Theodor Adorno's essay on "The Old Curiosity Shop" at Google Books--

"Mr Quilp could scarcely be said to be of any particular trade or calling, though his pursuits were diversified and his occupations numerous. He collected the rents of whole colonies of filthy streets and alleys by the waterside, advanced money to the seamen and petty officers of merchant vessels, had a share in the ventures of divers mates of East Indiamen, smoked his smuggled cigars under the very nose of the Custom House, and made appointments on “Change with men in glazed hats and round jackets pretty well every day. On the Surrey side of the river was a small rat-infested dreary yard called ‘Quilp’s Wharf,’ in which were a little wooden counting-house burrowing all awry in the dust as if it had fallen from the clouds and ploughed into the ground; a few fragments of rusty anchors; several large iron rings; some piles of rotten wood; and two or three heaps of old sheet copper, crumpled, cracked, and battered. On Quilp’s Wharf, Daniel Quilp was a ship-breaker, yet to judge from these appearances he must either have been a ship-breaker on a very small scale, or have broken his ships up very small indeed. Neither did the place present any extraordinary aspect of life or activity, as its only human occupant was an amphibious boy in a canvas suit, whose sole change of occupation was from sitting on the head of a pile and throwing stones into the mud when the tide was out, to standing with his hands in his pockets gazing listlessly on the motion and on the bustle of the river at high-water..."

the peerless Frank McHugh in "Lily Turner"--

Spencer Tracy: "Frank, dear Frank. Of all our gang, Frank was the funniest one, and the only people who saw him at his funniest were the boys down at The Players and The Lambs. He'd take those skinny little parts they gave him at Warners and make them little bits of comic genious. I saw him just a few days ago on television in the musical version of State Fair, a nothing part, and Frank made it bloom with his charm. An actor."

another reason to move to Weehawken--New Jersey officially abolishes death penalty

"Corzine said the new law 'best captures our state's highest values and reflects our best efforts to search for true justice rather than state-endorsed killing.'"

Local trees

getting ready to read "The Old Curiosity Shop" (which Walter Benjamin translated into German) found this fine essay Dickens and the Dream of Cinema by Grahame Smith

"Quilp said not a word in reply, but walking so close to Kit as to bring his eyes within two or three inches of his face, looked fixedly at him, retreated a little distance without averting his gaze, approached again, again withdrew, and so on for half-a-dozen times, like a head in a phantasmagoria..."

Led Zep

“Kashmir” is as good an example as any of Zeppelin’s weird genius. The lumbering riff pits three guitar beats against two drumbeats, executing a Sisyphean march that cycles over and over without becoming tiresome; on the record, it is the shortest eight-and-a-half-minute song I know. Its minute-long breakdown is like one long drum sample, held together by the motion of John Bonham’s dancing right foot. (P. Diddy and Schoolly D have rapped over “Kashmir.”) The lyrics are allegedly inspired by the Sahara Desert—“the storm that leaves no trace”—and the combination of strings, guitar, and Mellotron keyboard has often been described as Middle Eastern. In concert, though, it became clear that “Middle Eastern” is just one way of capturing an implausibly big and eerie song that wanders through a spooky fog in enormous boots and could just as easily be about settling on the moon or diving to the bottom of the ocean..."

thanks CB & the photographer for these amazing images of the Nanaimo River Flood

via Ron Terry Eagleton vs the new atheism--

"He suggests that the question 'do you believe in God?' is akin to asking someone whether they believe in the Loch Ness monster. Dawkins, he says, seems to imagine God 'if not exactly with a white beard then at least as some kind of chap', whereas even in the simplest sense, 'for Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is... He is the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves. He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing. God and the universe do not add up to two any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects...."

Glenn Greenwald

"More than anything else, what these revelations highlight -- yet again -- is that the U.S. has become precisely the kind of surveillance state that we were always told was the hallmark of tyrannical societies, with literally no limits on the government's ability or willingness to spy on its own citizens and to maintain vast dossiers on those activities. The vast bulk of those on whom the Government spies have never been accused, let alone convicted, of having done anything wrong. One can dismiss those observations as hyperbole if one likes -- people want to believe that their own government is basically benevolent and "tyranny" is something that happens somewhere else -- but publicly available facts simply compel the conclusion that, by definition, we live in a lawless surveillance state, and most of our political officials are indifferent to, if not supportive of, that development..."

today's YouTube - JOE BATAAN-I WISH YOU LOVE (check out the red trombone!)

Jim "Ball Four" Bouton on the 'roid scandal...

"They knowingly turned a blind eye to almost everything. It’s not just baseball. It’s in politics, it’s in business. You’re sitting around the White House, or you’re sitting around a Congressional staffing meeting, “we’ve got this big problem, what are we going to do about it?” We’re going to keep it secret and not tell anybody about it and maybe we’ll be out of here by the time it gets discovered. It’s a failure of leadership, we’re really lacking in leadership in this country. Not just baseball executives and union executives but business executives and major politicians, presidents, congressmen, senators. It’s a shame. Nobody wants to come out and give people the bad news..."

(eagle-eyed viewers might also remember Bouton from his small but pivotal role in Altman's "The Long Goodbye")

nice to see the great fly-on-the-wall documentaries of Frederick Wiseman finally being made available on DVD, though not yet my favorite, the six hour acute care epic "Near Death"...

Local trees

nice long interview with trombone colossus Rico Rodriguez....

via sit down man, you're a bloody tragedy this evocative set of images made at Thamesmead, Riverside School, 76-78--

"In my early days I was employed, at my second school, as a science teacher at Riverside School, Thamesmead. Situtated on the Bexley/London border, it was a relatively new school in a "London" housing estate. Riverside School is now Bexley Business Academy.

I went into teaching full of belief and idealism, knowing that our children had limitless potential. After 5 years I realised that there was no place for idealism in teaching. I left in 1978 not knowing what I would do.

Some of the photorgraphs in this set were shown in a "Half Moon Photogaphy Workshop" exhibition in 1979. I titled the exhibition "Lost at School". Of course I was referring to my own situation, not that of the children in the photographs.

My negatives and photographs sat mouldering in the back of my garage for 30 years before the wonders of the digital age allowed me to rescue them..."

Otto Preminger's masterful adaptation of Francoise Sagan's Bonjour Tristesse, long a mosses favorite, on TCM at 700--

"In spite or perhaps precisely because of her flaws, if you love Jean Seberg, then you must love the film. Her performance, like Preminger's direction, is by turns problematic and sublime. In a strange way Jean's fragility as an actress - her constricted movements, her masked expression, her untrained yet distinctive voice, shivery and enchanting - mirrors Preminger's own inconsistency, his sometimes imperfect mastery of his own gifts...Ultimately her performance as a remote beauty with a capacity for casual destructiveness is bewitching."

in my thoughts i have seen rings of smoke through the trees...

Why the Schreiber Scandal Matters

"What mattered when Karlheinz, everyone’s favourite Christmas uncle, helped replace Joe Clark with Brian Mulroney, is that the door was opened to the globalization deals in Canada in the 1980s that helped shove this country down the global ladder to the position we occupy today as suppliers of oil sands oil to the Americans and greenhouse gas emissions to the planet.

What I can’t fathom are the media pundits whose line of analysis is that what went on in the 1980s was the bad old days of influence peddling and that all this has happily been put behind us. Are they kidding?

When Brian Mulroney came to power and made his deals, Canadian democracy was fundamentally weakened. We live today in the nether world of plutocracy, in which those with big money ensure that they get the arrangements that favour them. They twist arms, fight wars, educate economists to peddle their line, and yes, they bribe whenever and wherever it is necessary..."

The Purchase Price

"The Purchase Price opens with Stanwyck singing a torch song (in her own husky voice) begging someone to take her away. She's wearing a dramatic gown with narrow beaded panels that Orry Kelly appears to have recut from a Baby Face dress she had worn only a few months before. In a goofy plot twist, she takes it on the lam to Elk's Crossing ND to get away from her genial but pushy racketeer boyfriend, played by Lyle Talbot with his usual lack of sex appeal. Swapping places with a girl about to ship out as a mail order bride, she finds herself in short order married to a sniffle-wracked George Brent, who's been waiting for a wife for so long, he expects to go to bed with her RIGHT AWAY. Taken aback (but clearly no better than she should be) Barbara wallops him, which makes him pretty darn mad. It will take the rest of the movie for them to see eye to eye..."

a nice septuple feature of pre-code films by two-fisted director William Wellman (above in his Lafayette Escadrille outfit) TCM starting at 500, including a Stanwyck I haven't seen--

"5:00 PM Night Nurse (1931)
A nurse discovers that the children she's caring for are murder targets. Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Ben Lyon, Clark Gable. Dir: William A. Wellman. BW-72 mins, TV-G
6:15 PM Purchase Price, The (1932)
A night-club singer on the lam becomes a farmer's mail-order bride. Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, George Brent, Lyle Talbot. Dir: William A. Wellman. BW-68 mins, TV-PG
7:30 PM Safe In Hell (1931)
A ruthless woman wreaks havoc on a tropical haven for outlaws. Cast: Dorothy Mackaill, Donald Cook, John Wray. Dir: William A. Wellman. BW-73 mins, TV-PG
9:00 PM Lilly Turner (1933)
After unwittingly marrying a bigamist, a pregnant woman faces many trials on the road to romance. Cast: Ruth Chatterton, George Brent, Frank McHugh. Dir: William A. Wellman. BW-65 mins, TV-PG
10:15 PM Midnight Mary (1933)
An abused orphan sinks into a life of crime. Cast: Loretta Young, Ricardo Cortez, Franchot Tone. Dir: William A. Wellman. BW-74 mins, TV-PG
11:30 PM Frisco Jenny (1932)
A district attorney prosecutes his own mother for murder. Cast: Ruth Chatterton, Donald Cook, Louis Calhern. Dir: William A. Wellman. BW-71 mins, TV-PG
12:45 AM Other Men's Women (1931)
A railroad engineer falls for a co-worker's wife. Cast: James Cagney, Mary Astor, Joan Blondell. Dir: William A. Wellman. BW-70 mins, TV-PG, CC
2:00 AM Love Is A Racket (1932)
A beautiful girl convinces a reporter to cover up her involvement in a murder. Cast: Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Frances Dee, Ann Dvorak. Dir: William A. Wellman. BW-71 mins, TV-G"

new album from the Great Robert Wyatt

"A French journalist asked if my music was spiritual, and I said, 'Only in the original sense of spirit meaning breath.' I am a breathing animal. If anything, I get lower, not higher, in art to work things out, relying on animal instincts to guide me through what sounds right. Beyond that, it's unknowable, verbally inaccessible." He adds, with characteristic self-effacement: "That's why I work with musicians."