roses, bruises, 'bout your shoulders

This might be my last or second-last post to this LJ that isn't cross-posted from Dreamwidth. I'm going to be shifting over soon, anyway; I just wanted to get this out of my saved drafts pile first.

You may or may not recall that on January 26th of last year I posted a meme promising to Make Stuff for anybody who commented. The one year time span has come and gone. I never forgot about it, though I did get thoroughly sidetracked several times. I still intend to fulfill my promises, as soon as I'm able; this is an update on my progress.
pyroclasticgrub: I think you already know I was knitting you a vest. I had mostly finished it this fall, then ran out of yarn, and because the yarn I'm using was thrifted and old and I don't know where it came from, I cannot buy more. I've tried it on (we have pretty similar circumferences, I think?) and there seems to be a lot of positive ease, so I'm going to try frogging and restarting it with fewer stitches. I have a few other projects with stricter time limits to finish first.
prairiedaun: I had a lot of trouble deciding what to do for you. You can do your own knitting and many other crafts, you're good at finding music, you cook and bake, I don't know what your current fandoms are. I settled on designing a hat in your honour. Not sure it's the kind of thing you'd wear, but I hope you'll enjoy the premise at least. I'll put the pattern on Ravelry when I'm done. I'll probably donate the first prototype as a raffle prize for a pet rescue fundraiser coming up in a couple of weeks in Ottawa.
johnnypurple: A mix! This one has actually been technically finished for ages, aside from some minor picking and poking. It's big (30 tracks) and maybe a little weird; it started with me looking for a theme to work around and deciding somewhat arbitrarily to use only Canadian artists, and then it mutated into this big thing about Canadian identity, or my experience of living in a country with A Certain Reputation and trying to reconcile (or not) my love for so many of the people and places and words and ideas and bits of art that get flagged "Canadian" (willingly or nay) or that entangle in the rhizomatic tendrils of my "Canadian" experiences, with all the things I hate about that Reputation and about the realities of actually living here (many of which, such as sabotaging climate talks in Copenhagen, sabotaging post-secondary funding especially for social science and humanities students, denying Canada's history of colonialism, denying Canada's abuse of Afghan detainees, and proroguing parliament AGAIN to avoid talking about this stuff at least until the fucking wasteful destructive celebration of nationalism known euphemistically as the 2010 Vancouver-Whistler Olympic games are over, can be credited to the Harper administration's reign of bullshit; others, like performing pelvic exams on unconscious surgery patients without our knowledge or consent are less new [this example is pretty new to public awareness] but still fucking GROSS). At different points the playlist was much longer (but I don't need to include songs from every Canadian artist I kinda like) or much more angrily political (but that's hijacking, and there are better fora); I've tried to tame it down to artists or tracks I'm really fond of right now and which I feel stand out in some particular way, and use the Canadian identity issues mostly as a substrate. I'm posting it for everybody to enjoy, although I do especially hope that you specifically, johnnypurple, find some tracks or artists really warm you (or cool you, or whatever you need most this week). My title for the project is "A Case of You".

( music and stories )

ETA: BONUS TRACK! This totally should have been on the list, except that I hadn't listened to the album all the way through before I posted:
The Cliks (Toronto), We Are The Wolverines
We all come from the wheel and fire
We are, we are, we are the wolverines
Burning in your heart's desire
We are, we are, we are the wolverines
Because the Cliks are awesome and Lucas Silveira is a rock'n'roll god in the ascendant phase. Because Wolverine is a strange kind of Canadian icon even when he's played by an Australian in American movies (comic books do weird things to geography--cities, worlds, bodies, plausibilities). Because the first year I volunteered at the Winnipeg Folk Festival I had a conversation with Billy fucking Bragg about how he hadn't been a very good goatherd (no joke) and he hypothesized that in Canada wolverines would be the dominant menace re: disinterring livestock, rather than foxes which were the problem where he'd worked (they're not). Because the wolverine at the Assiniboine Park Zoo in Winnipeg is a total camwhore. Because the song is sexy and somehow inspiring even if I'm not sure I quite get it. Wolverines!

This Land Is Whose Land?
Race, Place and Genre: Situating “Folk” in Folk Festivals 1

It's been over a month since this year's Winnipeg Folk Festival, and I still have a stack of other things I Should Probably Be Working On, but if I leave this any longer it's not going to get written, and I need to write it.

Bird's Hill Provincial Park, 30some km NE of Winnipeg. A beautiful summer night on the Canadian prairies; stunning crayon-box sunset giving way to night's chill and stars almost as numerous as the mosquitoes (but theorizing “nature” and materiality of place is another conversation). It's getting near the end of the Mainstage concert, Thursday night at the 36th annual Winnipeg Folk Festival.2 I'm sitting at my grandparents' tarp, next to the mid-audience sound tower. King Sunny Adé and His African Beats have just left the stage, and I'm already mentally blogging (a couple of people on my friendslist had recently posted about size positivity, and apropos of that discussion I wanted to salute the two beautiful women dancers/hand percussionists whose enthusiastic performances were definitely a highlight of his set and possibly the whole weekend). Then, while the stage crew sets up for night's headliner Xavier Rudd, Vance Gilbert comes out to do a short set (in festival patois, a “'tweener”) and comments after his first song about how kind it was of the festival organizers to put all the Negroes on the same night. There's an audible hiss as thousands of hippies and seasonal wannabes draw a shocked breath. I wince, not because I'm scandalized by the suggestion but because I'd been thinking along similar lines when I read the schedule a few days earlier. It's not technically true, this year (Oumou Sangaré was on Mainstage the following night and Burning Spear on Saturday), but it's far from a spurious accusation.
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