Sometimes I like to proceed by innocence. I have never made a music video before. But this track totally needed one. Enjoy.
“Kleismic” refers to the Kleisma, a musical interval made slightly more significant by this composition.
Remember: If you reject or even ignore Christmas, you are still using it.
I think it was this article http://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/413/countertop_culture in The Sun magazine that first caught my interest in wild fermentation. Certainly, the pallid, soggy sauerkraut of my middle American world had never once lured me. Still, my interest in home food preservation and the health benefits of raw, fermented foods made trying this irresistible, and so in I leapt. I can only say that homemade, wild fermented sauerkraut is one the most unexpected pleasures of my life now. Each batch is unique and that is part of the fun. I like to add a little garlic, a bit of carraway seed (against flatulence) and any root veggies that might be available like beets, carrots or radishes. I use the least amount of salt I can get away with which has been a bit less than the recipe and it has worked out well. Beets and purple cabbage both give the kraut a lovely pink hue. I don’t even like pink, but I have loved the colors of my kraut batches.
Anyway, Sandor Katz is the wild fermentation maven. Here’s his website, starting right off at the recipe for kraut: http://www.wildfermentation.com/resources.php?page=sauerkraut
This is the batch I made just a few days ago, dedicated to Dan Schreiber:
I hope you make some of your own and you love it!
During our last house meeting, Maggie led us in an activity that I thought was pretty cool and worth sharing here on the blog. A few weeks ago we agreed it would be a good idea to reorganize the living room to better fit the ways in which we’d like to utilize it. We hadn’t really gotten a chance to put our heads together and figure out exactly how to do that. So, during last Sunday’s meeting, we spent some time reflecting on what we individually wanted to experience — first, in our home as a whole, and then, in our living room specifically. The collective results of that exercise, the various themes and commonalities, were a pretty interesting reflection (to me, anyway!) of the group we have living here currently.
As the newest member, I’ve been here a month, and so far I am still thrilled to be here! I keep being warned that this won’t last, that I’ll soon become bitter and disillusioned (okay, no one actually said THAT, exactly), but until then… I really do consider myself fortunate to be able to experience life at La Casa. Now…back to the activity!
We were first directed to write 3-5 FEELINGS we wanted to experience in our home. We performed this task individually and anonymously. Here were the results. (fyi, I tried to consolidate repeat words, those are shown bigger with the number of how many people wrote them)
Feelings. Home.
We were then asked to write 3-5 ACTIVITIES we wanted to see happening in our home.
Activites. Home.
At this point, Maggie read to us the list of words we had written collectively, first for the feelings, then for the activites. Next, we were to write 3-5 FEELINGS again, this time for our living room specifically.
Feelings. Living room.
Finally, we wrote 3-5 ACTIVITIES we wanted to see happening in the living room.
Activities. Living room.
The living room has gone through its first transformation since then (with the help and inspiration of a little tequila, so I hear). Next time you get a chance to pass through, these might be a few of the things you might see happening there!
I didn’t really think this post would have a particular theme until I wrote the title for it. Obviously at least some of us at La Casa are of a mind-body-spirit bent this season. I would say that, individually, we usually are, but things have recently coalesced so that these activities have entered into a somewhat more group sphere. As in many other enterprises, La Casa provides positive ground for do-it-yourself-improvement. I just made that up; do you like it? Anyway, we’ve got the space, the info, the mutual support to seriously pursue these interests without taking ourselves too seriously. A laughing Buddha would be the best sort to be, methinks.
Ice meditation, great cure for hangovers
On September 2, 2010, Andrew, a then two-years-&-one-month resident of La Casa — in other words, a La Casan — did that thing that every La Casan eventually does, perhaps th last thing that any La Casan can possibly do. He moved out of La Casa!
Out of La Casa & into a little rental house on Franklin St. Now Franklin St is a strange little street — a dead end poking almost obnoxiously into Crystal Lake Park. Obnoxious from th point of view of th park district, who’d like to see all th houses on th street torn down & th street turned into a parking lot! But for th few residents who live here, in these 8 houses, it’s a strange & magickal anomaly. And also not La Casa.
View Larger Map
Ok, first person now. I moved in with my partner Carey & her soon-to-be-ten-year-old daughter Kaleigh (who, as I type this, is spending some days in Springfield with her Dada and her friends — Springfield is where she moved from on September 2, 2010). So we’ve been settling in. There are domestic things to figure out — child care, unpacking, washing dishes, making “supper” (that’s what they call it around here), digging garden beds for winter greens! And there is love, passion, creativity here. Carey & I continue to fall deeper in love and surprise each other. Yesterday we harvested nine pounds of edible mushrooms! And Kaleigh & I invented a board game last week called CrazyPlay!!, which she took to Springfield with her and is hopefully surviving lots of games (it needs to be laminated, but we haven’t laminated it yet). We’ve also drawn & painted together, made bound books out of scrap paper, taken walks with Sophie, cast magic(k) spells with sticks. And it’s not always easy. As we settle into a new place with new people, there cannot not be turbulence. But there is also patience and love to soothe it.
C & K get up a lot earlier in th morning than I do. I’m getting used to it.
Today, with Kaleigh in Springfield and Carey at work, I’m doing some things that are important. Blogging is on my list (check!), and so is composing music, turning th compost (check!), taking a bath, re-reading a Gregory Bateson article, doing yoga in th park, & washing some dishes.
I miss my friends at La Casa. It’s nice to find excuses to go over there. It can’t happen every day, which makes it special when it does happen. When I lived there, I wasn’t in th habit of giving everyone a hug every time I see them, but now I am! I look forward to future La Casa events: potlucks, concerts, workshops, birthday parties…. It’s a nice circle to be in.
Much love,
Andrew, La Casan at Large.
ODDMUSIC URBANA-CHAMPAIGN
– presents –
odd instrument garden
at La Casa Grande Colectiva (a collective residence)
906 S. Maple St, Urbana
Sunday June 27 at 5pm
FREE!
Donations gratefully accepted to support our “artist in residence” program.
You’re invited to an open house in th form of a temporary sound garden. Odd and 1-of-a-kind instruments growing together in a “garden” for you to see & try out. Come at 5 to see th “garden.” Then stick around, because at 5:30, we’ll have a “garden tour,” & you can hear all our odd instruments at play: a full concert in th odd instrument garden.
= = =
Oddmusic U-C is building a library of unusual and usual musical instruments at the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center and facilitates events to connect experimental composition, microtonality, & instrument-building with radical social change.
After our house meeting last week we mucked out the coop to get it ready for some new birds. Maggie knows a lady outside of town with roosters and hens who agreed to sell us a few full grown layers when she heard about our recent tragedy with the pitbull. After cleaning out the coop and installing some perches made out of down limbs from the yard, a few of us went chicken shopping.
These two chickens are mixes of different breeds; on the left mainly Araucana, on the right Wyandotte. The breeder had a small operation and kept all her birds together creating eclectic mixes of colors and patterns. Before we had 4 Rhode Island Reds that were pretty much indistinguishable, which left us with no answer to the common question, “What’s this one’s name?” We made a point to pick out very different looking birds and have since begun the process of observing their behavior and choosing appropriate names.
We also got around the hanging up the feed dispenser, which seems to greatly reduce waste. More about the chickens to come. To see more photos check out my flickr stream starting here.
Unless you have a beehive in your backyard, you don’t see a lot of honeybees during Winter. In order to survive the long cold between flower blooms, the whole colony balls up inside of the hive and conserves heat by rubbing against one another. This mass of bees starts at the bottom of the hive and moves up the center eating all the honey. If they built up enough of a stockpile and the beekeeper didn’t take it all in the Fall, there will be enough to last till the Spring bloom. We didn’t harvest any honey last Fall, in fact Robby added an extra box of honey for the weaker of the two colonies (note the white box).
Another factor that helps the bees survival over the Winter is death. The population of the hive drops dramatically from 50,000+ at the peak, all the way down to a few thousand. This greatly reduces the rate at which the colony consumes the honey stores.
Of course, with fewer workers around general hive cleaning maintenance is neglected, and the bottom board becomes a mass open grave. The bodies pile up next to puddles of excrement almost blocking the hive entrance.
On nice sunny Winter days some activity can be viewed around the hives. These photos were taken when the temperature was hovering around freezing, but the sun was thawing some of the accumulated snow. Bees were peaking out of the hole in the hive.
I sat and watched with my camera, eager to see where the bees were venturing out to, and for what purpose.
The purpose of her flight quickly became obvious. After scurrying around along the surface of the snow for a few minutes, this bee keeled over and died.
Perhaps in a selfless act, she sacrificed herself so the rest of the colony could have enough to eat and survive. Or perhaps she was denied access to the honey stores and escaped only to find the cold white doom outside.
A lot of what I’ve read about beekeeping suggests thinking about the entire colony as one living organism, and each bee, while performing a specific set of tasks, functions as the tissues and organs. So, like a bear who hibernates through Winter, the hive emerges in the Spring leaner, and eager to build up and stockpile of food. While thousands of dead bees littered around the hive seems grim, it is all part of the process of seasonal regeneration.
La Casa Grande Colectiva 