Local trees & c.

HOBOTOPIA

moggnificent collection of east van cats

even mentions my dog book!  Sadly there seem to be few ancestors of the great red-headed cat league that dominated the alleys around Salsbury & Victoria in the mid-80's.  I caught a glimpse of the patriarch once, snoozing on a garage roof--as red as a fox & as big as a cougar, yellow tusk-like incisors...

Ken Loach's great film "Kes" is on TCM tonight...

happy 300 to Samuel Johnson

He loved the poor as I never yet saw any one else do, with an earnest desire to make them happy.--What signifies, says some one, giving halfpence to common beggars? they only lay it out in gin or tobacco. "And why should they be denied such sweeteners of their existence?" says Johnson. "It is surely very savage to refuse them every possible avenue to pleasure, reckoned too coarse for our own acceptance. Life is a pill which none of us can bear to swallow without gilding; yet for the poor we delight in stripping it still barer, and are not ashamed to shew even visible displeasure, if ever the bitter taste is taken from their mouths..."

from Mrs. Piozzi's Anecdotes

from a wonderful blog: A Book of Moss

Murmur, pictures of flocking birds by Richard Barnes

Nanaimo's own!

Kim Cattrall speaks out against the cuts to arts funding in BC

Paul & Richard, The Podcast

On September 3, Paul McCarthy and Richard Jackson flew up from LA to give what turned out to be a hilarious and historic talk at Seattle Art Museum—but a few hours before that, they sat down in a brightly lit conference room upstairs at the museum for a private conversation with a tape recorder and me.

McCarthy starts right in with a story about his liquid bodily functions, which seems right enough...

Keep Calm and Carry On

A series of posters appeared on bus shelters in 2002, with slogans such as ‘Secure Beneath the Watchful Eyes’ (with said eyes being CCTV cameras). They had distinct similarities in their typography with 1930s’ posters for London Transport by the Bauhaus designer László Moholy-Nagy. They quite deliberately played with the Orwellian associations of 1930s’ and 1940s’ design, the benign eyes watching over London’s bus commuters being explicitly delineated in mock-‘totalitarian’ terms. This is a rather queasy joke. London has some of the heaviest surveillance in the world, and more CCTV cameras than any other city. To treat this as something jollily benevolent is deeply dubious. It advertises the allegedly caring role of the Metropolitan Police in their surveillance of the bus or tube passenger; something which can only leave a foul taste in the mouth after the public execution of Jean Charles de Menezes. The great irony of all this is that the supposedly rather overbearing paternalistic public institutions of the 1940s were either unable or unwilling to set up the apparatus of surveillance that every Londoner now regards as normal. What Orwell did not realize was that the surveillance society would be accompanied by ironic jokes, not shrill exhortations...

Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn's Half the Sky

What would we do if we believed women were equal human beings, with as much right to determine their life story as men? How would we view the world differently?

When Getting Beaten By Your Husband Is A Pre-Existing Condition

It turns out that in eight states, plus the District of Columbia, getting beaten up by your spouse is a pre-existing condition.

Under the cold logic of the insurance industry, it makes perfect sense: If you are in a marriage with someone who has beaten you in the past, you're more likely to get beaten again than the average person and are therefore more expensive to insure.

Scrapbook by Hilda Doolittle, a.k.a., H.D. - a set on Flickr

thanks Don Share

a poem by David Wheatley at Isola di Rifiuti

Landscape with Satellite Dish

Nothing ever seemed to happen in Springfield;
there was never anything good on TV.
Then the newsflash came through about the bomb.
Lisa stopped trying to electrocute Bart
to watch. ‘Looks like we’re in deep doo-doo,’
said Homer, going to fix himself a snack.

The hairs stood up on the back of Grandpa’s neck—
all thirteen of them. Who would save Springfield?
There was nothing anyone could do
except sit and keep watching TV.
By the fourth ad-break Homer was bored.
Who cared anyway about some stupid bomb?

‘Didn’t Professor Frink make a bomb-
defusing robot?’ asked Bart. Yes, but there was a snag:
it kept blowing up. A tearful Marge bared
her soul to the cowering shoppers of Springfield—
‘We could lose everything, even TV’—
and hid the family savings in her hairdo.

Then Homer had an idea, chewing his do-
nut—let Mr Burns take care of the bomb.
That weirdo! He didn’t even have a TV.
Homer got on the phone to Burns, snug
in his fallout shelter, and hollered: ‘Save Springfield!’
Now he was thirsty, and headed off for a beer

at Moe’s. Jasper was crying into his beard
at the bar: soon he’d be as dead as a dodo
and nothing would remain of dear old Springfield
but roaches and fallout, all because of the bomb
some two-bit punk was using to cock a snook
at folk like him and get some time on TV.

Burns was on the job though. Of course he watched TV;
he’d staged the whole thing to help him sweep the board
at the Oscars with his new film Sneak
Attack, a Wellesian thriller. ‘Think of the dough
I’m going to make,’ he chortled to Smithers. The bomb
was a hoax—what a lucky escape for Springfield!

TV announced the news to the people of Springfield.
Bored again, Homer forgot all about the bomb
and sneaked to the fridge for a beer. It was empty. Doh!

Six Fonts That Piss People Off | Design & Innovation | Fast Company

(thanks DS)

local trees @ c.

Max Ophuls The Earrings of Madame de…
on TCM tonight...

Evanescence is an integral part of cinema, and no other director captured it as lyrically and yet as savagely as Ophüls. His tracking, dollying, gliding camera was never more mellifluous, or his visualization of life's inexorable flow more tangible, than in The Earrings of Madame de…: The dissolving ballroom twirls between the Countess and the Baron form possibly the most graceful invocation of the passage of time ever depicted on screen, while a transition from the fluttering pieces of a love letter to snow falling outside brilliantly conveys the slender line separating the incandescent from the sepulchral in a world marked by transience...

Book Review - 'Inside of a Dog - What Dogs See, Smell, and Know,' by Alexandra Horowitz

A human being experiences a rose as a lovely, familiar shape, a bright, beautiful color and a sublime scent. That is the very definition of a rose. But to a dog? Beauty has nothing to do with it; the color is irrelevant, barely visible, the flowery scent ignored. Only when it is adorned with some other important perfume — a recent spray of urine, perhaps — does the rose come alive for a dog.

Rainfall Is Likely to Occur: a report from Michael Scharf

The weather forecast invariably appears in the bottom left-hand corner of The Shillong Times's front page, always in a little green-tinted box, always with the same lack of specificity: "Rainfall is likely to occur over most areas in Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram and Tripura in the next 24 hours."

Basil Bunting on Jonathan Williams

Perhaps it was one of my suggestions, though no doubt I told Jonathan that North Tynedale was even lovelier, besides chance—since cottages are not often empty in such a landscape—that fixed him here to the great advantage of Dent and Sedbergh, overlooking the extravagant meanderings of the Dee and patterns of bracken on the fellside opposite, without close neighbours unless you count the natty red weasel that lives at the side of his waterfall or a score or so of monosyllabic sheep. What better neighbours could a laconic poet wish for?

(thanks Don Share)

a Grandville thistle from Les Fleurs Animées

"Your Majesty, the flowers here present beg you to accept their homage, and to lend a favorable ear to their humble complaint.

"For thousands of years we have supplied mankind with their themes of comparison; we alone have given them all their metaphors; indeed, without us poetry could not exist. Men lend to us their virtues and their vices; their good and their bad qualities; and it is time that we should have some experience of what these are.

We are tired of this flower-life. We wish for permission to assume the human form, and to judge, for ourselves, whether that which they say above, of our character, is agreeable to truth."

rare showing of Seth Holt's UK noir

Nowhere to Go (1958) on

TCM tomorrow afternoon...

Among the many pleasures of watching the film is the evocative black and white cinematography of Paul Beeson which gives us a crook’s tour of London complete with back streets, dive bars, shabby flats and seedy neighborhoods. A downbeat mood of desolation and overwhelming loneliness is further driven home through the film’s score which is composed and performed by jazz musician Dizzy Reece and his quintet; it remains the jazz trumpeter’s only film score to date. In addition, James Bond fans will get a kick out of seeing Bernard Lee – four years before his appearance as “M” in the series beginning with Dr. No (1962) – as the ruthless and
completely loathsome villain of the piece...

rainy sunday

The Exploding Kinetoscope: For Bravery: Das Unheimliche and INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS

The common accusation that the artist shows no evidence of having lived in the real world with other human beings is kind of offensive but largely baffling. What I see pouring out of Tarantino's films is a great love for people, the arts, stories and life itself. His is a profoundly uncynical cinema; even the artifice is completely sincere. I'm looking at my DVD shelves, trying to think of another filmmaker more in love with people, their speech, their faces, their reasons, and the list is miniscule; Tarantino's films are just so jazzed about spending time with their characters (and his actors) that the screen is crowded with affection...

LAUGH ALONG WITH DOM DOT COM

YouTube -Shirley Henderson "The Sun Whose Rays Are All Ablaze" from Mike Leigh's "Topsy-Turvy"

YouTube - Johnny Burnette - The train kept a-rollin

A Flapper's Dictionary (1922)

The Vehicule Poets

For the Vehicule reading, Gerry pasted pages of poetry across the wall of the space. As the poems were pasted at eye height, he walked along the wall, reading. His poems were... recordings of his thoughts, inner conversations, reflections, self-centered but always in the moment, always coming back to the poem he's thinking, writing. Many of his poems are only a few words, a phrase, out of context, comic aphorisms, a "translation" of Basho's haiku, or the "independently coined" phrase PRONDL, from the "automatic gearshift on your car". His reading is sometimes conversational, sometimes forced out one syllable at-a-time. He was suave, with silk scarf, moustache and sideburns. 1978 and very much alive. Gerry Gilbert...

Basil Bunting: Briggflatts in a new edition with audio/video...

YouTube - Basil Bunting reading from 'Briggflatts'

free mixes from Buck 65

Bears in the Adirondacks Defeat BearVault Food-Protection Container

“She’s quite talented,” said Jamie Hogan, owner of BearVault, based in San Diego. “I’m an engineer, and if one genius bear can do it, sooner or later there might be two genius bears..."

Damien Hirst in vicious feud with teenage artist over a box of pencils

He was told by custody officers that the pencils were valued at £500,000 and that he had damaged "the concept of a public artwork titled Pharmacy ... valued at £10,000,000". Cartrain is on bail and, if convicted, his actions will feature among the highest value modern art thefts in Britain. The box of pencils – a very rare "Faber Castell dated 1990 Mongol 482 Series" – will be put back by Hirst, although the installation is no longer on public display.

But that is not the end of it. Police also arrested Cartrain's 49-year-old father, who they suspected of harbouring the pencils...