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Yup, to just about every word. Grim times. Envoi: “Whether the country I once wanted to represent was ever there in the form I imagined is a question I’ll leave to the historians. What I can say is that it’s sure not there now. What remains, angry or depressed, has made for a toxic brew as well as the most dispiriting election of my life…”
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don't miss this one! The Cacophonous Quarter: erhu, tin whistle pests, even a Welsh harpist
Author Archives: oook
The persuasive Kunstler
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This certainly rings true to my jaundiced ear:
It’s really too late for both parties. They’re unreformable. They’ve squandered their legitimacy just as the US enters the fat heart of the long emergency. Neither of them have a plan, or even a single idea that isn’t a dodge or a grift. Both parties tout a “recovery” that is just a cover story for accounting chicanery and statistical lies aimed at concealing the criminally-engineered national bankruptcy that they presided over in split shifts. Both parties are overwhelmingly made up of bagmen for the companies that looted America.
Another video
I’m continuing my exploration of video as a medium of escape for my Nova Scotia Faces collections, this time with a short narrative linking together photos from a photo album rescued from a junk store in the 1970s. I’m not completely satisfied with this presentation, but it’s useful to try out different approaches. I don’t know what I think until I see what I say…
links for 2010-10-31
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from NYRB, and truly excellent coverage of material I consider essential
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inspired wordplay
Now THAT’s Entertainment
via The Wonderful World of Louis Armstrong, and you oughta go there to hear Louis’s variations on the theme.
Don’t miss this one
via Bruce Sterling’s Beyond the Beyond, this gem of urban wit:
panoptICONS Utrecht 2010 from Helden on Vimeo.
Videos from Nova Scotia Faces
It’s getting on for 40 years since I first started working on Nova Scotia, and I’ve finally found a productive outlet for the thousands of photographs I collected in junk stores, mostly in the 1970s before others saw the possibilities in vernacular photography. Here are two videos, produced in the last couple of days:
links for 2010-10-29
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from Language Log, some terms that OUGHT to have wider currency (I mean… if Schadenfreude, why not mamihlapinatapei?)
Sixth Grade Class Photo
I suppose there are millions in this genre, but this is the only one I’m in:
This picture has been on my mind for years, and it recently resurfaced with its metadata intact (names written on the back). What, I wonder, happened in the lives of those people I more-or-less knew pretty well at the time? How could the tales be collected? I left Andover MA myself about a year later, after 7th grade, and most of what I remember so vividly about the Shawsheen district of Andover has been effaced by decades of progress: the American Woolen Company mill (closed in the early 1950s) became a Raytheon factory and then transmuted into condos, the Brothers of the Sacred Heart school also condofied, and I doubt that commuter trains stop at Shawsheen.
links for 2010-10-23
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Bryan gives us something to chew upon, watch for, and wonder at