Untitled (Celine), 2008
- posted by cjb @ 9:22 PM

 

Why not see a legend while it's still being made?
Think it's kind of squirrelly when you're sleeping in the park
Jam too far propagating in the night
My colleagues and associates have kicked out all the lights
- posted by cjb @ 5:23 PM

 

Thanks, internets!
- posted by cjb @ 8:18 PM

 

Seals and bunnyfish by Kozyndan. There's much to be said for art that entwines realist details (the seals' graceful curves; the rabbits' ears, trailing out like bull kelp fronds) with fantastic or otherworldly content. It's fashionable to think that art attains its criticality by depicting images of conflict or unfreedom, and to disparage works depicting other types of interactions either as reifications of a preexisting social order, or as "illustration." I disagree: art's job is simply to depict what is there, without reflexively editing or prejudging. Goya's work means a lot to me, but I would not have gotten to it without, for example, Richard Scarry's Busytown, which trained me to spend a long time looking at visual details (posture; dress; "narrative grammar"), and to then orchestrate those details to "produce meaning." Images of joy and celebration are definitely part of a truly critical art. (Think of Brueghel's dancing peasants. Or Manet's La Musique aux Tuileries). And images of radically different cultures meeting and mingling (as above), each intrigued by its other, implicitly critique what presently passes for "debate" in public life.
- posted by cjb @ 7:18 PM

 

Oooooh, darlin' darlin'
It's your style to change your mind
But darlin' darlin'
Each time you do
I rearrange to suit you--
- posted by cjb @ 12:01 AM

 

Center Glow Ninebark

"The foliage of Centre Glow™ ninebark (P.o.’Centre Glow’) begins strikingly similar to Dart’s Gold, but quickly transforms to burgundy from the outside edge of the leaves inward - leaving the characteristic center of the leaf appearing to glow a bright gold. As the plant continues to age through the growing the season, the older leaves are always considerable darker than the newer emerging leaves, leaving the plant with a constantly dynamic, ever-changing appeal. In autumn, the leaves take on an extremely bright scarlet color, which rivals anything in the current Northern landscape."
- posted by cjb @ 8:30 PM

 
Heirloom tomatoes; scarlet runner beans; fava beans; a dwarf azalea; sunflowers; beets; swiss chard; squash; oregon grape.

Two very proud small cats. And hopefully a proud Frances Jean, too; I'd like to think she knows.
- posted by cjb @ 11:27 AM

 

ROBYN LABA
CLOUD-BUILT

Guest curated by Clint Burnham

29 May -- 30 June 2008

Opening reception Thursday 29 May 2008, 6-9pm

CSA Space
#5 - 2414 Main Street
Vancouver, British Columbia
Canada. V5T 3E2
info@csaspace.ca

See Pulpfiction Books, 2422 Main Street, for keys and directions
- posted by cjb @ 10:17 AM

 
Gaultheria shallon, flourishing out on the balcony
- posted by cjb @ 10:34 PM

 
Tonight's Youtube: Gnarls Barkley's Charity Case. Vo-coded backup vocals, beats, bells.

And I don’t understand how I’m so understanding
I guess that that’s all I can be
How are ya?
- posted by cjb @ 10:39 PM

 

STRAIGHT OUTTA YALETOWN: Is this Gnarls Barker?

CJB: Barkley. Yup.

SOY: It's great! [Holding Roy Arden retrospective catalog] I love this guy. Vancouver's got some great photographers. Fred Herzog! Jeff Wall, he's older. Nobody knows who these guys are in Vancouver! You should totally check them out!

CJB: W-A-L-L like with bricks?

SOY: And Fred Herzog. I loved that show!

[Arden catalog sold, and SOY continues his charmed evening unmolested]
- posted by cjb @ 8:54 PM

 

Nicolas Poussin, Landscape with a Man Washing his Feet at a Fountain, c.1648

T.J. Clark, one of my favorite living art historians, is visibly moved at the Met:

"Let us start with Poussin []. There is a picture in the show in New York that normally hangs in the National Gallery in London, called Landscape with a Man Washing His Feet at a Fountain. (I like the fact that an alternative title, Landscape with a Dirt Road, has got attached to it over the years. The would-be permanence of its wayside architecture – milestones and tombs as well as cisterns – versus the puddles on the country road speaks to the picture’s point.) Men and women in Poussin’s landscapes make their way by the side of rivers, seeking the shade of trees. They choose routes that others have trodden, and are glad of the reassurance offered by the presence of the past: stone basins to douse one’s aching feet, oaks tied round with offerings to the gods (a garland, a little effigy, a quiver with arrows), ivy falling from a sepulchre. A woman sweeps by, balancing a basket on her head. An old man in blue dreams full-length on the grass. The man with his feet in the fountain massages a blister.

Poussin was enormously interested in the persistence of our attempts to contain and discipline the physical world, and the ways those attempts can fail. For him the determinant event of human history seems to have been the decline and fall. A cultivated tourist once told him he was in search of souvenirs of the antique, and Poussin knelt in the grass, scooping up a handful of marble chips, saying: ‘Here you are, sir: take this to your museum and tell them, this is ancient Rome.’ His Saint John on Patmos, one of the great moments in New York, is utterly alone in a landscape that teems with the evidence of people’s will to perpetuate their way of life. Cut stone is everywhere. The very slope of the hill is massively reinforced, so that the road will stay safe in winter. Cities line the shore. Architraves catch the sun. But no other figure, however tiny, is in sight. And none will ever appear.

Such a view of time and civilisation is likely to coincide with a specific anthropology. Poussin is one of those painters – they are strangely rare, given the opportunities painting offers – whose sense of the human condition turns on the body’s standing. Which is to say, he cannot get over the human animal’s uprightness – its balancing on two legs. He is the master of load-bearing feet; and therefore, as we have seen, the master of those moments when people try to deal with the ordinary pains of bipedalism, or just give uprightness a rest. ‘He laid us as we lay at birth/On the cool flowery lap of earth,’ as Matthew Arnold had it of Wordsworth. The man in blue in the London picture is the perfect instance of this; but he is one of scores of such figures all through Poussin’s career. Give him a drowsing river god to paint, or a drunken cherub sucking his thumb and nodding off, or a Roman grandly used to doing business on the horizontal – Saint John shows his belonging to the Rome he is destroying above all in this – and Poussin almost automatically shifts into a higher poetic gear. Give him a dead Adonis. Give him Narcissus sprawled by the stream. Give him Phocion’s widow, scrabbling among the funeral ashes in search of her husband’s bones.

The greatest moments of a world-view like this have to do with kinds of contact between bodies and ground plane, where the human determination to ‘rise above things’ is indissociable from over-reach and vulnerability. Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake (whose miserable grey varnish is almost penetrated by the Metropolitan’s top-lighting) is explicit on the subject. But interval and distance are just as important as contact in Poussin. This is an artist uncannily aware of the spaces that lie between figures, stranding and silhouetting them. Time and again, in scenes that pullulate with bodies and buildings, he manages to install a governing, all-pervasive emptiness, pressing in on the human from the mineral and vegetable world. We reach out, we regularise, we raise up. He ‘put reason in the grass’, Cézanne was supposed to have said of him, but also – crucial insight – ‘tears in the sky’. Our best efforts are temporary. The marble chips are never far off."
- posted by cjb @ 7:39 PM

 

Channeling massive depression and aggression into "creativity" as per usual:

1. CJB 3, Mouse Invasion -3. Thumbs up for "fake plastic cheese!"

2. Drove the Ford to Home Depot, and rigged up a Rube Goldberg-style air conditioner for the store's stacks with the help of, a/ rotating fans; b/ 25' extension cords; c/ powerbars; and, d/ electrical switches.

3. Canon G9! I've wanted to make larger pictures for a while, but have always been stopped by the 11" x 14" prints produced by my little handheld Nikon. This summer I'm shooting two pictures, Heights Tree (study in the archives, 5/16/08) and Überarbeit (another Craigslist casting call, already underway) that wouldn't work as small prints. And London Drugs had a Victoria Day sale. . . .

4. Balcony composter. My own design. Various components rattling around in the back of the Ford as we speak.

5. Delphiniums (Pacific Giants); Lupins ("Gallery Blue Shades"); Beets ("Detroit Dark Reds").

6. Italian regional cookin'. Thank you, Mr. Buford, Mr. Batali.

It may not be a happy life, not always, but it's never unproductive.
- posted by cjb @ 6:40 PM

 

- posted by cjb @ 7:28 PM

 

Books That Failed to Stand the Test of Time
- posted by cjb @ 3:33 PM

 

CJB @ work. It's hot in here today!

Photograph courtesy Joseph Mallozzi, executive producer of Stargate: Atlantis.
- posted by cjb @ 11:37 AM

 
Richard Price, Lush Life:

"He had no particular talent or skill, or what was worse, he had a little talent, some skill: playing the lead in a basement-theatre production of The Dybbuk sponsored by 88 Forsyth House two years ago, his third small role since college, having a short story published in a now-defunct Alphabet City literary rag last year, his fourth in a decade, neither accomplishment leading to anything; and this unsatisfied yearning for validation was starting to make it near impossible for him to sit through a movie or read a book or even case out a new restaurant, all pulled off increasingly by those his age or younger, without wanting to run face-first into a wall."
- posted by cjb @ 9:39 AM

 

Via Craigslist, that most useful of art resources:

"A business without a lightbox is a sign of no business. We can help!

Starting a new venture? You will need bright & attractive Lightbox to make customers come to you. That's why Casino in Las Vegas are blistering with LED Neon and Lightbox Signage. An edge for you to compete. We have two brand new lightbox for sale. Both are 2' x 5' in measurement and can be use for indoor or outdoor. $750. Call Jim at [LOCAL CELL PHONE NUMBER]."
- posted by cjb @ 9:26 AM

 

Study for Heights Tree, 2008

- posted by cjb @ 9:54 PM

 
(Slightly Abridged) Letter to the Island

Well shit. I guess I'm pissed but I'll get over it soon enough. I can't change your relationship to your work, or to genre, and I hope that I am an astute enough critic to realize that mailed-in work ends up looking pretty bad in the medium- to long-term, even if it provides short-term consolation. So, no worries there.

Some psychological introspection of my own: I have wanted, since childhood, to make "creative" things full time: short stories, comic books, photographs, etc. Most of these projects don't come to fruition. Collaborative partners disappear, publishers go out of business, friendly editors die. Or "art friends," even good friends, like [BEST YOUNG ARTIST I KNOW] start looking visibly anxious at the thought of more photographs in the room. I was actually entertaining the prospect of "Emily Carr University" the other day -- not because I think it would change anything, but because in the context of being a student I could at least mount a picture on a wall without stressing anyone out or feeling like I was stepping on someone's toes. This has a lot to do with why I haven't sent out photographs or exhibited them upstairs, not because I think people wouldn't like the pictures, but because I think they would be discomfited by the gesture itself, and I have a hard enough time liking my own work without the added pressure-cooker of people hating the gesture (what they might call, if pressed, my "presumption") even before they engage with the objects themselves. That as yet-unmade performance about sleeping on the street outside the "world of art" has something to do with this, too.

I don't like business ownership, investing, economics etc. per se, (at least not as much as I like imaginary talking animals, or Imperial Star Destroyers, or Yoshitoshi's weird conjunctions of realism and the supernatural, or the quiet urban spaces surrounding Jeff Wall's performers) but the world of business does provide consolation in that I don't have to ask for anyone's permission/help/approval to do things; I can just get on with the work at hand and feel slightly more alive. Does that make sense? Probably not, but I appreciate your friendship and really want to see [your] massive [backyard] garden.

My scarlet runner beans have overrun the deck -- already! -- like the tourist-eating plant in The Ruins! -- and the cats are proud, somehow considering themselves responsible for this bright green miracle.
- posted by cjb @ 9:12 AM

 

Mother Superior's the only one who calls
She says, "Hey, when are you ever coming over?"
Remove that wretched writing from the wall
It's just more pictures again--
- posted by cjb @ 11:35 PM

 

Approaching the summit, Alpen Mountain. Nb. snowstorm!


Alpen Mountain materializes after approximately 4 hours of uphill from the car.


Team Cat successfully navigates a 50 degree snowslope.

"Maybe we're off-route."

"Maybe we didn't take the namby-pamby route."


Team Cat en route to Alpen Mountain. All photographs courtesy Keefer.
- posted by cjb @ 9:49 PM

 

Robert Rauschenberg, Cardbird V, 1971

"'Anything you do will be an abuse of somebody else’s aesthetics.'"

"The process — an improvisatory, counterintuitive way of doing things — was always what mattered most to him. 'Screwing things up is a virtue,' he said when he was 74 . . . . 'Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.'

This attitude also inclined him, as the painter Jack Tworkov once said, 'to see beyond what others have decided should be the limits of art.'"

"'I wanted something other than what I could make myself and I wanted to use the surprise and the collectiveness and the generosity of finding surprises. And if it wasn't a surprise at first, by the time I got through with it, it was. So the object itself was changed by its context and therefore it became a new thing.'"

"In an interview with critic Calvin Tomkins, Rauschenberg said: 'I had been working for some time at erasing, with the idea that I wanted to create a work of art by that method. Not just by deleting certain lines, you understand, but by erasing the whole thing. Using my own work wasn't satisfactory . . . I realized that it had to be something by someone who everybody agreed was great, and the most logical person for that was de Kooning. . . . [F]inally he gave me a drawing, and I took it home. It wasn't easy, by any means. The drawing was done with a hard line, and it was greasy too, so I had to work very hard on it, using every sort of eraser. But in the end it really worked. I liked the result.'"

"'Beauty is now underfoot wherever we take the trouble to look.'"

"There were many other images of downtrodden and lonely people, rapt in thought; pictures of ancient frescoes, out of focus as if half remembered; photographs of forlorn, neglected sites; bits and pieces of faraway places conveying a kind of nostalgia or remoteness. In bringing these things together, the art implied consolation."

"'The marvel of transposing a fact of nature into its almost complete and vibratory disappearance.'"
- posted by cjb @ 8:46 PM

 



- posted by cjb @ 9:10 PM

 

HIPSTER WHO APPARENTLY BOUGHT HIS CLOTHES AT A 4TH AVENUE BOUTIQUE [hands in pockets]: Heeeeey, man, who's that playin'?

CJB: Nine Horses.

HWABHCAA4thAB [hands still in pockets]: Naw, man, what's his name?

CJB: David Sylvian.

HWABHCAA4thAB: Cool. That guy produced The Joshua Tree!

CJB: No he didn't.

HWABHCAA4thAB: Yeah, and he played with Talking Heads.

CJB: You're thinking of Brian Eno.

HWABHCAA4thAB: No, man. David Sylvian. [beat] Brian Eno was in Japan!
- posted by cjb @ 6:23 PM

 



Dapper, soft-spoken George F. Will pauses over Hillary's entitlement mentality. While my father's mother, Louisa Brayshaw, was still alive, back in the early 1980s, brother Dru and I used to spend Sunday morning at her small dim Ambleside apartment, parked in front of her old black-and-white set. Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom was an early favorite, later replaced by ABC's This Week With David Brinkley. Dour old explosively-tempered Sam Donaldson made a significant contribution to what would later be immortalized as my "shopkeeper's persona" (along with co-contributors Basil Fawlty and Bernard Black) but George Will's extemporaneous, perfectly-composed paragraphs impressed me more than I was probably able to admit at the time. Anyone who has ever heard me speak about art from minimal or illegible handwritten notes owes George F. Will some thanks.

Will:

"After Tuesday's split decisions in Indiana and North Carolina, Clinton, the Yankee Clipperette, can, and hence eventually will, creatively argue that she is really ahead of Barack Obama, or at any rate she is sort of tied, mathematically or morally or something, in popular votes, or delegates, or some combination of the two, as determined by Fermat's Last Theorem, or something, in states whose names begin with vowels, or maybe consonants, or perhaps some mixture of the two as determined by listening to a recording of the Beach Boys' 'Help Me, Rhonda' played backward, or whatever other formula is most helpful to her, and counting the votes she received in Michigan, where hers was the only contending name on the ballot (her chief rivals, quaintly obeying their party's rules, boycotted the state, which had violated the party's rules for scheduling primaries), and counting the votes she received in Florida, which, like Michigan, was a scofflaw and where no one campaigned, and dividing Obama's delegate advantage in caucus states by pi multiplied by the square root of Yankee Stadium's Zip code.

Or perhaps she wins if Obama's popular vote total is, well, adjusted by counting each African American vote as only three-fifths of a vote. There is precedent, of sorts, for that arithmetic (see the Constitution, Article I, Section 2, before the 14th Amendment).

'We,' says Geoff Garin, a Clinton strategist who possesses the audacity of hopelessness required in that role, 'don't think this is just going to be about some numerical metric.' Mere numbers? Heaven forfend. That is how people speak when numerical metrics -- numbers of popular votes and delegates -- are inconvenient."

My take? Either Hillary or Barack would be preferable to the so-called "independent" Republican now scrambling as fast as he can toward his party's lunatic far-right wing, but Hillary reminds me of many of the ladies (and one particular Chief Librarian) that I worked with at Busy Suburban Library in the late 1980s, folks given to explaining, over and over in stilted management-ese, why "we do things" a certain way, even when those ways contradicted speed or common sense. And Barack? His complaints about the campaign's length seem a little naive -- six months of Hillary snapping at your heels is probably far better training for the Oval Office's demands than a victory lap around the Senate floor, flashbulbs popping -- but his Philadelphia speech made a lot of sense. I watched all forty minutes of it at a Motel 6 in Everett, Washington and was impressed by its complexity and plain-spokenness, two qualities sorely lacking in the vicious spin cycle of modern American politics.
- posted by cjb @ 9:40 AM

 


Tonight's Youtube:

I've lost dreams that won't come back

Pushing your consciousness deep into everything

Girl, I couldn't find my way
- posted by cjb @ 9:46 PM

 
Think Fast!

Via Craigslist:

"Pulp Fiction Trade Credit - $52 value - $40

I have a Trade Credit for Pulp Fiction Books [sic], which I received in exchange for some used books that I traded them.

The credit note is worth $52.

I am selling it for $40. You pay me $40 cash, I give you the $52 credit note. That's like getting $12 of books for free!

The credit note is good at their two locations in Vancouver: (1) 2422 Main St or (2) 3133 W. Broadway.

There is NO EXPIRY DATE on the credit note.

You can use the credit note on almost all of the books for sale at Pulp Fiction. The only exceptions are recent arrivals, books in their 'Meat Case' [i.e. rare books], and some other exceptions scattered throughout the store.

Great bookstore with lots of selection. Heavy on the literature and philosophy.

Email me if you're interested. I'm cleaning out my apartment, and trying to purge myself of all extraneous stuff - hence, the desire to sell the credit note."
- posted by cjb @ 4:29 PM

 

Recent reading: Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon, The 100-Mile Diet

Read cover-to-cover last night on the couch between 10pm and 1am, blinds swinging in the breeze, beans' leaves folded in tight against the cold, like chickens tucking their heads beneath a wing, stuffed cats vigilant beside them. A peculiar book, a patchwork of old blog posts, thoughtful historical asides, directions to small Fraser Valley farms, over-ripe Kitsilano rhapsodizing about the rockier portions of the co-authors' long relationship. Everyone on the West Coast wants to talk about their feelings:

"'Tell me about your inner workings.'

'I don't have inner workings.'

'You don't have anything but inner workings!'"

Some readers will find these digressions profound and meaningful. I want to intrude on the narrative, to impose stricter editorial control, to point out that the co-authors' emotional interactions with each other are far better developed through their relationships with local farmers; with friends; with parents, siblings, and the ghosts of dead grandparents; with their Skeena River neighbor Roy, who lives in a tent in the bush on the outskirts of a ghost town and cans his own salmon. When the co-authors' relationship materializes only in passing, as a component of their journalistic investigation of local food production and their relationship to the "natural web" that sustains them, their writing crackles with profound curiosity about the world. When it doesn't, their sentences are curiously flat and ridden with cliches. "Could my restlesslessness be, rather than a desire for greater motion, a longing to understand how truly to take root in one place?" Who fucking cares? The cats and I want to hear more about pumpkin honey; about the improvised soup with the chum salmon tail; want directions to the Fraser Valley hazelnut farm and the Vancouver Island farm that sells 100-mile grain.

One of the better paragraphs, which made a deep impact on me:

"Hebda, when he gives talks to the public, often suggests something he calls the One Bean Revolution. Everyone, he says, should plant at least a single bean in a windowsill pot. He will always recommend a bean over, say, a tree, because a bean reinforces an original truth: that human beings are sustained by the natural world. The thing we call nature is not, as a tree can be, just something to look at on weekends out of the city. It is what keeps us alive. This is so basic a fact that it seems tedious to say it, and yet this understanding is not among the founding principles of civilization as we know it. There was a time, though, where we felt this knowledge every time we ate."
- posted by cjb @ 9:00 AM

 

"Say, what's with [THE GAPING HOLE IN THE CEILING / ALL THOSE PLASTIC TARPS ]? Did you guys have a flood?"
- posted by cjb @ 3:09 PM

 

Last week I picked up a sack of peat pots and a pack of scarlet runner bean seeds at the local gardening supply store. Back home I rehydrated the pots and planted the seeds. The animals gathered 'round to watch, just to make sure that nothing sprouted while they weren't looking.

Now the bean plants are putting out their first leaves, and their sturdy white roots have punched through the bottoms of the soon-to-be-too-small peat pots. Next step: planting the beans in a new 25 gallon plastic tub on the deck.

Apparently I am now part of some flaky back-to-the-land urban agricultural movement, though probably the only member to have successfully incubated and hatched beans with the help of stuffed cats.
- posted by cjb @ 9:43 AM

 

"Local trees." Photo by Mr. Range.
- posted by cjb @ 9:14 PM

 

Mick Range, 5 May 2008, 2008

Fellow hiker, mountaineer, Clubtread.com participant, big tree enthusiast and honorary Team Cat member. Shot around the 1000m. mark on the south slope of Grouse Mountain, a few enormous mountain hemlocks in the background. Shortly before this photograph was made Mick and I were disturbed by a chorus of whistling and squeaking from the top of one of the neighboring trees. "Bald eagle," said Mick. Thirty seconds later, the largest eagle I have ever seen in my life, with a wingspan of easily six feet from tip to tip, dove out of the tree, skimmed directly above us, and zipped off along the 1000m. contour, hunting lunch. No summits were obtained, the coffee in the chalet was only passable, the "isothermic snow" had us plunging up to our knees, and Mick and I spent the whole day creaking along like old men, both having somehow missed breakfast. Still, another amazing day out in the local mountains, overcast but definitely warm like spring.
- posted by cjb @ 8:45 PM

 


Bookseller's Standup

The biggest tool in the world walks into the shop and requests:

1. The Game

2. Ayn Rand

3. Books on NLP

4. Nietzsche

No punchline; repeat all afternoon!

(& just for the record, the runners-up:

5. Golf books

6. BDSM manuals (not a weird or offensive pastime, but any goatee-rockin', trenchcoat-sportin' ponytailed Matrix-wannabe requesting same is inevitably bound to be a tool)

7. A used copy of any new book reviewed in Saturday's Globe & Mail

8. American Psycho

9. LSAT test prep guides

10. The Satanic Bible

11. "Phish tab")
- posted by cjb @ 4:59 PM

 




[Discussing totally decent neighborhood local who recently had two guitars stolen from her apartment]

[PULPFICTION REGULAR] GARY: That totally blows. I don't know [GUITARS' OWNER] very well, but I've seen her at [LOCAL CLUB] once or twice. Super-nice girl. She likes the Canucks! Not like you. [Beat] I bet she likes cats though! Hey, if they changed the team name to the CATnucks, would you start going to games?

CJB: You bet. The minute they put some pointy little ears on the logo, I'm there.
- posted by cjb @ 12:28 PM

 

Thoughtful NYT review of a new Guston drawing show at the Morgan Library:

"[Guston] told stories of Sisyphean ennui. The beat-up, bandaged head with the big sad eye gazing uphill; the boards with nails pounded into them; the empty shoes; the man smoking in bed, staring at the ceiling: these images exude that sense of futility that almost all artists must periodically endure. Sometimes there is the relief of simple pleasures: a pile of cherries, a sandwich, sitting with one’s wife and looking out the window at the sunset. And then there is the junk-covered hillside with the gravestone at its foot presciently marked P. G. 1980.

Today the drawings don’t look as shockingly crude as they did to critics in the 1970s. They look like the work of a brilliant cartoonist knowingly inspired by 'Mutt and Jeff,' 'Krazy Kat' and other classic Sunday funnies. They may appear Neanderthal, but they are the products of a sophisticated performance, a kind of method acting."

(Image: Philip Guston, Artist in His Studio, 1969)
- posted by cjb @ 1:17 PM

 

CJB Vs. Mouse Invasion

CJB's cleverly deployed traps: 2

Mice: -2

En route to the corner trash can with the evidence, I dropped in on my comic book store neighbors for some impromptu show-and-tell:

DON THE COMIC GUY: Good going! We never had any luck with those [snap traps].

CJB: Really!

DON: We only ever caught a Tim Sale sketchbook, the Elektra: Assassin figure, my thumb. . . .
- posted by cjb @ 12:28 PM

 

Question In the Form of a Picture (Western & Industrial), 2008
- posted by cjb @ 9:35 AM

 
Jerry Salinger speaking. They just towed my car--

"After getting a second call, in just a few days, from a writer needing money -- this one purportedly from English writer Nick Hornby -- Book Soup's Tosh Berman didn't hesitate to cut him off. 'Almost exactly from the script he said, "I'm embarrassed to be calling you like this, but I'm at the airport. . . ."

'He really managed the accent,' Berman said of the Hornby impersonator. 'I almost fell for it. But I didn't take that trip.'

Berman speculated that this gang has several members -- one black man, one English guy, one woman -- to make impersonation easier. 'It's like the Mod Squad or something.'

Vroman's has hung up on someone claiming to be Ray Bradbury and, in late February, Ramos said, Russell Banks."

(via our South Wellington correspondent)

- posted by cjb @ 8:58 AM