great if coloraturacentric Opera mp3 site has links to YouTube videos &c, inc. the great Anna Moffo (above)...
 

enjoying Dutch songstress Rita Reys this am...
 

sharp Ange Mlinko on Altman, Keillor, and the Suicide Poet Girl

"Sure enough, as the story unfolds, Lola Johnson devolves into a series of incoherent stereotypes. She is not our sharp observer, just one of the ensemble. She isn't a rebel, she's Mama's little girl tearing up when someone else dies backstage and she's told the show must go on. There will be no critique of the Prairie Home Companion, or Keillor, or Meryl Streep's pink shawls. There is, instead, another cliche rearing its head: the cliche of the Interchangeable Starlet, who serves no earthly purpose in a film besides eye candy.

Reader, this is the part when I became the teenage suicide girl: contorting in my seat, drawing up my knees, playing with my hair, tilting my head, and sighing loudly, squashing my cheeks. I was bored out of my skull..."



 

many more examples of "Zoomorphic Calligraphy" at BibliOdyssey
 

Chinese Lanterns

In a poplar mist
a polar opposite

trumps intelligent design
through sheer forfeiture

anecdotally
like that guy in Mann's

Faustus--
the shells must

be saying something!
all those curlicued glyphs

and painted
bells!

let alone these
Boundary Bay fish coilers

we're erasing
underfoot...get

the luminol out
later, you're shedding

skin like
linear b here...a whiff

of red clay
and a transparency

is assumed then lost,
our faces

scanned as Cobbett would
scan a prospect from his mule,

(hay rots in the field--
thanks all night euchre/

Methodism,
it hardly matters)

and then a blunt assesment
bluntly deliver.

For you to touch the remote control
you have to touch

yourself first, but its
hardly a matter

of first causes,
tiny traces left are

not in themselves
an offense, and if

the endless and softening
imprint of appearance

avails thee not
what of it?

The ghosts
are knickers

in the trees,
sky pink

as an innocent
Christian ham...
 

Rags


Wilderness for welfare,
Athenians all in a little rank
we slipped out the back way

just glad to be of use, really
wiping up the unthinkable
with the untouchable--

a parachute of J-cloths,
linen liberated
for midsummer sneezes--

otherwise they'd be diving
under their desks! reaching
around for the comical

golden shred, the
big booty polish.
Cooking up Woolite

with Worcestershire
in hammocks of lint
the last stage in the life

of an honoured object,
soaked with sap and
strained through particle board

as the world of print
sulphurously beckons;
each thing eventually the receipt

of itself, each hanky
bearing a needlepoint letter
more easily felt than seen.
 

here's the first of the last three of the captions I wrote for Adam Harrison's photographs--


Condensation on Mirror

Kavanagh's "bright
shillings of March"
well spent for aince:

conker string,
a brand-new set of clackers,
a towel that becomes

a sleeping cat then disappears,
a camera that puts the silver
back into the lake, all those

pets and old uncles released
from whispering branches
and skins of chrome

to fistfuls of earth
and muscular sepia--
never to be recorded otherwise,

like the mound people,
sieved once through Toynbee's catbox
but never written down,

not even in steam
not even to spend a penny,
dredged up from a Murphy bed

into the coalsmoke
and cigarette smoke
and cabbage steam.



 

"Popular Science Joins the Hippies" from Modern Mechanix
 

The Shadow War

"I said he was important," Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. "You're not going to let me lose face on this, are you?" "No sir, Mr. President," Tenet replied. Bush "was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth," Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, "Do some of these harsh methods really work?" Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety -- against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, "thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each . . . target." And so, Suskind writes, "the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered."

Goldilocks in reverse

"Three police officers who went to the home Thursday couldn't get the bear to budge, so authorities let the animal finish its (oat)meal.

"The bear didn't appear to be aggressive and wasn't destroying the house, so they just let it do what it was doing and eventually the bear decided to make its way out of the residence and down toward a forested gully," Skelton said. "It ended the best it could.""


 

watching and reading most of the reviews of the minor but sublime Nacho Libre made me realise how utterly out of sync I am with mainstream film criticism--watching Roger Ebert & the new guy Sunday night it was as if they couldn't wash their hands quickly enough--the same crew foisting ugly classist "adult" crap like "Crash" and "Million-Dollar Baby" on us...& I'll take "Mouse Hunt" over "Magnolia" anytime...
 

"Drawing of the Crab Nebula by William Parsons, the Third Earl of Rosse. This drawing gave rise to the name "Crab Nebula". It was created using the 36-inch reflector at Birr Castle about 1844." from Lord Rosse's Drawings of Messier Objects

(one of the usual galaxy of good links at Plep)
 

many Pictures from Old Books at this well-laid out site...