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Remote chance of more power for Scotlands islands

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Scotlands independence referendum is a welcome opportunity to push for concessions but it has also caused disquiet on the Isle of Lewis (above) and the rest of the Western Isles. Photograph: Cathal McNaughton/Reuters

Local Free Church of Scotland minister Iver Martin, who intends to vote No on September 18th: If its a 52/48 split, or something like that, then there will be residual bitterness if Yes is beaten. For some people it has become quite an obsession. There will be an agitation for some time to come. Photograph: Mark Hennessy

Scottish National Party minister Alistair Allan and Cllr John McKeever in the Yes Scotland offices in Stornoway on Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. Photograph: Mark Hennessy

Place names on the Isle of Lewis in Outer Hebrides reflect a shared past over centuries between Gallic-speaking Scots, Norse and latecomers from the south. Each evokes weather forecasts of old on crackling Radio 4 signals: Arnol, Ballantrushal, Barvas, Shawbost, Dalbeg and Branahuie, Newmarket, and Plasterfield.

Today, much of the conversation on Lewis is filled with talk of independence. Last week, 250 neighbours gathered in Stornoway, the capital, for a debate hosted by the local Gazette newspaper. Ninety-nine voted Yes; ninety-nine voted No. Five were undecided, and the rest did not bother to vote, says one local.

For many in Lewis and the other islands in the Western Isles, along with Orkney and Shetland, the referendum has offered the chance to press for devolution not just from London but from Edinburgh.

But the trend has, if anything, gone the other way under the Scottish National Party. European Union funds are now distributed by Edinburgh rather than Inverness. Fire brigades and ambulance services have merged. And the merger of Scotlands police forces has been deeply unpopular in the Highlands and Islands particularly the decision by Chief Constable Stephen House to routinely have armed police on the streets.

Last year, Scotlands islands which are all remote, although Shetland is blessed with oil riches produced a report, Our Islands, Our Future, which pressed for extra powers.

In June, the Scottish government offered the islands control of all income from leasing the seabed for wind farms, piers, etc money that currently goes to the crown estate.

The Edinburgh government has pledged that control of planning out to 12 nautical miles would be devolved to local partnerships, with the island councils playing a role.

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Remote chance of more power for Scotlands islands

Discovering Italys Quiet, Beautiful Aeolian Islands

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A view of Stromboli from the northern end of Panarea. Photo courtesy of Cond Nast Traveler.

It sounds like an impossible requestWanted: Beautiful Italian countryside, few touristsbut the dream of an unspoiled, undeveloped Italy actually still exists in the form of the UNESCO-protected Aeolian archipelago, a scatter of seven small islands and five islets afloat in the Tyrrhenian Sea. Unlike Capri and Amalfi, spots that today seem more curated for tourists than authentically Italian, the Aeoliansas close as a 45-minute hydrofoil ride from Milazzo or Palermo, depending on which island youre going tohave retained their traditions of wine cultivation, fishing, and farming. Add to this a handful of intimate hotels and guesthouses (no huge resorts here) and you have a place whose low-key chic is so seductive that even usually cynical Italians can only sigh dreamily when they speak of it.

Because its difficult (and pricey) to find a room in July and August, the best time to take advantage of the Aeolian idyll, as real insiders know, is during the off-months of April through June as well as in September and October, after the crowds of swanky Milanese and Romans have headed home and the islands have returned to their usual quiet. Its also in these months that youre able to properly appreciate each of the islands unique topographies, from the fields of dazzling wildflowers that blanket Filicudi in the spring to the vines of Malvasia grapes that brighten Salinas countryside in the late summer. In the waters around Stromboli, meanwhile, the late-spring and early-autumn months offer spectacular fishing and deep-sea diving (the water, which hovers in the sixties throughout the year, will be plenty warm for swimming), and on Panarea, youll have the rocky coves virtually to yourself, with not a yacht in sight.

Of all the islands, Panarea, Salina, and Filicudi are the best places to base yourself, as they offer both beautiful scenery and the archipelagos nicest hotels. But youll want to take day-trips to the othersthe easiest way to reach them is by chartered boat.

Dattilo, as seen from one of the Hotel Rayas suites.Photo courtesy of Cond Nast Traveler.

If youve only heard of one of the Aeolians, its most likely this one. The smallest and most stylish of the islands, it owes its exclusive reputation largely to Michelangelo Antonionis classic film LAvventura, as well as to the rustic (but chic) 36-room Hotel Raya, a sexy hideaway that opened in the 1960s. Today, the Raya, with its whitewashed terraces and stunning views of the still-active Stromboli volcano (ask for a Raya Alto room to secure a sea panorama), continues to host everyone from Uma Thurman to Roberto Cavalli, and during summer sunsets, the terraced bar transforms into one of the archipelagos only nightclubs. But off-season, its another world altogether: as gorgeous as ever, with windswept bluffs plunging down to rocky deserted beaches and a sound track of rustling olive-tree leavesbut without the attitude and preening.

There isnt a lot to do on Panareathere are no cars and fewer than 300 residentsbut thats the point. If lounging on the terrace grows monotonous, hike to Punta Milazzese, a promontory once home to a Bronze Age settlement, or Cala Junco, a cobalt-blue cove surrounded by volcanic cliffs. Or you could rent a gozzo, a small wooden motorboat, and drive out to the hidden coves that punctuate the perimeter of the island, or to islets like Lisca Biancalocal lore has it that couples who swim here under the Arco degli Innamorati (Lovers Arch) will stay together forever. And be sure to head to San Pietro, the small village thats home to the port, for an aperitivo at Bridge, where the Japanese chefs make delicious sushi from the fishermens daily haul.

The second-largest and lushest of the islands is dotted with caper bushes, olive trees, and neatly terraced vineyards. Much of the land in the interior has been turned into a nature reserve, and the volcanic trails, seemingly made for nimble goats, offer incredible sea views. A collection of restored former farmhouses and small gardens, the Hotel Signum, in the tiny hillside town of Malfa, put the island on the Italian-boho map when it opened 26 years ago, and since then, its gained a cult following of Sicilian insiders who come for co-owners Clara Rametta and Michele Carusos familial house-party atmosphere. Fresh island ingredients dominate the menu at the Signums restaurant: You might find octopus and potato ravioli or a crudo of sushi-grade local seafood. Book one of the rooms with a sea-facing terrace; theyre pricier but have a much greater sense of place than the garden rooms, which can be noisy. (Like many hotels in the Aeolians, the Signum offers three-nights-for-the-price-of-two deals during the off-season.) The recently renovated 23 rooms and four suites are decorated with wrought iron beds, tiled floors, and vintage photos of the island (especially beautiful is suite 18, which has a stand-alone tub right in the bedroom).

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For a more luxurious option, theres the 18-room Capofaro. Originally a working vineyard, the property still grows Malvasia grapes, from which it makes both a dry, easy-drinking white and a sweet after-dinner wine. Housed in a cluster of whitewashed buildings surrounding the vineyard, Capofaro has an excellent seafood restaurant, a pool ringed by white-cushioned sun beds, and a stylish bar overlooking the seanot to mention a perfect view of Stromboli and Panarea. The rooms have little balconies and beds with earth-toned linens.

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Discovering Italys Quiet, Beautiful Aeolian Islands

All Things Go Fall Classic debuts at Union Market

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By Geoffrey Himes September 11

One has to go way back to the years before the Beatles Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967 to find a time when singles overpowered albums as they do today. Now you only have to look to the All Things Go Fall Classic, an alternative-rock festival at Union Market on Saturday. Three of the top acts Future Islands, Bear Hands and Tove Lo have taken a big leap this year thanks to one particular song going viral.

For Baltimore band Future Islands, that song was Seasons (Waiting on You). After the band performed it on The Late Show With David Letterman in March, the video of lead singer Sam Herring doing his chest-thumping gorilla dance as he achingly sang, Ive been waiting on you became a YouTube sensation and helped lift the song to No. 37 on Billboards alternative songs chart.

For Tove Lo of Sweden, the song was Habits (Stay High). The video of the singer downing gallons of liquor as she tells her ex, I gotta stay high all the time to keep you off my mind helped propel the song to No. 20 on the same chart. And for Brooklyn-based Bear Hands, it was Giants. The videos jittery editing of writhing, scantily clad women echoed the contrast between the staccato, angst-ridden verses and the more optimistic, hook-laden refrain, I am loving you more. That tension elevated the tune to No. 8.

More than ever, people are consuming music one song at a time, says Bear Hands guitarist and producer Ted Feldman. There are a million artists in the world. Theres only so much time, and all those artists are competing for everyones ears. So its far more likely that one song will grab those ears than a whole album. You hope that that one song is a foot in the door that gets you more attention.

Thats the world we live in, agrees Will Suter, one of the four founders of All Things Go, a Washington-based music Web site that has evolved into a major live-music promoter. People have shorter attention spans now. Theyll fall in love with one song, and theyll listen to that over and over again. The new Future Islands album is called Singles for a reason they get it.

The renewed emphasis on one breakthrough song has created a conundrum for the alternative rock that All Things Go emphasizes on its Web site and is featuring in its first music festival. How can you create a sound unlike usual rock and also connect with a large audience? Or develop a multifaceted personality through multiple songs when many listeners know you for only one song?

Feldman refuses to accept such either/or premises.

I dont really understand people who say they dont care what the audience thinks, he says by phone from the road. Were not writing to the lowest common denominator, but we do want to connect with an audience who can get the song from top to bottom. No one wants to hear a song that they can guess how the rest of it goes the first time they hear it. We want to join the cultural conversation by speaking the common language, but we want to add something new.

Giants began as so many Bear Hands songs do with lead singer Dylan Rau improvising lyrics to a simple drum-and-keyboard loop. But there was something about this effort that got the quartet excited.

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All Things Go Fall Classic debuts at Union Market

The Virgin Islands, Rewritten

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Credit Photograph by Christian Heeb/laif/Redux

When I moved to the U.S. Virgin Islands after college, for a job at a local newspaper, everyone I met told me that I had to read Herman Wouks Dont Stop the Carnival. It was the best novel ever set in the Virgin Islands. The funniest. Wouk, people said, gets island life exactly right. Never mind that no one north of the eighteenth parallel had heard of the book. You could find copies for sale in virtually every gift shop and bookstore from Tortola to Grenada. I found a tattered hardcover in the newspapers office and finished it in a day or two. It was dated, but a fun read.

Wouk, the author of The Caine Mutiny and Marjorie Morningstar, lived on St. Thomas from 1958 until 1964. (He is now ninety-nine.) He moved to the island to escape the distractions of New York City. While there, in his big house on a hill, he started writing The Winds of War, a major novel about the Second World War. He also made time to write something lighter. Dont Stop the Carnival, published in 1965, is a zippy farce about a Broadway press agent and self-described good New York liberal, Norman Paperman, who sees an ad in The New Yorker listing a funky Caribbean hotel for sale, flies south, and buys it. A large cast of eccentrics surrounds Paperman and drives the mostly slapstick narrative. His vision of paradise (green hills, snowy sand, azure sea) is soon crowded off the page by baroque catastrophe (scheming contractor, bursting cistern, island bureaucracy). Racism, intolerance, imperialism, cronyism, and alcoholism become the leitmotifs. Characters start getting killed. Paperman sells the hotel as quickly as he bought it and flees back to New York.

For Tiphanie Yanique, who is from St. Thomas, Dont Stop the Carnival was not a fun read. Her dbut novel, Land of Love and Drowning, which came out this summer, was written partly as an answer to Wouk. As she said in a recent interview, Virgin Islanders dont really give the book much thought. We dont think its a good representation of who we are. And yet this was the book being marketed as a credible anthropological text. The Virgin Islanders in the book are buffoons. I wanted to write something that people would say, If youre going to read the Herman Wouk, you have to also read the Yanique. For a writer from the Virgin Islands, there was, apparently, no escaping the shadow cast by Wouks beach umbrella.

Land of Love and Drowning is a completely different type of novel. Its a multigenerational saga about an island family, dramatizing historical events and salted with magical realism: one woman has hooves for feet, another has glittering silver pubic hair. But Yanique takes characters and settings from Wouks book and subversively reimagines them. A hotel cook, Sheila, gets a last name and an inner life. A talented but violent handyman named Hippolyte reappears, now more the holy fool, less the dangerous lunatic. The hotel itself gets a major moral facelift. It is now the touchstone for Yaniques characters jaundiced views of land development on their islands, and of the obnoxious, greedy, and debauched continentals who arrive in ever larger numbers. As far as we could see, thats all the Americans seemed to dodrink rum and buy up land, Anette Bradshaw, a history teacher, observes.

The two novels converge on the same incidents, from opposite angles. At the hotelcalled, in both books, the Gull Reef Clubone of Papermans recurring headaches involves negotiations over the immigration status of his employees. A bureaucrat threatens to deport his best chambermaid. Yanique uses this Woukian plot thread to show the new form of racism that Virgin Islanders increasingly confronted when continentals showed up and built houses, hotels, and golf courses across St. Thomas. Anette Bradshaw is walking home from the airport with her children. A big car full of Americans pulls up, with a white man and a white woman in the front seat. The driver says that he owns the Gull Reef Club. Were looking for a chambermaid. Ours, it seems, has just been deported back to Antigua or Anguilla or somewhere. You can imagine were in a bind. If youre free, we could take you right now, tykes and all. If Anette was not at present in mourning she might have done the fiery thing reach over the driver, and slap the woman in the face. A woman should have known better than to allow such an insult in front of the children.

Land of Love and Drowning is also, according to an authors note, a response to a soft-porn film called Girls Are for Loving, which was shot in the Virgin Islands in the nineteen-seventies. The film crew employed local people as extras, Yanique writes, but did not inform them of the films sexual content. In the novel, the films local scenes, primarily dancing, are shot at the Gull Reef Club. Anette and her husband, Franky, are among the extras. Anette senses that something is amiss, but ignores the signs. Months later, when Girls Are for Loving premires on the island, she and Franky dress up and join an excited crowd of islanders at the local theater. In the film, they see their own faces, and Anettes red skirt flying, accompanied by African drumming, intercut with shots of a white couple kissing and, soon enough, copulating. The audience is horrified. Then the pastors wife scream in the theater like she bout to dead. And all the people in the theater start to flood out. We spill out into the street but cant look at each other. This how we get put on the map in America? This me and my husband debut to the island and the nation? Is what they call pornographic. You hearing me.

We do hear Anette, loud and clear. She narrates some of the novels best passages in a dialect that is both inventive and fluid. Describing the day in 1917 when the islands of St. Thomas, St. John, and St. Croix were transferred from Danish to American rule, she says, Denmark decide it dont want we. America decide it do. One find we unnecessary because they way up in Europe. The next find we absolutely necessary because they backside sitting on the Caribbean. I wish Yanique had written more of the novel in that voice. Instead, she jumps erratically from one characters mind to the next, in a way that can feel unbalanced. Perhaps that was her aim. Yanique makes it clear from the beginning that she is not interested in the framing and cornicing of realism. History is a kind of magic I doing here, Anette says. Yanique, meanwhile, brings the natural world of the Virgin Islands into high relief, with similes that seem to erupt effortlessly from the lushness of her prose. Boys will stick to the younger sister like the slick of mango juice. A trinity of men will feel the love of her like casha bush burring their scalp in sleep.

I lived on St. John. It was a small island, very beautiful, quite segregated. Soon after I arrived, there was a rash of violent crimesassault, vandalism, alleged rape, arsonwith a toxic racial element. A white furniture-store owner known as Bali Bob ended up going to prison for assault and battery. Our little newspaper struggled to cover these stories. There was nothing slapstick about any of it. For an outsider, it was impossible to know much about the long, gnarled, local history of racial insult, stratification, and conflicta history kept largely through oral transmission by island families. Yanique brings reams of this spoken lore to the page. The ladys right: if youre going to read the Wouk, you also have to read the Yanique.

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The Virgin Islands, Rewritten

Islands of Adventure – Disney Family Fevereiro 2014 – Menegatour – Video

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Islands of Adventure - Disney Family Fevereiro 2014 - Menegatour
http://www.menegatour.com.br Curta nossa fanpage - facebook.com/menegatour Como assistir a este vdeo em HD: 1. D play e quando comear a rodar, pause o vdeo no smbolo que aparece no canto...

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Islands of Adventure - Disney Family Fevereiro 2014 - Menegatour - Video


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