Burying brutal truths about war:

"Noticeably absent, though, has been the New York Times, which, according to an electronic search, has never even referenced the Blade series or its historic findings in its print pages. Asked about the omission, a Times spokeswoman did not return calls by deadline.

The Times' peculiar silence has raised eyebrows in some journalistic circles. 'I'm appalled the New York Times hasn't run anything,' says investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. 'Not even a wire story?' Additionally, for three weeks none of the network news operations or all-news cable channels picked up the Blade's report. Asked if he's surprised by the lack of media pickup, Hersh answers, 'I'm enraged, are you kidding?' Hersh, who won a Pulitzer for uncovering the 1968 My Lai massacre, where U.S. troops killed hundreds of Vietnamese civilians, suggests the Blade's work has been ignored because of a chill that's in the media air today, with troops on the ground in Iraq, and the White House claiming too much attention is being paid to bad news. "

Tiger Force must read Vietnam series from Toledo Blade

NPR : Sewer Cleaners, Dirty Work: "Americans' perception of sewer workers, Speer says, 'is largely defined by one 1950s-era television show' -- The Honeymooners, in which comedians Jackie Gleason and Art Carney played bus driver Ralph Kramden and his pal Ed Norton, a sewer worker. Real-life sewer workers 'aren't above joking about the work they do,' says Speer -- but they contend their lives are nothing like a TV sit-com. "

The Wine of Life: The Meaning of Drainage:
"This alligator was pinto: pale white, seaweed black. It moved fast but clumsy. It could have been lazy, or old or stupid. Profane thought maybe it was tired of living.
The chase had been going on since nightfall. They were in a section of 48-inch pipe, his back was killing him. Profane hoped the alligator would not run off into something smaller, somewhere he couldn't follow. Because then he would have to kneel in the sludge, aim half-blind and fire., all quickly, before the cocodrilo got out of range. Angel held the flashlight, but he had been drinking wine, and would crawl along behind Profane absent-mindedly, letting the beam waver all of the pipe. Profane could only see the coco in occasional flashes.
From time to time his quarry would half-turn, coy, enticing. A little sad. Up above it must have been raining. A continual thin drool sounded behind them at the last sewer opening. Ahead was darkness. The sewer tunnel here was torturous and built decades ago. Profane was hoping for a straightaway. He could make an easy kill there. If he fired anywhere in this stretch of short, crazy angles there'd be danger from ricochets. "

Brooklyn Bound

The Norton Anthology

Neil's Garage

Happy Birthday Shakey!!

You wake up
in the morning
And the sun's comin' up.
Its been up for hours
and hours
and hours
and hours
and hours
and hours
It's been up
for hours
and hours
and hours
And you light up
the stove
And the coffee cup, its hot.
And the orange juice is cold,
cold, cold
Monday morning,
Wake up,
wake up,
wake up,
wake up
Its time to go,
Time to go
to work.

New Marianne Moore collected

Drew Gardner's Blog assays Wilder's "Apartment" as well as George and I's reading

Armor-Plated Snail Discovered in Deep Sea: "Waren said that when he first examined the sea snail, the animal's magnetized scales kept sticking to his forceps. He guessed that an iron mineral was involved. "

Songs of ourselves: " In music we hear the echo of our basic sound-making instrument -- the vocal tract. The explanation for human music is simpler still than Pythagoras's mathematical equations: We like the sounds that are familiar to us -- specifically, we like sounds that remind us of us."

Happy Birthday Rene Clair!

No Nanaimo record stores reviewed but still a good resource

Alberta Wheat Pool

Grain Elevators

Buffalo Grain Elevator Project : "When LeCorbusier saw the pure cylindrical forms of Buffalo's concrete grain elevators he exclaimed: 'The first fruits of the new age!' "

Listen to Old Time Music from 78s

good Night time photos from the area just south of K's

wild boys of Vernon: "'I spent a lot of my former life in the bush,' Stinson told the Vancouver Province. 'I once met a person who hadn't been out in society since 1918. We took him out in 1976 and he flipped out seeing cars and stoplights. So is it possible, you bet it is.' "

Happy 18th Brumaire!
"But unheroic though bourgeois society is, it nevertheless needed heroism, sacrifice, terror, civil war, and national wars to bring it into being. And in the austere classical traditions of the Roman Republic the bourgeois gladiators found the ideals and the art forms, the self-deceptions, that they needed to conceal from themselves the bourgeois-limited content of their struggles and to keep their passion on the high plane of great historic tragedy. Similarly, at another stage of development a century earlier, Cromwell and the English people had borrowed from the Old Testament the speech, emotions, and illusions for their bourgeois revolution. When the real goal had been achieved and the bourgeois transformation of English society had been accomplished, Locke supplanted Habakkuk. "

Colour Order Systems in Art and Science

Radio Free Flatbush
"He drives a cab by day. At night, he broadcasts Haitian gospel music somewhere between Flatbush and Crown Heights with the help of a used, low-power FM transmitter that he bought from a friend for $1500. Last Saturday night he was parked on 87.9 FM.

'My music is my ministry,' he says with a thick Creole accent and gravelly voice. 'But there's no one in Brooklyn who knows my place. Even my wife, I can'tt tell her. I am always traveling. I don't even get time to sleep.'"

Soup

Popsicle art

Fort Tryon

Van Cortlandt Park

did most of this between the bridges tour myself, but would still have been fun

Lunar Eclipse

Alfred Hitchcock mosaics

Michael Bracewell hosts Mark. E Smith: "I remembered too late that these kinds of events - 'In Conversations', bookshop appearances and so forth - are wholly bourgeois in their conception: they presuppose a complicity between the audience, subject and interviewer, in which a kind of broadsheet notion of edification is the predominant tone. And I was face to face with the man who had written Prole Art Threat in 1979 and thrown Courtney Love off a tour bus. A man who preferred to get arrested by the LAPD rather than put out his fag on a plane. Smith had lambasted all the institutions of middle-class popular culture, from open-air festivals to student vegans; and as his greatest hero was Wyndham Lewis, so he assumed his best-known public mask of being The Enemy. No matter that I'd seen The Fall maybe 20 times, no matter that I listened to the records with unceasing enthusiasm, and had written about them as vital works of contemporary art. I came across like Wilfrid Hyde-White trying to interview Eminem"

Purple frog delights scientists

Bellona Times: "Sofia Coppola wants to make herself look good the way Woody Allen used to make himself look good, but she's unable or unwilling to provide her stand-in with any distinguishing marks."

Allodox reviews overrated Lost In Translation: "Saw the movie at the crappy early 90s theater on Third Ave, around 11th St. 4 overlit floors. But the ticketseller back and forth courteous in an unforced way - pain reduction all around. On the way out, very humid, with fast thick fog passing across upper buildings and lights. Inflected greys and sharp whites. Some reflections from all the glass further uptown. Could just sort of glimpse the red-lit spire of a big gothic insurance building on Park South.

The new traffic signals and iconic pedestrian signage reduce the number of differences between Tokyo and New York."

craven realpolitik from Canada's national newspaper: "There is a larger issue. The United States has invited Canada to join in creating the so-called North American Security Perimeter. The success of that perimeter depends on close interdepartmental co-operation among the many police, intelligence, customs and immigration agencies in both countries."

Multi-intelligence matters: "Mr. Easter told reporters yesterday he did not know how the Americans obtained the lease, but said it did not come from the RCMP, and might have been obtained by foreign intelligence agencies.
'That particular document, there are multi-intelligence agencies involved in these matters,' he said.
'Just because it happens to be a lease does not necessarily mean it came from Canadian sources,' he said. 'Of course, I'm worried about it. I'm always concerned about illegal matters.'"

Diplomacy: "'I don't know if diplomacy blinds them to the obvious,' said Mr. McTeague. 'But it's pretty clear when a person is busted up and kept in those kind of conditions and he's trying to signal to you with three of his tormentors who happen to be around him, that there is something wrong.'"

The Soft Power Argument: "Sampson suggested that the Canadian government decided to take a soft approach to his case so as not to anger officials in Riyadh.
'I'm not convinced the soft power argument has worked in my case or other cases,' he said. 'If the Canadian government wanted to effect an earlier release, they have to be prepared to much more publicly declaim the government's concerns.'
'Because of the political clout that Saudi Arabia supposedly has, people were hiding behind the soft-power argument to do nothing.'
Saudi Arabia has rejected a formal Canadian request for an investigation into Sampson's imprisonment. They insist the torture did not happen and that Sampson is still guilty of the bombing."

NATIONAL POST: "Reporters asked Bill Graham, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, how this document came to be in the possession of the FBI, but he had nothing to offer but his own confusion.
'If I could answer that question, I wouldn't be Foreign Minister, I'd be the divine. There are many things that are unanswerable,' he replied."

Democracy Now! | Canadian Man Deported by U.S. Details Torture in Syria: "On Wednesday, officials told the Washington Post anonymously that the U.S. knowingly sends suspects abroad to be tortured. One official said 'The temptation is to have these folks in other hands because they have different standards,' while another said, 'Someone might be able to get information we can't from detainees.'"

Continues clear and cold here. The thick frost via the brushwork of Denzil Best w/George Shearing ca. 1951(thank you Rod) doesn't begin to budge before full sun hits it early afternoon.

A walk with Gilbert White (PDF)

Water proof: Dinosaur secret revealed: "This is where the mystery comes in. In many places, including Texas and Korea, researchers have found sauropod footprints -- but only from the front feet. Henderson, whose work combines paleontology with biomechanics, says the dinosaurs were floating, and were able to punt along the bottom with their front feet."

Baltic Light

Found the catalogue for this show on the sale table at the National Gallery bookstore in DC.

Deal for Nanaimo band is short on land, long on weasel words

Field's Chip Shop and lots more from the Amber Collective

Las Vegas sign graveyard

more on the Gunpowder Plot

"I am a Syrian-born Canadian. "
Canada's complicity with the appalling treatment of this man by US and Syrian officials is shameful and scandalous. I experienced an extremely minor version of this when I was "refused" at the border trying to get to Portland, Ore. last month--I was fingerprinted, photographed and interrogated for no stated reason--and it was trauma and humiliation enough. The anguish of this man, as innocent as I was but unprotected by whiteness, can scarcely be imagined.

The Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union: "36-G (Buffalo, N.Y.)-Cheerios, Kix, Total, Lucky Charms, Wheaties"

Found photos

Kind words on George and myself's St Mark's reading via THE PHILLY SOUND: New Poetry from gypsy queen bowling sensation Cori Copp...

Many thanks to everyone who organised and came to my readings, but especially to George Stanley and Bernadette Mayer, the poets I was fortunate enough to read with. Their shining models of sustained attentiveness could not help but flatter and enhance my efforts.

Home to this bright clear cold fall here after 80 Fahrenheit in Fort Tryon the day before yesterday. Not one Protestant firework last night, though a hundred years ago...

In Scotland (late 60's/early 70's) I remember huge bonfires, Bengal matches (which were regular matches with huge heads which burned in different colours--sold to children for thruppence literally!-- wrapped in a swatch of a provincial newspaper from the midlands, a red elephant on the yellow box) and being given cocoa and a baked potato. Helicopters would fly up and down the UK photographing the bonfires for TV. The implied assertion of the crown's legitimacy very much in the picture.

Away from the Manse until Guy Fawkes day. Do come and see me at St Mark's Poetry Project on the 22nd, SUNY Buffalo on the 24th or Aerial Edge Books on the 26th.

Vancouver producer Chris Haddock's new show "The Handler" , which I turned to after the hiatusing of "Boomtown", has the peerless Joey Pants as its Prospero.

Pynchon and Homer

Satan's Laundromat fine outer borough photoblog...

77/12/16
THE QUEEN OF PERU
W: David Chase
D: Meta Rosenberg
Rockford's barbecue grill is stolen by tourists who are not aware that a
$3-million diamond is hidden in the ashes.
(Rocky, Becker, Beth, Chapman)
Stephen Kalifer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . George Wyner
Carl Wronko. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ken Swofford
Ginger Townsend. . . . . . . . . . . . . . Christopher Cary
Mike Trevino . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Joe E. Tata
Lou. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Luke Andreas
Skip Speece . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hunter von Leer
Shareen Wronko . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jennifer Marx
Sean Wronko. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Michael Morgan
Dot Wronko . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Susan Davis
Donny Waugh. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Paul Cavonis
Hubbard. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jack Garner

Edge: "THAT DAMN BIRD": "We are going to do some more studies with recursion. Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch published a paper in Science at the end of October 2002 stating that only humans produce recursive phrases and that recursion is thus what separates human language from animal communication systems. Well, parrots, dolphins and sea lions respond to recursive sentences. Dolphins and sea lions will differentially respond to statements such as 'Touch the surfboard that is grey and to the left' versus 'Swim over the Frisbee that is black and to your right.' Alex responds to questions such as 'What object is green and three-corner?' versus 'What color is wood and four-corner?' or 'What shape is paper and purple?' "

Portlandia over 50 feet standing up...

Portland Building

English Fairy and Other Folk Tales: Drolls: The Wise Fools of Gotham:

"Tell me no more of Gotham fools,
Or of their eels in little pools,
Which they were told were drowning;
Nor of their carts drawn up on high,
When King John's men were standing by,
To keep a wood from browning.
'Nor of their cheese shoved down the hill,
Nor of a cuckoo sitting still,
While it they hedged round;
Such tales of them have long been told,
By prating boobies, young and old,
In drunken circles crowned.

'The fools are those who thither go
To see the cuckoo bush, I trow,
The wood, the barn, and pools;
For such are seen both here and there,
And passed by without a sneer
By all but errant fools."

Million Poems:

"Knock down the walls
Like a powerful rule
Please go past my shoulders
Months
Meaning
Brushstroke
In the territory
Guitar chord
On the corner
Do you love me?
Dog goes by
Phone rings

1/17/97 5:30"

Al Hirschfeld - Gordon Kahn - The Speakeasies of 1932

josh blog: "But I'm not shaken, Wittgenstein. Hearing a song in your head is kind of like singing it aloud - your memory of it can be different when doing it as opposed to just recalling it. Once you start singing, you can keep going. You can remember parts in the middle that you would otherwise be unable to. (I think it works the same way with the train departures too, but there the story is more complicated.)"

The Poetry Project Calendar has George Stanley and myself's reading next Wednesday (and much more) up

Oregon History Project many fine big images here

Big Peckinpah section at THE HIGH HAT.

Overlap: Drew Gardner's Blog: "I gently put the keyboard on the cement behind me, picked up the keyboard stand, held it above my head in a way that made it clear he could be putting himself in harm's way, and asked, 'Are you okay?' He seem confused by this, stopped, and threw what turned out to be a square metal plate at me, which completely missed. He grudgingly and slowly went away as I calmly menaced him with the keyboard stand.

I realized later that this use of a musical instrument is in the tradition of the Japanese Shakuhachi flute, which doubles as a weapon if you're in a pinch. "

Borges' Dictionary for sale!!: "177. Fowler (H.W., editor). The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English, signed and dated twice by Borges on title, original cloth, gilt spine, sightly rubbed, 8vo, Oxford, 1931.
£400 - 600"

They're selling his dagger, too.

quicktime t.o.

Mexperimental: "A pattern of attacking and invading other countries that started with Mexico, and illegally taking half of our territory in 1848, a date still not forgotten for many Mexicans. Facts that American don't want to take seriously or remember, because American history is full of these kinds of attacks against others and oblivion about it. This is why Americans want to escape from reality. Electing Schwarzenneger for example. Substituting reality with illusory figures. "

You Could Look It Up: "H. L. Mencken wrote that the O.E.D.'s completion would be celebrated with ''military exercises, boxing matches between the dons, orations in Latin, Greek, English and the Oxford dialect, yelling contests between the different colleges and a series of medieval drinking bouts.'' "

Holt Uncensored #376 Good editing tips

Joss Stone

Bruce Conkle, whose "Sasquatch Feng Shui" was a highlight of my visit to Portland...

With this long PDF from Ronald Dwokrin on "Rights and Terror", I'll say goodbye for a week or so.

Lee Ann Brown and I will be doing a workshop in Queens for Buzzer Thirty Nov 1st & 2nd. It will include a field trip, etc....

my book launch is up on the KSW site.

The Atget Rephotographic Project

Queens Street Artists: "'Art trickles down to culture, intentionally or not,' James says. 'From Chris Burden to Johnny Knoxville, it’s a clear progression.'"

Go Elton!: "Elton sat down at the piano, but before he began to play, shot back:
'This night is about charity - not washing your dirty political laundry.
I love America, but if you want to know why the world hates America, I can give you two words: Dennis Miller.' "

Mallarme reviewed in Guardian

Tonka Literature

After inconclusive and scanty evidence of visits from our local bear last fall, I was pleased to find abundant scat, black as truffles, in three heaps along the railway tracks, his customary trail... Clearly the bear had been at the abundant windfall plums, fermented in the warm September sun, big time. An involuntary shudder all that's left of my flight response. More nervous about being mistaken for a bear than being confronted by one. Lots of horsie evidence, a good thing, it means the solid upper-middle class has some stake in the right of way. It's as if the horses get to decide where the parks go.

lucid re-cap of Blair vs. Beeb

365 Days Project features Larry Krone

Baja to Vancouver

from the Fantastic in Art and Fiction.....

Thomas Rowlandson's Danse Macabre

The hermit and the bear

The beaver and fox promenade

Slavoj steamed at Verso:
"In an interview appearing in Critical Intellectuals on Writing, a volume published this summer by the State University of New York Press, Mr. Zizek complained that Verso had been unenthusiastic about his 400-page theoretical magnum opus, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Center of Political Ontology. The press asked him to make it shorter, he says, and to include more obscene jokes. "

thanks to Metafilter for the two below...

GREAT Top 100 Films list

Weird Gardens

CONVERSATION BETWEEN D'ALEMBERT AND DIDEROT: "Diderot: I think that is so; that has made me sometimes compare the fibres of our organs to sensitive vibrating strings which vibrate and resound long after they have been plucked. It is this vibration, this kind of inevitable resonance, which holds the object -present, while the mind is busied about the quality that belongs to that object. But vibrating strings have yet another property, that of making other strings vibrate; and that is how the first idea recalls a second, the two of them a third, these three a fourth and so on, so that there is no limit to the ideas awakened and interconnected in the mind of the philosopher, as he meditates and hearkens to himself amid silence and darkness. This instrument makes surprising leaps, and an idea once aroused may sometimes set vibrating an harmonic at an inconceivable distance. If this phenomenon may be observed between resonant strings that are lifeless and separate, why should it not occur between points that are alive and connected, between fibres that are continuous and sensitive? "

Jonathan Edwards @ 300: "Unconverted men walk over the pit of hell on a rotten covering, and there are innumerable places in this covering so weak that they will not bear their weight, and these places are not seen"

William Steig 1907-2003