dazzle yourself with my grampy's new book of poems The Age of Briggs & Stratton (Hammertown)...

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's ‘The Leopard’ Turns 50

“From the ceiling the gods, reclining on gilded couches, gazed down smiling and inexorable as a summer sky. They thought themselves eternal; but a bomb manufactured in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was to prove the contrary in 1943...”

You are Invited to

the
Opening Party + Performance for

The MARSHALL AMPhitheatre

at

The French Broad Institute
(of Time & the River)


with an evening of short sets of

Poetry & Song

by Rod Bowling, Lee Ann Brown, Jeff Davis, Mary Eagle,

Laura Hope Gill, Erin O'Neal, Ted Pope, Nancy Roche

+
Other Surprise Guests

Friday
July 11th, 2008

8:30


COME early for 6:30
MERMAID & FAIRY PARADE

created by Miranda Lee Reality Torn & many others

Bring your friends & family! Please forward widely!

We are located in the former Methodist Church across from the firehouse, across the parking lot on the same side of the street as the French Broad Tacqueria.

For more information or to volunteer, please contact:

Lee Ann Brown: LA@tenderbuttons.net, 646.734.4157

Tony Torn: 646.391.8002, tony.torn@verizon.net

Land line: 828.649.1082

Free: Donations Encouraged

(Tax deductible donations under the auspices of the Solo Foundation)

"The sanctuary of Epidaurus provided was created in order to let citizens realign themselves & awaken to the full energy of the present."

—from Devotional Cinema by Nathaniel Dorsky

...A living river...

The MARSHALL AMPhitheatre

at the French Broad Institute of Time & the River

68 North Main Street, Marshall, NC 28753

Kent Mackenzie's "The Exiles" a lost-now-found film about Native Americans from the Southwest in late 50's Los Angeles...

"Inspired both by early documentary filmmakers like Robert Flaherty and Humphrey Jennings and by the social realism of Jean Renoir and Vittorio de Sica, Mackenzie strove to capture his subjects' lives in all their complexity, without pitying or exoticizing them. "I tried very hard not to be attracted by the strangeness of the environment as opposed to my own, and to avoid the 'romance of poverty,'" he wrote. He intended "The Exiles" as an "anti-theatrical" and "anti-social-documentary" film, which would pose problems for the viewer it did not resolve. Given that it has never had a commercial, theatrical engagement in the past 47 years, I suppose he succeeded a little too well..."

Cat Memoir from my Uncle Rod--

"I was at sea by the time that Judy left the scene, I know not how, and I came home to 57 Folkestone to find that a tabby tom by the name of Trevor (after Trevor Bailey of Essex and England cricket fame) was in residence. He was a bit of a snob, with a name like Trevor in East Ham –what else - and whilst he would come in by the back door, he insisted that he always left through the front door. Wally!! At the time, Dad was working night shift with the Blue Funnel Line and would walk home down Vicarage Lane each morning about a quarter past seven. Trevor would get up and stand by the front door about seven o’clock, demanding to be let out, and then sit on the gate post until about ten past seven, when he would jump down and disappear round the corner into Vicarage Lane and meet Dad a hundred or so yards up the street. I don’t know whether it was smell, sound or ESP that triggered his mad dash around the corner but he was spot on every morning and would trot alongside Dad, jumping up every few yards, all the way home and into the hall. Dad used to bring the cat home a little morsel of food each day – a bit of fish or meat – wrapped up in greaseproof paper. The cat could smell the food and would go bananas with frustrated hunger, while Dad would be telling him that there wasn’t any food today. Then a search of all his pockets until, much to his surprise, there was a package, which took agonising moments to unwrap , until finally the cat was able to gulp down this prime piece of manna from heaven.
After Dad died, Trevor would still go out every morning and sit on the gate post and wait for hours. I don’t know how long this lasted but I know that it hurt Mum and kept reminding her of the little scene that used to be enacted every morning. I don’t think Mum had another cat after that...."

Chinese trees from Sidney D. Gamble Photographs

"From 1908 to 1932, Sidney Gamble (1890-1968) visited China four times, traveling throughout the country to collect data for social-economic surveys and to photograph urban and rural life, public events, architecture, religious statuary, and the countryside. A sociologist, renowned China scholar, and avid amateur photographer, Gamble used some of the pictures to illustrate his monographs. The Sidney D. Gamble Photographs digital collection marks the first comprehensive public presentation of this large body of work that includes photographs of Korea, Japan, Hawaii, San Francisco, and Russia. The site currently features photographs dated between 1917 and 1932; the 1908 photographs will be digitized and uploaded as part of future additions to the site."

went to the handsomely-beamed 1958 Brechin United Church in Nanaimo last night to hear the Ellerhein Girls Choir from Estonia, on our shores as part of the International Choral Kathaumixw Festival, Powell River, BC . Estonia is a very choir-centric country & the Ellerheins are one of their best, appearing on lots of albums & c. so it was a top show, especially the avant-garde Estonian stuff with shrieks, bird sounds & swirling stereo effects, but they could handle the lump-in-your-throat melodic Ave Maria stuff too. They're appearing tomorrow in Victoria at the First Metropolitan United (Quadra & Balmoral) at 730 & on Friday in North Van at St. Andrews United 10th at St George's, same time...

Local trees

sex in The Age of Nixon

"Sometimes I felt like I was writing a book about the history of sexual neuroses in the American ’60s. You had cops saying about antiwar protesters, “You pull down their pants, and they ain’t got no pecker.” You had a janitor after the march on the Pentagon being quoted in Time saying this absurd, impossible thing, that all the garbage was panties. You had Richard Nixon saying in 1971, when these brave anti-war Vietnam veterans are encamped in the Mall, “They’re just screwing chicks in their sleeping bags.” On the other side, you have one of the leaders of the Columbia University strike in 1968 telling women that the cops are so sexually screwed up that if you “pick up your shirt, they won’t know whether to jerk off or go blind.” You have people like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin describing their ideological adversaries as “menopausal men.” Basically you have every side accusing the other side of sexual dysfunction because of their ideological disagreements.

Sex was a weapon. Everything was a weapon. During the Kent State situation, which ended with four students being shot by the National Guard, part of the provocation these National Guardsmen felt was that women were looking up their names on their nameplates, calling their wives in Akron, and saying, “Guess what? I’m screwing your man over here at Kent State!”

Even putting a flower in the barrel of a gun is to a certain degree an act of cruelty. If you have someone whose job it is to follow orders and do their duty, and you taunt them for not being able to respond on a human level to an act like that, you’re basically just lording your superiority over them. Love can be a hateful thing..."