Local trees

Sagittarius - My World Fell Down

YouTube - The Shmenges - The Last Polka (Part 1)

album of the year: Fire In My Bones

The majority of this music has never been reissued on CD, or in any other form (most tracks were originally released on regional independent labels). Most post-WWII compilations of African-American gospel music naturally concentrate on the astounding quartet and solo vocalist sounds made during the music’s Golden Age. Fire In My Bones attempts to address and collect more neglected sounds from that era (and on to the present day). Dozens of traditions are represented. Some go back hundreds of years while others seem to have been arrived at as soon as the tape began to roll. Field recordings and studio tracks are all mashed together, with solo performances next to congregational recordings, hellfire sermons next to afterlife laments. Leon Pinson, Elder & Sister Brinson & the Brinson Brothers, Grant & Ella, Straight Street Holiness Group, Theotis Taylor, Brother & Sister W B Grate—these artists will now be just a little less obscure...

Tompkins Square Records

nice article on actor Richard Farnsworth & David Lynch's great Straight Story--

Focusing on people relegated to the fringes of American society, the challenge in The Straight Story for the filmmakers and the viewer is to listen carefully, adapting our frenetic pace to the seemingly bland but hypnotic patterns of this film. Seeing this movie can be one of those cinematic experiences that stays with you for days after, maybe even changing the viewer for the better. Filmed in a glorious Autumn, the bucolic aspects of this movie, do not mask the darkness that is there. Straight’s family is marked by estrangement, poverty, a sorrow and injustice related to an incident that occurred when a daughter’s children are removed from her care following a tragic fire. Beneath the understanding way that strangers approach and listen to Alvin’s cockamamie reasons for traveling in such a hazardous fashion, there is an awareness of the danger he faces and the implicit possibility that one of the strangers might harm him or try to have him committed to a nursing home against his will. Those things happen in this world, but, as this movie makes clear, sometimes generosity, bemusement, genuine curiosity and respect survive too...

on TCM tonight: Guest Programmer: Neko Case

A Woody Allen fan, Case chooses Radio Days (1987) as her favorite Allen film with its “celebration of the entertainment industry.” Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd (1957) remains “shocking” to her in its satire of the corruptive power of television. She admires Orson Welles (“a force of nature”) and Joseph Cot- ten (“the foxy Everyman”) in Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949). The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945) casts a spell on her with its Oscar Wilde dialogue and appeal to “art-history nerds.” A bonus in Case’s selections is a collection of Dogville shorts from the 1930s...

Tsawawssen Ferry Terminal 0730

Norman Rockwell’s Photo Realism

Norman Rockwell’s rosy illustrations of small town American life looked so photographic because his method was to copy photographs that he conceived and meticulously directed, working with various photographers and using friends and neighbors as his models...

The Great Scrapple Correspondence of 1872

In the winter of 1872, the Letters page of The New York Times was briefly invaded by scrapple.

It all started with one reader’s paean to his favorite breakfast food. Calling himself “EPICURE,” he pronounced the dish—a Spam-like slab of cornmeal and pig parts—both delicious and inexpensive. If anyone was interested, he continued, he’d be delighted to share his good lady’s recipe...

Local trees & c

Prison Rape as Policy

America’s prison-industrial complex, like the health-insurance industry, is not designed to solve the problem it is ostensibly intended to address. The healthcare industry is a financial turnstile providing employment and profits to insurance companies, hospitals, doctors, pharmaceutical companies and other vendors; patient health is a means to an end. Similarly, prisons are jobs programs and tax boons to localities starving for revenue; prisoner rehabilitation is rarely in the equation.

Prisons are hellholes. Prison literature and biographical reflections, from Dickens or Solzhenitsyn, Malcolm X or Mumia Abu-Jamal, are testaments to truth telling and courage, not favorable prison conditions. As a document, the NPREC report reads like a research backgrounder for a futurist horror film. It paints a truly gruesome portrait of America’s prison conditions. Sadly, the report’s cast of characters does not include a Cagney of “Public Enemy” or a George Jackson at San Quentin or a Frank “Big Black” Smith at Attica. Without mass social unrest outside, the upheaval of the ’30s and the ‘70s, the culture inside the prison is one of victims and predators, not revolutionaries...

Canada's image lies in tatters. It is now to climate what Japan is to whaling | George Monbiot

Until now I believed that the nation that has done most to sabotage a new climate change agreement was the United States. I was wrong. The real villain is Canada. Unless we can stop it, the harm done by Canada in December 2009 will outweigh a century of good works.

In 2006 the new Canadian government announced it was abandoning its targets to cut greenhouse gases under the Kyoto protocol. No other country that had ratified the treaty has done this. Canada was meant to have cut emissions by 6% between 1990 and 2012. Instead they have already risen by 26%.

It is now clear that Canada will refuse to be sanctioned for abandoning its legal obligations. The Kyoto protocol can be enforced only through goodwill: countries must agree to accept punitive future obligations if they miss their current targets. But the future cut Canada has volunteered is smaller than that of any other rich nation. Never mind special measures; it won't accept even an equal share. The Canadian government is testing the international process to destruction and finding that it breaks all too easily. By demonstrating that climate sanctions aren't worth the paper they're written on, it threatens to render any treaty struck at Copenhagen void...

Local trees & c.

YouTube - History Of House Music Prt 1

Glenn Greenwald on Tom Friedman

Tom Friedman can declare with a straight face that "anyone who shoots up innocent people is ... mentally imbalanced" without seeing how clearly that applies to himself and those who think like he does. It's that self-absorbed disconnect -- seeing Hasan's murder of American soldiers as an act of consummate evil and sickness while refusing to see our own acts in a similar light -- that shapes most of our warped political discourse. And note the morality on display here: Hasan attacks soldiers on a military base of a country that has spent the last decade screaming to the world that "we're at war!!," and that's a deranged and evil act, while Friedman cheers for an unprovoked war that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians and displaced millions more -- all justified by sick power fantasies, lame Mafia dialogue, and cravings more appropriate for a porno film than a civilized foreign policy -- and he's the arbiter of Western reason and sanity...

two biker classics on on TCM tonight....Psychomania followed by

Electra Glide in Blue

my cousin's excellent clothing & textile company:



You are cordially invited to attend the upcoming Sans Soucie
studio sale just in time for Christmas!!!

We are clearing out our studio to make room for completely new work so there will be great deals available to one and all!!!

Most stock ( clothing and accessories) will be available at wholesale prices, which means 50% off the retail price as well as there will be an addition to our sale this year that has never seen before.....which we will keep as a surprise!!!

Please come and join us for a cup of tea and a nibble or two and see what treasures you might find!  We will also have some new work on display that has been not seen anywhere else yet!

If you would like to attend please RSVP at info@sanssoucie.ca or call 604.716.1531 to let us know which date you may attend.

If you are unable to attend any of the dates below please contact us to arrange an alternative time to visit the studio.  For those folks who are not in Vancouver we will have work online available at studio sale prices. 

Please feel free to forward this message to anyone who you might think would like to attend!

We hope to see you this Holiday Season!

Best,

All of us at Sans Soucie


Where:

            123 E. Hastings (main floor, it is gated so please ring the doorbell to gain entrance)

When:

            Saturday Dec 5th 12-6pm

          Saturday Dec 12th 12-6pm


Pay Parking available on the south side of the street of Hastings across the street form the studio and on Columbia St.  We are directly on the bus route, if you need directions please let us know.

Torture: The greased pig of our perilous existence

Canada’s military is deeply integrated into that of the US. Since the 2004 torture scandal at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison it is well known the US has been practicing torture. Only the utterly naïve would be believe that Canada’s military could avoid being complicit in torture and the breaking of international law in this close and utterly compliant relationship. It now remains to be seen how many other NATO countries serving there are also complicit in torture. The British army for one is embroiled in a series of torture accusations dating back to the Iraq war.



As long as this not so cuddly little pig has the run of the house all of us get smeared and the blame does not lie totally with our leaders. We too are refusing to wrestle this not so cuddly little pig as we drift toward being torture tolerant societies. Stark testimony to this is not only our lack of outrage to torture connected to the less than authentic war on terror but also domestic torture. Domestic torture comes in the form of our apparent tolerance for the use of the tasers by our police forces. Both the UN and Amnesty International consider the taser a form of torture. It was never intended as a lethal weapon, but it now has a proven lethality, and a growing list of victims...

local trees & c.

A Quote and a Marvellous Mix: Theo Parrish – Straight No Chaser!

Love of the music should be driving force of any producer, performer or dj. Everything else stems from that core, that love. With that love, sampling can become a tribute, an expansion on ideas long forgotten, reconstruction, collage. Using this same understanding openly & respectfully, can turn djing into spiritual participation. It can turn a few hours of selection into essential history. Necessary listening through movement...

1. Jaco Pastorius – ‘Portrait of Tracy’ (Sony)
2. Hanna – ‘Hanna’s Waltz’ (?)
3. Blackbyrds – ‘Mother/Son Talk’ (Fantasy)
4. Common – ‘It’s Your World’ (Good Music)
5. Jean Luc Ponty – ‘Between you and Me’ (Atlantic)
6. Ojeda Penn – ‘Happy People’ ((?)
7. Al Jarreau – ‘Take Five’ (Warner/WEA)
8. The Crusaders – ‘Chain Reaction’ (MCA)
9. Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers – ‘Cubano Chant’ (Philips)
10. Herbie Hancock – ‘Sleeping Giant’ (WEA)
11. Herbie Hancock with Bill Laswell Feat Chaka Khan – ‘The Essence’ (Transparent)
12. Miles Davis – ‘Ife” (Sony)
13. Lenny White – ‘Venusian Summer Suite’ (Wounded Bird)
14. Haki Madhabuti & Nation – ‘Medasi’ (Third World)
15. Theo Parrish – ‘Love is War for Miles’ (Peacefrog)
16. The Rebirth – ‘This Journey In’ (Cajmere Sounds)
17. Fertile Ground – ‘Yellow Daisies’ (Blackout Studios)
18. Dee Felice Trio – ‘The Cricket Sing’ (?)
19. Hanna – ‘Laughin’ (?)
20. Ronnie Laws – ‘Tidal Wave’ (Blue Note)
21. The Heath Bros – ‘Smilin’ Billy Suite’ (Strata East)
22. Georgia Anne Muldrow – ‘One For the Funk (Stones Throw)