Cascadia Terminal Bucket Elevator, Vancouver


Portland filmmakers Bill Daniel and Vanessa Renwick are back in the van and touring the Pacific Northwest with new work.

Contact: Bill Daniel, www.billdaniel.net, billdaniel@hotmail.com, 503 939 6916 mobile
Vanessa Renwick, www.odoka.org, odoka@hotmail.com

“Daniel and Renwick make some of the liveliest work on the microcinema circuit, wherein film, video art, and music collide with edgy, confrontational, unpredictable and often exuberant intensity”--- Ann Hornaday, The Washington Post

Headlining is Daniel’s just-completed 56min documentary on the secret history of hobo and railworker graffiti, called WHO IS BOZO TEXINO? Shooting over a period of 16 years, Daniel rode freights across the west gathering interviews and clues to the identities of many of the most legendary boxcar artists while discovering a vast underground folkloric practice that has existed for over a century.

Also on the bill is WALDO POINT, by Saul Rouda, 1970, a 20 min. stoned and song-filled documentary shot in Sausalito’s hippie houseboat community. An utterly unique and authentic snapshot of ‘60’s freedom set in a floating utopia of hand-made houseboats.

Vanessa Renwick (the Oregon Dept. of Kick Ass) presents two shorts: BRITTON, SOUTH DAKOTA, a series of haunting images of depression-era children, and CASCADIA TERMINAL, a mesmerizing portrait of Vancouver’s towering industrial facility.

TOUR SCHEDULE

Aug 12 Santa Cruz, Guerilla Drive-In, www.thespoon.com/drivein
Aug 18 Arcata, HSU, Goodwin Forum in Nelson Hall East, 9pm $5 707-822-9531
Aug 19 Eugene, Museum of Unfine Art, 8:23 pm, 541-683-7357
Aug 24 Anacortes, Dept. of Safety, 8pm, $4, www.departmentofsafety.com
Aug 25 Victoria BC, 50/50 Arts Collective, 2516 Douglas, 9pm, $5
Aug 26 Vancouver BC, The Butchershop, 195 E 26th Ave, 9pm,$5, www.butchershop.ca
Aug 27 Bellingham, 3B Tavern, 122 N State st, 8:30pm, $5 www.3btavern.com
Aug 28 Port Townsend, The Boiler Room, 8pm, $5
Aug 30 Olympia, tba
Aug 31 Seattle, Central Cinema, (runs thru Sept 4) 6:30,8:15, 10:00 nightly,
1411 21st Ave, central-cinema.com,
Aug 31 special opening night event, live music by Spectratone International (featuring Lori Goldston and Kyle Hanson of Black Cat Orchestra) at 9pm, screenings at 7 and 10. (filmmaker in-person only on the 31st)
Sept 3 Astoria, Columbia Theatre, 503-325-2233


INFO FOR BRITTON, SOUTH DAKOTA BY VANESSA RENWICK

SYNOPSIS:
Ivan Besse was the Strand movie theater manager in Britton, S. Dakota during the Depression. He had a 16mm camera and went about town shooting people at their various activities during the day. He would show the footage before features and newsreels as a way to lure the people into the theatre.
Most of the 2 1/2 hours of footage that he shot is of people walking down the street, there are also scenes of a barn being moved, a corn husking contest and kids running out of school.
The footage that really stood out to me was these 8 minutes of portraits of children. They had no idea of what a movie camera was.

CREDITS:
Director: Vanessa Renwick
Music: Johnne Eschleman
Cinematographer: Ivan Besse (shot in 1938)
Footage obtained from The Prelinger Archives / Rick Prelinger
for the DeComposer Film and Music series programmed by Bill Daniel and Vanessa Renwick in Portland, Oregon

“Not only found footage, but a found film made 60-some years ago directly addressing contemporary structural concerns. I wish I had made this film today. Oh, it was made today.”
James Benning, judge NWFF 2003, awarded Britton, S.Dakota† Best Experimental Film
“The lack of narrative invites dressing these cinematic dolls with futures, now histories. The melancholic drone of the accompanying organ music tends to lead them into sad tragic finery.” NWFF

Gecko Prize, Cinematexas 2004

Gus Van Sant Award Best Experimental Film, Ann Arbor Film Festival 2005




"Portrait #1: Cascadia Terminal'
by Vanessa Renwick
sound by Tara Jane O'Neil
16mm hand processed and tinted to video
6 minutes 2005


A mesmerizing stare at the most efficient grain terminal at the port of Vancouver, B.C.
The terminal is serviced by the Canadian Pacific Railway and can unload up to 300 cars in 24 hours which is equal to approximately 25,800 tons of prairie.

Books Do Furnish a Room

"The story of Anthony Cima is the book lover's nightmare: The 87-year-old stuffed 10,000 books into a one-room San Diego apartment, and when a 5.4-magnitude earthquake hit just off the coast of Oceanside in July 1986, he was buried beneath them and barely survived."
 

farewell Barbara Bel Geddes, Miss Ellie on Dallas, "Midge" in Vertigo, "Maggie the Cat" on Broadway, the wife who does in her husband with a leg of lamb and then feeds it to the cops on Alfred Hitchcock Presents...

 

The Bacon Show

One bacon recipe per day, every day, forever...

(via Metafilter) 

(Popular Characteristics 1800)

(Henry Adams)


"Good country this
for lazy fellows,
(wrote Wilson from

Kentucky); they plant
corn, turn their
pigs into the

woods and in
the autumn feed upon
corn and pork.

They lounge about
the rest of the year."
But sometime between

then and now,
despite flip books,
Jack Spicer bootlegs,

Miltown, Motown, Milton
the race of tavern
loafers, customs-house flaneurs

wall holder-uppers
& Virginia eye gougers
died out, wagons

full of keeners,
enthusiasts, stereoptical
estimaters & paint-chip

matchers darkened
the passes, planting apples
for roughage not cider.

*

"That free-born
Rhode Islanders ought
never to submit

to be priest-ridden,
nor to pay for
the privilege

of travelling
on the highway."
Better indeed stranded

up to our
rusticated Yankee necks
in yellow shit

than travel
to Providence
under such pretenses;

wearing a horse collar,
a T-shirt reading
"Citizen X"--

better a beanie,
a New Year's diaper,
a Brownie uniform,

and the bones
of any shiny Hussar--
uncowed by Miranda v. Arizona

or the Second Amendment
or the by-God
Yosemite Sam mudflaps

hanging from my ears--
attempts to stroll unbidden
into my library,

garage or sugar shack
will end up as struts
in the drug tunnel

that gently winds
between Lasqueti
and Narraganset:--

Canadians Hate Freedom, Too

"And if you want to blue-sky a little bit, if that eventuality was to occur, the government would probably move in with some pretty stiff measures and not meet much public resistance."

(when bees are in hives)

(cont.)


Just but one bee
on the paler
other kind of

sweet-pea, orange
chevron very
circa '83, &

you'd think the boys
at Last Call Towing
would be glad to

see their girlriends
(Wednesday PM
half-cloudy

scented August)
but they won't climb
down or let go

their pneumatic
bolt-tighteners
long enough

and won't discuss
who said what to
who last weekend

on innertubes
that flattered them
but made us look

like our dads, tits
up on the couch
and these maroon

uniforms itch
more and more as
threadbare summer

wears out its buzz
and welcome mat
and baseball hat.

UK's oldest fountain restored

"Minister for tourism Patricia Ferguson MSP said: "I think this was built to show the power and the confidence that James V had, and I think he very much wanted to say to people "I'm here, look at me". I suspect that now that it's been restored, it will actually have the same effect in Linlithgow.""

thanks to Daphne for this one 

Smoking Dope with Thomas Pynchon: A Sixties Memoir

"All of a sudden, he pulled out of his pocket a string of firecrackers and asked, 'Where can we set these off?' "

Observations

on the Bills of Mortality:
on the leaves of Sage:
on small living Flies in the powder of Cantharides:
of insects bred in Dew:
of Virginian Silk-Bottoms:
of the parts, and anatomy, of fishes:
of Barnacles:
of the calcin'd powder of Toads:
of an outlandish Deer-Skin, and hair:
of the parts of Vipers:
of Stones taken out of the Heart of a Man:
of young Vipers, that they do not eat holes
through their old ones Bellies
as is commonly affirm'd.

from "The History of the Royal Society" Thomas Sprat 1667
quoted in "Pandaemonium" by Humphrey Jennings

from Darwin's Origin Of Species chapter Vl:--

"It is scarcely possible to avoid comparing the eye with a telescope. We know that this instrument has been perfected by the long-continued efforts of the highest human intellects; and we naturally infer that the eye has been formed by a somewhat analogous process. But may not this inference be presumptuous? Have we any right to assume that the Creator works by intellectual powers like those of man? If we must compare the eye to an optical instrument, we ought in imagination to take a thick layer of transparent tissue, with spaces filled with fluid, and with a nerve sensitive to light beneath, and then suppose every part of this layer to be continually changing slowly in density, so as to separate into layers of different densities and thicknesses, placed at different distances from each other, and with the surfaces of each layer slowly changing in form. Further we must suppose that there is a power, represented by natural selection or the survival of the fittest, always intently watching each slight alteration in the transparent layers; and carefully preserving each which, under varied circumstances, in any way or in any degree, tends to produce a distincter image. We must suppose each new state of the instrument to be multiplied by the million; each to be preserved until a better one is produced, and then the old ones to be all destroyed."  

[ mytinygarden ]

splendid, intensive Flash site of the bugs in someone's yard:--

(via Plep)

 

Lambden Milligan's petition to Sec. Stanton


from EX PARTE MILLIGAN

(re: Lincoln's Civil War suspension of habeus corpus & military tribunals)

"This nation, as experience has proved, cannot always remain at peace, and has no right to expect that it will always have wise and humane rulers, sincerely attached to the principles of the Constitution. Wicked men, ambitious of power, with hatred of liberty and contempt of law, may fill the place once occupied by Washington and Lincoln; and if this right is conceded, and the calamities of war again befall us, the dangers to human liberty are frightful to contemplate. If our fathers had failed to provide for just such a contingency, they would have been false to the trust reposed in them. They knew -- the history of the world told them -- the nation they were founding, be its existence short or long, would be involved in war; how often or how long continued, human foresight could not tell; and that unlimited power, wherever lodged at such a time, was especially hazardous to freemen. For this, and other equally weighty reasons, they secured the inheritance they had fought to maintain, by incorporating in a written constitution the safeguards which time had proved were essential to its preservation. Not one of these safeguards can the President, or Congress, or the Judiciary disturb, except the one concerning the writ of habeas corpus."

great-sounding Sergio Leone museum exhibit:--


"So on loan from Eastwood himself is the iconic poncho he wore as the Man With No Name, as well as the wooden gun grips decorated with metal snakes that he used in the films. These were the same grips he'd used as Rowdy Yates in the TV series 'Rawhide': The actor, who dedicated his classic western 'Unforgiven' to Leone and director Don Siegel, had brought them to Hollywood for good luck.

Though the curators couldn't manage to pry the bed Claudia Cardinale used in 'Once Upon a Time in the West' from the gentleman in northern Italy who's currently sleeping in it, they did get the Winchester that Gian Maria Volontes bad guy used to put some holes in that poncho, a rifle that took a while to get into this country. 'We're one of the few organizations,' Frayling says dryly, 'importing firearms into the U.S.'"

 

"Advice from a Caterpillar" from

The Many Faces of Alice,

"the process and product
of a fourth grade class study of
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, its author,
Lewis Carroll, and its many illustrators"

includes great puppet theatre quicktime movies, hypertext annotations &c. :--

"The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence: at last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and addressed her in a languid, sleepy voice.

`Who are YOU?' said the Caterpillar.

This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, `I--I hardly know, sir, just at present-- at least I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then...'"

(thanks to the Protection Island crew)

"a blood-spattered Canadarm..."

"Taken on its own merits, the Shuttle gives the impression of a vehicle designed to be launched repeatedly to near-Earth orbit, tended by five to seven passengers with little concern for their personal safety, and requiring extravagant care and preparation before each flight, with an almost fetishistic emphasis on reuse. Clearly this primitive space plane must have been a sacred artifact, used in religious rituals to deliver sacrifice to a sky god.

As tempting as it is to picture a blood-spattered Canadarm flinging goat carcasses into the void, we know that the Shuttle is the fruit of what was supposed to be a rational decision making process. That so much about the vehicle design is bizarre and confused is the direct result of the Shuttle's little-remembered role as a military vehicle during the Cold War. "

from

(When bees are in hives)

from

Bracton: De Legibus Et Consuetudinibus Angliae
(Bracton on the Laws and Customs of England
attributed to Henry of Bratton, c. 1210-1268)


For if they settle
in my tree
they are no more mine--

before I shut them
into a hive--
than are the birds

who make their nest there,
and therefore
if another hives them

he will be their owner.
A swarm that flies
out of my hive

is taken to be mine
so long as it remains
in my sight

and pursuit is not impossible,
otherwise it becomes
the property of the taker.

trippy single-cell silica leak forms:--Ernst Haeckel: Die Radiolarien (1862)


(from MetaFilter where there's more)

some deadly unreachable & far from ripe Vancouver blackberries from Adam Harrison; Nanaimo's are good to go, ran into a couple of folks picking in the lee of our hinge and their pails were 3/4 full, leaning over to check, that great wafting smell...
 

interesting guest writer at Altercation

"Although liberals accomplished great things during the first three quarters of the 20th century, thereafter they stumbled badly. When they encountered resistance to black civil rights among poor and working class whites--some of it racially motivated some of it not--rather than dealing with the resistance politically, liberal elites sought to impose solutions from above by taking advantage of their privileged access to judicial and executive power. Then, rather than telling Americans honestly about the likely costs and consequences of a military intervention in Southeast Asia and trust them to make the correct decisions, they used lies and deception to trick voters into supporting an unwinnable war that was fought mostly by the poor and working classes; and when the war came too close to home, they quickly forgot about the lower class combatants and their sacrifices they had made. Then after liberals' attempt to support guns and butter set off hyperinflation to erode the real value of wages, they callously thought up new ways to spend the windfall of tax revenue rather than adjust tax brackets to relieve the unsustainable burden on the middle class. Finally, when faced with political revolt because of these misguided policies, they retreated into arcane ideologies to wage a rearguard cultural insurgency from the safety of the ivory tower. Is it any wonder that liberals lost the public trust?"

many, many versions of Ghost Riders in the Sky--including Burl Ives, Shadows, Roy Rogers & c. I remember a fine, unrecorded instrumental version played by the Dick Damron Band (my pal Vic Bateman on bass)in the hotels & beer halls of Edmonton, winter of '77...

(via the newly-located gmtPlus9)

Flow, Laura Niagara

"when I was a Freeport,
and you were the Main Drag..."

"I've got a lot of patience, baby
That's a lot of patience to lose..."

"affectionate
machine-tickling aphid" Darwin

globalisation's
over-crayoned blue sky flakes

but the duck's left blank,
like Depot Harbour

getting rubbed off
the grid was no biblical

judgement, dig--
it looked like a nice place!

but Carthage NOW
looks better than this place

fifty years on--
alder-poked, broom-worried,

a ghost town
after the ghost had gone--

a desertedness
out of large-print SF--

writhing and plinking
in the furzy foundation

the dreaded
"Ukelele Konig"

laced its tongue
through a web

of taut nylon but
we couldn't make it out

or if it was even
talking at all--

auctioned off
from under your feet

like the family
Astrakhan, and if

a trestle is the only
thing holding it back

then admit the jungle
the empire of the ants

could we not just
get it over with?

Or must we choke forever
on periphery's piney sap?

Shandy Hall in Yorkshire hosts the premiere of A Cock and Bull Story, Michael Winterbottom's promising adaptation of Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy

"After a nap in the garden (I woke to see Winterbottom wandering across the lawn), it was time to wander down to the village hall. In the field outside it, people were milling around, eating canapes, drinking wine and staring at a large, black bull. They were trying to guess its weight. I bought a ticket saying 428kg and a 'christen the cock' ticket saying 'Phutatorius'.

I met John, an accountant from York, a woman called Marion, a big, bluff businessman who was in York for the races and a beautiful woman called Polly. She, it turned out, was Lady Feversham. She had offered, since all the B&Bs were full, to put me up for the night. 'We've got 10,000 Hells Angels at the moment,' said her husband Peter. 'Don't worry, you can't see them from the house.'"

interesting Elvis revisionism from jazz writer Will Friedwald--

"Unlike Sinatra’s, Presley’s recorded output looks meager when compared with what it could have been. There are so many songs he should have done: “There Must Be a Better World Somewhere” (a Doc Pomus song for B. B. King that’s far superior to anything he wrote for Presley), “I Wonder Where Our Love Has Gone,” “A Rainy Night in Georgia,” “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool,” Louis Jordan’s “Early in the Morning,” “What a Wonderful World,” “Empty Bed Blues,” “Stand by Me,” “On Broadway,” “I Pity the Fool,” Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come,” “Work Song,” “Señor Blues,” “Don’t Go to Strangers,” “At Last,” “Teach Me Tonight,” Robert Johnson’s “Hellhound on My Trail.” He could have sung entire songbook albums of the works of Harold Arlen, Johnny Mercer, and Hoagy Carmichael, three old-school songwriters who also bridged the worlds of jazz, pop, and country music."

Guardian on politically active, underrated Dorothy Parker 

"The Beaver and the Fox Promenade" from The Fantastic in Art and Fiction 

the threat of fear and defeatism

"The armed plainclothes squad pursued a man essentially because he was not white and was wearing an unseasonably thick coat. They allowed him to board and leave a double-decker bus unchallenged. Then, when he ran away from them and jumped on a tube train, they apparently decided that he must be a bomber and shot him eight times, seven times in the head and once in the shoulder.


These crack anti-terrorist marksmen acted with about as much cool professionalism as the American gunman who shot dead a turban-wearing Sikh immediately after 9/11, for supposedly looking like a Muslim. But they were only acting on the message that has come from the top of the UK political and police establishment since 7 July. The panicky message has been that these few bombers allegedly pose an 'unprecedented' threat to our way of life, so that any liberty can be sacrificed or draconian measure justified if it is supposed to help stop them."

from Michael Scharf's "Contract Law" at Poetry Daily

"If every exchange is negotiated with the presumption of bad faith, the only possible way to come away with even a piece of what you
want is to propose basic terms which you have no intention of fulfilling, while feeling around for what givens on the other side can be seized
and services extracted without further harm to you, though the tenets of the system be destroyed... "

(thanks Jordan) 

Alternate illustration for poem below.

Lime Rickey, anyone?

article on "Call It Sleep" novelist Henry Roth

(Les Chemins de la Liberte)

In a basement
presently bereft of life

avocado
beer fridge contains single

serving Pop Shoppe
Tom Collins mix bottle

to which the cap
bent by the opener

is reattached
precariously and

symbolically
panelling well you know

old tube TV
21 inch black and

white and best of
all an RCA "in"

jack to which I
could run a chord from

the portable
suitcase mono that was

my parent's thus
adding a channel of deep

mahogany
courtesy the TV's

mighty twin four
inch cones resonating

through layers of made-
in-Canada-goddam

it verathane
and varnished returned now

to duty as
the downstairs TV which

I alone watched
things in black and white old

movies &c.
on this warm night having

drained the mix which
when held long enough gave

a hint of fizz
good & cold certainly!

I returned to the
weekday summer showing of

the early 70's
serialisation

of Sartre's Roads
to Freedom done by

the BBC
in that particular

house style that
English actors use

portraying
the French as in that great

Maigret series
with Michael Gambon

of which nothing
outside a lot of shouted

conversations
I remember nothing

except for that
on this night the action

suddenly shrank
to the size of a postcard

then a stamp
then a pearl on which you

could still make out
the tiny figure of a

woman in a
trench coat striding across

a tiny room
then the image brightened

to the head
of a pin retinal

trace only now
and then from the back of

the TV an
acrid plume of black smoke

(COMMITMENT
they were talking about)

poured clinging
through the vent upstairs yanked

the plug blue blue
spark a copper smell curled

but the chancy
wiring and fridge were saved.

fine Geoffrey O'Brien on Spielberg's (and Wells') "War of the Worlds"--

"The aura of virtual historical reality that Spielberg labored to create for the ghetto takeover in Schindler's List or the Omaha Beach landing in Saving Private Ryan is here imparted to an invasion that might as well be historical: the devastation of twenty-first-century New Jersey by illustrations from a Victorian scientific romance. These almost fussily perfect vistas, like the extraordinary moment when the alien machines are seen from a distance standing knee-deep in the Hudson to feed on their human prey, evoke a peculiar kind of history painting: Landscape with Tripods, perhaps, an exercise in the Spielbergian sublime, where what devastates us does, from a certain angle, possess an undeniable abstract beauty. These spacious set-ups have a gaudy splendor far removed from the cramped dullness of the ordinary world on which the aliens intruded, a world in which the sole note of aesthetic liveliness was provided by a children's cartoon show. "

"I'm in love with moonlight,
128 when its dark outside"

(Roadrunner)


Though my infantilised cat
confirms my existence
the cars don't see me--

Ganesha's prints
were all over the trunk, giant

pants in black
with a velcroed
right-turn indicator

over which
a cuff neatly folded,
red compact, splashed,

lost, speeding, between Boundary
& Bowen, the other leg muddy,
raggedy, platforms

worn at an angle of 35 degrees
from walking in circles--
just right for ditch baloney,

though between here and
the "quarter mile"
of the old Northfield industrial park

(mid-sixties, still an implied
roundedness in the signage, "moderne"
so far as it recalls Rockford,

Barnaby Jones &c.) the
fairgrounds, concrete
terrace overlooking

an oval track, everywhere
the cars had been before me
writing through the ivy.