Our Daily Bird 60: The Great Grey Shrike

Hallõgija / The Great Grey Shrike from Chintis Lundgren on Vimeo.

From Estonia: spend 6 minutes or so with the great grey shrike, some sparrows, the common cuckoo and a few other weird little birds.

Our Daily Bird 59: A place to call my own

It seems that many minds are turning to thoughts of home, place and space during these long winter months. Birds may need to to find shelter and not every one may want what are arguably some of the brightest and happiest houses known to birdkind. A few birds  may enjoy a more modern design and that's where ChrisJob at the Curbly blog helps out with a mid-century influenced birdhouse complete with design plans and how-to videos so your fine feathered friends can practice their unhappy hipster poses in fine minimalist style.

Our Daily Bird 57: Harper's Red Cardinal

You'll have to pardon the little Hedge break. I was in Tofino, BC watching waves crash into rocks and couldn't bear to interrupt all that with blogging. The sound of waves are firmly tucked into my memory for those long winter's nights and we are back with all the good things that Hedgies have to offer.

We started Our Daily Bird with some Charlie Harper and there is so much to pick from his work, it is inevitable that Harper's birds will land here from time to time. I have also been listening to Mile's Davis' Blue in Green and this hip red guy seemed to fit that mood.

Poster Cabaret has these available as small canvas murals. If you are looking for some more affordable art work, Poster Cabaret also has a nice selection of posters from artists like Bianca Gomez, Amy Ruppel, and Frank Chimero.

2011 Calendars: papercraft and yetis!

Get your paper and scissors out and add calendar every month from The Curiousity Group.

Our Daily Bird 55: Idiots and Angels

Imprint interviews with Bill Plympton, creator of Idiots & Angels:

This haunting, “cartoon-noir,”  animated feature is about a morally bankrupt man who wakes up one morning to find wings sprouting from his back. The wings make him do good deeds and thus follows a tale about the battle for the human soul. Here, Plympton talks about the making of the film and his love of animation

Into 2011: Making stuff and small.

This year's theme came to me as I watched Mr. Rogers videos with Tiny Niece. We were both fascinated watching people make stuff, soothed into relaxation by quiet narration and gentle piano music. There go some painted red wagons, some fortune cookies, canvas sneakers, and bright yellow crayons. As I watched all this industry , I realized that the factories in these videos probably don't exist anymore, everyone laid off and all the cookie dough and crayon wax shipped overseas in search of a bigger profit margin.

It's easy to wax nostalgic about manufacturing gone by and forget pollution, bad labor practices, and Red Dye No. 2. But in the middle of it all, there is the making of things, the creating of something with hands and the help of machines that contribute in their own small way to someone's daily life. As Frank Sobotka said on The Wire, in the least Mr. Rogers way possible: "You know what the trouble is, Brucey? We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy's pocket."

So I think this year at the Hedge we will continue, in our own small way, to talk about making stuff - soups and calendars and music and communities and books and a life. If it was good enough for Mr. Rogers, it's more than a good path for us. We hope you join us.

And we're back/Our Daily Bird 54

The little Hedge Society that could. We begin with birds and notebooks and letters. It makes my former magazine publisher heart sing...

BIRD - IdN 100th issue from Hardcuore on Vimeo.

And to all a good night...

  

 Out the west coast window of Hedge Society Central.

My Christmas Eve Song.

The McGarrigle Christmas Hour
Kate and Anna MCGarrigle ( and Rufus and Martha Wainwright and Emmylou and Beth Orton...just get the whole CD, and look up a bit o' history on the McGarrigle family at the same time.)

>> Play "Counting Stars"
(just for a few days in hopes you'll get the whole album)
 

Every year around Christmas or New Year's, the big black phone tucked into the cubbyhole of our yellow kitchen would send its loud bbbbb-ring into the house late into the night. We'd all wake up as mom ran for the phone knowing that it was my uncle, loudly talking about eternal life and Jesus while mom tried to calm him down. He was always half in tears and more than drunk. Being drunk was his thing, his lifelong thing.

The song Counting Stars reminds me of him, gone now to lung cancer. My last memory holds a thin man sitting in a low-rent apartment hooked up to an oxygen tank, a necklace of plastic tubes on his stained t-shirt. This spoken word piece reminds me of him and other hims and hers that might be "in damn trouble again" as Christmas rolls around. I listen to this song and try to send hope along. I hope they're all counting the best kinds of stars as the chorus sings and the pianos play. I hope when they call  - all drunk and thinking of Jesus - that someone picks up the phone.



Card me for Kiva!

 Smoking Kangaroo letterpress card by Pistachio Press

Just say, "Card me!" and $1 will go to Kiva.

I love letterpress. And you'll be seeing more of it now that I have sent a few projects on their way and I'm able to focus on the Hedge's year-end calendar roundup. Hurray for small presses where people lovingly press their designs into beautiful tactile papers. I encourage Hedgies of all kinds to support letterpress makers and send beautiful papery things into the world.

If you remember, when this blog was first launched we held The Great Paper Exchange where perfect and imperfect strangers sent papery things to each other just for the great fun of it all. I'm thinking we need to do that again - maybe to combat the February blues.

Christmas is one of the opportunities to send letterpress but this year, I am not sending cards. Part of this has to do with choosing to celebrate a different kind of holiday - not one that needs to battle consumerism, or save money or hold up the banner of Buy Nothing Christmas although those are all interesting choices. It just feels different to me. Every once in a while, I need to rethink traditions and notions of celebration.

I find it a necessary corrective but also somehow soothing, to be able to change, to look at things differently every so often and offer myself another perspective. For now, this is something that is too hard to explain in bloggish format. It seems like anytime you choose something you are passing judgement on someone choosing something else and so I will leave my different choice to my own mind.

That being said, i would like to send something out into the world during this time of year. So here's the deal: let me know that you'd like a Christmas card and I'll send $1 to Kiva, the online microfinancing platform with the motto "loans that change lives".  For the last few years, I've loaned money through Kiva to women in South America, Africa, and Asia. It's good fun and as someone who often works independently, I'm happy to be a part of the small businesses that other women in  the world are operating.

Here's how it works:

Just say, "Card me!" and $1 will go to Kiva.

You can email (hedgesociety at gmail dot com), DM (@kr_wolfe), use facebook, leave a message in the comments, or use tin cans and string.  Just for the great fun of it all.

Infographic: Little Red Riding Hood

As mentioned in the animated poetry post, I'm working on a few things that make me clunk my head on the desk at regular intervals. I think if you have to treat ideas like they are doomed Grade 9 Biology frogs, they should at least have the elegance of Tomas Nilsson's Little Red Riding Hood.

Slagsmålsklubben - Sponsored by destiny from Tomas Nilsson on Vimeo.

Animated Poetry: Billy Collins

I try to read a poem every morning. Three weeks of lectures and then weeks of other often inscrutable and dull writing has made catching the rhythm of a poem on the page more difficult. Since readings and being read to are not my favorite thing, a little animated poetry often saves the day.

JWTNY animated poetry channel:

"Billy Collins, former US Poet Laureate and one of America's best-selling poets, reads his poem[s] with animation by Juan Delcan of Spontaneous.

Noted for their intelligent humor, accessibility and observations on daily life, Collins' popular poems come alive further in a series of animated poems produced by JWT New York."

These are best dished out slowly. Here is Billy Collins reading "Forgetfulness".

2011: Calendar 4: Sandra Juto

Sandra Juto Illustraton:

Three  laminated pocket calendars in a package to keep tempis from fugit-ing.
8$ USD plus 2$ USD shipping.

Sandra also has her prints on sale. If you buy one, you get one free. One for you, one for Santa...

Our Daily Bird 44: Sometimes I hear them...

Da Vinci Landscape with Crows
© 2007 Lori Goldberg

I saw this painting at the Eastside Culture Crawl in Vancouver last year. There are a lot of crows where I currently live and I've been trying to look at them differently over the past few months. Less Poe and Milton. Something else. I don't know what yet.  I like how the artist saw crows not as the traditional tricksters but as helpers.

Goldberg has a strong connection to crows. She feels they have helped
her both emotionally and technically.

“When my daughter died twelve years ago at 10 months old, I would
walk the streets in an altered state, grieving a deep loss and the crows
would just be there landing in front of me or dropping stuff at me or
swooping down at me.

It was like they knew and they were trying to bring me back from the
depths of my pain and make me become more present. It worked.”

source: Grab News: Art Unfolding: featuring Painter Lori Goldberg by Rod Drown

While looking at this painting I had pieces of this poem running in my head. The crows, the painting, and Clifton's words remind me that there are those who may be experiencing the kind of extra heaviness that these long dark days of winter can bring. I hope part of that heaviness could be winged and beautiful.

sorrows
by Lucille Clifton

who would believe them winged

who would believe they could be

beautiful         who would believe

they could fall so in love with mortals

that they would attach themselves

as scars attach and ride the skin

sometimes we hear them in our dreams

rattling their skulls         clicking their bony fingers

envying our crackling hair

our spice filled flesh

they have heard me beseeching

as I whispered into my own

cupped hands       enough not me again

enough       but who can distinguish

one human voice

amid such choruses of   desire



November 11: Poppies

Photo: Thomas Lieser via flickr/creative commons

I have been wearing my poppy for over a week now. I spotted the change bucket and the little pile of red plastic flowers while waiting in line at the bank. I put in my money and attached my poppy to the left side of my jacket - the simple act of pinning brings many memories:

• elementary school and the shock of learning that people killed each other in such terrible ways
• the neat little rows of the poem In Flanders Fields, hand-copied by fellow students onto ruled paper and then stapled onto school bulletin boards:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row

• the RCMP officer, my next door neighbor, standing in dress reds at the local cenotaph. How could he stand still so long?
• taking the poppy apart at recess, putting the red part in our mouths, making fake lips and then wondering if we had done something wrong.
• watching all the red flowers go by as people walk down the street. If you just look at the flowers, it looks like the poppies are carrying  people across crosswalks, along the street, and into buildings and cars.
• one year in Paris for Remembrance Day. Poppy red against a black jacket. I turn to look north towards the D-Day beaches.

The poppy won't let you forget. Its long, straight pin sticks out of your jacket, catching on the sleeves or shoulders of other poppy wearers. It finds fingertips when you go to get dressed. It pokes you in the back when you lay your jacket over a chair. It constantly works its way loose and drops to the floor where people find it and say, "Excuse me, you dropped your poppy," and you put it on again. You are always checking to see if it is still there.

War is always failure. There is nothing glorious about it and the red flower reminds me of that and the hard work of peace that I must do in my own heart.

2011: Calendar 1: Atherton Lin

We featured Atherton Lin last year. Here's the offering for 2011:

Across the Sea: 16.50 USD plus shipping

Geographies real and imagined, collections of small intrigue and landscapes of longing combine to tell stories of travel and wanderlust. ACROSS THE SEA is the new installment of the Atherton Lin narrative, a wall calendar for the year 2011 and a journey of high adventure and perpetual adolescence. As usual, it is hand drawn in watercolour and reproduced to high standard in London, England.

The calendar measures 230mm high x 297mm wide, litho printed with vegetable-based inks on heavy matte 100% recycled paper. Printed by Calverts Co-op in East London

 

Calendar Roundup

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.

-Annie Dillard, The Writing Life, chapter 2, 1989

It is time to look at our favorite calendars found in Hedges around the world. If we need a lifeboat in the wreck of time, it might as well be an inviting one. Stay tuned.

24 Hours Alone

I was thinking the other day about how hard it is to spend 24 hours alone. It takes some real planning. It would take planning even for those without children or other live-in humans. If I counted up all the times I intentionally spent 24 hours in my own company, it wouldn't even take five fingers.

It is more difficult for women. We can't just step into the empty woods or take a 2 AM walk without extra considerations. This is a fact of life I find beyond irritating but there it is.

Still, there are all sorts of ways being alone can be done. The challenge of 24 hours alone should be taken at least once a life and more often if possible. Make a plan and include the word "No." Get some groceries. Turn off all the ringing and beeping things. See what happens in your own company.

And if you need to start slow, watch this:

Waving Under a June-Blue Sky

It's been a rainy few days and my mind wandered back to reading Johnny Cash's autobiography and  listening to June Carter Cash's last recording, Wildwood Flower, which traces a life that has its memories in seven decades of music. June's voice is very frail on this CD and I love the way it shows its wrinkles.

Rosanne Cash writes in the liner notes of Wildwood Flower:

This record 'Wildwood Flower', is the musical summation of an extraordinary life. I first heard it on May 10, 2003. My dad played it for me on a boom box while we took a short break from our vigil at June's beside during her last illness. Halfway through the record, I realized that I was listening to more than a collection of songs, I was hearing an autobiography, nearly cinematic in nature, and completely comprehensive in the scope of June's unique life. By the time we got to "Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone", I was wiping away tears, and chilled to the bone. I knew that it was her farewell and her mission statement, and that her soul, on some level that was greater than everyday conciousness, had directed its creation. The pain of imminent loss was like a mist surrounding my dad and me while we listened, and the poignancy of hearing a musical and cultural past that is now a part of history was, and is, so deeply moving.

I love biography of all kinds for this reason. It wipes away the illusion of fragmentation. We are not as separate as we think and we should not be as separate as we try to be.  When we are tempted to crawl into the corner and hold our heads over the immense and very real suffering around us, biography is a shouting reminder from the great crowd of witnesses. Beauty and hope continues to be deeply formed in every human life even when we can't see it because hurricane winds are blowing or leaders are lying and people perish for the lack of a few pennies worth of food or medicine.

Rosanne Cash also includes June's eulogy on the Wildwood Flower liner notes. The whole transcript can be found here and I highly recommend a careful reading of this tribute. This part will stay with me as I head out to look at the Fall colors:

June gave us so many gifts, some directly, some by example. She was so kind, so charming, and so funny. She made up crazy words that somehow everyone understood. She carried songs in her body the way other people carry red blood cells-she had thousands of them at her immediate disposal; she could recall to the last detail every word and note, and she shared them spontaneously. She loved a particular shade of blue so much that she named it after herself: "June-blue". She loved flowers and always had them around her. In fact, I don't ever recall seeing her in a room without flowers: not a dressing room, a hotel room, certainly not her home. It seemed as if flowers sprouted wherever she walked. John Carter suggested that the last line of her obituary read: "In lieu of donations, send flowers". We put it in. We thought she would get a kick out of that.

She treasured her friends and fawned over them. She made a great, silly girlfriend who would advise you about men and take you shopping and do comparison tastings of cheesecake. She made a lovely surrogate mother to all the sundry musicians who came to her with their craziness and heartaches. She called them her babies. She loved family and home fiercely. She inspired decades of unwavering loyalty in Peggy and her staff. She never sulked, was never rude, and went out of her way to make you feel at home. She had tremendous dignity and grace. I never heard her use coarse language, or even raise her voice. She treated the cashier at the supermarket with the same friendly respect that she treated the President of the United States.

I have many, many cherished images of her. I can see her cooing to her beloved hummingbirds on the terrace at Cinnamon Hill in Jamaica, and those hummingbirds would come, unbelievably, and hang suspended a few inches in front of her face to listen to her sing to them. I can see her laying flat on her back on the floor and laughing as she let her little granddaughters brush her hair out all around her head. I can see her come into the room with her hands held out, a ring on every finger, and say to the girls, "Pick one!" I can see her dancing with her leg out sideways and her fist thrust forward, or cradling her autoharp, or working in her gardens. But the memory I hold most dear is of her, two summers ago on her birthday in Virginia.

Dad had orchestrated a reunion and called it 'Grandchildren's Week'. The whole week was in honor of June. Every day the grandchildren read tributes to her, and we played songs for her and did crazy things to amuse her. One day, she sent all of us children and grandchildren out on canoes with her Virginia relations steering us down the Holston River. It was a gorgeous, magical day. Some of the more urban members of the family had never even been in a canoe. We drifted for a couple of hours and as we rounded the last bend in the river to the place where we would dock, there was June, standing on the shore in the little clearing between the trees. She had gone ahead in a car to surprise us and welcome us at the end of the journey. She was wearing one of her big flowered hats and long white skirt, and she was waving her scarf and calling, 'helloooo!' I have never seen her so happy.

So, today, from a bereft husband, seven grieving children, sixteen grandchildren and three great-grandchildren, we wave to her from THIS shore, as she drifts out of our lives. What a legacy she leaves, what a mother she was. I know she has gone ahead of us to the far side bank. I have faith that when we all round the last bend in the river, she will be standing there on the shore in her big flowered hat and long white skirt, under a June-blue sky, waving her scarf to greet us.