after noticing my giant bargain tub contained a blend from Canadian, Chinese & Argentinian bees I hunted down this article on globalisation & Honey...

"It started coming in a year or so ago," Boynton said. "It's got a yellowish cast, and it's a little thicker than real honey, and it doesn't taste like regular honey either. We're developing a good, reliable test for it with a research institute in Oregon. The thing about this stuff is that it's incredibly cheap. A lot of packers deny it, but I imagine it could be used quite widely in the American food industry instead of the real thing."

Burnaby trees from Chris Brayshaw

fine tribute to the late tenor Giuseppe Di Stefano

YouTube - Giuseppe di Stefano sings "Nessun dorma" from Turandot

pretty cool Disney Album Link Page!

thanks Electric Mud

Join Peter Culley and George Stanley for a launch & reading
to celebrate publication of their new books

Vancouver: A Poem
by George Stanley

The Age of Briggs & Stratton
by Peter Culley


WHEN: Friday, April 25, 7 PM
WHERE: Pulpfiction | 2422 Main Street, just south of Broadway
Free admission

For more information about the launch, call 604.738-9429, or look here:
http://newstarbooks.com/event.asp



This is a BC Book & Magazine Week event.

Local trees

The Unknown Music of Birds

"The essence and the theoretical significance of the discovery of true animal (avian) music have been explained in detail and illustrated with numerous slowed down bird vocalizations in the author's book "The origin and the three realms of music - on the levels of pre-life, animal, and human existence", published in Hungarian in 1982 ... In making the choice of sound material for the record the author was guided not so much by the beauty of the vocalizations but by the beauty and the importance of the recognition of the Unknown..."

Local trees

Japanese Monster Trees

essay on the Trailer Park Boys

"The anti-social, indeed violent nature of TPB and its characters may be interpreted as a typically Canadian reaction to American cultural hegemony. It is not active, but rather, an indirect attempt to assert a unique cultural manifestation into the marketplace historically dominated by American corporatists and their generic products. Recently, Canada has given the undiplomatic finger to our American cousins through our relaxed marijuana laws, and the legalization of same-sex unions, despite repeated political pressure from Conservative government representatives. Let us observe that the themes of the show include habitual criminality, addiction and homosexuality, garnished with a vernacular of profanity; themes that brashly oppose all that are traditionally deemed appropriate for American audiences. It may be argued that the popularity of TPB both domestically and internationally negates the failure of the characters themselves. In essence, our industry has emerged triumphant in the marketplace while resting on the shoulders of hosers.

In addition to its inverted family value system, TPB has comparatively far less interest in the subversion of cinematic representation by corporate interests. All of the commodities consumed on-screen are deliberately obscured, signaling the show’s non-alignment with a policy of product placement exercised by many of its American contemporaries. There is a growing disparity between the lifestyle portrayed on television (i.e. Friends, The Sopranos, Sex and the City) and the lifestyle affordable to the average viewer. But TPB resists this trend; although the characters are consumers, their products of choice are chiefly illegal, or at least condemnable by U.S. production standards. In terms of the representation of bodily features, Ricky, Julian and Bubbles truly personify a more realistic physicality than the flawless skin, freshly cut hair and chiseled abdominal sections of Joey and Ross. TPB represents a departure from the culture of commodity fetish endorsed by mainstream television series, making it virtually the only counter-commodity on the dial..."

Terrorphobia

"Key to this dynamic is that the public apparently continues to remain unimpressed by several inconvenient facts. One such fact is that there have been no al-Qaeda attacks whatsoever in the United States since 2001. A second is that no true al-Qaeda cell (or scarcely anybody who might even be deemed to have a “connection” to the diabolical group) has been unearthed in this country. A third is that the homegrown “plotters” who have been apprehended, while perhaps potentially somewhat dangerous at least in a few cases, have mostly been either flaky or almost absurdly incompetent.

Beyond these facts are a few comparisons that ought to arrest attention. One is that the total number of people killed worldwide by genuine al-Qaeda types and assorted wannabes outside of war zones since 9/11 averages about 300 per year. That is certainly 300 a year too many, but that number is smaller than the yearly number of bathtub drownings in the United States. Moreover, unless the terrorists are able somehow massively to increase their capacities, the likelihood that a person living outside a war zone will perish at the hands of an international terrorist over an eighty-year period is about one in 80,000. By comparison, an American’s chance of dying in an auto accident over the same time interval is one in eighty.

Despite these facts, polls since 2001 do not demonstrate all that much of a decline in the percentage of the American public anticipating another terrorist attack, or expressing fear that they themselves might become a victim of it. The public has chosen to wallow in a false sense of insecurity, and it apparently plans to keep on doing so. Accordingly, it will presumably continue to demand that its leaders defer to its insecurities, and will uncritically approve as huge amounts of money are shelled out in a quixotic and mostly symbolic effort to assuage those insecurities..."

don't miss your chance to grab the immortal 1986 EP Against the Glass by Expo-marring Slow, a steaming slab of snotty postpunk that gives a glimpse of what grunge might have sounded like if it had come from Vancouver...

"Slow are most famous for a controversial incident which both marred the Expo 86 festivities and effectively ended the band's career. On the opening night of the Festival of Independent Recording Artists, several people who were not attending the concert wandered into the pavilion, witnessed the band's outrageous live show, and rushed out to complain to Expo management. The officials turned off the power, ending the band's set. Anselmi expressed his displeasure by mooning the audience, and Hamm quickly followed suit, also exposing himself frontally.

The band were detained by the Vancouver police, who considered charging them with indecent exposure. Expo officials initially cancelled the evening's concert, citing security concerns.

Some of the fans in attendance got onstage and refused to leave the venue, others began to riot, and yet another group stormed BCTV's onsite studios, where they protested the concert's cancellation so loudly and persistently that the station had to pull its 11:00 p.m. newscast.

The following day, Expo announced the cancellation of the whole concert festival..."

terrific Ange Mlinko on National Poetry Month...

"...elitism is a laughable charge to levy against an art that doesn't require tickets or a premium cable subscription..."

Jacques Tourneur's not-seen-by-me location shot (by Lucien Ballard!) Berlin Express with Robert Ryan & Merle Oberon, on at 1930hrs, part of TCM's evening of train movies...

relevant chapter from Chris Fujiwara's Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall...

a lovely memoir of Jonathan Williams in England...

"As the car pulled off I felt that the end of some essential organ in my body had been attached to their bumper and was slowly, smoothly unspooling. I didn’t know who I was, nor where; with what was left to wave goodbye or with what had been drawn out, away, and gathered up, like wool, by what had happened. Thirty-six hours later, having made up my mind that I could never just go on with my life as it was, which now seemed as false and hollow as I’d become, I was on the road for Dentdale..."

Police State UK--Was it like this for the Irish?

"Through a myriad other routes Britain attempts to evade internationally recognised legal restraints. Several years ago Tony Blair attempted to deport an Egyptian human rights lawyer who had been the victim of truly terrible torture in his own country: Blair argued that an assurance from Egypt of the man’s safety would suffice. Unusually, during a court challenge to the legality of his detention, private memoranda between Blair and the Home Office were made public. Across a note from the Home Office expressing concern that even hard assurances given by Egypt were unlikely to provide real protection against torture and execution, Blair had scribbled: ‘Get them back.’ Beside the passage about the assurances he wrote: ‘This is a bit much. Why do we need all these things?’ The man succeeded in his court challenge, but today, on the basis of secret information provided by Egypt, he is the subject of a UN Assets Freezing Order managed by the Treasury. He has no assets, no income and no work, and can be given neither money nor ‘benefit’ without a licence. ‘Benefit’ includes eating the meals his wife cooks. She requires a licence to cook them, and is obliged to account for every penny spent by the household. She speaks little English and is disabled, so is compelled to pass the obligation onto their children, who have to submit monthly accounts to the Treasury of every apple bought from the market, every bus fare to school. Failure to do so constitutes a criminal and imprisonable offence. A few weeks ago in the House of Lords, Lord Hoffman expressed horror at ‘the meanness and squalor’ of a regime ‘that monitored who had what for breakfast’. The number of such cases now multiplies daily. They have nothing at all to do with national security, they only succeed, as they are intended to, in sapping morale; they have everything to do with reinforcing the growing belief of the suspect community that it is expected to eradicate its opinions, its identity and many of the core precepts of its religion..."

Trabant Man

"A Derbyshire man who has spent almost 20 years collecting East German Trabant cars has lost his final appeal against an order to remove them...

...Dismissing the appeal, Lord Justice Keene said: "The reality here is that he was, to a large extent, the author of his own misfortune."

farewell Charlton Heston--the last actor who could play iconic figures without the need for cheap irony--try and think of any actor currently working who could do Moses, El Cid & the last man on earth, twice...

happy birthday Bette Davis

celebrate her centenary at TURNER CLASSIC MOVIES

The establishment media in a nutshell

"Every day, it becomes more difficult to blame George Bush, Dick Cheney and comrades for their seven years (and counting) of crimes, corruption and destruction of our political values. Think about it this way: if you were a high government official and watched as -- all in a couple of weeks time -- it is revealed, right out in the open, that you suspended the Fourth Amendment, authorized torture, proclaimed yourself empowered to break the law, and sent the nation's top law enforcement officer to lie blatantly about how and why the 9/11 attacks happened so that you could acquire still more unchecked spying power and get rid of lawsuits that would expose what you did, and the political press in this country basically ignored all of that and blathered on about Obama's bowling score and how he eats chocolate, wouldn't you also conclude that you could do anything you want, without limits, and know there will be no consequences? What would be the incentive to stop doing all of that?"

John Fahey - March! For Martin Luther King

Letter From A Birmingham Jail

"One may well ask, "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer is found in the fact that there are two types of laws: there are just laws, and there are unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "An unjust law is no law at all."

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine when a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law, or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust..."

Local trees

Gouge and Bite

"Eye gouging represented neither the "real" human animal emerging on the frontier, nor nature acting through man in a Darwinian struggle for survival, nor anarchic disorder and communal breakdown. Rather, rough-and-tumble fighting was ritualized behavior – a product of specific cultural assumptions. Men drink together, tongues loosen, a simmering old rivalry begins to boil; insult is given, offense taken, ritual boasts commence; the fight begins, mettle is tested, blood redeems honor, and equilibrium is restored. Eye gouging was the poor and middling whites’ own version of a historical southern tendency to consider personal violence socially useful – indeed, ethically essential..."

William Hazlitt "The Fight" 1822

"From this time forward the event became more certain every round; and about the twelfth it seemed as if it must have been over. Hickman generally stood with his back to me; but in the scuffle, he had changed positions, and Neate just then made a tremendous lunge at him, and hit him full in the face. It was doubtful whether he would fall backwards or forwards; he hung suspended for about a second or two, and then fell back, throwing his hands in the air, and with his face lifted up to the sky. I never saw anything more terrific than his aspect just before he fell. All traces of life, of natural expression, were gone from him. His face was like a human skull, a death's head, spouting blood. The eyes were filled with blood, the nose streamed with blood, the mouth gaped blood. He was not like an actual man, but like a preternatural, spectral appearance, or like one of the figures in Dante's "Inferno." Yet he fought on after this for several rounds, still striking the first desperate blow, and Neate standing on the defensive, and using the same cautious guard to the last, as if he had still all his work to do; and it was not till the Gas-man was so stunned in the seventeenth or eighteenth round, that his senses forsook him, and he could not come to time, that the battle was declared over. Ye who despise the FANCY, do something to show as much pluck, or as much self-possession as this, before you assume a superiority which you have never given a single proof of by any one action in the whole course of your lives!"

priceless YouTube - LISA STANSFIELD (Live) - All Around The World from "Live at the Apollo" in 1990...

"Magnolia After Midnight" from Anodyne

JJ Cale:--"Magnolia" (awesome Poco version) "After Midnight"

I have fond if very ancient memories of this 1970 spaghetti western The Five Man Army which it turns out MIGHT have been directed by Dario Argento--anyway its on TCM at 2300 Pacific. What promises entertainment more than the presence of Bud Spencer??