Tea Appreciation Society – We love tea
Tea
Make Mine a Builders…
May 17th
Make Mine a Builders tea is offering one lucky tea drinker the chance to “press the button” on an explosive building demolition.
Jonathan Chiu from Make Mine a Builders said “we have been demolishing the competition in tea taste tests and wanted to give one of our customers the exciting, once-in-a-lifetime chance to do the same to a building”.
Make Mine a Builders partnered with demolition industry leaders Precision Demolition Company Limited (demolition consultants, explosive demolition contractors and the world’s first in digital explosive demolition www.explosive-demolition.com) and C&D Consultancy (advisers for the demolition of structures and buildings throughout Europe www.demolishdismantle.com) to bring the competition to life.
Entry forms can be found on the back of promotional packs at Morrisons or online at www.makemineabuilders.com . To enter, tea drinkers have to guess the six-digit demolition code. The promotion closes 30 July 2010.
Make Mine a Builders tea was developed specifically for people that like a full flavoured builders’ brew – the final blend was chosen by a panel of 300 builders in a blind taste test. A special blend of ethically sourced East African tea leaves, Make Mine a Builders brews to full strength in just 20 seconds (about the time it takes to demolish a building) and is available at Morrisons stores nationwide priced at £1.68 for a box of 80 tea bags. Make Mine a Builders is packed by members of the Ethical Tea Partnership.
The Tea House Near Forbidden City
Dec 18th
Forbidden City is an experimental piece combining traditional Chinese cut paper and digital animation techniques, which unveils the unspeakable reality in contemporary history of China.
The scene is set in a serene, traditional interior of a teahouse near Forbidden City in Beijing. The thousand-year-old place looks seemingly steady, peaceful, where a cup of green tea is steaming under sunshine. The window panel, a metaphor of the boundary between social surrounding and individual’s inner world, is decorated with a popular Chinese symbol of “prosperity.” When the red “prosperity” is falling and music suddenly turns to inharmonious, another layer of facts is revealed – the vital confrontation between individual and authority, that is symbolized by “tankman,” the taboo in today’s China.
Toward the end of the film, everything becomes vanished, the blood-like substance transforms to steam turning back into the cup of green tea, and the auspicious “prosperity” character flies back to the window, which again contribute to the peaceful, harmonious atmosphere around Forbidden City. Only the covered facts are left for us, who happened to experience the incident first-hand, or whoever cares its social, historical effects on a global culture, to taste.
Formally, in order to create an aesthetic space where history and the contemporary encounter each other, digital animation techniques have been combined with traditional folk art form, Chinese Cut Paper. The static cut paper imagery then is transformed to moving images for multi-layered narratives. Our interest is to convey serious social and cultural significance associated with folk art, a distinctive form of human expression.. In Forbidden City, Cut Paper is referred to not only an ancient, auspicious symbolic art, but also adapted to propaganda needs throughout contemporary Chinese political life.
The music, composed and performed by American musician Williams David and Nicholas Thibault, is adapted from an ancient Chinese qin melody, Guangling San, which is regarded as a piece of classical “dissident art.”
