Thursday, March 12, 2009
Six Questions for Juan Cole
To tell you the truth, I cannot understand what the mission is in Afghanistan any more. It is not to fight Al Qaeda there. I haven’t seen anything about U.S. troops engaging or capturing “Arab Afghans” for years. It appears that the U.S. and NATO are just trying to shore up the government of Hamid Karzai, which only controls thirty percent of the country. And what do we expect? That someday rural Pashtun Muslims will wake up and say, “I don’t mind foreign troops patrolling my country, I’m happy to be ruled by Tajiks and Hazara Shiites, and I’m not that interested in living by Islamic law anymore”? President Obama has spoken about fighting defeating the “Taliban,” but there seem to be four or five distinct groups now being called that, only one of them is Mulla Omar’s “Old Taliban.” And, I have a distinct sense of dread that some of the Pashtuns attacking NATO checkpoints are just disgruntled poppy farmers whose crops we burned down...
Tom Clark on Caspar David Friedrich and the Interior Dictation of Landscape, Captain Cook & the Nootka, etc...
He had a special interest in the moon
He used to say
that if after death men were transported to another place
then he would prefer one less terrestrial than lunar
in order to allow the beings inside him to feel at home...
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Poor South Wellington barely gets a "with coal mines", but Nanaimo comes off rather well in the 1922 Baedeker Dominion of Canada, with Newfoundland and an excursion to Alaska. Handbook for travellers; it's "pretty rose-gardened cottages are very unlike the grimy abodes of coal-miners in England", and there are "pleasant excursions to be made"....
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
inspiration tale of Surfers vs. the Superferry--
It all started in 2001 as a purportedly modest "local" effort to offer inter-island ferry service to "help local people more easily visit their relatives on other islands, and carry their farm produce to market." Most locals liked the idea but soon found that this ferry, the gigantic Hawaii Superferry, was an environmental nightmare. It uses far more fuel (in total and per person) than big planes. It races at high speed (40-45 miles per hour) through zones teeming with endangered humpback whales, dolphins and rare sea turtles. It could transport dangerous invasive species to pristine islands. And it carries hundreds of cars to tiny places already choking on traffic...
Meredith Quartermain on David Bromige
“There is nothing ambiguous about our double entendres,” Bromige tells us in “Typicality Enthralls with its Particular Failures,” and then continues with “The poet, having no identity is continually informing and filling some other body, and who isn’t a poet, if by that this case means scorned, spurned, feverish, headed for death, name writ on water, way with words, incapable of not noticing all this and more upon occasion?”
Isola di Rifiuti's reading Kerouac:--
Beyond the joys of pure rhythmic clatter and shift, isn’t there in Kerouac a breeze willingness to come spoutingly close to nonsense, as if the present American vernacular simply cannot contain what he’s saying. I love the moments—kin to a blues guitarist stretching a string, pulling out a long blue grace note, or air-thrashing amp-tight in full-feedback, making the electronic overload do the talking—where Kerouac simply makes up the words, little splurges of talking in tongues. Phrases like “spluttrous inheld explosions of dont-laugh” or “lamplit oil house flimmered in a glub of night trees” or “incarnate dirt behung in drapes of grain by level deep doop dung” or “spermatazoing in all directions” or “a rosecovered cottage flat on the dreaming lurps and purls of the Merrimac” or (swimming in that Thoreauvian stream now bedung’d):
—where regularly you saw lumps of human shit floating—I have nightmares of swallowing a cud of crap when I get up on my half rock and point hands to dive, by God I learned to dive by myself by half submerging to my waist—but there’s these turds floating in the river of time and I‘m ready to sprowf myself one up, flubadegud—
Think how precise “half rock” is, and “point hands to dive” and how “sprowf” rejects the thing it ingests, a visceral gag-reflex of a word: it’s the all-assault precision of Kerouac that allows in things like “river of time”—just another springboard (abstract) cantilever’d out over the all, another dive into it. Does it—Kerouac’s racing pulse, picking up whatever sound-confab comes along the ear-ways—fit in against Clark Coolidge’s sense of Free Jazz—“these guys made a time where there was no strong or weak beat. It was all like one-one-one-one-one-one-one to infinity. In other words you could play anything at all over that time, you could go anywhere and not worry about how to come back”?
Monday, March 09, 2009
on TCM tonight, unseen by me THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK (James Whale, 1939)
But the Spanish princess to whom Louis is engaged, but who is in love with Philippe, steals the key to the mask that Louis wears around his
neck. In a wonderful shot, Louis’s back is to the camera and Maria Theresa’s arm, rendered immense by the camera proximity, reaches around...
But the Spanish princess to whom Louis is engaged, but who is in love with Philippe, steals the key to the mask that Louis wears around his
neck. In a wonderful shot, Louis’s back is to the camera and Maria Theresa’s arm, rendered immense by the camera proximity, reaches around...
Sunday, March 08, 2009
Theo Parrish- The ugly edits compilation
amazing, essential 2002-2005 series of singles refashioning soul & disco hits...which doesn't adequately describe them or what they do...
amazing, essential 2002-2005 series of singles refashioning soul & disco hits...which doesn't adequately describe them or what they do...
Friday, March 06, 2009
My father managed to establish a Ham radio "shack", rather more modest than most of those pictured above, in all of the houses (mostly RCAF PMQ's) we ever lived in, culminating in a rather nice greenhouse in Scotland...
lovely tribute the the late, great Sammi Smith
On “Saunders Ferry Lane,” for example, from her Mega debut, her phrasing is so matter of fact, her delivery so quiet, and the string chart behind her is so melancholy and spare, that as Smith tells her story it’s as if we can see the leaves she describes tumbling and the clouds threatening, as if we can hear the dock in the song creaking. In Smith’s voice we can feel the “awful cold in Saunders Ferry Lane,” and we understand she’s not just complaining about the temperature...
On “Saunders Ferry Lane,” for example, from her Mega debut, her phrasing is so matter of fact, her delivery so quiet, and the string chart behind her is so melancholy and spare, that as Smith tells her story it’s as if we can see the leaves she describes tumbling and the clouds threatening, as if we can hear the dock in the song creaking. In Smith’s voice we can feel the “awful cold in Saunders Ferry Lane,” and we understand she’s not just complaining about the temperature...
YouTube SAUNDER'S FERRY LANEYouTube - Help Me Make it Through the NightHallelujah For Beer"Sunshine" & "Today I Started Loving You Again" MEGA LPs
Brooklyn Revealed
...a virtual experience through which users would not only learn about how the streets of Brooklyn got their names, but could also share with the world their knowledge of Brooklyn’s streets and neighborhoods...
...a virtual experience through which users would not only learn about how the streets of Brooklyn got their names, but could also share with the world their knowledge of Brooklyn’s streets and neighborhoods...
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