Or Gallery: Hold On: Aaron Carpenter Steven Hubert Kathy Slade

"Kathy Slade’s film Tugboat (2007) pictures a tugboat “wrapping doughnuts” in Vancouver’s industrial harbour. The 16mm film loop is both playful and melancholic, as it is unclear whether this workhorse of BC’s resource and shipping economies is caught in playful abandon or if the boat is revolving in a momentary lapse of agency..."

via Ron, Bolano--The Caracas Speech

"Frequently, our way of praising it is to curse the hour in which we decided to become writers, but as a general rule we tend to clap and dance when we’re alone, for this is a solitary occupation, and we recite our own pages to ourselves, and that is our way of praising ourselves, and we don’t need for anyone to tell us what we have to do and much less for a poll to elect ours as the most honorable of occupations. Cervantes, who wasn’t dyslexic but who was left crippled by the exercise of arms, knew perfectly well what he was saying. Literature is a dangerous occupation..."

Local trees

Frank Capra's fascinating The Bitter Tea of General Yen on TCM at 2245 Pacific tonight as part of their series on the depictions of Asians in Hollywood...

"Barbara Stanwyck plays the fiancee of a missionary and finds herself captivated—in both senses of the word—by an Oxford-educated warlord (Nils Asther). The then-unthinkable romance between a Chinese man and a European woman made the film notorious; director Frank Capra even claimed that it was banned in England. It wasn't, writes Capra biographer Joseph McBride (The Catastrophe of Success), but the racist reaction to Bitter Tea can't be exaggerated: Variety noted, "Seeing a Chinaman attempting to romance with a pretty and supposedly decent young American white woman is bound to evoke adverse reaction." It's the best Von Sternberg movie Von Sternberg never made, and so very unlike Capra because of its sexuality..."

new at Ubuweb--Glenn Gould--Prospects of Recording crucial for me in the print version---


"Broadcast on CBC radio in 1965, this unique recording is positioned between Glenn Gould's last live concert performance in 1964 and his seminal publication 'Prospects of Recording' for High Fidelity magazine in 1966. In a proto-tapestry of sound, music and voice, which came to fruition in his experimental radio documentary Idea of North (1967), Gould counterpoints the opinions of those celebrating the imminent ubiquity of recordings with those lamenting the loss of the live concert. As the host of the show, Gould explicates on how recordings are made from different geographical regions, while arguing for the superiority of the recorded performance. Marshall McLuhan is one of the many interviewees, providing his usual insightful and at times 'far-out' theories. The transcripts of the broadcast were later published by McLuhan in his Explorations column and were to provide the foundation for the High Fidelity text. However, with this broadcast one can ingest the ideas while listening to some classic examples of recordings that bolster Gould's argument."

Ladysmith trees

farewell Bo Diddley--saw him open (with the Dishrags) for the Clash at their first North American show at the Commodore in January 1979...