Beautification, Anarchy, or just plain fun?

I’m a little obsessed with what I’ll call Anarchist Knitting. I came to it through a Vancouver-based blog called Yarn Bombing. It turns out there have been anarchist knitting groups cropping up all over the place for the past few years, the most notable of which seems to be Knitta. Their objective is to beautify the urban landscape by “tagging” urban structures with patches of knitting. It’s also a movement to reclaim knitting as an aesthetic activity, as knitting is one of those things that we are usually only expected to do for others or for a particular purpose.

I’m drawn to anarchist knitting for other reasons in addition to these. To me, it seems like a way to not just beautify the urban landscape, but also a way to critique it. Tagging a structure draws attention to it, makes people acknowledge and think about it. How many telephone poles, signs, benches, mailboxes, etc. do you walk by every day without even noticing them? In a way, we are alienated from the very spaces within which we live. Not only do we not build them, we don’t even really see them. To go a step further, tagging doesn’t just make us think about urban space, it seems to me like a nice way of making that space our own.

The other day I tagged a sign in my neighbourhood. Two elderly women were walking by while I was sewing the tag on and they stopped to watch me for a moment. They initially looked confused, then one of them said: “You’re giving that pole something to wear on this chilly day. That’s very kind of you!” She wasn’t being sarcastic, she was genuinely pleased, if a little mystified. That’s exactly the reaction I was hoping for.

If you live in Victoria, keep your eyes peeled for more…

Look What I Made!

*Thanks Caillie, for being an awesome hand model!

“I have measured out my life with coffee spoons”

In a previous post I had mentioned that I haven’t changed the desktop background on my laptop in over 6 years. Well, today I finally changed it.

My lovely friend Emily runs a feature on her blog each week called “Illustrating Democracy.” Every Thursday her readers post suggestions for a theme and she then posts her interpretation of that theme as an illustration. This week she posted an illustration to accompany T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” one of my favourite poems. And the illustration includes a coffee cup with a spoon in it to reflect my favourite line: “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”

In two weeks I have to write my major field exam on 20th century British and Irish Literature. I’m a little nervous about it but I am doing alright. What I need is to constantly renew my motivation, to remind myself every day that I am doing this because I love the material, and to remember that it is so much more to me than just a hoop I have to jump through. And having J. Alfred Prufrock looking back at me every day is exactly what I need to accomplish that.

If Only I’d Gotten There First!

Do you ever read something and think to yourself, “that was the book I should have written”? Or heard a song and thought something similar? I’m not just referring to things you really like. I mean creative output that is so close to home that, had you taken the time to make it yourself, it would have come out almost exactly the same.

Here is a brief list of things I should have made but I’m too lazy so someone beat me there (not to suggest I’m actually quite that multi-talented…).

The book I should have written: Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century by Greil Marcus.

The poem I should have written: “The Legs” by Robert Graves. (*see full text below)

The song I should have written: “One Two Three Four” by Feist.

The movie I should have made: Nowhere, dir. Gregg Araki.

The music video I should have made: “Here It Goes Again” by Ok Go.

Wow — that makes me sound really pretentious, doesn’t it? I don’t actually believe I would have done as good of a job with any of those ideas, but who knows cause I never tried!

—

“The Legs”

There was this road,
And it led up-hill,
And it led down-hill,
And round and in and out.

And the traffic was legs,
Legs from the knees down,
Coming and going,
Never pausing.

And the gutters gurgled
With the rain’s overflow,
And the sticks on the pavement
Blindly tapped and tapped.

What drew the legs along
Was the never-stopping
And the senseless, frightening
Fate of being legs.

Legs for the road,
The road for legs,
Resolutely nowhere
In both directions.

My legs at least
Were not in that rout:
On grass by the roadside
Entire I stood,

Watching the unstoppable
Legs go by
With never a stumble
Between step and step.

Though my smile was broad
The legs could not see,
Though my laugh was loud
The legs could not hear.

My head dizzied, then:
I wondered suddenly,
Might I too be a walker
From the knees down?

Gently I touched my shins.
The doubt unchained them:
They had run in twenty puddles
Before I regained them.

What to do, what to do…

Last week, on Valentine’s Day, I went to see Hayden. He’s a great musician — one of those on-his-own-with-a-guitar-and-a-harmonica kinds of guys — and he played the Alix Goolden Hall in Victoria, which is a converted church. The show was fantastic of course but for some reason it left me with an unexpected feeling. As I was sitting there, listening, taking in the stained glass windows, I became overwhelmed with the desire to make something. My life has always been achievement-oriented. My career path has always been set. And now that I’m closer to making that all happen I’m having moments of doubt. I’m not traumatized by them or anything like that — in a strange way I’m rather enjoying entertaining the possibilities. I keep thinking, I wish I could make music or paint. I think I’d even be satisfied with doing something crafty like knitting or scrapbooking or something. Or even just growing a garden. As long as there was a product at the end of it all. Something that I had made with my own hands and that expressed something of what is inside. I mean, I guess I’m producing stuff all the time in the world of academia, but it’s just not that satisfying right now. The reading is still pretty satisfying — but I’d rather be making something out of it that is entirely different. And it would be nice if it wasn’t all about getting somewhere but rather about enjoying the material I’m working with, which is the reason I went into English in the first place. And the blog is, well, somehow not satisfying either. I’d like to do something more with it, I just don’t know exactly what yet. I guess writing regularly would be a good start.

“To Russia, Asses and Others”

This Marc Chagall painting is called “To Russia, Asses and Others.” Chagall was a Russian-Jewish painter in the early 20th century who spent much of his artistic life moving back and forth between Russia and France. He spent time with the Cubists and is often categorized a Surrealist.

When I first travelled around Europe in 2001, I saw this painting at the Centre Pompidou modern art gallery in Paris. The gallery was full of interesting work, including a significant number of Jackson Pollocks, some Andy Warhol, and plenty of Surrealist work. But of all the paintings I saw, this is the one that caught my eye. I couldn’t pinpoint what it was exactly but I just found it so compelling. I sat down on a bench in front of it in the hallway and stared at it for over half an hour. It has been seared into my brain ever since.

Since I returned from that trip, this painting has been the desktop background on my computer. For 6 years, I haven’t changed it. I look at it every single day and I feel like it is so much a part of my everyday life that I would feel empty without it. People always see it and ask what it is. Usually they cock their heads to the side and say “hm,” and that’s it. Or occasionally they say something like “wow, that’s fucked right up, why do you have it up there?” To which I never have an answer. I’ve thought long and hard but I still can’t tell you exactly what is so compelling to me about it. I know the contrast in the colours, especially in the sky, give it an air of deep foreboding mixed with a sort of fantastic or carnivalistic mystery. The floating head is the part that I look at the most and I’m not sure what that’s about. Perhaps I identify with her. She looks so lost and so free all at once. And the blue dome of the church places it for me in a historical moment that I will never have access to but seems so fascinating. But none of these things really explain what it is that makes this painting my favourite piece.

When I was back in Paris this summer I returned to the gallery to visit it. Again, I sat on the bench in the hallway and stared at it for a long time. Then I walked right up to it and scrutinized every brush stroke as if imagining Chagall crafting it before my eyes. It is so familiar to me now, yet still so new. I suppose that’s what makes modern art modern — it is always avant-garde, even long after its time.

Check This Out

First things first, since I know you’re looking… Hi Emily!

I’m going to do a little shameless and unsolicited promoting now for my friend. She’s an artist and a genius and you’ll find her here. Her work is unique, skilled, and lovely, and everyone should know about her. My mom (who’s a bit of an artist herself) is sure that she is going to be big news one day soon, so be one of the cool people who got on board before it was the thing to do. Her blog is good too — it includes posts of new works as they come. If you don’t fall in love with her work, you are heartless (I say that with the utmost respect for you, my friends and readers).

The Angriest Dog in the World

The Angriest Dog in the World strip came about when I was working on Eraserhead. I drew a little dog. And it looked angry. And I started looking at it and thinking about it, and I wondered why it was angry.

And then I did a four-block strip with the dog never moving – three panels were set in the day and one was at night. So there’s a passage of time, but the dog never moves. And it struck me that it’s the environment that’s causing this anger – it’s what’s going on in the environment.

–David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish, p. 41

Some minds will always be a mystery. David Lynch’s book doesn’t illuminate the enigmas of his work really — but it does describe his attitude toward the art of living and creating quite well. Probably my favourite part is when he says: “Anger and depression and sorrow are beautiful things in a story, but they’re like poison to the filmmaker or artist. They’re like a vise grip on creativity. If you’re in that grip, you can hardly get out of bed, much less experience the flow of creativity and ideas. You must have clarity to create. You have to be able to catch ideas” (8).

This, to me, is a pleasant turn away from the idea that the artist has to suffer to create anything honest or beautiful.

Mind you, I don’t know if I should be taking life advice from the guy who brought us Lost Highway.