Elizabeth Thomas at last year's Sunkin Garden

Love this poem! If you like this go to it on YouTube and hit LIKE!

Cantus - gorgeous voices and arrangements

Cantus -- read that:  Lush.  A celebration of all that is human.

An all male professional a capella vocal ensemble from Minnesota, they call their performances and music the art of "spontaneous grace."   The men often weave and move and interact with each other as they sing.  They obviously love what they do, are present and focused, and the audience can't help but be swept up into their musical universe. There is no stern baton waving distraction out front and no sheet music to crinkle, no folders to block our view of their expressions as they sing. It's all from memory, all internalized. all amazing. They also create many of their own arrangements.

The program I head last Friday, at the Gardiner Theater in Pawling, NY included the classical and popular, the ancient and the modern, the sacred and the profane, never flinching as it looked at the human species and its frailty, its fragile gasp of time, at the depth of loss and the joy of living. For an idea of their range check out these two videos from YouTube. Very different. Both incredible. They have a YouTube channel and a myspace page and six or more albums, (search iTunes or Amazon or Google Play)

  Yes, it's a week and a day later. I am so far behind on my posts I may never recover.

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the Phoebe Wars

Skill and sweat built the house where I grew up -- the skill and sweat of my father (left), his father, and my mother (below), guided by blueprints scratched on the back of an old window shade.

Almost before the roof was on, another kind of building was in progress. Two little grey birds with instinctive skill and determination of their own were slinging mud and moss under the back porch overhang. They cemented their nest to the side of ours - a union that would last more than forty years.



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By a bird's reckoning it was a perfect location. It was a foil for cats, eight feet off the ground with no climbable surfaces below. It was totally sheltered from the weather by the porch floor above and protected on three sides by the cellar-door alcove. With nearby woods the supply of insects was endless and mud for the nest was readily available. In short it was phoebe paradise.

Every year since then, a pair of phoebes has happily dribbled mud somewhere on this house. Evidently phoebes are like salmon and earnest men - willing to swim against the current to reach their stream of origin. The opposing current in this case was my father who was determined to move them. Their preferred nesting spot was directly above the cellar door, which Dad used several times a day. He hated to disturb them once there were eggs involved and he worried the nest would fall if he inadvertently slammed the door. His only alternative was using the garage door. The roar of it always sent the phoebe flapping off to a nearby tree, leaving her four or five whitish eggs cooling alone.

My father spent a lot of time thinking about how to outwit those birds. He didn't want to hurt them. He was in fact a bird enthusiast who provided suet in net-bags and bird feeders overflowing with sunflower and other seed. These treats were set where they could be easily seen from the kitchen window where Dad breakfasted with binoculars and field guides.

But phoebes are members of the flycatcher family. They aren't interested in handouts. All they want are bugs: gnats, mosquitoes and flies on the hoof, caught right out of the air during angular sorties that put the maneuvers of an F-16 to shame. Unknown to the phoebe, my father admired them for their work ethic, for their domesticity, their agility and especially for their stubbornness. But he was stubborn too. And he wanted them to build somewhere else. He decided on swift preventative action in the early spring, before there were any eggs in the nest. So began the great Phoebe Wars of New Road.

First came the battle of the pie tins. Dad hung one on a string so it spun and whirled on every breeze right in front of the unfinished nest. So the Phoebe began building on the other side of the doorway. My father knocked the nest down. They built it again. He knocked it down again and hung a flurry of pie tins to wave and flap and bang together in the breeze. While not much impressed with the hardware, the Phoebes finally built over the living room window instead, a spot well out of my father's reach.

But the following spring they were back under the porch. Every year it's always their first choice. And with each succeeding season they seemed less and less impressed with the shiny, noisy decorations; so the size, variety and decibel-capacity of the deterrents increased accordingly. Eventually things escalated to sheet metal, old kitchen pans, chicken wire, strips of tin foil, usually arranged to rattle and clank like the Ghost of Christmas past. Although the Phoebe were indifferent to Dickens, knocking down the unfinished nest often won the day. Several years in a row they built a second nest over the living room window. Once they built over the front porch light.

One year my father went to knock down the nest but found it was way too late. Five open mouths with pink gullets pointed at him, emitting various squeaking sounds. He determined they all had lice and he dusted each of the baby birds with delousing powder, dusted the nest and lowered it into the bottom half of a plastic milk carton which he nailed back over the doorway. The adult birds came back flustered and scolding but fed the chicks anyway. Dad didn't bother them again that year.

During winter he got to thinking that the ledge on which the birds anchored their nest was very narrow, barely an inch in width. In spring he optimistically stretched heavy tinfoil over it with no success. The next year he built a triangular ledge filler-upper that ran the length of the door. He was fairly satisfied this would stop them. Any nesting material would just slide right off, like snow on a steep roof, he thought. But he overlooked one important aspect. The triangle was hollow and he hadn't plugged the ends. That year the Phoebes built inside it. They probably thought it was a bird house.

My father carried on his bird wars until he died in 1984. For their part, the Phoebe have continued to build under the back porch, though in recent years my mother has taken up the torch of moving them out. This spring she hung up a roll of chicken wire. When the birds began building inside it, she took it down. Amazingly, they started building again in a completely new location. Their latest nest sits in an elbow of drainpipe under the roof overhang in the crook of the ``L'' formed by the dining room and the kitchen. This spot might prove to be a new favorite.

While I can't kid myself that it's been the same Phoebes all this time, I'd wager its been a long line of descendants of the original pair - birds that returned here because they felt the first tickle of the night breeze while still damp from eggs pecked open in the shelter of the porch overhang. Some internal homing device brings them back from their winter travels. If only wandering humans could find their way home so easily.

-- Mar Walker , original date 1993

Inverse Origami (1998) now on Google

My very first chapbook (from 1998),  Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding is now available for reading though Google Books....   If you visit its page on books.google.com/  you can download a pdf file of the book via a dropdown menu on the upper right. Or you can view a full text preview on this page by either scrolling down, or clicking the arrows, or jumping to the table of contents and clicking on each poem title. Very cool, Google!!!

I started this process around Xmas of last year - sent off the package and documentation, and never heard anymore about it. Just this week, it came online!  I sent the physical book in to be scanned as the publication's original MS Publisher file predated Windows XP, and was so antiquated as to be unopenable.  Though I have second thoughts about the 2012 cover and front matter, the rest is reasonably presentable for something captured in an automated scan.

  I also have also discovered I can make a ebook pdf on Google docs. So more books are coming.  Hurray!

Philosophy from my past - a 1982 journal entry

I found an old journal of mine in the basement - a book in pen on paper. Some entries I think I will post. :)

This is the very first, from January 4, 1982 -- long before blogs, before cell phones, before I had email, or even a computer.   I was fighting sadness:

     There are no whys.

     There are only nows,
     spanning eternity end to end,
     like points in a line, infinite,
     yet each in strident isolation.

     I am sick of whys.
     Whys stink of pain.
     Give me distraction: the eternal present.
     The kingdom of contentment is "NOW."

     Life needs no reason.
     Life is reason enough.
                   
                           -- Mad Mar (Mistryel) Walker

Library Concerts: Berkshire Big Band - WOW

I cannot say enough good things about the Berkshire Big Band.  I saw them at the Brookfield Library on March 18 - a free concert - and it was just incredible. (Library concerts are wonderful that way.)

 "They're going to knock your socks off" Victoria Munoz, who is a sax player with the band, told me before the show. She was right. The sound of those smooth brass harmonies flowed over me like a wave! They are just amazing: The playing is tight, nuanced, totally danceable. They present each piece in the frame of its history, cut across styles and do it well, play things you don't expect or things you do in a way you didn't.  For this show, there were tunes or arrangements by Benny Goodman, Glen Miller, Count Basie, Buddy Rich and more.  There was a vocalist too Jan Maki.  It was a wonderful show. Go see them.
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Berkshire-Big-Band/75080779193

Paddies Day Part 2: Killian Troupe at Molten

Three heads are better than one they say. On Paddies Day evening I caught the first performance ever of a new trio: the Killian Troupe at Molten Java in Bethel. It's an acoustic trio where all three sing and write songs.



It's comprised of Richard King, (upper right)  Cassandra Mulcahy (upper left) and Jeff Smith (lower left). This was their very first show as a group. Though there are a few instrumental kinks to work out,  the result will be quite nice judging by Saturday's performance. Their vocal harmonies were wonderful, and they can also each take the spot light for a song or more or swap out instruments to lend variety to the show.






Each of these independent musicians/songwriters brings different strengths and skills to the group and this may play out well over the long haul:

• Jeff Smith  brings a relentless melancholy musicianship and songwriting to his own songs, that is emotive and somehow transcendent. He also brings guitar and mandolin, both accompaniment and lead.
• Cassandra Mulcahy, a music therapist, brings a counterbalancing joy and delight in life, an impish loving song-writing charm on guitar, keyboard and bass guitar chops too.
• Finally Richard King who bills himself as "The Old Picker" brings a lifetime of performing as a folk/country player. With it come a sense of pacing and that solid entertainer's patter to the audience which is almost always lacking in the shows of beginning musicians and songwriters who are so busy feeling their music that they forget they must be showmen too.

You can find out more, and click "like" on their Killian Troupe Facebook page where there are links to their individual pages.