(from SwissMiss; thanks Adrian)

“In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan, armed with a reel-to-reel tape deck, snuck into John Lennon’s hotel room in Toronto and convinced John to do an interview about peace. 38 years later, Jerry has produced a film about it. Using the original interview recording as the soundtrack, director Josh Raskin has woven a visual narrative which tenderly romances Lennon’s every word in a cascading flood of multipronged animation. Raskin marries the terrifyingly genius pen work of James Braithwaite with masterful digital illustration by Alex Kurina, resulting in a spell-binding vessel for Lennon’s boundless wit, and timeless message.”

Enjoy the moment… here and get the back-story here.

Somewhere in Iraq…

From today’s New York Times feature: “4,000 U.S. Deaths, and a Handful of Images:” clearly, the U.S. military has been controlling the dissemination of graphic imagery of deaths and injuries resulting from the illegal, immoral, and unjustified war this “superpower” has been staging for over five years on the hapless citizens of Iraq (estimated Iraqi war casualties are between 90,000 and 700,000, depending on which source you cite). Read the story in the New York Times here, and view a slide show here.

“We don’t do body counts.”—U.S. General Tommy Franks

Re-mixed works by Micah Wright (who seems to have disappeared from the Internet)…

Milano, Italy

The aim of Good 50×70 is to use designers’ skills to raise awareness amongst the creative community of the power we have to be a force for good (posters can have a positive impact on thousands of lives). There are 7 briefs from 7 charities on 7 issues that affect thousands of people around the world—participants pick a topic that inspires them and submit a poster on that theme. 210 posters (30 from each brief) are selected by a jury of leading designers, are then exhibited around the world, and are published in a catalogue—more importantly they are presented to the 7 charities for their use in potential campaigns.

(Thanks Adrian and Mark Simpson).

Washington, D.C.

From the “did you know” and “almost beyond belief” departments… according to the CIA’s “World Factbook,” the United States spent some $623 billion last year on its military (that’s $1.7 billion per day!) which dwarfs the military spending of all other nations combined. Yet this “leading superpower” gun-loving nation of 304 million people is already nearly $10 trillion in debt (view a debt clock here), the average U.S. citizen’s share of this debt is over $31,000 and the U.S. national debt continues to increase an average of $1.6 billion per day! Hmmm…

Image: a page from the May/June #77 issue of Adbusters

Shepard Fairey’s apt expression… (read a great interview with Shepard on Fecal Face; see an archive of Shepard’s posters here).

from www.samwreimer.com… (launched to promote bard and book)

Well, here it is at long last “warts and all”— Sam W. Reimer’s Gray Matter Graffitti: remnants of collections lost… an early gallery from some alleyways & other by-ways. This initial collection of some 200 original written works (of which only a handful have previously seen the light of day) draws from a prodigious assemblage penned during four decades of expressive poetic ideation—as the book title suggests, these poems have percolated in the bard’s brain long enough—they’re good and ripe by now and ready to be read by all.

Sam’s poems provide a plaintive voice for our tempestuous times—his unique commentaries on life and love (and love-lost ennui) are at once poignant, unapologetically direct, and (often) edged with the tragic—his ponderings range from the profane to the sacred, drill deep, and dare to pose unanswerable questions. Unheralded, unsung, and little published though Sam’s inspired ruminations have been in the past, they’re finally compiled, printed, bound, and available for a broader readership.

It’s our hope that as you dip in and out of this book, you do so with an open mind (which, like a parachute, works much better than when closed)… and as you read, let Sam’s pen sketch stories, pictures, contemplations on blank pages of your own imagination. The works offered are Sam’s invitation to laugh, to cry, to curse, and to reflect—on opportunities long gone and outcomes yet to come. Enjoy…

(from the Introduction, by Robert L. Peters, Editor)

Images: the book’s cover; illustrated chapter titles (poems in the 214-page book appear in eight thematic chapters).

Vancouver, British Columbia

Well, the long-promised book I’ve been working on for the past years with downtown-Eastside Vancouver gem-of-a poet Sam W. Reimer, (published by and designed at Circle), had its unofficial launch here in Lotusland this weekend—replete with readings at the Ivanhoe Pub (where many of the works were penned over the past few decades) and memory-enriched visits to some of the significant Vancouver sites cited in the book’s 200+ poems (parks, beaches, crime scenes, and edgy slum addresses). The weather cooperated, (as did the poet’s rheumatoid arthritis, for the most part) and we were blessed with magnificent sunshine.

Thanks to my dear cousins Sam (with whom I also shared a birthday yesterday) and Lois (also a Reimer) for welcoming me to her west-side home. If you’re interested in an advance copy of the book ($16 Cdn. plus postage) contact me here. (Active marketing of the book will commence within the next few weeks, and I’ll share further information on that as it rolls out…).

Sam W. and Lois at the Granville Island Market; “bard in bar” at the lower Ivanhoe; the book’s cover (thanks, Adrian).

From the Huffington Post (thanks Nancy Wynn)

“Last night, Keith Olbermann unleashed what may well have been his angriest, most blistering Special Comment yet, aimed squarely at his favorite target: President Bush. Olbermann was responding to Bush’s claim that he had given up golf in honor of the Iraq war—and his assertion that a Democratic president withdrawing from Iraq would “eventually lead to another attack on the United States”—a statement Olbermann called “ludicrous, infuriating, holier-than-thou and most importantly bone-headedly wrong.” Olbermann continued in that vein for a full 12 minutes (or 2,000 words), frequently raising his voice and spitting out his words in disgust…

Olbermann turned Bush’s reference to “cold-blooded killers who will kill people to achieve their political objectives” around and threw it back at him, saying that such killers were “those in—or formerly in—your employ, who may yet be charged some day with war crimes.” It didn’t get any milder—saying that, to Bush, “freedom is just a brand name,” and pointing out that al Qaeda in Iraq was a result of the invasion: “Terrorism inside Iraq is your creation, Mr. Bush!” Olbermann also criticized Bush’s statement that he was “told by people” that there were WMDs in Iraq: “People? What people?… Mr. Bush, you destroyed the evidence that contradicted the resolution you jammed down the Congress’s throat, the way you jammed it down the nation’s throat.”

A cathartic rant worth taking in… and perhaps(!?) a sign that the U.S.’s cowed media might eventually find its voice again? The concerned world watches, hopes, and prays…

Brooklyn, New York

“At an age when social, sexual, and educational explorations are at their highest point, the life of an eighteen-year-old Israeli girl is interrupted. She is plucked from her home surroundings and placed in a rigorous institution where her individuality is temporarily forced aside in the name of nationalism. During the next two years, immersed in a regimented and masculine environment, she will be transformed from a girl to a woman, within the framework of an army that is engaged in daily war and conflict. She is now a soldier serving her country, in a military camp amidst hundreds like her, yet beneath the uniform there is someone wishing to be noticed, listened to, and understood.” From an insightful and poignant documentary perspective, and the recollections of Rachel Papo, 15 years after she herself served in the Israeli army, here.

Thanks for the link, Gregor, who wrote to me… “I recall you saying that Israeli army girls (women) were among the scariest and most beautiful women you have seen in your travels :-). Here is a site about those women…” Thanks for the reminder, Gregor—having been to Israel and experiencing first-hand the reality of a narrow nation precariously pushed up against the sea by (mostly) hostile neighbors, I feel empathy with their collective, defensive stance… on the other hand, I deplore the militantly combative (and almost-fascist) position the Israeli state has taken vis-a-vis the Palestinian people who were robbed of their own homeland by Israel’s nascent nationhood, 60 years ago this week.