"I have such mental landscapes too."

"One thing I wanted to tell you is that I often think of him." Tamaru said. "Not that I want to see him again or anything. I really don't. We wouldn't have anything to talk about, for one thing. It's just that I still have this vivid image of him 'pulling rats out' of blocks of wood with total concentration, and that has remained an important mental landscape for me, a reference point. It teaches me something-or tries to. People need things like that to go on living-mental landscapes that have meaning for them, even if they can't explain them in words. Part of why we go on living is to come up with explanations for these things."
-1Q84

The Brushed Suri

The Brushed Suri
Originally uploaded by Zanalee
Took a little trip to a place called "The Yarn Company" after work today. It's a place I've seen a bunch of times but have never gone in. It's one of those shops that is just above a street level store so you have to buzz in before you go up. I was just desperate for more yarn and looking for a store that was not too far from midtown.

The store has a really nice layout, a veritable fine yarn haven, mercifully quiet and relatively spacious. The women there were super helpful and nice. I took a long look around, taking photos and touching several things before I settled on two skeins of brushed suri so unbelievably soft, it's just crazy and two skeins of worsted wool to make something for my dad.

I thought it would be harder to work with the suri but it's really not that bad. I was very careful with unraveling it though. These kind of skeins always worry me. I would never take it out of the apartment to work on which makes me a little sad because I love working on these at "work."

A Heart's World

1Q84 The World of Two Moons

"There is nothing in this world that never takes a step outside a person's heart."
-H. Murakami
1Q84

I will try not to give too much of the context of this quote away for anyone who may be reading 1Q84 right now, but it arrives at the absolute apex of the story in a certain chapter of the second book and it's left me kind of...shaken.

There are many things we keep inside, which we never talk about, write about, or even speak of, not even to our own selves. For this reason we believe they are hidden things, things which no one could ever know maybe never even care to, things which we keep hidden for specific reasons; we keep them locked away tightly and in this way believe that no one can ever perceive them. We all know what this entails. We all do it.

So what could it mean to say that there is nothing in this world that never takes a step outside the human heart? The statement is a total reversal of what we are conditioned to believe is true in our world about well kept secrets. It reminds me of a quote by Oscar Wilde that Christian Bale dropped in an interview I read with him a while back. The quote is in opposition to the statement in Murakami's book but it sets up an interesting debate. The quote was something like, "The artist reveals nothing of himself in his work." Bale was using this quote to support his view of acting as something which in fact does not reveal anything about the actor and therefore does not rely as method acting would disprove on the need to dig into deep emotional wells in oneself to produce the most genuine depiction of reality. In essence, I guess he was saying that acting os merely pretend work or at least that he approaches it that way and not as internally as some would believe. It was not a very good argument but an interesting one. The only real impression I came away with from the interview ultimately was that he afraid of being exposed, as most of us are. So we need explanations, excuses, diversions to keep people from noticing what we are hiding about ourselves, what we are in sense, ashamed of or what we don't "love" about ourselves.

There is a film by David Mamet  I really like, called "House of Cards" wherein the male lead, a seductive con man played by Joe Matengna says to the female lead who has been drawn into his shadowy world something like "Everybody has a tell." You can say or not say what you feel but you can't not feel it. All that is required by whoever is having an exchange with you is a degree of sensitivity to perceive these feelings. But this rarely happens. People are just not that sensitive, not that disciplined. I think religion to some degree creates buy in on a monopoly of these hidden feelings by instilling fear of retribution on those who may not have the "right" kinds of feelings or thoughts about life. God, as the "Thought Police."  Religion as a con game.

It is often said that only God knows what is in our hearts.To some, depending on their particular  understanding about the nature of who God is, this can be a source of great comfort or a source of deep contention and despair. But what if there is another world where nothing felt in our hearts stays hidden, another something that witnesses the deep, conflicted and constant traffic of our hearts? I have always felt that books are one of those places, one of those alternate worlds, where every once in a while you come face to face with the things you think no one will ever know about you or the  things you think no one else ever thinks or feels. That in itself can be comforting, can be jarring, can be disturbing, can be enlightening. But it can never be expected.

born to be a photographer?

born to be a photographer?
Originally uploaded by 魏三米ya

I just thought this was the sweetest photo!
EEEP!! What a cutie!

1Q84 Afternoon

1Q84 Afternoon
Originally uploaded by Zanalee

It's getting to that part where anything can happen. I have to make conscious decisions about whether I should eat my lunch while reading certain chapters or not. I never know what form of horror Murkuami's fiction will take but I know that it's never what you expect.

Sometimes it's just the threat of something foreboding that can be as fearful if not more than something clearly defined and literal. In any case I have to vacillate between reading Book 2 and doing something very superficial or pure mechanical to avoid getting too absorbed just so I can remember, it's just a book.

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?