Farewell, Etaoin Shrdlu (1980) 1/2

Farewell Etaoin Shrdlu

Filmed at The New York Times during production of the last edition that used centuries-old hot-metal typesetting. Editors, printers, stereotypers and pressmen are seen working with traditional letterpress printing. The printers are later seen, retrained, composing images by electronics and running computer-driven videotype-setters. Clearly shows how a newspaper is put together by old and new methods and how some workers feel about adapting their skills to the change. ("ETAOIN SHRDLU" was formed by striking the first twelve keys on a Linotype machine keyboard. The operator hit these keys to quickly finish a line which had an error in it. The line was then discarded.)

Guernica / Detroitism

Michigan Central Station appears to be a potent symbol of decline and the inevitable cycles of capitalist booms and busts. But there’s also money to be made on destruction. The decrepit station has been owned for years by the city’s most notorious real estate mogul, Matty Moroun, a politically-connected, Teflon-coated trucking magnate who owns the bridge to Canada and covets land near the city’s major transportation hubs. Alas, a photograph can tell us little about the city’s real estate industry and the state’s cheaply-bought politicians. All it can do is show the catastrophic results. Taken together, all the images of the ruined city become fragments of stories told so often about Detroit that they are at the same time instantly familiar and utterly vague, like a dimly remembered episode from childhood or a vivid dream whose storyline we can’t quite remember in the morning: Murder city! Unemployment! Drugs! White flight! Crime! Because the ironic appeal of modern ruins lies in the archaeological fantasy of discovery combined with the banality of what is discovered—a nineteen-eighties dentist’s office is not implicitly fascinating for anyone who inhabited one in its intact state—a ruin photograph succeeds in providing the details of a familiar story whose major plot points we can’t piece together...

Digger & VHS from Jamie Tolagson

Cape Town Nightclub Photographs by Billy Monk

Michael Stevenson is pleased to present a selection of 47 images by the legendary photographer Billy Monk taken in Cape Town nightclubs in 1967-9.

[Audio] – Miles Davis – “He Loved Him Madly” (1974) « Musicophilia Daily

Morrissey's Code

for RA

Adjusted the rain
for rheostatic intervention,
to walk so far so slowly
was never my intention.

I had arrived
at Bentall station
by unknown forces
& monstrous motivations.

By the time I got out
of the Octagon
the Broadway bus
had come & gone.

In the bustop gravel
I dug a pit
into which I dropped
a cigarette.

Consonants interrupt
alluvial flow
that's where
the letters go.

Annulled immediacy,
a cloud with eye holes
a blunt expediency
dispensed in vials.

A shadow falling
on the snow
that's where
the letters go.

for GS

The weak solder
of Solidarity--Zonko's
"Hang the Sock-reds!!"
in his best Queens in Victoria
under the gaze of Victoria
who looks like a young Mary Tod
or a bomb-wielding Avignon pope,
under the gaze of the rank & file
who can't wait for Jack Munro
to come out of the snow
to get them off the hook
& back to Nanaimo.

"when the poets start
it's time to leave"

A farewell
no less permanent
for its awkwardness
& accompanying banners.

The island highway
is the tinnitus
of the landscape,
fifty words for wet snow
words over wetter snow
breaking a stick
off another stick
on my breastbone
then banging
the lichen loose
a layer of something
is the thing
slurry under slush
steel toe cow catcher
but its not the North
not the dog of the North.

This snowball smells like fish
& down the same railroad cut
which carries the ascending whine
& keening rumble of traffic sometimes
bacon, smokes, coffee, acetone
pigshit, cowshit, frying chicken
(if less of the burger onion
startup combo casserole
than years since)
weed, the horse-farm
goat, always the greenwood smoke
at the bottom of the bowl.

Yellowed Penguin pages
ordinary leaves of Don Allen
failing transmissions from off-island
subject to frequency modulation
& infant theft, the last
ethered sunlight of Grade 11
a slice of lemon pound cake
from which the rind
had been removed.
Morse code
from a coffin.

Idea of North
Protestant North
no California lemons
bareknuckle bonhomie
pubs heated by sweat & breath
& pickled egg farts
terrycloth tonsure
cards 'til daybreak
a winter without hugs or drugs
hockey fights & hockey kisses
the rolling greyscale
of a cheap TV
into which the test pattern
has been burned--
conditional recognition
not so much as a poet
as one marked off

as that injured aldermanic raven
walking bent through the snow &
toward the fence
with an entitled eye
to the point of death.

Philip Guston at Isola di Rifiuti

I think it’s true of my whole past, as far as I know my past, to be fascinated by the one and the multitudinous. Sometimes I’ll put a lot of forms into a picture and think: Why do I need all that? I really don’t need this multitudinous feeling of forms. The world is filled with multitudinous forms. I really am looking for one form, a static form, from which the multitudinous forms come anyway. Like that bulging book we’re looking at now. . . .

Rhetorical Maneuvers in Contemporary Art, Part 1

The artist has learned that to do less is to be credited with doing more. The artist has learned that to be engaged with physical materials and processes is to be a mere craftsperson, while to work with concepts is to be respected as an intellectual worker (now properly identified as a member of a creative class by the ubiquitous urbanist Richard Florida). The artist has learned that art should be able to claim a political subtext, but not a political subject per se, as the latter will often be derided as unsophisticated and unartistic. We are left with a situation in which the increasingly meager offerings of artists are accompanied by a kind of critical discourse that is both maddeningly academic in its style and often politically pretentious as well. It is the kind of bad faith that arises when a population with the highest ideals is marginalized to begin with, and is then further stripped of the tools it once possessed to assert its unique importance...

The Spoils of the Park returns

“A great object of all that is done in a park, of all the art of a park, is to influence the mind of men through their imagination”

The Albertans - The Wake OFFICIAL VIDEO ('New Age' available 03/08/11)

new video from Vancouver combo "The Albertans"

out & about

fun-sounding Jules Dassin's The Law on TCM tonight...

Set in a sunbaked Catfish Row, The Law is a movie of cartoon-like
mass formations, singing urchins, and operatic outbursts—it opens with
the town's midday torpor broken by top-billed Gina Lollobrigida's siren song as she lovingly polishes a pair of boots belonging to her master, the crusty local padrone (Pierre Brasseur).
Snugly corseted and highly Coppertoned, Lollobrigida plays a
flirtatious virgin half her age. (Dassin's notion of the role seems
modeled after the manic gamine in Modern Times.) Everyone is transfixed by her cleavage, but La Lollo has eyes only for Marcello Mastroianni,
the progressive young agronomist arrived from the north to drain the
swamp—they have the best looks and the least chemistry of any couple
I've seen onscreen this year. A sleazily mustached Yves Montand plays the town gangster, with Dassin's wife, Melina Mercouri, unhappily married to the local judge, reading Anna Karenina and making (very scary) eyes at Montand's college-age son...

Super Punch: beatles

TOM CLARK: Geronimo in Exile (Edward Dorn: Recollections of Gran Apacheria)

they had not invented Mind
and as we know
their domain was by Mind over-ridden...

Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness

The authority of any doctor depends on their ability to name a patient’s
suffering. For patients to accept a diagnosis, they must believe that
doctors know—in the same way that physicists know about gravity or
biologists about mitosis—that their disease exists and that they have
it. But this kind of certainty has eluded psychiatry, and every fight
over nomenclature threatens to undermine the legitimacy of the
profession by revealing its dirty secret: that for all their confident
pronouncements, psychiatrists can’t rigorously differentiate illness
from everyday suffering...

electronic music pioneer Delia Derbyshire Recordings

Delia Derbyshire's "Dreams"

"Dreams" was made in collaboration with Barry Bermange (who originally
recorded the narrations). Bermange put together The Dreams (1964), a
collage of people describing their dreams, set to a background of
electronic sound. Dreams is a collection of spliced/reassembled
interviews with people describing their dreams, particularly recurring
elements. The program of sounds and voices attempts to represent, in
five movements, some sensations of dreaming: running away, falling,
landscape, underwater, and colour...

the late billy little's poems are at Zonko'd

Mama

thanks for
the swallowtail,

thanks for the smell of the species iris

thanks for the lilac's attack

thanks for the ears

that hear the heron's hoarse compleynt,

the raptors' whistles the loons' hilarity,

thanks for the lips whispering thanks for the tongue

thanks for the kicks thanks for the kisser

and thanks for the nose that brings me back

to the herb and the rose thanks for the womb

thanks for the fingers thanks for the toes

thanks for the coming and going

thanks for teeth chatterin ice cool life

The Real American Pie | Feature | Chicago Reader

The mince pie we speak of here bears only passing resemblance to present-day mincemeat pie, that gooey vegetarian article sitting next to the store-bought gingerbread men at office holiday parties. The mincemeat savored by our forebears was made with actual meat (beef, typically, or sometimes venison), flavored with substantial quantities of booze (usually brandy but sometimes rum and/or Madeira)...

terrific radio series--CBC.ca | Ideas | Dogs Themselves, Part 1 - 3