Category: franky

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Trajectories and targets

Dr Omed asks:

Have you ever walked a labyrinth? Not a maze, a labyrinth. A maze has false turnings and dead ends; the way in and the way out are hidden by walls or hedges. A maze is a puzzle or a trap; a sort of crossword for the feet. The purpose of a maze is to get lost. A labyrinth does not need concealment; it has curves and turnings that in the end bring the walker to the center of the pattern. The way out is the same as the way in. Turn about and follow the same meanders coiled on themselves. Step over threshold and exit where you entered. Like all forms of meditation or prayer the only change is the self of the one walks the path. The purpose of the labryrinth is to be found.

in the labyrinth

This labyrinth (constructed by a mental health charity, I note,) differs from that of Dr Omed in that the walls were so high they almost, in places, met overhead. Which gave it a mazey feel without the choices mazes offer. (Maizy wasn’t there, unusually.)

Appreciation of the dancing dappled light, the meditative pacing process etc etc was somewhat impaired by the alternative use to which the boys put the space which they found ideal stalking and sniping territory in which to employ their newly-acquired toys of mass destruction. For them the purpose of this labyrinth was precisely not to be found.

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Community and collaboration

Is it, I wonder, possible to have one without the other? if they were venn diagrammed would the circles entirely overlap or are there aspects of each independent of the other? at the moment of collaboration does a community spark into being, however short-lived? is it possible to have community, of any sort, entirely without collaboration?

This past weekend I benefited from the area enclosed by the arcs where the venn circles quite definitely overlap in two different ways simultaneously.

Firstly there was the computer. The old (2002) 17″ flat panel iMac which, having served me well was moved to the rather less tender care of the boys when I got my laptop. When we got back from our holiday it died. Wouldn’t boot up at all. The boys were, understandably, upset at the thought of losing access to… whatever it is they access. All we could get was a white screen with a grey apple in the middle and, while elegant and understated, it was rather unvarying and inflexible.

Grey

After hours of effort including hair-pulling, zapping things, unscrewing base plates, swearing and suchlike I’d advanced to being able to open the CD drive and hearing the startup sound. And had discovered that, search as I might, I could find every other installation disc for every other programme for every other computer in the history of the world except, of course, the one I needed.

Enter the geeks. One reassures me that it’s a software not hardware problem and the other sends out a tweet-o-s asking if anyone in her network (community?) had a copy of the appropriate disc they could lend a complete stranger. Less than 20 minutes later and offers have flowed in from across the globe.

You might be thinking that fine tweets butter no parsnips, but you’d be wrong. As instantly as is possible within the confines of the UK postal system I actually have a copy of the said disc in the letterbox, in the CD drive and soon after in my (ok, the boys’) computer.

magic happening

thankyouthankyouthankyou! to the wonderful person who came to the aid of someone they’d never met on the other side of the country. Look! It works! It works!

Soft-centred

And by a happy deliberance (what’s the opposite of a coincidence if it isn’t a deliberance?) the picture displayed in the browser on the computer is of the other, parallel, example of collaborative communitarian gorgeousness, namely my hap blanket.

As knitters will readily grasp this project had, because of the frequent changes from one yarn colour to another, quite a lot of ends to darn in. As my nearest and dearest will testify I loath and detest darning in (in particular, and sewing in general) with such a passion that it can mean I knit all the bits of a project and then fail to do the last bits that turn it from heaps of crumpled fabric into a functional finished thing.

Not so this blanket. Because, being aware of my sore affliction, the aforementioned pixeldiva and the also-present Erzebel plonked themselves on either side of the reluctant darner on the sofa, got out their needles and sewed in those ends. Such are the dimensions of the thing (more than three feet square) we could all stitch at the same time. And pix probably twittered about the computer disc simultaneously too. It adds a further layer of speciality to a project already dripping with wonderful associations (and Scottish rain).

Awesomeness abounds, unbounded.

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You know how to whistle, don't you?

Thank you, Oliver Postgate.

“When the BBC got the script, [they] rang me up and said ‘At the beginning of episode three, where the doors get stuck, Major Clanger says sod it, the bloody thing’s stuck again,'” he said. [At about 59″ in the video above.]

“‘You can’t say that on children’s television’ … I said ‘It’s not going to be said, it’s going to be whistled’, but [they] just said ‘But people will know!’ … If you watch the episode, the one where the rocket goes up and shoots down the Iron Chicken, Major Clanger kicks the door to make it work and his first words are ‘Sod it, the bloody thing’s stuck again’.”

Pissed off with the morning chorus of microsoft startup music that happened every day at work I swapped out the corporate drone on my computer and replaced it with the cluck of the iron chicken (she first arrives at 3’59” in the above video). It amused me greatly, particularly because it infuriated the boss who otherwise prided himself on his iconoclasm.

I promised a wonderful friend, also from work, that I’d knit him a clanger but he died before it was done.

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Lookalikes

lookalikes
Guitar player by Lady P                Lute player by Caravaggio

A reader writes: While clearing my desk this morning I happened across a picture of a lute player by the celebrated Italian Baroque artist Caravaggio which reminded me of your image of a guitar player. Might they perhaps be related?

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What a year!

How did she phrase it? that it had been a weird year? or strange? As we sat on the edge of the stage watching the crowds disperse Hg and I realised that yes, it was indeed only a year since we’d first seen Laura Marling play, at the memorable event we now refer to as the gig in the gutter where she took to the street outside the Soho venue having been barred from playing after the management discovered she was not yet 18 years old.

tuning

Well, she’s 18 now. Still gamin, but oh what a difference a year has made. The voice has grown, matured, mellowed, gained immeasurably in confidence, and so has she.

While still obviously painfully shy (there were several self-deprecating references to her inability to “banter”) the full-on touring schedule, both national and international, has strengthened her stage presence. She was backed on about half the songs by the new “team Laura Marling” – keyboards (Pete Roe), violin/ukelele (Phil Renna), bass/double bass (Graeme Ross), percussion/accordion (David Sanderson) and, on a couple, a backing singer called Emma – but whether alone or surrounded she was, gracefully, in control.

laughing

Both Hg and I had, it transpired, been worried that the gig might suffer from end-of-tour ennui, material polished to beyond perfection and/or delivered with the lack of zest which comes from repetition and over-familiarity. But no, it was quite the reverse. Not only were the album tracks fresh and zingy both in delivery and arrangement, there was a wealth of new material, “as new as songs can be” she explained while apologising in advance for any roughness. One, Hope in the Air saw her putting aside the familiar guitar and accompanying herself on the banjo.

banjo

Lyrically the new songs seem to be returning to the darker places from whence much of her early material came, but from her position of greater depth and experience. I continue to be impressed (to the point of slack-jawed awe, quite frankly) by Laura Marling’s prodigious talent which shows every sign of continuing to develop. I can’t wait for the second album.

Some links:

* Evening Standard review of the (previous night’s) Scala gig on 11 November;
* The Guardian review of that same gig;
* Interview on ClashMusic.com;
* the rest of the pictures (no, I’m not going to moan about my camera still being broken yadda yadda).

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The fact that Grace Jones exists…

…gives me enormous pleasure.

This has been all over everywhere since July, and now it’s here:

(And thanks to the wonder that is KeepVid and its mp4 downloading magic it’s now on my iPod for an anytime anyplace fix.)

The video was made by photographer and director Nick Hooker who obviously found it a memorable experience:

I walked in and opened my laptop and played the clips for her, and she couldn’t believe it, she went completely mad, and jumped on me – so I’m staggering around holding her and thinking any second my hernia scar is going to give way and 30 feet of intestines are going to fly across the room.

Unfortunately I can’t find any confirmation of my conviction that it was made on a Mac and am forced to wonder whether I’m such an Apple fangrrrl that I just made it up.

The album is out now.

(She wears Issey Miyake even when cycling, you know.)

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Two circs, wedges and a shower

To Richmond, on Saturday, where we found tropical weather and a pair of recycled shoes.

shoes

They were attached to Pix, who was accompanied by a sock being knitted on two circular needles. She darned in some of my ends (yay!) while I knitted about half an inch of her sock (double yay!) and discovered the delight that is two circ socking. A win-win-win situation for me, really.

two circs sock

We (as in Pix and I) hope we persuaded Karen to join us on a future knitting jaunt. After all, she’s got a lovely wip on the way.

On Sunday we (as in the spawn and I) attended the UK premier of The Rise of Darkrai courtesy of 1stSon who had won tickets in a competition. I shall draw a discreet veil over the experience of the film itself, the screaming children, the fighting for freebies, the hearing-loss resulting from the volume of the soundtrack, the stench of stale popcorn and the brain-death resulting from the narrative.

Afterwards, in the centre of Leicester Square, we drew (relatively) free breath in the small and unexpected park and watched a pigeon take a shower in the fountain.

For a brief moment, what with the sunshine and the birdsong and the gentle sound of water, we might have been somewhere else entirely than the place where we were. Which just went to show how lovely the place where we really were really had been all the time, just without our noticing.

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Atmospheric noise and its utility for knitters

My cousin J is having a baby in December. This is storming news. I’ve always loved and admired her very much so obviously the baby must have a very superior knitted something.

Whilst at I Knit Day I saw, pinned up on the wall, this blanket:

It was love.

It’s a pattern by and designed for yarn from The Natural Dye Studio, which is all absolutely beautiful. However from my point of view there were a couple of problems. Firstly the pattern didn’t say how much yarn in total was required and secondly how many different colours were used. The first was simply remedied – I asked to weigh the finished blanket and discovered it was 560g. But as to the second… it was obvious that a very large number of different colourways had been used, but with each 100g skein of alpaca/merino retailing for (a perfectly reasonable) £10.99 the cost of making something similar was rapidly going to become totally prohibitive.

Luckily I had to hand a top advisor (and “enabler”, aka pusher) in the shape of Pixeldiva and a compromise was reached. I purchased three skeins of the luscious alpaca/merino and made up the rest from my (extensive) collection of random balls of similar-weight yarn.

So I ended up with 12 different balls of yarn to make a blanket of 15×12=180 squares, each requiring two colours. The next challenge was distribute the different colours evenly across the grid. I know for certain that it’s definitely got to be worked out in advance (making it up as you go along is a recipe, or rather non-recipe, for disaster) and I also know that I’m not very good at keeping my pet colour combination preferences from dominating the mix.

Enter, tab left, RANDOM.ORG:

RANDOM.ORG offers true random numbers to anyone on the Internet. The randomness comes from atmospheric noise, which for many purposes is better than the pseudo-random number algorithms typically used in computer programs. People use RANDOM.ORG for holding draws, lotteries and sweepstakes, to drive games and gambling sites, for scientific applications and for art and music.

Knitting comes under the “art” category of course.

The blanket is constructed in 12 strips of 15 squares each (which will be sewn together) giving a total of 180 squares requiring two colours/numbers each. I allocated a number between 1 and 12 to each of the yarn colours. What I needed was 180 random sets of two numbers between 1 and 12. So I went to the integer generator and asked for just that – set the total of numbers required to 360, set the integers to be used to any between 1 and 12 and ask for the output to be generated in two columns.

It’s like magic.

I had, of course, to tidy it up just a teeny weeny bit because I didn’t want to have squares with the same colour centre as border. Nor did I want two adjacent squares to have the same border colour. But it was the work of a few minutes to eliminate these results, generate a few more numbers to replace those removed, and then slip the whole lot into a 12×15 spreadsheet.

This makes me almost unbelievably happy. Firstly because I’m deeply sad geeky, secondly because it gives the knitting (which is very very simple) a level of interest to keep me motivated – finding out what each square is going to look like and how it relates to all the others as I go along.

12 yarns required

There are, however, a couple of drawbacks to this otherwise very satisfying project. The first is the necessity to cart around 12 balls of wool at all times thus making the project less than totally portable. The second is the humungous number of ends which will need darning in. Six ends per square, 180 squares… that’s… that’s… 1080 ends! Greater love hath no woman than that she darn in any ends, never mind more than a thousand, for her friend.

the first strip in progress

Meanwhile in other knitting news there are two satisfied customers – Fresca loves her Jayne so much she’s prepared to risk sautéed brain disease by wearing it in 76 degrees of heat; 2ndSon loves his birthday socks so much he’s wearing them literally day and night and contracted extreme smelly feet disease. I’ve had to remove them by force to wash them.

birthday socks