New Pornographers + Slow Food

@ Slow Food Nation. Too bad I'm out of the country by then, but hopefully it there will be other Slow Food Nation celebrations in the future.

Weepies- Simple Life

I'll kiss you awake, and we'll have time
To know our neighbors all by name
And every star at night.
We'll weave our days together like waves
And particles of light.

I want only this, I want to live
I want to live a simple life.

Hipster-farmer music: Bon Iver...even my music eats sustainably

Saw Bon Iver yesterday with all Justin Vernon's falsetto folk goodness. Stereogum has a great interview where he talks about eating really locally in Wisconsin:

I hunt for food and for the tradition. I do hunt every year but only during legal seasons. My family is not a hunt-for-sport kind of family...That's what it's mostly about: being outside in the quiet, and catching your meat the only true and honest way there is.

We do our own butchering, yes. We do send scrap meat and other things to a sausage place in Milwaukee, WI for fun stuff, like Cajun Brats or Venison bacon, but we do our own cuts. Last year I paid for a guitar repair with a shoulder roast. Gordy was jazzed, said he plucked some mushrooms out the back of his property and had the best meal of the year.

Hipster-farmer music: Andrew Bird and CAFOs

I've seen Andrew Bird in concert three times. Yes, I like him that much. For the uninformed, Andrew Bird creates some incredible tunes using his violin and his own whistling. He also has a farm where he records much of his music.

No surprise then that his newsletter today linked to Stop the Mega Dairy, a campaign to stop a California (gosh do I hate on California ag enough?)- style megadairy from coming to Nora, IL. If you live in Illinois you should speak up about this.

Also, you should speak up about the proposed rule change which would allow CAFOs exemptions from air emissions reporting requirements under the Superfund and Community Right-to-Know laws.

Livewire: How did you come up with the title The Mysterious Production of Eggs?

Andrew: Well, it came from an old magic catalog. It's been in my head for years and kind of took on multiple meanings when I lived, for a few years, out in my barn. I had 26 chickens and I would go get their eggs for omelets in the morning and make coffee - I would write these songs. It's pretty amazing to hold this egg that just came out of the body of this animal and then go about cooking it and eating it. People just aren't used to having that direct connection.

First Song a song of Galway Kinnell's poem

Then it was dusk in Illinois, the small boy
After an afternoon of carting dung
Hung on the rail fence, a sapped thing
Weary to crying. Dark was growing tall
And he began to hear the pond frogs all
Calling on his ear with what seemed their joy.

Soon their sound was pleasant for a boy
Listening in the smoky dusk and the nightfall
Of Illinois, and from the fields two small
Boys came bearing cornstalk violins
And they rubbed the cornstalk bows with resins
And the three sat there scraping of their joy.

It was now fine music the frogs and the boys
Did in the towering Illinois twilight make
And into dark in spite of a shoulder’s ache
A boy’s hunched body loved out of a stalk
The first song of his happiness, and the song woke
His heart to the darkness and into the sadness of joy.