local/Tsawassen trees

War and Deliverance

"You remember the scene in "Deliverance" where Lewis has shot one of the mountain men in the back with a broadhead arrow and he's convincing the other three that they should hide the body. The decent family man Drew (Ronny Cox) says no, they have to tell the police what they've done. After all, the law is the law.

"The law?" Lewis half laughs. "The law? What law. Where's the law, Drew?" And then Lewis goes on. "You believe in democracy don't you? Well, then, we'll take a vote." The terrified companions opt to hide the evidence.


Yeah, you believe in democracy, don't you?"

must-read--The Death of Canadian Journalism

"Led by CEO Leonard Asper and the powerful Asper family, the Winnipeg-based corporation now owns both of Vancouver’s daily newspapers (the Sun and the tabloid Province), the city’s top-rated television station (GlobalTV), 12 community newspapers, eight analog and digital television stations, and one of two national papers. For good measure, it also owns the only daily in the nearby provincial capital, Victoria’s Times Colonist. A throwback to the classic Company Town, CanWest has turned Vancouver into the single-most media concentrated city in the western world..."

Moths that drink the tears of sleeping birds

"This can be inserted under the bird’s eyelids, where the barbs anchor it, apparently without disturbing the bird. The team does not yet know whether the insect spits out an anaesthetic to dull the irritation..."

am off to the Roy Arden opening at the VAG tonight, see you there!

Between Two Worlds

Falling asleep's been a bad 40's play
a gâteaux of allegory
which means no war prophecy

(pending the pact) no Yalta
no mittens knitted for Winter War kittens
just Julie Garfield leering in quotes

a Popular Front cloud in trousers
(authoritarian impulse bitten tersely,
victimhood projected retrospectively)

smoking shorthands the era for tv
but the herbal version won't light
or won't stay lit, non-smokers indicate too much

(under unbunched alders pressed & tendrilled,
a clearing of caterpillars pavilioned
by calicos cotillioned)

Big Syd intervenes like the Coquitlam Queen
between the ball-bearing gaze & its object serene,
a half stop down his priestly collar glows

doublewide thus not washed out
by the ivory suit, while Eleanor walks backward
up black marble understandably but everyone's

moving toward that big Broadway tableaux
with feathered edges floating in a cloud
'twixt anschluss & Pearl Harbor

with a belated apologia for non-intervention
with every view expressed at length
until unlit papers smudge & slap the pavement.

"The Myth of the Counterculture" & "White Album No. 2972886"-- from Jamie Tolagson

review of Beechcombings by Richard Mabey

"Rather in the manner of a risk-taking actor, the beech can command a great presence, but may at any moment fall flat on its face."

farewell Deborah Kerr

thanks V for these trees

"Myoung Ho Lee separates subjects from their original circumstances to derange the difference between subject and image. His work reveals nature by twists and turns, a little fabrication and optical illusion."

The Genocidal Imagination of Christopher Hitchens

"In "Letters to a Young Contrarian", Hitchens urges his young reader to live 'at a slight angle to society,' which means to be idiosyncratic rather than tendentious. This contrarianism is a fetish, and it is one that encases in amber the burning polemical zeal of a former radical, a soixante-huitard. In the wake of a detumescent revolutionary fervor, and with the associated political vision largely gone, we are left with an opportunistic polemicising in which no matter how much one's opinion alters, it remains permanently in opposition, permanently contrarian. And this delivers the hammering Hitchensian irony in which the most consummately bourgeois opinion acquires the mould and fashion of resistance.."

catching up with the top American poet--The 77 Best Lil' Wayne Songs of 2007

new Common-Place (already!) has a great defense of Undisciplined Reading--

"Is it hard to imagine John Cotton at one of the monthly meetings of the OULIPO, reporting to Italo Calvino or Harry Matthews a constraint for literary production? Well, yes. Yet Puritan sermon dictates certainly sound Oulipian: "Take a fragment from a source work. Dramatize or contextualize it in five ways. Then develop three philosophical propositions from it. Then create three rules of behavior based on it. Do this every week for the rest of your life..."

trees from Impressed by Light: British Photographs from Paper Negatives, 1840–1860

JOHN FAHEY "Dance Of The Inhabitants Of The Palace Of King Phillip XIV Of Spain"--16 minutes at the height of his powers...

live from Portland Oregon in 1976--John Fahey--"Fare Forward Voyagers"



"When the train starts, and the passengers are settled
To fruit, periodicals and business letters
(And those who saw them off have left the platform)
Their faces relax from grief into relief,
To the sleepy rhythm of a hundred hours.
Fare forward, travellers! not escaping from the past
Into different lives, or into any future;
You are not the same people who left that station
Or who will arrive at any terminus,
While the narrowing rails slide together behind you;
And on the deck of the drumming liner
Watching the furrow that widens behind you,
You shall not think 'the past is finished'
Or 'the future is before us'.
At nightfall, in the rigging and the aerial,
Is a voice descanting (though not to the ear,
The murmuring shell of time, and not in any language)
'Fare forward, you who think that you are voyaging;
You are not those who saw the harbour
Receding, or those who will disembark.
Here between the hither and the farther shore
While time is withdrawn, consider the future
And the past with an equal mind.
At the moment which is not of action or inaction
You can receive this: "on whatever sphere of being
The mind of a man may be intent
At the time of death"—that is the one action
(And the time of death is every moment)
Which shall fructify in the lives of others:
And do not think of the fruit of action.
Fare forward.
O voyagers, O seamen,
You who came to port, and you whose bodies
Will suffer the trial and judgement of the sea,
Or whatever event, this is your real destination.'
So Krishna, as when he admonished Arjuna
On the field of battle.
Not fare well,
But fare forward, voyagers..."

(from TS Eliot "The Dry Salvages")

(from Onion Sunday Magazine covers)

Local/Ladysmith trees

terrific long piece on The Wire...

autumn with the Laugh-Out-Loud Cats

scariest movie ever Eyes Without a Face by Georges Franju on TCM at 1130 Pacific tomorrow night...

thanks SO for A Tree Grows Around It

"If you take the bus in Buenos Aires, which you should do sometime, you will have discovered that some of the bus stops are hard to find. Some bus stops, like for the #10, are indicated by no more than a little sticker slapped on a utility pole. Over the last year I’ve been observing this bus stop sign that is being slowed enveloped by a tree. Earlier this month I finally got around to taking a photo."

I really would like to take the bus in Buenos Aires sometime!

Ancient cedar falls in Vancouver's Stanley Park

"The top of the tree lies so deep in the forest it can't be seen..."

Curiosities of Literature: Secret History of Authors who have Ruined their Booksellers--

“I must be allowed my freedom in my studies, for I substitute my writings for a game at the tennis-court, or a club at the tavern; I never counted among my honours these opuscula of mine, but merely as harmless amusements. It is my partridge, as with St. John the Evangelist; my cat, as with Pope St. Gregory; my little dog, as with St. Dominick; my lamb, as with St. Francis; my great black mastiff, as with Cornelius Agrippa; and my tame hare, as with Justus Lipsius.” I have since discovered in Niceron that this Catherinot could never get a printer, and was rather compelled to study economy in his two hundred quartos of four or eight pages; his paper was of inferior quality; and when he could not get his dissertations into his prescribed number of pages, he used to promise the end at another time, which did not always happen. But his greatest anxiety was to publish and spread his works: in despair he adopted an odd expedient. Whenever Monsieur Catherinot came to Paris, he used to haunt the quaies where books are sold, and while he appeared to be looking over them, he adroitly slided one of his own dissertations among these old books. He began this mode of publication early, and continued it to his last days. He died with a perfect conviction that he had secured his immortality; and in this manner had disposed of more than one edition of his unsaleable works. Niceron has given the titles of 118 of his things, which he had looked over..."

more recent acquisitions

for his 100th birthday--Le site officiel de Jacques Tati, Les films de mon oncle, Tativille, Monsieur Hulot, Tatischeff, Playtime, Parade, Trafic:

today's YouTube - Cal Tjader / Clare Fischer - Guachi Guaro (aka Soul Sauce)

been listening to a lot more Tjader lately, mostly thanks to the efforts of this splendid person, & am continually pleased by how fresh & inventive his playing is--he even finds something new in Bacharach...

I'd missed Matt Taibbi's genius Friedman takedown--a must read--That's a Flattener...

"The baseline argument begins with a lengthy description of the 'ten great flatteners,' which is basically a highlight reel of globalization tomahawk dunks from the past two decades: the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Netscape IPO, the pre-Y2K outsourcing craze, and so on. Everything that would give an IBM human resources director a boner, that's a flattener. The catch here is that Flattener #10 is new communications technology: 'Digital, Mobile, Personal, and Virtual.' These technologies Friedman calls 'steroids,' because they are 'amplifying and turbocharging all the other flatteners.' According to the mathematics of the book, if you add an IPac to your offshoring, you go from running to sprinting with gazelles and from eating with lions to devouring with them..."

Brooklyn punters footloose on Friday should check out Bruce Conkle's new show...(don't know if Marne Lucas (above) will be there...)

Opening: Friday, October 12, 7–9pm
Dates:
Saturday, October 13–Sunday, November 11
Location:
487 Driggs Ave, bet N. 9 and N. 10

Hours:
Thurs–Mon, 12–6pm
Contact:
eva@JackthePelicanPresents.com 718-782-0183


"Jack the Pelican is pleased to present stalwart of the revolution, Bruce Conkle. De facto king of the Pacific NW eco art geeks and self-styled "misfit at the crossroads," he creates "Lament for Middle Kingdom Earth," a quirky eco-absurd installation that restages contemporary ideas about nature and community in a pre-modern world of fairytale landscape.


Conkle is the proverbial stranger come to heal the village with a whacky old prospector's assortment of things, mostly of the detritus kind, and mis-wired ancient magic spells that can never in a million years actually work.

He launches his exhibition at the opening by blowing his 12-foot Alphorn and playing with puppets. The show is laced with bits of meteorite. In the background are mountains of cardboard--Alps, if you please, where he comes from, being half Swiss by descent--and also 'them thar hills,' source of the lore of sasquatch and gingerbread houses and the like, all of which have been his mainstay of interest over the years. Rivers of Pepto-Bismol flow. A shovel dissolves in a decorative woof of fancy. A snowman drowns himself ( Suicide Snowman ). And dancing overhead are visions of a coconut planet spaceship with Superman crystal-colony cities..."