25sep2013

I've been busting butt for the past 4 days in the garden, cuz I got some plants in an exchange, and now they need to go into the ground. Plus, the weather is perfect for being outside. (Now I need to wait for the next lot of stuff to finish blooming so's I can tear it out/move it around).

It's kind of interesting to me, how much time I spend simply wandering around, looking at stuff, trying to figure out where I should move/plant/remove things, because there are so many parallels to the way I work in my studio: I love getting free stuff (ends of glass, weedy extra plants), and trying to fit the limitations (COE issues, chemical reactions such as sulfur precipitate—that grey mess you get when mixing ivory and a lot of other things, frex) in glass or plants (how much water or sun the plant is likely to get, or how tall it's likely to get, or how weedy it is) into making stuff work.

The big difference is that glass just gets a little dusty, or bead release on mandrels a little rusty, if you let it sit, but the plants may die if they're not stuck in the ground. (Although not necessarily. I found some stuff from last year still struggling and straggling along. All that rain saved me. This year I'm positively doing something with it...)

Anyway. Speaking of things peripherally related to art, via boinboing, some cool pix of antiquey/steampunky/victorian machines—that doohickey in the upper left is an old sewing machine, btw—and here's this simulated aging of a person from, say, 6 to 60—very handy for would be cartoonists; and here's another, from infancy to age 12.

Via Scalzi's Whatever, a very cool video of a peacock spider. Wow.

Or you can check out point-focused photos of my fall late summer garden.

20sep2013

Yeah, today is s'posed to be FridayFugly.

So this post is the very antithesis of that, but hey, sometimes I like to break rules & shake things up a bit. Besides, f2tY's JD (Otousan) said they were all gonna visit the Iga-Ueno area, and see the Kumihimo Center, and studios, and kumi being made and did I have any suggestions for what they should look for?

Eep.

I could certainly tell Otousan what I would like to find out—how do takadai and ayatakedai work? What are the recommended weight ratios of ends to total tama weight? How big a kagami (mirror) realistically do you need for 24, let alone 32 tama braids? What about this argument that highly complex 144 tama square braids were made handlooped by several braiders working together, as opposed to being worked on the takadai, as has been historically accepted? Plus, I'd love to actually see pros braid, to get a sense of fast the bobbins can be moved, how difficult it is to maintain a twist on multiple ends, etc. I mean, the list of stuff could go on and on...

In the end, I enquired about the wraps on today's entry, which I haven't seen documented in any my books. Jacqui Carey touches on the topic briefly, in the ‘floating threads’ section of Creative Kumihimo on pp. 89-90 but I'm remarkably lazy when it comes to exploring braid structures on my own—I play a bit with ombre yarns, but I do very simple braids—keiruko no himo and variations on the marudai and kongo on the foam disk—for the most part. Braiding for me is more of a form of relaxing meditation.

I couldn't really give Otousan very good advice, because all the things that interest me—little details of technique, equipment and the like—would have a non-braider's eyes glazing over in boredom in very short order. Was it Dorothy Sayers, or Lois McMaster Bujold, who noted that when artists get together, they don't so much discuss the great themes of their art as which brush is best?

But his question does lead me to a larger theme I've been thinking about, off and on, for the past month or so I've been failing to post. Part of that is that, artistically, I'm being fairly productive right now—my joints are behaving, the weather is sunny and appealing, my stresses are low—and when I'm making the art I don't have so much time to document it; part of the issue is that the allegations about the NSA are indeed very dispiriting; but part of my problem was that I've been stewing over this issue in another context.

---

See, one of my friends was explaining why she liked Oklahoma. Oklahoma, to me, part of the Dustbowl —flat, dry, and ugly or, I dunno, where the Oklahoma City bombing took place, which has sorta been lost in the angst over 9/11, cuz homegrown terrorists aren't nearly as scary as the brown mooslim kind, amirite?

But in fact Oklahoma has a lot going for it —it encompasses part of the Ozarks (for which I do have fond childhood associations), and is actually more racially mixed than much of the nation, with 15% blacks, and more tribes of any state excepting California—so despite the hokey state foods and state hymn (separation of church and state, what's that?!) you'd expect a lively, interesting culture. It's warm, there's water, and diverse geography. I still wouldn't wanna live there, but I do see the appeal.

But aside from the climate, my friend also found it, for lack of a better term, less intellectually pretentious. I have to admit, this comment frustrated me some. Oh, I get that some people use $64 words to intimidate others (I do this myself when folks are being nasty to me, especially in commercial or bureaucratic settings) but I think for the most part “intellectuals” —like geeks or nerds—are just having their own kind of weird fun. It's, to paraphrase Miss Manners, their sport of choice.

I do not aspire to high levels of academic, NYC style intellectualism, of the sort published by journals that Sokol spoofed; I'm never gonna read Marcel Proust or James Joyce (though I had a friend who loved Ulysses and Dragonlance written for hire novels in equal measure, which I thought utterly cool)—I'm pretty safely in the middle-brow bourgeoisie (and yeah, I have to look up the spelling of this word every time).

Though I certainly appreciate how that thinking has trickled into the mainstream, and affected our culture. (An arty example—most people don't really get dada, even today, 80 years and more since this nonsense ‘anti-art’ came out of the malaise of WWI—but that movement, particularly the work of Joseph Cornell, is behind of all those totschkes used to make the current, and in my opinion, quite attractive style of scrapbooking as sponsored by the local craft shops.) Do I feel a bit intimidated by those who argue over Derrida and Hegel and that impenetrable High Art Speak?

Yeah, sure. But for the most part, they'd be just as baffled by my discussions of the intricacies of kumihimo, or glass, or the various fanac quarreling that made Harry Potter fandom so entertaining in the late 2000s. I don't care what folks deeply into football (either the US or world kinds) think about it, cuz that's not my interest, and my identity isn't invested in public sports.

I think part of the problem is that some people presume intellectualism and brain-power always go together; and they don't. I've felt underpowered in the smarts department pretty much all my life, and get by on sheer doggedness, and the realization that some things are simply beyond me, and always will be. Thinking about things is more a sign of introversion than brains, I suspect; and in any event the two are only loosely correlated.

If ‘intellectual pursuits’ are fun for you, well then, go to't; if they hold roughly the same interest as the minutiae of tama design or kagami width, then do something that does catch your passion, cuz, yanno, if the fact that main interest kumi holds for you is that it was once employed by ninjas, or used by samurai to lace their armor together, that's fine too.

Cuz life is too short not to enjoy.

15aug2013

Today's post is brought to you by the perseids. ‘If you are awake in the early morning hours—and it's clear—you should try to see them.’ Well, I was awake, and it looked fairly clear, so despite its being an August morning I put on warm knee-socks and Bride of Frankencoat, and gave thanks I could lay flat on the deck behind my studio.

I suffer from a streetlight in front of our house; even at 4am, there is still a lot of traffic noise on the main road nearby. The neighbor's house was producing some rhythmic noise or other—not A/C, it's too chilly for that; perhaps a dehumidifier. —I recall reading some post or page on the intertubes, about some angry old woman who was mad that email and twitter and text had killed the communication of her youth, letters with real stamps on them, a life in the slow lane when people lay on their backs, watching stars to the accompaniment of crickets. She wasn't, the poster said, so much raging against the new technology as mourning the loss of the old, that had given her delight.

A meteor flashed by, vivid and bright, a lucky sighting soon after I lay down, and for a moment I could imagine living long ago, when stars and crickets were one's principal night-time entertainment. Say, about a decade short of a hundred years ago, when this house was newly built; when it likely had a carriage house, which exists now only as foundations that serve to edge various of my garden beds, because in 1923 there were few cars (and I'm guessing no streetlights.) Go back another hundred years, to 1823 the collection of houses, barns and shops was on the verge of becoming a town. I watched for more meteors, feeling fortunate that I could see so many stars in the city (the trees helped). I saw one more before traffic noise and the neighbor's pump intruded too heavily upon my fantasy.

But I have one thing, perhaps, that other woman didn't: the hope that my descendants, as well as my ancestors, will enjoy a night sky brilliant with stars, while crickets sing, the hope that one day, some day, society as a whole (not just crackpots like me) will recognize the ceaseless light and noise we accept now as the pollution they are; and write laws to protect the environment from them, as we wrote laws against air and water pollution.

It seems only fitting after seeing two meteors, many stars (and a satellite or two plus an airplane) that today's braid should be black and white. And a thing that could've been made a hundred years ago—or perhaps a hundred hence.

14aug2013

Links: Via Brad DeLong (which was via Scalzi's ‘Being Poor’ category), NK Jemisin's WorldCon Speech, in which she illuminates the US by way of Australia's Reconciliations; and Ta-Nehisi Coates finding one's heart and home in a foreign country:

Every time he brought me before a great poem I was injured, because I knew that I would never say anything that beautiful. Yusef Komunyakaa has this line–"her red dress turns the corner\like blood in a man's eye." I read that when I was 19, and thought "If this is writing, then I will just go ahead and hang myself right now." I was injured because this was one less beautiful thing in the world waiting to be written, and even though I knew there were many others, I would never get to write them.

I know that feeling, that despair. That is why people make art. THC has long since turned his corner, and his writing flows like the blood some great writer told us we must let. I will never reach those heights. But beads are small; beads are available to all. One of their special qualities is that they are beautiful even in the hands of us ordinary creators.

Right now, I'm fiddling around with Kristina Logan beads. I took a class from her oh, let's say fifteen years ago (or mebbe a couple more.) I remember her saying, ‘I'm not going to teach you how to make a Kristina Logan bead.’ As if we ever could. Eventually she realized that too, and started teaching her beads—not just her old beads, but the ones she's making now, the disks. Because she'd come to understand that art is a reflection of the artist, and the better an artist you are—the clearer, the more exact that reflection—the harder it is for anyone else to reproduce it. And Logan is one of the truest beadmakers I know.

I make these beads because they're a handy indicator of my skillset: how far have I progressed? Trying to copy her beads has proven to be very reliable indeed, but there is no danger of my nor anyone else's successfully reproducing what she does. But as I climb that impossible, asymptotic slope of perfection, I can, for awhile, forget how good or bad I am, and live in the moment. For that, I am convinced, is the other reason people make art: to be present.

(So this website is weird, because it is almost always a record of my past. Speaking of which, a braid from ...three years ago.)

13aug2013

Sometimes I have no idea—zero, zip, zilch—how some tab ends up on my browser. Such is the case with A Girl called Jack, whose most famous post would make a good companion to Scalzi's Being Poor. But Jack also has what looks to be a bunch of tasty cheap recipes. I am all about tasty, cheap and nutritious. After the horrid pantry moth infestation, I do kinda feel the need to clear stuff out, and using up staples is definitely part of eating cheap's modus operandi.

In other helpful tips, The Oatmeal gives some useful spelling/grammar advice —with cartoons! One of my apa-mates did this for loose and lose—she had her fave character grabbing his pants in one panel to keep ’em from falling down, and hunting under the bed for them in the other:) Anyway. Have an orange and blue disk-made braid.

30jul2013

Ok, today's post is for f2tY's Japanese father, Yoshiaki-san.

And here's a useful link for our last Japanese daughter, whom I insisted educate herself on this issue before we went camping last time, and which others might find helpful, since for whatever reason—all the rain, perhaps—poison ivy has really been growing rampant this year.