an empty sweater

the very first post on this blog was a special one, featuring a special dog, who died last wednesday. anyone who reads this blog can only imagine how saddened our household is by this passing, which, although we thought we were prepared for it, was a tremendous change for us all.

flannery loved to be everywhere at once, and that's something cremation really gives a dog the opportunity to do. we learned many things from flanny, one of them being: no matter how fast you are, you can't outrun your own flatulence. there were other things too, but i can't remember them right now. when tim, ben and i (after all, she was flanny "two homes" stopper) get all the photos together, there will be a glorious retrospective on my flickr. she had a fantastic life - that much i would stake my own on.

a thank-you to all the friends and fans who were supportive during this time.

freeform knitting 365

after i wrote here about my experiences with flickr's 365 days project and how i thought they might be transposed to knitting, i had an idea. it's not finely wrought, but it's an idea i'm working with nonetheless. i've started a flickr group called "freeform knitting 365", and i bet you can guess what it's for.

it's quite easy to go to the page and ask to be "invited" into the group. please feel free to "ask" for the "invitation"; unless you already know i think you're worthless and putrid, i'll happily grant it. we have, i believe, five people signed up, but it is only myself and one other knitter so far who have made the daily commitment. we're very early in the project and there's only so much to see, but more knitters who could make the daily commitment would make it even more fun. however, even if you aren't going to join, you may as well know where to find us having our fun. (but you can only read the discussion topics if you belong to the group.) it's been really cool so far, and i'm glad i'm doing it.

i totally know what my piece is going to be. that may not be the point of freeform, yes, but i do know.

the coffin of the sensualist

The body of a sensualist is the coffin of a dead soul.

- christian nevell bovee

what i have already learned participating in flickr's 365 days project is that people, in general, have faces that they make in response to the sight of a camera or mirror, and not just when they are caught off guard by these devices - people have a "presentable" face, a "presentable" angle, and since participating in the project i have been on the lookout for the chin tilts, lip purses, eye widenings, that negate the candid moment.

i recently trolled through a breadcrumb trail of knitting blog links and realized that, once you were on the lookout for it, it was easy to spot all the little tricks of language that similarly eradicate the individual voice. although i was looking at knitting blogs specifically, there are some commonalities that are evident in non-knitting blogs too. like that "something mc something" construction - my god, how many variations of this does one have to see before it doesn't look fresh and winsome anymore? (answer: two.) and the "somethingy goodness" thing. i think blogs might be the worst thing to happen to language in centuries.

and it's still remarkable to me that writing about knitting (air quotes around that "write") is so heavily infused with pseudo-sexual or pseudo-semisexual language - as if the only way to express any kind of sensualism is with this limiting, babyish, knee-jerk talk. vixen, trollop, slut, harlot, yummy, tantalizing, sooooooooooo anything. is anybody getting laid out there? because this all borders in my mind on the kind of thing that gets the women's magazines describing chocolate desserts as though they too were blue material.

rather thirdhand - and followed by some research that indicated that this is a more or less universal problem in our increasingly flat world - i recently heard about the justifiable horrors that yarn shop employees sometimes experience when a customer comes into their place of business, picks up a skein or a hank, and then proceeds to rub it against their face luxuriantly. good god! and it's not like they go into a corner and do this hoping to attract no attention; they do it in front of yarn store staff! they rub yarn on their faces - in front of what is essentially a paid audience - to what end? to demonstrate their intense appreciation of the fiber that they haven't purchased and yet are smearing their maybelline all over?

you can just imagine individuals like this striding up to the door of the secret clubhouse and telling themselves with confidence, "i'll just flap my hands around and whatever i do is so likely to approximate the secret handshake that they'll just let me on in." these people, whose incredible lust for their tools has materialized in their sebaceous oil glands, have got camille claudel looking down at them from the great beyond and shaking her head. clay, clay is sexy, says camille. what the fuck is with the yarn?

is there some unspoken suggestion that if one does not succumb to la petit mort upon contact with a limp ball of cashmere, or does not use the words, the tone, that one is dispassionate about knitting? not really "hardcore"? that one is unappreciative, or has such a dulled palate for yarn that they should just sit at home with a couple of plastic straight needles and some acrylic?

it sort of - and i'm the last person who'd call themselves a feminist but i guess it sort of stands to reason that so many, many people are happy to be yarn ho's, but it seems that words like hog, glutton, and pig are, while not entirely unused, a little less popular. i feel that the language has gone from a thread of familiarity to a nest or bunker, to a downright prison, and that iterations of the same sentiments, phrased similarly, used to gain entry like a key for a lock, and are in this capacity detrimental both to originality and to expression.

on blogs - knitting and otherwise - it is sometimes awfully, transparently sad to see how people in the comment fields of any given post will be downright contorting in their efforts to parrot tone and message to the person who wrote the entry upon which they are commenting. what is ironic about this is how much of it is often touted as "outspokenness" and telling-it-like-it-is. it seems well proven: when "vitriol" meets a yes-man mentality, there's no mutual exclusivity; "vitriol" plus yes-man mentality equals blog comment. one might call this phenomenon divide and concur, as it so heavily relies on both herd-culling and boot-licking.

this language, these secret handshakes, both flubbed and approved, are the chin tilts, the lip purses, the eye widenings that people apply to their "faces", not necessarily with bad intent, to make themselves what they think they ought to be. i have learned already - and seen others learn, in the 365 days project - that, while it is perhaps hard to catch one's on patterns as one flits from blog entry to comments on another blog or comments on yet another blog, it is impossible to miss those patterns when you have to take a photograph of yourself for three hundred and sixty-five days in a row. and what might have been a "bad" picture of you on day one is a lot more acceptable on day forty - because, without learning to accept it, you'd have to have dug in hard and believed, beyond all question, that you only have one acceptable face. and that round-eyed mc rictus and all its chin-tilty goodness gets pretty tiring after day three, and starts to look like an outright scam by day ten. maybe earlier.

why should people put leg-irons on themselves when expressing their creativity? haven't i made it through this entire entry without calling it a "rant" or my own thoughts "random"? why aren't tickets being issued for those who do? and what is there like the 365 days project that could be applied to knitting? it would have to take only a snippet of time if necessary, longer if one had the time.

suddenly, it seems so obvious.

the NOSHI knitting monograph series

looking for a new, short read that you won't find in a magazine or on a blog? like to keep a digital library of prettily organized pdfs, or like to carry around a light and portable array of handy opinions and experiments related to knitting, any one of which might serve as a vade mecum (google word-of-the-day!) for your knitting life?

the NOSHI KNITTING MONOGRAPH SERIES is now up and running, with a wide range of TWO TITLES available for purchase!

hey. we said we'd be moving at our own pace. (and actually, now that i recall the first time lisa and i ever discussed this project i was paging through the oriental trading company halloween catalog with one of her daughters, letting her choose the treats to be handed out at my house that year. and that was last year.) so it took us almost a year, but it's up, and it's begun, and we are pleased. i myself am pleased with each of our representative works, and how different from one another they are. it's a solid, satisfying, and enticing beginning. i'm also excited about other titles in the works, by us, and by others.

our first order came, surprisingly, about 24 hours before the store went live, and we were still testing and uploading. it just snuck through. then, after sending out the offical NOTIFY e-mail to the NOSHI list, our next "first" order came through three minutes later - from new zealand! by morning we had another from what appeared to be a rather posh address in london england (maybe the all look posh), as well as some domestic sales. it was a rather thrilling beginning!

anything else you need to know about the NOSHI series is available on its website. its editors have, as the one who is not me so eloquently put it yesterday, recently graduated from the "balls in the air" metaphor to the "plate spinning" one, but all print orders placed yesterday will be fullfilled by the end of this month, and any between now and the thirtieth will be fulfilled by the fifteenth of next month. thank you to all who ordered. welcome to anyone who is about to, or anyone whom might wish to request our contributors' prospectus.

knitting and QUISP!

you know, i take a lot of pleasure in being a product of my generation. as a matter of fact, i pretty much have nothing but pity for anybody born after 1976.

this afternoon, ben and i found this great old quisp cereal commercial, which features knitting!

i was such a big fan of quisp, by which i mean, the quisp box design. i have no recollection of eating it although i know i did. there was also some cereal in the early '70s that had an owl as the mascot? does anybody know what i'm talking about?

or - koogle. does anybody remember that "flavored" peanut butter, koogle?

UPDATE: corvus elrod was able to expediently provide almost full recall of HOOTS cereal to me (i know i was sitting in a high chair while eating this stuff). you can trust a man named corvus elrod.

i was motivated by this enough to continue my search for KOOGLE, which it does appear many remember. koo koo koogle with the koo koo koogly eyes! a peanut butter spread in the flavors of chocolate, vanilla, cinnamon and banana. all i want is an image, and so it seems do many others.

DOUBLE UPDATE: he may be incapable of other, simple courtesies, but nebish found a picture of a jar of koogle. check out the sell-by date! june '75.

dogme v. dogma

does anybody yet recall danish director lars von trier's dogme95 jawn?

if not, here's a quickie overview of the dogme filmmaking movement, as well a nice primer on the dogme mission. i saw the first few of the dogme movies, and it was clear to me that it had been a "worthwhile" experiment - in that it created some really good films and told some really good stories.

people bristle at "limitations". particularly, it seems, voluntary ones. often, people see "limits" as vacancies (or worse, perceive them to be presented as "virtues" by those practicing them). but a rule to "use no additional or effect lighting" in a film is a decision to use natural lighting. it's not an absence, it's a presence. it's not a rubicon, but a way to look at new options.

also, it usually is a tacit expression of the fact that whatever one is turning one's back on is not complete anathema to the person shunning or questioning its use. it's something that tempted that person, or something that person did embrace at one time. what do you think it was that got f. scott fitzgerald in the position to claim, "I only wanted absolute quiet to think out... why I had become identified with the objects of my horror or compassion." ?

when i stopped buying yarn, it was because i was overwhelmed with the commercialism of it. at the time that i became overwhelmed with the commercialism of the handknitting industry, i had been participating within it.

i don't think that new "movements" are necessarily intended to be subject to the law of diminishing returns, in the way that the first hit single released from a pop album is almost invariably better than the third and fourth singles, if they even present themselves. truly, i think that in most cases, people willing to subject their work to such experiments want the next generation of experimenting, whether enacted by themselves or by others, to move things yet again forward - and forward means somewhere new, or with new understanding of something old. but it all does begin with one fumbling, semi-blind step. who would you rather be - the one taking the step, or the one standing over to the side saying "well smartypants! it's not so PERFECT, is it, doing it your way! look at the problem you're having! you didn't think of that, did you?"

i ask "which would you rather be?" as a rhetorical question, but clearly, it has two answers, both of which have active camps, although i suppose one side is more easy with admitting it than the other.

here is a question that i hope is not rhetorical: what do you end up with if, as a knitter, you - as stated in the tenets of dogme95 -"refrain from personal taste" in your knitting, or create a set of rules for it that denies the use of certain materials or the ways you might gain those materials?

one of the first things that would happen is that someone, somewhere, would bluster, "well then what's the point?" of course, the presence of that voice is a good thing, because it gives everybody the luxury of not having to lift a finger to figure out who lacks so much imagination and vision that they can't even see what is left. folks like that identify themselves quickly. they will ask questions as though they are rhetorical questions. "well why not just knit invisible things? well why not just knit with spaghetti? well why not just stop knitting?"

there also seems to be a knee-jerk reaction that, if someone says they are going to do a thing a certain way, or within a certain set of rules, that someone finds it clever to suggest that if the little knitting bodhisattva may as well just throw out the baby with the bathwater. "well if you're going to do it this way, and hope to make a difference, why don't you just do it this (exponentially radical) way?"

in the process of our impending adoption, i have heard story that has really stuck with me: a caucasian mother was in the grocery store with her cambodian-born daughter, and was approached by a pregnant, caucasian woman, who asked "why didn't you just adopt a needy child from your own country?" to which the mother replied, "why didn't you?"

i can certaintly argue that lars von trier did not entirely "refrain from personal taste" by his adherence to the dogme "VOW OF CHASTITY", since he invented the vow. but nor do i tolerate the attitude that "if a person says they're going to do A, i'll just suggest that A is meaningless unless they also do B, and then they will hopefully feel foolish and overwhelmed enough to just go back to what everybody is 'supposed' to do - and this stringency shall not even begin to apply to any of my choices, which invite no scrutiny and therefore do not necessarily beg admiration."

nobody else gets to tell anybody else "in for a penny, in for a pound." we may wonder why people do things a certain way, and may ask questions - because we are curious or because we want to be a bigger part of the action ourselves - but those questions are entirely different from the ones just meant to scare or shame people into quiet. it's important to be able to hear the difference.

it would have seemed certain to some that a filmmaker who abided by the dogme "VOW OF CHASTITY" was, perhaps, not interested in making a movie at all. but those films were not accidents. they weren't even reductive. they had new, and valid, concentrations of effort applied to them, and it showed in the finished work. lars von trier applied his "personal taste" to each of those movies by creating the dogme95 movement itself. and, if upon announcing his intentions, anyone had asked him smartly, "what's the point of making a movie if you can't use the artistry of props, sets or additional lighting, or additional sound or music, or the beauty of black-and-white film, and you have to use a hand-held camera? what's the point of a bunch of arbitrary restrictions like that?" lars von trier or any of his coterie would have had an answer.

the characters. the story.

so much for rhetorical questions.

what would the answers be if the same questions were put to knitting? and what would the restrictions be if the same practice was put to knitting?

because i have to admit, i believe in something i've never seen, when it comes to knitting; something utterly pure and beyond what i know. it has practical applications and beautiful ones; something organic, but which requires all the finesse of human intelligence. it's something i can almost see, like a double-exposure on a snapshot, or a bonebreak in an x-ray. but it's not something i can quite get at yet, although i'm trying to find it.

everybody is a star (and the return of voluptuous stoicism)

i remember reading somewhere once that, throughout the history of the film industry, just about every facet of it has had its fifteen minutes as the "star" of the scene. actors and actresses never really stop being significant, where gossip and faces are concerned, but there have certainly been times when just as much oooh-aaaaah credence is given to directors (coppola! scorsese! romero!), or even writers (joe esterhaus?). and, keep in mind, back in the day, it was the heads of studios who were the bigwigs who everybody talked about! (louie b. mayer - what's he eating for breakfast?)

i have no chronology for it, but i have to guess that within the handknitting industry there is some shift from time to time as to who is the "star" - designers? writers? actual artists producing one-of-a-kind works to be shown in exhibition? spinners? dyers? people who run magazines? shopkeeps? bloggers?

or, a little more esoteric - is it sometimes the day-in-the-sun for... needles? of course, that sounds silly, but i think it just as silly, the amount of importance that has been placed on yarn in knitting. i addressed this over a year ago in a post entitled voluptuous stoicism, in the midst of my yarn-buying moratorium. that moratorium was a successful, albeit somewhat foreshortened experience, but put me in a new, permanent space. as mentioned in the "voluptuous stoicism" post, there is something repugnant to me about hearing yarn brand names and colors being spoken of nearly as though they were people. creativity at any elevation is not dependent upon materials to that extent.

more knitters seem to be stirring themselves out of the self-induced trance of buying and "coveting" yarn (the way the verb "covet" has attached itself to knitting lately is in my opinion particularly weak-minded), and there is now a group blog called "knitting simplicity" wherein knitters gather to talk about, it seems, using up the stash they have, using recycled materials, and concentrating on the knitting more than the acquiring. i think it's a good step, but it does bother me that each of the members of the knitting simplicity group blog has his or her own blog as well. why not just talk about the topics that matter to you about knitting, on the knitting blog you already have? is safety in numbers that much of a concern? and, even if it is, if the comment fields are open on your blog (and the blogs of others you read), why not just use them? in that way, i think "knitting simplicity" is a small step rather than a large one; i would feel like the empowerment was spreading even further when knitters just chose to express this heresy about not buying yarn in their own "homes", rather than just in the lantern-lit secret meetingplace. but i do applaud the effort. if that's where things have to start, then that's where they have to start.

but i'm well into the journey of knitting being far, far more than "all about the yarn", and the fact that other forms of fiber art are almost in spite of the materials they use, it's no wonder that i am thinking more about those forms.

when a friend and fellow writer - a woman who sews but does not knit - read my first draft of the interview feature i did with chunghie lee for KOREAN QUARTERLY, she (my friend) claimed to be "very glad (chunghie lee) didn't say 'i just let the materials do what they want, and the pojagi happens.' " that was an unprompted comment from someone completely outside the fiber arts community, and i feel the same way.

i don't let yarn "figure out what it wants to be". i am sure this does work for some knitters, and that they achieve the effects that they desire. it's certainly less likely to work in making pojagi, where the materials aren't as likely to tell you "what they want to be" as much as yarn might, for two big reasons:

one, they already are something (since pojagi are often created from scraps of existing garments and goods); and two, they're going to be a pojagi - which, sure, could be a sock or a hat or a kite or other pojagi-inspired piece. but it's a matter of pojagi materials going from a bigger range of identifiables to a smaller range, whereas with yarn i think it's the other way around.

if i don't know what i want yarn to be, i put it away. then eventually i want something to be, and i'll find the yarn for the job. it might be here, it might not. when i buy yarn i concentrate more on what seems to me to be the quality (which will not alter, regardless of the project) or the specific type of fiber content and color (because they are aesthetically correct for me, for a garment or for my home, and this does not change that much from project to project either.) i have a local yarn store that i trust to give me accurate information on the quality, durability and tendencies of any yarn i choose there, and a decade of shopping there has proven to me that i'll never get upsold or pushed towards the flavor du jour. that's what i depend on, when i do purchase - that knowledge.

algorithmic visuals

here is a java applet that lets you view your website, as a graphic that has a rather joan miro, or maybe marimekko, look. the images above, from left to right, represent: this knitting blog, the the knitting tarot page, and the NOSHI knitting monograph series site. (and yes, we're a couple weeks behind where we thought we would be in getting the first two NOSHI monographs up for sale, but we are currently doing user testing on the site and expect that everyone on the list WILL receive an "open for business" e mail by the end of this month, just in time for back-to-school!)

the key for the above graphics is on the site where they can be created, but it's fun to look at the images before the key has been committed to memory, or even consulted, to see how different they all are, and why. (the graphic for this page, in fact, wouldn't stop "growing", and ben realized it was because of the little flickr rotating images over to the right.)

i like a thing that's a representation of another thing. it's documentary, and it's often good to look at. like alex dragulescu's "spam plants", which are computer generated "growths" in which the attributes of size, shape, color, et cetera, are determined by the variables - headers, footers, text - in spam e-mails. switch out "plants" for architecture if you're not the nature-loving type.

and so when do we switch in "knitting"? and to document what? i understand that in debbie new's unexpected knitting there is a chapter called "cellular automaton knitting" in which she gives principles for self-generating patterns. something like that is about the only knit-along i'd ever get involved in. i'm not smart enough to get a ball like this rolling. there are people out there who can offer hypothoses on how leopard spots form, which has something to do with cannibals and celibate missionaries and nowt to do with knitting, but it could.

feel free to get in touch if this topic as a whole - not just leopard spots and plants and cannibals, but using predetermined data to chart knitting - interests you, and you'd like to make a team effort of looking into it. what data would you represent in knitting? how many versions of the same data could you make, changing the "key"? or would you keep the key the same and make multiple efforts to track fluctuating, or evolving, data?

knitting and elvis costello: they can't do it all

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.

august 2006

taken from an actual postcard written by a friend of mine who is still in single-digits. some of you may remember that last year i "handled" august by posting to this blog every single day. that won't be happening this year; there is, though, more activity at the NOSHI knitting monograph series than there is here (the first two monographs should be available for sale within the next two weeks!), and of course the KNITTING TAROT soldiers on, letter by letter, page by page. things won't be silent here, but i'm certainly not going to make much of an effort. everything i'm knitting now is on the huge side and the longer i wait the more interesting any photos will be.

ben and i have decided to "handle" august 2006 by embarking upon a new adventure every day -- things we've never tried or haven't done together in a long time. i am not sure what's on his list, but i'm planning a seance and need to go get a OUIJA board.

for now, i leave you with this: this, my friends, is august in a nutshell.

NEW YORK - Boy George will perform his court-ordered community service by picking up trash on city streets in the August heat, a sanitation spokesman said.

The one-time Culture Club singer will be issued a shovel, broom, plastic bags and gloves when he reports for five days of work on Aug. 14, department spokesman Vito Turso said.

"This is the epitome of community service," Turso told the Daily News for Monday editions. "It's not like he's going to be working in an air-conditioned office."

Born George O'Dowd, the singer has struggled with drug problems for years. He was ordered to do community service after pleading guilty in March to false reporting of an incident. He called police with a bogus report of a burglary at his lower Manhattan apartment in October, and the responding officers found cocaine inside.

Turso's statement was the first indication of what sort of work the singer would be given. He could be assigned to pick up streets in Chinatown, Little Italy, Nolita or parts of the Lower East Side.

when a man named vito issues your first idol and role model a shovel, broom, bags and gloves, and sends him into the sweltering streets of manhattan to pick up trash - that- that, is august.

vincent van gogh's lust for life and softsoap with pure cashmere

here are the things that steered my thoughts about knitting yesterday.

in general, if there's a movie about a painter, i'll watch it. (among my favorites are basquiat and love is the devil, with derek jacobi as francis bacon.) watching kirk douglas as a frenzied, color-drunk, batshit van gogh in lust for life was, naturally, inspiring. i've never been a big van gogh fan but did appreciate the portrayal of his no-brakes emoting and processing, making him both deeply loved and utterly exhausting to everyone around him. (with his "usual" café fare of two coffees and three absinthes, it's not a surprise that he was a challenge socially.)

no matter where he was - no matter what the tools were he had at his disposal with which he could try to translate his vision for others - it was enough. in fact, it was too much. up until the last, the people who cared for him and understood him most were still telling him he was doing it all wrong, and that he needed to learn to slow down, calm down, and, well, do things more like things other people were already doing.

maybe what he needed was a little exposure to luxury. like, for instance, cashmere - real cashmere. in his liquid soap. because everybody knows there's nothing as luxurious as real cashmere and the people have softsoap have found a way to bring you that inarguable, ironclad luxury in a pump bottle. because it doesn't matter how you get it, in what form - luxury is what is important. the finest of everything. that's what makes you... soft. and it's not about what you as an individual select - it's about what somebody else tells you is the best. very high-end. do you deserve anything less?

i've seen cashmere here and there in my knitting experiences but my definition of it is circling the drain right now. i think about softsoap with cashmere, and i think about vincent van gogh's fleece vest that everyone kept telling him to take off as if he was wearing some sort of necrotic, seeping pelt.

i am not drawing any conclusions, but i'm not confused, either.

who likes robot buttons?

we like robot buttons! that's why we bought one of each kind!

the thing about going to rosie's yarn cellar is no matter how many times you go, if you adjust your vision a half-inch to the side of where you usually look, you'll see something you haven't seen. i've been walking past these for months. it'll be some time before i use them, no doubt, but they are stupendous.

amazing sheep!!!

it's going to be so amazing!!! and it's happening right now!!!! or soon!!! so get ready!!! and get to the webcam!

this is a whole lot cooler -- and more humane -- than taking sheep on a book tour, which somebody recently told me was happening. that is the most idiotic, selfish thing i ever heard of in my life, akin to the people who will tell you how race horses "love to run". ask gwen stefani or somebody how much fun it is to tour! and then, pretend you're a SHEEP having to do it!

morons.

anyway go see the amazing sheep!!!

(link via my friend john, who says i am smart, funny, cool and pretty.)

UPDATE! see the amazing sheep in time-lapse faux-wool growing glory.

for another fiber-related treat from the same source - this one with an added bonus for all us koreaphiles - digest your last meal thoroughly, then check out steve's delicious snack of canned silkworm pupas..

making plans for nigel

let me begin this post by saying: we live in a world of contradictions. black is white! up is down! there's no laws here! it's thunderdome!

and as much as i detest the summer season - and i do - if there is any reliability to "seasonal" disorders and mood variations, summertime is very good for me - i get very organized and energetic. at the gym, i work out harder. at home, i'm less prone to blue moods and racing thoughts. summer, it seems, is my good season, and i post a lot more to this blog when it's hot. i seem to recall posting every single day of last august, which is the month i hate the most.

and i can already feel it ramping up and amping up here, and have a lot of posts in my head, but will begin today's by showing you the big, recycled plastic glands that i bought for eighty-nine cents each at IKEA yesterday and which are now a component of my little spinning room. you see as well that my "little poseur" fingerpuppets have found a home in a box on the wall along with my playbill from when i saw boy george in "taboo" on broadway.

back to the yarn boobs! i think they are SMASHING. they are made of that picky-piecey looking mulitcolored recycled plastic and they can hold a LOT of yarn!

plus, they're just sort of horrible, lovecraftian, and kinda leigh bowery-ish. i am totally in love with them.

i'm getting some new shelving up in that room too, and for my birthday this past winter got a chair and a painted oilcloth for the floor - i'll have pictures when it all comes together but i couldn't wait on the big yarn glands. everybody should have them!

bonus image: our new watercolor canvas of the tingler as rendered by mikey wild, which i purchased last weekend at the 9th street market festival.

seen at whole foods: the shopping bag dress

probably every american reader here is familiar with the cheap, strong, reusable shopping bags that whole foods market sells for a pittance and for which they give you a nickel back on your purchases every time you use them. the bags have "vintage-inspired" designs advertising bulk items such as lemons, potatoes, and apples - and someone has turned the coffee-themed ones into a summer sundress!

i can't remember the exact names of the two designers attributed, nor can i read them on the sign below the dress but they have something to do with the walnut street theatre.

inspiration

i was really inspired when i went to zoe "how i learned to stop worrying and be the bomb" strauss' I-95.06 show today.

i've also been really inspired lately by korean director chan-wook park's vengeance trilogy.

so -- what's it mean to be inspired by things, visual or otherwise, and to take that inspiration into knitting?

as usual, i don't have the answer, but i am compiling a growing list of what isn't the answer. i'll give you a hint as to where it begins. think fast: are you sweet and stylish or are you fresh and edgy? and are you vomiting? because the vogue knitting conglomerate has a magazine JUST FOR YOU, as long as you're answer a or b.

and since i'm obviously more fresh and edgy than sweet or stylish, it's pretty clear to me which magazine i should be reading. and hey, knit.1 takes it's artistic inspirations just as seriously as i do. they're having, this may 2006, an ART ISSUE. they're "inspired" by frieda kahlo! so they've knit... some frieda kahlo costumes. and they've also been "inspired" by... it looks like andy warhol. i think. and so... they've made a model look like edie sedgwick! and knitted... some... thing to put on her! for the photo shoot!

please. tell. me. there. is. more. to. inspiration. than dressing up. like somebody else. or putting an intarsia motif. of somebody else's work. on a sweater.

there's only so much explaining here i feel tempted to do.

from "the simpsons" treehouse of horror X" original air date 10/31/99:

Milhouse: Check it out Lisa, I'm Radioactive Man.

Lisa: I don't think the real Radioactive Man wears a plastic smock with a picture of himself on it.

Milhouse: He would on Halloween.

that pretty much sums it up for me.

it's the thing i've been thinking about today whilst y'all are covered in sunblock, sheep grease and deep fried cadbury egg residue at MS&W.

the NOSHI knitting monograph series

i'm making fewer entries in this blog lately. that isn't because i'm not knitting, and it isn't because i'm not writing about knitting, either. it's just that i'm doing a lot of it in a different forum.

please visit the homepage for THE NOSHI KNITTING MONOGRAPH SERIES to find out more. while it's all laid out there pretty clearly, we still expect to post a FAQ on the "about" page, so if you have Qs, feel free to use the NOSHI e-mail address (located on the "contact" page) to ask your Q.

i suppose a rather broad Q on the subject will be, "why?" why indeed? you will note upon visiting the page that i have a partner in this venture. she may, in her own time and on her own platform, address her own "why" issues, which are not that different from mine, and yet, come from a completely different place. my reasons for embarking upon the NOSHI series are easily quantified:

1. i love writing, i love writing about knitting, and i often want to write something about knitting that i doubt could find publication in any of today's knitting magazines.

2. the world doesn't need another knitting magazine. nor does it need another book about knitting. do i really need to go into this diatribe again? i don't think so. filler, ads, and crap: not for me.

3. i get published in "real" publications of all sorts, all the time. it's not exciting or special for me to break that barrier to entry. undoubtedly, this fact has softened the blow, so to speak, when it comes to self-publishing; it's not the plan B, it's an active choice. (feel free to read more about my experiences in publishing and editing, as opposed to just writing, in the essay requiem for a literary journal - an essay which, a few months ago, i was surprised to find was being used as required reading, for the last couple years, in a literature course at a university in germany. you really never know who your writing is going to effect!)

4. a lot of the things i might want to say about knitting - this will make you reel with disbelief - would not necessarily be welcome in the great machine of the "knitting industry". furthermore, i think that other knitter/writers - and i don't frankly care if no more than one a decade emerges for this series - deserve a thoughtful, responsible venue. because guess what, folks, not everybody with a knitting blog should be getting a book contract, and way, way too many are. whatever "knitting books" used to mean, it's now one very watered down bottle of gin indeed. same with magazines.

that's about as much as i can put to it at the moment; the NOSHI page itself does a pretty good job, not to mention the pieces that are actually nearing readiness. i would expect to see the site in full operation by july. use the sign-up notification box on the NOSHI page if you want to receive updates.

in the long run, it's about fulfulling a personal need. i've learned, in the last five or six years - and i can't even really say "the hard way" - that this is what means something to me where writing is concerned. i like the little, personal, one-on-one recognitions: i like it when i get a letter from some doctor in manhattan that says "i read your short story in a journal and i thought it was fantastic." or when i e-mail a museum in another state for info about their hours and get a response saying "aren't you a short story writer? i recognized your name." or when a professor in germany e-mails and says "i've been using your essay in my class for the last two years!" this stuff isn't exactly instant gratification. it's the icing on the cake, this recognition, and what i'm very thankful for is that it's never been in response to work i didn't think was the best i could have done.

i write for me. i write with the hope that it will move someone else. i don't go out of my way to hope i will ever have empirical proof that it did. it's very nice when it does. but when it comes down to it, i write for me. and, a postcard featuring this quote by kurt vonnegut is in view of my writing desk at all times:

Still and all, why bother? Here is my answer: Many people need desperately to receive this message: 'I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don't care about them. You are not alone.'

so check out the NOSHI page. it's not a substitute for this blog, but it's keeping me pretty busy. and i expect my partner will have something to say at some point and you'll know where to find her. in any case, she's the only person i'd trust to do this with. but we're easy to tell apart, even on the page. i'm the one who says "fuck" a lot.

mudcloth chuck taylors

in case there should be an initiative in which anyone who loves me at all was thinking of getting together to buy me a big, big gift...

i love chuck taylors, and i love african mudcloth. people who know me, know this. they also know that i hate hate HATE bono and would jump at the opportunity to stick my foot as far up his ass as i could get it UNLESS of course i did not want to soil my new AFRICAN MUDCLOTH CHUCK TAYLORS. gimme! i want them so much!

and actually, this left-to-right lineup shows them in the order of my preference. those brown ones are the best. that last one, too confusing -- only in a pinch. but really, i think it's wonderful, and, as i just told ben, if i don't get them, it's only because the gift-givers in my life embrace AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, and shame on them. shame on them.

field report: textiles in washington DC

ben and i took an early weekend in DC. we jumped in the car and headed off with no real plan other than to make a stop at the textile museum. it's lovely, indeed, and its library is particularly impressive! i'd have spent a good deal more time in that library if i'd had a longer visit, but the museum's online research tool textile muse is pretty cool, too. in fact, very cool.

the big exhibit now at the museum is one of greek embroidery, which was lovely, but the thing i enjoyed most was these seemingly-crocheted hats from cameroon. the projecting bits in some cases have wooden bits bolstering them from the inside. they are 20th century hats but are made to emulate hairstyles worn in cameroon before that time (i think that's what the card said. i was busy fake-coughing to cover up the sound of my camera going off, as you're not supposed to take pictures there. and what IS it with these digital cameras that have this phony little "shutter-clicking" sound? it's DIGITAL. it could be utterly silent if it wanted to be.)


the textile museum is located on embassy row, and there, ben had a photo op outside of the chinese embassy. and yes, we saw cherry trees - everywhere - and at the height of prettiness and scentiness.





on connecticut ave., near dupont circle, we found a store specializing in asian textiles. for local philly folks, i will say: it was like ruka, but outlet-sized, and not quite as diverse or elegant as ruka can often be (i love ruka). or, like material culture, but not as overpriced and snotty.



there were a lot of rugs, runners, bedcovers and garments...





and other stuff...









this copper cut is very much like the kind used in letterpress printing, but this one was obviously used for fabric surface design.

we had a marvellous time!

"if you like to look at crime"

...read the subject line of the e-mail from my friend lisa annelouise. oh, she knows i love to look at crime, and i particularly like to look at corinne may botz' nutshell studies of unexplained death.

are you aware?

are you aware that the yarn moratorium is ending soon?

oh, shit! not as soon as i thought, though. i thought it ended in MARCH. and it doesn't end until mid-april?

this is particularly bad, because i had planned to tack an extra month onto it, since i did buy two balls of yarn to finish edmund bacon. it had to be done, and i don't regret it, but i was going to add an extra month onto my ascetic journey because of that little stumble... but may? wait until may?

there've been times when this was very hard. it's been occasionally hard as far back as august, but everything's hard in august. i hit a bad point around the holidays, when spending time in the yarn store was just becoming painful, and i thought i was ready to go off the wagon then; i heard myself saying, "i NEED yarn -- the only yarn i have at home is for this project, and this one, and this one." and i left the store empty-handed and sad, and thinking i didn't have yarn.

that time, the perspective i got just being away from yarn that wasn't mine was enough to get me back on track. out of sight, out of mind. that time.

overall, there's empirical proof of how well this experiment worked for me, over the course of these last 10-ish months: just look at the blog. it's been great.

however. i've got things i want to make next and they aren't the things that the yarn i do have left can be part of -- nor do i feel like trolling e bay or etsy or spinning or bartering. i have projects in mind, knitting projects in MY MIND, and they require large amounts of reliable, homogeneous, uniform-of-structure-and-composition-and-there's-more-where-that-came-from YARN.

fuck the extra month. april thirteenth it is.

mind you, it's not going to be a slobbering free-for-all. i've just got a new set of parameters planned. we can talk about that later. for the time being, though, i'm really dragging my feet on knitting, because nothing feels good and nothing feels fun. then again, it seems i can go for longer now without knitting becuase i'm working on so many things i didn't know how to do before. and maybe i'll have one more second wind, as it were. or maybe i'll just sew and embroider and do canvaswork and print print print. dunno yet. i'm not bored. but i'm not knitting, either.

harajuku hoko-ten

for my birthday my dad bought me two volumes of photography from shoichi aoki's fruits magazine. i had admired them in stores but i don't think he'd known that -- they were a very good pick and in fact helped me figure out a hole in something i was writing (that had nothing to do with japan or harajuku.)



i'm sad to read that the hoko-ten has been abolished in japan; feel free to read about it on your own, but i didn't find any link that i thought was as good an explanation as the books' was.





to say that the page scans here are my "favorites" wouldn't be entirely accurate, since i'd have had to reproduce about a third of each book to get in everything i really admired. and it would of course seem simple to say "i wish we had this kind of thing here in america" but i pray to god we won't -- america would fuck it up to no end (as evidenced, actually, by gwen stefani's abortive little attempt to basically minstralize the harajuku girls -- thankfully gwen's gone onto much loftier pursuits.)




anyway, while it's hard to point out all my favorites here, there is one that is far, far and away, THE best of all -- in fact, i think many of you will recognize, when you see it, "yes. this has been amber's white whale. here it is. if she had this outfit, she would never wear another." and you would be right.

change nothing. change nothing. this is the most PERFECT outfit on the face of the earth and it's good for EVERYTHING you could possibly need clothing for. day or night. 365 days a year. this is emphatically the reason why i wear so much black: because i don't have this.

ah well. the books are really inspirational and full of joy and guts and just plain pleasure. jean-jacques rousseau said that "Craft must have clothes but Truth loves to go naked." i think both states are evident in the harajuku kids.

famous artists

my friend lisa annelouise -- she of many years of extremely original gift-giving and collaboration -- sent me a 1969 copy of famous artists magazine for my birthday, directing me specifically to the textile design competition results.

there are a few things you should know immediately about famous artists magazine.

that should satisfy anyone's needs of proof of the validity of said enterprise: now, onto the top-prize winners of what appears for the most part to be a surface design competition, although i'm not sure about the first-prize winner's entry in that sense. it seems three dimensional, and it makes me want mackarel sushi.






there was a specific category for children's textiles, or, i suppose, designs that would be used to decorate children's rooms, or to just decorate children; they were so abysmal, so hideous, and it was on these entries that famous artists magazine chose to squander what was obviously a very finite budget for the use of colored ink. it was just too depressing to reproduce here.

there was one entry (not in the children's category specifically) that i really loved. i'd wear pants made of this, in an instant! it's rather phantom tollbooth, i think. the entry was from a swede.






i love the text in this ad.









and never forget, all you cleverniks:

hand knits for service men

my dad was excited to hand out gifts on christmas and he made it clear that this was the one, for me, that he was most excited about: hand knits for service men, published in 1944.





as previously mentioned on this blog, our service man is my cousin alex, who waved away any suggestion that the readers of this blog should bombard him or his men with knitted teddy bears, preemie caps, swaddling bandages, or other knitted tokens of esteem. this is not to say that he is not lighthearted, because, as you see here, he is perfectly happy to wear a (mass-produced, not handknitted) santa hat and kebab it up in iraq on christmas.