local trees

yet another YouTube - Soft Machine-Moon In June-Bilzen Festival-August 22, 1969 Hugh Hopper bass Mike Ratledge organ Robert Wyatt drums vocal

MySpaceTV Videos: Brian Auger, Julie Driscoll & The Trinity- Save Me more Joolz, cause it's my blog!

Charlie sez: easy on the Vitalis, this is my first haircut!

via mefi--Vietnam 1967-1968: Darrell Hill, Photographer - a photoset on Flickr--these Ektachromes & Kodakchromes were tossed into a dumpster, later recovered & sold, then put on Flickr where their photographer re-discovered them...

find myself in rare concert with both Ron & Hitch today, who helpfully seize some of the gems from Norman Mailer's highly variable landslide of prose--especially interesting to see Ron on the brilliant beat pastiche "Why Are We in Vietnam?" & Hitch on "Harlot's Ghost", which to my mind beat LeCarre at his own game. I would add "Of a Fire on the Moon" his epic on the Apollo 11 mission, which is not only one of the few times an important writer attempts to actually come to detailed terms with the technology of our time, but then uses it to undergird his bad faith--"The Wrong Stuff", perhaps---

The Grand Inquisitor

Weekly Web Mini-Series Premieres November 11th
Original Score by DJ Spooky Screenplay by Ruth Margraff Multi Image Design by Julie Talen Directed by Tony Torn
Produced by Lee Ann Brown and George Norfleet Executive Producer Michael McCartney

"...a five part film updating Dostoevsky's mystical fable to a future, Fox network style reality. The second coming has arrived in the form of a radical African-American messiah, and the Network/Church/Government is seen in the teaser looking through auditions for a more acceptable replacement Jesus that they can rush into the marketplace to offset the disruptive influence of the 'false prophet'. In the original story, from Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, Christ returns at the height of the Inquisition, to great celebration, but when The Grand Inquisitor orders the people to throw Christ into jail, such is the authority of the Inquisitor that the people instantly turn on Jesus. The Inquisitor visits Jesus in the cell and in a nutshell, he tells him he recognizes him as the true Christ, but will nonetheless burn him as a heretic, to protect a Church which has vastly improved his original, flawed message. In response, Jesus kisses the Grand Inquisitor on the lips, and the GI lets him go. ‘The kiss burned in his heart’ writes Dostoevsky, ‘but he held onto his opinion’.

The film begins in and sustains an aggressively satirical mode, but dovetails with the original story until the final episode which follows the source very closely. As director, it's my attempt to claim a personal perspective on Christianity after being confronted by the powerfully presented, yet soul killing version presented by The Passion of The Christ. The danger of our approach is scaring folks away with the viciousness of the initial satire, before they are able to access the deeper allegory we are trying to present. But the piece is finished now after three years of development and fifteen months of editing (it has a very complex visual style), so it is what it is.”

another video--Retro: Mailer and McLuhan--the Tussle in Toronto? The K.O. in Etobicoke?

today's YouTube - I'm a Believer - Micky Dolenz and Julie Driscoll

from the same Monkees special--Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger & The Trinity - Come On Up--the outfits have to be seen to be believed!

CBC Caves in to China

"The truth is that Chinese diplomatic officials had contacted CBC and had employed at least one long-known Chinese Communist Party agent to orchestrate a campaign against showing the film, which they denounced as "all lies." How they could know this is unclear since no one has yet seen the film. CBC itself has acknowl-edged the intervention by China, but has said only that it decided to ask for further editing..."

Similar to what happened in Vancouver last year when the Falun Gong had their protest site removed...

so long, Norman Mailer--

"What the liberal cannot bear to admit is the hatred beneath the skin of a society so unjust that the amount of collective violence buried in the people is perhaps incapable of being contained, and therefore if one wants a better world one does well to hold one’s breath, for a worse world is bound to come first, and the dilemma may well be this: given such hatred, it must either vent itself nihilistically or become turned into the cold murderous liquidations of the totalitarian state..."

mark your TV Guide: on Tuesday the 13th the not-heard-from-much-lately novelist James Ellroy hosts a very promising set of crime dramas on TCM--(all times Pacific)--the only one I've seen is "Kiss Me Deadly"...



5:00 PM Stakeout on Dope Street (1958)
Three teens get into the drug business when they discover heroin in a stolen briefcase. Cast: Yale Wexler, Jonathan Haze, Abby Dalton. Dir: Irvin Kershner. BW-89 mins, TV-PG

6:30 PM Murder by Contract (1958)
A ruthless contract killer balks when he discovers his next hit is a woman. Cast: Vince Edwards, Phillip Pine, Herschel Bernardi. Dir: Irving Lerner. BW-81 mins, TV-PG

8:00 PM Lineup, The (1958)
A pair of hit men track down a heroin shipment while the police get closer. Cast: Eli Wallach, Robert Keith, Warner Anderson. Dir: Don Siegel. BW-86 mins, TV-14

9:30 PM Armored Car Robbery (1950)
A police officer tries to find half a million dollars stolen by gangsters. Cast: Charles McGraw, Adele Jergens, William Talman. Dir: Richard Fleischer BW-68 mins, TV-PG

10:45 PM Follow Me Quietly (1949)
Police track a mysterious killer nicknamed "The Judge." Cast: William Lundigan, Dorothy Patrick, Jeff Corey. Dir: Richard Fleischer. BW-59 mins, TV-14, CC

11:45 PM Kiss Me Deadly (1955)
Detective Mike Hammer fights to solve the murder of a beautiful hitchhiker with a mysterious connection to the Mob. Cast: Ralph Meeker, Cloris Leachman, Albert Dekker. Dir: Robert Aldrich. BW-106 mins, TV-PG, Letterbox Format

1:45 AM Man in the Vault (1956)
Bank robbers force a locksmith to help them with a big heist. Cast: William Campbell, Karen Sharpe, Anita Ekberg. Dir: Andrew V. McLaglen. BW-73 mins, TV-G, CC, Letterbox Format...

today's YouTube - Townes Van Zandt in Heartworn Highway at home, singing his first song "Waiting Around to Die" --this clip was also in the good "Be Here to Love Me" doc which we watched yesterday...

today's YouTube - Jackie DeShannon - I'll Go Crazy in a cute tam! (also check out her cover of "The Weight")

Tourists of History

"The disavowal that we engage in today in the United States has reached new depths—a disavowal of the United States’s imperial project, a disavowal of the prison nation we have become, a disavowal of the bankrupt state of U.S. democracy, a disavowal of the ways that our political acquiescence has allowed for the reduction of our civil rights and an increase of our vulnerability to terrorist attack.

This disavowal is aided by many aspects of American culture, not only a belief in national innocence but also a comfort culture of kitsch patriotism and a consumer culture that sells security and comfort. National innocence must be actively, constantly maintenanced by narratives that reinscribe it—in order to be shocked when teenagers pick up guns that they have ready access to and kill their classmates, we must ascribe their acts to popular culture; in order to be shocked about the fact that our country sanctions and engages in torture, we must think it was the work of a few “bad apples.” Innocence is a position from which such acts of aggression are easily screened out..."

fine poem from Weldon--

"Shank's Pony

for Gerry Gilbert

what do you hear in the city
that gets very wet in a rising tone?

where the rain is falling in gusts
& you see the Fall in the gutters

in fact the blue & grey of the sky
comes out rather explicitly in the falling water

I take my shoe
& give it a fuckin good shake

if only I could keep
from moving this heap of limbs

I went for a walk in the Supply District
but all I could find were leaves & planets

the kinetic resurrection of
commerce has eroded the streets

the roads get stoned
the avenues come to visit

the stars twinkle like salted fish
the sun is a glittering lyric hibiscus"

another gem, Glen singing Jimmy Webb's Where's the Playground Suzie?--

Nanaimo trees

today's YouTube - Glen Campbell - Guess I'm Dumb written & produced by Brian Wilson...as good as it gets...

stumbled on this online version of
Victor Coleman's 1969 Light Verse--though find the book if you can, its one of the loveliest Coach House productions, squeezing our coastal landscape into a little Cornell box...



"...Now I sit to write the story
of the images we saw there

and the poem holds forth fantasy
that cries to be reality

so much so that the tears it sheds
become clear pools of water

which we look in to discover that
Mnemosyne's our daughter and

a memory's as real as
the food that we ingest each day

unless we take consumption now
to be a way of living

as the ever perfect fiction
rears its head up into lies







So when loving starts to fail you
and your truth begins to wander

put your mind into a motion
big as ocean or an instant

let the wandering become you
so that fashion is an instinct

and the flesh that is behind your mind
's all glowing and resplendent


It's not your eyes that take you there
because they are small cameras

of past things lost to interest
and images whose records tell

so little that's of use to us
as we lie down to die here..."