the schedule for the June Charles Olson Centenary Conference is up...

YouTube - James Joyce reading from "Finnegans Wake"

C-SPAN has it's archives online, here including a bunch of interviews with one of my heroes, Robert Moses & LBJ biographer Robert Caro...

Is there no purpose beyond the blood?

Spartacus is about the flirtation between immaturity and immortality. Every word reversal that gets employed to remind the viewer that this is indeed olden days gets matched up with a willfully adolescent take on sex and violence. And for good measure, a shot of a disembodied head or a shaved scrotum. At the mid-season climax, Spartacus asks, pointedly, “Is there no purpose beyond the blood?” It’s directed towards Crixus, a fellow enslaved gladiator, who surely doubts any higher calling, but it feels like an aside. If you have to ask about the blood, you’ll never know. It’s another wink at the demographic that the show’s opening disclaimer is intended to scare off. Each episode opens with a title card declaiming that the “intensity of the sensuality, brutality, and language is intended to suggest an authentic representation of that period.” Not provide an authentic representation, but suggest that one could be created, should another, say, classier, producer so desire...

Fug Right Off --interview with an unrepentant Tuli Kupferberg:

“He’s really full of Yiddishkeit,” said Israel, who still uses a line in his one-man show that Kupferberg told him years ago: “If the rich could pay the poor to die for them, then the poor could really make a living.”

The Second Pass: a great list of out-of-print books that shouldn't be...

DJ Screw – Do You Remember Me? (2009)

Its a 4 CD DJ Screw Box Set.. need I say more?

The David Foster Wallace Archive

Big Time

Koons is famous for a public persona of relentlessly smiley, Amway-salesman unctuousness. But “Skin Fruit” makes clear to me that his deepest passion is anger, provoked by situations over which he has no control. The object of that anger, like the proverbial aim of standup comedians, is to “kill.”

Koons’s recourse to an air of collegiality and aesthetic assault is dictated by a distinct vulnerability in his position. His career and the plutocratic culture that it has adorned represent an epoch-making collusion of mega-collectors and leading artists, which has overridden the former gatekeeping roles of critics and curators and sidelined the traditional gallerists who work with artists on a long-term basis of mutual loyalty. With numbing regularity, newly hot artists have abandoned such nurture for gaudy, precarious deals with corporate-style dealers like Larry Gagosian, Pace-Wildenstein, and David Zwirner. In the boom era, buzz about the opportunistic exhibitions of such dealers and the latest sales figures from art fairs and auction houses were what passed for critical discourse. The situation mesmerized newcomers, by flashing promises of ascension to the starry feeding trough. Now that such promises can no longer be made, the posturing of “Skin Fruit”—roughly, noblesse oblige, laced with a left-libertarian raciness—cannot long deflect the mounting potency of class resentment. People are going to notice that the defensive elements, in this particular scrimmage of sensibilities, are members of the putatively vanguard aristocracy of wealth and social clout. The future of art, and the corresponding character of cultured society, seem bound to be determined by some smart, talented, as yet unidentified parties among the howling sansculottes...

thanks Chris

Waterboarding for dummies

The documents also lay out exactly what should occur in each two-hour waterboarding "session." Interrogators were instructed to start pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he inhaled water, not air, in his next breath. They could use their hands to "dam the runoff" and prevent water from spilling out of a detainee's mouth. They were allowed six separate 40-second "applications" of liquid in each two-hour session – and could dump water over a detainee's nose and mouth for a total of 12 minutes a day. Finally, to keep detainees alive even if they inhaled their own vomit during a session – a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding – the prisoners were kept on a liquid diet. The agency recommended Ensure Plus...

lots of nice old school music at Lonesome Lefty's Scratchy Attic including a lot of Canadian stuff...

7.

Something
you had once
is why there's
a past tense.

Anyone
can say please
that's been hurtin'
tell it to the second person.

Vicodin country
by funicular entry
Rancho Relaxo
by appointment to the gentry.

Vestigial barb
on a red branch
plausible to pollen
but otherwise not often.

Some days
the heat's off
& spring goes out
the open window.

Talismanic
ordinary chalices
huddled masses
take their chances.

Advancing thought
like they ought
the moon trails its coat
across their throat.

David Thomson on the (don't miss) British TV film trilogy RED RIDING

Call that a movie? you say, as if you believed in pictures with a beginning, a middle, and an end. But haven’t you noticed that no one has that trick or the heart to do it that way now? So many movie stories are humiliated by their tellers’ lack of faith, or by our carelessness—why watch if you can’t follow it? There is a struggle going on in the best filmmaking, and it has to do with this anxiety or suspicion: Do films cheat life any more persistently than by insisting on story? Suppose there are just the years passing and the burial ground of all our forlorn attempts at progress...

They have something of a love-hate relationship with their neighbors in Dumbo, appreciating the many services and stores now ensconced next door, but disturbed by increasing traffic, by the shadows of new condo towers and, it must be said, by unwelcome evidence that Dumboites are walking their dogs in Vinegar Hill...

NYT piece on lovely Vinegar Hill, Brooklyn where I once happily spent a week...

Vinegar Hill Historic District

Vancouver Report: The Remains of the Olympiad has a brief interview with Ken Lum, whose magnificent Monument for East Vancouver (above) was my recent visit's happiest surprise, appearing magically out of the sky while I was being driven back to the East End from downtown last Saturday...

Jackie Gleason Manipulating Space and Time

definitive 9 minute version of the greatest song ever!! Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers - Roadrunner (Thrice)

check out this awesome video by handsome Vancouver synthpoppers "Christine", who I shared the stage with at the Candahar Bar on Saturday night! & thanks everyone for making it such a blast!

YouTube - Christine - Bad Doo Wop

Art on the Tracks

Yesterday, driving down Airport Way South, this little art parlor appeared in my peripheral vision. It's just sitting there, next to the train tracks, up against and on the I-5 retaining wall...

YouTube - Alice in Wonderland (1903)

The first-ever film version of Lewis Carroll's tale has recently been restored by the BFI National Archive from severely damaged materials. Made just 37 years after Lewis Carroll wrote his novel and eight years after the birth of cinema, the adaptation was directed by Cecil Hepworth and Percy Stow, and was based on Sir John Tenniel's original illustrations. In an act that was to echo more than 100 years later, Hepworth cast his wife as the Red Queen, and he himself appears as the Frog Footman. Even the Cheshire cat is played by a family pet.

With a running time of just 12 minutes (8 of which survive), Alice in Wonderland was the longest film produced in England at that time. Film archivists have been able to restore the film's original colours for the first time in over 100 years...

Weaponizing Mozart

Britain might not make steel anymore, or cars, or pop music worth listening to, but, boy, are we world-beaters when it comes to tyranny. And now classical music, which was once taught to young people as a way of elevating their minds and tingling their souls, is being mined for its potential as a deterrent against bad behavior...

fine Basil Bunting birthday celebration over at ::: wood s lot :::

come on out & here me DJ tomorrow night!


The Candahar Bar

Flashes (february)    2:24    Hal Blaine
Steppin'    5:55    Lee Oskar
I'm Movin' On    2:28    Taste
Riot in Cell Block #9    2:29    Wanda Jackson
The Train Kept A-Rollin    2:17    Johnny Burnette
Click Clack    3:31    Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band
One Two Brown Eyes    2:35    Van Morrison/ Them
Chick-A-Boom    3:46    Joe Bataan
Fabian - Turn Me Loose    2:27   
Jailbreak    4:06    Thin Lizzy
Have Not Been The Same   3:22    Slow
Beckton Dumps    3:16    Humble Pie
Cherry Red    5:46    The Groundhogs
Nite Flights    4:25    The Walker Brothers
Dreams    4:53    Buddy Miles
Ode To Billie Joe    4:16    Bobbie Gentry
Walk on gilded splinters   5:51    Johnny Jenkins
The Indian Summer of Benazir Bhutto 9:22    Muslimgauze
House Music Is Controllable Desire You Can Own   7:09    Terre Thaemlitz
Cowbells Shakin’    1:06    Walker, Scott
Tell Me When the Whistle Blows   4:21    Elton John
You Didn't Have To Be So Nice    3:14    Triste Janero
When You Walk In The Room    3:07    Jackie De Shannon
Sun Goddess     8:31    Ramsey Lewis
Funkentelchy    10:59    Parliament
Stoned Out Of My Mind    3:06    Chi-Lites
Angola Anthem    17: 32  Dr. John
&c &c.

visiting the Richard Prince Library

“Basically, my collection is about sex, drugs, Beats, hippies, punks.” Imagine a long, thoughtful pause here. “And great reads...”

link for two great out-of print albums by Jennifer Warnes including JENNIFER (Reprise 1972) which I found it in a junk store on Powell Street ca. 1980 (produced by John Cale scrawled on masking tape in felt-tip on its front cover)...contains definitive versions of songs by Free, Procol Harum, Jimmy Webb, The Brothers Gibb, Jackson Browne, John Cale (the song Empty Bottles was written for this) w/ an original by Warnes...

Our 'Olympic dessert' gets more attention

"The Nanaimo Bar is a popular treat that helped put us on the map," she said....

Weegee Speaks!

"It's like a modern Aladdin's lamp. You rub it--in this case, the camera-- you push the button and it gives you the things you want"

YouTube - Dr.Music - Sun Goes By

Sun goes by,
cannons fly up against the sky,
moon up high,
banners ride Cancer 'cross Eli,

hear a cry, scenes of life
reflected in the eye,

Orion ride, picture me
a pencil-image lie,
& when will evening, blessed evening
come into our lives?

Can't you see it, and believe it?
...we won't buy the lies...
time will mean
only as it seems to be,
driftin' between
the shape and the means--
will you watch and obey
heedless and pay?
Be aware
of the sign.
And will you be there?

Mindless eyes
chariots of death will be disguised--

high winds glide
troopers hear not
the babies' sighs
They just stare
ignorance attempting to compare,
can't they try
looking at the writing in the sky?
Don't deceive us,
just believe us
time will only know--
not bad meanings, not sad feelings
just the world we show.

Blood is red
must it all be shed
in the light of the years and the
knowledge of our fears?

Can you hide in the lie?

Reason
soak your mind,
& be aware of the sign...

& will you be there?

"Terrorism"?

In sum: a Muslim who attacks military targets, including in war zones or even in their own countries that have been invaded by a foreign army, is a Terrorist. A non-Muslim who flies an airplane into a government building in pursuit of a political agenda is not, or at least is not a Real Terrorist with a capital T -- not the kind who should be tortured and thrown in a cage with no charges and assassinated with no due process. Nor are Christians who stand outside abortion clinics and murder doctors and clinic workers. Nor are acts undertaken by us or our favored allies designed to kill large numbers of civilians or which will recklessly cause such deaths as a means of terrorizing the population into desired behavioral change -- the Glorious Shock and Awe campaign and the pummeling of Gaza. Except as a means for demonizing Muslims, the word is used so inconsistently and manipulatively that it is impoverished of any discernible meaning...

Alan J Pakula's flawed (but at least as handsome as say Days of Heaven) Comes a Horseman on TCM late tonight--

The delight of the film lies not only in Pakula’s recognition of what makes a cliché an archetype, and what he does with his film’s archetypal content, but also in the sheer audacity of the Pakula style...

6.

A ferry receipt's too thin
for the sort of work engaged in
by a jimmy-wielding skeleton

& the crocuses would like to know
if spring is here or will it go
the way of Dr Zhivago

garden shovels in a row
outside Rona row on row
yellow blue green yellow

our reno hit a rock
our reno hit the hard pan
our reno hit the wall

a business card's too thick
for all but thin-lipped heretics
stirring their Kool-aid with a stick.

dose encounters

Apparently, everyone decided to take a break from reading the day in 2002 when author and Brown University psychiatrist Dr. Peter Kramer wrote in the New York Times that “Prozac was no more, and perhaps less, effective in treating major depression than prior medications. . . . I argued that the theories of brain functioning that led to the development of Prozac must be wrong or incomplete.” Tell that to TV and those ads that hypnotize the consumer-patient directly: “You just shouldn’t have to feel this way anymore” (Zoloft); “Lexapro improves symptoms of depression.” And the clincher: “Feeling unusually sad or irritable? Find it hard to concentrate? Lose your appetite? Lack energy? Or having trouble feeling pleasure? . . . To help bring serotonin levels closer to normal, the medicine doctors now prescribe most often is Prozac.” For all we know, like 35 percent of American adults, according to a 2003 survey on the health effects of direct-to-consumer drug advertising, Kazmierczak walked into his doctor’s office on a day he felt a little worse for wear and requested a prescription for the fix-all himself...

5.

The reasons why I mumble
are numerous
& far from simple

from truck to trickle
bare arms tickle
conjoined manfreckle

we could talk the handshake talk
Harewood muscular under the dome
& pigeon walk home alone

I know that I'm shouting
or would have been shouting
before we got re-routed

but please lean forward
& look toward
the world's reward

radio free Olympus for instance
Triumph of the Will-itis
sclerotic eighty-sixers

with wooly Bouvier fists
grasping cans of Lucky
clip-boards gently plucking

slushies like cold melon
roughly sensuous
like freezer burn hung

from a ceiling rug
drug against a goat's beard
like anything when it stops.

my favorite dylan

YouTube - bob dylan "one of us must know (sooner or later)" (1966) sous-titré

Displacement is Happening

Given the considerable power differential between the new condo owners moving into the neighborhood and the low-income population that has been rooted there for many years, the language of social mix serves to justify giving the right to space and property to those with wealth, and taking it away from those who are poor. Social mix, then, is a strategy used to expand hierarchical structures and mask asymmetrical power, and as such it undermines the possibility of genuine social solidarity while rhetorically appearing to promote it. It is the wolf in sheep’s clothing...

Local trees & c.

Broadway Street Views (1899) - a set on Flickr