Even though my computer has crashed *again* and has made me a bit gunshy of relying on technology, that doesn’t mean I don’t love it still. But I do wish it would hurry up and get out of the shop already! I’ve been taking heaps of photographs in the interim, even though they are currently trapped in my digital camera waiting for me to upload them to my soon-to-be-fixed computer!

A few projects that I was working on have now come into the public domain, most notably the Queen of Hearts show at the Paper Boat Boutique in Madison, Wisconsin (even the show has come down, the digital pics are up to stay!) and a freelance piece on the state of the wool industry in the UK in the Spring issue of Vogue Knitting! The piece for the Queen of Hearts show is called “Being Queen Makes Me Powerful, but the State of Being Female Makes Me Weak,” and the article is part of a much longer piece that I am working on…

Also online is the article from Pistil about craftivism and me! Eeeep!

The return to the cubicle has upped my online clicking time (for some reason being online and not typing gives the illusion of being busy), but decreased my actual writing time, so here are a few of my favorite new-found sites that have had my imagination and mind on overdrive lately:

Shelterrific: makes me wish I was at home making things instead of deskbound
Threadymade: Sonja makes Sewlaroids along with other cool things.
Custom Serenade*: the Song-a-Day Podcast almost makes me wish I could play guitar
Mike Roig’s sculpture: he lives up the street from me and has the coolest front yard on the block
Organic Gardening: now that I have a garden, I need to know when to sow seeds!

*I met Billy through the amazing Karen last year at our joint kickball cookout birthday extravaganza!

Lately I’ve been thinking about the amount of pigeonholing that goes on when someone decides to commit to a subject or line of work. Have things in society become so watered down that in order to survive you must micro-concentrate? If so, how does that help anyone? I get asked if I’m an artist or a sociologist or an ethnographer or an academic or a dilettante…and to what end? So I can be pigeonholed and confined to one specific track where I am destined to wile away and twiddle my thumbs?

Last night as I was rifling through my bookshelf, I came upon an old copy of Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums. It greeted me like an old friend, reminding me of the first time I read the novel in 1993. Back then I was a freshman in college starting an interdisciplinary arts program, and now, years later, I find myself still heavily involved in interdisciplinary modes of thought. Looking back, it’s not hard to see why I gravitated towards this particular school, as it allows for the blurring of lines and opening of spaces. As I write and research along boths that allow me to attempt to connect the worlds both inside and outside of academia and between common societal notions of art and craft, I am often stunned by the threads (no pun intended) that hold them together.

In this blurring of lines we work towards expanding our world views and pre-conceived notions as we go about our daily lives, connecting the disparate and seemingly separate. Once we connect one thing to another our understanding and compassion grows in ways that not only allow for our creativity to spark but also our own personal lives.

Which is precisely why keeping a sharp eye towards how things intertwine is vital. One of my current favorite examples of this is the website 10×10, which by using “linguistic analysis”, notes the top 100 news stories of each hour and day. Although it looks a bit like the child’s game Memory, to me, the site serves as a welcome visual reminder of not only the world’s vastness, but also its constant states of unrest, waiting and hope.

Sometimes I get asked why I see connections between two quite random things, but I think that in modernity, we can only grow by realizing that instead of difference, everything is very much quite the same.

This weekend I’m planning on getting back to my graffiti cross-stitch project, as I start returning to Aida cloth and embroidery thread as the weather gets hotter and working with wool seems less inviting. The first piece from the project is currently being exhibited as part of MicroRevolt’s Needlecraft Art Show, both online as well as in the Richard F. Brush Art Gallery at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York. Although I posted this picture here when I finished it, you can see my contribution here. I am currently in awe of Mercedes Rodgers’ and Sarah Stollak’s works from the same show, as they, too, question what is “craft” and what is “art.”

This morning I stumbled across a well-timed article in The Guardian about the cultural importance of graffiti and how Melbourne painted over much of its graffiti when the Commonwealth Games came to town. The same is feared for London, as the 2012 Olympics are based in Hackney, a part of eastern London where graffiti is highly prevalent. I was surprised in the fall when I found several of the Banksy pieces in Shoreditch and Brick Lane that I had come to love were gone. In fact, the piece above is one of Banksy’s own works, which I recreated in cross-stitch as part of the questions I’ve been pondering as to whom does graffiti belong and how does it fit in in our cultural environment?

The Guardian notes, “modern street art is the product of a generation tired of growing up with a relentless barrage of logos and images being thrown at their head every day, and much of it is an attempt to pick up these visual rocks and throw them back…” I’m not so sure if I agree, as graffiti has been a mode of artistic expression longer than just the current generation, but do think that much of the artwork is based on frustration- as well as the reappropriation and reclamation of public space.

For years, I have been awed by graffiti and the questions it prompts- Who owns it? (The space as well as the work itself?) Who is the target audience? The juxtaposition of art and urbanity fascinates me to no end, as it has historically given a voice to those who feel they have none.

Again, from the same article, “the street art destroyed in Melbourne will survive on graffiti’s new best friend – the internet. The web has done wonders for graffiti; it perfectly reflects its transient nature, and graffiti is ludicrously overrepresented on its pages. The ability to photograph a street piece that may last for only a few days and bounce it round the world to an audience of millions has dramatically improved its currency.” I am thankful that the web could be an ally to the future of such work if cities such as London and Melbourne decide to whitewash local graffiti so walls can become uniform and cultural identity erased, but still can’t help questioning when creative and cultural production will be seen as truly important to our environments instead of just temporary examples of our collective frustrations, angers and questions.

The spaces we inhabit everyday as if on autopilot never fail to inspire me. Not only am I amazed by the various shades of green and brown below, but also by the fact that there are so many different types of products available.

It’s amazing what happens when you find yourself with a camera again. Suddenly every thing comes to life, framed by four corners.

And equally amazing what happens when you’re spoiled for choice. Everyday we go through our lives consuming and meandering through these giant warehouse spaces, most often completely unaware of the presence of the sublime and the ridiculous.

Today I’ve been trying not to think too much about why Gawker Stalker really really bothers me, but it’s better than yesterday’s preoccupation which was from Frederick Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England, page 43, regarding the textile industry after the invention of the spinning jenny: “The demand for woven goods, already increasing, rose yet more in consequence of the cheapness of these goods, which cheapness, in turn, was the outcome of the diminished cost of producing the yarn.”

The difference in days being that they are the two things I relentlessly toggle back and forth from: the insanity of modernity and how the hell we ended up at this point to begin with. The following photo I took early one morning in a Starbucks in the Cannon Street train station in London

There’s something about the tiny me in the corner, the morning commute of Cannon Street and the sterility of Starbucks that struck me as an almost perfect representation of life in an urban commercial environment. At no one point are you left with just one thing to think about (as I have been in this office with no windows and for the moment, no foot traffic), as like the photo, things keep adhering themselves together in the most likely (and sometimes most interesting) manner.

Lately I’ve been trying to recreate the same visual cacophony in a much more rural setting, which has been a bit more difficult. How do you think modernity represents itself in rural environments?

p.s. Steal This Sweater is my new internet crush.