I Let My Fists Do The Talkin’

I used to read a lot of sewing blogs—sew but they all seem to have been neglected of late. Sew Hip It Hurts and Sew Wrong have both been killed.

My mother has always been a major sew-er (is there a different way to spell that so as not to be confused with the subterranean tunnel where ninja turtles live?) and made a lot of clothes for me and my brother (and continues to, for me anyway—she did the costumes for Girl Crush and Sarah’s dress in My Wife, The Ghost)

Eliza sent me the link for You Knit What??, an archive of hideous knitting being modeled by lumpy semi-pro models pulled from magazines and pattern catelogues and comments full of negative hyperbole and swearing. Knitting takes so much more time than sewing, it makes me sad to think of people putting 10 million hours and 10 billion stitches into these “fashions;” it reminds me of the “designer” garment in Threads Magazine (ethnic-inspired “wearable art” that is so labor-intensive it no longer resembles clothes).

And then, the site also has a lot of “Martha Ponchos;” I don’t get ponchos outside of a Spaghetti Western context.

I made a “favicon” for the site and for GirlCrush2040.com but neither of them seems to be showing up. Will said he could see them, but I can’t.

My brother “re-gifted” a camera he had gotten from our parents two years before to my last Christmas—a Canon Exilim “Wearable Card Camera.” Of course, it was missing all of its software and some of its cables. I tried for months to get the USB “cradle” to download to my computer… downloading software and getting new, somehow subtley different, USB cables. No dice. I assumed it just didn’t work on Macs (which the Canon site somewhat implied)

Anyway, right before tossing it, I plugged it in to my laptop and for reasons known only to Life, Destiny and Jesus Christ himself, it worked.

....Aaaaaand, the picture quality sucks.

See my sporatic usages of this camera in the first half of the year at my flickr: Things I Found On A Camera

Combing several of my favorite things, enjoy some vintage, baffling Japanese commercials for soaps and such:

I made this tiled wallpaper. There’s like 2 pixels off at the border, so it’s not perfect. I might do a cleaned up version later. But feel free to download and use as you please.

Seamless tiled textures vanished for a while from the website makin’ game. I’ve been making a lot of them lately. I really would like to find—or if I have to, make—a good seamless background of entangling vines. Something kind of like this William Morris pattern called Willow (which this sample doesn’t have any repeats visible).

I’m very slow on the uptake, but I’ve come to really enjoy Pandora by the Music Genome Project. You can type in any song or band/singer and get a music stream of “related” artists. Custom streaming radio.

There have been a lot of misfires (They Might Be Giants ->Foghat?), but you can fast forward or skip around. I’ve been using it to look up bands I don’t know anything about, just to see if I might like to buy, say, “I am the World Trade Center.” They seem to only have one album of some people so a search for “Future Bible Heroes,” not THAT obscure, basically plays one album interrupted by weird misfires (Foghat!)

They’ve added to their “genome” qualifiers (such as “major key tonality” “mild synchopation” “mixed acoustic and electric instrumentation”)—”humorous lyrics.” I aimed to make that my main thread of genomical relation but “The Laughing Gnome” by David Bowie was not in their database. Just plenty of Foghat. (There’s a difference between “humorous lyrics” and “joke band,” Pandora.)

No one eats as much Chinese food as me. It’s a major obsession and it may have clouded my judgment in recommending this site— Mei Wah: Eating in Chinese—which I found pretty interesting. If only to find out what Moo Go Gai Pan means (Mushroom Mushroom Chicken Slice, which sounds like a horrible soda).

I live down the block from Dumpling Man, which both food snobs and drunks seem to adore but I am less than enamored with. The mascot is really cute (like a Super Mario power-up), but some of the people who work there are retarded and the dumplings are really aggressively chivey. Too too chivey.

There was a food feud earlier this year over a knock off restaurant opening 4 blocks away, nicking the concept and having a piss-poor cease-and-decist-inuring logo. They changed their logo to an extremely weird chicken fat yellow heart with a face and dropped dumplings in favor of the sort of menu Mee Noodles used to serve before they burned down (terrifying!)—noodle soup, dumplings, Ameri-Chinese slop on rice.

I have to embarrasingly admit… I like Plump Dumpling. Why? The storefront is kind of a bummer, always empty and covered in piles of menues and 5-year-old Maxims that I’m positive were pulled from the trash. Becase they make their own wontons… and getting any decent wontons in NYC has always been an uphill battle. One place on A doesn’t even fully reheat their mass produced wontons… it’s a wet, doughy snowball with a thimble of stink meet in the middle. Revolting. And yet I’ve ordered them more than once because I was craving “wontons.” Plump Dumpling’s are almost identical to the ones at Wonton Garden in Chinatown… they’re a little expensive for how little food it is, but I’m thinking about them RIGHT NOW.

If I want dumplings, I’ll go to Excellent Dumpling House in Chinatown. No big.

Cromartie High School the Movie (Live Action)

Thank you, Japan.

On Wednesday I was walking around in Chinatown and back up to my apartment and I passed what was probably a restaurant on Bowery that had just opened. There were ropes of triangle rainbow pennants hanging off the awning; that usually means “Grand Opening” (or “used car dealership”).

It seems to be a Chinatown thing that either family members or investors or someone give new retaurants potted palms and “good luck” wreaths (written in Chinese, so I assume they said “good luck”) lining the sidewalk. This particular restaurant must have had more than 100 of them… completely obstructing the sidewalk and entrance to the building. Ironic that so many glad tidings for good business would be an impediment to any potential customers entering. Or maybe that was the intention? 100+ plant-giving “family members?” Triad-controlled front for illicit heroin addict bathhouse, natch.

On that note, please welcome Mr Ghost to the internet.

For Thanksgiving, Will Hines drove Kirk and me down to DC as he and Eliza were continuing on to Richmond. It was a huge bonus double plus good thing since Amtrak sucks an ass in the days leading up to any major holiday (like weekends) and I was looking forward to forced merriment as we kill time in traffic jams. A call home to get directions turned into a harshly worded warning about leaving too late in the day, so I advised Will we had to leave at 8 AM or he wouldn’t make Richmond before midnight.

The night before was Harold Night, which I actually attended, attempting to collect Kirk’s Girl Scout cookie order and ended up staying out at the bar until midnight. Kirk had gone to watch Dr Who at his weekly nerd club meeting in Brooklyn and was supposed to call when he was in so we could meet up. Eliza went to see ‘Rent” and had the latest night of all.

So, as a result, in the morning, we were all very tired and there was no fun road-bits until Baltimore. As Camden Yards came into view, Will denounced giving stadiums corporate names and wished he was rich enough to buy a sports arena and name it something embarrassing like “Suck-Your-Dick Miniwheats Stadium” so people would have to say it all the time.

There was also no traffic for the entire way and we only hit roadwork on the DC Beltway (where I also had no more directions to give them). Roadwork on the busiest travel day of the year? What the fuck? Well, on the news that night they reported that some 6 hours earlier in the day an oil tanker truck had EXPLODED on that spot and melted all the pavement off… we were seeing the last wave of repair work .

When my directions ran out, we went to Three Pigs Barbecue in McLean, which was close to my house in high school but I had no gauge how close it was to my parents current house. Eliza announced an appreciation of Brunswick Stew, which they were out of, and my mother came to pick us up since she didn’t know any of the street names to give us directions.

Kirk and I spent 4 days down there and then took the train back up.