Welcome To The Security State Of North America

"1) As FISA currently stands, U.S. security agencies can monitor phone calls, emails and whatnot outside of the U.S. without the need of warrants - this of course, includes Canada;

2) Similarly, current Canadian laws do not require that Canadian security agencies obtain court approved warrants in order to monitor phone calls, emails and whatnot outside of Canada - which includes, of course, the U.S.;

3) If anything, the Maher Arar affair has shown to which extent American and Canadian security agencies have been freely sharing information compiled into databases for quite some time now;

and 4) the Security and Prosperity Partneship of North America (SPPNA) aims at full integration/cooperation of security measures, police activities, anti-terrorism policies, and even use of armed forces domestically - including, of course, the complete sharing of intelligence databases, such as no fly lists, private citizen files, private citizen informations, etc. And by the way: the establishment of the SPPNA keeps on advancing slowly but surely ..."

from PC: Burnaby Youth Correctional Centre trees

a day late--YouTube - Liz Phair - Cinco de Mayo (1994)

Zombie Bush

"It's a beautiful place," the president discloses. "In the spring, the flowers are fantastic. In the fall, the -- it's just such a -- kind of a place that's so fresh. In the winter, of course, it's got a lot of snow. [Laughter.] Summer is real hot, but it's -- we love it out here. It's beautiful."

Mark E. Smith has written his memoirs--

"Despite the practised snarl of his publicity shots and a willingness to conform to curmudgeonly stereotype, Smith is no nihilist; far from it. He sings a song of common sense, decency, loyalty to your family and community. He writes that he “doesn't deliberate”, and this has meant that his art and vision has remained steadfast for 30 years. He seems to have understood, almost from The Fall's first practice, that the values a working-class background instils: graft, self-belief and honesty, are armoury enough to withstand any condescension or chicanery..."

Nanaimo's Harmac pulp mill, for many years (though not recently) the cornerstone of the local economy, seems to be on its last legs...

Anthony Mann's glorious The Fall of the Roman Empire--remade as the much inferior "Gladiator"-- is finally out on DVD...

just before toddling off to bed last night watched a bit of the 1943 Ann Miller 'B' musical "Reveille for Beverley", a great favorite of Dad's, full of wartime jokes about ration cards & saving your grease, just long enough to see Count Basie do One O'Clock Jump and Bob Crosby (with Ray Bauduc & Bob Haggart) perform Big Noise From Winnetka, whose awesome bass/drums/whistiling duet was memorably used in "Raging Bull"...

Local trees

my giant new book of poems The Age of Briggs & Stratton is now available from Amazon...

my friend Weldon Hunter is reading in NYC with Mike Hauser at Zinc Bar (90 W Houston) on Sunday at 700--

a jazz version of Homer's Odyssey...

review of Tom McCarthy's 'Tintin and the Secret of Literature'--his novel "Remainder" is well worth seeking out--

"McCarthy is telling us less about, say, what literature is than what it isn't. We come to a novel expecting it to tell us everything that it can, to be replete. McCarthy lifts the rug to show us that the more a story tells us, the more it hides. Channeling Barthes, McCarthy characterizes Tintin -- whose exploits so often involve misread missives, misunderstood map coordinates, misconstruction of another character's language -- as standing "guardian . . . at the heart of a noise." In all his adventures around the globe, Tintin is constantly trying to decode clues he's been given, constantly finding himself mired in perils, from which he inevitably escapes, only to compulsively reboot the fiendish cycle again and again. All his labors turn out to be frustratingly like those of Sisyphus -- unending. Whenever he figures out a particular enigma, it only unleashes more enigmas, sending him off on yet another quest. For McCarthy, as for Barthes, this is the "secret" of literature..."

(pssst!)