Saturday, February 28, 2009


The Wisdom of the Discount Rack
It's one of those covers where I had trouble matching the characters with the illustration and, after a bit, gave up because I didn't want them to look like that in my mind...


it's a Jackie de Shannon kind of day around the manse...

(above playing Monopoly with George Harrison in '64)

Friday, February 27, 2009


Sita Sings the Blues
Sita is a goddess separated from her beloved Lord and husband Rama. Nina is an animator whose husband moves to India, then dumps her by e-mail. Three hilarious shadow puppets narrate both ancient tragedy and modern comedy in this beautifully animated interpretation of the Indian epic Ramayana. Set to the 1920’s jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw, Sita Sings the Blues earns its tagline as "The Greatest Break-Up Story Ever Told".







Thursday, February 26, 2009

from "National Geographic"-- Alberta Tar Sands

Nowhere on Earth is more earth being moved these days than in the Athabasca Valley. To extract each barrel of oil from a surface mine,
the industry must first cut down the forest, then remove an average of two tons of peat and dirt that lie above the oil sands layer, then two
tons of the sand itself. It must heat several barrels of water to strip the bitumen from the sand and upgrade it, and afterward it discharges
contaminated water into tailings ponds like the one near Mildred Lake. They now cover around 50 square miles. Last April some 500 migrating ducks mistook one of those ponds, at a newer Syncrude mine north of Fort McKay, for a hospitable stopover, landed on its oily surface, and died...




events in Toronto & Portland





Stan Persky on George Stanley's 'Vancouver: A Poem'
My point is: if you're a writer in Vancouver, there's an obvious temptation to figure out the enigma of a city that's a cross between a multi-ethnic Floating World Shangri-La and a shabby netherworld of boarded-up storefronts, discarded heroin needles, and basket-carts of the homeless rattling through the back lanes. It might be interesting to know how a poet sees this West Coast patchwork...


(cover & bottom photo by Roy Arden)

Wednesday, February 25, 2009




The Indian Railway King
Only Bollywood does more to unite India than its railways. The statistics beggar belief: every year, Indians take 5.4 billion train trips, 7 million per day in suburban Mumbai alone. New Delhi Station sees daily transit of 350,000 passengers, which is roughly five times more than New York’s LaGuardia Airport, and enough to make Grand Central look like Mayberry Junction. The railways’ total track mileage rivals the length of the entire U.S. Interstate Highway system, even though the United States is three times the size of India. Among human resource problems, the railways of India are an Everest. Its employees outnumber Wal-Mart’s by a figure comparable to the population of Pittsburgh. The world’s only larger employer is the People’s Liberation Army of China...

Tuesday, February 24, 2009


Charlie sez: spring is just round the corner, really, so why not celebrate by buying my grampy's generally acclaimed book of poems The Age of Briggs & Stratton
or, if awesome pictures & poignant anecdotes are your bag why not try
To the Dogs







Local trees


Coleridge & Turner
Old art becomes impenetrable (which is not to say, unenjoyable) when we no longer have the will or the knowledge to re-create the mindset of its makers and audience. The Goddess of Discord hangs high up (and abominably lit) in the Turner gallery of Tate Britain. The figures are hard to read, the colour dim. But mental distance is the real difficulty. The dragon high on the mountainous horizons that defends the Garden of the Hesperides looks absurdly like a huge crocodile – Ruskin estimated its length at about three-quarters of a mile. Thinking geology while retelling mythology, he also points out that the scaly wrinkles of its back are a very good representation of the broken surface of a glacier...

Monday, February 23, 2009


The man who invented the doner kebab has died
Kebab meat, consisiting of roast lamb and spices, had traditionally been served with rice but in a moment of inspiration Mr Aygun saw that the future lay in putting the meat inside a pitta bread.

That allowed customers who had been drinking to wander off into the night with their food and eat it as they stumbled home.

Mr Aygun once said: "I thought how much easier it would be if they could take their food with them..."

CSA presents:

Drawings: 2002-2007
Alison Yip

Curated by Chrisopher Brayshaw and Adam Harrison


February 21 - March 20, 2009

Opening Friday, Feburary 20th 6 - 9 p.m.

Alison Yip's new exhibition at CSA Space records her ongoing engagement with the act of drawing. Culled from a much larger image archive, the drawings on display speak to Yip's careful observation of the world around her, the people, animals, and objects occupying it, and her sensitivity to the subtleties of dress and gesture that define her human subjects.

Alison Yip is represented by Monte Clark Gallery, Vancouver.


CSA Space
#5 - 2414 Main St., Vancouver, BC, V5T 3E2
www.csaspace.ca | info@csaspace.ca


splinter in your eye--a wonderful drawing & photography blog--

"The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying glass."
— Theodore W. Adorno


Sunday, February 22, 2009










some Hollywood trees from a recent visit by Pete Cummings...