Roy Arden

Ange Mlinko on Jimmy Schuyler

Light From Canada

A wonderful freshness, air
that billows like bedsheets
on a clothesline and the clouds
hang in a traffic jam: summer
heads home. Evangeline,
our light is scoured and Nova
Scotian and of a clarity that
opens up the huddled masses
of the stolid spruce so you
see them in their bristling
individuality. The other
day, walking among them, I
cast my gaze upon the ground
in hope of orchids and,
pendant, dead, a sharp shadow
in the shade, a branch gouged
and left me "scarred forever
'neath the eye." Not quite. Not
the cut, but the surprise, and
how, when her dress caught fire,
Longfellow's wife spun
into his arms and in the dying
of its flaring, died. The
irreparable, which changes
nothing that went before
though it ends it. Above the wash
and bark of rumpled water, a gull
falls down the wind to dine
on fish that swim up to do same.

Orson Welles' legacy

Welles stubbornly insisted on keeping his freedom long after he had to
relinquish his power, which makes him a troubled role model at best...

Isola di Rifiuti

“Fontenelle’s rose saying that within the memory of a rose no gardener had been known to die.”

excellent roundup on Radical Robbie Burns, Peoples Poet

the secret of Stieg Larsson

My favorite part of "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" (after the scene where Lisbeth Salander triumphs over the court-appointed guardian who abused her) is the part where crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist sets up, box by box, a research office in a little cabin on a remote Swedish island. My favorite part of "The Girl Who Played with Fire" (after the chapter where Salander infiltrates the bad guys' security system) is when she goes to Ikea to furnish her secret hideout and Larsson lists every last thing she buys there.

Local trees

Obama and the myth of the public opinion excuse

...what were once viewed as controversial right-wing, Bush/Cheney Terrorism policies have been transformed, under Obama, into bipartisan consensus. Whereas the vast majority of Democrats spent the last eight years claiming to vehemently oppose policies such as indefinite detention, military commissions, and secrecy claims, they now actively defend them or (at best) remain meekly silent because it's now their political party, rather than the GOP, that is responsible for them. By embracing as his own many of the very policies he vowed to uproot, Obama has gutted the core of public opposition to those policies...

on TCM this afternoon Preminger's classic noir Angel Face

Date Farmers

via

bill bissett - Awake In Th Red Desert (Canadian Psych Concrete Poetry 1967)

This is one of the most out there Canadian records of the late 60s. bill bissett is a one of the first concrete poets from the 60s who to this day is still writing and performing. In the late 60s he lived in Vancouver Canada and made these far out recordings with friends jamming in the background over top of his poety. There are also some tracks that where done with the help of a Buchla System 100 Synthesizer. The first Modular System made by the man who created the surround sound system at Kesey's trip festival in the late 60s. It was a age where electronic where being freed into the musical cosmos and experiments with poety and music where being done by people and not just academics...

...tableware & more at the The Kitchen of Dr. Moreau

terrific bird writer Bernd Henrich has a new book out--Can birds fall in love?

For about 97 percent of the year, most birds are not having sex with
each other. But again, with birds of paradise, if females keep arriving
that window might be extended for months...