Storminess brought out the sun today...

farewell Barbara McNair (1934-2007)

Il Maestro in America

"If Morricone has a signature theme, of all the great music he has created over the past 45 years, it is surely this amazing orchestral invention, combining haunting melodic beauty, savage lust and animal desperation. No one can listen to this and not picture Eli Wallach as Tuco, running among the crosses marking the graves of thousands of war dead, breathlessly seeking the one that marks the hiding place of a treasure beyond imagining.

That show-stopping sequence in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly astonishes everyone who sees that movie for the first time - or for the 31st. A "privileged moment" if ever there was one, it dares to stop the film's narrative for more than three minutes of blood-churning, temperature-raising pure style - a moment that, in case anyone hadn't noticed yet, announced the absolute arrival of both Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone. It is the defining moment of that film, and the first of several defining moments of Morricone's career. And as I watched and listened, I couldn't help thinking how far we have come from 1967, when so many critics considered The Good, the Bad and the Ugly grindhouse grunge from an upstart Italian who knew nothing about that uniquely American genre, the Western; and even those few who were sensitive enough to be struck by the music and the stylistic bravura still wondered why it was wasted on genre trash. Today, here we are, dressed up in our Saturday night finest, to hear the composer perform that music in a hallowed American concert venue. And rightly so. Morricone and his music always deserved this. It just took close to half a century for most people to recognize it..."

wonderful album covers from Jim Flora (via Metafilter)

Site formerly occupied by the old Nanaimo graveyard. At one point some of the gravestones were inset into a wall & what was left of the graveyard was turned into a small park, where Audrey Alexander Brown had the vision that resulted in "A Dryad in Nanaimo" in the 1930's, still by far the most popular poem to come out of Nanaimo. More recently the grove of trees was "accidentally" cut down by the city.

Can I Borrow a Feeling?

Happy Valentine's Day, beloved readers!

pleased to find a very nice fake-buckram three-volume 1981 version of Webster's Third at the Literacy Nanaimo bookstore yesterday for $12...

Site formerly occupied by Schwab's Meats, Cedar. That's the new Duke Point road crossing the Cedar River behind. Schwab's moved but then eventually closed. Very good, lightly smoked hams. I remember walking back from there with a wrapped hock in my jacket pocket to the barking accompaniment of a thousand confused but ravenous dogs...

Site formerly occupied by the entrance to the No. 1 Mine South Wellington. This is a couple of hundred yards from the house.

another website for a poet who died very young of TB, Edinburgh's Robert Fergusson (1750-74)--from "Auld Reekie" (nickname for his then-stinky home town)

"Auld Reikie, wale o' ilka Town
That Scotland kens beneath the Moon;
Where couthy Chiels at E'ening meet
Their bizzing Craigs and Mous to weet;
And blythly gar auld Care gae bye
Wi' blinkit and wi' bleering Eye:
O'er lang frae thee the Muse has been
Sae frisky on the Simmer's Green,
Whan Flowers and Gowans wont to glent
In bonny Blinks upo' the Bent;
But now the Leaves a Yellow die
Peel'd frae the Branches, quickly fly;
And now frae nouther Bush nor Brier
The spreckl'd Mavis greets your ear;
Nor bonny Blackbird Skims and Roves
To seek his Love in yonder Groves.
Then, Reikie, welcome! Thou canst charm
Unfleggit by the year's Alarm;
Not Boreas that sae snelly blows,
Dare here pap in his angry Nose:
Thanks to our Dads, whase biggin stands
A Shelter to surrounding Lands..."

Site formerly occupied by a 7-11, Nichol St.(Highway 1) & Milton, Nanaimo

The second 7-11 in Nanaimo, opened mid-70's, memorable site of well-lit teenage
hallucinations, later I lived on nearby Hecate. Torn down about five years ago when the alley became a shooting gallery. No sign of development.

finally got around to checking out the fine website for Samuel Greenberg: American Poet


"Samuel Greenberg died of tuberculosis in 1917, at age 23. His childhood was spent in poverty on the Lower East Side of New York City. After leaving school at 14 to begin working, he became ill and spent his final years as a patient in several charity hospitals, where he did most of his writing..."


Early Ghosts

When first I beheld
The sight of self alone,
Here standing upon a floor--
A new sensitive throne--
By dark corners round
I shaded myself, in hope
That some light or people
Would be seen through a grate.
But by the might of pictures
Each sighted object looked
As if my soul was but a fortune--
To its memory, meaning booked.

PDF of Italian & English versions of Jeff Derksen's Transnational Muscle Cars & more...

great quote from engraver Thomas Bewick in review of Jenny Uglow's new biography--

"Bewick's aim was to make a personal, durable mark on the world. While out fishing he'd muse on suitable poems that "I would, if I could afford it, have committed to the care of a rock"."

brilliant Joe Klein takedown...

"If you gave the people Joe Klein calls "leftists" a choice -- told them they could have an instant Scandanavian-style state-directed economy, but only if The Sopranos was pulled off the air -- how many of them do you think would vote for even that kind of socialism? The A&E network has nothing to worry about, let's put it that way..."

Area Trees

Philly poet Frank Sherlock is very ill sans insurance--find out how to help here.

some Poplars, Scotch Elms & a Heron from this wonderful Disappearing Surrey Gallery

(thanks CB)

nice Altman obit by "Player" screenwriter Michael Tolkin--

"Some sort of sincerity: Robert Altman was a misanthrope who loved having people around, to watch their behavior. This made him a great host. He should have adapted Poe, he never made a horror film and if I’ve ever been sorry that I didn’t know him better, it’s for this, thinking about it this morning, I would have loved to pitch “The Gold Bug” to him, a story about something meaning something to people, the meaning being more important than the thing. This formula is a bit like his movies or marijuana, and the element that divides those who like his movies from those who don’t, since his movies don’t have the sharp perspectives that always point out the one thing the film wants watched.

I had forgotten how pot works, the way it rearranges the significance of things, the way internal distractions become interesting or threatening paths. It’s not a happy drug at all, it’s not two flutes of nice champagne and a pretty face and perfume in the air. After smoking a little pot with him—and other than one morning in the office he didn’t smoke during the day—some of his methods made sense, and if it was pot sense, the sense is not invalid..."

A Broken Windows Theory Of Tyranny

"The obvious and oft repeated has some truth -- deeply empathic people get their hearts broken young, and learn to "toughen up". Some get toughened into monsters, and some find weird paths to walk between their hardened skin and still soft hearts. If you've read Alice Miller, or any of the people who write about how authoritarian societies "break" children, and encourage this as necessary and important, you've got some idea. Breaking children is the Republican factory, near as I can tell sitting here. You learn that truth is a function of power; and what you feel is a function of what daddy or mommy want you to feel; and then you get 60 more years to untangle it, if you don't turn into a war criminal or vote one into office along the way (or even if you do). But what interested me this morning, and inspired this rant, was not the deeper cause in child rearing, but the effect of a society so cruel and insane that you cannot turn on a TV, or read a paper, or talk to a friend, without some ready evidence of the boot descending on a human face, another fresh example of cruelty and gratuitous control..."

Area Trees