Kh'bin oysgeforn felder un velder

Most of this week went toward construction—I was going to write that the kitchen has finally begun to look like a functional room rather than an art installation, but I think it is always going to look like a little of both—with some time off for good behavior, but there are now some genuinely bad things happening in my extended family and I am not sure how much I feel like posting substantively. I made chicken coconut soup for dinner with lemongrass, galangal, and kaffir lime leaves; I had to leave out the fish sauce so that my father could eat it. On the basis of its first episode, I am ready to declare Slings & Arrows (2003—2006) some of the best television I have ever seen. Remind me about A.S. Byatt. Here are some songs I have recently discovered.

Patrick Wolf, "The Bachelor (feat. Eliza Carthy)"

I will never marry, marry at all
No one will wear my silver ring

Susan McKeown & Lorin Sklamberg, "Prayer for the Dead"

Oy, ver vet nokh mir kadish zogn?
Ver vet mayn likht nokhtrogn?

Who will say Kaddish for me?
Who will carry my light?

Peter Doherty, "Last of the English Roses"

She knows her Rodneys from her Stanleys
And her Kappas from her Reeboks
And her tit from her tat
And her Winstons from her Enochs

Tori Amos, "Starling"

Starling, when he screams
He screams in black and white
Just like the magpie

The first is purportedly Appalachian in origin, although I believe it belongs to one of cucumberseed's worlds; the second is a braiding of nineteenth-century Irish folk, twentieth-century Yiddish, and a macaronic prayer in eleventh-century Latin and Irish; the third, the internet tells me, is reworking Jean Genet's Notre Dame des Fleurs (1943). I can't explain the fourth in the least, but I like its language. Enjoy.

My best friend is my hi-fi

From the department of small things I feel like complaining about, because that is also a human instinct: I did not hear the Neighborhoods at the Boston GreenFest last night. Fortunately it was a free concert, so there were no fixed plans I had to break, but I had really been hoping. This is the band I discovered in January when they opened for Mission of Burma at the Somerville Theatre; I described them enthusiastically and somewhat incoherently to nineweaving as soon as I got home:

I had heard of [the Neighborhoods] only insofar as Eric had mentioned them as another band from the Boston punk scene that I would really like, but he never played me any of their songs; I hadn't realized they were still (or in this case, again) performing. There are three of them. You must understand first that their guitarist and frontman, Dave Minehan, looks strikingly like David Bowie as Jareth: the same slashed eyebrows and freefall mop of hair, except that he is wearing a horizontally striped sweater and a coonskin cap, which loses the latter section of its tail in the first song as he bounces around the stage; he will eventually pogo so hard that the whole piece of haberdashery flies off his head and commits suicide somewhere in the drum kit. Understand next that the bass player, Lee Harrington, has the mild and slightly perplexed, nut-shaped face of a British character actor, with suit jacket and brows to match, but he wears bright black-and-white tennis shoes and periodically launches into deadpan politically conservative rants, so the overall impression is that someone upstairs just screwed up and made Stephen Colbert a Time Lord. The drummer, Johnny Lynch, is just a pleasant-looking, heavyset guy who doesn't look fazed by either of them. And then their music is audibly punk, but with a poppy bounce to about half the songs, and really good lyrics, some of which twist off in directions that probably should have been suggested by the coonskin cap and the rants; life is a pawnshop, fire is coming, and what sounds like a straight rock reminiscence about a burnt-out friend turns into the anthemic "Tommy's gone, but he is not forgotten / Tommy's gone, 'cause his liver it was rotten / But his heart was made of gold" with lines about how the narrator used to see him all the time when he worked at the liquor store. Supposedly Eric has some of their CDs which he will now transfer to me, but I may have to hunt them down myself. They were strange. I approve.

And their CDs are not bad, but all of the songs I could compare from the show in Somerville ("Real Stories," "Innocence Lost," "Tommy," "Fire Is Coming," "Pure and Easy," and "Prettiest Girl"—the other four being unknown to Eric or existing only on a taped-off-the-radio cassette he has not yet succeeded in digging up for me) were firecrackers live. I had been looking forward to future shows. So my heart won't snap in half, but I am sorry I missed this one. Did anyone else get the chance?