Knit Purl and Crotchet Madness

I finished this cowl neck scarf (to the right) just before Thanksgiving last week. It was a huge triumph for me because I completed it on circular needles vs double point needles which are both methods of knitting that produce seamless garments and pieces of garments "in the round." Whenever I have seen knitters working with double pointed needles it has intimidated the hell out of me. It's always so weird when you see someone knitting with all these crazy points sticking out all over the place. It looks a bit like a torture device but it turns out that the finishes pieced will be socks, gloves, a sleeve or something perfectly functional and harmless. LOL!!

Double pointed needles

Anyway, I ended up picking up knitting in the round on dps (double points) right away for some reason but it was circular needles that boggled me. I don't know why. I just didn't get it. I attribute this to the fact that I was trying to knit pieces with too small a circumference. So I tried a larger basic project, a cowl neck scarf and it worked out perfect. I've already started another one for my dad for Christmas which will be narrower but wider height wise so that when it's finished it will hopefully collapse into a vertical column of elegant folds around the neck. That's what I'm hoping. When I learn any new knitting method for the first time I do tend to go a little crazy with it. I have two projects on circular needles at the moment but they're only hold because I'm also learning to crotchet. HA!

Crotchet drives me crazy but I just love the way crotchet pieces look so I have to try to learn! If you don't know anything about crotchet and knitting, this will all just sound like mish mosh to you. You're like, I just wanna by a hat, scarf and some gloves, maybe a shawl. I don't care how they make it! LOL! But if you do know anything about making yarn fabric, you know that crotchet is one of the most improvisational ways to make fabric patterns and textiles. In my opinion, it's what makes it wonderful as well as infuriating. Knitting for me is way more structured. Two types of stitches, knit purl, that's it. I don't pretend to know who to read really complex knitting patterns. I don't yet, but I can do quite a few straight knit stitch patterns with no problem. Crotchet...well I finally understand the single crotchet stitch which is the first basic stitch, but let's just say, I'm starting slowly. I'm doing this because I have to. I would rather learn it fast. I want to go from beginner to intermediate in a day because there are so many pretty things I wanna make! But I can't yet. Poo! I will try to be patient with myself. What I really need to do it take a class.But it's so hard to do with all these youtube tutorials around. That will be the next step for me though: taking a class or finding a certain someone to sit with me and walk me through basic stitches.

Single Crotchet Stitch

It makes me feel really amazing when I can complete a garment and I'm addicted to that feeling. You're making something that you can use, that is purposeful, functional, attractive, that you can give as a gift to make someone else happy and that is also one of a kind and unable to be reproduced in the exact same way by anyone else. In fact, it's the flaws that make it most unique. It's something you spend time with and get to know and then it's over, and you either use it or give it away for someone else to use.

The Music or the Misery

"What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?"
-High Fidelity

I had a shitty day at work yesterday. Not the first and not the last, I'm sure. It was on a par with the kind of day that makes you feel really lost and angry and violent and hopeless all at once and nothing helped really to distract me for more than a few moments or hours, not yoga, not food. So when I got home I did what I did when I was a teenager, what I've done all my life. I holed up in my room and put on some music. In this case, my Pearl Jam Radio Station on Pandora. It turns out that all that dark, emo, Seattle based white boy rock was just what I needed. One song in particular by Soundgarden: "Black Days," really caught my attention the way it has hundreds of times before when I used to listen to the album as a younger person. But this time I was acutely aware of the fact that I not only felt exactly what Chris Cornell was saying but I finally knew why he was saying it. That's a difference in age. Age. I'm starting to feel my age more lately than I ever have. I'm 36, but just recently, I'm finally starting to feel like 30. Chris Cornell knew what the fuck was up when I was a teenager. And he knows what the fuck is up now. That's a very reassuring thing. Makes you feel like you have a friend who understands you, not matter how much you change.

It also got me thinking though about the effects of music on our developmental young minds, and the about how the music of our particular generations and our parents' generations shape us. I don't care for the movie "High Fidelity" based on the book by Nick Hornby but the quote I posted above was the only thing in that story that hit the mark for me. How different would my relationship to music have been had I been born in the hey day of bee bop, listening to Sarah Vaughn, Billie Holiday or Glen Miller. What's it like now for those youth coming of age listening to Nicki Minaj, Lady Gaga, or Justin Beiber? How will what is expressed there shape their own emotional lives when juxtaposed with their own daily realities given their race, class, sexual preference and economic status? How much does music do to spur on pre-existing feelings of joy, anger, depression, desire, elation, violence or and how much of it actually brings those feelings to the surface for the first time long before we really understand what they even mean?

Personally, by the time I'd listened to any piece of music that carried my imagination to a foreign but familiar emotional space for the first time I can remember, I was so wrapped up in owning that space or rather being able to identify with a new and interesting part of myself, I was so excited to see what came next that I never gave a thought to whether I would have ever felt that feeling without exposure to this medium.

I was raised with music, all kinds of music playing in my house all the time. If the "Beach Boys" asked me to go surfing, it was my understanding that this song expressed all the best things about what surfing was like. And if Michael Jackson said "You wanna be starting something, got to be starting something." I knew that "something" was a narrative involving a physical altercation that would end up making me want to dance. When Barbra Streisand sang that love was soft as an easy chair, I saw that easy chair and sank as deeply into it as her voice sank into my mind. I was a sponge. And yet I had never been surfing, never started anything with anyone and certainly had not ever been in love yet, not really. Did I think I had been in love because my feeling matched the description of falling in love that music had described for me? Or did I just want to fall in love because of music?

1Q84 Update

"I don't care what the for reason is for these drills of yours, it's less than dignified to have a gang of nubile women kicking a doll in the crotch and screeching their heads off."
-"1Q84" Pg 130

This is my first and last 1Q84 update. I swear. I certainly don't plan on writing an entry when ever I read something in the book I like. I just thought this was kind of important because as much as I love Murakami, I feel often that he doesn't write as well for female characters as he does for men. My favorite and for me the most memorable of all his female characters is Yuki in "Dance Dance Dance." She's a fragile, cynical, sarcastic adolescent who happens to be involuntarily psychic and likes to go for long aimless drives with the main character, an adult man rather than hang out with her peers because they think her intuition is strange. But most of Murakami's adult female characters, and perhaps some of this is owed to his various English translators are not as memorable to me. They are a bit like emotional shadows or enhancements. Very well written, essential shadows but still not terribly memorable. Very few male authors can write female characters well and Murakami is by no means terrible at it but after awhile his adult female characters from one novel to the next, do tend to wash together a bit. But in 1Q84's Aomame is a total break from his usual female characterization pretty much from the start.

To be be honest, I wasn't too crazy about her at first. I kept plowing through her chapters (the book alternates between the male character's narrative and hers) just to get to Tengo's, the male character story line which is, for me, immediately engaging. I was so used to his damned beautiful, sensual, depressed and quirky shadow women that I was thrown off by Aomame's dark, physical, violent, hilariously up front approach. Good job patriarchy! But this latest chapter on Aomame had me laughing out loud in the bookstore cafe at lunch. And it's not so much that I now find her approachable because of the fact that it made me laugh. It's the fact that I now feel more tuned in to what is driving her and I care. The thing about Murakami's writing is that even though you may be laughing at a situational scene in one respect, the narrative need not ever appear to be evoking laughter as a matter of fact. I'm familiar enough with Murakami's writing style to know that this character's motivation stems from revenge for something very dark and fucked up that happened to her that has yet to be revealed and is probably quite different in nature than one might expect. It's the way she handles it though,how it links to what she does for a living that has finally begun to make sense to me. And Thank God for that because this book is huge! I don't have time for characters I don't like. LOL!

Add Some Bratwurst: Murakami Madness

I really enjoyed the mini marathon reading of Murukami shorts at Symphony Space last night. It reminded me that I haven't been to any kind of reading, poetry or otherwise in ages, much less one that featured celebrity readers reading the work of one of my favorite authors.

I was particularly looking forward to Campbell Scott's reading of "The Mirror" but it was Parker Posey's reading of "Airplane" that I loved the most. Each reader naturally brought their own special brand of performance to each piece and it was really interesting to hear pieces I had read before illuminated in different ways through the intonations of others through spoken word. There was humor in stories that I had always characterized as chilling and morbid, adventure in placed that were as banal and standard as the rooms we sit in everyday to work or eat or stand in crowded commuter silence. I believe this is conveyed most successfully because of the care with which Murakami takes in describing many of the small things in our lives, our daily routines, the things which all have in common and linking them enigmatically to our emotional and often tumultuous inner lives.

When I'm in the mood, every so often, when I'm alone, I will pull out a book of poetry and read it out loud to myself. The rooms of a narrative take on different shapes when read out loud and of course depending on the reader, certain elements of that narrative can emerge you never noticed or considered before. To me it's like a meditation. Anything that reveals something new the more and more you take it in is a rare gift. And Murakami is one of those gifted writers who has the ability to create stories which continue to unravel something deeper and more informative over the course of several readings.

During his remarks on his first meeting with Murakami,John Wray, an author and Murakami fan, talked last night about winning over Murukami and his famously wooden reception of people by presenting him with a near mint red vinyl album of Miles Davis' "Kinda Blue." A consummate collector and lover of jazz, Wray described Murakami as being completely transformed in manner after receiving this special gift. It was the beginning of a friendship between them that continues to this day. When Wray told Murakami that own writing wasn't going so well, Murakami said that he should then try putting the things he wanted and liked into his work. They had this conversation over a meal of curried bratwurst. When Wray asked Murakami exactly what he meant by this, Murakmami asked if he liked the bratwurst. Wray answered yes. Murukami said he should put the bratwurst in his writing.