Gung Hay Fat Choy!

ON THE CORNER

"So what is this most mysterious and outré of albums? The culmination of Davis's two-decade-long quest for the African roots of his music, On the Corner has a huge, extended rhythm section rotating around circular, one-chord bass riffs. But there were a number of other things that set the album apart. First there were the influences of Stockhausen, Paul Buckmaster, and Ornette Coleman's atonal "harmolodics". These were superimposed over grooves and bass riffs that were more tightly circumscribed than ever before. On the opening track, the bass plays the same few notes for 20 minutes. Inundated by an ocean of rhythm instruments, including sitar, tabla and three electric keyboards (played by Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock, among others), and without any harmonic development, the soloists had very little space, and became merely strands in a tangle of grooves and colours..."

The most hated album in jazz...

A D 1735

"This blog attempts to collate various materials in connection with the year 1735."

images from Clare Singleton, a new South Wellingtonian, often seen hereabouts, walking her handsome dogs

Talking Heads '77 sure holds up ...

a nice tribute...

Bruno Schulz's Stories - translated by John Curran Davis (I like these much better than the published translations)

"THE YELLOW and thoroughly boring days of winter had come. An outworn and tattered, too-short mantle of snow lay on the russet hued earth. It did not stretch far enough for many of the roofs, which stood black or rust coloured, shingled, thatches and arks concealing the smoke-blackened expanses of the attics inside them—black, charred cathedrals bristling with their ribs of rafters, purlins and joists—the dark lungs of the winter gales. Each dawn uncovered new vent pipes and chimney stacks, sprung up in the night, scoured by the nocturnal gale—black pipes of diabolical organs. Chimney sweeps could never drive away the crows that perched in the evenings like living black leaves on the branches of the trees by the church—they took flight again, flapping, finally to cling each to its own place on its own branch—but at daybreak they would take to the air in great flocks—clouds of soot, flakes of undulating and fantastic lampblack smearing the dull-yellow streaks of the dawn with their twinkling cawing. Like last year’s bread loaves, the days hardened in the cold and the boredom. We cut them with blunt knives, without appetite, in idle sleepiness..."

The Art of Bruno Schulz (a flash site)

from the Giornale Nuovo archive

YouTube - Brothers Quay: Street of Crocodiles part 1.

YouTube - Brothers Quay: Street of Crocodiles part 2

short, lucid take on William Blake's

London

I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.

How the Chimney-sweeper’s cry
Every black'ning Church appalls;
And the hapless Soldier’s sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.

But most thro’ midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot’s curse
Blasts the new-born Infant’s tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.

landscape urbanism bullshit generator

At last a place where you can perforate your exurban pluralities while rectifying you extensible armatures!

Wider Roads Touted as 'Green'

"The provincial and federal governments have found a novel way to help Nanaimo fight global warming: spend money on roads.

"The City of Nanaimo will reduce greenhouse gases and vehicle congestion by improving a busy stretch of road," promises a Jan. 22 announcement. "New traffic lights, widened traffic lanes and improved access to the Swy-a-lana Lagoon Park... will improve traffic flow and reduce greenhouse gas emissions from idling vehicles."

The federal and provincial governments are spending $790,000 on the project, out of a fund dedicated to helping communities become "healthier, greener and more sustainable places to live..."

"Autumn Cabbalism" & "Purple Train" by Roy Arden from

THE WORLD ETC...
January 31 to March 1, 2008



Opening Reception:
Thursday, January 31st, 8-10 pm



"The Monte Clark Gallery Vancouver is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Roy Arden.

Following his mid-career survey exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Roy Arden’s exhibition will feature new graphic works and collages.

The World etc… presents Arden’s latest graphic works (archival pigment prints) that are essentially digital collages, as well as recent small paper collages made from printed matter.

Humans have a need to make images, which begets their collection, storage, ordering, interpretation, and re-use. Yet, there is always an element of folly to any archive, no matter how important or useful. What starts as a rational project invariably grows into a large problem if not an unruly monster. All archives are mirrors of human history.

Arden’s digital and paper collages derive from his archives of images taken from books and magazines as well as his immense archive of images gleaned from the Internet. He mostly collects vernacular (non-art) photo images and since photography is largely synchronous with modernity, his archive and the collages he makes from it reflect modern history. Arden’s sense of history has always been critical in the dialectical sense that Walter Benjamin neatly described in his famous dictum; “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism”.

In Arden’s new works, he plays with different ordering systems from quasi-scientific or simple scrapbook grids to complexly layered poetic collage. While each work focuses on a specific theme or subject, as with most of his art - history and modernity are the larger subjects. Many of the works pay homage to artists who have used retrieved imagery and so the history of collage is variously invoked from Picasso and Kurt Schwitters to Rauschenberg and Hans-Peter Feldmann.

Roy Arden's ongoing web project, The World as Will and Representation - Archive 2007 (viewable at royarden.com) presents his personal archive of images gleaned from the Internet..."

seven Short Stories by Roberto Bolaño, only some previously linked, etc at me-fi...

Whiny Plutocrats

"If the market economy is looking peaky, then its accompanying free market ideology should be on life support. Behold the hypocrisy. The free marketeers have spent the past two decades preaching against the evils of state intervention, the dead hand of government, the need to roll back the frontiers, and so on. Yet what happens when these buccaneers of unfettered capitalism run into trouble? They go running to the nanny state they so deplore, sob into her lap and beg for help. The results of their own greed - "exuberance", they call it - and incompetence have caused more than 100 substantial banking crises over the past 30 years, yet time and again it is the reviled state which answers the call for help. Four times in this period, the authorities have had to rescue crucial parts of the US financial setup. If the banks make money, they get to keep it. The moment they look like losing it, we have to cough up. In Wolf's brilliant summary: "No industry has a comparable talent for privatising gains and socialising losses..."

review of Donato Mancini's Aethel--

"A gorgeous collection of concrete poetry, Aethel uses a variety of fonts and spatial layouts, contrasting and shifting between each piece. Each poem presents a new jumble of text, an arrangement of letters and fonts shaped into amorphous bursts on the page. Each work is imbued with a certain grace, a rounded beauty that leaks from one age of the page to the next. The more eye catching pieces are the ones like “Blood of a Concrete Poet” and “I Think Therefore I’m Not Sure” that use the American Sign Language hand diagrams and brief arrows as a unique way to portray movement and construct new phrases from visual matter..."

new books on Trees--

"A medlar smells of Pimms with cucumber, hawthorn of unwashed underwear, pollarded trees are “cruelly elegant”, big trees are terribly thirsty and can drink 9,000 gallons a year, gingkos are terrifying and Sitka spruce needs as much as thirty inches of rain per annum. Sitka is exquisitely light. The Wright brothers built their Kitty Hawk with it. “Surprisingly for such a dour tree, you can strike a jolly tune from its light wood and it is used in the sounding boards of violins and guitars...”

Vancouver trees

review of two books on George Oppen--

"For this reason, as Nicholls demonstrates, Oppen's poems rarely contain philosophical arguments, just as they rarely contain political arguments. The wonder of existence is registered not only in what Oppen's poems say--

In the small beauty of the forest
The wild deer bedding down--
That they are there!

--but in their manner of saying: rather than providing the evidence of completed thought, the poems disclose the process of thinking as it happens. Nicholls is more interested in Oppen as a thinker than as a poet, but he allows Oppen to be everything that he was, refusing--like Oppen himself--to ask poetry to shoulder responsibilities it cannot bear..."

EPC/George Oppen Home Page

nice short piece on Gram Parsons & Frank Sanford--

"But it makes me feel bitter
Each time it begins
Calling me home, hickory wind..."

via

from Bolano's "Nazi Literature in the Americas"--The Fabulous Schiaffino Boys--

"He began to write poetry at the age of thirteen. At sixteen, while his elder brother was making his name with "The Path to Glory", he produced fifty mimeographed copies of his first book, at his own expense and risk. It was a series of thirty epigrams entitled "Anthology of the Best Argentine Jokes"; over one weekend he personally sold all the copies to members of the Boca gangs. In April 1973, employing the same editorial strategy, he published his story "The Invasion of Chile", an exercise in black humor (some passages resemble a splatter movie script) about a hypothetical war between the two republics. In December of the same year he published the manifesto "We’re Not Going to Take It", in which he attacked the league’s umpires, whom he accused of bias, lack of physical fitness, and, in some cases, drug use..."

poems by Lissa Wolsak (here "marqueed" by Jack Kimball) & Robert Mittenthal (above) at The Kootenay School of Writing, this Saturday at Spartacus Books 319 E. Hastings...

local trees

Killer of Sheep turned out to be as good as its reputation...

farewell Suzanne Pleshette

addendum to Payday/Naked Prey note below: Cornel Wilde directed Torn in the graphic gritty, Fulleresque Beach Red in 1967, based on a long narrative poem by Peter Bowman, published just after the war, which I have somewhere. The film shows up on TCM.

local trees