Saturday, December 30, 2006

veselykh sviat'! & a musical gift


{sunset, riverlot 56, dec.26}


{waxwing fluttering, elm tree 76th ave - 115st, dec.30}


{sunset, pine tree & christmas lights, the acreage, dec. 25}


{aspens & birches + blue sky, riverlot 56, dec. 26}

Here are some songs to sample, a sort of best of 2006 in no particular order. I've tried to provide mp3s for as many as I can, but I'm having some technical issues, so some are missing or linked to other sites where you might hear the songs. Nevertheless, enjoy! Please let me know what you think... If you would like a mix cd consisting of a similar musical mélange, do let me know, it could perhaps be arranged.

1. Lion's Jaws -- Neko Case (Fox Confessor Brings the Flood)
2. Lived in Bars -- Cat Power (The Greatest)
3. Scenic World -- Beirut (Gulag Orkestar)
4. On the Radio -- Regina Spektor (Begin to Hope)
5. Green Grass -- Cibelle (covering Tom Waits) (The Shine of Dried Electric Leaves)
6. Wild Sage -- The Mountain Goats (Get Lonely)
7. The Modern -- Frida Hyvönen (Until Death Comes)
8. Willow's Song -- Isobel Campbell (Milk White Sheets)
9. For the Turnstiles -- The Be Good Tanyas (Neil Young cover) (Hello Love)
10. Chinese Translation -- M. Ward (Post-War)
11. Emily -- Joanna Newsom (Ys)
12. Ramblin' Man -- Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan (Hank Williams cover) (Ballad of the Broken Seas)
13. Golem Hora -- Golem! (Fresh Off Boat)
14. Parentheses -- The Blow (Paper Television)
15. Hypnotize -- Ani Di Franco (Reprieve) -- hear the track streamed here
16. I Was A Lover -- TV on the Radio (Return from Cookie Mountain)
17. Put in a Penny in the Slot -- Fionn Regan (The End of History)
18. Listopad 2004-oho roku -- Haydamaky (Ukraine Calling)
19. Benton Harbour Blues -- The Fiery Furnaces (Bitter Tea)
20. Vincent and Theo -- Jacob Borshard (The Last Brontosaurus) -- can be obtained here in its entirety on Jacob's webpage
21. May be the last time, I don't know -- Ndidi Onukwulu (No I Never) -- listen to a sample here
22. Springfield (or Bobby had a shadfly caught in his hair) -- Sufjan Stevens (The Avalanche)
23. The Gates of Istanbul -- Loreena McKennitt (An Ancient Muse) -- you can hear a snippet here
24. Mountains -- Sparklehorse (Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain)
25. The Ukrainians -- vitaminsforyou (The Legend of Bird's Hill)
26. Pieces of Sky -- Beth Orton (Comfort of Strangers)

I could make another list of other music I have been saturated in over the course of the year that was not produced in 2006, but that would be even longer...


Monday, December 18, 2006

language change (poem)


{little weed-skeletons over the ice, north saskatchewan}

{north saskatchewan riverbank, looking north to hawrelak park}

language change (in progress)

“we used to speak / a different language / i wasted my breath / on words soon forgotten / left unattended / they're moving their feet -- but nobody's dancing” – low, ‘like a forest’

speaking to eachother
now we find ourselves unintelligible.
you’re not listening, yer not
lissening
, yuar nalissineng
there is so much accusation
but really i do hear you
you just sound like a bird
singing with water trapped
in a cold little throat –

through glottochronology
we can see how
time has elongated my vowels.
since i moved across the river drift
became inescapable.
visiting less & less & less
soon i found new names for things:

first for the tamarack,
then the blue-jay
then the pinecone
then slowly through these
lexical half-lives
i began to pronounce other sounds for
such universals as attraction
& compromise
& lust.

now when i speak
i am calling upstream to you,
into the past, against a current
with a tongue weighted down
by delta silt
& the words all waterlogged
just float further away –

banks erode slowly
& we filter differently
through the gravel bars, the eddys
& oxbows that can’t quite be bridged
without translation –

never thought we’d be
such stubborn monolinguals,
not then. though
it could still be argued,
really, that we still speak
dialects of the same language –

yet we insist that
our mutually intelligible ancestor
has passed away, one
wrote her down
& now we’ve become too proud,
too politicized
to admit, acknowledge
that maybe we still
understand –

perhaps in the future

some linguist
will want to study us,
reconstruct our old tongue,
recreate that proto-speech
with its slippery soundchanges
& forms & asterisks,
study the strange dialects
that arise with movement
& the lessening of someone’s
love.


Thursday, December 14, 2006

pomegranates.


Last night I was watching Bryna cut up a pomegranate {see above} & it made me dream about pomegranates... I was in a kitchen that was not mine, & I was chewing palmfuls of the seeds, then spitting them out into my hands, & smearing the juice on my nightgown. It was quite bizarre, with little pools of red juice all over the floor. I am not exactly sure what this signifies -- I know what may have provoked the images, obviously, but the eating-spitting-smearing is not how I usually interact with pomegranates. I like to eat them in pilaf or just by themselves. My only theory is that I was Persephone, you know, & I suddenly realized if I ate all the pomegranate seeds it would be winter forever. So I thought that I'd spit out a few, to keep the season a little shorter, perhaps, because my mother (& I'm sure, many other people) would be disappointed if winter lasted toooo long....

Speaking of pomegranates, remind me of when I was in Grade 2 & brought a pomegranate for show-&-tell, but it was almost gone by the end of the day because I kept it in my desk & kept stuffing the kernels into my mouth.

Pomegranates also make me think of Loreena McKennitt, who I just discovered made another CD! She hasn't done that in nearly ten years. So, so lovely. Her music always reminds me of being 14 and reading The Golden Compass series & faerytale books late into the night & listening to her music & crying because some of it was so thoroughly gorgeous & writing poems that sounded too much like Yeats & hiking in the snow in Jasper at Christmas & dreaming about someday wandering across Scotland or taking the Trans-Siberian Railway across the Urals... & just being a strange little 14-year-old, but in a good way. The really idealistic, hopeful sort of way, being lost in the things that I love.

Wednesday, December 13, 2006

you are worth hundreds of [waxwings]


{tree of waxwings, 112st & 77 ave}


{waxwing silhouettes in an elm tree}

When the universe wants to send me flowers, it actually sends me birds.

Not bouquets but flocks, of bohemian waxwings -- even though they aren't usually seen until later in the winter... But they were there, all darting & undulant in little dark waves... Last Friday at 78 ave and 112 st, & the Arts quad at the university, in late afternoon sun the colour of pomegranates, between the elms & spruce & mountain ashes, weaving all over the sky. It's impossible to be too sad when I hear that soft sreeeeeeing of waxwings surrounding me, or I'm feeding a chickadee sunflower seeds from my mittens.

& here is a little mix of some of my favourite bird songs for your listening enjoyment. Just follow the links to download the mp3s. They're on YouSendIt & should stay fresh for about a week.

Eels -- I Like Birds (Daisies of the Galaxy)
Neko Case -- Maybe Sparrow (Fox Confessor Brings the Flood)
Sparklehorse -- Hundreds of Sparrows (Good Morning Spider)
Paris to Kyiv -- Ta i Vylitala Halka (And the crow flies off...) (Fragmenti)

Monday, December 11, 2006

baba lessons


{kitchen window frost ferns}


Yesterday my mama & I made holubchi with my uncle, out at the acreage. We never made any cabbage rolls for Christmas last year, the last time we made any my baba was still alive. She couldn't make them, then, but she could direct us, observe us -- just as she'd sit in a chair in the garden and watch us pick the cucumbers and dig the potatoes, we'd hand them to her & she'd brush the dirt off, admire them.

It was so good to talk about her yesterday, standing in the kitchen at the acreage, sun on snow, listening to my mama and uncle tell stories. About her, her cooking, their youth. We knew we had made the cabbage rolls properly because soon the house smelled just right, just as if we had recreated her kitchen... warm rice & onion, & buttery bacon for the rolls that won't be eaten on Christmas Eve... & from peeling the sour cabbage my hands still smell a bit like vinegar & spices. Baba hands, folding up the wet papery leaves into fat little nestly pigeons, holubchi.

This is what I mean by living memory. How this kind of active reminiscence -- the conscious remembering of a person's tradition -- is a sort of continuous resurrection. I feel so grateful for for this nourishment, physical & spiritual.

* * *

Holubchi (Cabbage Rolls)

This is a recipe that has never been written down before, but I shall try to explain how my baba made these tasty morsels. If you believe that you don't enjoy cabbage rolls, it's likely because you have happened upon either a commercially made variety or a homemade but sadly misguided little holubchi that was made boiled limp without sour cabbage or love. Those are not my baba's cabbage rolls. You will like these, because they are tangy & comforting & decidedly un-soggy winter food of goodness.

I will describe how to make enough to feed a small army, but you can easily half this recipe.
For the filling, you will need about 4 cups of rice to about 7 cups of water, in a very large pot. You should do about half water, & half chicken/vegetable stock for the best flavour... You can cook the rice the way you normally do it, but for a little less time -- it should be slightly undercooked, a bit crunchy, so as not to get too soggy when the rolls themselves are heated.

While the rice cooks, mince two onions and sauté in butter until nice & translucent. Once the rice is (under)cooked, mix it with the onions in a very large bowl.

When made without meat, holubchi are one of the 12 dishes of Sviata Vechera, the Ukrainian Christmas Eve Holy Supper. If you like to eat meat &/or these rolls won't be eaten for Sviata Vechera (which is meatless to honour the sacrifices of farm animals), feel free to add bacon. You can get what my mama says are 'bacon ends' or you can get 'normal' bacon and cook it up in butter until it's not too crispy, then crumble it up & add lots of fresh ground pepper to the mix.

You should also have procured two nice-sized heads of sour cabbage. Apparently some people are afraid of sour cabbage, & like to steam a normal cabbage til it is just soft enough to peel -- you can do this, but I highly recommend the sour one, which you can find in grocery stores fairly readily. Around here you can get a brand called Kissel which is suitably tangy. Usually the core is removed too, but if not, you should do that first. Then, start peeling off the leaves, rinsing them in cold water to remove excess vinegar. If the leaves tear, don't worry. You can 'patch' them up as you're rolling. Put any tiny pieces aside for 'scrap', and then cut the larger leaves in two so they are palm-sized, & trim the hard stem-part off. Let the leaves sit in a colander til you're ready to roll. (That's a bad pun, yes, but my family loves bad puns, so I'm keeping it there).

Rolling holubchi is a fine art. If you do it well, your skills will be celebrated far & wide, you know. (People still rave about my great-aunt Nancy's tiny, elegant holubchi). However, even larger, more unwieldy cabbage rolls still taste delicious. Take a cabbage leaf in the palm of your hand (most leaves curve a little, let the curve fit with your hand). Place a heaping spoonful of filling in the middle & roll the leaf tightly around it, folding & tucking in the sides. (You can also spread the mix thinly over the whole leaf & then roll it). Place the roll in an oven-safe dish with the ends of the leaf tucked down. Repeat until all your cabbage is gone. If your cabbage leaf has holes or tears in it, just place a small thin piece (from your scrap pile) on the inside of the role to cover it up. (Save any other cabbage scraps -- you can chop them up, fry them in butter with any leftover filling & fresh chopped tomato...)

Now, you can take your holubchi & immediately freeze them to oven-bake later, or you can cook them right away. You'll need to make some sauce -- my baba used tomato soup from a can, slightly thinned with some tomato juice. You can use stewed tomatos, too. Season your sauce with more ground pepper & some Hungarian paprika, & pour it over your cabbage rolls. Preheat the oven to ~350 degrees fahrenheit & cook covered for about 1 & 1/2 to 2 hours til the cabbage is nice & tender. I todi, ïzh, ïzh! Na zdorovia!

Wednesday, December 06, 2006

podvijne shchastia!


{me, feeding a chickadee in Hawrelak Park -- picture taken by Bryna}

Because I have written precisely 17915 words in term-paperage over the past week or so, I shall just leave you with this:

Me (going x-country skiing) + chickadee (eating little black sunflower seeds out of my mitten) = (super extra) happiness

also, now I am finished papers, so I can ski & feed birds whenever I want.