Mike Scharf warily circles War & Peace

"I know this feeling very well--even now, I have been experiencing it lately: everything seems to be ready for writing--for fulfilling my earthly duty, what's missing is the urge to believe in myself, the belief in the importance of my task, I'm lacking the energy of delusion; an earthly, spontaneous energy that's impossible to invent. And it's impossible to begin without it."

tons of new stuff from Well-diddy

"Beer Can

vindaloo landing
hidalgo lunar
Viggo Pixies
Mortensen tapecase
Corey Datsun
Feldman timewarp
Marty swatchband
Robbins Einstein
canoe Das Boot
Canadian Chariots
feels of Fire
mountain SCTV
fresh Tony
dew Rosato
green pasta
can Margot
slurp Kidder
polar cameo
bear words
splash ups"

found at the excellent LUCIPO Anthology


"**Glossary: rede: advise graith: gear, one's member ca'd: driven sair: serve carlin: old woman koontrie: country tway: two thumb-bread: thumb-breadths sonsy: jolly, fair pintle: prick leeze me: how I love daud: hunk, lump nidge't: thrust weary fa': damn laithron: lazy doup: ass loup: jump lowse: loosen lug: pull gyvel: gable, gateway"

late birthday present to self 22cd (!!) Works of Igor Stravinsky arrived. If you have any interest at all don't hesitate its an amazing bargain. The 60's studio sound is great too! Because of (my ignorant reading of) Theodor Adorno I managed to avoid Stravinsky for a long time so its a real plunge...

found a nice old pocket edition of RL Stevenson's Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes at Literacy Nanaimo's half-price classics sale along various Collins or World's classics versions of Thackeray (essays/poems & Newcomes), Carlyle (essays with a lot I don't have) a nice Palgrave & an Oxford Dictionary of Christian Names...)

"I questioned at first if I were sleepy, for I felt my heart beating faster than usual, as if with an agreeable excitement to which my mind remained a stranger. But as soon as my eyelids touched, that subtle glue leaped between them, and they would no more come separate. The wind among the trees was my lullaby. Sometimes it sounded for minutes together with a steady, even rush, not rising nor abating; and again it would swell and burst like a great crashing breaker, and the trees would patter me all over with big drops from the rain of the afternoon. Night after night, in my own bedroom in the country, I have given ear to this perturbing concert of the wind among the woods; but whether it was a difference in the trees, or the lie of the ground, or because I was myself outside and in the midst of it, the fact remains that the wind sang to a different tune among these woods of Gévaudan. I hearkened and hearkened; and meanwhile sleep took gradual possession of my body and subdued my thoughts and senses; but still my last waking effort was to listen and distinguish, and my last conscious state was one of wonder at the foreign clamour in my ears..."

Rachel Haidu on Broodthaers Decor: A Conquest

"For his first self-retrospective, in 1974, Broodthaers remade a 1966 exhibition catalogue titled Moules Œufs Frites Pots Charbon, adding the term Perroquets (Parrots) to the title.¹ He placed two copies inside a glass-topped exhibition table and placed the table next to a caged parrot between two palm trees, thus constituting a work titled Ne dites pas que je ne l’ai pas dit—Le Perroquet (Don’t Say I Didn’t Say So—The Parrot). A mordant commentary on the condition of artists consigned by the market to grandiose repetitions of their earlier experiments, Ne dites pas . . . mercilessly dramatizes the efforts at self-historicization that are an artistic institution in themselves. This self-parodic mode becomes a manner of reframing the question of how institutions produce the traditions they are charged with keeping. As institutions that produce history and those that produce art and artists are set into a relay with each other, an uncomfortably similar static quality emerges from the comparison. For all the alleged differences between their audiences and functions, a series of rooms dedicated to a radical avant-garde artist’s retrospective and a series of rooms dedicated to the seemingly inert view of the past proposed by a historical society share utterly conventional pedagogical aspirations and a singular appeal to the spirit of collection..."

a rare opportunity if you're in the area (sigh)---

"White Columns and Michael Werner Gallery present –

in association with Anthology Film Archives:

A rare screening of 35mm films by

MARCEL BROODTHAERS


Tuesday, September 4, 2007 at 7.30pm.

At: Anthology Film Archives, 32 2nd Avenue, New York, NY 10003.

Admission is free, however reservations are recommended.

Please contact White Columns at info@whitecolumns.org

For program details visit: www.whitecolumns.org



This screening has been organized with the generous assistance of the Estate of Marcel Broodthaers."

The Laugh-Out-Loud Cats

today's YouTube - Stop SPP Protest - Union Leader stops provocateurs--anarchist cop boots!

farewell Max Roach--I saw him once, at the Charlie Parker Day event in NYC, August of '96....

Aaron kindly shares a Letter from Margaret Avison

"As for myself: the Conference discussions widened the scope of means for arriving at a text, ie. doing as Sir Philip Sidney counselled, “ ‘Fool!’ said my Muse to me, ‘look in your heart and write’.” And Olson’s Homeric Hymns lost me in academic vistas awhile—a Homer thesis, fortunately abandoned. I leared a lot from Creeley’s clenched-teeth diction, the way Duncan’s thought was expressed in terms of feeling, and Levertov’s return to the English Romantic voice, perhaps her convalescence from Vietnam. I write by ear too..."

thanks Benny for this photo of Il Castagno dei Cento Cavalli or the Chestnut Tree of One Hundred Horses

"The Chestnut Tree of One Hundred Horses (Italian: Castagno dei Cento Cavalli) is the largest and oldest known chestnut tree in the world.[1][2] Located on Linguaglossa road in Sant'Alfio, on the eastern slope of Mount Etna in Sicily[3] — only 8 km (5 miles) from the mountain's crater — it is generally believed to be 2,000 to 4,000 years old[4] It is a Sweet Chestnut (Castanea sativa, family Fagaceae). Guinness World Records has listed it for the record of 'Greatest Tree Girth Ever', noting that it had a circumference of 57.9 m (190 ft) when it was measured in 1780. Above-ground the tree has since split into multiple large trunks, but below-ground these trunks still share the same roots.

The tree's name originated from a legend in which a queen of Aragon and her company of one hundred knights, during a trip to Mount Etna, were caught in a severe thunderstorm. The entire cavalry is said to have taken shelter under the tree."

more NC trees

must-read all the way through--George Bush's Death Grip

"They told the judges they wanted to test the relationship between personality traits and bail decisions, but, for one group, they inserted in the middle of the personality questionnaire two exercises meant to evoke awareness of their mortality. One asked the judges to "briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you"; the other required them to "jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you physically as you die and once you are physically dead." They then asked the judges to set bail in the hypothetical case of a prostitute whom the prosecutor claimed was a flight risk. The judges who did the mortality exercises set an average bail of $455. The control group that did not do the exercises set it at an average of $50. The psychologists knew they were onto something..."

from the 25th Anniversary Quilt Show
at the North Carolina Arboretum

Laurel Horton, An Upcountry Legacy: Mary Black's Family Quilts

"The seven quilts presented in this essay were made in the Carolina Piedmont between the mid-nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. Part of a collection of sixteen quilts, they once belonged to Mary Louisa Snoddy Black (1860-1927), who lived her entire life in Spartanburg County, South Carolina.

Collections of family quilts are not unusual. What gives these special significance is their age, provenance, and the attention Mary Black devoted to ensuring that the names and relations of the makers would be remembered. The number of quilts and the care with which they were labeled suggests that she thought of them as a collection, the culmination of the work of many hands. Sometime in the mid-1920s, Mary met with her two adult daughters, Rosa and Mary Kate, and passed along information about the quilts and quiltmakers, which were sewn, as small slips of paper, onto each quilt.

As the historical archaeologist James Deetz urged, those "small things forgotten," the ordinary objects that remain from past generations, must be examined in "new and imaginative ways" to achieve "a different appreciation for what life is today, and was in the past." When interpreted thoughtfully and alongside other historical materials, Mary Black's collection can convey the values and experiences of her family, beginning with the arrival of her great-grandparents in the Carolinas in 1773 and continuing through her descendants..."

from Hit Parader, 1967--Frank Zappa's Favorite Records

"I hope you spell all the names right because if any of these composers read Hit Parade, and see a mistake, they're going to be real mad at you."

farewell to Margaret Avison--

"Snow"

Nobody stuffs the world in at your eyes.
The optic heart must venture: a jail-break
And re-creation. Sedges and wild rice
Chase rivery pewter. The astonished cinders quake
With rhizomes. All ways through the electric air
Trundle candy-bright disks; they are desolate
Toys if the soul's gates seal, and cannot bear,
Must shudder under, creation's unseen freight.
But soft, there is snow's legend: colour of mourning
Along the yellow Yangtze where the wheel
Spins an indifferent stasis that's death's warning.
Asters of tumbled quietness reveal
Their petals. Suffering this starry blur
The rest may ring your change, sad listener.

today's YouTube - GEORGIA..........BUSH--Lil Wayne

Elgar, Vicat Cole and the Ghosts of Brinkwells

"This is what I hear all day – the trees are singing my music – or have I sung theirs?"