Local trees

it's Kim Novak day on TCM today, including a noir with Fred MacMurray & an unseen-by-me Phil ("Walking Tall", "Phenix City Story &c.) Karlson heist movie with Brian Keith, as well as the usual Hitchcock & Aldrich....

Isaac Hayes on "The Rockford Files"

"When reading the various online stories/tributes about Hayes' death, most of the writers focused on Isaac's undeniable influence on popular music and his role as the voice of "Chef" on the animated series South Park. Since I had nothing unique to add from either of those angles, I thought this would be an excellent opportunity to focus on his acting and pay tribute to my favorite Isaac Hayes' portrayal... his recurring role as badass Gandolf "Gandy" Fitch on The Rockford Files (which ran on NBC from 1974-1980)..."

The Bush administration's feckless response to the Russian invasion of Georgia. - By Fred Kaplan - Slate Magazine

Regardless of what happens next, it is worth asking what the Bush people were thinking when they egged on Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia's young, Western-educated president, to apply for NATO membership, send 2,000 of his troops to Iraq as a full-fledged U.S. ally, and receive tactical training and weapons from our military. Did they really think Putin would sit by and see another border state (and former province of the Russian empire) slip away to the West? If they thought that Putin might not, what did they plan to do about it, and how firmly did they warn Saakashvili not to get too brash or provoke an outburst?

It's heartbreaking, but even more infuriating, to read so many Georgians quoted in the New York Times—officials, soldiers, and citizens—wondering when the United States is coming to their rescue. It's infuriating because it's clear that Bush did everything to encourage them to believe that he would. When Bush (properly) pushed for Kosovo's independence from Serbia, Putin warned that he would do the same for pro-Russian secessionists elsewhere, by which he could only have meant Georgia's separatist regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Putin had taken drastic steps in earlier disputes over those regions—for instance, embargoing all trade with Georgia—with an implicit threat that he could inflict far greater punishment. Yet Bush continued to entice Saakashvili with weapons, training, and talk of entry into NATO. Of course the Georgians believed that if they got into a firefight with Russia, the Americans would bail them out...

It's grim up North Island--with an excellent question

"Why don't we have a Canadian IKEA?" asks Claire Trevena. The raw logs of the region go elsewhere for processing, when local industries could turn them into more than shakes and carvings...

at the end of your rope? swing into the dog days with my grampy's narrowly-acclaimed new book of poems THE AGE OF BRIGGS & STRATTON

Afghanistan Transforms Canada

"Our role in the war is dominating our international reputation and integrating us into the U.S. and its imperial designs on Middle East oil. In order to justify this colonial occupation, Canada now spends so much of its (paltry) aid budget on Afghanistan (much of it finding its way into the pockets of corrupt officials) that there is barely any financing left over for other developing countries' needs.

Meanwhile, the conflict and its "war on terror" rationale are being used to justify massive increases in military spending, completely distorting the role of government and the spending priorities of Canadians.

Lastly, the military's role in Canadian politics and culture is being rapidly Americanized. Canadian military spokespersons now openly promote their war-fighting role and take part in cultural events, and the media (most notably the CBC) promotes this new expansive role.

It is hard to imagine a less honourable "mission" on which to base such fundamental changes to the country. There are no longer any secrets about the Afghan conflict or Canada's continuing role in it..."

"the power of love...."

farewell Isaac Hayes

By the time I get to Phoenix

scores Shaft film - Café Reggio & Shaft Theme 1971

Cafe Reggio's

The look of Love (live) 1973

Local trees

often listened to, but never seen before YouTube - Al Bowlly - The Very Thought of You

Sport, art and activity

"While many artists and arts institutions have wished for an end to the tick boxes and quotas of Blairite "socialist realism", if they now get what they wished for in the form of a flight to "quality" (and the market), will this create more latitude for critical and political art or open the way for unaccountable cuts and capricious, commercially-based funding decisions? In short, what will happen to the money if art stops being sport? As arguments for the economic and "social" value of creative activity and cultural industries are exposed as inflated by economic downturn, both art and sport may turn out to have been mere contributors to the emerging crisis, factories (or at least "digital workshops") of fictitious value whose stream of liquidity is now drying up. However, State funded art, as a relatively weak contributor to major league capital projects such as the Olympics, is likely to feel the squeeze before aestheticised mass sport does..."

YouTube - Bruce Lee in Marlowe scene 1 James Garner

YouTube - Bruce Lee in Marlowe scene 2 James Garner

Local trees

YouTube - Marc Bolan & T.Rex - "Ride A White Swan" [French TV '70]

first 45 I ever bought--sometime that year...

interesting Vancouver history blog Past Tense on “The Dope Craze that’s Terrorizing Vancouver”--

"A 1955 MacLean’s Magazine article entitled “The Dope Craze that’s Terrorizing Vancouver” estimated there were more like 2000 addicts in the city. The writer calculated that this amounted to “one addict for every two hundred and fifty citizens. This not only gives Vancouver the highest rate of drug addiction in the Western Hemisphere,” he continued, “but means that if the city’s rate of addiction continues to increase as at present, the crop of addicts now being born will constitute one in every sixteen Vancouverites...”

pre-Rockford James Garner as Phillip Marlowe from 1969, with Bruce Lee & Rita Moreno, on TCM tomorrow night. No "Long Goodbye" but not bad, either, while waiting for a cool cross breeze to find you. Preceded by his decent dog mystery "They Only Kill Their Masters"....

Local trees

more Anne Bancroft--hilarious "Yma Dream" sketch...

Lower mainland & Ladysmith trees

Anne Bancroft day on TCM tomorrow--don't miss her in Jack Clayton's Pinter-scripted "Pumpkin Eater" if you get a chance--

"After her Oscar win, Bancroft fought for the plum leading role in this superbly directed and written adaptation of Penelope Mortimer’s novel, a nearly impenetrable portrait of a compulsively child-bearing woman fighting her way through a clinical depression. Bancroft’s performance here is nearly impenetrable, too; she’s so immersed in creating the extreme of this woman’s lower-than-low mood that sometimes her face is nothing but a tragic mask with the merest glimmers of legible emotion behind her liquid, widely spaced dark eyes. In flashbacks to happier times, Bancroft’s eyes squeeze shut whenever she’s taken with one of her overcome, juicy smiles, but this same smile turns into a choked grimace when she breaks down in Harrods department store: in extreme close-up, tears streaming down her face unconsciously, Bancroft laughs and strangles out nonsense words, as if she’s being pulled in two different directions at once (once, I watched The Pumpkin Eater with someone who had suffered a breakdown, and they said that Bancroft’s Harrods breakdown scene was the most accurate physical rendition of this sort of illness that they had ever seen).

Deploying a light British accent seems to focus and lighten Bancroft’s effects here, so that she feasts on Harold Pinter’s suggestive dialogue in the most disciplined way. At the same time, she dives into the more unappealing aspects of the role without even thinking of flinching, beating the hell out of her straying husband (Peter Finch), descending into the most unattractive depths of self-pity, and finally smiling with mingled hope, agony and outright madness in her last close-up. This is the kind of performance that can inspire awe; God only knows what Bancroft had to dig up to get to the emotion of that Harrods breakdown. In this film, she’s like a heavyweight champion defending her title with punches so hard that they seem to come from some primordial place; it remains her most ambitious, most mysterious work..."

from Shanghai, "Spider" Perry republishes his review of my 2003
Hammertown

cool, out-of-the-way June Christy: Something Broadway, Something Latin (1965)