I will not cease from mental fight
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.
 

Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
Oh! raise us up, return to us again;
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart:
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
So didst thou travel on life's common way,
In cheerful godliness; and yet the heart
The lowliest duties on herself did lay.

-- William Wordsworth
 

Cruel and Unusual--the end of the 8th amendment--

"The ghost of slavery is built into our legal language and holds our prison system in its grip. To the extent that slaves were allowed personalities before the law, they were regarded chiefly—almost solely—as potential criminals. During the second session of the 39th Congress (December 12, 1866-January 8, 1867) debates raged on the meaning of the exemption in the 13th Amendment to the Constitution. It abolished slavery “except as punishment of crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” The parenthetical expression guaranteed enclosure, a bracketing of servitude that revived slavery under cover of removing it. Those who were once slaves were now criminals, and forced labor in the form of the convict lease system ensured continued degradation. As Charles Sumner warned, the locale for enslavement would move from the auction block to the courts of the United States. "

Helen Levitt's graffitti photos from the 30's 

"Spirit of the Beehive" director Victor Erice On the Uncertain Nature of Cinema

"A ghost always carries with it a specific and factual truth: the death or disappearance of someone or something. In the history of cinema, beyond its episodic deaths--real or symbolic: the death of classical cinema, Modernity - there exists a primordial mourning, practically forgotten nowadays: the mourning and sorrow caused by the disappearance of silent cinema in the moment of its maximum splendour, sacrificed for the sake of the spoken word. A premature death, without a doubt; a death of which Manoel de Oliveira is the only active filmmaker who can offer an embodied and heartfelt testimony, a death felt by him as an essential loss. A loss, above all, of a certain specificity of a cinema elaborated under the protection of montage theories, wherein the image worked in favour of an expression that substituted the word." 

Speegle--talking Google!

rounding up the numerous centennial A. J. Liebling re-issues--

"There are three kinds of writers of news in our generation. In inverse order of worldly consideration, they are:

1. The reporter, who writes what he sees.

2. The interpretive reporter, who writes what he sees and what he construes to be its meaning.

3. The expert, who writes what he construes to be the meaning of what he hasn't seen.

All is manifest to him, since his powers are not limited by his powers of observation. Logistics, to borrow a word from the military species of the genus, favor him, since it is possible to not see many things at the same time. For example, a correspondent cannot cover a front and the Pentagon simultaneously. An expert can, and from an office in New York, at that."  

Anodyne on Tim Lee and Kevin Schmidt

"Kevin Schmidt's "Fog", at Presentation House Gallery, is a two-piece installation. Facing you in the darkened gallery is an eight foot by eight foot slide projection of a West Coast forest interior at night. Huge gnarled trees are covered by beards of pale green moss and lichen. Evergreen boughs crisscross the image plane. Sword ferns' sharp points protrude from an opaque white mist that swirls across the foreground. The projected image's enormous size and crystalline clarity makes it seem like a doorway to the distant river valley where the photograph was taken. You feel that if you stepped forward, you would find your feet scuffling through the ferns, and kicking up clouds of mist."

("Kevin Schmidt's "Fog" is on display at North Vancouver's Presentation House Gallery from 6 November through 19 December 2004. Tim Lee's exhibition, "The Askance View", is on display at Vancouver's Tracey Lawrence Gallery from 28 October to 27 November 2004.) 

blogged elsewhere but don't miss alan sondheim on the election...

TAPPED: "Gallup's post-election poll seems to do some major damage to the rapidly emerging conventional wisdom about the 2004 election. According to Gallup, George W. Bush improved his share among suburban voters (51 percent in 2000, 54 percent in 2004) and among urban voters (35 percent in 2000, 44 percent in 2004) while doing worse among rural voters (60 percent in 2000, down to 54 percent in 2004). Similarly, while Bush gained among all categories of educational attainment, his biggest improvement was among those holding postgraduate degrees (47 percent, up from 43 percent) while his smallest gain was among those with high school or less (46 percent, up from 45 percent). "

Don't forget to vote, American readers! 

I'll be back after Guy Fawkes day!! 

Norman Mailer on The Gilmore Girls tonight--

"I've got to call Rory. She read "The Naked and the Dead" while she was still in footie pajamas."  

"In counting there is strength"

Thomas Nast 

"An Election Entertainment"

William Hogarth & 18th century print culture 

endlessly searchable Brooklyn Daily Eagle Online (1841-1902) 

an interesting-looking play about electronic music pioneer Delia Derbyshire was just on in the UK and its website has free Mp3's "responding" to her work--I wonder if they'll do a movie?

the mighty Sasha Frere-Jones on London Calling--

"On "London Calling," Strummer remakes his major points: the police are on the wrong side, wage labor will crush your soul, and sometimes people need to destroy property to be heard. His sense of righteousness is enhanced by the album's sequencing, which feels Biblically logical and begins with one of the best opening songs of any record ever, the title track. The song starts cold. Two guitar chords ring on the downbeats, locked in step with the drums, marching forward with no dynamic variation. A second guitar introduces difference, coming toward us like an ambulance Dopplering into range. The bass guitar, sounding like someone’s voice, heralds everybody over the hill and into the song. If you can listen to it without getting a chilly burst of immortality, there is a layer between you and the world. Joe Strummer simultaneously watches the riots and sloughs off his role as de-facto punk president: "London calling, now don't look to us / All that phony Beatlemania has bitten the dust / London calling, see we ain't got no swing / 'Cept for the ring of that truncheon thing." The chorus forms a keystone for the whole album: "A nuclear error, but I have no fear / London is drowning and I, I live by the river." The Clash are laughing at Margaret Thatcher and will be dancing long after the police have come and gone." 

extraordinary rendition

"The Torture Convention naturally bars parties from sending anyone to a country where “there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.” But the House bill would lift this prohibition, enabling the United States to deport (or “render”) foreign nationals to countries long condemned by the U.S. State Department for widespread practices of torture and other gross abuse. A potential deportee could avoid this fate only by proving through “clear and convincing evidence that he or she would be tortured” upon return. Merely showing that torture is more likely than not would no longer be enough. "

just watched Aki Kurasmaki's The Man Without A Past which was excellent. Kati Outinen really deserved her Cannes prize. 

Maine, vote to get rid of Bush and leave the bears alone!

"Bear guides disagree, saying hunting with bait requires perseverance and patience. They note that only one-fourth of bait hunters are able to bag a bear.

'It's a tough job to go out and sit motionless for six hours a day in a tree stand,' said Wayne Bosowicz of Foggy Mountain Guide Service. 'It takes a certain breed of hunter. It's not a walk in the park.' " 

Hey folks! check out these Totoro and Studio Ghibli calendars!! 

lovely glimpses of Fred Neil, Karen Dalton & c. from the whole first chapter of Bob Dylan's Chronicles

"Fred played for about twenty minutes and then introduced all the rest of the acts, then came back up to play whenever he felt like it, whenever the joint was packed. The acts were disjointed, awkward and seemed to have come from the Ted Mack Amateur Hour, a popular TV show. The audience was mostly collegiate types, suburbanites, lunch-hour secretaries, sailors and tourists. Everybody performed from ten to fifteen minutes. Fred would play for however long he felt, however long the inspiration would last. Freddy had the flow, dressed conservatively, sullen and brooding, with an enigmatical gaze, peachlike complexion, hair splashed with curls and an angry and powerful baritone voice that struck blue notes and blasted them to the rafters with or without a mike. He was the emperor of the place, even had his own harem, his devotees. You couldn't touch him. Everything revolved around him. Years later, Freddy would write the hit song 'Everybody's Talkin'.' I never played any of my own sets. I just accompanied Neil on all of his and that's where I began playing regular in New York. " 

good Steve Lacy appreciation

"What sets Lacy apart from other jazz composers is his devotion to the song form. Influenced by everyone from Weill to Webern, Lacy's settings of poetry borrow from both jazz and classical music yet are beholden to neither. His output--over 100 settings of poets such as Robert Creeley, Jack Kerouac, and Bob Kaufman--makes him something of a jazz Schubert. Like Schubert, Lacy wraps a mantle around the words, adding a new layer of meaning with melodies that enhance and illuminate them, as if the music were his own gloss of the text. At gigs without a vocalist--always his wife, the singer Irene Aebi--Lacy would simply read the poem before launching into the tune. His voice deployed the same shades of nuance that his horn did." 

Steve Lacy, Irene Aebi, and Frederic Rzewski two free mp3's

(preparing for election night on the US Armed Forces Network of Vietnam)

nice appreciation of Timothy Crouse's classic account of the '72 campaign coverage'Boys on the Bus'


"Some reporters thrived in this suffocating palace atmosphere. They began to think of themselves as part of the White House, and they proudly identified themselves as being 'from the White House press' instead of mentioning the paper they worked for. They forgot that they were handout artists and convinced themselves that they were somehow associates of a man who was shaping epochal events. . . . The faces of these men [in old photos on the pressroom wall] were infused with a funny expression, a pathetic aura of pride, a sense that they were taking part in the colossal moments of history. Now most of those moments were forgotten, and no one remembered a word that any of these men had written."  

A Very British Coup

"When Harry Perkins, a plain-spoken steelworker and third-generation socialist, becomes prime minister in a landslide Labour Party victory, the entrenched ruling class goes to work in a very British way to bring him down. With help from a smarmy media mogul and a like-minded U.S. government, Perkins' enemies wage a brutal but bloodless battle for control."

Watched the first episode last night, and listened to the interview with the author of the book (which I haven't read) Chris Mullin, now a Labour MP. Very much a period piece--Perkins trumps the IMF with Moscow cash!--but not without contemporary resonance. And the sadly deceased Ray MacAnally was just brilliant. (Yesterday a few seconds of Tommy Douglas reciting "Jerusalem" and then Sun Ra on an old Sat Night Live, all good omens as was the Sox win)) 

a sailor and his girlfriend walk through the ruins of Plymouth, from Blitz Photos of Lady Nancy Astor

(thanks Bifurcated Rivets) 

that smell in the air today... 

i refute it thus

"What matters is that nothing in Heisenberg's uncertainty principle applies to any object larger than a molecule. We may not be able to determine precisely where an electron is--but we know exactly where a rock, desk, or chair is. Uncertainty at the quantum level washes out when averaged across the quadrillions of quantum-sized particles in a baseball, whose position may then be precisely known. There is no uncertainty about most physics of the macro world, and no uncertainty about how we experience that world." 

Without a Doubt a must read

"''You think he's an idiot, don't you?'' I said, no, I didn't. ''No, you do, all of you do, up and down the West Coast, the East Coast, a few blocks in southern Manhattan called Wall Street. Let me clue you in. We don't care. You see, you're outnumbered 2 to 1 by folks in the big, wide middle of America, busy working people who don't read The New York Times or Washington Post or The L.A. Times. And you know what they like? They like the way he walks and the way he points, the way he exudes confidence. They have faith in him. And when you attack him for his malaprops, his jumbled syntax, it's good for us. Because you know what those folks don't like? They don't like you!'' In this instance, the final ''you,'' of course, meant the entire reality-based community. " 

this weekend is weally the Woolly Worm Festival in Banner Elk, North Carolina, with waces and stwipe intewpwetation & c.