yesterday i was listening to mingus big band's "tonight at noon...three or four shades of love". i had checked it out of the library. i was enjoying it - a lot - and then a voice that i couldn't call unfamiliar showed up mid-album.
"oh no," i groaned. and was as surprised at this reaction as i would have been if someone else had given it.
i have always been a big fan of elvis costello. but honestly. does he have to wedge himself in everywhere?
a bazillion-squillion caveats. elvis can write a mean song. elvis can write a song that roy orbison wants to sing. elvis can write a song that chet baker wants to sing! elvis is good at the derivative; elvis is a shape-shifter who can write power-pop anthems, country ballads, torch songs, whatever whatever whatever. he can write and he can play and he can perform and he can produce and he must be a pleasure to work with - because he works with everybody.
this is what is tiring to me; elvis and his goddamned collaborating. "i'm doing a string quartet thing! i'm doing a cajun thing! i'm doing a burt bacharach thing! i've impregnated diana krall!" ... it's all boring now. that plaintive vibrato just crops up everywhichwhere and everybody seems so glad to have him on board.
i'm glad for elvis that he's not angry anymo!... and i like his new, older, gap-toothed chortling happiness. but i'm getting almost panicky about needing to avoid him. he seems unnecessarily desperate about securing his legacy. i would pick up a new cd these days if only on the merit of a sticker on the front of it that read NOW ELVIS COSTELLO-FREE!
this is a pretty good corrolary to the way i feel about a lot of knitting. some things just aren't made to be knit. just aren't. i think, even on the wane of the knitting "craze", knitters continue to attempt intrepidness and originality by inserting knitting in places it just isn't meant to be. the last thing the world needs is an entry on a knitting blog with a bunch of "case-in-point: it's ugly!" photographs or links. those who think it's still fun to go to town on that should just get out their swiffers and crockpots and do something useful rather than sitting in front of the computer.
i could come up with a lot more to say here, and maybe i'll come up with a lot more to say somewhere else, some other time, and with more explanations and examples. but i find more than anything lately i think about knitting as something limited in scope, and that's not a bad thing. i think about garments that will never look, or feel, or drape, the way i want them to in my dreams, if they are knitted. do i need to learn to sew? or weave?
while i want to try new things with knitting - and don't mind making mistakes, god knows - i don't want to swear undue allegiance to a pair of sticks and a ball of yarn, when it's really just shoving a square peg into a round hole some of the time.
so much for analogies.