the dozen or New York City owners of my 1995 book "The Climax Forest", where Reid Shier's version appears on page nine, and eight million other folks should get out and get a good long gander at the realisation of the late Robert Smithson's "Floating Island" project, which will be circling Manhattan for a few more days...
 

Andre Kertesz

"Without the time-consuming distraction of a job even trivial questions assume the weight of fate itself. You have all day to dwell on the slights dealt out to you, the decisions wrongly made, but this, in turn, can generate its own solace: with nothing else to distract you such things start to seem like the facts of life, as much a part of the human condition as a bench is part of a park. So when you come to a bench in the park, possibly your favourite bench, and find it broken, the experience comes as both a personal disappointment and corroboration of something to which you had already pretty much resigned yourself. In these circumstances, what can you do except look at it and try to work out how much should be read into it, how personally to take it, whether, actually, there is any difference between destiny and chance?"

Geoff Dyer, from his new book on photography "The Ongoing Moment"

P*** K******

"But in a larger sense, the administration's lethally inept response to Hurricane Katrina had a lot to do with race. For race is the biggest reason the United States, uniquely among advanced countries, is ruled by a political movement that is hostile to the idea of helping citizens in need.

Race, after all, was central to the emergence of a Republican majority: essentially, the South switched sides after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Today, states that had slavery in 1860 are much more likely to vote Republican than states that didn't.
And who can honestly deny that race is a major reason America treats its poor more harshly than any other advanced country? To put it crudely: a middle-class European, thinking about the poor, says to himself, 'There but for the grace of God go I.' A middle-class American is all too likely to think, perhaps without admitting it to himself, 'Why should I be taxed to support those people?'"

(Mama Roux)

At the corner store
the protestant santeria
of the lottery logos--

fake foxing
against a gold rush font,
the leprechaun's derby

overflows--
a yellow cord
marks off the liquor store

after eleven,
outside (courtesy of
the smoke from Burns Bog)

the moon trails
a gambler's beard,
a kettle of coins

rattles inside the aqua
tunnel under highway one
illuminates the figure eight

I inscribed on a whim
on the slope outside
the fire station--

or it could be
the "pimpjuice" sticker
the pepsico rep

slapped near the entrance
or the icecube with wings
and a Grecian profile

loyal to the old regime
where the word "cold"
came wreathed in beads of sweat

and every word
unashamedly itself,
like those farmers

in Emerson
who planted
themselves last

pulling the earth
over themselves
like an old quilt.



 

Boing Boing: Katrina: joke du jour

"Q: What's George Bush's position on Roe v. Wade?
A: He really doesn't care how people get out of New Orleans. "

No matter what Bush says, all Americans hear is "disaster"

"The rest of the federal bureaucracy may be slow off the dime, but not this Republican Congress: They practice spending hundreds of billions all year long so that when disaster hits, they'll be ready. "

on "repeat" at the manse today Country Got Soul a collection of smooth 'n' gritty cookers from people like Charlie Rich, Dan Penn, Tony Joe White, including "Fancy" by Bobbie Gentry, as jaw-dropping a story song as you're ever likely to hear. And if you've never heard Eddie Hinton...
 

The Decline of the West

"During my months in the Caribbean, I often asked myself why, when I was exhausted by the vitality of others, it was in the Afro-Cuban cults, of all places, that I regained my strength. Why, of all things, the sect-like rituals of the Santeria and Palo Monte gave me a sense of security whose effect even lasted a while on my return to everyday life. And the answer I reluctantly gave myself again and again was that besides giving us a great deal, Enlightenment finally takes away that which makes life easier and brings happiness closer--certainty beyond knowledge, steadfastness in spite of all trials and tribulations--and precisely this was rendered palpable by every practising Santero or Palero. It was only during these hours of ritual that I felt once again the cathartic trembling before the superhuman which in Christian churches has vanished in the programme of 'love thy neighbour as thyself'. Who wants bread and wine when they can have blood and (sacrificed) flesh? Who wants a benevolent god in some abstract realm who has withdrawn from his creation (with a shepherd-in-chief who always appears uncertain, in spite of the hype surrounding the Pope), when they can have priests who give clear instructions and certainty in life, when they can have communication with the dead, when they can have gods who violently possess their followers to dance, smoke and drink with them? Anyone who has experienced the undiminished, African intensity of religious belief in the Caribbean--with all its fear and horror, dread and terror, to the point of barbarity --knows that in the long term, our godless society cannot defend itself against this with a private brand of individualist esotericism."

via metafilter a great trove of mp3's by Enrico Caruso

Ben Watt "The Night I Heard Caruso Sing" (from EBTG "Idlewild")

The highlands and the lowlands
are the routes my father knows,
the holidays at Oban
and the towns around Montrose,
but even as he sleeps,
they're loading bombs into the hills,
and the waters in the lochs can run deep,
but never still.

I've thought of having children,
but I've gone and changed my mind.
It's hard enough to watch the news,
let alone explain it to a child,
to cast your eye cross nature,
over fields of rape and corn,
and tell him without flinching
not to fear where he's been born.

Then someone sat me down last night,
and I heard Caruso sing.
He's almost as good as Presley,
and if I only do one thing,
I'll sing songs to my father,
I'll sing songs to my child.
It's time to hold your loved ones
while the chains are loose,
and the world runs wild.

But even as we speak,
they're loading bombs
onto a white train.
How can we afford to ever sleep,
so sound again?



 

Zak Smith's Illustrations for Each Page of Gravity's Rainbow

After telling someone I wasn't going to I find myself reading it again, in the golden Bantam paperback I first read it in, stretched in the back seat of Victor Bateman's one-door Ford in the parking lot of Nanaimo District Senior Secondary, 1975...

 

No Direction Home

"Let's be clear about one thing. Nothing that happened last week -- the mass destruction in the Mississippi Delta, the obliteration of the city of New Orleans, the murderous abandonment of thousands of people to death, chaos and disease -- will change the Bush Administration or American politics at all. Not one whit. President George W. Bush will not reverse his brutal policies; his Congressional rubber-stamps will not revolt against the White House; the Democrats will not suddenly grow a spine. There will be no real change, and the bitter corrosion of injustice, indifference and inhumanity that is consuming American society will go on as before.

One indication of this can be found in the first polls coming out after the disaster, which show that some 45 percent of the American people approve of Bush's handling of the relief effort. It seems inconceivable that any sentient being could witness the agonizing results of the Bush team's dithering, dilatory response -- an agony played out in the full glare of non-stop media coverage -- and not come away with a sense of towering anger at this criminal incompetence. But it's obvious that nearly half the American people have now left the "reality-based community" altogether; they see only what they want to see, a world bathed in the hazy, golden nimbus of the Leader. The fact -- the undeniable truth -- that behind this carefully-concocted mirage lies nothing more than a steaming pile of rancid, rotting offal means nothing to these true believers. The Lie is better, the Lie is more comforting, the Lie lets them keep feeding on the suffering of others without guilt or shame.


This painful split between obvious reality and popular perception is nothing new, of course. Today we look at old footage of Adolf Hitler and wonder how on earth such a pathetic and ludicrous creature could ever have commanded the adoration and obedience of tens of millions of people. Yet he did. As T.S. Eliot once wrote, "Human kind cannot bear very much reality." "

Glenn Gould's "The Search for Petula Clark" and Samuel Beckett's "Film" (with Buster Keaton) only some of the many goodies new and old on the thankfully revived U B U W E B
 

Smoky Moon

Smoky Moon, originally uploaded by The Nature Lady.

Last night the Nanaimo moon was still pale orange around midnight. Delta only 20km not forty, the wind going the other way today though hazy.

Burns Bog, September 11 2005

Burns Bog, September 11 2005, originally uploaded by megarhyssa.

shrooms (click) 

Power to the victims of New Orleans

"Before the flood, this highly profitable vision was already displacing thousands of poor African-Americans: while their music and culture was for sale in an increasingly corporatised French Quarter (where only 4.3% of residents are black), their housing developments were being torn down. 'For white tourists and businesspeople, New Orleans's reputation means a great place to have a vacation, but don't leave the French Quarter or you'll get shot,' Jordan Flaherty, a New Orleans-based labour organiser told me the day after he left the city by boat. 'Now the developers have their big chance to disperse the obstacle to gentrification - poor people.'"
 

great to see Robert Duvall's The Apostle again, though with some concern for the lovely bayou country in which its mostly set...
 

Burns Bog: Fire outside of Vancouver (Sep. 11, 2005)

Burns Bog: Fire outside of Vancouver (Sep. 11, 2005), originally uploaded by bmann.

We're about 40km away, and this morning a pall of smoke started filling our valley.

I just got back from a FEMA Detainment Camp

"We then lug all food products requiring cooking back to the car. We start unloading our snacks. Mom appeared to have cornered the market in five counties on pop-tarts and apparently that was an acceptable snack so the guy started shoving them under the counter. He said these would be good to tied people over in between their two meals a day. But he tells my mother she must take all the breakfast cereal back. My mother protests that cereal requires no cooking. "There will be no milk, ma'am." My mother points to the huge industrial double-wide refrigerator the church had just purchased in the past year. "Ma'am, you don't understand...

It could cause a riot."

He then points to the vegetables and fruit. "You'll have to take that back as well. It looks like you've got about 10 apples there. I'm about to bring in 40 men. What would we do then?"

My mother, in her sweet, soft voice says, "Quarter them?"

"No ma'am. FEMA said no...

It could cause a riot. You don't understand the type of people that are about to come here...."

I turn and walk out of the room...lugging all the healthy stuff back to the car. My son later tells me the man went on to say "We've already been told of teenage girls delivering fetuses on buses." My son steps toward him and says "That's because they've almost been starved to death, haven't had a decent place to get a good night's sleep, and their bodies can't keep a baby alive. I'm not sure that's any evidence some one should be using to show these are 'bad people'."

useful Katrina Timeline