autumn with the Laugh-Out-Loud Cats

scariest movie ever Eyes Without a Face by Georges Franju on TCM at 1130 Pacific tomorrow night...

thanks SO for A Tree Grows Around It

"If you take the bus in Buenos Aires, which you should do sometime, you will have discovered that some of the bus stops are hard to find. Some bus stops, like for the #10, are indicated by no more than a little sticker slapped on a utility pole. Over the last year I’ve been observing this bus stop sign that is being slowed enveloped by a tree. Earlier this month I finally got around to taking a photo."

I really would like to take the bus in Buenos Aires sometime!

Ancient cedar falls in Vancouver's Stanley Park

"The top of the tree lies so deep in the forest it can't be seen..."

Curiosities of Literature: Secret History of Authors who have Ruined their Booksellers--

“I must be allowed my freedom in my studies, for I substitute my writings for a game at the tennis-court, or a club at the tavern; I never counted among my honours these opuscula of mine, but merely as harmless amusements. It is my partridge, as with St. John the Evangelist; my cat, as with Pope St. Gregory; my little dog, as with St. Dominick; my lamb, as with St. Francis; my great black mastiff, as with Cornelius Agrippa; and my tame hare, as with Justus Lipsius.” I have since discovered in Niceron that this Catherinot could never get a printer, and was rather compelled to study economy in his two hundred quartos of four or eight pages; his paper was of inferior quality; and when he could not get his dissertations into his prescribed number of pages, he used to promise the end at another time, which did not always happen. But his greatest anxiety was to publish and spread his works: in despair he adopted an odd expedient. Whenever Monsieur Catherinot came to Paris, he used to haunt the quaies where books are sold, and while he appeared to be looking over them, he adroitly slided one of his own dissertations among these old books. He began this mode of publication early, and continued it to his last days. He died with a perfect conviction that he had secured his immortality; and in this manner had disposed of more than one edition of his unsaleable works. Niceron has given the titles of 118 of his things, which he had looked over..."

more recent acquisitions

for his 100th birthday--Le site officiel de Jacques Tati, Les films de mon oncle, Tativille, Monsieur Hulot, Tatischeff, Playtime, Parade, Trafic:

today's YouTube - Cal Tjader / Clare Fischer - Guachi Guaro (aka Soul Sauce)

been listening to a lot more Tjader lately, mostly thanks to the efforts of this splendid person, & am continually pleased by how fresh & inventive his playing is--he even finds something new in Bacharach...

I'd missed Matt Taibbi's genius Friedman takedown--a must read--That's a Flattener...

"The baseline argument begins with a lengthy description of the 'ten great flatteners,' which is basically a highlight reel of globalization tomahawk dunks from the past two decades: the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Netscape IPO, the pre-Y2K outsourcing craze, and so on. Everything that would give an IBM human resources director a boner, that's a flattener. The catch here is that Flattener #10 is new communications technology: 'Digital, Mobile, Personal, and Virtual.' These technologies Friedman calls 'steroids,' because they are 'amplifying and turbocharging all the other flatteners.' According to the mathematics of the book, if you add an IPac to your offshoring, you go from running to sprinting with gazelles and from eating with lions to devouring with them..."

Brooklyn punters footloose on Friday should check out Bruce Conkle's new show...(don't know if Marne Lucas (above) will be there...)

Opening: Friday, October 12, 7–9pm
Dates:
Saturday, October 13–Sunday, November 11
Location:
487 Driggs Ave, bet N. 9 and N. 10

Hours:
Thurs–Mon, 12–6pm
Contact:
eva@JackthePelicanPresents.com 718-782-0183


"Jack the Pelican is pleased to present stalwart of the revolution, Bruce Conkle. De facto king of the Pacific NW eco art geeks and self-styled "misfit at the crossroads," he creates "Lament for Middle Kingdom Earth," a quirky eco-absurd installation that restages contemporary ideas about nature and community in a pre-modern world of fairytale landscape.


Conkle is the proverbial stranger come to heal the village with a whacky old prospector's assortment of things, mostly of the detritus kind, and mis-wired ancient magic spells that can never in a million years actually work.

He launches his exhibition at the opening by blowing his 12-foot Alphorn and playing with puppets. The show is laced with bits of meteorite. In the background are mountains of cardboard--Alps, if you please, where he comes from, being half Swiss by descent--and also 'them thar hills,' source of the lore of sasquatch and gingerbread houses and the like, all of which have been his mainstay of interest over the years. Rivers of Pepto-Bismol flow. A shovel dissolves in a decorative woof of fancy. A snowman drowns himself ( Suicide Snowman ). And dancing overhead are visions of a coconut planet spaceship with Superman crystal-colony cities..."

recent acquisitions

The Best Book on Mozart

"His categories assume unwarrantably that the composer always expressed his art more personally when transforming tradition than by conforming to it, that Mozart, in short, was most Mozartean only when most radical. That is particularly dangerous with this composer because it may prevent us from recognizing that Mozart could be as inspired when he conformed to tradition as when he was revolutionary. The refusal to acknowledge that Mozart often showed his genius when he was most conventional has inspired such foolishness as Theodor W. Adorno's rueful assertion that Mozart, unlike Beethoven, could not always write the way he wanted, or Glenn Gould's attempt, by performance as well as writing, to demonstrate that Mozart in his last years had become an inferior composer..."

a bunch of swell Django linkage...

via birthday boy ::: wood s lot ::: the new Common-place---an issue on money, including the Pine Tree Shilling...

missed the beginning last week but the second episode of Canada's best tv show Intelligence is on tonight at 900...

more on the Joy Division pic

"...at times, the studio sets and sluggish pace means the film could be a portrayal of the northwest of England anytime between, say, 1959 and 1979. In truth 1980, the year Curtis committed suicide, was actually as bleak and cold as the hole in the number ‘0’. The full onslaught of the New Right agenda, led by Thatcher, was becoming self-evident. This was the year that unemployment hit two million for the first time since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan. Nuclear war felt inevitable. We were all going to die - or so many people believed. In such a context, ramalama punk pop sounded increasingly flimsy and threadbare. All of a sudden, former punk bands evolved into something far more intense and foreboding, bleak and brittle, twisted and metallic: a soundtrack for the oncoming economic and social depression..."

fans of Bebel Gilberto should check out this rare & lovely 1989 album by her mom Miucha, which includes an early appearance by BG...

Thomas Gainsborough as a boy
The Shelleys & Frankenstein's
Sappho


via below, from excellent Look and Learn magazine, illustrations and picture library...

good article on "Children's Encyclopaedia" editor Arthur Mee--

"Mee's Children's Encyclopaedia is nothing like an encyclopaedia, or, rather, it is perhaps the prime and supreme encyclopaedia - an encyclical. There is no A-Z arrangement; indeed, there often appears to be no conscious arrangement to it at all; the material simply circles and circulates in and around itself, a vast labyrinth of facts, fancies, niceties, delicacies and wonderful minutiae. There are stories, and diagrams, and illustrations, and articles about animals, and history, and biography, and biology, and "Great Thoughts", and "Things to Do and Make", and "Plain Answers to the Questions of the Children of the World" such as "Why do I laugh and cry?" (Answer: "You laugh and cry because you are 'made that way'.") In any given issue you might find advice on how to keep a hedgehog as a pet, or how to make a fiddle from a cigar box, and examples of "The Jolly Pictures the Cave Men Made", and an essay on "How to Feel the Pressure of the Air", and musings and ruminations on Chaucer, Michelangelo and the meaning of beauty, distance and courage ("The Great Words that Stir the Hearts and Minds of All Mankind")..."