Explore Your Creativity with an Art Class at Pine Camp
European Travel Commission
Guided Walks on Richmond's Slave Trail
City Dance Theatre to Perform
Have Fun and Help Save the Planet! - Plant Trees in Bryd Park
Last March, GAISF was rebranded SportAccord; the organisation brings together 87 International Federations and 17 Associated Members and works closely with the Olympic Movement; its aim is to 'unite, support and promote its members for the co-ordination and protection of their common aims and interests...while at the same time conserving and respecting their autonomy'. The website helps to carry this task forward by providing the latest news from across the sports sphere and the Sports Calendar highlights upcoming sporting events. SportAccord has two new projects in the pipeline - Multi-Sports Games and a Doping-Free Sport Unit which will provide support to its members.
The 13th World Sport for All Congress will take place in Jyväskylä, Finland, from 14 to 17 June 2010.
Marxist Leninism on the silver screen
During the communist period, the Albanian state produced a wide range of propaganda, for both internal and external consumption. The link below is to a clip on YouTube from an Italian documentary called 'Albania - il paese di fronte' ('Albania - the country opposite') which includes several examples, including a Radio Tirana broadcast, a particularly peculiar film about WW2 partisans (a variant on the 'Valkyrie' sequence from 'Apocalypse Now' involving a loudspeaker strapped to a bus and some dancing Italians), some 'racy' communist-era jazz and a ballet written for Enver Hoxha's atheism campaign. It's quite tricky to follow if you don't speak Italian but the images speak pretty much for themselves.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-u5B2TSaDY&feature=related
Should this whet your appetite, the remaining ten parts of the documentary are also on YouTube and include footage of, amongst other things, King Zog and his wedding, the Italian invasion in 1939, Mayday parades, Khruschev planting a tree in Tirana, Enver Hoxha dancing with a Chinese delegation and, in the final instalment, the toppling of Hoxha's statue during the anti-communist revolution in 1991.
Two revised poems
Jetstream mirage and the taste of kerosene
is how it might start across the field,
or a Hawker Hunter hanging on a stall turn,
its chevron tailfin roundel against clouds.
Armed with bulbous candyfloss,
we’re walking between disputes,
provenance issues, these tanks
too often repaired, no longer ‘authentic’.
Redundant fighters’ afterburners sear
the early afternoon like rough nostalgia,
aerobatics over middle England.
And still it is easier to find a name
for Venom, Tempest, Fury
or how we might be expected to feel
about splintered tree-lines,
sand-bursts across that combat zone,
than for patterns of thought
in these actually occurring vapour trails
which backdrop one last fly-past:
impervious Spitfire, engine growling,
over woods and out of the sun.
Beginning with Palma
This is where a poem might start out,
here, on this terrace curtained with rain,
a Mediterranean afternoon
stifling with sweat and Ducados.
The cathedral’s too drab for a ticket
(history priced out of the market)
and you won’t find time to trace
intermittent carnival noise
to its roiling, gaudy source.
So never mind that you can’t recall
the word for it or put a name
to that face which insolently
stares from each window you look in.
Those booted boys – or others –
will be there the same tomorrow,
conveniently just out of focus,
details for your composition,
sketches for your Hemingway phase.
Is this boredom or fear? On the far side
of the rain, the Guardia Civil
patrol a cobbled, almost-empty street.
Keep your eyes peeled, they’d suggest.
You have, of course, and found them wanting.
The carnival’s moved on. Would you reach
for coins left lying on the ground?
You might do, if it didn’t mean
leaning over, wetting your hand.
Tom Phillips
Worldwide Hospitality & Tourism Themes
Warning: Park Lakes Currently Dangerous
Spotlight Gallery to Feature Local African-American Artists
Graphic Design from the 1920s-30s in Travel Ephemera
Conferences
City and national capital tourism research group meeting - 4-5 March, Belgium
INVTUR 2010 - Tourism Research: state of the art and future perspectives - 10-13 March , Portugal
7th International Conference for consumer behaviour, tourism and retailing research - 7-9 April, Portugal
Contested economies: global tourism and cultural heritage - 8-10 April, Florida
Journeys of Expression VIII: prospects and potentials for tourism, festivals and cultural events - 20-21 April, Denmark
International Conference on Monitoring and Management of Visitor Flows in Recreational and Protected Areas - 30 May-3 June, The Netherlands
Managing for the global and the local - 3-4 June, Canada
Poem: Catching the Drift
Collared by its spectral bridge, the bay’s incursion
narrows to a creek, these tongues of sand
where mist-wreathed skiff masts lie at odds
among the trees. “The well-to-do,” you say
and point at the far shore’s terraced villas.
What else to add? It wasn’t to be
that you’d put your name to such deeds
would allow you such possession.
Only here, on this shack’s uneven planks,
the morning’s steeped in diesel fumes,
or whatever else that smell might be,
and flies, perplexed by angling lures,
are seething on lopped fish-heads,
grounds for some complaint, perhaps,
were that your way. We push out
the boat instead, catching the drift
which squirls at fallen branches,
knots of weed, the sure-footed bridge’s
concrete stanchions, then thickens
to an estuary. If the jetstreams
unfurling north and east
register as promises, promises
made at one time to yourself,
there’s not a sign in your straight gaze.
Tom Philliips