Whether they are still, at their current advanced age, the "greatest rock'n'roll band in the world" is almost academic. Every night, somewhere in the world, a different band will wear that mantle, but the Stones have worn it on more nights than any other band extant. Even if their increasingly elaborate stadium spectaculars place more emphasis on Jagger the fitness fanatic and all-round showman rather than the ragged glory of Richards' still-unique guitar and the unmistakable whomp of Watts' drums, they do, after all, still represent the grand archetype of the whiteboy rock'n'roll band.
As Richards put it, "We had a whole new generation listening to our music. There are 12-year-old kids I used to play to who are now making hit records - bands like The Hives and The Strokes. On a musician's gravestone all you can have is 'He passed it on.' It's the best accolade you can get."

Charles Shaar Murray Independent UK 15 August 2003

...the buildings are still strewn vacantly around the square. But you know what to frame. You know how to count. Arch flowing into arch flowing into arch, and through...

Album
Donna Stonecipher
Poetry Daily

Amish, Hutterites and Mennonites at Catherine Edelman Gallery

Michael Kenna

links list at OBEYGIANT

links list at HiFiArt

Dream Lives
_____

Shy Girl, Heart 101

happyfeettravels stencil art

Dutch stencil

{there was so cool stencil art in A'dam in 91, I never forgot it}

Thinly Veiled
Lynnette Ojeda Mohill
ARC Gallery

Cleared and Stained Multi-limbed Pacific Tree Frog Aptos, California
Brandon Ballengée
greenmuseum.org

from the gory depictions of headless mercenaries and coddled murderers on his breakthrough album Excitable Boy to the bespectacled, cigarette-smoking skull that adorned the singer’s albums and backstage passes. But in recent years, the subject seemed to loom even larger in Mr. Zevon’s work. His last two albums were, respectively, Life’ll Kill Ya (2000) and My Ride’s Here

{The visual blogwerks is twinkling with Don Hong-Oai's 'photographs'. And at first I was there too. But it's fake. Imbalanced, pretentious and fake. It's like these houses around here (central California coast). Because the area's so climatically desirable, people who have made money elsewhere move here and do their Kublai Khan trips. A lot of them create these grotesque assemblages of ideas-made-reality, like picket fences and geraniums and lavender and holly and other 'plants' and the door a certain shape, and the brickwork all just so. And everything looks like it was picked one item at a time from some digital menu and just stuck together. Instant tradition. The effect they want is what you get when someone who loves their home lives in it and works on it for twenty years minimum. Grandma's house. You can't 'duplicate' that. The attempts are macabre. It's frightening, and disgusting. Don Hong-Oai isn't disgusting but he's got a real 'zen'-Disney thing going on, and aside from the pseudo floating world/antique Chinese aesthetic it's just technology again, formula. Thomas Kinkade for buddhists.}

Apocalypse Now on the San Juan Islands

I watched the ground as I wove in and out between parked cycles, motorcycles, cycle rickshaws, auto rickshaws, cows, bullock carts, hand carts. I saw water, mud, potholes, puddles tinted lime green with chemicals, scattered paper, leaves, dung; peoples' feet, bare, sandalled; children in school uniforms with cloth bags of books jumping across the puddles. Once in a while I looked up, to see two Sikhs on a parked motorcycle, getting ready to enter the stream, or a sugar-cane crushing machine daubed with turmeric, sindoor and sandalwood from the Worship of Tools festival...

under the fire star
most readable Nancy Gandhi , an outsider in Chennai, India

Main Street, Stanley, Virginia, 1957
O. Winston Link
Peter Fetterman Gallery

also:
Hester Fringer's Living Room on the Tracks, Lithia, Virginia, 1955

How do you step from the top of a 100-foot pole?
-zen koan
___

Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while
A great wind is bearing me across the sky.
-Ojibwa saying

Poetry, Proverbs, and Sayings from Zen and Tao {highly recommended}
Bruce Jones UCSD
whose The Rise of the University
somehow linked from Book of the Month & Book of the Month archive at Univ. Glasgow

If you want to tell me that the stars are not words, then stop calling them stars.
-Jack Kerouac

Beer For My Horses

we look to Scotland for all our ideas of civilisation

Voltaire

Scottish Thought and Letters in the Eighteenth Century
Univ. Glasgow Spec. Coll.

A MOST
Certain, Strange, and true Discovery of a

WITCH

Being taken by some of the Parliamentary Forces, as she was standing on a small planck-board and sayling on it over the River of Newbury:

Together with the strange and true manner of her death, with
the propheticall words and speeches she used at the same time.

Mr. Bones and Mr. Rhino
Bernhard Siegfried Albinus
The Body Revealed: Renaissance and Baroque Anatomical Illustration
Univ. Glasgow Special Collections

Puzzling over how to get to the uni and the town's residents to integrate better, they decided to smersh their two (slightly poor) library collections together into one $178 million co-venture.
It's worked amazingly well. Everything was running smoothly on the first day. They've combined the two catalogues (even though one used Dewey and the other the Library of Congress cataloguing system), and moved both groups of readers into a brand new building.
There are 150 data-ports in the building for laptops, about three hundred PCs for general use, and hundred laptops that can be loaned. See how long they last. (No wifi yet, though.) Looks like they've negotiated deals with all the SJSU academic database providers - so I can get LexisNexis ,the O'Reilly Safari. book collection, the OED and a stack of other for-money subscriptions if I access them from within the building.
The printed book collection really benefits from the merge. The usual popular introductions to non-fiction fields are all there, courtesy of the public library, and backed up with several large research collections if you're tempted to pursue any in more detail. I love deep, wide archives like this.
The selection gets more and more ethereal as you clamber up the seven floors. There's a browsing section on the ground floor, laid out like a bookstore, and at the very top, there are piles of SJSU theses, empty group study rooms and that hay-and-dust smell of old, hardbound stacks.
But my favourite moment was when Quinn and I were snooping around the pop fiction section. Someone leant on the "Mystery" bookshelf...

Danny O'Brien's Oblomovka Aug 8 2003

Does anyone out there know what a haiku is?

Why yes, yes, we learned it in school. It's a Japanese poetic form consisting of seventeen syllables, divided into three lines of five, seven and five syllables.

Wrong, fool, it's a Japanese poetic form consisting of seventeen Japanese syllables, etc, etc, etc. What you learned about in school was a completely pointless exercise in attempting to transfer a verse form which makes sense in its native language into a language in which it doesn't make sense. Japanese doesn't have word stresses in the way in which English does, and all the words in in vowels, so the concepts of rhythmic metre and rhyme are pretty alien. Conversely, Japanese syllables are well-defined and unalterable, while English ones are often ambiguous and elided. Furthermore, I read on the internet that classical Japanese haiku actually have (rather like the Welsh englyn) many other restrictions on their form, so it is actually quite difficult to compose one which sticks rigidly to the rules. In English, the answer to the question "can you compose a haiku?" is basically the answer to the question "can you count?"

the eloquently irascible and quasi-polymathic D-squared Digest
link from Busy Busy Busy, home of fine shortening

{People are outraged because they care, Mencken cared, that's why he wrote about the things he despised, because they assaulted the things he didn't.}

The award-winning actor and tap-dancer Gregory Hines, best known for his roles in The Cotton Club and Will and Grace, has died at the age of 57.

Hines, who was known as the greatest tap dancer of his generation, died of cancer on Saturday.

Guardian UK August 11 2003

Kuwabata

Is Apu-chan's mother a refrigerator?
Ushioda Tokuko

Otto Tootsi Plohound

link dervala

Puck-Hyah-Toot