misc.

Yet to be categorized.

friday dispatch v1.0

| Betsy

I can’t believe that it’s already May. May of 2005. Which means I will turn 30 in 2 months. (11th July to be exact. Mark your calendars now!)

Despite this somewhat-of-a-watershed occasion, this summer also sees me returning to the temporary battlefield world of office administration. While my resume is rejoicing that I can once again put “temporary employee” in the left-hand column often reserved for “job title,” I am not so full of glee.

So while I get my closet properly stocked with clothes I will only wear in the office, my voice ready and steady to say “Good morning/afternoon, this is Betsy, how may I direct your call?” 4323409 times per day, and a bevvy of lists mentally stored to be expunged on endless reams of pilfered Post-Its, I bring you the first in a summerlong installment of Friday posts.

With ethics and activism in mind (as well as good old-fashioned time wasting), these Friday posts will be written with my fellow office peons and cubicle dwellers predicament in consideration, you fellow compatriots in a war against lost memos and improperly delivered mail where we’re armed with leftover food scraps from board member meetings and a rainbows choice of pen colors. And a reminder that you’re not the only clockwatcher, daydeamer or person-who-wishes-they-were-anywhere-else.

And, of course, all links are worksafe!

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Atleast this gig gave me a window.

*Realise how bad you are at HMTL with the artistic genius of Huong Ngo.

*Craft and snark make for perfect reading over at Threadbared.

*Learn more about why you procrastinate. Although you will most likely procrastinate on clicking this very link.

*Take comfort in the fact that you’re not the only one in a pen, courtesy of Seattle’s Barking Lounge

*No matter what you’re doing, the The Yes Men are doing something cooler.

*You, too, can make a zine in 24 hours!

*Plan your dinner tonight thanks to these free veg*n cookbooks!

*Take further comfort in the fact that someone else likes Lionel Richie even more than I do. (Hmmm…Remember how I said my birthday was on the horizon?) ;)

*Read about the work of Maakin Lab in Shetland. Discover more about how knitting in Shetland contributes to its historical and cultural heritage.

*Learn more than you possibly ever knew existed about heavy metal at BNR metal. Rock!

Rah Rah Rah! Go and listen to The Chap!

the summer of allen.

| Betsy

I have a secret.

No matter how many crushes or loves I have, it will be an exceptionally hard sell to beat my love for Allen Ginsberg.

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I have hidden my love for Allen, Gary (Snyder) and Jack (Kerouac) guiltily for years now. I think it had something to do with me fearing they were too pedestrian to adore. And the fact that they probably would think it bizarre that some random woman still gets teary when she reads “Howl” and in younger days dreamt of drinking tea with Japhy Ryder.

It all began when I attended a college arts programme run by hippies in the mountains in a dormitory basement. Instead of “English Literature 101” we had classes like, “The Genius of Kerouac.” I took performance art classes and performed a piece in front of my peers that consisted of me writing words on my body that my roommate yelled at me from the audience. I wrote poems about the simultaneous disaffection and gloriousness of youth. You know, average university fodder.

After those two years of expansion, I went off to England and got muddled up for the better part of a decade, for no good reason really, c’est la vie. I am the kid at the parties now with the best stories of my life but with the least to show for it.

But this is not about my own pity party, it’s about a revival.

The other night I caught a documentary on Allen Ginsberg and it was a welcome reunion. For those years when I first discovered the Beats, I was enamored by their crazy wild lives. And subsequently, went off on my own crazy wild adventures. Since resurfacing, I had forgotten all about my previous heroes until suddenly their images and voices were blasting through the television screen.

“Howl” still makes me teary, but in a different way at (almost) 30 than it did at 18. Even though the words hold the same syncopation, they resonate differently. In recordings, the voice of Allen still has the same tenor it did years ago, but now instead of frenzy I hear strength.

This summer I want to get reacquainted with these old dearly departed friends who meant so much to me so long ago and see what they have to teach me now.

And in remembering Allen, I also remember all my other dilettantish exploits of my younger years, craft or otherwise, and can’t wait til they pop up again on the surface. Because I know that the me now will look at them through slightly different eyes than the me then.

hmm…. that ukulele in the corner sure looks dusty… oh, and sigur ros have been keeping me contemplative. rock on with pretty music!

‘but you’ve got too much to wear on your sleeves…’

| Betsy

For the past week, I’ve been wandering around London listening to ‘A Year of Seconds’ by The Standard. When I get back to my laptop, it’s nothing but “Kissing the Lipless” by The Shins. I’ve also been openly redeclaring my love for satsumas and sesame snaps, so things aren’t totally bleak.

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All the hustle and bustle of London has me thinking in patterns as well as words. It seems like every time I sit down I’m talking with someone about contemporary crafts, so walking around the city is somewhat of a wordless reprieve. I turn my somewhat decrepit tape-playing walkman up loud and watch the drama of the city unfold around me as my feet stepstepstep one foot in front of the other without any forethought.

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Passing women in saris, men in coveralls and children in school uniforms, I find my mind racing with all the color combinations and textures, curious about the origin of all the cloth displayed before me. Was any of it handknitted? Produced in a sweatshop? Inherited from a family member? When I was younger, my mother used to always warn me to be careful of what I was wearing as it projected a persona. As an adult, my outfits generally consist of something donned in a hurry as I’m perpetually late and in a rush. On grey days I’m most often to be wearing color in a futile attempt to beat the drabness into submission. Although when it’s nice out, I don’t mind the way hot pink gleams in the sun.

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But I’d like to think that I’m not the only one that notices the kaleidoscope of the city as I walk from place to place in outfits that may or may not add or subtract to the explosions of color I see rush around me. Spying patterns in clothing, buildings and rubbish while my walkman keeps me to a steady beat with my mouth shut and my eyes open. Once I’m back at home again, I take out my wool and knitting needles and daydream* about what I will make next after taking in all the sights and secrets that the city continually offers up.

*Lately my daydreams have been about what I’m going to create for knitpro Needlecraft Art Show, whose deadline has been changed to June 1st! Oh, the possibilities!

the soundtrack of spring.

| Betsy

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Lately soundtracks have been on my mind.

The past few weeks my head has been full of the sounds of The Decemberists, Edith Frost Sebadoh and Silver Scooter.

And I’ve been thinking about the soundtracks that permeate our lives. How they change over time and vary with our surroundings.

I’m back in London for a week and am remembering how whenever I think of the city I think of trains and when I think of North Carolina I think of chirping birds outside my window.

I never quite made a conscious decision on the matter, but somehow the sounds of trains and birds have imprinted themselves onto my brain as sounds of comfort and home, independent of one another, each denoting different locations.

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While North Carolina makes me want to run around barefoot in the grass and drink sweet tea at weekend cookouts and make pretty things, London makes me want to urgently create due to its raw energy and constant grind never ceasing to inspire me with its contrast of decay and renewal.

Even though the birds and the trains and the things I create change, the music I’m listening to rarely does. Even though in my youth I listened to nothing but loud and screamy bands, I’ve been listening to prettier music as of late, music that is best described as bittersweet. Because instead of overarching sadnesses that so often belong to youth, I’ve grown into loving the bittersweetness that prevails more often than not as youth passes. And come to enjoy the flipped sides of coins and the greener side of the grass.

While may this may seem completely inconsequential and ludicrous, I see in it a perfect analogy to my feeling about the world of craft lately. Due to the resurgence of handmade crafts over the past few years, I’ve seen so many people flourish and grow.

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But lately, I’ve seen more than a few people whose work I admire very much begin to doubt their own consequence and strength. Begin to burn out because they don’t believe that what they are doing is worth their time or energy or money. And all I want to do is whisper to them that it’s not all in vain that their work is important and valid and not inconsequential.

But that’s the power of soundtracks, isn’t it? That sometimes we forget to listen to the birds or the trains or the music or our own inner voices and just hear the negative soundtracks that we started to record in our fragile youths. And we forget that all we have to do is simply change the tape and put on something new.

So I guess this entry is for anyone out there who feels burntout and tired and unoriginal and drained and boring. And just a tiny reminder to remember why you started making art in the first place.

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I heart storytime.

| Betsy

I tried my hand at writing in a real paper spiralbound notebook today. All I could really manage was the word “FOCUS” in bubble letters and a weird cartoony comicy piece about the conversation I was eavesdropping on. I know it’s considered a bit gauche, but I couldn’t tell if the guy was spilling his relationships issues because he was in some sort of coffeehouse therapy session or if he was dumping the person he was talking to. In a word, it was gripping. In the end, the lack of histrionics led me to leave. To my defense, it was a public place and he was really loud.

And he actually used the phrase, “there are a lot of men out there…” line which had me wanting to chuck my coffee all over him. I thought such witty repartee was left for films alone?

Anyway, lately I’ve been trying to pin down what is so enticing to me about the world of crafts. I mean, on the one hand, who the f*ck cares? It’s just a bunch of people with varying sizes of needles and string! But on the other, I think that a lot of this stems from an interest in the experience of women.

We’ve made it til the 3rd (some say 4th, some say post-) wave of feminism. Now what? To we keep creating waves until they are backed out to sea or start upon making some new definitions and metaphors?

I don’t know about your personal work experience, but mine has been mostly uneventful. Most of my work experience has centered on work in secretarial positions. A lot of phone answering, filing and sitting on my ass. While finding the actual work (or complete lack thereof) banal and time-wasting, I was often fascinated by the personal dynamics of this mainly woman-dominated sphere.

In one particular office of 9 women on a university campus, I was constantly enthralled by the drama that ensuing in these women’s lives, these ordinary women who came from differing socio-economic backgrounds, age groups, marital status. No one was a supermodel or high profile particularly, just a group of women working in an office with lots of beige decor and a few plants thrown in for good measure.

One woman (who had retired just before I got there but was a frequent visitor) lost a battle to cancer, another was suddenly diagnosed with weeks to live if both of her breasts weren’t removed within days. Stories emerged of past battles with cancer that were previous kept under wraps. I was there throughout the operation, the chemo, the picking out of wigs, the grit, the strength, and the tension-breaking laughter. Watching all of these women deal with this in such a small work environment was fascinating.

Its pure ordinariness made it sublime.

I still have that sense of awe everytime I’m around people knitting or otherwise crafting and as their hands methodically work, their stories start tumbling out of their mouths.

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This picture was sent to me by an amazing woman in New York state who spins wool from her own sheep. The above ewe in question is named Sophie.

Sometimes I feel like I inhabit someplace firmly inbetween flaneur and voyeur. But one things for sure, I never get enough of the stories that unfold around me.