It’s been over a week since the big 7.1 quake hit Christchurch, New Zealand. And while there has been, to paraphrase Jerry Lee Lewis, a “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” Christchurch may be battered and bruise but it is far from broken.

In fact, in many of the suburbs, there is no indication, except for minor cracks in walls and ceilings, that buildings (and people) had even been shaken around.

Life has returned to normal – well, almost.

People are going to work, children are going to school, but in reality, we are all on edge, in a state of readiness, just in case another big one hits. It’s going to take some time to relax the guard, to stop sleeping with a flashlight under the pillow and an emergency kit by the front door.

One of these days, we might even reconnect the electric garage door opener.

But while life has returned to ‘normal’ for most of us, those in the worst hit suburbs and the central city have the constant visual reminder of the damage such an earthquake can do.

Sadly, most of the damage in the central city is to the historic buildings, which isn’t surprising given that over 450 of the heritage listed blocks (as well as 7000 pre-1976 commercial blocks)  around Christchurch have been classified as earthquake prone.

Structural damage to many of these historic buildings will result in them being demolished. Actually, it’s already happening in some parts of the city.

Other historic buildings, thankfully, suffered what appears to be only superficial damage, mainly to their facades

The Repertory Theater, on Kilmore Street, is one such building. Originally called Radiant Hall, this building, with it’s ornate façade, has been part of Christchurch’s cityscape since 1929.  But now, thanks to the earthquake, parts of it’s façade, along with many red bricks, crashed to the ground. 

According to Rozena Hallum, the artistic director of the Repertory Society Committee, there is no question that this building will be repaired instead of demolished. And with that in mind, Hallum is holding  rehearsals for their next production, planned for next month, in her living room.

The show, after all, must go on.

Emily Smith finds landscape and history, and the connections between them, endlessly inspiring for her music. That’s as true for the songs she writes herself as for the music she seeks out from older sources. In Smith’s case, the landscapes which most draw her imagination are those of Dumfries and Galloway, in southwestern Scotland.

“Local history is a big thing for me,” she says. “The traditional music, I try to trace back songs coming from Dumfriesshire. I’m very much inspired by the landscape in the songs I write, also. And there are a couple of songs I’ve done about historical figures from the region.”

Smith sings and writes in both straightforward English and in Scots. Though she’s won a number of top awards for both songwriting and singing, neither of those got her started in music. “My parents gave me an accordion one Christmas,” Smith recalled, and that eventually led to her joining an accordion orchestra and playing with other bands for ceilidhs, too. “When I was first starting out, I was very much more of an accordion player than a singer,” she says.

Smith grew up in the same area of Dumfries and Galloway where she now makes her home. “A lot of the traditional music that’s played around here is Scottish country dance band, all accordion and fiddle — there’s a very strong following for that,”she said. “If you were to stumble upon a session in a pub –doesn’t happen often down here but there are a few sessions — the majority of the tunes are Irish, because we’re so close to Ireland and a lot of the people here have connections there. All that was my background when I first got into traditional music, really.”

Both of the bands she was in decided they needed a singer and a spokesperson “and I’m not quite sure how it happened, but that became me,” Smith said, pointing out that she learned a great deal about stage presence and connecting with audiences from those experiences. She knew she didn’t want to pursue a course in classical music at university, though, so she was considering other careers, when she heard of the Scottish traditional music course at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow. “I hadn’t really planned on that at all,” she says. but she got a last minute audition. “They accepted me in to the course to start that autumn, and just away I went!”

Though she values her time in Glasgow for the academic study of Scottish tradition as well as for getting her involved in the traditional musical scene beyond her rural home area, it was to Dumfriesshire she returned. Her most recent solo album, Too Long Away, includes both traditional songs and songs she has written, among them Sunset Hymn, which crystalizes a moment of a summer evening, and Winter Song, a meditation of the challenges and choices of settling in to make it through winter time. “We were snowed in when I wrote that one,” Smith recalled, laughing.

Smith was one of the writers who participated in The Darwin Song Project, in which songwriters were commisoned to collaborate to create songs about and inspired by the scientist. Last year, she and husband and musical partner Jamie McClennan decided to pay tribute to another figure from history, Scotland’s national bard Robert Burns, who was also a Dumfriesshire resident. “We started out choosing songs he wrote about this local area,” Smith says, “and then added a few songs, lesser known and well known, just because we liked them!” Smith handles lead singing on songs including the title track, Adoon Winding Nith, Silver Tassie, and The Plooman, while McClennan contributes outstanding fiddle playing and sits in on guitar and other instruments as well.

Smith is at work on a new recording to be launched in February of 2011. She’s booking dates in Europe in support of that, and in the meanwhile has a short run of concerts in New England and Canada coming up.

As she works on her own music and looks for traditional songs she’d like to sing, she often looks through old books of history and poetry, both to find songs and to find lines and ideas that suggest directions for her own writing. “ A big thing for me is still the local history side. I guess that just means that I’ve found it easier to relate to things that I know are sourced from this part of Scotland,” Emily Smith says. “I like to be able to go to the locations that are mentioned in in the story. It’s the story that really grabs me.”

photograph of Emily Smith at Celtic Connections copyright Kerry Dexter.

Recent studies estimate just 1.8 square meters of green space in Bangkok per resident; indeed, this might be one of the noisiest, dirtiest, and sweatiest capital cities you’ll encounter in Southeast Asia. That’s what makes verdant Lumpini Park such a special place, especially during the early-evening hours when Thais flock to the park to unwind.

Despite its location off insanely busy Rama IV and Ratchadamri Roads, Lumpini is surprisingly tranquil and quiet, especially as the sun sets and reflects off the ponds and canals that wind through the park. During the dry season (December – February), free performances by the Bangkok Symphony Orchestra are held in the park’s bandshell on late Sunday afternoons; this is also the time of the year when you’ll find free nightly aerobics classes. They’re open to anyone and hilariously, uniquely Thai.

With plenty of bars and restaurants nearby–including an enclave of street food vendors set up just outside the park on Ratchadamri–a sunset visit to Lumpini, when the scorching afternoon heat has burned away in favor of a balmy dusk, is an exceedingly pleasant way to start a night on the town. Just be sure to watch out for the massive monitor lizards!

Photo © 2010 Brian Spencer and cannot be used or reprinted without permission.

Compared to my rather frenzied efforts to shoot video of the twice-daily Longhorn cattle drive in the Fort Worth Stockyards, this plein air painter was taking her own sweet time capturing the Livestock Exchange building one bright, clear morning on Labor Day weekend.

I blog and shoot video, and I like the immediacy of it, but for a few quiet moments I began to think that some mellow painting lessons might be just what my life needs….

(If you like this post, please consider subscribing to the blog via RSS feed or by email – the email signup box is at the top of the right sidebar near the Search box. Thanks!)

We had money to burn and a couple of hours to kill in Istanbul.  But being a Sunday, Istanbul’s famed shopping market, The Grand Bazaar, was closed.

Still, there were plenty of other shops lining the streets to choose from. Mainly aimed at the tourists, they were crammed full of belly dancer costumes, pashminas, trinkets, postcards, fridge magnets and coffee cups depicting the Blue Mosque.  And, of course, intermixed with all this were dozens of variations of the nazar boncuau amulet (blue eye) designed to protect the owner from the evil eye.

But after a while, all the shops started to look the same. 

Except this one…

This one made us laugh.

And after that, it didn’t take too much effort by the shopkeeper to get us to open up the purses and buy a pashmina or two.