named thus because knitting him kept me calm on the plane during our little trip last fall, this guy has been on the needles since then - and is finally finished! the pattern is from an issue of spin-off from last summer - he is an estonian sheep puppet.
last night, when he was just one ear short, i put him on my hand and made him dance to the closing-credits music of the movie we were watching. i now realize i have entirely new level of power over ben's emotional life. i have never seen him laugh so hard, so fast. and so predictably - all lowell had to do was move his arms and ben was in tears.
a simple man, my husband.
this yarn, by the way, is stuff i dyed with mac in the summer. i think i do a pretty good near-solid; at least i do it the way i like it.
more dyeing coming up within the next few weeks.
Fallen leaves lying on the grass in the November sun bring more happiness than daffodills. Spring is a call to action, hence to disillusion, therefore is April called 'the cruellest month'. Autumn is the mind's true Spring; what is there we have, 'quidquid promiserat annus' and it is more than we expected.
- Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave
you may perhaps recall last year's leafy man.
he was certainly nowhere near finished, and so he's back again, this year. and he's nowhere near finished. at this rate, he's at least a four-year project. i really do like to take him out only during this season, and meditate on the autumn. perhaps it is because i am a bit of a leafy dame myself.
i'm not the only person to find leafy men appealing. check out this image from czech artist jindrich pilecek - an intaglio print called "knight of autumn". that's a whole nother way to do a leafy man!
and, there's more than one way to make a textile leaf! my father went to the phila. museum of art craft show and came home with information about finnish textile artist raija rastas. i have a sweet spot for the finnish to begin with, and i love this woman's work - not only her beautiful leaf brooches (my favorites are the half-black, half-white one, and the reddish one), but her vestements and liturgical cloths.
and this is the third year - i've posted about both years previous - that i've gotten out cyril connolly's the unquiet grave when autumn starts to show itself (or i begin to imagine that it has). the quote at the start of this entry is one i have used before, but honestly, who could tire of it?
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.
the second in the series of favorite philadelphians (knitted). i currently have plans for three others, all in various states of partial readiness. i started mikey back in october, and then put him away over the holidays. i began with his flat bottom, knowing that while he wasn't going to be a bust like ed bacon, he wasn't going to have legs, either. he's kind of a weeble, really, but sorta stands up on his own as well.
there's nothing that didn't go right with mikey. the cigarette. the hunched shoulders. the leather jacket. everything. as long as he doesn't mind not having legs, i think mikey himself is going to be pretty pleased -- because i can't think of anybody but him who should have this. (i had intended to give edmund bacon his bust, too, but since he died before i finished it, i gave it to the ed bacon foundation -- where it was well received. i also got a very nice letter from bacon's daughter saying that the family really liked it, and that she felt her father would have loved it. that made me very happy.)
i should be able to update with pictures of mikey-with-mikey before too long.
you know, i think i gave him more grey than he actually has, but we can live with that.
(wanna see more mikey love? go to goat films and click "animation", then choose the mikey wild animation teaser... i'd say big things are coming!)
the bear for the lunar new year celebration raffle is complete!
i pondered for awhile about his "nakedness", and where to give him some color. the insides of his ears seemed a good choice; then, in practicing my chinese and korean knotting techniques, i put a "ten-accord knot" (chinese), made out of i-cord, onto his belly. care bear-style, if you will. (not that i like care bears, i do not. does anybody remember teddy ruxpin? in high school i used to hang out in a friend's dorm where they had a teddy ruxpin with all the fabric and fur torn away from his head -- but his mechanical jaws and eyes still worked.)
i still felt the lunar new year bear needed color but didn't want to cover his very cute limb joints! they were so puffy anyway -- he's built like a teletubby -- and i didn't want them hidden, because i liked them. i consulted with friends, who suggested shoes or booties of some sort. so that's what i went with! and i think the colors are pretty unisex.
a close-up of the ten-accord knot. looks rather celtic, but it is chinese. learning these complex knots with i-cord actually makes it a little easier in my opinion.
this bear is so large, and full of such high loft stuffing, that handling (much less seaming) him is like trying to wrestle a big slippery drunk. now to find a box that he can fit inside of.
here's most of a bear -- for those of you who are familiar with my couch and pillows, you can see by scale that he's rather a big bear -- being assembled and dressed now, as a raffle item for our adoption agency's lunar new year event and raffle in early february.
i'm at that dreaded and torturous "need distance/can't stop working on it" point in this project. once his limbs are attached i think i can back away a bit (working on his jacket counts as "backing away".) it's interesting to me that i can work so happily without a net and without a map on various heads and effigies without worry -- even going to bed seeing them looking like nothing in particular and not having a care in the world about it -- and yet, because this bear was worked from a pattern, and because there was a photo of what it was "supposed" to look like, my bear's weak-chinned visage had me fretting for hours, almost to the point of sneaking downstairs in the middle of the night to inspect him some more.
and that's just silly. he's adorable -- and i think when i begin to work on his attire (which isn't very related to the pattern from which the bear was made), i'll start seeing him more as "my" work and be a little less bothered by coloring outside the lines, as it were.
even just writing about it has let off some of the steam. i think i'm going to go put him in the spinning room for a day or two and get a little break from him.
roger leans rather towards the "new romantic" -- he has that elizabethan ruff, that very victorian little memento mori brooch, and under his prune-colored blouson he is probably hiding a copy of baudelaire's les fleurs du mal. yet, he's pretty cheery.
here's all four of them together. i've definitely got a fifth in me, although i may not get going on it right away. little zakka projects are a nice little palate-cleanser, are they not?
after lamenting earlier today that i was, finally, running out of yarn, i realized i had what i needed for at least two more large projects that are on the docket. i might not start them before christmas though, since working on the unfinished canvaswork and blackwork sampler may take priority -- it gives the wrists a break.
a third in a series of new waver finger puppets, stuart is wearing a camo jacket and a safety pin in his ear. (when my dad gave us our new blanket, this pin was attached to one of its tags, and i immediately thought "yay! i can use that as an earring for a punker finger puppet!" it worries me a little, sometimes, that these are the paths my mind takes at my age.) you may also notice that stuart has -- like david bowie! -- two different color eyes. dreamy. like his dreamy red hair. he's so irish looking! dreeeeeeeamy.
i'm a little surprised to see him hanging out in the lav with that character, though -- maybe he's just waiting to beat him up. unsavory, regardless.
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.
we (the royal we) are merely a bit of primping away from finishing the ed bacon bust. as for "sizzling", we (the royal we) actually did a bit of that too -- as i tried to steam ed's collar down with a not-so-good iron and put a bit of burn on his shirt. ah well. although painfully fussy about some things, there are other things i can live with.
isn't he gorgeous? i mean, admit it. HE'S GORGEOUS. those front shoulder seams are a little wonky and then there's the little iron burn but hell doesn't it make him MARVELOUSLY working class? like a certain little city i know? that he designed? hmmm?
as usual i got a ton of help at
rosie's yarn cellar
. once i had the head done i really did need pretty regular consultations about the shoulder base and the oxford shirt, and of course, i got all the help i needed.
BUT. yes. it's true. this blue yarn for ed's shirt i did purchase -- THEREBY BRIEFLY AND PURPOSEFULLY BREAKING THE MORATORIUM ON YARN BUYING -- a week ago. RECIDIVISM! YES!
i am back on the wagon now. it was not the same thing as, say, just buying some yarn that i didn't have any plans for but that i "couldn't live without" because it was so "yummy". nothing anybody offered me -- and people did offer -- looked the way i wanted the shirt to look. and i did what i had to do for my project! i make the rules, i break the rules (giving the finger boldly to the .5% of readership that doubts it.)
undoubtedly my tone tells you that we are in major celebration mode here, over ed. heck, even flannery had a couple of chocolate bars to celebrate! (and that's because my ex-husband is an idiot who leaves chocolate all over his house, at dog-height. the vet says she will be fine.)
ed isn't going to be living here much longer, i don't think, but more on that later. this weekend, he is going to LOVE park for a photo shoot by our photographer friend lou. lou works with vintage cameras -- i don't think he owns a camera that doesn't have a baffle on it. i'm sure i'll have those special portraits to post before long -- and an update on where ed's headed!
when making the little leaf albums i made a few too many leaves, and they started stacking up.
then i remembered this figure i had in a closet. it's made of a weird stretchy material and is filled with poly-beads, the kind that are soooooo squishy and cool. i bought the little doll at BJ's while also purchasing a bolster made of the same material and filling. the bolster has become ben's primary rival for my affections, even far ahead of the animals -- i'm mad about the bolster. in the middle of the night i will awaken sometimes flailing my arms blindly and crying BOLSTER! until i find it.
it's great between the knees -- very good for your lower back, if you happen to sleep on your side. and it was cheap, and the little man-figure was cheap as well, so i got them both, last winter.
now i have begun to stitch the extra leaves onto the little man. i guess i intend to cover him. i saw a children's book recently called leaf man and i suppose the idea stuck somewhere in my head (although we do not yet have the book.) a leafy little man who is squishy to hug -- i find this a satisfying prospect.
white hair, and an eye.
this hair is handspun ramie -- correct in color and texture but goodness it's for better spinners than i am. and all these cut ends only compound the problem. when things began to fray, i added some dubbing wax -- that's something used in tying flies, and has worked well so far.
well, of course, nigel needed somebody to hang out with. this pasty-faced, black lipstick-wearing guy came into being while watching halloween: resurrection and eating tamales.
ben
really thought his name should be ezra. while i see his point, i have named him andek niemand.
if anyone has any information about the location of the "real" andek niemand, or if he himself should find this post through googling, please feel free to contact theknittingtarot@gmail.com... my sister and i would LOVE to hear from him! our favorite boy from finland! i know he's out there!
this andek niemand has had liberties taken with his person... he is wearing a fuzzy spangly sweater and must be eating arsenic or something to keep his skin so white. i have him set up with nigel near my desk and the two of them look for all the world like they are lurking at the school bus stop.
i've been feeling the need over the last few months to make sure that this house really had a good store of finger puppets set aside. with many thematic series in mind, i seem to have begun with the punk rockers. nigel, who we see here, came into being over the course of watching scream 2, it's the great pumpkin charlie brown, and the blob, although i alternated making nigel with making stuffed cabbage rolls, and eating them, and french onion soup.
i have not decided, looking at nigel, whether he is british or american. one would think the name would give it away. maybe, maybe not. for sure, the first record nigel ever purchased -- and few know this -- was the village people's cruisin' album. but he followed that up quickly with a bunch of blondie albums, of course, and some siouxie, and lene lovich. then he went through this obsession with general public, which isn't much to sink one's teeth into. then, in his later youth, nigel was known to listen to and purchase kylie minogue and even some of the stock-aitken-waterman factory hits of the late eighties, more or less bringing nigel full circle.
you can rest assured i'm not tired of this yet.
Former City Planner Edmund Bacon Dies
By KYW's Sonia Rincon
Edmund Bacon directed the Philadelphia city planning commission in the 1950s and 60s, and was the mastermind behind the revival of Independence mall, Society Hill, Penn Center and Market East among many other projects years later.
He designed the LOVE park and just three years ago at age 92 skateboarded in it as a protest against the city's ban.
Governor Ed Rendell says a lot of people may not realize how much Bacon accomplished.
"In his latter years he became known as a little bit of a gadfly. But he was such a renowned city planner that he was on the cover of Time magazine. His design for the new Philadelphia in the late 50's was breathtaking and really precedent shattering."
Bacon died of natural causes at his home in Rittenhouse Square, according to his family, which includes his son actor Kevin Bacon.
Edmund Bacon was 95.
yes, in fact, the mystery head is a study of edmund bacon, who i was lucky enough to meet, at his home, two days short of two years ago. i knew i was quite likely working against the clock to hope to have the head completed before he died, and in fact a couple friends will undoubtedly still have e-mails from me in their inboxes, from yesterday or the day before, where i mention just that.
i was lucky to have met him and i will continue work on the head while thinking kindly of him. he had some fascinating hobbies and there are ways to learn more about him. he shaped this city that i love so much.
he's back! in knitted ornament form!
i've been knitting in effigy lately, a lot. it's going to keep happening, i think. it's taking me where i need to go.
...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!
during the knitting, flanny guarded it....
and as the felting began, ripley feared it....
someone is Becoming!
depending on how small i can get this head and still keep the "features" as clear as i want them, it will either be a full doll, as originally intended, or, if i don't get it much smaller than this, it will, in fact, be a shoulderless bust. seriously. either way is going to be alright with me, although if it's a bust (an actual bust, not a subjective one), i will have to start the doll again, as i have dedicated myself now to a series of at least five Favorite Philadelphians. i will say no more about which Favorite is represented here although really i have counted one, two, three really good clues in this post alone, and if you are a pal o'mine, you have considerable extra context through which to root. what do you get for guessing correctly? pinched. if you're lucky.
in the "been around so long it's never been blogged because i forgot to think of it as knitting" category: a small family of knitted pigs (mom, dad, three babies) that i made and sent to
ben
the summer he was working in paris (four years ago). i think the pattern was from one of those expansive debbie bliss things, like knit an entire working abattoir (seriously, i like debbie bliss kiddie patterns -- pirate rats and hats that look like plum puddings, you know i like those) -- but i didn't get further than the pigs.
i can't even remember what the joke was now. why did i send him knitted pigs? it's a total blank for me.
i am never "stuck" for ideas about what to knit, whether it be from a pattern from a book or something i'm just going to make up on my own. but i must say, lately, i have more ideas than usual. i thought it had something to do with the yarn moratorium, and maybe it does.
but i've also been writing like crazy -- absolutely crazy. i have filled a mead college-rule notebook with longhand this summer (an alarming amount of that having been written in various cosi/xando coffee-and-sandwich shops around center city -- their crumb cake is now officially a trigger mechanism for writing). i have also rewritten stories that have been lying around for some time (it is no unusual circumstance for me to make scrapple of a story for five years before seeing it placed) and i have exhausted, i feel certain, my store of "first readers" this summer -- even they have tired eyes (which is a shame since i just got the galley proof for the anthology story and really have no one to proof it. i can't. even if i read it upside down i probably couldn't proof it at this point.)
somebody -- and i wish i could remember who, since i've been really bad with my long-distance e-mail friends lately, just sending rather short messages complaining about my eyestrain -- suggested that little amber was the source of all this new creativity. well, the dates certainly line up. it's very possible!
this week, i suggested the same theory to little amber's creator, beth robinson.
Amber, that is so fascinating. I do believe that creativity breeds
creativity and it can spread like wildfire if given the right environment!
You gave it to me to begin with and I gave it back to you. Now that's a
wonderful exchange.
There is an artist in Miami that is completely fascinated with your doll.
He's a good guy, a customer of mine, and he's mentioned your doll on a few
occasions via email. I think he may be salivating with creative juice from
it as well - he was so touched that such deeply personal items could be
brought together in an art form like that. He said it made him think
differently about the work he was doing. Wildfire!
this is an example, to me, of what it is to be living an ideal.
ADDENDUM: this very day, syndicated sex columnist dan savage emphatically endorses "brechtian punk cabaret" act the dresden dolls, who use beth robinson's dolls in the video for their song "perfect fit". synchronicity!
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.
the wooden shadow box came, from all places, target. now she's hanging right above my computer, right where my eyes go when i write.
she feels so absolutely right to me! my ex husband said she was my familiar. so y'all watch yourselves.
a little refresher: a few months ago, i mailed some organic bits to a woman in vermont. some hair, some puppy teeth, and a kidney stone.
then, more recently, i did a little bit of blackwork on linen -- and sent that back to her as well, after using some chintz pattern pieces she had sent me, to frame the borders i was stitching.
are you ready? are you ABSOLUTELY ready?
okay, then, if you say you're ready.
beth and i have been calling her "amber junior" or little amber . she is, for me, a reminder of an inner expression -- something i need to use for writing, and for knitting, too. (Things are in the saddle, / And ride mankind, warned ralph waldo emerson in the mid-nineteenth century.)
i hesitate to call this a collaboration because obviously the very talented beth robinson did the hard stuff -- sure, i did the blackwork, passed the kidney stone, harvested the dog's teeth, and grew my hair (in june, my hairdresser DID find the missing piece: "why is this section back here so much shorter than the rest of it!?"). but beth really made her what she is.
i got "in progress" photos along the way.
the first pictures were of just the head. as beth and i had discussed, we would use the kidney stone to represent the mole on my left cheek. (ben has this exact same mole in the exact same place.) and, of course, ripley's baby teeth -- gathered one at a time throughout her first few months with us -- were inserted into the mouth.
then we conferred back and forth a bit on how to do the clothes. dress pieces had already been made; they were sent to me, in chintz, and i used some linen i had here at home to re-create them, and add the blackwork.
soon, she was on her way.
this was a luxury for me -- normally i do not spend any money on things just for myself, unless they are tools for knitting or letterpress, or an occasional book or cd. but that said, beth's dolls are much more affordable than they ought to be, and are getting more and more press all the time. i do not think that little amber will be the last strange doll i get... although it seems that to date, my request was, even for strangedolls.net, pretty strange!
more pics will be forthcoming, of little amber in her new environment. we are just loving the heck out of her.
still missing a lot of things: clothes. (his "muddy" pants are knitted on, but he needs a shirt and jacket.) shoes (and feet). shackles. his other arm. i'm getting there...
i reckon this will be the LAST "in progress" photo of bub. there are a few steps between here and the finished product but they aren't going to be very interesting to look at.
ben, the beautiful and thoughtful half, knew that i wanted to barricade myself in the den with some movies last weekend -- to get an extra-good jump on bub. from his company's free DVD library, he brought home a copy of cursed, which ranks as one of my new favorite japanese horror movies of all time -- better than any of the tomie movies which tend to be hit and miss. cursed is PERFECT. it has that perfect balance of really funny moments and really REALLY put-down-the-knitting scary moments. and with japanese horror, there's none of this "jump cut and two-frames of scary thing and that's the big revealing horror-part" -- in cursed you see PLENTY of the scary thing, and it just keeps coming. we were LOVING it!
then, last sunday night, i guess it was, i chose the new release the wickeds. please. everyone. stay away from this stupid, stupid film. it has ron jeremy in it. that almost made it funny. but it was so ghastly bad that we couldn't bring ourselves to turn it off -- because that would have been ADMITTING that we had turned it ON. and we just couldn't admit that. my shame is trillionfold.
by tuesday we were on to a jackpot score of the nomi song. redemption! but. alas. there was just NO way that bub was gonna be ready for friday night. no way at all. bub, being timeless, didn't care so much himself. and, i have to say, this is a comforting lesson in the relativity of time. i started knitting bub to get me through the INTERMINABLE wait until the release of LAND OF THE DEAD. how can i complain that it came too soon?
i can certainly complain that it didn't last long enough. it's over! i've seen it! all that waiting! i loved EVERY SECOND. as always, romero is the master of racially mixed casting, with subtle surprises and interpretations everywhere; the terrifying, sentient black zombie who was the first to feel for his people; the giant first-a-bad-guy-then-a-good-guy samoan; the ruthless yet loveable john leguizamo.
however well romero mixes it up racially, he is a man of the people. when the "wealthy" were about to be introduced -- living in impenetrable splendor and isolation -- i said to ben, here come the jewish people. because jews, of course, have no street cred.
seconds later, we were introduced to the mastermind behind the luxury living accommodations -- "mr. kaufmann".
who lived in the zombie-free ivory tower called "fiddler's green".
which was wall-to-wall lucite and silk plants and decorative fiber optics.
the light touch of george a. romero. well, i mean, in casting dennis hopper as a jew.
anyway, it was great, the zombies RULED, and romero's vision is as interesting and thoughtful as ever. what i love most about this body of work is that romero has never -- not since night of the living dead in 1968, and not now -- had the best of ANYTHING when it comes to making his films. not actors, not cinematography, not budget, nothing. but he can tell the story he came to tell, god damn it. and he has never run away from that story's sometimes halting progress: two steps forward from one movie to the next when it came to effects, but one step back, perhaps, on script. or actors. it has been a ragged progression. he didn't sit around waiting to polish everything 'til you couldn't tell one film from the next. i admire that.
as the master says: stay scared! be awake, alive, telling your own stories and knitting your dreams, right down to the last second! even if all you've got is red heart acrylic, the cockroach of yarns. crank up the AC, bring your own raisinettes (because the riverview octoplex doesn't even CARRY raisinettes) and that's how we'll get through the summer.
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.
henry's oldest living children are growing up.
as a restless teenager, mary tudor would get bored at the castle and go to visit king james V and marie de guise, and their live-in border hans holbein. there she grew curious about the ways of love, watching the amorous king and queen.
mary agreed to sit for a portrait for master holbein, and their friendship grew. soon hans was visiting mary at the castle. they could dance and have fun, but since she was a teen and he an adult, their romance could not truly blossom.
still, mary enjoyed taunting hans with her sexuality, and the minute she became an adult, she received her first kiss.
they married as soon as they could, and they moved into their own little house. will mary ever wear the crown? perhaps, perhaps not. king hans holbein? prince consort? who knows.
poor arthur, harold and greensleeves. in a kingdom where just about everyone was either their half-sibling or someone their father has to marry, they had very few dating options.
arthur was getting friendly with "scot", the maid... but things really didn't go anywhere. and then there was the fire. so unfortunate. this was a fire, as opposed to a "fire" that "happened" and in which all the princes "died" (quote marks mean you should picture me clicking and mousing and dispatching them all to their deaths in a conveniently ordered -- by me -- kitchen fire.) this fire really just happened, and even though i tried to save arthur (my favorite), they all just died. for real.
arthur -- last remaining son of henry and catherine of aragon. dead. harold and greensleeves, for whom i had great hopes of evil despotism, sons of henry and anne boleyn -- dead. boring, and dead.
henry does still have three illegitimate (and fictional) daughters with bessie blount, and they are still alive -- maxine, and the twins peak frean and mushy pea. but for them, henry only has the legitimate, historically accurate children he would have had to begin with -- mary (by catherine of aragon), elizabeth (by anne boleyn), and edward (by the recently dead jane seymour). i think the power of history is forcing my hand.
princess elizabeth, since i wanted her to be as formidable as her historical counterpart, has a lot of skills. logic, creativity, charisma -- she is a well endowed girl. alas, her possibilities for romance are also limited, because her only peers are her half-sister maxine, and of course, mary queen of scots.
i guess there is something i should explain about mary queen of scots. at the time marie de guise gave birth, this was a very boring house to play, and when the baby was born a boy, i did not know how to force-quit ben's computer properly, and he was a few rooms away, busy doing something. so i yelled "do you want to come force-quit this machine, or do we want mary queen of scots to start life as a boy and become a tranny?"
so you see which option we chose. mary queen of scots is a force to be reckoned with though -- having maxed out on logic in childhood.
but, remember -- mary queen of scots IS still a male teenager, and is NOT related to elizabeth -- and currently, until i make a new houseful of auxilliary characters, is her ONLY chance at a bloodline.
there is much yummy, nearly rapturous information to be had about elizabeth's clothes, and i will be damned if i'm not going to get my hands on it. and i had not known until recently about mary queen of scots' needlework, which contained secret messages. that mary has her fans. isn't it fantastic?
there's something that needs explaining about the illegitimate maxine fitzroy as well. lovely as she is, she went through a stage of temporary dwarfism heretofore unseen in this game, at least by me.
here is my best guess at what happened. when you play the sims, time is only passing in the house you occupy while you are playing. therefore, babies born on the same day (if you played both houses that day ) will not age at the same rate if you spend more time in one house than in the other.
also, if a sim is a visitor in the house you are playing -- even if when in their "own" house you can boss them around -- they are out of your control. not only that, but, say, a girl goes to a party at a neighbor's, and you stop playing that house while she is sitting there eating cake. go back to the house that girl "lives" in -- and she will be there, because it is a different time and day in that house.
got that?
maxine fitzroy went to the birthday party of mary queen of scots. maxine went to this party as a child. while maxine was still at the party, i closed the house and started playing the house where maxine actually lived.
while playing the house where maxine lived, maxine herself age-transitioned from child to teenager. quite attractively i might add.
but when i re-entered the home of mary queen of scots, and the frozen-in-time birthday party -- maxine was still there. and dwarfism, however temporary, was the very upsetting result.
this whole weird ugly squatness of maxine revisits a fear i had as a little girl -- a fear and dislike of an illustration in a facsimile reproduction of lewis carroll's alice's adventures underground. it was not disneyfied. and carroll's drawings were a little primative and upsetting to me. in that book, when alice grew small, her head was the same size as it had been when she was herself -- and her expression really bothered me.
this is 18 count linen, and so much nicer than the aida cloth. also, i used a crewel needle rather than a tapestry needle and felt much more in control of my stitches. this is for use with the bits.
here's a front, and here's a back! not bad!
always remember: the ugly may be beautiful, the pretty never. that one is attributed to both paul gaugin and mary baker eddy -- but is worth remembering, particularly in response to this project.
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.
here is a handful of important "fiber" matter -- a bunch of ripley's baby teeth, and a grape-nutlike item.
a little closer now. it really does look like a grape-nut, doesn't it?
it's a kidney stone that i had when i was seventeen. really! i have saved it all these years because boy, was that an event.
this is a photo of me on the day before the kidney stone announced itself. that would be october 30, 1987. yep, that's how significant a day it was. it's branded on my memory. and although i have always loved this photo, it is forever in my mind "the picture of the day before the kidney stone".
that baby -- toddy freedman -- made me a lego wedding cake when i got married to tim in 1994. he is in college now.
here are my items again -- the ripley teeth and the kidney stone -- all done up in a little tube for fed exing. yep, i fed exed them. but where? and why? that's the part i can't tell yet, for i do not want to spoil the surprise.
i also had to e-mail this picture to the individual who, later that week, received a very ominous fed ex package indeed. she was expecting it, so it was okay. this picture is taken an entire lifetime later than that last picture -- almost exactly! and while it may not be a favorite, i can certainly take worse, and this image does get across some information necessary to the recipient of the special package. there is geographic information, and there is emotional information, both imparted in this photo. i did not send her a cute, smiley photo, for a reason.
there. that's all i have now. there will be knitting and blackwork posts related to this project as well. more to come.
and for those special readers of mine who demand a rigorous continuity at all times, yes those are ripper's teeth -- i DO have a tooth of flannery's, but only one. i do intend to have a ring made out of it. but hey! i found a use for the kidney stone, didn't i?
remember the cool palomamobile (the last knitted thing i posted to this blog, and a full month ago at that -- i am knitting, it's just that none of it is showing up here yet) that i made for kathy? i mean for paloma?
as previously reported, it was created from a "pattern" in a british sewing magazine. i was certainly drawn to the triangles. today i discovered, clicking through various links, an article about turkoman embroidery that shows some pictures of doga, which are "worn by people of all ages, attached to horse's harness, tied to cradles, or hung in houses or yurts. The doga is shaped from rough cloth into a triangular form....some are empty and others are simply triangular cloth sections decorated with embroidery." they can be used to carry amulets, or as amulets themselves.
mention is made on this page of something that could entice anybody to carry an amulet: "the albasty, an evil female spirit who appears sometimes as a goat but most often as a woman with hair to her heels and an open wound on her back, through which her entrails are always spilling." holy cow, sicilian peasant that i am, even i do not have hair on my heels -- nor does my sister, who, however, having been born with spina bifida, fits the rest of the description rather well.
or did at her birth. all fixed up now of course.
actually i don't remember any mention of entrails, either.
okay, well, she's evil and she did have a wound on her back and sometimes she appears as a goat.
looking at more turkoman textiles just convinces me i should be wearing embellished robes more often. you only live once (unless you are an evil hirsute goat spirit with spina bifida, in which case you probably live forever).
i cannot tell you that her real name is kathy but i do have a pal -- a very ex-cellent gift-giver herself, giving me a run for my money -- who wishes to be known by the alias "paloma". there are probably precious few vietnamese women in the world named paloma, but all the more reason to have one. it is her birthday today. paloma's birthday. (i am winking. get it?)
this past weekend ben, paloma and i were treated to a pre-hoi-polloi showing of the dali exhibit, (i ate some chocolate covered ants!) and lunch at illuminare (which is owned by the brother of my friend kevin), by daddy warbucks.
for paloma's birthday, i gave her a portrait of a dog by todd marrone, and this mobile, knitted in koigu and embellished with sequins, beads, silk ribbons and buttons. i was a koigu virgin up until this point, and big deal, it's yarn. but i am now very devoted to lantern moon's small double-pointed needles.
i found the pattern for this mobile -- originally just a little patchwork sewing project -- in a british stitching magazine that was tossed in along with my blackwork stuff for my birthday. i am a bit of an anglophile, but i still believe that every incredibly cool thing that DOES come out of england is in direct defiance to those peoples' genetic programming, which directs them to lie around like puddings, not going places, out of fear they will be picked up by a white slave trade ring.
the pattern was straightforward enough, and included gentle hints at the end of it, for "options", in case, you know, you should run out of them.
You can change the scale of your square to create bigger or smaller mobiles.
Mix and match the size of the triangles for variety.
and my favorite "option":
Use different colours to create a totally different effect.
different "effects". produced by different colors. as my old friend paulie russo would say, who do no dat. one ponders the possibilities. for red hatters, for instance, "different colors" would produce a "different effect" -- a mutinous effect, and there would be townspeople, and torches, like in frankenstein, if they chose wrong.
it stands to reason that the british version of this mobile -- the one pictured in the magazine along with the pattern -- was done in various shades of white.
i myself have a few "options" when making one of these again: i might make one for hanging in an oft-used closet, and stuff the little triangles with fragrant herbal moth repellent. i may also make numerous, more or less uniform strands of many triangles -- creating a set of "beaded" curtains!
we're a little concerned that ripley will take an interest in this toukie as well. made of swatches from projects over the last couple of years (and really illustrating the limited color range i work in, particularly for ben), it is not only good for rolling around on the floor with -- but i wrapped it around gibson's neck last night and he LEFT it there. it probably keeps a cat relatively warm and snug!
i like the way the head turned out. that was the swatch from a pair of slippers.
quelle tragedie -- this is the last thing truman capote would ever want ganging up on him.
i was doing so well -- very few knitted holiday projects on the needles, and moving at a reasonable pace -- and no impulse, need-to-make-many-of-these urges in sight. and then i saw the pattern for a womb.
one for my mom -- an ob/gyn nurse practicioner who also gets this cool obstetrics textbook, written by a dr. john cooke hirst, who was affiliated with graduate, u of p, st. agnes and mt. sinai hospitals here in philadelphia. this is the 1924 second edition printing of the book. it appears to have been owned at one time by one silvio miceli of 1320 north 55th street, who was a student at jefferson medical college.
but i digress.
one for my friend lisa who was recently appointed to the board of directors of her local planned parenthood association in beaufort, south carolina. you have to be brave, and have heart, to do work there, at this time in american history.
one for my own much beloved gynecologist dr. richard krauss.
if you have a few movies to watch (or are on verdict watch via court tv, as i was), you can crank out three wombs in less than 24 hours. mine each have at least one egg in the fallopian tube. in fact, two of them have two eggs. those are the "julia roberts" models.
a whole nother week has gone by and hillel is still cute. he's twice the size he was and totally lacking in empathy for any other thing, living or dead, on this earth. he is all about hillel.
click for video of hillel playing with a hemingway toukie in the window.
isn't he supposed to start getting big and ugly and ungainly and uninteresting soon? it's been two weeks. how many more times am i going to have to charge the camera up just because i've taken four hundred pictures exactly like this one?
he cracks us up constantly. sometimes we don't even know he's around and then suddenly we see he is more or less hanging in mid-air, matrix-style, next to us.
and today he caught his first "buggie" -- a little earwig that he stomped, maimed, and attempted to eat, but it got stuck to his nose and he couldn't find it and lost interest. i guess eventually it fell off.
in poor lighting conditions, a kitten squeezes himself between a houseplant and a knitted footstool, setting his sights on an innocent toukie.
he pounces! paralyzing his prey with fear, and snacking on its pelvis.
the kitten hunts not to survive, you see, but for the challenge.
the toukie carcass is left to rot in the glare of the ott-light. it will be fed upon by scavengers, or maybe gibson.
the killing machine that is hillel warren sidecar dorko levin, is sated, for the nonce.
whew! this summer, i was not going to be the one to miss out on all the fun knitalongs, particularly the piñata knit-along! here it is!
now that i'm finished knitting my piñata, i have the time to put my "piñata knit-along" button up on the sidebar of the blog, and of course, list all the people who are also knitting piñatas, with links to their blogs, so you can c