The Friends of Peter Culley

The puffer:

The skink:

And the manatee:

from Parkway (2013)

A poem by Peter Culley, taken from the kswnet.org site. (I added possessives to the first line in the first stanza and the fifth line in the second stanza; changed a pluralized proper noun to a singular possessive in the first line of the third; and separated "monitor" and "the" in the third as well.) The poem appears in Pete's latest collection, Parkway (New Star, 2013), the third of three books in his "Hammertown" series.

A POEM FOR THE SEATTLE POETS

Blue from Player's Plain
Pharoah & Coltrane
hopped-up hummingbirds
raging on raw honey, oysters &
barnacle-scraping soul-encounters
buzz the pre-dawn Lynnwood rain

Blue from Winslow Homer
or someone with no home to go to
he wet his finger west
& traces out the weather week
his weakest hunch a sheriff's gut 
thrust out for the informer 

Blue Six's Music & Wine
was a song we heard all the time
before the macrobiotic encounter
split the silver monitor the crashing
symptoms came complete 
with waves of Om on yellow gull feet

Blue moons a passenger with no ID
& nothing solid in the dictionary
no per diem, no booking fee, 
no very convincing reason to be
alone in swollen solidarity with
the puffer, the skink & the manatee

Publications

Last night I attended the launch of three book projects, two of glue and paper (an Isabelle Pauwels monograph and Phaidon Press's Art Cities of the Future), the other online (Flakey: the Early Artworks of Glenn Lewis). Although held at The Apartment, the publications were generated by Presentation House Gallery (the Art Cities "Vancouver" entry was written by PHG director Reid Shier).

The night before saw launches of literary works by two authors I am social with, Thea Bowering and Peter Culley. The launches where a block apart -- at exactly the same time. The lack of co-ordination bothered me, so I took it out on the authors and allowed my annual late lunch with visiting writer Oana Avasilichioaei to extend into the evening.

Yesterday morning I received in the mail the latest issue of The Capilano Review, which carries within it a section devoted to my A Postcard from Victoria exhibition (annotated video grabs, installation shots and my essay). Very happy with how this section turned out, as I always am when I publish with this journal.

As for tonight, another launch, this one at Or Gallery: Jesse Birch's Ginger Goodwin Way (Publication Studio, 2013) and a 12" vinyl record called Night Shift by Brady Cranfield and Jamie Hilder. I will be talking about/reading from my contribution to Ginger Goodwin Way, so if you are entertaining friends from out of town, and you cannot decide what to do, I understand.

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Village Sunday (1960)

A documentary on Greenwich Village that tells us early on (0:40) who was kicking around prior to the arrival of the European documentary tradition.

Killer Guitars

The electric

and the acoustic

Christine

Among the highlights of our Candahar program at the 2010 Winter Olympics was a performance by Christine, a band that includes visual artist Kevin Schmidt.

The video above, like the video in yesterday's post, shows the relationship between popular music and industrial machinery -- in this case, Christine performing a song in their basement studio to the razing of the house next door, something the Olympics, as an agent of gentrification, had a hand in.