it's not every day we get gifts from those whose work we so greatly admire. i am unbelievably honored - baffled, really - to have received this gorgeous scarf today from chunghie lee.
interviewing her for korea quarterly was more of an experience than i ever thought i'd get. if you'd told me in the year i first found and admired her work that all this would happen you could have knocked me over with a feather.
i'm just so touched. also, you see that the wrapping paper here is also gorgeous - and in my two favorite colors no less.
an EXCELLENT mail day - not only this, but we also received our "invitation" to be fingerprinted for the department of homeland security (this, you do when bringing a new little citizen into the US), and even received our child abuse and criminal clearances for the adoption! it's quite a day in the dorko levin house!
i posted last month about the beginnings of the buddhist temple mural in my neighborhood. boy, they were only getting started. this is one of the most beautiful - frankly, glorious - murals i've ever seen in philly!
and we've got some great murals. my old favorite was the harriet tubman mural at 9th and chestnut, which i was able to photograph in 2002, as it was being demolished by a wrecking ball. and, if you didn't know it, the flower girl from my first wedding has been the subject of not one, but two philly murals.
but that temple mural... wow.
from the incredible bibliodyssey i found this equally remarkable tibetian anatomical chart. again, the colors are lovely, and not dissimilar to those in this display of art from japanese children's books from the 1920's. which, in turn, got me thinking about the work of paul jacoulet. why do you suppose his print bebe coreen en costume de ceremonie. seoul is so appealing to me?
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 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.
i am in my mid-thirties, twice-married - now to the absolute love of my life - so celebrity crushes are pretty much a thing of the past for me. however, if i *had* to pick *one* person, i pick john lurie.
it's no wonder that the brilliant fishing with john is already available through the criterion collection. it didn't take long to proclaim that a classic. and while i'm not a big jim jarmusch fan i always did love down by law. and did you know john lurie played the apostle james in the last temptation of christ? he's one of those everywhere-people, and yet stays above the radar of the lowest common denominator; it's almost like he's lived forever (i had no idea he was a regular on the series oz, and was recently reading a biography of painter jean-michel basquiat when, lo and behold, lurie popped up again, right in the center of everything as usual.)
recently john lurie has begun exhibiting his artwork, which i like as much as i like his music, which is pretty much. i am, however, not going to pay five hundred dollars for an inkjet print, particularly when a selection of his paintings have just been reproduced in a literary magazine which i bought for ten bucks. that solved that. however, mazel tov to john for having work recently added to MoMA's permanent collection.
when it comes to john lurie and textiles, it's really very much in the way the man wears his clothing. i love john's clothing, which all looks like he probably bought it at a time when he cared but that time has long since passed. but he dances beautifully.
the video for "big heart" by john lurie and the lounge lizards shows how john can dance wildly in native sardinian robes and also rock the sharkskin suit and skinny tie with equal aplomb. this video has, in fact, much of the "fishing with john" charm that comes from lurie's ability to be himself anywhere and be, if not comfortable, willing to leave as much of himself in a new place as he takes from it, and vice versa.
i can't say i'd ever want to meet him, but i like to watch him work.
i don't know how much more "inspiring" a sight can be on washington avenue. this is a pretty high bar. (i love the smiling guy up on the platform, painting. you can't see it in the web-resolution photo, but trust me, he was very smiley.)
i like something that's going on with the colors here. i have lately found myself drawn to the combination of pink and red, with a bit of yellow nearby. nice when an expression of faith creates such prettiness. i like having the temple in the neighborhood because we do frequently see monks or novices in saffron robes (and often with backpacks) walking down our block. we also have an ice cream truck that plays christmas carols all summer long, and in autumn, a profusion of red-tailed hawks in the field across the street (the first time i saw one, right after we moved in, i called
ben
to tell him "there's a penguin on the soccer goal.")
perhaps i will update later as the mural progresses...
"Lady, only a fool thinks he's superior to beautiful bindings, but only a double-distilled fool reads nothing but bindings." - sinclair lewis' main street
a friend (in fact, a friend with a short novel manuscript that i believe would be very much at home here) sent me a link to london's persephone books, specifically to read about their design and endpapers.
just fascinating. how they choose the books that they print is also interesting. i'm not sure that i'd want every title here (no judith viorst, please) - but there's a few that interest me. (actually, a very NICE gift idea would INDEED be a book token or two.)
just look at the detail page for the book An Interrupted Life: The Diaries and Letters of Etty Hillesum 1941-43: the fabric design that serves as the book's endpapers is described thus: "The fabric, by Otti Berger (d. Auschwitz 1944), a Bauhaus designer living in Holland, could have been Etty's bedspread; the stripes running across the muted, if cheerful, pattern have the effect of barbed-wire."
they have their own, interesting-looking quarterly, a back issue of which featurees an essay entitled What's wrong with new novels by B.R. Myers, the same B.R. Myers who wrote the very influential - to me - A Reader's Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose.
really very inspiring indeed, especially since, virtually halfway through the bookwork for the knitting tarot, we are going to be thinking more and more about the binding, jacket and endpapers. (while such issues do not necessarily enter into the NOSHI knitting monograph series, that series being much more utilitatian, i do hereby SWEAR that we are mere DAYS away from having the first two monographs available for sale - we will sell no monographs before their time - and we are all working tirelessly.)
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?
how's YOUR monday morning shaping up?
NEW YORK - With a city-issued broom in his hand, Boy George started his court-ordered community service early Monday, sweeping leaves and trash off the sidewalks of New York.
It took less than an hour for the former Culture Club frontman to get into a spat with the media.
"You think you're better than me?" he yelled. "Go home. Let me do my community service."
Boy George took to the streets of Manhattan as a Department of Sanitation worker wearing an orange vest, dark capri pants, shoes without socks, and without the wild makeup and androgynous style that made him so recognizable as the '80s icon who sang "Karma Chameleon" and "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?"
"This is supposed to be making me humble. Let me do this," he said. "I just want to do my job."
The singer, born George O'Dowd, was ordered to spend five days working for the Department of Sanitation after pleading guilty in March to falsely reporting a burglary at his lower Manhattan apartment. The officers who responded found cocaine instead.
i'm adding an inspiration category here today, although you'll note i backtracked a bit and grandfathered in a few not-so recent posts as well. through bibliodyssey - one of the only blogs i read daily (along with the superficial) - i woke up this morning to bright hot sunshiney-shadowy spanish illustrator manolo prieto and boy am i hooked by the colors and the lines, not to mention that sinister humor.
korean video artist nam june paik's father was a textile manufacturer; other than that, he had little to do with the medium, and certainly very little to do with it in his art. but upon reading one article about him in korean quarterly, i knew i would soon be adding him to my list of heavy-duty inspirations and influences (along with leigh bowery* and chunghie lee.)
nam june paik's video arbor installation was placed in philadelphia in 1990. while the website of the residential complex that boasts it still uses a very early photograph of the arbor, ben and i visited it last night to find it significantly changed. here's what the video arbor looks like today.
even before we visited i felt my knitting fingers itching to pay tribute, and envelope my brain, in paik's work. although officially begun before ever hearing of nam june paik, a very clear concept has since presented itself to me, and an in-progress post will not be far behind.
both ben and i are in very fecund states of mind right now, both of us dropping utensils and tools in the midst of regular household duties and running to the computer or notebook to write something down. that's how summer is; like the wisteria vines on the video arbor (as well as the ones on the front of our house!): you can almost sit and watch it grow, even when you're the thing that's growing.
(play a little "where's waldo" on the paik studios website and see if you can find george plimpton. or, watch this very pretty, trancy little video clip from paik's memorial exhibition.)
* having mentioned leigh, and playing "find the public figure" trivia, here is an interesting bowery-related image. you'll have to scroll down a few entries to find it; see the man taking the photo in the mirror? it is author william gibson (the photo is from his blog).
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.
i think it has great knitting potential. as well as tattoo potential. i love the colors.
i know i haven't been posting much here lately. irons in the fire, baby. irons in the fire. i should have a post about something i've knit by the end of the weekend, maybe.
for the next few days i'm taking a break from almost all handwork, due to some crunchy tingly appendages that i'd like to keep functional for the next sixty years or so. they want a rest. they want to read bret easton ellis novels while sipping iced tea. so that's what they are going to get...
for all you comcast viewers, the legend of leigh bowery is currently a freebie on the "on demand" channel. and the book leigh bowery looks is due out in just a few days. and me with an itchy amazon.com finger as it is.
fantastic documentary, a great chance to see it free if you've got comcast, and a tremendous knitting inspiration. leigh learned to knit at his mum's knee -- like so many of you out there did, and like so many of you are teaching your children.
keep it in mind.
i am still in the swirl of assimilation -- this past weekend, i saw boy george on broadway. boy george: the most influential role model i have ever had. it's been twenty years with him; i've managed to include him in both the eighties tarot and the trinity doughnuts tarot decks. i can't think of a reason to put him in the knitting tarot, but he is definitely present in my knitting.
boy george is present in my knitting because he demonstrated to me, at a precious young age -- when i yet had a hint of neuroplasticity -- that the best reason to do a thing is to please yourself; and that something one-of-a-kind is worth far more than something off the rack. sure, george was not the only or the first person demonstrating this. he was, in part, a product of the DIY/punk ethic, which is a very admirable one. i've not grown up to be much of a clotheshorse, or even very interested in my clothes -- although i can put on the dog when i choose to -- but without a doubt, george helped form me, and the way that i knit, and i dare say, write.
i think i was very, very lucky to be a teenager in the early 80's. it was an excellent time to be forming a character. among the other distractions enjoyed in that time, people made their outfits. i know i did. even if it was just a lot of intricate pinning and fastening -- i've never been a seamstress -- i was just as happy in my bedroom listening to kajagoogoo and doctoring old clothes as i was doing anything else.
in george's musical, taboo, the character that george plays -- artist and demi-icon leigh bowery -- responds to a friend's plea that he get more organized with his "career" by saying that he designs for only one client -- himself. what a relief this kind of thinking is, particularly after a weekend in new york where every female between the ages of five and sixty is sporting an angora bucket hat purchased from a street vendor. i say today's look is nothing: does that make me "dated"? what's this obsession with time and the idea that what comes later in it is somehow advanced? it seems rather like saying, "the best thing at the salad bar is always whatever's in the last chafing dish." but we all know that could be anything. don't we?
the nice thing about inspiration is that it's very slippery to attack, and unnecessary to defend. consider yourself lucky enough to be inspired by anything, if you are. this past weekend in new york, seeing boy george on broadway, carrying my trash bag bag, i felt quite sure that if the fourteen year-old me could have looked twenty years into the future at the thirty four year-old me, she'd have been very satisfied. and so am i.