When making a garment, you really need to finish and secure the inside seams.
Not so in making a poem. In a way, you almost want it to fray.
You consider yourself very lucky if anyone actually WANTS to turn it inside out.
I find it quite remarkable that this piece appeared in the NY Times about a week after I completed my first sewing venture in years — a skirt made out of a fabulous $10 discount store jacquard curtain and edged with curtain tassels (scroll down to see my brave effort). I wonder, am I flattering myself to observe the extent to which I have my finger on the pulse of the moment?
Is That a Tapestry You’re Wearing?
By ERIC WILSON
Published: February 8, 2005
Last year’s fall collections were full of tweeds. Now designers are tearing down the curtains, making use of decorators’ fabrics with a fervor that would do Scarlett O’Hara or Maria von Trapp proud.
Fabrics more commonly found in the castles of the Loire Valley or a conference room at the Hilton – thick gold chenille, tapestry-weight brocades, wallpaper prints – have turned up in several of the fall 2005 collections shown so far.
Irksome
Guy talking to his friend on the F train:
“I keep thinking about the Higher Power, you know, and how I want to do some kind of work that involves serving people and making their lives better, just like I want God to do for me…”
An absolutely wretched homeless man gets on the train, asks for money, standing right in front of Mr. Charitable Service, who does absolutely nothing.
Thoughts on garment construction
The incredible fragility of paper pattern pieces and cut pieces of fabric — their vulnerable fraying edges — — the goal of “sewing” is to make them strong.
Sewing is Oulipean — the pattern is the restraint within which so many variations can emerge. The final results, though, are aleatoric– the way, for example, a particular sort of fabric will interact with a pattern — how it will drape the body, and so on.
It’s an incredible struggle. Far more dificult than writing.
Fungibility! Engaging the visual and tactile senses in particular. But then there’s the smell of the sewing machine — sweet and dusty-hot — and it’s purposeful whirr.
Everyone should try to construct a garment at least once, if only to deepen their respect for the people who do so, at sweatshop wages, for a living. When someone asked me why I think people get paid so little for sewing, I replied — “because they are so good at it.” Cruel paradox!
Become aware of your seams.
The miracle of a seam — just one, and there’s a garment’s incipience!
Without forgetting to consider… the incredible complexity … of a textile mill. I bow my head.
Please! No anonymous comments! Tho I love to hear from everyone.
Sorry, but “majorhood” turns my stomach.
What I enjoy, I realize, is not so much “poetry” or “cooking” or “dance” or “parties” — but rather the combination of elements to create a fungible, gestural whole.
Everyone knows that honey makes the best extemporaneous face masque, and it’s fun to lick off the lips.
But listen! Try using the granulated honey and you’ll get exfoliation as well as the circulation-enhancing, pore-refining qualities of smooth honey.
Lacan, Trumped by a Bird
From an article in the NY Times today on the changing concepts of the “birdbrain”:
“Magpies, at an earlier age than any other creature tested develop an understanding of the fact that when an object disappears behind a curtain, it has not vanished.”
This would make magpies smarter than my cats, who seem to believe that a hand under a piece of fabric is not a hand but a toy.
The article also mentions crows in Japan that throw walnuts under the tires of cars, and then, when the coast is clear, run to eat the shelled nuts,
that pigeons can memorize up to 725 different visual patterns and show evidence of deceptive behavior (a sign of intelligence…),
that parrots “can converse with humans, invent syntax and teach other parrots what they know.”
Chirp!
