no birds

The girl looking behind her in the center of this photo, taken during the filming of Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds," is my sister Valerie. She and the other kids are running from a flock of angry crows, to be added later with optical effects. The street the kids are running on is in Bodega, California, but the close-ups were filmed in front of a blue screen at Universal Studios. In one shot, Valerie has a mechanical crow attached to her sweater which she made flap its wings by pressing a button hidden in her clothing. I wasn't allowed to see the movie when it came out because I was four and it was too scary for me.

Pamelyn Ferdin

Facebook post, February 16, 2021

jill lepore | this is how they tell me the world ends

In the nightmare, sirens caterwaul as ambulances career down ice-slicked, car-crashed streets whose traffic lights flash all three colors at once (they’ve been hacked by North Korea) during a climate-catastrophic blizzard, bringing pandemic patients to hospitals without water or electricity—pitch-black, all vaccinations and medications spoiled (the power grid has been hacked by Iran)—racing past apartment buildings where people are freezing to death in their beds, families huddled together under quilts, while, outside the darkened, besieged halls of government, men wearing fur hats and Kevlar vests (social media has been hacked by Russia), flashlights strapped to their rifles, chant, “Q is true! Q is true!” 

from Zero Day, by Jill Lepore 

The New Yorker, February 8, 2021

tuff city radio | mike chips | psychedelic basement

 

love

country joe & the fish, electric music for the mind and body (1967)

 

cinnamon girl

the gentrys, the gentrys (1970)

 

a man needs a maid / heart of gold

neil young, live at massey hall (rec. jan 19, 1971)

 

chuck e's in love

rickie lee jones, rickie lee jones (1979)

 

don't get your back up

sarah harmer, you were here (2000)

 

i worship the ground you walk on

etta james, tell mama (1968)

 

side one:

in brooklyn

old compton street blues

the ballad of mary foster

life and life only

al stewart, love chronicles (1969)

baby driver

simon & garfunkel, bridge over troubled water (1970)

can't seem to make you mine

the seeds, the seeds (1966)

she lives (in a time of her own)

the 13th floor elevators, easter everywhere (1967)

the last time

janis joplin, big brother & the holding company (1967) 

i ain't no miracle worker

the chocolate watch band, the inner mystique (1968)

(unidentified track)

the doors, strange days (1967)

i'll be your mirror

the velvet underground, the velvet underground & nico (1967)

somebody to love (live)

grace slick & the great society, live at the matrix (1966)

side one: 

don't let it get you down (for rachel)

shouting in a bucket blues

when your parents go to sleep *

interview

internotional anthem

kevin ayers, bananamour (1973)

is it love?

t. rex, t. rex (1970)

friction

television, marquee moon (1977)

look at me now

electric light orchestra, the electric light orchestra (1971)

rene

small faces, ogdens' nut gone flake (1968)

canadian exodus

h.y. sledge, bootleg music (1970)

inside your mind

the fool, the fool (1968)

the beginning 

pink floyd, green is the colour / the journey (live, amsterdam, sep 17, 1969)

how do you sleep?

john lennon, imagine (1971)

side one:

thoughts for naught

a pot head pixie's advice

magick mother invocation

master builder

a sprinkling of clouds

gong, you (1974)

second set:

that's it for the other one

new potato caboose

born cross-eyed

spanish jam

alligator / drums / alligator

the grateful dead, live at the carousel ballroom (feb 14, 1968)

playlist from February 15, 2021

psychedelic basement is broadcast every monday night from 8-11pm on

tuff city radio, 90.1 fm, tofino - "All over the map, at the end of the road"

you can stream it here

oscar wilde on 'the importance of being earnest'

Oscar Wilde showed up at a rehearsal for his play "The Importance of Being Earnest" a few days before the opening, wearing his trademark green carnation pinned onto a three-piece maroon suit. After watching the actors for a few minutes he said, “Yes, it is quite a good play. I remember I wrote one very like it myself, but it was even more brilliant than this.”

molly burhans : "she had fallen in love with god"

She spent six months travelling, by herself, in Guatemala, where she volunteered with several NGOs. She was surprised by some of the fries she made. "They were Christians but not like the Christians you see on TV - none of the prosperity gospel crap," she said. "In fact, exactly the opposite. I began to think, Maybe I'm a Christian."

Burhan's family was nominally Catholic. She had attended a parochial school through third grade, and Mercyhurst and Canisius are both Catholic institutions. But when she went to church as a child, she said, "I'm pretty sure I was only in it for the doughnuts." When she was twelve, the Boston Globe published its "Spotlight" articles about child abuse by priests. She said her feelings about the Church, which had been "not spiritually mature," turned angry and hostile. "Here was this institution that had perpetuated colonialism, and now it was hiding a bunch of pedophiles." 

At Canisius, though, she experienced a spiritual awakening. She was working on a physics problem one day, thinking about limits and infinitesimal values, and suddenly she felt overwhelmed. "The Jesuits talk about seeing God in all things, and you can see God in all things through the infinite," she said. She began meeting regularly with a Jesuit spiritual director, who introduced her to the Examen of St. Ignatius, a demanding daily prayer exercise, which she described to me as "mindfulness on steroids."

As Burhand became interested in Catholicism, he social life changed. "I no longer had people to listen to John Cage or Frank Zappa with," she told me. Her new friends were "middle-class suburban campus-ministry members who liked belting Disney songs." She had no real regrets, thought, because she had "fallen in love with God."

from "Promised Land" by David Owen, a portrait of climate activist Molly Burhans 

The New Yorker, February 8, 2021

stephen dunn | stories

It was back when we used to listen to stories,
     our minds developing
pictures as we were taken into the elsewhere

 

of our experience or to the forbidden
     or under the sea.
Television was wrestling, Milton Berle,

 

Believe It Or Not. We knelt before it
     like natives
in front of something sent by parachute,

 

but when grandfather said “I’ll tell you a story,”
     we stopped with pleasure,
sat crosslegged next to the fireplace, waited.

 

He’d sip gin and hold us, his voice
     the extra truth
beyond what we believed without question.

 

When grandfather died and changed
     what an evening meant,
it was 1954. After supper we went

 

to the television, innocents in a magic land
     getting more innocent,
a thousand years away from Oswald and the shock,

 

the end of our enormous childhood.
     We sat still
for anything, laughed when anyone slipped

 

or lisped or got hit with a pie. We said
     to our friends
“What the hey?” and punched them in the arms.

 

The television had arrived, and was coming.
     Throughout the country
all the grandfathers were dying,

giving their reluctant permission, like Indians.

"Stories" by Stephen Dunn

from Local Time, Quill Press, 1986

garrison keillor | sea chantey dream

"I’ve found during the pandemic that my dream life has become quite rich: long novels with sustained dialogue. The other night I was working in the Orkney Islands on a trawler that hauled various goods from one port to another. The sea was calm. My shipmates spoke in a musical dialect that, odd as it was, I understood perfectly. Sometimes, hauling crates along a wharf, one of them would burst into song and we all sang together, a chorus of big burly men singing four-part harmony, rousing sea chanteys and heartbreaking laments for lost love. We walked through town past a barrelworks where men were shaping oak staves to make barrels to store whiskey in. We stopped in a tavern and had a glass of whiskey and sang some more. It was a fabulous dream. I’d love to go back and rejoin those men, if only I knew where the door is." 

Garrison Keillor, "An old Democrat in a chorus in the Orkneys" 

February 2, 2021

found poem in progress | assembled from the pages of the new yorker, 2020

Propagation propensity's a question mark;
not a lot of body in the slab.
Dry facets, two to three mils,
it's running the whole gamut of crystal types--
wasn't ice, by any means.
Rimy, small grains.

Snow is less forthcoming than the wind.
Its chaos hides beneath the surface.
She lifts her immaculate face to the winter light.
Something stirs within her, even now,
beneath the ice.

Some believed eels were born of sea foam,
or created when the rays of the sun fell on a certain kind of dew 

that covered lakeshores and riverbanks
in the spring.
Most people adhered to the theory that
eels were born when hairs from horses' tails
fell into the water.

*

The oldest known still-lifes are Eyptian - 
frescoes of figs for the afterlife.
The Assyrians carved pomegranates from ivory. 
And so it continues,

from Caravaggio's grapes to Cézanne's apples.

The actress, model, and Hollywood scion Isabella Rossellini returns to the (virtual) stage

with "Sex and Consequences," 

a live-streamed show about biodiversity and animal reproduction,

beamed from her farm in Bellport, New York,

where she breeds poultry.

I don't know how fluidly feline I would have been.

I'd be a very stagnant, boxlike, kind of anxious cat, 

scurrying down Mulberry Street, past a gesticulating anecdotalist.

If King Lear had gone into the book trade,
he could have saved himself a world of grief.
An excellent hippy, 

his father had died in a wrestling accident.

Flagrant humility;

That’s how I feel every time the camera in my hand 
accidentally reverses and I hear a scream 
and then realize it’s coming from me.

The robot had brought them balloons, confetti, and
letters for a birthday sign,
and they had a cake and a spicy Sichuanese dish called moicai
delivered to one of the gates.
There were cable protectors and scented oils and chicken-jerky curls and baby pacifiers and "Frozen"-themed Ziploc bags and party napkins and elastic wrist supports and charcoal foot scrub and romance novels, detergent and toys and pet food and underwear and motor oil and flashlights and strollers and mops and drain cleaner and glassware and wind chimes and rakes and shoes and balloons and bath towels and condoms and winter coats.

I inadvertently caused my own groping.

ron reed | found poem | typos, misread, overheard and dreamed 2020

27 Contact Lenses Are Found in Woman’s Eye, Doctors Report

She felt a sharp pain in her left eye while taking part
in an annual tradition of tomb-swapping,
four bees living in her eye, feeding on her tears.

Dr. Hong said the situation could have been much worse.

"This is the first time in Taiwan we've seen something like this," he added.

how do you improve on the power of fluff?

a mis-hit swivel high volley

blackberries
hose winder
bury the frog

I’m you could purchase an entire baseball team for $365M years old.

define anything:
false prevention
power outrages
mental sweater vest

I am indeed a nephew.

I'm trying to understand how technology works. A friend told me that we were supposed to have something fly by to push the smoke away this morning, but whatever it was was too high and didn't do what we needed it to do.

In case of volcanic eruption, you will hear mermaids. 

Do not ignore the mermaids; they are there for your safety.

Weird how Governors can see a snow emergency and say "Hey, stay off the roads because it's dangerous for you and others" and no one is putting on their Gears of War cosplay and jumping in a Dodge Ram with between 4 and 20 flags on it to throw a tantrum.

"I love you more than apples!"
the orange are the same chair as the grey one

steamed as Stimson in stasis

Hi! Speech (aphasia),
church Lutheran, movie, zoo,
Spark, National Music,
YMCA, Military Museum,
strokes,
newspaper.
WCB Manager 11, Alberta Health Services Manager.
Old friends .
Move??

My phone was open in my bag and typed this:
the first 5o and then you can get the good taco shelled by any chance
think paste it to to to you and then we will be be in a few weeks of my
parents and I have a decent time time time time time in my way home
home from work work work work work work work work work work work work work
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work work work 70.vž

the final stanza was written by autofill on Danielle Klaudt's cel phone

job title: dilettante

"I'm in the group of those who aspire to be dilettantes." 

Duke Ellington 

dilettante, 

gadabout, 

layabout,

flâneur, 

amateur, 

connoisseur,

dabbler,

dropout, 

idler.

dilettante : a person who takes up an art, activity, or subject merely for amusement, especially in a desultory or superficial way. "It was unparalleled, undreamed-of, that I, Humphrey Van Weyden, a scholar and a dilettante, if you please, in things artistic and literary, should be lying here on a Bering Sea seal-hunting schooner." Jack London

amateur : 1) a person who engages in a pursuit on an unpaid rather than a professional basis. 2) a person who is incompetent or inept at a particular activity. Late 18th century: from French, from Italian amatore, from Latin amator ‘lover’, from amare ‘to love’.

gadabout : a person who goes out a lot and does not worry about other things they should be doing; an habitual pleasure-seeker. "I'm quitting my job to go to gad school." Steven Gomez

flâneur :  the French masculine noun flâneur—which has the basic meanings of “stroller”, “lounger”, “saunterer”, “loafer”—which itself comes from the French verb flâner, which means “to stroll”. 

"The French poet Charles Baudelaire characterized the flâneur as a 'gentleman stroller of city streets, and wrote that in the modern city we become a flâneur or stroller. This was an entirely new urban figure, associated with the era of modernity. According to Baudelaire, the flâneur moves through the labyrinthine streets and hidden spaces of the city, partaking of its attractions and fearful pleasures, but remaining somehow detached and apart from it. They aren’t walking to get something, or to go somewhere, they aren’t even shopping (which is as near as most of us get to this Baudelerian ideal). Flâneurs are standing in deliberate opposition to capitalist society, with its two great imperatives, to be in a hurry, and to buy things." lightgraphite 

"The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world—impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito. The lover of life makes the whole world his family, just like the lover of the fair sex who builds up his family from all the beautiful women that he has ever found, or that are or are not—to be found; or the lover of pictures who lives in a magical society of dreams painted on canvas. Thus the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy. Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life." Charles Baudelaire

"The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque'." Susan Sontag

"I have to walk to survive." Fred Herzog

Flaneur, Granville (1960)

Fred Herzog

royal sproule | it's simple

 

illustration by royal sproule, 2020

rehearsals for 'the furniture of heaven' (nov/dec 1990), conversation about dramaturgy

"the supply room is out of paper clips" : crib notes for a prairie home companion

Every week on Prairie Home, Garrison tells the news of Lake Wobegon; a small Minnesotan town where “all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.” Wikipedia labels it a fictional town, while strangely adding: “said to be the boyhood home of Garrison Keillor.” 

As an adult, Garrison has lived in New York and St. Paul – neither place small. How do you bring a small town to life every week without living in one? 

One thing he did was call in help. Holly Harden. A writer who lives in a small town, a Lake Wobegon-type town of ice fishing, loon calls and Midwestern values. Each week she sent concrete details of life there, allowing Garrison to set his tales in proper time. From her notes in early June 2016: 

“The cottonwood fuzz is floating about now, blowing everywhere like a light springtime snow, drifting against the curbs.” 

“There’s a solar farm going up a mile out of town and it’s causing a lot of controversy.” 

“Vacation Bible School starts next week. Seventeen kids are enrolled and the teachers are doing some decorating.” 

“The school secretary is at her wit’s end. Parents are calling about grades. The supply room is out of paper clips. The lost and found box is overflowing. Someone threw up in the teacher’s bathroom. There is a tornado drill scheduled for Monday morning. One of the cooks is out with whatever chest thing is going around. It’s a kind of chaos, a hot mess.”

from What I Learned Living in Garrison Keillor's House 

by Katy Sewall

edward burtynsky | photographs

 

1  Xiaolangdi Dam #3 Yellow River, Henan Province, China, 2011

2  Stepwell #4 Sagar Kund Baori, Bundi, Rajasthan, India, 2010

3  Colorado River Delta #2 Near San Felipe, Baja, Mexico, 2011

4  Dryland Farming #2 Monegros County, Aragon, Spain, 2010

5  Salton City California, USA, 2009

6  Colorado River Delta #9 Sonora, Mexico, 2012

7  Cerro Prieto Geothermal Power Station Baja, Mexico, 2012

8  Log Booms #1, Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada, 2016

9  Freeman Island, Long Beach, California, USA, 2017

10  Coal Mine #3, North Rhine, Westphalia, Germany, 2015

11  Oil Bunkering #1, Niger Delta, Nigeria, 2016

12  Oil Bunkering #7, Niger Delta, Nigeria, 2016

13  Uralkali Potash Mine #2, Berezniki, Russia, 2017

14  Uralkali Potash Mine #4, Berezniki, Russia, 2017

15  Uralkali Potash Mine #6, Berezniki, Russia, 2017

16  Saw Mills #1, Lagos, Nigeria, 2016

17  Saw Mills #2, Lagos, Nigeria, 2016

18  Phosphor Tailings Pond #4, Near Lakeland, Florida, USA, 2012

19  Markarfljót River #1, 2013

20  Salinas #2, Cadiz, Spain, 2013

21  Dryland Farming #24, Monegros County, Aragon, Spain, 2010

22  Pipe Coating Plant, 2017

23  Shipbreaking #10 Chittagong, Bangladesh, 2000

24  Shipyard #7, Qili Port, Zhejiang Province, 2005

25  Pivot Irrigation #7, High Plains, Texas Panhandle, USA, 2011

26  Oxford Tire Pile #1, Westley, California, USA, 1999

27  Greenhouses, Almería Peninsula, Spain, 2010

willa cather | one of the truest artists i ever knew

 

Annie Pavelka

“One of the truest artists I ever knew 
in the keenness and sensitiveness of her enjoyment, 
in her love of people 
and in her willingness to take pains.”

Willa Cather, about her friend Annie Pavelka, inspiration for "My Antonia"

connie wanek | for a change

                             

Earth had become a job that required 

constant customer support. 

Humans didn’t seem to understand 

the basics of their service. 

Mrs. God suggested a standard message 

when people first connected: 

The Kingdom of God is within you. 

“Honestly I think it gives them 

a sense of agency,” she said. 

 But God thought the problem stemmed 

from a confusing owners’ manual. 

“Some of these translations are inscrutable,” 

he said, paging through the dense instructions. 

“What about a series of drawings, 

where steps would be illustrated with a 

puzzled little angel, sort of like IKEA? 

And of course an extensive 

FAQ on the website.” 

“It’s worth a try,” said Mrs. God. “The most 

important thing is that people know

they’re getting accurate information.”

 “For a change,” said God. 

jim harrison | overtrying

Sometimes we live without noticing it. 

Overtrying makes it harder. 

 from Carpe Diem, by Jim Harrison

william shakespeare | god's spies

Come, let's away to prison. 

We two alone will sing like birds i' th' cage. 

When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down 

And ask of thee forgiveness. So we'll live, 

And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh 

At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues 

Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too- 

Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out- 

And take upon 's the mystery of things, 

As if we were God's spies; and we'll wear out, 

In a wall'd prison, packs and sects of great ones 

That ebb and flow by th' moon. 

King Lear

Act V, Scene 3

russell mang | house, south central saskatchewan

garrison keillor | staying home is an excellent idea

"I’m a Scot on my mother’s side and so I expect the worst and for us pessimists, staying home is an excellent idea and the pandemic gives me a good excuse. I can imagine walking down the street and a 500-pound anvil falls out of a tree and crushes me and someone gets it on video and it goes viral, a tall scholarly man suddenly obliterated and it’s horrible but also weirdly humorous — he’s a white male and then suddenly he’s a pile of clothing — and though you ask, “Why was a 500-pound anvil parked in a tree on Columbus Avenue?” it’s too late for Nowhere Man — he’s being carried in a coffin the size of a fruit basket and his death video has gotten 57 million hits. I refuse to be him; I am the man happy to be eating waffles in his own kitchen."

ursula leguin | art is work

"If you have to find devices to coax yourself to stay focused on writing, perhaps you should not be writing what you’re writing. And, if this lack of motivation is a constant problem, perhaps writing is not your forte. I mean, what is the problem? If writing bores you, that is pretty fatal. If that is not the case, but you find that it is hard going and it just doesn’t flow, well, what did you expect? It is work; art is work.”

keaton patti | trump rally

 

Author's note: "I forced a bot to watch over 1,000 hours of Trump rallies and then asked it to write a Trump rally of its own. Here is the first page." But not really; all credit goes to Mr Patti.

jim harrison | my great-uncle floyd

I can't forget my great-uncle Floyd, who was the most unsuccessful knife thrower in the history of the American circus. An emigré from Sweden near the Arctic Circle, Floyd had an uncommon flash and sense of showmanship but ended up wounding a total of eleven women, none fatally, before the Barnum and Bailey authorities convinced him to retire. Curiously, despite his public record, Floyd had no problem finding women to stand there and take their chances. A cousin told me that when Floyd died at age eighty-eight in Wisconsin on May 18, 1957, he said on this deathbed, "I could have been a famous knife thrower, but I just couldn't throw knives."

Jim Harrison, "A Really Big Lunch"