on TCM tonight: Crime of Passion (1957)

“There you are deserted by him in whom you have placed all your faith. We are alone. Women tortured by fate, betrayed by all men. Where can we turn except to the heart and the understanding of another woman who knows what you are suffering? I feel for you. I suffer with you. I want to help you. Let me stand by your side in your fight for justice and compassion in a world made by men and for men...”

it's Miriam Hopkins night on TCM , including three by Lubitsch...

Augustus Saint-Gaudens at the Met

Willowy and taut, she rests the toes of one foot on a sphere and leans forward a bit, into her shot, with athletic allowance for the coming recoil. Good luck deciding what she symbolizes. “Diana” seems to me sui generis, embodying sheer, somewhat mad inspiration in a manner that wasn’t uncommon in the era of Art Nouveau but was realized nowhere else with such Apollonian aplomb. It affects me as one of those moments—certain sentences by F. Scott Fitzgerald, say, or the better turns of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers—when an oxymoronic American dream of aristocratic democracy comes suddenly, briefly true...

George WS Trow's classic NYer profile of Ahmet Ertegun:

Eclectic, Reminiscent, Amused, Fickle, Perverse

In 1956, at the age of thirteen, I went into a suburban record store and bought a copy of “Since I Met You Baby,” by Ivory Joe Hunter. This was an Atlantic record. I had heard “Since I Met You Baby” sung over the radio, but I had not seen a copy of the record. It was my sense of the situation, when I saw the record in the suburban record store, that to buy and then to own it would be a potent experience. I looked at the record jacket. On one side, there were depicted little stick people playing little stick instruments. On the other side, there were sketched portraits of Atlantic’s principal artists. There was a portrait of Ruth Brown (her eyes slightly slanted, her hair in a mysterious upswept arrangement I had never seen on any living woman), Joe Turner (mouth open, full mustache, little black bow tie), LaVern Baker, Clyde McPhatter, Ray Charles (a small pencil thin mustache and dark glasses), and the Clovers. Ray Charles, in his sketch, had been given the suggestion of a neck. The heads of the others floated on the jacket. The heads of the five Clovers floated together in a way that suggested no possible physical grouping. The names of the artists were printed in red under the black sketches. Black and red were at that moment the Atlantic colors. Across the top of the side of the jacket where the sketches appeared, there was the name “ATLANTIC,” in big black type. Under that was “Leads the Field in Rhythm & Blues,” in black type of a size slightly more modest. Under the sketches, at the bottom, in red script, were the words “And Many Other Exclusive Artists.” There was nothing on this record jacket that did not excite my interest. I was interested in the strange upswept hair of Ruth Brown, in the dark glasses of Ray Charles, in the little black bow tie of Joe Turner. I thought it would be a very strong thing to Lead the Field in Rhythm & Blues. I was interested in the Other Exclusive Artists. I felt, with some poignance, that this record—not just the song but the record, and not just the record but the jacket of the record—held some information that I needed to have. I felt, in fact, a certain pain, and even a certain anger. I felt pained that there was important information of great power of which I had no idea. I felt anger because I sensed that this information had been withheld from me deliberately...

Gerry Gilbert 1936-2009

Like the population of Nanaimo, the population of poets has just about quadrupled since I came on the scene in the mid 1970's. It's a lot tougher out there, the suburbs are full of rocks & unfriendly stares. Years of Creative Writing degree programs, MFA programs, workshops, boot camps, festivals & glittering awards nights have swelled the population of poets and their retainers at the same time as both quantity & quality of attention have palpably declined. The organised world of poetry has become entirely subject to the same codes of deference, decorum, complicity & conformity as the academy where it now mostly resides. And however opposed various schools of "quietude" & "post-avant" might be in matters of style & technique their approach in most other matters is indistinguishable--one hand still washes the other, the forelock is still ritually tugged. Caste systems & contests, 25 dollar bribes paid to poets you wouldn't read to read you. Gatekeepers on both sides squat imperiously; as remote, arbitrary in judgement & drunk on power as any CEO, surrounded by office seekers and supplicants, dispensing favours and punishing dissent. The trickle-down, the hidden hand, the arm's length. In the past couple of decades this state of affairs has become so total and so deeply entrenched within the larger decline of all democratic forms & institutions that one could safely assume that this is the way it must always have been, so best set up another tent among the ruins & hope that some one uses your ghazal for a toilet paper commercial or something. Internalize your oppression. Or better still, set up a revolutionary cell within the English department & wait for the pillars to start dropping. Describe but don't prescribe. Or wait around for a quick huff off the American oxygen tank while no one's looking. The market is the universal gravy, poured over every dish. Dissent is the sand at the picnic, the fruit fly swallowed with the wine. The price of doing business. Doing more with less. If good poetry can & does still get written, it is under a steady, morbid & undesired constraint.


The proof I can offer that this was not always entirely so is the life & career of the man we have gathered to celebrate today.

For what Gerry was able to offer to me as we became friends in the early 1980's----which included amongst other things publications, introductions, a trip to New Hazelton, the privilege of denouncing Expo 86 on CBC Montreal's Brave New Waves the month it opened, a roof (if sometimes leaking) in the heart of the city at any time & under any circumstance (insert anecdote here), Woodward's Food Floor Peanut Butter & Vancouver Vocational College wheat germ Loaf, a fried tofu & potato with vinaigrette thing I've been trying to reproduce for decades, access to the Vancouver airwaves on any Sunday at 9 pm , 45 rpm pancakes, the thrift shop 8-tracks of "Fear" & "TV Eye" &c &c--depended on a number of circumstances far beyond the undoubted generosity of Gerry's nature, the fragility of which were only to become apparent later. At the time for me it just seemed the normal way of things, something to which I was entitled. I never thought about it much one way or the other. How could Gerry be wrong? But from the grim vantage of 2009 the early 80's in BC now seem a time of comparative enlightenment, the reviled Socreds Medicis in comparison with the thugs now in control. And would an NDP victory, nay a string of NDP victories return the welfare rates to their former levels? Never. Who do I vote for to get the cars & cops off the street, to shut down the Olympics? No one.

Federally, the repressively tolerant arts policies of the Trudeau era were by the early 80's a battered but still effective conduit of cultural energy: one way or another enough money flowed so that a poet like Gerry could survive as an independent artist. Honest poverty, it shocks me to remember, was once considered an equal ground from which to address the pretensions of authority--Gerry's legacy is offered as proof once again. In return for some acts of mildly benign state intervention (not really a pension as would have been proper & persuasive, but grants & welfare which were arbitrary & meagre & thus purchased no potentially befuddling loyalty) Gerry acted as would any of God's natural anarchists, any true modernist, he took the money where he could & made a full time job not only of his art, but of biting the hand that fed him deeply, loudly & at every opportunity. An air force cadet as a teen, Gerry was a patriot all his life, which for him meant both due gratitude for whatever freedom & tolerance he enjoyed but a mandate, a duty to call things as he saw them, to place the power of his expression at the service of the polity. And always from a position of complete equality, equality always a more active & fruitful principle with Gerry than difference.

Such a practice categorically refused both the comforts and protections of marginality. Gerry's generosity--& on this I can speak with authority--came without any sense of quid pro quo. Beyond clumsily collating a few pages of BC Monthly from time to time & helping out with radiofreerainforest Gerry didn't let me lift a finger; I have no recollection of so much as making coffee at New Era. I wouldn't have done it right anyway, for if Gerry was as open & clear as a window in argument, in the managing of domestic & professional details he was of the wrong way & my way school. But again, he was never really wrong about such things in any way that I ever saw much indication of. You get a lot of advice as a young poet; Gerry taught me how to cut up an onion. He always treated the vaguely sordid networks of favors & debts that bind up & marinade the literary world as a bit beneath him, which might have been a mistake. Gerry's undimmed pride & iconoclasm--never cantankerous or ornery but always pitched hard & at worst a little arrogant--did not allow him to think necessary the cosy fallback plans or exit routes that undergird bourgeois life: he mistook his natural ebullience & optimism for the fact of the world's incremental improvement, as if the immense service he had rendered his city & community took some permanent form, as in a culture worthy of the name it would. Time will reveal that permanence, I think--for we have, in a run of activity that began in the early 1960's & didn't halt until the last months of his life, the record of an acutely perceptive & observant human's journey through space & history unequalled in our literature--but this will occur much too late for his city & community to indicate to him its profound debt. For when calamity & misunderstanding overwhelmed Gerry's life that community for the most part turned away and the city whose most communally active poet he had been could barely rouse itself from Olympic dreams to notice his death. Long before Gerry died the powers that be decided that the kind of check against arbitrary power & irrational judgement his practice represented was something it could do without. Vancouver has been deeply diminished by its repudiation of what Gerry stood for, another indication (if one were needed) of the moral deterioration that has accompanied its financial ascension. But we needn't be, and this gathering is start.

it's Dirk Bogarde day on TCM ...

Ed Dorn in the Summer of 1968

“If you went to the Sorbonne, which we did, and, you know, saw the situationistes spilling over the balconies and explaining the L.A. riots, it all made some kind of sense. It was beautifully intellectual and feasible and containable, embraceable … and now it’s so cheap, you couldn’t give it away...”

Vanessa Place

Poetry Magazine was right : I am the law as a lawyer sees it, nothing less than a likeness of being, a set of facts selected from a larger set (itself gleaned from a constellation of actual and fictitious events) and categorized by a codification of conduct, itself categorized from a constellation of possible points of perception. A set of facts, therefore, of being, being thus referencing genre, or medium, thereby referencing nothing more than the means of likeness itself at its point of reception. My linguistic materiality is therefore nothing, and thus, like the American that I am, becomes something. I do not elucidate. I instantiate. I am repetition with variation, the generic affect of which is affectless-ness. There is no disjunction, because there is no juxtaposition. I am everywhere displaced.The question always is whether teleology is possible : whether the deterritorialized creates a new territory. What is the subsumption of the, or the unhinged individual case, of a-judication, of the text as the text, of language as language as nothing more than enunciation? Thierry de Deuve wrote that « Art was a proper name, » meaning that it is only the individual case that calls art into question, and always into question : once work has been deemed art, it operates retrospectively in its subsumption to the rule of art. What has not been written about writing is that in the case of writing, it cannot work subsumptively because it cannot act outside the perception of language in the first instance. Art may be any thing, or nothing at all. It has another point of referentiality—language...

Experimental Soviet Homemade Photography

Film family portraits

YouTube - Laura Nyro sing's Dr. John's "Mama Roux"

To The Motion Picture Production Code on its 75th Birthday

When we look on the pre-Code years (from roughly 1929 to July 1, 1934), we see an American cinema in which actresses are as important or more important than actors, in which love and sex are presented with a certain blithe insightfulness and maturity. Then comes the wrench—and from then on nothing is the same...

...The Code's founders hoped to foster a wholesome culture. All they fostered was a repressed culture, one with neurotic emanations slipping through the cracks. Look at the Marilyn Monroe persona and those of her imitators in the 1950s—the image of woman as oversexed child. For that matter, look at the much more palatable gamine image of Audrey Hepburn in that same decade, the image of woman as asexual child. These are sex symbols for a guilty, prurient, and uncomfortable culture, one nothing like the pre-censorship film culture of the late 1920s and early 1930s...

Why Portland Beats Vancouver

"Anyone who thinks Vancouver is cosmopolitan has never been south or east of Portland," the writer asserted. "Most of Vancouver's other attributes, meanwhile, are seen in better form in either Portland, Seattle, or San Francisco. Spend your time in Victoria instead, or Whistler, or, heck, Nanaimo..."

great article on ANDRE THE GIANT ,though it doesn't mention Samuel Beckett driving him to school.....

beat the heat with a bunch of racy pre-code musicals on TCM tonight, including

Hips Hips Hooray (1934)

Gold Diggers of 1933

Footlight Parade (1933) (with James Cagney!

Fashions Of 1934 (with Bette Davis!)

from 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...

(polaroid by Lary Bremner)

Ontario, California & Oregon trees

A century after Swinburne

If Swinburne’s two abiding memories of Eton were Greek prosody and the flogging block, is it surprising that he should have become both a masochist and a master-metrician?

review of  ‘The Age of Wonder’ by Richard Holmes

Much of the book is also devoted to Humphry Davy, whose reputation is multifaceted. He wrote poetry; he had lively friendships with some of the best-known writers of his day; he invented a lamp that would prevent methane gas from exploding and save the lives of countless miners. Best immortalized here, though, are Davy’s experiments with nitrous oxide, tests in which he eagerly served as guinea pig. Inhaling that substance gave him “a thrilling all over me most exquisitely pleasurable,” he recorded. “I said to myself I was born to benefit the world by my great talents...”

(cont.)

Orcadian fiddle music survives
in the high arctic

the last latticed leaf
of the HBC's

imperial tree, after
& century & a half the

viking stream
reduced to a trickle

& the rigid tripartite
of the reels stretched like ragas

the better to suit
the long dances

of mid-summer,
loosening by tallow light

messages
in knotted leather.