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..."