Ladysmith trees

The Wire (cont.)



Thirty-four crocuses
in a bright square yard underneath Toilet Hill

a year & ten days ago means
its not just me sleeping all day this Feb.

except for the inter-urban sparrow-squirrel
standoff in the walnut's big triple fork

location location location
but only for about five seconds

the sparrows puffed up double
like officials in raincoats

I didn't say that no but really
no saunter or easy back-away

in either being though not much
endless hand-shaking malice either

but they really do look like people
or else why even speculate

let alone shake hands with 'em
eat their flesh or honey

dress them in uniforms
fight them for money

the boundary issue
is not the territory

a pocket atlas ends all speculation
a series of pale dashes marks the Parkway---

today's YouTube - Christopher Walken - Let's Misbehave

(the whole of Herbert Ross' rather underrated adaptation of Dennis Potter's "Pennies from Heaven" is on TCM tonight at 2245...)

bonus: YouTube - The Raven: Read by Christopher Walken

The Pelican Project

via Anodyne

The Ballad of the Man in the White Castle

The man in the high chair
is a critter sitter of the first order
granitic tics brush mercury hair
he folds his paper over & over

He reads with pleasure that the young
can trace their liminal state
to those distant peasant barbecues
that did not spare the great--

With unity & impunity sundered at the root
& goofs spared neither rod nor boot
the bearshit continues, deep & crisp & even
though the Lemon Hart contains no lemon

& of the Great & Good
there once was a Great Many
their shuttered doors & buckled floors
their moral miscellany--

CAN I HAZ A WITNESS TUESDAY
sd Miranda the original decider--
The Man in the White Castle
peels back paper from his slider

Corrugated as the fries he stuffs
as with deranged analgesia he puffs
a Zeppelinish tabloid in his fist
& on the board there is a list

The bus flew over the river
The bus flew over the river
Corduroy over the river
Corduroy over the river

For zombies swing a Pulaski axe
it's the standard global chopper
& if you have to ask how much
you ain't our kind of shopper

Rattle of Dew in a Coke cup
ice chew till you throw up
when you gonna grow up
stop pretending that you know us

Ride the bus discussion
FOR A HAMBURGER TODAY
phone it in from Vernon
double rainbow off Foul Bay

With nothing but an inset map
a phone voice and a head shot
slowly he peels back the wrap
slowly he peels back the wrap

images of Shanghai from Chinese Historical Postcard Project

Folia--a nice site for gardeners to share information & tall tales & can spring be far behind?

review of the big Lawrence Wiener retrospective--

"Weiner's conceptualism, if that's the right word for it, turns out to be a strange way of transcending the romance of ruins, his equivalent of his contemporary Robert Smithson's embrace of entropy as a basic principle for his work. But such strategies have a deep background. Artists have always held that something remains of the life they give to a work even after its inevitable physical decrepitude. Alberto Giacometti, in his day, questioned whether Modernist abstract art might not be too vulnerable to the ravages of time; one could understand classical statuary from a broken torso, or medieval painting from an isolated and cut-down panel from an altarpiece--but, he wondered, "How would a Brancusi statue look if it were chipped and broken, or a Mondrian painting if it were torn or dark with age?" For centuries, Greek artists like Apelles and Praxiteles were held up as models of artistic achievement even though their works were entirely lost; they inspired generations through verbal report alone. As Walter Benjamin observed, "The medium through which works of art continue to influence later ages is always different from the one in which they affect their own age." Turning his art into suggestive language no longer vulnerable to ruin, Weiner seems to be trying an end run around history--like the ghost at the funeral, seeing his own work in the form it might have some time in the future when some future civilization has displaced our own and he is at best a figure of legend like the masters of ancient Greek painting and sculpture..."

"Ed Wood" from Unknown Victoria: Trees and The City

a little taste of spring--YouTube - Emilie Simon - Fleur de Saison

Leslie Scalapino's introduction to the Philip Whalen collected....

via Bookslut

EPC/Philip Whalen Author Home Page

from "Sourdough Mountain Lookout"--

Ptarmigan hunt for bugs in the snow
Bear peers through the wad at noon
Deer crowd up to see the lamp
A mouse nearly drowns in the honey
I see my bootprints mingle with deer-foot
Bear-paw mule-shoe in the dusty path to the privy

Much later I write down:
"raging, Viking sunrise
The gorgeous death of summer in the east"
(Influence of a Byronic landscape-
Bent pages exhibiting depravity of style.)

Outside the lookout I lay nude on the granite
Mountain hot September sun but inside my head
Calm dark night with all the other stars
HERACLITUS: "The Waking have one common world
But the sleeping turn aside
Each into a world of his own."

I keep telling myself what I really like
Are music, books, certain land and sea-scapes
The way light falls across them, diffusion of
Light through agate, light itself...I suppose
I'm still afraid of the dark...

local & Vancouver trees

Gung Hay Fat Choy!

ON THE CORNER

"So what is this most mysterious and outré of albums? The culmination of Davis's two-decade-long quest for the African roots of his music, On the Corner has a huge, extended rhythm section rotating around circular, one-chord bass riffs. But there were a number of other things that set the album apart. First there were the influences of Stockhausen, Paul Buckmaster, and Ornette Coleman's atonal "harmolodics". These were superimposed over grooves and bass riffs that were more tightly circumscribed than ever before. On the opening track, the bass plays the same few notes for 20 minutes. Inundated by an ocean of rhythm instruments, including sitar, tabla and three electric keyboards (played by Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock, among others), and without any harmonic development, the soloists had very little space, and became merely strands in a tangle of grooves and colours..."

The most hated album in jazz...

A D 1735

"This blog attempts to collate various materials in connection with the year 1735."

images from Clare Singleton, a new South Wellingtonian, often seen hereabouts, walking her handsome dogs

Talking Heads '77 sure holds up ...

a nice tribute...

Bruno Schulz's Stories - translated by John Curran Davis (I like these much better than the published translations)

"THE YELLOW and thoroughly boring days of winter had come. An outworn and tattered, too-short mantle of snow lay on the russet hued earth. It did not stretch far enough for many of the roofs, which stood black or rust coloured, shingled, thatches and arks concealing the smoke-blackened expanses of the attics inside them—black, charred cathedrals bristling with their ribs of rafters, purlins and joists—the dark lungs of the winter gales. Each dawn uncovered new vent pipes and chimney stacks, sprung up in the night, scoured by the nocturnal gale—black pipes of diabolical organs. Chimney sweeps could never drive away the crows that perched in the evenings like living black leaves on the branches of the trees by the church—they took flight again, flapping, finally to cling each to its own place on its own branch—but at daybreak they would take to the air in great flocks—clouds of soot, flakes of undulating and fantastic lampblack smearing the dull-yellow streaks of the dawn with their twinkling cawing. Like last year’s bread loaves, the days hardened in the cold and the boredom. We cut them with blunt knives, without appetite, in idle sleepiness..."

The Art of Bruno Schulz (a flash site)

from the Giornale Nuovo archive

YouTube - Brothers Quay: Street of Crocodiles part 1.

YouTube - Brothers Quay: Street of Crocodiles part 2

short, lucid take on William Blake's

London

I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.

How the Chimney-sweeper’s cry
Every black'ning Church appalls;
And the hapless Soldier’s sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.

But most thro’ midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot’s curse
Blasts the new-born Infant’s tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.