a couple of months ago a friend of mine and a friend of his were, too late for a gig, wandering shoreditch late. they squeezed into a pub and met a large group of girls who were knitting. they were hoxton trendy types, mullets in evidence, entirely serious in their endeavours.
this was knitting as collective therapy, as partial performance. i cheerfully suggested this was an example of hakim bey's immediatism in practise.
The difference between a 19th century quilting bee, for example, & an Immediatist quilting bee would lie in our awareness of the practice of Immediatism as a response to the sorrows of alienation & the `` death of art.'' zero news datapoolxi - xiv
yesterday i heard about a 'radical knitting' night at the radical
dairy in stoke newington. i really have no idea what it all
implies, but i feel oddly driven to find out.
in a post-migraine fugue in exeter i purchased several balls of fluorescent wool. i picked up some needles today and have knitted a small pink L-shape. another friend of mine says knitting is soma. but it's good to defocus. i'd could get into a knitting machine, though.
i notice the knitting community online seems rather vocal and
organised, unlike sewing on the web which is very commercial. i
found a good basic
tutorial, and plenty of resources.
i question the metaphysics, the meta-ethics of the knitting act with this information. more structural purity, more elevation in knitting, taking a single skein and knotting it into whole cloth, than sewing, taking whole cloth and colluding with design and serednidty to make it fitter. at least it is more portable; presumably knitting still goes on on a semi-industrial scale like it does in sewing workshops.
the flexibility of the tools, the entanglement of the wool and the slight threat of the needles, the simplicity of the demonstration? but it is soma, it is not self-emancipation. i can't quite see it.
so. radical knitting with revolutionary aims. there's a
global knit-in planned on june 26th. i might make it.
23-03-2002