these images were originally accompanied by a post that took me two hours to write.
when re-reading the post in preparation for making it live, i decided that the pictures were enough.
there will be a third picture in this series, and what it will show has not entirely been determined yet. but i should know soon!
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Posted in amber
as a craft editor at InCultureParent magazine, i’ve been pretty busy taking unattractive self-portraits of my ugly fingers. i’m signed up for a lot, and this month i added a rash (three!) of new crafts. check them out!
2012
BABA MARTA and ST. DAVID’S DAY (march 1)
BELTANE (may 1)
BUDDHA’S BIRTHDAY/LOTUS LANTERN FESTIVAL (may 4-6)
something GEECHEE/GULLAH related in the summer
CHUSEOK (september)
ADVENT (november)
ST. NIKOLAS DAY/KRAMPUSNACHT (dec 5)
HANUKKAH (dec 8)
KWANZAA (dec 26)
2013
UP HELLY AA (last tues of jan)
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Posted in african-american, amber, holidays, korean, publishing
everybody’s doing it — or at least some people are. about a month ago, i deleted my personal facebook account (i do still have one, under an easily-found pseudonym, so i can run the krampus maker group and krampuslauf philly page there) and i’m pleased with the results thus far.
i’ve suspected for some time that facebook is brutally damaging to the creative process. and lo, leaving facebook has contributed to a reawakening of my senses and the ability to really “compost” thoughts better than i have in a long time. it’s almost like living in a four dimensional world. and there have been some nice trickle-down effects as well; i’m less attuned than i used to be to any superfluous online communication. for the first time in my life, there are things in my gmail inbox that i just… don’t… read. i’ve never done that before. i’ve always taken correspondence very seriously. but when the rest of the world doesn’t — when it’s all quantity (or frequency) over quality, what’s the point?
it was interesting, the number of people who e mailed me to see if something had “happened” to make me leave facebook. this is the expectation, i think; we are held in the thrall of this beast, and if we do not treat the beast well, it might just do something “bad” to us. the idea that someone would just decide, one day, to go — and not have a juicy story to tell about why they did it — seemed to sit uncomfortably with some people.
i also had a number of folks e mail me to say they “wished” they could get off of FB. i had the same issue, back and forth, with worrying about how to manage the krampus group. i didn’t know how to get off. i didn’t think i could. eventually, the dummy account seemed the best option. i have, i think, eight “friends” at that account, and i do write on walls and read status updates. but the degree to which i have reduced my presence makes me a virtual facebook nonentity. the reasons i have chosen the eight “friends” that i do keep there is a matter of my own personal algorithm.
i know the studies are coming, in the future, that will show us what online social networking has done to our brain chemistry. and what we have modeled for our children; not only in letting them watch us “communicate” this way, but in what we have fed of THEIR lives into the machine. so people can see that they are cute. so people can see that they are well. so people can believe that those who post, thrive. these pictures mean about as much to me as styled photos of juicy mcdonald’s hamburgers. it may just be the writer in me, but for every update i see, for every photo, i picture numerous stories behind it, and they aren’t always the ones people are hoping that their audience thinks of.
if not putting up advertisements for my family on facebook leads people to “wonder” what “happened”, let them wonder. at this rate, it may be the most creative experience they ever get.
i have a magazine-writing colleague who said last night, on a professional e mail on which we were both copied, that she “missed” me on FB. i told her to e mail me. she replied, “but then i’d have to have something to say.” that kind of candor, and the balls to come out and say it, makes me think she has a fighting chance. (and she obviously doesn’t need me to tell her that, ’cause if she did, she’d have e mailed me!)
for a lot of people, giving up the opiate of the masses isn’t going to make them any more creative, productive, valuable or interesting. but for those for whom it might, i am rooting for you. but you’ll just have to imagine what you might be missing.
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Posted in amber
it has been the most exciting holiday season i can remember — between sinterklaas rhinebeck and krampuslauf philadelphia, also the most original!
you might think it’s just holiday sentimentality, or blogperbole, to say that krampuslauf philadelphia changed my world, gave me new purpose in life, and made me want to stay in philadelphia after a few years of thinking about leaving. but the fact is — it did all of this. i feel like our krampuslauf — and indeed, grassroots festal culture, is a calling for me.
of course, i had never even heard the term “grassroots festal culture” before finding that an organization called many mouths one stomach, in tuscon, AZ, had congratulated us on the lauf after hearing about it on national public radio. after i checked out their site, i could see that what i was feeling, and what i wanted to do more of, was no one-shot deal — it was a real need, and a need i felt my community — the community in which i raise my children — was feeling deeply.
the interview i did for the many mouths one stomach blog puts it all together — and i mean all of it. it was the best opportunity i had to speak to someone who understood what i had wanted to do, WHY i had wanted to do it, and who helped me see that the stumbling blocks i had come up against were almost archetypical. using the only definition i know of a “fulfilling experience”, this was one of the most fulfilling of my life.
why do i continue to think a CHRISTMAS DEVIL PARADE is good for my kids? well, it’s all right here, in InCultureParent magazine.
and here’s our quickest, easiest, cheapest krampus craft! and that craft is of course permanently linked here as well.
and, if you’d like a more audio-ish experience, listen to this WHYY radio piece, in which janet and arun and i talk about krampuslauf philadelphia.
we were pretty amazed when this piece aired on NPR’s “weekend edition” the morning of the lauf.
it had been shared over 8,000 times on facebook before we even got in the car to go to liberty lands, and over 10,000 on that day alone. wow!
check out the krampuslauf philadelphia flickr pool for shots of the event.
did i mention that joel came?
continue to follow along at krampuslaufphiladelphia.com.
Posted in amber, family, holidays, inspiration, knitting, textiles, publishing
yarn bombs have bored me since day one. i mean, one ends up having to be polite about it — oh god, the number of times people will e mail me articles about yarn bombs or goddamned crocheted coral reefs telling me they “thought of me” when they saw them — but i’ve never seen much point in going beyond the first of either of those particular enterprises.
but here’s a bomb i can get behind — it’s local, it incorporates found objects, helps clean up litter, and uses actual folklore to transform not just an already tended public area (like a sweater on a statue), but goes into territory that’s in need of a second look — and a watchful eye. marie elcin says it well — she worked on this with her friend johanna marshall, whom i am sure i remember working at rosie’s at one point, but in the blur-of-having-the-kids years of ’08 and ’09.
when i saw on facebook that marie was working on this project, i found a tutorial on shisha stitching online right away, as i had always wondered how that worked… but wasn’t sure how or when i would apply it. amazingly, that evening, as i continued to research perchta for the krampuslauf, i discovered that perchta is sometimes adorned with small pieces of mirror and edelweiss… how is this possible? i never cease to be amazed at how things “come together” for me and how frequently and richly i am rewarded for either chasing down, or holding out for, the things that interest and inspire me most.
working towards krampuslauf has become an exercise in process over product for me. i am, of course, interested in the final “outcome”, but my expectations of how “right” it will be have changed so significantly and gotten so much more serious than i remember my intial impulses being. the ways i’ve been able to incorprorate both knitting and writing into the project, not as a way to buoy the project itself but as a way to understand the krampus folklore, its meaning in general, and its more specific meaning in a world where “enlightned” rich white people believe they have no need for folklore and that “scary” things serve no purpose but to scare, has been a phenomenal gift. as a handworker, as a writer, and as a parent, i have learned more from krampus this year than from just about anything else.
i think our event itself will not be a “performers” and “audience” scenario, nor will it be a resume-builder for anyone — it’s a little too down-home for that. but i love the “stone soup” approach in which the real pleasure comes from creating something WITH people — who know that their fun from the event will be in direct proportion to the fun they want to have with it. it’s amazing to see other people’s renditions and ideas come to life.
and every day seems to add something else to the list of things i am making. i keep trying to “get ahead” but between halloween costumes and krampus and actual christmas gifts it’s never gonna happen and i also now realize i don’t even WANT it to happen. i can’t just “get projects done on time” and then let the clock run out with days or weeks to spare — i really just want to keep going until it’s all over. why be done if you’ve even got a few more hours left to make it more interesting, to learn a new technique, to use a new material?
at a time when claudia’s interest particularly is leading us to read a lot of fairytales and folklore, and we are avoiding disneyfied versions (she’s really into the grimm’s), my own interest is really growing. folk textiles have always been important to me, but now the stories surrounding them is becoming more important to me as well. if i were eighteen again, i’d be about to embark upon a VERY useless degree program, i bet.
maybe we all need a college of one. scott and sheilah’s began with proust, which i am rereading now as well. life is wonderful when you don’t settle. there’s no other way i can say it.
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Posted in amber, family, inspiration, knitting, textiles
have you ever seen nam june paik’s video arbor here in philadelphia?
have you ever seen it working?
have you ever even seen a picture of it working?
do you know who nam june paik is?
whether you know it or not, you are likely familiar with his influence on visuals relating to video. stacks of old-school TVs, robots with cathode ray screen “faces”, things that seem ubiquitous and modern-yet-period — look at paik’s work, and you will see. and, while al gore is credited with coining the phrase “information superhighway”, what are the chances he’d walked by paik’s electronic superhighway, installed at the smithsonian american art museum, before he “thought of it”? (paik had coined the term in 1974; we have a lovely “bill clinton stole my idea” pin from an exhibition called nam june paik in the nineties, but we didn’t see the exhibition — i got the pin on ebay.)
and we have a piece of paik’s work here in philly, and it’s not in a museum. video arbor was dedicated in 1990, and paik had even then expressed concern about exposing the video components to the elements. this indeed has been a problem. that, and disinterest. or poor archiving of video source material on the part of paik himself and his foundation. depends on who you talk to, and maybe it’s a combination of all of those things, but i think out of those three possibilities it’s pretty easy to pinpoint which of them can, and should, change for the better.
shortly after visiting the arbor in 2006 — the year paik died, as the first time i ever heard of him was in reading his obituary — i began knitting an homage to what i thought the piece would look like if it was operational. the “screens” all came together easily and quickly (maybe because they were exactly what was missing from the actual piece in real life)… but, like real wisteria, the knitted wisteria in my piece has been slow to grow. in fact, the piece has become “that pillow” in claudia’s room for some years. which is not to say i won’t finish it.
in 2010, i was inspired to see if i could get the actual video arbor running (not by any clever means, but by sticking my beak in and continuing to follow up on every brush-off bit of info i was fed). art critic and creative connector, the wonderful roberta fallon, suggested i contact the philadelphia redevelopment authority. the RDA were very responsive and prompt in sharing my concern, and they communicated directly with the property management company that runs the condos where the arbor lives. they say the screens are turned on every evening, but that’s not what we see. so, this story is not over, but hear a little about it from the residents of one franklin town (and from me!) in this fascinating piece about philadelphia’s orphaned public art, by peter crimmins.
as dave kim says, “nam june paik 4 lyfe”.
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Posted in amber, knitting, textiles, korean
as of today. a couple for ten years. a house, a printing press, various animals, two children, and a business (papers of incorporation came yesterday!) are just SOME of the things we have done together.
he got me a dancing dror video.
we had a REALLY good date night. we had dinner at a full plate in northern liberties. we went and saw “final destination 5″ in 3D. we went to a stag party at the bike stop.
i don’t need anybody to tell me how lucky i am, although they often do. girl friends, guy friends… MANY friends have told me what a good catch i got. i know it!
oh, it’s a serious wish list. and the holidays are coming, you know.
but i’m not really expecting to get any of these treasures this holiday season. it’s likely that i will never get some of them at all. still, if you were really out to impress me, these are the things that’d do it. the holy grail gifts. the white whale gifts.
in order, from “really really want” to “REALLY REALLY REALLY WANT”:
dr. shock memorabilia
if you grew up in the philly area in the 1970s, you remember dr. shock as the saturday afternoon and late-night UHF horror host. i know there’s some good memorabilia out there (a pinback badge, in particular, i would LOOOOOVE) and once in a blue moon stuff comes up on ebay — signed pictures or postcards — but i’ve not won an auction yet.
a very nice biography of the doctor has come out in the last few years, and i did get that for my birthday last year. but oh. the pinback badge. i’d go crazy.
paintings from rod serling’s night gallery
we are collectors of horror-themed art. there’s two ways to come to own a “night gallery” painting: the set of prints produced and sold in a folio in the early seventies (hard to come by, and does NOT contain some of the best paintings) or, a good painted reproduction of one of the better paintings — and believe it or not, these do show up on e bay. my friend ken recently pointed me towards a very well-done reproduction of the FIRST painting used in the pilot for the night gallery series, but it was just a painting of the damned cemetery, without the old man rising up out of his coffin! come on!
nothing would be better than a well-done copy of one of the later paintings in that episode. if i went episode by episode i’m sure i could find others i would like to have in the house. again, i’d take the mass-produced folio, or any print from it, if i could find those.
(i am also fond of the alamo drafthouse posters from repertory showings of horror films, but they are not so impossible to come by.)
mudcloth chuck taylors from 2006
okay. i am pretty sure this all had something to do with bono. i can’t bear bono. but these authentic african mudcloth chucks were were about $600 bucks when released, and i am not sure even a thousand pair were made. somekinda fundraiser. but damn. i wanted them then. i want them now!
metal movable hangul type
for awhile, i wondered if it even existed — but of COURSE it did. (the koreans INVENTED metal movable type, if you don’t know.)
i have a lead on some (that’s almost a letterpress pun, there) — and i have an ally in looking for it. but, no practical access as of yet.
a forenza shaker knit v-neck cotton-ramie sweater from 1985
you wore them with the V in the front or in the back. you always had more than one. in 1985, they were EVERYWHERE… and why is it so hard to find one now? i mean, 1985 was a long time ago — and i don’t think these sweaters were really made to last (i remember mine getting rather ratty), but i’ve found it hard to even find an IMAGE of one. (the images here, i took myself, as screenshots from some very bad film adaptation of an h.p. lovecraft story.)
anyone who knows me well can guess what i’m up to here — yes, i’m going to try to reproduce it in a handknit — so i can take it in any size or color. ratty or mothbally, i’d squeal with joy.
that’s it. five things! think i’ll get them? i’ve wanted them all for so long they are burned into my breast.
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Posted in amber
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