"I asked if he was a good person to work with or for. 'The fact is that I can be really irritable when I’m unhappy about stuff,' he said. 'I can be a nit-picker about details that seem to be over the top. But then again I’m into what I’m into, so a lot of people forgive me because of that.'"
- posted by cjb @ 12:08 AM

 



- posted by cjb @ 11:07 PM

 

Gordon Smith, Creek Tangle A/2, 2009
- posted by cjb @ 10:16 PM

 
Too Many Unlucky Coincidences in the Mexican Kidnapping Alibi

"It is inherently implausible that there would be the many unfortunate coincidences that the accused’s Mexican kidnapping alibi depends on: that two men would try to rob and would then kidnap the accused during the very time when his wife is attacked; and that they would then get into a car accident at a location and at a time that approximates how long it would take to drive there from the complainant’s residence immediately after the attack on her. There are so many holes in the Mexican kidnapping story that it simply defies belief, and I will touch on some of them."
- posted by cjb @ 1:47 PM

 
No poetry here for a while.  Here's a new poem I like, by my pal Weldon Gardner Hunter, from his collection The Stella and Pony Years (Small Ghosts, 2012, $8CDN @ PFB and elsewhere)

Whitewash
by Weldon Gardner Hunter

I guess the spirits messed up
this season, but I am not about
to go & call them on it.

So many creatures, totems,
and fetishes -- it's like finding
the right search term and running with it.

The Jungle Lords of Copyright,
taking pens, pencils, Starbucks
cups, Ricky's soccer team;

everything, in an attempt to
protect thenselves.  But they're
ruining North American criticism.

Lose all respect, and then you
too can balance on the edge
between the poem & a hole so deep.

The rising of scales, the Poem
in Action, not to drag it down to
the deplorable condition of "information."

The good isn't bad.  It's
strategic.  There's some good shit
in here, may it proudly proliferate.
- posted by cjb @ 9:20 PM

 
Heartfelt thanks to everyone in YVR who voted PFB best independent bookstore in this year's Georgia Straight readers' poll.  PFB has come a long way in twelve and a half years, something I could not have accurately predicted on day #1, sitting behind a battered school desk with a paper Hilroy ledger, a cigar-box float, and a brand new shingle (handmade by my dad and I, vinyl lettering courtesy Steven Shearer) out on the sidewalk.

If you're successful in business, you're given progressively more complicated problems to solve.  The problems never go away, but they do get more interesting over time.

I am very fortunate to have been given a complex set of interlocking problems, a great group of staff, one of the most ruthless and technologically savvy competitors on the planet, and a deeply contrarian temperament.  The work isn't easy, but it is rewarding, and I wouldn't trade it for anything.
- posted by cjb @ 9:33 AM

 

"Another illustration of radicalizing self-delusion comes when the son of a governor and corporate chief executive says that 'everything that Ann and I have, we earned the old-fashioned way, and that’s by hard work.'"
- posted by cjb @ 9:19 AM

 

ACT (Aesthetically Claimed Thing): this photograph

"It was hard not to be charmed by the remarkable execution of a deep obsession."
- posted by cjb @ 9:34 AM

 

"My own view is that the centerpiece of American foreign policy has to be strength. Everything I do will be calculated to increasing America’s strength. When you stand by your allies, you increase your strength. When you attack your allies, you become weaker. When you stand by your principles, you get stronger. When you have a big military that’s bigger than anyone else’s, you’re stronger. When you have a strong economy, you build American strength. For me, everything is about strength and communicating to people what is and is not acceptable."
- posted by cjb @ 10:59 PM

 

Metropolitan (63), 2012
- posted by cjb @ 10:40 PM

 

Metropolitan (62), 2012
- posted by cjb @ 9:39 PM

 

- posted by cjb @ 9:20 AM

 

"'I'm Not the Same Without You is a gloss on those anthemic tunes in which the singer tells a story about how she's going to make it through a recent breakup and bravely carry on. I say "she" because I'm thinking of songs like Gloria Gaynor's I Will Survive or These Boots Are Made for Walkin by Nancy Sinatra,' says Fagen. 'In I'm Not the Same Without You, the narrator not only survives but rapidly evolves into something a bit more than human – at least in his own mind.'"
- posted by cjb @ 8:58 AM

 
MICHAEL LEONHART ANSWERS FAN QUESTIONS ABOUT UPCOMING DONALD FAGEN RELEASE SUNKEN CONDOS

"The idea with Donald is always to make everything sound as hyper-real and natural as possible. On a few rare occasions, we used a synth setting on the PROPHET-5, JUNO-6 or MINIMOOG that was unapologetically synth-y, but only because it blended so well with the other natural instruments and helped to create a richer timbre. With respect to the drums on this album, we took a unique approach to recording. The drums were all played live by yours truly (credited to 'EARL COOKE, JR.') taking great care and time to select just the right vintage snare, kick, hat, etc.. for each song. Donald and I then sat and put together the ultimate hyper-real drum track using all available modern techniques. The goal was always 'hyperreal' and never synthetic, programmed or sequenced."
- posted by cjb @ 1:55 PM

 

- posted by cjb @ 5:13 PM

 

A new responsibility, at least for the next two weeks.
- posted by cjb @ 9:30 AM

 
ART (Aesthetically Rejected Thing): Yacht Rock Burglar Alarm
- posted by cjb @ 11:21 PM

 

Armed with a copy of Scott Mueller's Upgrading and Repairing PCs, and Crucial.com's invaluable assistance, I just upgraded the RAM in the desk machine at work.  No explosion, fire, or blue screen of death. 

This may not seem like much of an accomplishment, but I have limited hand-eye coordination, zero patience, and bad spatial skills, making this one of the more challenging physical things I've done in the few years.  More importantly, I am now basking  in the atypical and enjoyable sense of actually having performed real "work."
- posted by cjb @ 10:27 PM

 

CJ (22), 2012
- posted by cjb @ 10:12 PM

 

Soundtrack for Metropolitan

By the look in your eyes
You'd think that it was a surprise
But you seem to forget
Something somebody said
About the bubbles in the sea
And an ocean full of trees.

And you now, L.A.
Uptight
city in the smog,
city in the smog.
Don't you wish that
you could be here too?
Don't you wish that
you could be here too?
Don't you wish that
you could be here too?

Well, it's hard to believe
So you get up to leave
And you laugh at the door
That you heard it all before
Oh it's so good to know
That it's all just a show for you.

But when the suppers are planned
And the freeways are crammed
And the mountains erupt
And the valley is sucked
Into cracks in the earth
Will I finally be heard by you?
- posted by cjb @ 9:39 PM

 

Sketch for Metropolitan (JLSK), 2012
- posted by cjb @ 10:24 PM

 

Metropolitan (61), 2012
- posted by cjb @ 10:16 PM

 
Q: Any other Nightfly stories you'd like to share?

A: Here's a classic story from recording The Nightfly at Soundworks. About six months into recording the album -- it took a couple of days less than one year to do -- I was working five days a week, taking weekends off. I came in and Donald was doing some vocals and he goes "Something smells weird." And so we kind of go "Yeah, yeah, yeah." But as the day goes on there "is" a peculiar smell in the control room. So next day we come in and we mention it and it's a little bit worse the next day and Donald's going "I can't work, there's something nauseating in the room." What it is we have no clue. This goes on and on and finally Donald says "I'm not gonna come in and work until you can find out what it is." So he starts to take days off and that is a concern for Charlie Bonatti who owns Soundworks. So we said "Call us if the smell is gone and we'll come in and work." We arrive at the studio and there's candles and sticks of incense burning and that's how they got rid of the smell. They tried checking everything; he has people coming in and going through all the air conditioning and finally they just start to tear apart the studio and literally tear out part of the control room, all the equipment, they take away the console, they tear up carpeting, they tear up floors; the studio is gutted and finally they start tearing up the floorboards and back in one corner of the room is a little drainpipe and there is a very moist, very dead, very big rat. And it just came out of this pipe and died from eating poison. We literally took about a week off from the album because of this dead rat.
- posted by cjb @ 9:50 PM

 

One of this year's motifs.  For the record: N34° 4.5735', W118° 17.5622'
- posted by cjb @ 11:50 PM

 
Pertinent news headline: BRAYSHAW COMMITS 'FOR THE LONG HAUL'
- posted by cjb @ 11:29 PM

 

Metropolitan (60), 2012

December desert light, out in the far reaches of the Inland Empire.

"Shooting. Stick exclusively to impressions, to sensations. No intervention of intelligence which is foreign to these impressions and sensations."
- posted by cjb @ 10:54 PM

 

Metropolitan (59), 2012
- posted by cjb @ 10:23 AM

 
John Roberts, The Intangibilities of Form: Skilling and Deskilling in Art After the Readymade

"Copying or replication in art is not an inert practice, the repetition of the prototype, but the very means by which art provides a new successor to its chosen antecedent. Thus, the reworking or incorporation of extant materials is as much a means of sustaining what is thought to be authentic and critical, as it is a way of trying to replicate or 'steal' what is felt to be the aura of the image or object in question. In this respect copying clearly needs to be distinguished from plagarism or pastiche proper given their association with traditional craft, and of passing one thing off in the style or manner of another. Whereas the latter replicates the admired precedent as an act of indebtedness, the former takes the likeness of [a] thing in order to inscribe it, or reinscribe it, in a critical tradition or novel context. Copying in this sense, therefore, is never strictly copying, never flat mimesis, because it is able to reanimate the thing replicated. Or, as Kant puts it, mimesis can be divided into two modes: nachahmen, which is merely a form of reproduction, and nachfolgen, which is transformative and creative. This is why the act of selecting and presenting a readymade [...] is always a creative act. Reproduction becomes a form of creative re-presentation, or reenactment, insofar as it brings the thing reproduced to life, or rather, releases it from its previous identity."
- posted by cjb @ 9:52 AM

 



Foreshadowing, of a kind.
- posted by cjb @ 11:29 PM

 

Metropolitan (58), 2012
- posted by cjb @ 11:04 PM

 

And the sun rose over the city 
The wind swept through the valley 

"You know how in the early 90s, a lot of the songs were very focused on the verses being very quiet, and the choruses being super loud, like Nirvana? I was looking for the opposite of that, where you hardly notice where the chorus starts; it's just like an airplane taking off from a runway, smooth, and all of a sudden you're in the air."
- posted by cjb @ 10:36 PM

 
"I grew up with handsome dark blue trucks, some of them immense, everywhere in the city, every day of my life, passing in front of me, on the side of which in clean white lettering was the name SEIDEL. But I felt quite early on that I belonged somewhere else, and had to get to that somewhere else."

& also, more directly pertinent:

"I will say that learning how to write has to do in part with learning how to accede to yourself and your object, instead of writing what you think you ought to write, or what at that point in time the world thinks poetry is about. Or what you think you ought to be about. The moment comes, if it ever comes, when you have enough strength to give way, to give in to being who you are, to give in to your themes. Giving in to your obsessions, giving in to the things that you will be writing about over and over. And sometimes the things you’ll be writing about over and over are things that some people don’t find very nice."
- posted by cjb @ 2:32 PM

 

- posted by cjb @ 8:58 AM

 

- posted by cjb @ 1:30 AM

 

Waste My Time, Please (Verbatim!)

"Book Description: RANDOM HOUSE, NEW YORK, 1981. HardBOUND. Book Condition: VERY GOOD. Dust Jacket Condition: VERY GOOD. FIRST EDITION. OCTAVO. MARTIN CRUZ SMITH IS ONE OF THE FINEST AND MOST COLLECTABLE WRITERS IN THE U.S.A. NICE COPIES SIGNED BY SMITH ARE GETTING SCARCE AND MORE EXPENSIVE.AND NOW THAT HE IS BEING MENTIONED AS A POSSIBLE NOBEL PRIZE WINNER AND CONSIDERED IN THE SAME LEAGUE WITH HEMINGWAY, FAULKNER, STEINBECK AND FITZGERALD THIS IS AN EXCELLENT TIME TO PUT TOGETHER A NICE COLLECTION OF HIS BOOKs IN SIGNED FIRST EDITIONS.THIS IS A LOVELY FIRST IN DJ OF HIS BOOK  GORKY PARK.SIGNED BY SMITH AND PRICED LOW DUE TO THE FACT THAT THIS COPY WOULD ONLY QUALIFY AS VERY GOOD.THERE IS A SNATCH OF SOILING AND THE BOOK SHOWS A BIT OF WEAR.BUT A WONDERFUL COPY OF A SCARCE AND IMPORTANT BOOK AT A LOW, LOW PRICE.WOW. SIGNED BY MARTIN CRUZ SMITH. MARTIN CRUZ SMITH."
- posted by cjb @ 12:42 AM

 

And another one. This music makes me happy, esp. its pulsing 70s electric bass beat and lovingly reconstructed yacht-sax solo.

"In March, 2009, I disbanded Yura Yura Teikoku, a band I’d been doing for 21 years straight. I spent the next year holed up at home, and thought of the concept for this album: 'An obscure party band of unclear nationality is playing mood music in a small bar, and the audience, normally shy people who rarely let their hair down, starts to feel more relaxed and, before they know it, starts to dance.' I wanted to make music that would approximate the atmosphere of this club. I guess an important point being that I didn’t set out to make songs that would sound like the songs performed by that band, but rather songs that would evoke the mood of that club."
- posted by cjb @ 8:23 AM

 

Best album so far this year.  A weird-ass stew of tropicalia, Steely Dan harmonies, Japanese lyrics & in this particular case, a very clever Dead/Fagen/Dukes guitar quote.
- posted by cjb @ 8:17 AM

 
1 Star Review of Vroman's Bookstore (Pasadena) by Tina L.

"I don't like Vroman's and I have a valid reason. I only go to bookstores to read their tabloid magazines for free! I usually buy my books online since it's way cheaper.

Anyways, Vroman's has ALL their magazines on racks outside in front of their store. First of all they don't provide tables (outside) for you to read. Secondly, the attendant outside is always glaring at you if you start flipping through a magazine for more than five minutes. Come on!!! Chill, I'm sure you don't get commission on the items you sell."

(via Fuck You Yelper)
- posted by cjb @ 8:06 AM

 
Waste My Time, Please

"Dear Sir Madam, Please find attached my new book that is about how the magical forest was saved by the help of a united word [sic] it is a Children's fiction all magical and interesting I have attached my web site for you to inspect. It is a storey of the world working together with all the magical images we all think of as children it travels through Norway and strange places and finds the Irish king Paddy the little people of Ireland the Emporia of China the Witch of the North and West and fire Dragons to save the Magical Forest."
- posted by cjb @ 7:59 AM

 
"[A] core part of his worldview, formed as an outsider child who grew up to defy others’ views of the limits of his abilities."
- posted by cjb @ 8:34 AM

 
Scott Brown, a like-minded colleague, dropping science.  A great essay that realistically and humanely sets out a rationale (to my mind, the only rationale) for a small business' place in its community.

"[I]f I ever have to leave town for two months, I won't ask someone to do my job for free. I'll hire an extra employee, find a pet sitter for the cat and the chickens, and let my replacement buy their own pizza and laundry detergent with the living wage I'll pay them."
- posted by cjb @ 12:59 PM