Seattle trees

Extract from Aaron Vidaver's

"Introductions and incomplete bibliography written for the Anomalous Parlance series organized at the Kootenay School of Writing in 2000...

If ontology is the luxury of the landed, what is the necessity of the nomadic? In one of Warren Tallman’s letters to Robin Blaser he suggested that the New American Poets each demanded a cult of readers, because each poetry proposed a world requiring domestic inhabitation. The 6, 7, or 8 poetries in this series permit squatting only: perfect hide-outs from the authorities. They’re anomalous not in the sense of being abnormal (a psychological notion), but in their uncomfortability to common orders. They’re lawless, but not uniformly so. The word “parlance”, however, strikes me more deeply than ‘anomalous’ – it points to a conference to discuss terms, a conference that I hope will arise. Let’s defer the problem of specifying this writing as a poetics of _______, to prevent vaccination against the work itself...

Local & Tsawassen trees, Eva's typewriter (to whom special thanks for so graciously giving up her room, also to CJ for plugging the fan in, Sam for the new cartoons & Lord Bentley for the Springsteen singalong...)

very interesting looking Blast of Silence on TCM late tomorrow....

Having to work within the thinnest of shoestring budgets, Baron elected to use, as few filmmakers had before, the expressive potential of New York City; bringing his camera into the streets of midtown Manhattan at Christmastime, to Rockefeller Center, Harlem, Brooklyn, and Staten Island. Whether it was a conscious strategy or the result of having no resources to create a setting for his tale from scratch, this unglamorous, rather desolate photography of the city by Merrill S. Brody (who also acted as the film's producer) worked immeasurably to Baron's advantage. Indeed, as a directorial debut, Blast of Silence is an altogether prodigious achievement...

& earlier, Sean Connery & a crack team of UK thesps chew the scenery old-school in Sidney Lumet's super-intense WWll brig opera

The Hill, quite possibly the shoutiest movie ever made...

Dirt Dogs and Jinegar: A New Baseball Dictionary--

Baseball slang is an avalanche of skewed logic. The commonest words take
on very precise meanings. "Stuff" refers quite specifically to the
totality of a pitcher's arsenal: his array of pitches and the velocity
and movement with which he throws them. A pitcher can easily have good
stuff but not succeed if his "command"--the ability to locate pitches
accurately--is erratic. Terms associated with dirt and filth are highly
complimentary. A hitter respectfully calls an excellent pitcher
"filthy," a term that evolved out of common adjectives from a decade
ago: "nasty" and "dirty." "Dirtbags" and "dirt dogs" are consummate
hustlers, guys with perpetually soiled uniforms and caps and batting
helmets stained with sweat, tobacco juice and pine tar. Naturally,
dirtbags and dirt dogs play "dirtball." A player who is "pretty" is the
opposite of a dirtbag, as is a "muffin." Food references are as
prevalent as the television announcers who longingly mention the
hallowed postgame buffet in the players' clubhouse. The ball itself can
be an egg, apricot, apple or stitched potato. "Jelly beans" are rookies
and inexperienced kids, the type a veteran might relentlessly call bush
for a year before acknowledging him properly. Reaching base for your
team's big hitters is "setting the table." "Fat" pitches are hittable
ones, almost exclusively delectable treats, my favorite being
"ham-and-cheese." And then there's the colorful (although unfortunately
out of fashion) term for pep or spirit: "jinegar." Forms of kinship lurk
suggestively, with positive connotations only for the hitter. Batters
aspire to find their "cousin," the pitcher they manage to hit
inexplicably well. In the early 2000s the Yankees' weak-hitting utility
infielder Enrique Wilson found an unlikely cousin in the Red Sox's
masterful Pedro Martínez, and Pedro's tough luck against the
Yankees culminated in his admitting in an infamous interview that the
Yanks were his "daddy." It was a rare moment of hearing baseball slang
invented in real time...

don't miss the chance to hear the complete Warner Brothers recordings of Richard Pryor...

excerpt--

That N**ger's Crazy album (Part 1)

via Carl Wilson: Everything Tracy Jordan Said

“Petey Pete, for letting us use the sound booth, please accept this chinchilla coat.”

“Look. I grew up here, Larry, in the days before Starbuck. And if Wall
St crashes, it’ll be the 1970’s all over again. People will get mean.
The streets won’t be safe. It’ll be graffiti everywhere. And the movies
will only cost 3 dollars.”

Viva El Indio

Few recognize that the lusty, predatory Mapache was played by an incredibly important figure in the Mexican film industry — actor/director Emilio Fernandez. Fernandez not only spear-headed the Golden Age of Mexican cinema by directing a powerful series of films during the early 1940s but he had actually participated in the tail end of his country’s revolutionary period in the early 1920s. In other words, Fernandez lived long and large, with his life and career spanning the real history of the revolution to a fictionalized version of it...

Local trees

a great one on on TCM this pm...Robert Mitchum & Susan Hayward in The Lusty Men (1952, Nicholas Ray)

Why bother to learn to read when you can smell meat a mile away?

from

Michail Bulgakov. The heart of a dog

via

Why Obama Is in Denial

Just as Bush outsourced his own sadism to Guantanamo, most of us outsourced our sadism to him by passively accepting what he did. It’s a truth we all want to avoid having to recognize—what drove his orders was a sense of pleasure derived from inflicting pain on others, And, like it or not, this tendency to derive pleasure from cruelty is a trait that, at some level, we all share...

after twenty incredible mixes of blues, rockabilly, doo-wop &c. it looks like the Joan Selects series, one of the glories of the internet, has reached a close...

We tortured to justify war

...even when the interrogators of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the Libyan al-Qaida operative, reported that he had become “compliant” -- in other words, cooperative after sufficient abuse -- the vice-president’s office ordered further torture of the Libyan by his hosts at an Egyptian prison because he had not yet implicated Saddam with al-Qaida. So his interrogators put al-Libi into a tiny coffin until he said what Cheney wanted to hear. Nobody in the U.S. intelligence community actually believed this nonsense. But now, al-Libi has reportedly and very conveniently "committed suicide" in a prison cell in Libya, where he was dispatched to the tender mercies of the Bush administration's newfound friends in the Qaddafi regime several years ago. So the deceased man won't be able to discuss what actually happened to him and why...

wisdom for us all in this Dogme 09 (for djs)

THE VOWS OF CHASTITY

1. no selection which has been used by another dj *that you know of* in live or studio mixing.

2. no selection which you *think* the majority of the audience knows well in live or studio mixing.

3. no dj tools except as transition between non-tool tracks, (hallo techno djs).

4. avoid arbitrary fucking with the EQ, track volumes, cross fader, etc., for pure effect if it doesn't enhance the material. (same goes for chaos pads, etc.)

5. use repetition and monotony as means toward ends, and not out of default laziness.

6. when possible, make best use of the innate human tendency to recognize/imagine patterns, instead of beating people's heads with a giant kick drum ALL of the time.

7. if Electro-Rock Stadium-Techno Big-Room-Nu-Rave Anthems are an integral part of your project, fine, but do not play it all night. in fact,

8. do not play ANY ONE THING all night. selection should not be restricted to genre definitions, but guided by what feels right, and what works the best together to build the feeling you want to create in the over-all composition.

9. all mashups must sound BETTER than, or at least become more meaningful than the original songs.

10. no unnecessary flashy edits when making remixes if the original material does not require or is enhanced by it.

11. no excessive use of arpeggios as lazy way to create excitement-by-numbers.

12. there must be a chunk of at least 9 seconds of silence somewhere in the middle of a live experience.

13. in production, tracks must sound good at fairly low levels of sound engineering, and all subsequent microedits and polish must only improve on what is already there...

The Fifth International

There's a phrase from the afterword to the second edition of Capital that appeared in paper after paper about not writing recipes for "the cook-shops of the future." By this Marx meant that the purpose of social theory is not to sketch blueprints for what shape a possible revolution would or should take, but to elucidate the present situation and analyze the contradictions that inhibit or promote change.

The point is well taken, but on the other hand it is difficult to imagine selling anyone on political practices without a vividly rendered advertisement of the world that the practices might bring into existence. Otherwise the intellectual is either useless or some sort of vanguard, tracing out revolutionary possibilities without a thought for the constituencies that could make these possibilities real. To dream of a political transformation that takes place without the prior endorsement of the people whose lives will be transformed, a revolution made in books that almost no one except the academic elite will or even could read, is to fall into a trap that should be utterly avoidable, the one thing we know from the start that we do not want to repeat...

SpongeBob's Golden Dream

Bikini Bottom is also an effortlessly postmodern place, a baby-blue void in which all manner of cultural bric-a-brac drifts and combines. Neptune might pop by, or the Flying Dutchman, or even David Hasselhoff: the climactic scene in The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie features SpongeBob and Patrick clinging, amid live-action waves, to the Baywatch star’s hairy legs. It even has its own pair of Watchmen-style deconstructed superheroes: Mermaid Man, shuffling in peevish slippers toward senility, and his long-suffering sidekick, Barnacle Boy. In Atlantis SquarePantis, SpongeBob and the gang are magically transported to the lost undersea city of Atlantis, whose Lord Royal Highness, red-lipped and stack-heeled like a Blue Meanie, has the same initials as L. Ron Hubbard (“My friends call me LRH!”). Various masterpieces hang in the great Atlantean halls, and Squidward is thrilled to discover that he can enter them bodily; he climbs into Van Gogh’s crooked bed, and drapes his proboscis alongside the fondant clocks in Dalí’s Persistence of Memory. “Ask your Mama or your Dada,” he sings, perched inside Marcel Duchamp’s famous urinal, “to tell you about the schism between Minimalism and Cubism...”

Terry Eagleton: The liberal supremacists

If the test of liberalism is how it confronts its illiberal adversaries, some of the liberal intelligentsia seem to have fallen at the first hurdle. Writers such as Martin Amis and Hitchens do not just want to lock terrorists away. They also tout a brand of western cultural supremacism. Dawkins strongly opposed the invasion of Iraq, but preaches a self-satisfied, old-fashioned Whiggish rationalism that can be wielded against a benighted Islam. The philosopher AC Grayling has an equally starry-eyed view of the stately march of Western Progress. The novelist Ian McEwan is a freshly recruited champion of this militant rationalism. Both Hitchens and Salman Rushdie have defended Amis's slurs on Muslims. Whether they like it or not, Dawkins and his ilk have become weapons in the war on terror. Western supremacism has gravitated from the Bible to atheism...

drowning in Stupid Conspiracy Theories

While Da Vinci starred Opus Dei, a Catholic organization whose secret, unstated mission is to suppress the knowledge that Jesus had kids with Mary Magdalene, Angels and Demons takes on the Illuminati, a secular secret society that supposedly exists to impose Enlightenment on the world against its will. As far as Brown and his readers are concerned, it doesn't matter what purpose any given secret society serves — religion or atheism, the church or its opposite — just so long as there's a conspiracy. The hunger that Brown's books feed is not a hatred of one group or another but the fantasy that someone, whoever it may be, is running the show from behind the scenes. The rumor circulating about his next book, putatively titled The Solomon Key, is that it's about the Freemasons. Maybe Mel Gibson will get lucky and Brown will then move on to the Jews.

Brown's most bankable decision — and one mimicked by a string of best-selling imitators like Raymond Khoury and Steve Berry — was to avoid the mistake of overcomplication, making paranoid delusions of hidden power, which are usually esoteric and elaborate, simple enough that anyone with a grade-six education could understand them. The old adage that nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people needs a caveat: Wide audiences can desire more difficulty, more confusion, more stripping away of the expected and apparent, but only for a while. The appeal of a show like Lost, at least at the beginning, was the feeling that nothing is ever what it seems. What is this island? Who are "the Others"? Why is Michael shooting Ana Lucia and Libby and then himself in the arm? The sensation of assumptions collapsing drove the show. Now Lost has collapsed under its own endless collapsing, its record-low ratings a symptom of intellectual exhaustion...