Bangor Trees

Red Hook Trees

Coming soon: some non-local trees!

Will be away from the Manse till just after Guy Fawke's Day. Till then!!

More trees.

The Lamb Ran Away With the Crown

"you cannot reap unless you sow"

Given her Pythagorean triad
says Babs in a houndstooth huntress
anima number its Judee
for John Dee the real hippie
in out of the rain with
the rest of the ensemble
in the eggskull cave
of a stormy Gaslight cash-in
set inside a giant cake
where the fake wrench-shaped scar
of the corrupt chemist
is paired with the real scar
on Bogie's upper lip--
in every scene
its the only thing really "lit"--
leaving his hands (he thinks)
free to wander at will
back and forth &
back and forth between
the poison milk on the table
his thin silver belt,
a series of not quite lit
smokes & a half-inch
double thumbed
pantwaist insertion,
O he's guilty guilty
guilty alright--
of mailing it in bookrate,
writhing in his wingchair
jabbing the air with prepschool tics
until shoulderpadded Alexis Smith
hipfirsts toweringly in
swinging her gold David Hume turban
chain & giant buckle around until
his cowering leaves nothing
but the baked light of North Hollywood
through the grey of the background
of the background of the grey hills
& appearing from behind
an oak screen a skinny arm,
catching the last of it
with a pivoting obsidian mirror.

at 2300 PST on TCM tomorrow the 1964 film version
of Lafcadio Hearn's book of ghostly tales Kwaidan is essential Halloween pre-viewing...

in sody-pop news, from Germany comes Bionade: the triumph of a guiltless pleasure

"What is it about this drink which originally only appealed to the fringes of society? There's no colouring, not too many bubbles and little sugar – only half the amount found in similar drinks. The palate gets a refreshing but restrained kick from the acids, mixed with the utmost care. With the second mouthful the drink unfolds its secret and breaks all the soft drink rules.

There are 4 different flavours – elderflower, herb, lychee and ginger-orange. The thirsty customer has a choice and not just between these four, but between good and bad; between the sticky soft-drink empire of Coke, Pepsi, etc. which has taken on such mammoth dimensions that it virtually squashes all other alternatives, or the little, innocent lemonade from the franconian Rhön district. It stands for guiltless pleasure. Lemonade is coming home: this is what home tastes like!"

more on Pinter’s Beckett--

"Famously, the most frequently repeated stage direction is that Krapp should brood, and, Mr. Nightingale wrote, Mr. Pinter does so “with an intensity that signals the loss of hope, self-contempt and an inner bleakness that lets up only when he hears his 39-year-old self remembering a dreamy moment with a loved one in a boat that rocks ‘gently, up and down and from side to side.’ ”"

Colm Toibin on Pinter takes on Beckett & the talk turns to the great Patrick Magee...

"The previous year, Beckett had met Magee for the first time when the actor recorded some of Beckett's prose work for the BBC. He later said that Magee's voice had excited him so much that he wrote the play for it. As Beckett's biographer, Anthony Cronin, has written of Magee: "There was a sense in which, as an actor, he had been waiting for Beckett just as Beckett had been waiting for him.""

More Nanaimo Trees

Odie Ode

Farewell dog not native to the valley
but like me too
an all-weather patriot
& devotee of its unbillable hours,
sans cats & purebred jogging helmets
with at least the possibility of chicken
in a broth from a ditch
made with something else living,
fur weatherproofed with
coal tar & sulphur until only
a rain of little punches
sunk into haunches
can wake the sleeping beast
from his dream of bacon.

Jenny Uglow, whose biography of Hogarth is a great favorite, has written one on another engraver, Thomas Bewick

"In his memoir, Bewick also displayed a rhapsodic response to a unifying force "beyond the reach of thought and human knowledge". As a naturalist, the more facts he learned, the more he was intrigued by the promise beyond the horizon. Yet his engravings of "humble life" were stubbornly down-to-earth. He showed his country folk as cruel, foolish and crude, as well as hard-working and long-suffering. The country might be beautiful, but it also stank: men relieve themselves in hedges and ruins, a woman holds her nose as she walks between the cowpats, and a farmyard privy shows that men are as filthy as the pigs they despise. In the respectable atmosphere that settled like a cloud during the Napoleonic wars, such scenes disconcerted his readers: an article appeared suggesting "that the fair sex, pass overleef on seeing them"."

The Canadian Tire Food Court

One thing Lang taught Hitch
was that those UFA model cities--
etched in nitrate, moonshine
& black letter gothic--
blow up even nicer
than the real thing;
chemical factory
monochromes layer
& unfold real slow & pretty-like
over receding heaths
til naptha flames flare
& spark to reveal
the Napoleon of Crime
in real time scratchin' & tumblin'
working the curtains doubletime--
out of politeness really--
while turntables on strings
answer the phones &
forged fistfuls of Canadian Tire money
pour out of Dr. Mabuse's call centre
into the pockets of a fifth column
nourished on circus-grade granola
& keno at the henhouse.

vanished New York Bookstores--

‘Mrs. Auchincloss is leaving for Paris and wants something to read. Pick out two books, and bring them to her apartment.’

Judee Sill's two rare Asylum albums are now reissued in a double CD with bonuses as "Abracadra" cheap and easy to find, so...

20th anniversary of th'immortal Withnail & I


"It's a lesson to all filmmakers everywhere that you don't need a good plot," says Ralph Brown (who plays the inimitable drug dealer Danny) in the 1999 documentary "Withnail & Us," included on both the Criterion Collection DVD and the new British edition. Spot on. Who needs plot with lines like (to take a few at random, out of context) "They're throwing ... themselves into the road to escape all this hideousness. Throw yourself into the road, darling, you haven't got a chance!" and "You've got eels down your leg"?..."

lately re-enjoying a favorite of my youth, the Shoes, a sublime power-pop band from Zion, Illinois. Someone gave me a copy of their 1979 major label debut "Present Tense" back then (finding it insufficiently "new wave", a exileable offense at the time) & I've loved it ever since...(harmonies and gently layered distorted guitars/sweet but with crunch, like Nutella on a Rye-Krisp)---another point of view:


"Shoes brief flirtation with major label recording and major-league success was the period during which I encountered them, and during which I wrote them my first, barely literate, fan letter, the first (and one of very few) I ever wrote. I received a hand-written response from a friend of the band on shoe-themed stationery, pretty heady business for a quiet kid in a small town. (A recent scan of boxes of old crap failed to turn up said letter, but I found an alarming amount of other Shoes-themed material, including a valentine from 1983; not one, but two, fan club membership cards; and my own writing, ennobled today by the euphemistic term fan-fic, but which I would never have dreamed of showing to another soul.)"


video for Too Late (pretty cute for sure!) & everything's in print at their website...

farewell Freddy Fender, whose immortal "Wasted Days & Wasted Nights", wherever heard, turns that space into a dark wooden bar at 11am, bright daylight illuminating dust motes through a crack in paisley oil-cloth curtains; smells of cologne, smoke, hops and disinfectant; the metallic smack of the shuffleboard...

The Sedentary Militia

We built these postal districts
over the bones of the dead
because we didn't recognize them
until remote control
returned them to us
as eye-stuffing but static ritual--
Frank McHugh & Capucine,
Alec Baldwin & Bart the Bear,
rolling bones in the alley
behind was it the Archimedes Club,
The Old Flag Inn, The Ambassador,
The Outrigger, The Diner's Rendezvous?
Not even the sky uninterrupted
by their clacking sound
as the old machinery broke down,
& town stopped being "town"
& the mountains got filled in
with mile after mile of drywall scrim
through which a poltergeist chopper
but not an untainted breeze could pass.

Cold was the heather
& colder was the weather,
colder still the reckoning--
Gulliver burgers & brown soup
over hashmarked bohemian rice
not far from where the very air
was unpacked & rendered
of its rhetoric, passed out
in the park for pigeon peas,
a yard of rotting pillow straw
ripped from home plate & turned
from the foot of Woodland
toward the bus stop.

don't miss Lang's mighty 1933 Testament of Dr. Mabuse on TCM tomorrow night 2300 PST...

The Socialist Review Style Guide

Turns out syndicalisation
doesn't work any better for wooly bears
than verbal warnings or
white stripes worked for us;
the road these nutdrop noons
is just the warmest place around
as well as the hardest--
twenty feet of good Akenhead with a slight tilt
covered in shit and shiny shells
courtesy of Mr. Blue October here--
& even when they make it over the line
the berm is not permanent,
and the fuckraking leafblowers
papercut the air into orange froth.

& then of course there's Bubble from AbFab...

thanks Boing Boing for a couple of great law links--

Project Posner

"Richard Posner is probably the greatest living American jurist. He has sat on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago since 1981, and written several thousand opinions during that time..."

& the very extensive http://www.law.cornell.edu/...

priceless Silliman

"At The Socialist Review, we knew what it was, and discussed it at length, tho it was never written down anywhere...."

So much of L' Orphee
plays in that grim middle-aged way
poor Spicer never lived to see
that its almost like I know better:
ie Jean Marais is how we're
supposed to look on the INSIDE
& those hoopleheads at the Cafe
rioting over Johnny Ray
as Mrs. Mills tinkles the 88's
& the Hugo Boss bike cops drop their skates--
what Martian could have predicted an Elvis
emerging from that thin Hugenot mess?
& why do the youngsters blame me?
Don't their radios get the CBC?

Don't really feel like piling on with the huzzahs greeting Scorsese's latest--Damon and Decaprio are merely adequate and Nicholson is indulged to little effect (role should have gone to enforcer Ray Winstone, who can plausibly manage physical intimidation, well out of Nicholson's range always) & o I'm already sick of the perfect patterns of CGI exit wounds and the endless parade of golden oldies BUT Mark Wahlberg and Alec Baldwin are worth the price of the ticket and then some. Baldwin is a reliable hoot, but Wahlberg tucks the movie up under his arm and walks off with it...you could feel the audience perk up every time he was on screen...

for those beltway enthusiasts alienated by the increasingly brazenheaded pronouncementness of "The Note"SHOWDOWN '06: The Washington Monthly is a good roundup. Bush at 33!

How He Was: Samuel Beckett's Lives

"After the War, Beckett volunteered to work as part of a Red Cross mission to the shattered town of Saint-Lô. As usual, Knowlson has the edge over Cronin in the abundance and variety of the testimonies and materials on which he is able to draw. But again, the very thinness of Cronin's fabric lets some of the bony edges poke out that are pillowed by the profusion of circumstance in Knowlson's account. Knowlson alludes only in passing to the 1946 broadcast that Beckett made for Radio Eireann about his experiences at Saint-Lô, asserting blandly that it shows how deeply the experience affected him. Cronin does not flinch from showing us the possibly self-defensive, but still shocking frigidity of that broadcast. Only a knowledge of the humanity of Beckett's later explorations of the inhuman condition could rescue the insufferable, sarky high-mindedness of stuff like this:

What was important was not our having penicillin when they had none... but the occasional glimpse obtained by us in them and who knows, by them in us (for they are an imaginative people) of that smile at the human condition as little to be extinguished by bombs as to be broadened by the elixirs of Burroughs and Wellcome - the smile deriding, among other things, the having and the not having, the giving and the taking, sickness and health, (qtd. in Cronin, p. 352)

Was the attainment of this sardonic rictus really more important than penicillin? One is tempted to respond to this outrageous assertion in words like those that close Beckett's own story 'Dante and the Lobster': It Was Not. The most emphatic sign of humanisation in the writing that Beckett was already doing in Watt by this time would be the ethical dilapidations it wrought (not least with the meddling power of the comma) on the stifled, self-regarding composure of sentences like the above..."

Samuel Beckett in Wisden's Cricketer's Almanac

"Samuel Barclay Beckett, who died in Paris on December 22, 1989, aged 83, had two first-class games for Dublin University against Northamptonshire in 1925 and 1926, scoring 35 runs in his four innings and conceding 64 runs without taking a wicket. A left-hand opening batsman, possessing what he himself called a gritty defense, and a useful left-arm medium-pace bowler, he had enjoyed a distinguished all-round sporting as well as academic record at Portora Royal School, near Enniskillen, and maintained his interest in games while at Trinity College, Dublin..."

Beckett In Berlin, January 1937--(notebook quoted in "Damned to Fame" James Knowlson 1996)

"I am not interested in a "unification" of chaos any more than I am in the "clarification" of the individual chaos, and still less in the anthropomorphisation of the inhuman necessities that provoke the chaos. What I want is the straws, flotsam, etc., names, dates, births and deaths, because that is all I can know....Meir says the background is more important than the foreground, the causes than the effects, the causes rather than their representatives and opponents. I say the backgrounds and the causes are an inhuman and incomprehensible machinery and venture to wonder what kind of appetite is that can be appeased by the modern animism that consists in rationalising them. Rationalism is the last form of animism. Whereas the pure incoherence of times and men and places is at least amusing."