tea blends: the goodbye blend #3

Due to a kitchen full of tins of tea I’ve begun making mixed-media teapots each day, mixing ’em all up. I shall list blends #1 and # 2 when I have a min but today blend #3

The last tsp of Steeps Lady Earl Grey (silver tin)

2 tsp of the stale 11  yr old Clive McCabe Kenyan leaves given to me by the glorious Mary Mac

half a tsp of Steeps Lapsong souchong (which I mistakenly called lapsang duchong til I just read the tin)

It’s a goodbye tea blend, since it’s the last day of the year. And the first cup out of the pot I must confess I hesitate over. It couldn’t quite decide whether it was willing to give up any strident taste to the tongue. I return for the second cup now and we’ll see does she lower her resistance?

Send in the wimmin’

A bunch of documents have been released from 1978 and this story made me chuckle in today’s Irish Times. The govt at the time grappling with the concept of depopulation of the Islands.

THE ISLANDS: THE PROBLEM of declining population on islands led one minister to suggest a need to provide well-paid jobs for “females of marriageable age” to reverse the trend.

The declining and ageing population with a lack of women of marriageable age is identified as one factor that may lead to the eventual depopulation of the inhabited non-Gaeltacht islands of the west coast, a 1978 report revealed.

The minister for economic planning and development Martin O’Donoghue sought approval to “create female-employing projects on the islands, since without these the population structure is in danger due to the migration of marriageable age women in the islands”, a memorandum for the government states.

I love how the assumption is that’s all it takes. You see them banging the table, insisting “come on lads send in the uterus’!”

Of course there’s no mention of whether this was after the time when women had to give up their jobs once they were married. Unbelievable as it may sound. Since that would surely scupper the plan. Come to the Islands be a teacher until your up the pole and then … stay and populate the Island sans employment. Indeed.

There’s also no consideration of the males that lay in store for these women. The notion that you’d merely arrive female and fertile … er come again?

This year (almost last year) I was blessed to see some of Allen King’s documentaries. I’ve tried hard to find them via library and video shops to little or no avail. A bunch were screened in a retrospective at Vancity and Pacific Cinematheque. I was particularly transfixed by the b/w short he made entitled Skid Row. That image of Main and Hastings and people arriving from out of town (should be probably be out of city, tho’ Vancouver has a towny quality (pre the stainless steel era) to my eyes when I see it in older presentations) keeps coming back to me.

The film was so beautiful to watch. Something slightly arrested and theatrical in its stylized presentation of social poverty and street drinking.  There were these cast iron stair railings that’d I’ve not managed to figure out their location. The other day I was down at that same intersection, or approaching it on foot from the East and the movement of people reminded me of the film. Obviously the traffic is slightly different. In the King film it was loggers I recall, or a logger who the man bumped into and hooked up with. (?) Tuesday there was a tension on the road, post xmas, early enough in the day, people coming out of the SRO’s, striding determined, magnet like, looking to score.  I had to walk a block South (this compass gives me trouble but I am decade late grasping it) and then return that same block.

The dealers wore the good coats. They had their hoods up. There was intense agitation on the street that day. I’d been there the same time, the same morning a week earlier and it had been noticeably different.  North side of the street, a young woman stopped middle of the road while she crossed roared at a group of four men taunting or retorting or smiling. She walked another few steps. She stopped. She turned. She roared and so on.

In the library reading room was a quiet that you don’t find in other libraries. Except the frustration on the streets that day wound round into the alley behind it and for the next hour or so it was war down there. And then for whatever reason, it all stopped from the alley. And it was lovely and peaceful and wooden for the next hour. Then a man arrived, stood over by the window and read a newspaper to himself mumbling out loud and farting something astonishing. Finally he tired of his own mumbling and drifted off.

I was reading something later that day that referred to that street as Skid Road, and I wondered was it an error. Was it called Skid Road or Skid Row?   I’d seen another old b/w documentary of The Catholic Worker movement on Chrystie Street just off The Bowery in NY at the same period and had read up on the depression in the twenties in the same area. One difference was how static the people were in those NY stories, either lining up in queues or sat at the tables and not necessarily straying from The Bowery. One resident told me the cops would order the drunks to “get back on the Bowery”.

A few times I have heard people remark on that street of Main and Hastings in terms of when they came to town.. as in it was the place they arrived. I always think of movement in that street since I saw the King film. Even if it may be the same movement around in the same circle and cycle all day long. There’s also much criss-crossing into and out of Chinatown and Strathcona Pedestrian movement largely.

Post note: So I found a link to clip from Allen King’s Skid Row. Curiously Jim lives by the harbour, I must try to see the film again and locate that image of the men arriving in the city and see was it in fact those two streets where I thought.  Or did I imagine it to be somewhere it was not.

http://archives.cbc.ca/arts_entertainment/film/topics/3746/

pots

Some years back I used to read Zadie Smith’s pieces in the papers and think she’s got stuff to say, but she aint quite saying it yet. There’s also that sense reading her novels, that she’s capable of much more interesting work.

In this NYRB piece Two Paths for the novel she wrote, the pot is boiling man and the lid’s lifting. The shovel’s going into the soil. Her dissection on Netherland and the questions she’s asking (which I will post post slumber) … As a reader I want to think harder, her reflections, the questions have my brain ticking, ticking hard.

Cookery has long perplexed me, there was some reassuring listening to Ruth Reichl’s tales of her mum’s cooking. Myself and my son just roared laughing at this. So it had two listening innings. Three in fact. One where I described it to him, and he insisted, but let’s find it, I want to hear it and he hunted, bless him and he found it and we listened again. Intergenerational to intergenerational. Pass it along.

This evening I cooked yet another disastrous stirfry that smoke rose up from alarmingly and polluted the place. But it was comforting against the backdrop of those sceals. Some made to cook, others made to eat and disaster.

Here it is

Wiseman

Some quick notes on Frederick Wiseman’s La Danse.

• Sacrifice: the pain, the feet, the lower back, the pain, the feet, the bunched up toes, the pain the feet the scissor’d jetes.
• Dancers: “half nun half boxer”
• Every individual sequin hand sewn on costumes. Every shoes sprayed with paint, wigs made, tools made, everything made, made, made. Every eyebrows attended to on an individual basis.
• Extremity of the body in all its possibility. Extend. Extend. Extend. Minimalist fat so we can see every muscle where he starts and where he ends.
• Are legs really that long?
• silence
• Feeding the five thousand a la Bernada Alba. Wahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
• Man repairing the roof with plaster.
• Moments. Single Moments. Establishing shots that repeat or situate being the string.
• Clocking in: The dancers heads move past the posters, door opens, bag on shoulder.
• Precision and pain.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9khElEVt-Q&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

rhotic 16

Ding,
Nollaig Shona duit cailín deas agus go hálainn
Tá súil agam an lá joyful mhaith an am Rahoots cócaireacht an turcaí le seacláide, ceapaim go raibh sé Mheicsiceo.
Gorm a bhí an lá go hálainn agus foirfe do siúl.

Oiche mhaith.