"Many of the law enforcement offcials were driving around with their guns out the window."

dispatches from The Interdictor

"What a bowl of fubar soup we got served for dinner tonight. Yummy. Fuel is still a no-show. No ETA on my resupply schedule tonight.

Was waiting on the street freaking out the Federal Cops guarding the Bogs building until the actually came over to talk and found out who we are and what we're doing.

Then Homeland Sec comes driving by and yells water and hums a 20 ouncer at our feet without slowing down. I know I'm not looking too hot right now, but come on. I'm standing out there with my flashlight on in the middle of the road, obviously waiting on a convoy.

Bunch of stressed out, trigger-ready police and military types driving by suspicious as all hell. It's not safe just standing out on the street even if you look like you belong there.

Anyway, I'm gonna sit tight up here until something definite appears on the street."

Noam Scheiber

"What makes the post interesting is that it cuts to a central dilemma for conservatives, which is that, at the level of worldview, they simply aren't able to accommodate an event like Katrina. They want to be able to say that government's job is basically to defend us against external enemies and criminals, and that short of that it's every man for himself. But despite efforts by people like Haley Barbour to try to fit Katrina into that rubric (with their preoccupatoin with shooting looters, who have come to occupy the role terrorists played in 9/11), it just doesn't fly. Yes, looters and armed thugs are now a problem in New Orleans. But, beyond the obvious (i.e., a category 4 hurricane and New Orleans' unfortunate geography/elevation), the reason the city has become such a hell-hole isn't looters; it's that the government wasn't very competent either beforehand or afterward at mitigating the effects of a natural disaster which were clearly possible to mitigate."

Couldn't Pay the Price of Admission

"Lots of people in that area - the poor and the old and the sick - get checks from the goverment on the 1st of the month. They spend for the month with that money, so by the end of the month they are broke.

The storm hit on the 29th.

Many people could not afford the $50 to fill their gas tanks to leave. The interviewee said they people were begging him to please loan them the money for gas. They were forced to stay, and forced to stay when they were broke."

Why no mention of race or class in TV's Katrina coverage?

"But we aren't one united race, we aren't one united class, and Katrina didn't hit all folks equally. By failing to acknowledge upfront that black New Orleanians--and perhaps black Mississippians--suffered more from Katrina than whites, the TV talkers may escape potential accusations that they're racist. But by ignoring race and class, they boot the journalistic opportunity to bring attention to the disenfranchisement of a whole definable segment of the population. What I wouldn't pay to hear a Fox anchor ask, 'Say, Bob, why are these African-Americans so poor to begin with?'"

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Why city's defences were down

"'There doesn't seem to have been much attention paid to people who didn't have private automobiles,' he said. 'I didn't hear anything about school buses or city buses being used to aim people out of town.' He said that there appeared to be little forward planning to cater to those on low incomes who would be unable to return to their homes for up to two months but who would not have the money to pay for that time in a hotel. 'The Department of Homeland Security says on its website that it deals with natural disasters,' he said. 'They don't seem to have done a very good job. There doesn't seem to have been any long-term planning.'"

Wonkette

"A tipster informs us that down in New Orleans, they have a name for the flood waters that have invaded the city: Lake George. "

How New Orleans Was Lost - by Paul Craig Roberts

"Chalk up the city of New Orleans as a cost of Bush's Iraq war.

There were not enough helicopters to repair the breached levees and rescue people trapped by rising water. Nor are there enough Louisiana National Guardsmen available to help with rescue efforts and to patrol against looting.

The situation is the same in Mississippi.

The National Guard and helicopters are off on a fool's mission in Iraq.

The National Guard is in Iraq because fanatical neoconservatives in the Bush administration were determined to invade the Middle East and because incompetent Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld refused to listen to the generals, who told him there were not enough regular troops available to do the job.

After the invasion, the arrogant Rumsfeld found out that the generals were right. The National Guard was called up to fill in the gaping gaps.

Now the Guardsmen, trapped in the Iraqi quagmire, are watching on TV the families they left behind trapped by rising waters and wondering if the floating bodies are family members. None know where their dislocated families are, but, shades of Fallujah, they do see their destroyed homes.

The mayor of New Orleans was counting on helicopters to put in place massive sandbags to repair the levee. However, someone called the few helicopters away to rescue people from rooftops. The rising water overwhelmed the massive pumping stations, and New Orleans disappeared under deep water.

What a terrible casualty of the Iraqi war – one of our oldest and most beautiful cities, a famous city, a historic city.

Distracted by its phony war on terrorism, the U.S. government had made no preparations in the event Hurricane Katrina brought catastrophe to New Orleans. No contingency plan existed. Only now after the disaster are FEMA and the Corps of Engineers trying to assemble the material and equipment to save New Orleans from the fate of Atlantis. "

"French Quarter, Nov 5, 1941" by Charles W. Cushman

(thanks Plep)
 

Boing Boing: Email attributed to NOLA rescue worker; economics of disaster

"The poorest 20% (you can argue with the number -- 10%? 18%? no one knows) of the city was left behind to drown. This was the plan. Forget the sanctimonious bullshit about the bullheaded people who wouldn't leave. The evacuation plan was strictly laissez-faire. It depended on privately owned vehicles, and on having ready cash to fund an evacuation. The planners knew full well that the poor, who in new orleans are overwhelmingly black, wouldn't be able to get out. The resources -- meaning, the political will -- weren't there to get them out. "
 

old Penny Postcards from Biloxi, Gulfport etc, in better times, looking vulnerable, too open to the ocean, helpless. My deepest sympathies for everyone affected, especially the displaced.


 

Anodyne's list of favorite books includes a poem I wrote in the seventies!
 

Rue Hazard:--Latta's back!!

"Reading against one's clique--that is, omnivorously, unhesitantly, exceedingly--is the sine qua non of any robust criticism (or its recent simulacrum of "author-divvying") or poetry writing. Part of the job description. To constitute it as a particular "project" (donc, "admirable," donc, "worthy of our attention") smacks, yes, of dilettantism, attending schematically to a superficies. Gourmandizing. "

more on 'The Golden Morning Breaks', including a video

samples of Colleen's wonderful new album the golden morning breaks here
 

James Wolcott

"George Costanza, furious that a pigeon didn't get out of the way of his car (in the stellar 'Merv Griffin set' episode), vented to Jerry that we have 'a deal' with the pigeons, a deal that Jerry elucidated upon.

The deal is, they get out of our way when we're walking or driving, and we overlook the statute defecation.

Simple as that. The pigeon George ran over didn't honor he deal.

The neocons had a deal with Pat Robertson and his followers. As long as Pat and company cleaved to Israel, the neocons would overlook that old Protocol Elders nonsense.

In short, Pat Robertson was their pigeon. They were willing to countenance his occasional poop."

guy who looks after the Tower Ravens--

Gwylum (male), aged 17
Thor (m), 14
Hugine (f), 10
Munin (f), 10
Branwen (f), 3
Bran (m), 2
Gundulf (m), 5 months
Baldrick (m), 5 months--


"'The fact it's an unusual job does give me a little bit of a fillip. There's no one else who can say 'I'm the only Ravenmaster Yeoman Warder in the world'.' "



 

over the Rockies and across the Strait comes the new TOLLING ELF with poems by Edmund Berrigan & cool linocutlets from the fabulous Sophia Warsh & a Tim Atkins Horace supplement--weighing less than a catbird--

10 Best Plumage by Edmund Berrigan

elegiac catbird
mercenary hedgehog hoecakes
as I crawls across my cheek
how's the new infection
a breeze sort of
wash the modal straw evaporate
bereaved touch of class
element pigment
anonymous sty hung
form of icebucket



 

buona sera to my favorite cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli

"'You've got to understand the sunlight, the contrast between light and shade. For Italians, who are familiar with the southern sun and the fog of the north, it's difficult to get things wrong.' "


 

How BC Trimmed 107,000 People from Welfare Rolls:

"The month he died, he was just one of 161 people who went out that way, according to documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. Between June 2002 and January 2005, a period of 32 months, 6,065 people on welfare died.

(To put that in perspective, in 2003, the latest for which statistics are available, 443 people reportedly died in traffic accidents in the province.)

For comparison, during that period, 37,404 people left welfare by Campbell's preferred route, because they obtained employment. Put another way, for roughly every six people on welfare who got a job, one died."

Frank Rich--The Swift Boating of Cindy Sheehan

"The 24/7 cable and Web attack dogs can keep on sliming Cindy Sheehan. The president can keep trying to ration the photos of flag-draped caskets. But this White House no longer has any more control over the insurgency at home than it does over the one in Iraq."



 

listen to 44 seconds of The Ivory-billed Woodpecker

"It is the largest of all woodpeckers found in the United States and has been nicknamed "The Lord God Bird", from the usual expletive uttered whenever one appeared on the wing."

(via the recently-returned robot wisdom weblog)

work of Lateral Argument poet Kevin Davies irks Local Media (though you're told where to get it):--

"The magazine closes on the ridiculous, about 20 pages of deliberate and worthless nonsense by Kevin Davies, who may well be unaware..."
 

Happy Birthday to me. Daph got me the 1913 first edition of the giant Funk & Wagnall's New Standard Dictionary, edited by Frank Vizetelly, printed on 3000 pages of limp, heavy bible paper. 450,000 headwords, numerous engravings, occasional childish scrawls, numerous pressed plants...

"Alfred E. Smith's ''baloney dollar'' could not swerve Dr. Vizetelly from ''bologna.'' But he was quick to favor President Roosvelt's ''chiseler'', which he said actually had attained dictionary rating in England in 1808. He found ''whoopee'' went back to A.D. 450, discovered grammatical imperfections in Noah Webster and dismissed 1935's ''Oakie-doke'' as a moron's ''Yes.'' 

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. "