farewell John Phillip Law (on right)

Thirty Tables of Contents

Turner-prize winning artist Steve McQueen's film about Bobby Sands opens at Cannes...

"I'm not interested in left or right [wing politics]. I am interested in what happens to people in those kind of conditions. It is about the smell, the atmosphere, the texture of those events; about the things between the words in history books. These are things that have to be shown rather than written about."

Local trees, black slug, shrew

I warmly recommend the 2002 "To Be and to Have" a documentary set in a small school in the French countryside--unmissable for anybody connected with children or education...

farewell Robert Rauschenberg

The Godfather & foreign policy--

Tom Hagen, the liberal institutionalist: “We oughta hear what they have to say.”

Sonny, the neocon: “No, no more. Not this time, consigliere; no more meetings, no more discussions, no more Sollozzo tricks. . . . And do me a favor: no more advice on how to patch things up—just help me win alright?”

Ramp season is almost over...

a few ramp festivals left for devotees of this Smoky Mountain delicacy...

Bird-watcher

"Not long ago, I listened to him play a recording of “Okiedoke,” a tune that Parker recorded in 1949 with Machito and His Afro-Cuban Orchestra. Schaap, in his pontifical baritone, first provided routine detail on the session and Parker’s interest (via Dizzy Gillespie) in Latin jazz, and then, like a car hitting a patch of black ice, he veered off into a riff of many minutes’ duration on the pronunciation and meaning of the title—of “Okiedoke.” Was it “okey-doke” or was it, rather, “ ‘okey-dokey,’ as it is sometimes articulated”? What meaning did this innocent-seeming entry in the American lexicon have for Bird? And how precisely was the phrase used and understood in the black precincts of Kansas City, where Parker grew up? Declaring a “great interest in this issue,” Schaap then informed us that Arthur Taylor, a drummer of distinction “and a Bird associate,” had “stated that Parker used ‘okeydokey’ as an affirmative and ‘okeydoke’ as a negative.” And yet one of Parker’s ex-wives had averred otherwise, saying that Parker used “okeydoke” and “okeydokey” interchangeably. (At this point, I wondered, not for the first time, where, if anywhere, Schaap was going with this.) Then Schaap introduced into evidence a “rare recording of Bird’s voice,” in which Parker is captured joshing around onstage with a disk jockey of the forties and fifties named Sid Torin, better known as Symphony Sid. After a bit of chatter, Sid instructs Parker to play another number: “Blow, dad, go!"

Okeydoke, says Bird..."

thanks LB for this bit of Shakey news--Neil Young gets new honor -- his own spider

An East Carolina University biologist, Jason Bond, discovered a new species of trapdoor spider and opted to call the arachnid after his favorite musician, Canadian Neil Young, naming it Myrmekiaphila neilyoungi.

"There are rather strict rules about how you name new species," Bond said in a statement.

"As long as these rules are followed you can give a new species just about any name you please. With regards to Neil Young, I really enjoy his music and have had a great appreciation of him as an activist for peace and justice."

another gem--YouTube - Karen Dalton, It Hurts Me Too

this'll wake you up--Rahsaan Roland Kirk - Volunteered Slavery

also: a friend to poets--

"She got up and did a really dumb poem about her cat. It was really out of place, but the band tried to do something behind it. Some guy in the audience starting insulting her with half-sexist, half-racist hippie-dip comments. Rahsaan suddenly stopped the band and said, 'You can think whatever you want to about this lady's poem. But she's doin' somethin'! What can you do brother? You got an instrument? Bring it up here and play it! Can you sing? Come on up here and sing. Can you tell a joke? Come on up and tell one. Can you fight? Then come on up here and box with me!!!"

Local trees

Charlie sez: buy my Gumpy's new book of poems The Age of Briggs & Stratton today!

Fisk on T.E. Lawrence

"The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour," he wrote. "They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiqués are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows . . . We are today not far from a disaster."

from Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition by Robert Pogue Harrison--

"There is no doubt that Meneleus would opt for Elysium over Hades—any of us would—but would he gladly give up his worldly life prematurely for that garden existence? It seems not. Why? Because earthly paradises like Dilmun and Elysium offer ease and perpetual spring at the cost of an absolute isolation from the world of mortals—isolation from friends, family, city, and the ongoing story of human action and endeavor. Exile from both the private and public spheres of human interaction is a sorry condition, especially for a polis-loving people like the Greeks. It deprives one of both the cares and the consolations of mortal life, to which most of us are more attached than we may ever suspect. To go on living in such isolated gardens, human beings must either denature themselves like Utnapishtim, who is no longer fully human after so many centuries with no human companionship other than his wife, or else succumb to the melancholia that afflicts the inhabitants of Dante’s Elysian Fields in Limbo, where, as Virgil tells the pilgrim, sanza speme vivemo in disio, we live in desire without hope. As Thoreau puts it in Walden, “Be it life or death, we crave only reality” . If Meneleus took that craving for reality with him to Elysium, his everlasting life there is a mixed blessing indeed..."

farewell country crooner Eddy Arnold, a great favorite of my childhood...

YouTube - Eddy Arnold - I'll Hold You in My Heart--memorably covered by Elvis, who did a lot of Eddy's songs--both were managed by Colonel Parker...

YouTube - Elvis Presley's version of Mary In The Morning

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