Vancouver artist Sylvia Grace Borda looks at the modernist legacy of the Scottish "New Town" of East Kilbride, which I remember visiting sometime in the late 60's when it really was new. Though she doesn't mention it Bill Forsyth's movie "Gregory's Girl" was filmed there.

(thanks Chris) 

helpful as ever, Hotel Point provides a epigraph for my poem below--

"And Melville, in a letter: "For my part, I love sleepy

fellows, and the more ignorant the better. Damn your wideawake and knowing chaps. As for sleepiness, it is one of the noblest qualities of humanity. There is something

sociable about it, too. Think of those sensible and sociable millions of good fellows all taking a good long snooze together, under the sod . . ." (Paul Metcalf

told me that.) So we nod, and resume, we toss on our pallets, we sleep like dogs, thumping. "
 

Shoot to kill in order to protect

"This is a tragedy," Blair said Sunday. "The Metropolitan Police accepts full responsibility for this. To the family I can only express my deep regrets."


But he defended the shoot-to-kill policy, saying such action only applied when lives were thought to be at risk.


"I am very aware that minority communities are talking about a shoot-to-kill policy," he said. "It's only a shoot-to-kill-in-order-to-protect policy."


Blair said British police have drawn from the experiences of other countries that have dealt with suicide attackers.


"The only way to deal with this is to shoot to the head," he said. "There is no point in shooting at someone's chest because that is where the bomb is likely to be."

Shoot to kill

"Heavily armed private security contractors, who number in the tens of thousands, also are authorized by the U.S. government to use deadly force to protect themselves.

One contractor who works for the U.S. government and saw a colleague killed in a suicide bombing said it was better to shoot an innocent person than to risk being killed.

'I'd rather be tried by 12 than carried by six,' said the contractor, who insisted that he not be identified by name because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

The U.S. military says it investigates all shootings by American personnel that result in death. But U.S. Brig. Gen. Don Alston, spokesman for the multinational force in Iraq, said he was unaware of any soldier disciplined for shooting a civilian at a checkpoint or in traffic. "

the brand new onedit features work by (among others) Brian Kim Stefans, P. Inman, Lisa Jarnot &

Tim Atkins versioning

HORACE

the innumerable years
full of nobbers
& the transitory habits of murkin
are forming the roaring
Bospherous
Syrtes self-made minge of spinach
& Upton-on-Severn

Edgar & Johnny
clink to the raiders' spunk
more splendid than the Starkeys'
thin pamphlets & halitosis
on the neck of
translations

you know how no cincture of ropes

worry about you now I long to
regurgitate
Bern stars and the sailor's
KY, the seeps of whingers wax
shall worm to no other women, I -
more runched against than
runching

(Double Deadtime Bummer Blues)

for

(Judee Sill)



Alive to the moment
but you sleep a lot,

"misspent" as if
in a sentence describing

an unexpected skill
at pool or cards--though

an incremental embrace
of criminality inevitable

given just how strict, & c.
Dimes for the parking meter

in bowls at the Bank of
Montreal downtown (now

gone, the Harewood branch
gone) those little dusty mints

as we left the taverna
just as everyone's back was turned;

coffee with Coffeemate
at the Caledonia Clinic--

brighter now flooded everywhere
with glare it would be harder

to disappear into that soft-fringed
theology, those Townsite

alleys empty at all hours
of everything but

"Il Quatro Staggioni"
"The Sickness Unto Death".

Link Wray's Border Blues

"Instead, we listened to him announce, "Link isn't here yet. He's... um... just... down the street. Hang tight." This explanation didn't hold much weight with those near the stage, as an uncomfortable fear emoted from Miller's eyes. People in the back joked that the 76-year-old star was probably entertaining himself with lap dances at the Cecil Hotel next door. The crowd may not have been so jovial had it known that at that very moment, Link Wray was being both stripped naked and physically assaulted by Canadian border guards.

Five hours after the doors had opened, an announcement was finally made. For reasons not totally made clear, Link Wray's drummer was being detained and would not be allowed into Canada. The rest of the Wraymen had arrived in Vancouver, but were in no mood to perform."

the great Judee Sill's last recordings finally issued--

"This record's lovingly packaged accompanying 72-page oral history memorializes Sill in a doomed embroidery populated with the ghosts of Rosicrucian fellowships and other mystical mongrelisms, the musical revelations of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Bach and Mahler, Pythagorean intervallic worship, oil-money trust funds, seaside peyote picnics, a muscular hallucinogenic appetite, exotic reptile importing siblings, indiscrete bisexual trysting, near-fatal auto accidents with Danny Kaye, Madame Blavatsky, violent relationships, an electronic bypass apparatus designed to bridge Judee's ill-healed broken spine, Geffen's pink shoes, long-term heroin addiction, Bill Plummer's Cosmic Brotherhood, and a parakeet named Celine."

Greetings from Scrapperstown

"The Enchanted Forest

Paintings by Justin "Scrappers" Morrison

Artist Reception: Friday July 22nd, 6:00 to 9:00 pm

July 22nd - September 10th 2005

V-Gun 412 SW Fourth Avenue.
Portland Oregon 503 226-3400

Hours are 8 am to 6 pm Monday through Saturday

Free and open to the public, all ages.

Contacts: V-Gun co-curators: Marne Lucas ml@v-gun.us Bruce Conkle bc@v-gun.us



The Enchanted Forest

There is a deep far away forest that we can all reach. It is the wilderness inside. It is your wild side. My wild side is home to lumberjacks, savage scouts, happy hobos, vintage beer commercials, protesters, strange trees, unicorn and Bigfoot. They live the way they see fit and I let them be. Maybe someday I'll go join them in the Enchanted Forest, but until then they remind me to stay wild.

All the paint used is recycled, salvaged, or eco-groovy house paint. All of the wood was salvaged from dumpsters and houses that were being deconstructed. Recycling is cool, reusing is cooler, reducing your resource consumption and subsequent waste is coolest.

-Justin "Scrappers" Morrison



V-Gun

V-Gun is housed inside Veganopolis at 412 SW 4th Avenue in downtown Portland. V-Gun hosts 2 month rotating exhibitions, and is co-curated by artists Bruce Conkle (former gallery director of Orlo) and Marne Lucas (former curator at the Aalto Lounge).



For more information see www.v-gun.us and www.scrapperstown.com

10% of proceeds go to benefit animal welfare"

good-ish take on Cirque du Soleil, but once again its definitive zinging on the Simpson's (as "Cirque de Puree" & some years back, too) is ignored, or is that process of simpsonification presumed to have already happened already, to everything?--

"I arrived a few minutes late and found the stage occupied by a small goat-man with forest leaves protruding from his trousers and his hair gelled into a three-point salute. "Pfffft!" he said, to much laughter. A few moments later, an angel dressed in white descended from the heavens. The goat-man regarded the angel with mock fury until the angel rose and began to perform trapeze stunts with the aid of a hammock. This seemed to satisfy the goat-man and he departed at stage right."

& from The Simpsons December 2000, "Skinner's Sense of Snow"--

"Acrobats perform to colored lights and whimsical music. Suddenly, a clown with a pushcart interrupts the show.

Clown: Wait, wait! I cannot get the lid off my jar of rainbows. Who will help me?

[points to a man in a
double-breasted suit] You, sir!

Man: [heavy French-Canadian accent] But I cannot help you, I am just a local merchant from ... this town.

Homer:[yelling from the audience] Just smash it open!

Clown: Oh, you can do it if your heart is pure

-- or puree.
[audience laughs]

[the man opens the jar, and rainbow-colored light appears
to spill from it. The man, who is suspended on wires, is
lifted up and "flies" around the tent as more whimsical
music plays]

Marge: They always pick the guy with the wires."

The New World Order

"For there is a precedent in modern Western history for a country whose leader exploits national humiliation and fear to restrict public freedoms; for a government that makes permanent war as a tool of state policy and arranges for the torture of its political enemies; for a ruling class that pursues divisive social goals under the guise of national 'values'; for a culture that asserts its unique destiny and superiority and that worships military prowess; for a political system in which the dominant party manipulates procedural rules and threatens to change the law in order to get its own way; where journalists are intimidated into confessing their errors and made to do public penance. Europeans in particular have experienced such a regime in the recent past and they have a word for it. That word is not 'democracy.'"

Matt Taibbi

"The crime that ought to be considered this week is not that Rove may have whispered something or other to a few reporters. The crime is that hundreds, if not thousands, of journalists and politicians in this country have over the years cheerily honored this vile, scum-sucking pig of a human being by calling him names like "genius" and "boy wonder" and "wizard"—as though the business of Rove's life was somehow cute, quirky and lovably mischievous."

Where's the books?

"What is the message of this new medium? What does it mean when the University of Texas at Austin removes nearly all of the books from its undergraduate library to make room for coffee bars, computer terminals, and lounge chairs? What are students in those "learning commons" being taught that is qualitatively better than what they learned in traditional libraries?"  

Stanley Kubrick's dictionary on Ebay--starting bid 3500 quid...

Square America square format vernacular photography



(amongst much else at the newly relocated gmtPlus9) 

(Records Are Like Life)

The ageing shuffle function's
approximation of taste
gave us six downers in a row

then bounced back
with the cracker-barrel rictus
of happy hardcore.

Sadly never so "wasted"
that it ever made sense to me
just as in 1978 you could slip "new wave"

records on when everyone was drunk--
Homicide by 999, say, or The Stranglers (Peaches),
but... The shuffle function was

letting anyone else do it
which was never.
The shuffle function

of the guidance counsellor's
high-freckled "rap"
about the "sidjuation"

tight Jimmy Olsen curls
into an Archie crosshatch fade
a bifocal lowering sans specs

comes to rest
at the bridge of your nose, says
down to business--

and so impressive
the audio-visual gestetner
ink-smelling gestalt

(until perhaps a half-dozen
years ago I would still roam the halls
in sleep, stealing books

in an admixture of revulsion
that when I awoke)
that lacking even a robot's

will to charm the odds
or even an 8-track or a Lazy Susan
I consumed the script.
 

good Self-Storage Nation doesn't mention the numerous Simpsons riffs on the subject, though...



"And even when the stored items are innocent possessions, a certain poignant sadness haunts them: They are mementos we somehow can't live with, and yet can't live without, and exemplify the downside of acquisition, the moment when you realize there are more bread machines, plastic lawn chairs, and treadmills than anyone could use in a lifetime."


 

Another Ladybird illustration. (see below) 

long interview with writer/director Larry Cohen

"Jim Brown told me "It's Alive" was the scariest movie he ever saw, so I enjoy being the guy that scared Jim Brown."


(via GreenCine Daily)

illustrations from Ladybird Books

(much more at I like)

 

junior phenom Julia Mayhew on the Wimbledon final--

"HOW VENUS WILLIAMS WON WIMBLEDON 2005

One day on July 2nd
Venus played against Lindsay
Davenport. Venus was secretly
related to William Carlos
Williams and friends of the goddess Venus. During
the end of the game Venus
hypnotized Lindsay Davenport
with the love of poetry.
Lindsay was related to Jeremy
Davenport, a trumpet player and
tried to distract Venus with
very soft music but
Venus won anyway." 

good pieces on Pynchon and Vollman & c. up at the BOOKFORUM site

British-born bombers: not so shocking

"There is a growing sense of atomisation and alienation in the West, not only among immigrants but across society. Homesick Arabs and British-born Muslims in West Yorkshire might feel it more acutely, but it affects everyone in British, American and European societies, in the growth of disillusionment with public institutions and disenfranchisement from the political process. Could it be that the new terrorism, which we consider so awful and alien, is in fact a product of the same corrosive forces that impact on the rest of us? Could it be that those four alienated Asian kids from Leeds were expressing the same angst and disillusionment, in a much more violent way, as anti-globalist campaigners express when they smash up a McDonald's and others of us express in our pissed-off-ness with political and public life?"

though I disagree with him about 90 per cent of the time Armond White is with me on declaring "Kung Fu Hustle" & "The War of the Worlds" the best this year so far...

"War of the Worlds is Steven Spielberg's equivalent to Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend. It's an apocalyptic vision based in how we live today, amidst worldwide trauma, but every astonishing sequence demonstrates the hard psychic work of civilized man forced to rehumanize himself. This challenge to good-time filmgoers' expectations is the latest example of the 70s modernist urge to revise genre in order to face life more knowledgably. Weekend was based in theoretical political disillusionment; Spielberg's road movie has the taste of bitter experience." 

why not take a quick five & check out the five new Quicktimes at http://www.somedancersandmusicians.com/

Is anyone else freaked out by The Daily Show' s new studio set?

"I don't have the graphic-design vocabulary to describe this accurately, but let's just say that you can no longer watch The Daily Show without struggling to block out two constant, and competing, written reminders that you are, indeed, watching The Daily Show. On its own, the continuous blue scroll might have been forgivable, though it does give the studio a more claustrophobic feel than before. But those radiating white caps are just maddening. It's as if Stewart's head is actually producing the letters, like promotional dandruff. "

more Lee Siegel here--

"Imagine an Orwellian fable that had all the mass media of American society silenced--or mute with complacence--and confined to a kind of internment camp, with the exception of television, which for some reason escaped the censor's attention. It's up to television to save the country! It tries. It makes brave attempts--developing twelve new 'Law & Order' franchises, for example. It ascends to ever-higher levels of innovation and originality. But it can't.

This is a medium that people watch in their underwear, for goodness sake. Who's going to rush out of the house wearing his Calvin Klein briefs into an advancing wall of shields and truncheons? Ouch. You're going to give up that late-night mango sorbet and go out there and pile up furniture on Fifth Avenue to try and slow down the tanks? I don't think so. Why, I bet even if Jon Stewart, the Danton of cable television, called for a revolution in the face of the most horrendous injustice--say, you could no longer wear your favorite baseball cap while eating in a nice restaurant--not a single one of his ardent followers would leave their dormitory rooms to fight for what was right. "

What makes Lee Friedlander's pictures good? illustrated Flash essay by Slate's Lee Siegel-- 

good demystification of Che Guevara

"By 1961, Guevara was having to give embarrassing explanations to the workers at the office: 'Our technical comrades at the companies have made a toothpaste ... which is as good as the previous one; it cleans just the same, though after a while it turns to stone.' "

The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan due out soon!

"Wrong Train

Here comes the man! He's talking a lot
I'm sitting, by myself. I've got
A ticket to ride. Outside is, "Out to lunch."
It's no great pleasure, being on the make.
Well, who is? Or, well everyone is, tho.
"I'm laying there, & some guy comes up
& hits me with a billyclub!" A fat guy
Says. Shut up. & like that we cross a river
Into the Afterlife. Everything goes on as before
But never does any single experience make total use
Of you. You are always slightly ahead,
Slightly behind. It merely baffles, it doesn't hurt.
It's total pain & it breaks your heart
In a less than interesting way. Every day
Is payday. Never enough pay. A deja-vu
That lasts. It's no big thing, anyway.
A lukewarm greasy hamburger, ice-cold pepsi
that hurts your teeth."



 

Carny Lingo 

despite their hipster (Cornelius, High Llamas) cred I had sadly never heard until very recently of 60's "sunshine pop" group The Free Design who are just fantastically great--their song "Rhonda Go Round" (from their kids album) has not left my head for weeks now... 

James Wolcott

" When all of these 'terror experts'--many of them affiliated with rightwing think tanks--pontificate and speculate (based on no real information) about who the perpetrators were and the nature of the long struggle we're in, they look and sound keyed-up, keen with anticipation, eager to entertain the worst. Look how little time it took for CNN to point the finger of suspicion at al-Zarqawi as mastermind of the attacks--al-Zarqawi, the all-purpose shadowy villain, here, there, everywhere, and nowhere. Visually, this scare talk complemented with commando porn images of security patrols packing enough firepower to retake Stalingrad. What are those weapons for? It's not as if terrorists engage in running gun battles in the West. They plant explosives, and once those explosives go off, guys standing around with machine guns looking like an army of Bernie Keriks don't make a whole lot of difference. "

Eric Hobsbawm

"Even those who do not share the views of the old generals and proconsuls of the US world empire (which were those of Democratic as well as Republican administrations) will agree that there can be no rational justification of current Washington policy in terms of the interests of America's imperial ambitions or, for that matter, the global interests of US capitalism.

It may be that it makes sense only in terms of the calculations, electoral or otherwise, of American domestic policy. It may be a symptom of a more profound crisis within US society. It may be that it represents the - one hopes short-lived - colonisation of Washington power by a group of quasi-revolutionary doctrinaires. (At least one passionate ex-Marxist supporter of Bush has told me, only half in jest: 'After all, this is the only chance of supporting world revolution that looks like coming my way.') Such questions cannot yet be answered. "

enjoyed the fine character actor Tobin Bell doing wonders with not-much-on-the-page as the snowy-haired killer "Nordic Man" last night in Sydney Pollack's "The Firm", a not great movie but with an abundance of great character work by Holly Hunter, Gene Hackman, Gary Busey etc etc... & in a handful of scenes in the second feature a bearded Viggo Mortensen made a fine Lucifer to Christopher Walken's Gabriel in "The Prophecy"... 

(Larry Rivers looks on while Frank O'Hara ripens a metaphor)

Mel Bochner in a review of Donald Judd's writing--

"A good many of the reviewers of that time came from literary backgrounds, usually the New York School of poetry, which showed up in their exaggerated claims and overripe metaphors. In art school in the late '50s, we played a game, reading reviews aloud from the latest issue of Art News and trying to guess who the subject was. I can still remember one: 'X dumps live chunks of landscape steaming hot into the gallery.' (Give up? Helen Frankenthaler.) What changed this situation? Artists started writing. (I'll leave it to someone else to answer the question 'What changed it back?') Why let the critics speak for you when you are perfectly capable of speaking for yourself?"

No names of course, not even for his "remembered" example. But the reflexive condescension displayed for "literary backgrounds" (as opposed to the rigour of art school, say!) and the "New York School of Poetry" certainly help explain why Tim Davis neglected to inform readers about his poetry in last month's Artforum "Top 10", why Frank O'Hara's crucial early support of Pollock has been all but erased from the record, and why the visual art and poetry communities in New York--to the detriment of both--have drifted so far apart.