droll essay about Chairman Frank's wonderful "concept" album Watertown, though admittedly not as strong on the music as it should be--

"I think critics paint with too broad a brush in thinking that Watertown was an effort to attract the Woodstock generation—an effort Sinatra even at his most deluded must have realized was hopeless. Demographics do not break down into neat packets, with the Wake Island generation yielding directly to the Woodstock generation. The bulk of Sinatra's listeners were in fact tweeners slightly younger than himself. Tom Brokaw is unlikely to write a book-length encomium to this generation... But hey, they fought the Korean war, and they were the real Watertown generation—young enough to have their marriages wrecked by the sexual revolution, but too old to enjoy the benefits of women's lib and consequence-free copulation..."

(a download with a nice note)

turning back, after an immense interval, to the poems of D.H. Lawrence I found these two essays by Kenneth Rexroth pungent & useful--

"Sentimentality is spiritual realization on the installment plan. Socially viable patterns, like conventional verse, are a sort of underwriting or amortization of the weaknesses of the individual. This is the kernel of sense in the hollow snobbery of Valéry. The sonnet and quatrain are like the national debt, devices for postponing the day of reckoning indefinitely. All artistic conventions are a method of spiritual deficit-financing. If they were abandoned, the entire credit structure of Poets, Ltd., would be thrown into hopeless confusion. It is just as well that the professors have led the young, in my lifetime, away from free verse to something that can be taught. No one could be taught to be Lawrence, but in a world where the led lead the leaders, those who might pretend to do so are sure to be confidence men..."

Lower mainland & local trees

Glenn Greenwald

"That is why what they say -- all of their sober prognostications and warnings and analyses -- is meaningless. All of the talk about "worst options" and alleged fears of what will happen if we withdrawal and our "strategic interests" all just mask the simple truth that we are going to stay -- even when their own premises amount to an acknowledgement that there is no point in staying -- because we are staying to protect the reputations and credibility and egos of the Washington Establishment.

As much as our political class disgraced itself with its obsequious support for the invasion itself, and further disgraced itself with its complicity in the endless claims (including from the General Whose Credibility Must Not Be Questioned) that things were going well when the opposite was true, their behavior over the last twelve months -- when even they admit that the war is a failure and keep promising to support withdrawal only never to do so -- is the undeniable evidence of how corrupt and worthless they really are..."

Five Bucks On By-Tor

"Five Bucks On By-Tor is devoted to the lesser-known heroes of Canadian musical history...."

discovering & recovering Black Pearls & Ascension--

"Black Pearls is a transitional recording, one that allowed him to create the astonishing sessions for Atlantic from '59 to '61. Why, then, did I fear the LP? I knew it had nothing to do with the abstracted warnings in the liner notes. (Even as a teenager, I never blindly accepted the critics' voice.) Nor could the cover--which now just looks like a fine, somewhat overdramatized portrait of a heroic figure in my life--have generated such an extreme response. Could I place the LP in my memory the way we re-shelve records or CDs and locate that history? I kept playing the recording, hoping that music, as it so often does, would recover lost memory. Then I stared at the album until my eyes unfocused the way Coltrane's saxophone does on the cover, refracted light off the keys blurring to circles, the bell shadowed into the background, until I could see an old woman in a chair placed close to my mother's bedside, and she gave me the answer..."

via bookslut--Beckett for Babies

Polis Is This: Charles Olson

"From director Henry Ferrini and writer Ken Riaf, Polis Is This is the best film about an American poet ever made. Given travesties from Hollywood’s Tom and Viv to actors impersonating poets like Hart Crane and William Carlos Williams in public-television documentaries, that is not high enough phrase. Ferrini and Riaf present the complex American literary figure Charles Olson (1910–1970) in a clear way by focusing not on the facts of his life but on the facts of his work.

Ferrini exploited the great advantage he brought to the project: he lives in and knows Gloucester, Olson’s home, and the polis and place of the film’s title. His images are a visual analogue to Olson’s words, lit by the bracing clarity of Gloucester’s incomparable light. Some of these images illustrate Olson’s poems, but they do so in a way that might naturally occur to any reader. The interview subjects — students, friends, readers — are wide-ranging. Harvard Professor of Landscape (!) John Stilgoe encapsulates Olson’s thinking brilliantly, and poet Robert Creeley illuminates his friend’s work by referring to Miami Dolphins fullback Larry Csonka. In voiceovers, John Malkovich avoids speaking Olson’s words like an actor. Olson himself is seen in excerpts from a 15-minute documentary produced by NET in the 1950s, talking in his kitchen, walking Gloucester’s slushy streets. “Polis is eyes,” he wrote, and Ferrini gives his viewers the eyes to see Olson in Gloucester..."

Book launch for ÆTHEL by Donato Mancini
Friday, September 14, 2007

Time: 8 PM to 11 PM
Location: Helen Pitt Gallery 102-148 Alexander Street near Columbia

June Christy sings "Takin' a Chance on Love"

I Want To Be Happy

Imagination

Tampico

It's Been a Long Long Time

more trees

Harewood Nanaimo trees

good BBC film on The Life and Death of Steve Biko murdered by police on this day in 1977...

Part 2

Part 3

in the TLS--HUGH MACDIARMID (1977):

"The Black Rainbow Over the Minch


A black rainbow owre the Minch
Needna mak' onybody flinch.
It means juist aboot the same
As gin the usual colours came..."

farewell Joe Zawinul, here with an augmented, early Weather Report...

yet more on Bolaño

"Whole crowds of minor characters and passersby shuttle through those many scenes, and yet nearly everyone in those crowds, a few gangsters excepted, seems to share an unquestioning reverence for Mexican poetry—a sacred cause for which any sane person would gladly sacrifice his life. Not to mention the insane people, who seem to bring out Bolaño's keenest sympathies."

today's YouTube - Jimmy Giuffre - The Train And The River

support our troops?

"Soldiers don't have a monopoly on work that involves risk, physical danger and courage. In 2005 in B.C. alone, 43 loggers were killed in accidents on the job in what was a black year for the forestry industry. Total Canadian combat deaths for 2006, our bloodiest period in Afghanistan, was 36.

So why no stickers for our loggers, who are also essential to the economy?

It may be because they don't wear uniforms. Graham's stickers represent the romanticization of all things military that's crept through Canada in past years. It first appeared when we started getting sentimental about the dying out of the generation who saw us through the Second World War. The shock of 9/11, and the resulting commitment of Canadian troops to war in Afghanistan, intensified our feelings for anyone in boots.

Now military man-love has become part of the national consciousness. Think of how even peacenik Vancouver has shifted culturally. In the 1980s, city council declared Vancouver a nuclear weapons-free zone, thus frustrating the plans of the federal government of the time to put nuclear missile launchers in Mount Pleasant. (How the East Side roared at that one.) Now we're doing Tony Orlando and Dawn to public emergency vehicles..."

Duke Snider Gallery

Tsawasssen/Boundary Bay trees

Stravinsky Says 2.

Well if the pimps outnumber the pigeons
the players still outnumber the nay sayers--
"living off your income" is the new encomium!

Bush baby wrinkles checking for ammo
in a dog day dawn all swathed in pink cammo,
devouring a Denny's Grand Slam Supremo--

The Institute of Pederastics
announced the Heat Death of Disco
at the moment the collected works on Columbia

could be traded for less than a light quarter of bunk,
two cartons of Newport Kings or 24 Yuengling (cans)
SOUTH of DC, post-production

thrown in for free.
No libretti, no maps, no phones--
they mostly just like to leave you alone

up to your hips in the microtones
till the cuneiform fits the uniform--
ears dragged bleeding backwards through blackberries

and dark chromatic woods
varnish through which a crystal set has played
for a hundred years on every other day.

more on Max Roach

"'Max . . . has a flair for 'floating'—playing patterns between the soloist's phrases without interfering or disrupting them. This kind of 'sensitive intrusion' is a very special gift. Only a handful of percussionists can separate themselves bodily from the time in order to add another separate linear, yet rhythmic string of improvisational phrases—without altogether shredding the musical fiber of the performance...'"

more on Bolaño

"Half-done we remain, neither cooked nor raw, lost in the vastness of this endless trash heap, wandering and getting ourselves wrong, killing and begging pardon, manic-depressive characters in your dream, Father, your limitless dream that we have unravelled a thousand times and more than a thousand times again, Latin American detectives lost in a labyrinth of crystal and mud . . . lost in the misery of your utopian dream, Father, lost in the variety of your voices and abysses, manic-depressives in the uncontainable room in Hell where you cook up your Jokes..."

SABADABADA & Loronix--wonderful sites devoted to Brazilian music, esp of the 60's & 70's...