(in the Belkin Gallery at UBC)
judy radul - artforum.com / 500 words

When watching trials, we are aware that in the background there are numerous registers of power—the police, prisons, and the Law (with a capital l)—and that the trial itself is just the tip of a more invisible process. The trial actually has a kind of utopian dimension, a hope of bringing things into the public realm and the public record. But what strikes me is that the lawyers, the judges, the defendants, the guards, and the many, many clerks and team members are in a kind of fishbowl where some of them have been appearing, perhaps in the same trial, for several years....

A typo more mysterious that most

...our minds play tricks on us all the time — they positively excel at it — often for our own good. But mistakes, when caught, allow us a useful glimpse of the strange machinery within...

a collected Manny Farber...

The hard-bitten action film finds its natural home in caves: the murky, congested theaters, looking like glorified tattoo parlors on the outside and located near bus terminals in big cities. These theaters roll action films in what, at first, seems like a nightmarish atmosphere of shabby transience, prints that seem overgrown with jungle moss, sound tracks infected with hiccups. The spectator watches two or three action films go by and leaves feeling as though he were a pirate discharged from a giant sponge...

Local trees

La femme infidele (1969, Claude Chabrol)

While Chabrol’s cinematic mirroring of alienation borders on outright satire for the most part (Bouquet’s post-murder housecleaning is priceless), in the last act he pulls a startling about-face. He puts repression back on the mantle as a valid and virtuous mode of social intercourse, presenting a stony embrace between husband and wife as a sublime moment of genuine reconciliation...

David Bromige

They Gain Control of My Tongue





Which is to say, in lieu
Of playing the blue-tinted guitar,
A sociology of this process
Offers its studies of color.
The imagination
In complete autonomy
Disregards known outcomes
Now mounting into thousands
Because millions are incredible,
All those unwasted lives
Whose right companion , well....
Yes, a dead lion feeds bees,
Its rot is sweet, sweet

And unbreathable.
An objection
To test the hope eternal
In a prehistoric ploy
On the part of that great historian,
The gang. They sit there
Ordering the $3.99 breakfast
At three in the afternoon
(That terrible three in the afternoon
Standing for your incessant woe)
Chaired by Chuck Custer,
An obvious leader.
And history as tribes native

To a landscape all-too-familiar
In the Torah of Regret
Live on mistake, mistake
That doesn’t exist in California,
Whose holy ones banished it.
Yet the line at the DMV keeps shuffling
Toward validations
Required if control
Is to exist in a church spire.
Sit down I think I love you
That causes you to stalk out
Of every channel we click to.
Explode the car.



as ever

one of the great trio albums--
Paul Bley - Footloose (1963)

Local trees & c.

a wonderful dog
mix, dedicated to a cat...

Where the wild things aren't

"Where the Wild Things Are" may be a childlike picture, but it isn't an innocent one. The movie is so loaded with adult ideas about childhood -- as opposed to things that might delight or engage an actual child -- that it comes off as a calculated, petulant shout, the kind of trick kids play to guilt-trip their parents into paying attention to them. It appears to be a movie made by, and for, members of a generation who feel it's unfair to have to grow up. Jonze isn't channeling the feelings of 9-year-olds so much as he's obsessively fingering his own, like the silky edge of a blanket. "Who cares about the children?" is Jonze's sulky rhetorical question. "What about me?"