good essay on Scorsese's underrated Color Of Money

Equally arresting is the sudden bark “Come on, on the snap, Vincent!” This seems to come from nowhere—Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio was briefly visible a moment earlier, sitting behind Turturro as he calls for Cruise to join the game, but she doesn’t really register unless you’re looking for her. So now there’s some woman involved. Following some dorky samurai theatrics (foreshadowing Oprah’s couch, one could argue), Cruise starts making out with her, so we may file her under Girlfriend. But she seems way more intense about the unfolding action than one would expect of somebody that easily reducible, and the mere fact that her presence in the room has been carefully obscured tells us that she’s important. Newman senses it, too. After goggling at Cruise’s offer to “play play”—the very notion of pool divorced from financial gain seems heretical to everyone but this flaky virtuoso; Turturro’s silent exit is priceless—he takes a seat on the table behind Mastrantonio, prompting her (in a nice bit of business I don’t think I’d ever noticed before) to move a leather jacket away from where he could swipe it...

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...