Hello all,
Things have been quiet here for some time, except for about my friend JJ's awesome activist photography. I've realized that since we haven't been putting out records lately people might be laboring under the misconception that nothing's going on around here. Nothing could be further from the truth.
There's still a ton of music going on over here, even if it's not coming out on ruffian. Cephalopods have gone into hibernation with new professional responsibilities, two marriages, and the arrival of a delightful baby girl. We will get around to playing again once we sort out how to fit it into our new lives.
Kevin, my husband as of Saturday, has largely taken over the studio, as I have concentrated more and more energy on the garden. He's been down there working with Priests, a seriously rad girl/boy-revolution punk band whose music gives me that 15-years-old-and-at-my-first-good-punk-show tingly excited feeling. Gideon from Priests has also been engineering some projects down there, including a record by the also-awesome Downtown Boys.
I'm turning our back yard into a small urban farm. Between the garden, the Mt. Pleasant farmers' market, and a winter CSA from Even'Star farm in Lexington, MD, we've been able to get most of our produce locally and grown without chemicals. The difference has been enormous. We feel more nourished from less food. Our garden regularly attracts cardinals, robins, bluejays, mourning doves, finches, sparrows, hummingbirds, and woodpeckers. And bees. I get more sun and exercise. The food tastes a whole lot better. Every year the soil holds more water, there are more worms working it (enough to share with the robins), and more of our food gets harvested minutes before it's prepared and eaten. This year I'm feeling like we can skip the winter CSA - even we, lovers of greens, radishes, and turnips, can only consume or preserve so much per week. The market opens the year earlier and runs until Christmas now. I'm getting down with year-round food production and finding that I'm already growing a lot of what I used to buy.
To me, this is just a new growth from old DIY punk roots. We are trying to nourish ourselves and our communities physically in the way we always have culturally with music, support, and solidarity. A really satisfying day here tends to involve Kevin in the studio with a band and me in the garden. At some points I'll put down my tools and go into the studio to listen, chat, or fix a patch bay. At other points the band will break and we will chat in the yard. On really good days the dinner break finds us all sitting down at the dining room table with a meal cooked out of the garden. There is a deep and palpable satisfaction in the cultivation of the ground we live on and the cultivation of art and of friendship, fellowship, and community. I suspect I'm going to want to think through a lot of how this works, what it means, and why it's valuable on this blog while we are working out new ways to be. Hopefully this means there will still be cool updates about what's happening downstairs at swim-two-birds. But in the mean time, there are going to also be updates from the field, as it were. Today: Priests tour cassette mixes 3 pounds of radishes harvested 6 eggplant seedlings and 4 tomato seedlings transplanted Visits from Hugh's mother and Kevin's brother
