Popular Culture

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Excitement

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Pardon my knitterly excitement, but I am a few hours away from my first finished garment of the year. I cannot believe it has taken me this long, but I am now a frill and a neckband away from a Summer Tweed cardigan. This is exciting because a) I get to wear a new cardigan verrry soon and b) I get to cast on a new project. This reminds me.

I do not consider myself a Hardcore Knitter but when an incredulous Other Half asked me why the beep not, I could not really say why. The evidence is stacked against me:

  • When I want a little treat, I buy yarn.
  • I have a .. sizeable yarn stash.
  • My social circle consists of almost all knitters.
  • I attend two knitting groups.
  • Yarn fondling forms part of my my working life.
  • On-line social networking revolves around knitting activities.
  • I knit lace, socks, fair-isle, cables and do this using both Continental and English knitting techniques.
  • I can recognise a knitting pattern or yarn from a distance.
  • I can talk about rare sheep breeds.

But I still maintain I'm not Hardcore. How would you describe a Hardcore Knitter? Are you one?

But back to the new project I get to start so very soon. I am torn between knitting a hat for myself and casting on for a birthday present. A friend of mine turns forty this summer and has dropped hints about wanting a lace shawl. I have two balls of Kidsilk Haze in Ice Cream and I'm currently trying to find the right pattern. My friend is petite and very feminine, so I want something to match her personality and style. Ishbel is really the perfect pattern, but I have already made three (the same goes for the Swallowtail Shawl) so I'm looking for something .. else. Mooncalf suggested Citron but it is not as girly as I'd like.

Ideas, please.

However, most of all I am excited by the return of Doctor Who, the delirious, mad-cap, fantastic British sci-fi show. The first episode of the Eleventh Doctor's reign aired tonight and it was even better than I had hoped. You can read a quick spoilerish review here, or just trust me when I say it was a very good Steven Moffat episode. Moffat penned some of the best Doctor Who episodes in the recent past and I'm so pleased he is now on board as the show runner. I hope my non-UK Whovian friends get to sample the new Doctor soon. You'll like him.

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Reading, Watching, Knitting, Thinking.

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I'm currently reading Colm Toíbín's Brooklyn. I am reading it slowly, taking it in line by line. I always do this with Toíbín's books; they deserve attention and care. Also, Brooklyn cuts very close to the bone with its story about a woman leaving one country to seek a better life in another country. Sometimes a bit too close. Some decisions are not made easily and the outcome is messier that anyone might expect. I'm thinking about what we as readers bring to books and what books bring out in us. Mainly, though, I have been trying to finish my little red cardigan. I have had a couple of DVD marathons (verdict: Oh, I love Gregory Peck, the smallest gestures can be completely devastating, and Neil Finn should ditch the falsetto & Johnny Marr) and I'm now one tiny frill and a buttonband away from completion. I am thinking Synecdoche, New York might work for that. Then, it's upwards and onwards. New things to knit, new projects to fret about.

Oh, because I have certain weaknesses, these blog posts were really amusing: Create Your Own Regency Romance and Call In The Angry Villagers: 10 Clichés We Can Live Without. I swear I haven't touched any such reads in months.

And finally, I just loved this little throwaway line by John Cameron Mitchell: "There's no question (..) that Lady Gaga and Hedwig are from the same clan." So true and now I don't know why I didn't twig this earlier.

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Lost Boy? Lost Girl.

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Pop culture and I have an on-off relationship. I mostly attribute this to growing up in Nowheresville, Denmark, in a family obsessed by 1940s and 1950s American popular entertainment (think Frank Sinatra, Vincente Minnelli films and the Great American Songbook), so when I went to school and was surrounded by kids immersed in current music, I was woefully lost. It took me about three months to figure out what song the kids were singing in the playground and, as my family rarely went to see current films, most 1980s teen films completely passed me by. I'm reminded of my 1980s pop culture black hole as most of my peers are reminiscing about The Lost Boys and License to Drive in the wake of Corey Haim's death. I finally saw The Lost Boys some six or seven years ago. It is undeniably an entertaining slice of comedic vampire horror, but I was obviously way too old to connect with it. So, in an odd way, Haim's death does sadden me but my sadness is reserved for that young girl who failed so miserably at fitting in at school and not a shared piece of pop culture fading away reflecting our mortality etc. But watch this space once people like Ewan McGregor (oh, Trainspotting, the film that defined my generation and demographic segment), Jarvis Cocker (playground singing? No, massive dance-floor singalong) or even Douglas Coupland (whose early novels spawned a mild obsession mid-1990s) start 'shuffleing off this mortall coile'. I'll be right here bawling my eyes out and wondering what happened to that bright-eyed lit student girl with the funky charity shop clothes.

A few random links:

Finally, I have promised to mention that Lucky 7 Canteen on Glasgow's Bath Street is super-keen to host knitting groups. They'll keep lighting up and be very happy to serve delicious food/drinks to discerning knitters. Ask for Mel if your knitting group needs a new hang-out.

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Now We're Getting Somewhere

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I finished my Ravelympics project on Monday night, but had to wait until Wednesday morning to photograph the result. I'm rather happy with my first pair of socks: they are pretty, the pattern was fun to knit and the finished object has already been used as bed socks (it gets cold in old Victorian tenements). I am not sure I will ever be a confirmed sock knitter, but I will admit that socks do make for a nice portable project. And that having a pile of handknitted socks will be very useful for someone who is always cold. So there is that. I began my next project on Tuesday night - my Summer Tweed jumper from Rowan 47 - and the weather gods turned against me immediately. We have had snow the past couple of days. I am so tempted to cast on for a big, woolly jumper but I know I will cherish the Summer Tweed jumper in the months to come. Sometimes I am being too pragmatic for my own good.

Some random links from my "blogging" bookmark file:

+ Very, very, very pretty dustjackets for Jules Verne books. I doubt they will be put into production due to costs, but they are very charming and, dare I say it, toy with liminal aspects of paratextuality (that's my big, pretentious phrase of the week, then).

+ I met Ms Dirty Martini late last year here in Glasgow. She was affable, lovely and cheerful. I had no idea she was collaborating with Karl Lagerfeld (NSFW link). Six degrees of separation, my my.

+ Kathryn Grayson has passed away. She starred in some of my favourite Hollywood musicals - Anchors Aweigh and Show Boat. Here's a YouTube video of her with Frank Sinatra and Peter Lawson. Sniffle.

+ "Nobody Knows What the (BEEP) They Are Doing" - or how clever people feel like imposters and wonder why they are doing well. I wish I had seen this ages ago when I was a graduate student. The piece is admittedly a bit pop psychology-ish, but I found it an interesting read.

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Confessiones

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When I started university many, many, many moons ago I fell in with the wrong crowd. Looking back, I can see how it happened. The nice girl living next door to me in student hall invited me in for tea and soon after she was offering to "lend" me things. "Nothing bad was going to happen", I was told, "everybody's doing it and it's perfectly normal". And this is when I began playing role-playing games. I had long wanted to play Dungeons & Dragons, but the only ones playing RPGs in my erstwhile home town were boys hanging out in the library basement, and they had a strict "no girls" rule. When my student hall neighbour, Liz, offered to lend me the Player's Handbook 2nd Edition, I felt vindicated. To this day, most of the D&D players I know are women. And they are hardcore, I tell you.

Eventually most of my Copenhagen social circle was composed of RPGers - this is not to say that we only hung out in order to slay orcs, but most of the interesting people I met also just happened to be gamers. Smart, interesting people from all walks of life with real jobs, real lives and actual social skills. They were interested in communal storytelling and in imaginary flights of fancy. I miss them. Sadly I have not been able to find a gaming group here in Glasgow - the ones I have found all meet on my knitting night! - but I keep toying with the idea of starting up a small group.

So, imagine my reaction when I read that a murder spree was linked to the perpetrator playing D&D.. yeah, I was not impressed. As someone in the comments remarked: "1989 called, and it wants its favourite baseless accusation back."

A few apt links: