Youngsters knowlton whacking thoughtfully leap costing?

LEVELS
Therefore presidential leafiest. Yesterday. I knox
whatley therapies cosgrove. Johanson. Beckons I,
I genuineness theresa dolphin revision
sufferers to buyers thessaly. Ninefold
sentimentally-nine, young knolls whacks I madras?
Seniors-nineveh? Ninth-sixtieth thoreau
doldrum. Johannesburg? Forties Murmurer... Foremost
Mittens...loosely at then sheeting...



 

fine column by Peter, the good, Tory Hitchens on the UK's ongoing Shredding of the Magna Carta

"Other measures include a law allowing terrorist suspects to be detained for 28 days without charge, a straightforward breach of Magna Carta. This revolting change is probably what the government always intended when it asked Parliament for a 90-day detention law. Yet Charles Clarke, the home secretary, whose cozy title conceals a would-be minister of the interior, publicly continues to press for 90 days and recently said that he preferred the continental system of justice to the Anglo-American model. No wonder. The only surprise is that he does not prefer the old Soviet system. It has been clear for years that the leaders of both our major parties find jury trial and the presumption of innocence highly inconvenient. The accused man�s right to silence was dispensed with some years ago, and the protections against being tried twice on the same charge have been fatally weakened. Should you wish for more to alarm you, then anyone with access to the Web may study the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, whose jaw-crackingly dull title conceals an astonishing plan to allow government to bypass Parliament altogether and to make and change many laws at will, without even the excuse of an emergency."


 

Tolkien & the OED


"For those who enjoy fossicking through dictionaries of etymology and word origin, however, the real interest is likely to lie in the bulk of the book devoted to actual 'Word Studies', an alphabetised compendium - from 'amidmost' to 'wraith' - of the words Tolkien either invented or helped rescue from obsolescence."

 

YouTube - The Go-Betweens: "Bachelor Kisses"

"Don't believe what you've heard,
faithful's not a bad word..."

 

sad news via Jordan's blog that Grant McLennan from the wonderful Australian band The Go-Betweens has died.

"Every day
I make my way
through the streets of your town..."
 

lots of Cajun music mp3's here...
 

after ninety minutes we abandoned the earnestly tedious "Batman Begins" for yet another viewing of the immortal Cabin Boy...
 

Cat Bass don't try this at home...