nice to see Tony-nominated Amy Ryan--so memorable in A & E's "100 Centre St." a few years back as Alan Arkin's troubled daughter-- in the role of harbour cop Beatrice "Beadie" Russell in the second season of "The Wire". Also the feeling, watching that show, that if you see a good actor you can rest assured they'll be given something interesting to do...

 

Harold Innis: An Intellectual at the Edge of Empire (Mel Watkins)

"The colony, Canada, has no more than moved in formal terms from colony to nation, when Innis sees the dark side of it being turned, back, into a neo-colony. He fears that the increasing efficacy of modern metropolitan media is making indigenous intellectual creativity at the margin less possible. His vision, like George Grant's, foresees Canada's failed potential, and sees that fate as a manifestation of the increasing threat to the intellectual, not only in Canada but generally. At its darkest, he envisages the modern intellectual, as in the ancient aphorism, having "insight into much and power over nothing..." "

from the 1947 Brick Bradford movie... 

Brick Bradford & The Time Top

"As the title suggests, it involved a top-shaped vehicle vehicle that could travel in time--beating out Doc Wonmug's device in "Alley Oop" by more than four years, as the first regularly appearing time machine in comics. This series lasted only a couple of months but it wasn't forgotten--On Oct 17, 1937, the Time Top became a regular part of Brick's Sundat adventures. Whereas Oop's time travelling was limited to the past, Brick mostly visited the future. Thus, the entire cosmos became open to him..."

 

Loading bay. 

Venables sign. 

the late Jerry Pethick's magnificent, valedictory Time Top has landed in False Creek...

"It was Pethick's poetic conceit that the fictional Time Top was real and had been recovered from the ocean floor, a relic of both the past and the future. He was interested in using his sculpture to evoke a childlike sense of wonder by creating an enigmatic object that could transport its viewers into another realm of awareness. "The idea of form transmitting something other than material context encourages a fresh perception," he wrote."

Harbour Park. 

Clark Balcony. 

Bush. 

Beach volleyball under the Cambie St. bridge. 

hobo nickels, wooden nickels, hell money, sealskin money & much else at Pennylicious

 

"From the time he had shoes, he roamed the neighborhood."

--Nik Cohn "Tricksta: Life and Death and New Orleans Rap"


Defective and partly invisible
as the pagination of a yellow thesis
loosening like dream-teeth
or niblets blackening on the grill--
a study of piracy as much as trade,
of simony as much as privacy,
of property as much as specie,
thus an alum farmer of Yorkshire
is exempted from impressement
by the same principle as sugar bled
from a tree implies crystallisation,
not seeing its fate in the sticky Smitty's window
the summer not quite even over.

For the monthly purpose
of re-upping the state of emergency and toward
the interpretation of shipwrecks
we will assemble in this playhouse
by the light of a gibbous moon--
and not a crumb or shred or maccaroon
of what is said will leave this room...

Alka-seltzer stars scattered on blue felt,
the good warm smell of a dog smoking a cigar
with Lady Luck and her 52 imaginary friends
found curled in the ditches with coffee ends,
no one wants the burnt dregs of the last car
with a hole burnt through or to eat their phone.
Everyone just wants to go home.

Parkway four. 

Parkway three. 

Parkway two. 

Parkway one. 

informative piece on Humphrey Jennings & Mass Observation--

"In a 1938 radio talk, Jennings had suggested it was no accident that the search for the meaning of everyday life led to history. "Mysteries reside in the humblest everyday things," he said; they are a kind of legacy, and the poet, by examining them, can extract "an idea of 'what I am' from the past." To share this discovery, he relates it to contemporary experience, "the things that the community knows about, the things that they're interested in." Jennings cited, as an example, "The Waste Land," in which Eliot represents the past as a Christopher Wren church and the everyday as a pub in Lower Thames Street. The poet has to love both in order to connect them, Jennings insisted; "Everything else is snobbery." "

Pluto stays put in Maine's solar system

Driving south, it's hard to miss large planets like Jupiter, which is 5 feet in diameter and weighs close to a ton. The solar system ends 40 miles later with tiny Pluto, only 1 inch in diameter, mounted on the wall of a visitor information center.

"We're not planning on taking down Pluto," said McCartney...

...If astronomers keep discovering new dwarf planets, McCartney conjectured, the solar system model could one day stretch all the way down the coast."



 

A Letter From Hammertown


Only the densest
dentist insect overtones
dare drop into the valley

from the Sunday construction
so impatiently at ten begun above
though the rate of such things

varies more than you'd think:
some build as if session men
called out by the union

to short time the undergrowth
for the X-box simulation
of the Birth of Skiffle, others

as if flown in on Blackhawks
to build an interrogation centre
five days ahead of the army--

outward facing polished tin walls to
conduct heat, spirit animals
laminated into every post for

low grade hallucination
when the Redbull & castor oil
kick in--others as if alders were

closing in with a green man's leering
face and that aggregate should
be poured down his throat right now.

Over in Townsite
evolved sparrows turn into lawn
ornaments at will &

the sleepy subsonic rumble
of Chase River thru the park is
unbroken either by the snap of skateboard

veronicas or the dream-
speech of dogbarks & east of that
the Kingdom of the Cranes and Spiders

occupies the Arena
where Fats Domino once stood
where the roll of the Second Line

& the two-four of the bass drum
echoed from the Foundry
across Newcastle Channel.



 

new EP from Colleen

"We started to record the music boxes but things turned out differently from what I had expected; the melodies weren't that interesting and were actually quite cheesy. And then I happened to bend and stroke the comb (the music box is basically like a rolling pin, kind of like a big pin full of small staples or spikes and they're the ones that, when the pin turns or revolves, lift the blades from a metal comb) and, struck by what I heard, started to experiment with the comb itself. When played manually with my thumbnails or with the glass harmonicum's small mallets, a very rich sound is produced that's reminiscent of gamelan, marimba, and glockenspiel, and all sorts of sounds mixed into one. I recorded some really old and battered music boxes and some of my own which are either hand-cranked or mechanical; I also used a componium, a music box into which you feed strips of paper that you punch yourself, like a player piano."

reconsideration of Leszek Kolakowski

"Those who cheer the triumph of the market and the retreat of the state, who would have us celebrate the unregulated scope for economic initiative in today's "flat" world, have forgotten what happened the last time we passed this way. They are in for a rude shock (though, if the past is a reliable guide, probably at someone else's expense). As for those who dream of rerunning the Marxist tape, digitally remastered and free of irritating Communist scratches, they would be well-advised to ask sooner rather than later just what it is about all-embracing "systems" of thought that leads inexorably to all-embracing "systems" of rule..."

 

"Crane" by Sylvia Matas, one of an interesting group of artists at the Winnipeg based Other Gallery
 

The Crock of Appeasement

"Taken seriously, the doctrine of "no appeasement" on the right would mean we are stuck in perpectual war, always doomed to be on the offensive, always dedicated to gobbling up more of other people's territory and wealth even at the expense of living in constant dread of being blown up and being forced to give up the civil liberties which had made American civilization great.

It would never be possible to negotiate a truce with any enemy. That would be appeasement. It would never be possible to compromise. That would be appeasement. It would never be prudent to withdraw troops from a failed war. That would be appeasement. In other words, the rightwing doctrine of "no appeasement, ever" actually turns you into Hitler rather than into Churchill.

But we are anyway not stuck perpetually in the late 1930s, and it is not the only exemplary period in history to which we can resort for our metaphors and our courses of action.

The Iraq crisis, for instance, is clearly an odd sort of neocolonialism, which can only ultimately be resolved by decolonization. Decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s was also denounced as "appeasement," but it was the only right course..."

Anger Wells Up in Dry Tofino

"In a press conference today, Tofino mayor John Fraser said that his long-term management strategy was to "hope for rain." "


 

Must Read


"What we have watched unfold for a few decades, I have argued, is a broad reversion to 19th-century political form, with free-market economics understood as the state of nature, plutocracy as the default social condition, and, enthroned as the nation’s necessary vice, an institutionalized corruption surpassing anything we have seen for 80 years. All that is missing is a return to the gold standard and a war to Christianize the Philippines..."

Il Conformista

A tentative big toe
dipped in the Cold Lake
of rapture but as short
of real immersion as
the old army game,
balls dropping unnoticed
into the back pant pocket
or something like that--
an argument bolstered
by mere proximity (clack) is
the reassertion
of a dialectic that
never was, that
between looking
for something &
just looking, say
Dominique Sanda
as sleek as a panther
which I then didn't get
favoring the pale brunette,
but the desire, however
"gripped", that links
junkie, riot, sugarcone,
the washed away &
the washed out is
what muscles us up
for Mussolini, the
"primal scene" in that sense
comes free with every
Kodak. That's why
its called "software".