In San Francisco--

"Photo and video show by Bill Daniel
Sunset Scavenger
Post-Utopia California and Post-Katrina Louisiana

Opening: Wednesday, August 1st, 7-9pm
Exhibition dates: August 1st – August 26th
Opening night sounds by Matt Davignon www.ribosomemusic.com.

RayKo Photo Center , 428 Third Street

Itinerant documentarian, Bill Daniel, mounts a show of large-scale black and white photographs juxtaposing two contrasting landscapes: the floating hippie houseboats of Marin County, California, and the wrecked landscapes of New Orleans and St. Bernard Parrish in post-Katrina Louisiana.

Sunset Scavenger is an on-going film and photography project exploring images and themes of social and environmental collapse in the last days of the petroleum era. This show is part of Daniel's larger project investigating marginal subcultures and their relationship with the environment. Sunset Scavenger is a supported project of Creative Capital."

The Greatest Song Ever

"While every version of Roadrunner begins with the bawl of "One-two-three-four-five-six" and ends with the cry of "Bye bye!", each contains lyrical variations and deviations in the car journey Richman undertakes during the song's narrative, though it always begins on Route 128, the Boston ringroad that Richman uses to embody the wonders of existence. In one, he's heading out to western Massachusetts, and in another he's cruising around "where White City used to be" and to Grafton Street, to check out an old sporting store, observing: "Well they made many renovations in that part of town/ My grandpa used to be a dentist there." Over the course of the various recordings he refers to the Turnpike, the Industrial Park, the Howard Johnson, the North Shore, the South Shore, the Mass Pike, Interstate 90, Route 3, the Prudential Tower, Quincy, Deer Island, Boston harbour, Amherst, South Greenfield, the "college out there that rises up outta nuthin", Needham, Ashland, Palmerston, Lake Champlain, Route 495, the Sheraton Tower, Route 9, and the Stop & Shop..."

see you in a couple of weeks!

Subtext Reading Series: Culley & Donahue:

"Wednesday, August 1, 2007
Subtext Reading Series: Culley & Donahue

@ the Good Shepherd Center, 4649 Sunnyside Ave. N, Seattle, WA

7:30 PM; $5 suggested donation

Peter Culley lives south of Nanaimo, BC and has written several books of poetry including The Climax Forest, Hammertown, and the forthcoming Age of Briggs & Stratton. His writings on art have appeared in numerous publications.

Joseph Donahue currently teaches at Duke University. Born in TX, raised in MA, this ex-New Yorker & part-time Seattle-ite is author of Before Creation, Monitions of the Approach, Incidental Eclipse,
World Well Broken, Terra Lucida, and In This Paradise. Poems have appeared most recently in Hambone, Talisman, First Intensity, Fence, LVNG, and Fascicle."

a beautiful tree from Purmamarca, Argentina

memorial youtube: Papageno! Papagena! from Ingmar Bergman's 1975 Magic Flute--my Dad's favorite movie...

"Stanley Park" novelist Timothy Taylor says something nice about an essay of mine in his Globe & Mail review of the To the Dogs show, which is still up at Presentation House in North Vancouver...

London Hyde Park & Roman Coliseum Trees from Robert Lawson...

Hilary Mantel on Orpheus, Eurydice & Ghosts...

"Often, when people have been bereaved, their friends warn them to let a year go by before they listen to music, knowing how it can break down the barrier we carefully erect between ourselves and the recently dead, and unleash a flood of pain and regret. But it is hard now to avoid music. In a way that Monteverdi could never have imagined, it is in the air around us, sometimes degraded into an annoying background jangle, sometimes blanked out and ignored, but always capable of catching us unawares, infiltrating our self-protection, and making the dead walk..."