yeah. pretty proud. (LOVE park photos by adrian seward.)
we celebrated with friends and of course drew quite a few looks and doubletakes -- but only one inquisitive person came forward and asked. "that's neat. who is it?" "edmund bacon." "who's he?" "he was a city planner. he designed this park." "what happened to his eye?" "he didn't always have one."
the gentleman then suggested we place the scupture in the center of the fountain -- which, even though the fountain was not functioning, seemed a bad idea. the man offered to climb into the fountain with the sculpture himself. we declined the offer.
here's the headlight-beamingly-happy artiste (photo by ben.) note the hat -- also made of the same adopt-a-sheep fleece as ed himself is made!
then, along with kathy and lou, we were then off to brunch at continental two, where i had lobster mac and cheese. life is good!
UPDATE: there are so many good links about mr. bacon on the web, i thought it wise to share a few more. this one, from WHYY's "hometown legends" series, cracks me up -- look at the picture! that's not a photo i used while making the bust, believe it or not -- and that shade of blue shirt has become so ubiquitous that i just assumed he'd have had one -- it seems he actually did!
and, of course, having worked for and in the academy of music, this quote kills me: "We were so middle class that in the Academy of Music... my family always went to the family circle. And they thought if you went up to the Ampitheater, where I go now because I can't afford the family circle, that it would be very dangerous cause that's where the ruffians were and they thought that everybody below them in the balcony and the parquet and the boxes were the stuck up rich."
here's another about bacon's LOVE park anti-skateboard protest. here too is the city paper piece covering bacon's disobedient shredding. "'I want to ride a skateboard across LOVE Park and get arrested,' says Bacon, who, though he is 92 and has only one eye, exudes the rakish aura of a Little Rascal. 'I want to protest what the mayor has done to LOVE Park. And I want you to cover it.'"
love that man.
...because i know that soon, you'll change, and so will i. but i never want to forget this moment.
will i have the courage to let you go, and to continue to let you Become? or will i just keep you here like an unsprung bud because you are the fucking coolest thing i ever knit in my life?
who can say? i'm weak.
and thus ends august, the suckiest month of them all. every day was worth it. don't wish your life away, not even in august!
i'm knitting a head, again. i am still working my way through akuta's fleece and this project may use up most of it. we are in the verymost first stages and there's little i can say. the problem with this cotswold is that it sheds, and when i get up from knitting i'm covered, as much so as if one of the animals has been on my lap. irritating any day of the year, but particularly nasty in august. so, moving slowly on this one.
there. that's a blog entry title that google will pick up on! hear that, mr. romero? i mean, if you should be trolling the web for works derivative of -- in homage to -- your own. you can send me an e-mail, mr. romero, at theknittingtarot@gmail.com. i assume the subject line will be "NAME YOUR PRICE". ah yes.
oh, and then there's that howard sherman/sherman howard guy. he might be interested too. (ben and i were SO BLOWN AWAY when i looked up this entry on this actor -- since we had JUST SEEN the "malcom in the middle" episode in which he also appeared, but had not known it was BUB!!! BUB ON "MALCOM IN THE MIDDLE"!!!)
anyhoo, bub is finished. he has been finished for a little while but we were trying to find the right kind of lumberjack shirt for him. we compromised slightly for now and will see what the fall back-to-school lines bring. when all is said and done -- and it more or less is -- bub is wicked cool, utterly wicked cool, and a lot more than i expected him to be. the luck i had with this!! i LOVE it.
the full bub? full of reanimated life and ready to rumble.
his outlook on his soulless life? he has broken free of his chains, and his appetite for eviscera is endless.
his drippy sinew? pungent. his lower limbs? muddy, messy, and generally overlooked. (various brown-and-black odds-and-ends made a very basic "workboot" for the ends of bub's cartoonishly short legs.)
for anybody who has to ask why -- maybe you could try meditating on the phrase labor of love for awhile.
whoa no is right. i cannot gauge bub's love for me by his warm embrace at this juncture, since i only have this one arm complete. but he has some nice necrotic fingertips, and some icky red (and not very colorfast, which only added to the effect) sinew. the fingers slowed me down (i knitted the middle one while awaiting the michael jackson verdict) and i now fear that some people are going to be sad to hear that bub may not make it to the premiere of george a. romero's "land of the dead" a week from today! so much of bub does not exist yet -- torso. feet. other arm. shirt and jacket. shackles.
on top of that, ben had to go have a good idea.
BEN: not that i want to pressure you to knit MORE things, but don't you think bub needs to be eating a person's kidney or something?
ME: you're going to be cooking dinner tonight, i think. i'm going to be busy.
BEN: pizza it is!
so yes, i have begun a human giblet and have a length of nice human tripe ready to affix to bub's lovely and adept little hand, soon. will he really be done in a week? that's so doubtful. but, i suppose, not impossible.
even with his new eyes tucked in a bag next to him, bub didn't enjoy much about manhattan. he seemed to connect with the shackled, caged falun gong practicioners who demonstrate outside of madison square garden, but that's about it.
... but today is a NEW day in philadelphia... and with it we have a NEW BUB!!!!
the eyes, as you see, are not standard "spooky" or even malevolent eyes. nor were bub's -- bub has very blue and worried eyes. these eyes from tender buttons were worth it (it is impossible to get a cab on lexington ave. FYI) because they really show, to me, bub's conflicting emotions about his recent death, reanimation and capture.
bub also had male pattern baldness and a rather unkempt style. with some novelty yarn found in my bin -- i wonder where this stuff originated -- i was able to make a satisfactory style, as well as seal up the top of his head and do his more or less permanent stuffing there.
DMC embroidery thread served as a decent black pupil for the eyes as well. the holes in the buttons oriented the way i wanted them to.
so far, all that has been purchased in the making of bub has been some kool-aid packets and two buttons.
it's freaking hot here and i'm hankering down between printing and writing, with some court tv, waiting for the michael jackson verdict, and making bub some nice arms.
while at the new MoMA in new york city today,
ben
was trying to discuss the de koonings with bub, but bub just could not seem to get into it.
in fact, bub was very unenthusiastic about most of the art. we kept trying to encourage him, but it was useless.
we saw so many things we liked. yet bub's apathy was bringing everybody down.
finally,
ben
took bub into a corner to have it out with him, man to man.
then, we suddenly realized what it was that bub was lacking -- and that was keeping him from enjoying his art experience!
EYES! bub doesn't have eyes!!
what kind of moron takes a wool zombie to an art museum KNOWING that the zombie doesn't even have EYES with which to SEE the ART?
so we went to tender buttons (where it was a breezy three hundred degrees inside) and got what might serve as a reasonable iris for our boy.
before grabbing bub's eyes we all had lunch.
my dad had not seen rai in, well, ten years! and he had never seen carole, and carole and rai had not met diane. so everybody got met.
(dad and rai in 1995; dad and rai today!)
hope it is okay that i do not deliver the full bub eye report right now... i don't think they're going to be attached for a few days at least. i got some work on his arms going while on the train.
we didn't see debbie harry; we never do. how many visits to new york does it take to run into debbie harry?
a little on the dark side, but that's how bub likes it. his sockets are now all dark and grape and haunted, yes? i didn't want anybody to be underinformed about bub's latest transformative steps before his big adventure tomorrow... will he be ready to accompany us to the theatre for the opening of george a. romero's land of the dead on june 24th? he will need a lot of appendages... and some clothes -- i'm not knitting his clothes, dammit.
let me just clarify.
people give "kool-aid" to their children...
to drink.
ew.
well, bub -- you're soaking in it.
how excited were we to hear that george a. romero was releasing a FOURTH in his series of "dead" movies -- i am not much of a first-run moviegoer but i try to make the festive trek at least once during the summer months and thank GOD there will be no dennis quaid or jake gyllenhall for me this summer! i get dennis hopper, john leguizamo, and ZOMBIES!
i. love. zombies. i am fascinated with the (predictable) way in which humans will vilify even their most dearly loved ones the moment those loved ones make a transition -- in this case, to death -- that those "left behind" cannot understand. you've changed! = you're monstrous!
i love that romero's zombies come from all walks of life, with all the distinctions of their identities still sorta flopping off of them. i love his use of multiracial casting that reveals no "token" players. and i love the fantastic fun of angry, stumbling carrion ripping into the flesh of the living!
yes! yes! yes!
all those years volunteering for the opera company of philadelphia as an onstage extra and all they ever gave me was nun, whore, townswoman... never "zombie". some people have all the luck.
"bub" from 1985's day of the dead is such a sympathetic, sweet character. as soon as i heard about land coming out, we rented the original three, and before we had even finished watching dawn, i knew -- i wanted to knit bub.
i started with some single-ply costwold from akuta that i had been doing on my wheel. this stuff that i spin up with the akuta fleece, undyed, unanythinged, is kind of like the "simple syrup" of knitting and felting. and i was sure bub's head would need to be felted.
i began knitting on two circular needles, casting on simultaneous sock toes using the queen kahuna book's "invisible cast-on" (yes, that's what it is called. i think it's on page 90.) these sock toes, inverted, made bub's deep, tortured eye sockets.
then, i must admit, i just kinda went. i might as well have been playing with clay or with papier maché. he just happened.
miles to go, just on the head itself -- shaping, painting, hair... and of course those sexy blue eyes of bub's! then i can dye the yarn for bub's body (i will be doing some testing of colors soon -- all kool-aid, i think) and then get to work on his outfit. the rest of bub will NOT be felted, just knitted. alas, i tried to keep his neck stitches "live" but the waste yarn i used was NOT a piece of red heart as i had thought. it fused right in there. no matter because bub wears a neck collar and chain, as we all know!
i would like to give him fingers. you know, the beautiful "tape recorder scene". well, we'll see how it goes -- right now both bub and i need a few days of recovery and perspective.
i got the idea for a big tall hat made with my handspun akuta's 'owl noodles' and the plan to make a hat more wearable than a very pretty one in my possession. the inspiring hat is one made by my friend betsy, and actually belongs to my sister, but is for some reason in my house. it's a lovely hat, but nobody ever wears it. except my father, when he's pretending to be sun ra. the betsy hat is lovely, but it has never been comfortable to wear, nor does it provide much protection from the elements.
i thought, a big, wedding cake-height hat made of handspun -- and augmented with a rhinestone brooch or some such -- would be more suitable for me, and would actually get put on when i left the house.
here's what i came up with. the "brooch" on the hat now is in fact an earring with no match -- the shape of both the hat and the ornament evoke something rather military for me (whose military, i do not know.)
of course in the long run we realize this hat and betsy's hat have almost nothing in common other than being light-colored, brimless hats, but we don't go through life trying to recreate point A.
you may be noticing the "wall of tarot" behind me there. that's in the den. it's one uncut deck in two sheets. tarot makes great wall art.
here's a funky in-the-mirror shot.
it's a nest! it's a cake! it's military! fashion buzzwords for february 2005.
we may have a lot of irons in the fire here at notsoswift.com, but we don't leave many things unfinished.
remember akuta, my adopted cotswold sheep? his fleece arrived here weeks ago, and i sent it out again for processing. it returned once again, and i have been spinning it.
i love it! i love the feel of it -- it's sort of dry and coarse, but in a good way.
because i love the look of organic matter stuck in wool -- bits of leaves and whatnot -- i have been spinning in noodles of this natural silk stuff i had lying around. it was impossible to knit with, i had plied it with a bunch of stuff already, so now i've just made noodles out of it. i also think it give the effect of, you know, asymmetrical owl feathers. hence "owl noodles".
i did this on my wheel! i am getting better at that -- but then again, this stuff was easy for the wheel. there would have been no real point in trying the drop spindle with this.
i'm going to have a lot of it!
i got a little message from my adopted cotswald akuta today. he says his fleece is off, and is being processed for spinning, and will be sent out to me shortly after easter! i make my last "payment" on akuta's fleece in the first week of may, so it's really nice timing!
i have more yarn around here than i even want, and frankly, not only do i have akuta's fleece coming, but i have a lot of the soy silk from last year's maryland sheep and wool that i still haven't spun yet. it's funny: we are planning to go to maryland sheep and wool in a few weeks, and i don't want any fiber; we are more or less going there because, every year, there is a man who sells type drawers for letterpress. and we need some type drawers. oh, and we need a deep fried twinkie.
what will i use akuta's fleece for? shall i dye it? i have some cochineal and mordant lying around in a drawer. maybe i'll keep it natural. it's far, far too soon to say. but isn't he a sharpie?
Hi mom,
Well, it's been a weird summer. We've had rain twice within the last week! It has thundered and lightening and we even lost power for a while during the first storm. Anyway, I had to send you a photo of me with that matted wool off. Now I can grow you a real nice fleece. It will be perfect! Teresa didn't get much of a summer break. She taught summer school and then that ended mid-July and started back teaching on August 11th. Oh, well, it keeps us in grain and hay...They say sheep are stupid but it's really humans that are stupid. Do you see us going out and working a job all year? No way, we just lay around and get waited on and grow wool for you humans. So who's really smarter?
Anyway, Take care and have a good rest of the summer.
i got a message from akuta today! and some new pictures!
Dear new mom,
I hope you enjoy my photos. I'm very hot, and the sheep shearer is coming to do me in the next week or so. We had a very wet April and May and the sheep shearer has gotten behind. As soon as I get this fleece off, I'll be growing a new one just for you. I'm just a year and a half old right now. So I have an excellent fleece. As you can see in the photo there are some geese in with us. They are ok and don't bother us, but they do rat fink on us if we get out of our pen and raise a ruckus till someone comes out to see why the geese are being real noisy! Then we have to go back in the pen...It's more fun getting loose and going into the barn for an all you can eat hay feed!
Take care and I'll write to you soon.
Love,
Akuta
and
Teresa Simons
HGA Northern California Representative
Mountain Shadow Ranch
Cotswolds and Kuvaszok
it's a cotswold sheep named akuta!
i am taking part in mountain shadow ranch's adopt a sheep program. for twelve dollars a month for the next year, i sponsor akuta, and then receive his fleece for spinning! (for an extra fee, it can also be ready-made into yarn.)
when i first went to the site, akuta was the only sheep available for adoption. but i'm sure others will be coming up for new sponsorship soon! this is the first photo i ever saw of akuta, so i wanted to include it here, but teresa said she'd send me a new updated photo this week.