owls redux

Clearly there are many of you who like owls just as much as I do! Owl tattoo, Kirsty? Cor! As a brief glimpse into the murky depths of my long-standing owl obsession, I thought I’d show you a birthday card Tom made for me eight years ago. At this time, we were in our mod phase, and rode around Sheffield on 1960s Lambrettas we had acquired from the legendary Armando. The title of Tom’s genius artwork is “Wazz Rides with Owls and Bears”. It shows a heavily photoshopped still from the film Quadrophenia, with my head (note short haircut and youthful demeanour), and the heads of several owls and bears, superimposed over those of Phil Daniels and the other riders. Riding with owls. What could be better?

Ahem.

Anyway, just to let you know: I shall write up the pattern, it will be freely available here and on ravelry, and if you leave / have left a comment on yesterday’s post, I’ll make sure you are added to the email list to receive a copy.
hoot hoot!

Wool 100%

Needled reviews:
Mai Tomangi, Wool, 100% (2006)

Really, what’s not to like? In a Japanese cross between Bagpuss and the Wombles, two elderly sisters, armed with pokey sticks and shopping trolleys, collect furniture, toys, and other discarded items from surburban rubbish bins. Their house totters and teeters under the weight of their gathered spoils, and their bodies beat time to the tick of a thousand pilfered clocks. This world of lost memories and found objects is invaded by the destructive, succubus-like presence of a girl they call “Knit-Again.” The name is an apt one, for she is wearing a tatty, badly knitted, chunky red sweater that looks like it might have been designed by Twinkle. But her work is incomplete: the girl labours away at the sweater frantically until her blood-red wool runs out. Only then does she notice what a terrible job she’s made of the knitting: “Damn!” she wails, brandishing her needles, “I have to knit it all over again.”

Starring Ayu Kitaura, Kazuko Yoshiyuki and the wonderful Kyôko Kishida (of Woman in the Dunes fame) Mai Tominaga’s debut feature is strange, unsettling, and very, very witty. Combining elements of fairy-tales and dream work, as well as puppetry and animation, Wool 100% is an incredibly powerful meditation on desire, loss and the secret life of things. It is also, of course, a must-see for every knitter.

(No time for food. There’s knitting to be done)

The girl’s red sweater is full of meaning. The rhythms of it’s knitting match those of the female body through menstruation, childbirth and death. Knitting sublimates sexual desire (“If you knit, a baby will come” one sister tells another, looking with hate and longing at a young man outside their window). And, for the two sisters, who are forced to confront the story of their youth as the plot unravels, knitting also literalises the work of memory, showing how much the past is something that we are constantly making and re-making, in a daily effort of stitching and piecing together. The blood-red yarn is menacing, murderous, and also a figure for the discontinuous narrative thread of the film itself. I was strongly reminded of Takeshi Kitano’s Dolls, in which guilt, trauma, and narrative memory are similarly suggested in the long red cord by which an unfaithful lover drags his suicidal beloved through eternity.

(Takeshi Kitano, Dolls, 2002)

Dolls figure importantly in Wool 100%, too, as do several other kinds of inanimate objects which might, at any moment, spring to life. The objects the sisters collect are living presences: as they catalogue and care for the things that other people throw away, so these things, in their turn, seem to watch over and care for them. Their cuckoo clock chimes to cheer their morning repast; a futon snores and shudders as it envelops its silent sleeper. At the beginning of the film, a group of children sing a song for the two sisters: a neat, suggestive fable that sounds like something straight out of Blake’s Songs of Experience. A sheep sneezes, and an apple falls from a tree: “it is now the sheep’s apple,” sing the children. But, after the sheep munches the apple, it becomes part apple itself, “it is now the apple’s sheep” the song concludes. The subject ends up being possessed by the object it incorporates, just as the sisters are ultimately owned by their things.

(doll-things)

Much of Wool 100% seems to be about finding the appropriate process to deal with things and the memories they embody: to engage with them, to confront them, and ultimately to discard them (there is much funereal burning in the film: painful and theraputic in turns). And the film definitely suggests that there is something more than a little pathological in the repetitive, relentless activities of both knitting and object-collecting (the knitting will never be finished; the collection will never be complete). “Sleep tight,” says the sweater-wearing succubus to the two sisters, before her final destructive act, “when you awake, you’ll have to knit it all over again.” Hell, we all know that feeling.

Wool 100% is available on DVD (but only as a region 1 DVD, those in the UK take note)
Links:
NY Times Review
official Wool 100% site (Japanese)

Anytime his thumbs get tired . . .

A conversation the other day about the stereotypes associated with women and knitting in film got me thinking about Double Indemnity (which I’ve watched repeatedly . . .almost as many times as 3 Days of the Condor). There is just one reference to knitting, but it is a good one. For those of you who haven’t come across it, here it is. Canny insurance salesman, Walter Neff, is about to be trapped in the homicidal web of cold, conniving, Phyllis Dietrichson, caught on the twin promise of a superlative blonde and the thrill of creating the perfect crime. Phyllis entangles Neff by explaining her need for an escape route from her loveless marriage:

Phyllis: Sometimes we sit here all evening and never say a word to each other.
Walter: Sounds pretty dull.
Phyllis: So I just sit and knit.
Walter: Is that what you married him for?
Phyllis: Maybe I like the way his thumbs hold up the wool.
Walter: Anytime his thumbs get tired . . . Only with me around, you wouldn’t have to knit.
Phyllis: Wouldn’t I?
Walter: You bet your life you wouldn’t.

I think I probably used to read that exchange from Neff’s normative and masculine point of view: that is, there’s no way that Barbara Stanwyck (who plays Phyllis with tremendous, bristling, icy allure) should ever be knitting. Knitting? With that anklet? For Neff, knitting points to her domestic entrapment and her lack of sexual fulfilment. His thumbs would hold her wool up so much better. But what he, and the audience fail to get at this point in the film, is just how perfect and appropriate an activity knitting is for Phyllis Dietrichson. In fact, far from suggesting her stifling confinement, it hints at what we later discover—her terrifying sexual autonomy. In this context–that of the powerful, sexually controlling femme fatale–knitting is about plotting, scheming, planning—and it is also about a certain creative (albeit malignant) independence. So, in fact, Phyllis doesn’t need any bloke’s thumbs to hold up her wool. She’s more interested in how she can wind them round her fingers.

Just look at Stanwyck’s restless and incredibly sexy fingers in this still. She’s quite obviously a knitter!

Hmm. Does anyone know of any good articles on the knitting femme fatale?

meme

These flickr memes have been doing the rounds in various incarnations. The movie one is my favourite so far.

1. Favourite Movie? (A Man Escaped)
2. Favourite movie genre? (Melodrama)
3. Favourite actor? (Mitchum)
4. Favourite acress? (Bette)
5. What movie always makes you cry? (Ikiru)
6. What movie have you watched over & over? (3 Days of the Condor)
7. Worst movie you ever saw? (Ah, so many. I was sorely tempted by Bicentennial Man. But that was so bad it was funny. Truly Ugly Really is very, very bad, and not funny at all.)
8. What was the last movie you watched? (Writing in the Sand)
9. Favourite cult movie? (O! Lucky Man)
10.Most embarrassing favourite movie? (The Love Match. But then I’m not embarrassed by it.)
11. Hottest actor or actress? (I’m only talking Stamp in and around the time of Theorem , you understand).
12. The actor or actress most people say you remind them of. (Not hubris. I do not like HBC).

Details originally on flickr

miscellany

The postie has been bringing me a right bag of treats lately. Here’s a selection.

Big thanks to Lara, Felix, Jesse, Annushka, and Philippa!

The top pic shows some absolutely delicious Oxford Kitchen Yarn’s sock yarn in the plum colourway. The colour (which is not quite true in the photo) has a precise and very evocative childhood association for me — of blackcurrant jam mixed into rice pudding (thanks so much, L!) You see here also lovely buttons, badges and ribbons, as well as the Fantastical Reality Radio Show activity booklet which has brought me untold joy over the past few days. It has also made me strangely — nay, not a little obsessively — aware of ordinary household sounds. Mr B was bemused to discover me with a dictaphone, recording the sounds of making a pot of tea. And you’ll see from the last photo that I’m already putting Philippa’s red grossgrain to good use. More of this later.

Meanwhile, miscellaneous weekend things.
A sunday lunch of bread and beer:

I made the bread (unusual, this, as I don’t bake much) but not the beer. It is a dark mild – much lighter and more refreshing than it looks in that picture – delicious.

Also, I made a keyring with a bee in it. Just because I could.

did you know you can get a bag of blank keyrings for around 3p each on ebay? well you can . . .

Finally, something to see and something to avoid from the past couple of days.

ONE TO SEE: The Writing in The Sand, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, Amber Films (1991).
Having frequented the Side Gallery, cinema and cafe in Newcastle, and admiring the work of the Amber collective, I was looking forward to this DVD immensely, and it did not disappoint. Built out of of Konttinen’s fabulous photographs of the beaches and people of the North East, The Writing on the Sand is a miracle of editing: narrative-driven and highly cinematic. I am fond of British documentaries about leisure, and particularly seaside-associated leisure, but am often troubled by how treatments of this theme patronise their subjects. Lindsay Anderson’s O! Dreamland is a case in point (much as I love Lindsay Anderson). Written in the Sand, though, is a frank and affectionate, exuberant and celebratory portrait of people enjoying themselves outside. It’s really a great piece of work. And, as well as being a stunning document of the changeable and well-loved beaches and climate of the North East over the past 20 years; and providing an evocative, poetic critique of the effects of marine pollution, this short film also also conveys a very powerful message about the importance of public (and particularly recreational) space, and the threat to it from the wholescale privatisation of the British landscape — our beaches in particular. Eat that, Donald Trump (together with your plans for turning the dunes of Balmedie into golfing-hell)

I’m now very tempted to buy this book of Konttinen’s original photographs.

ONE TO AVOID:
Why, when I read the blurb (Michael Jackson connects with Marilyn Monroe on a Scottish island retreat for celebrity impersonators) did I think it might be a good idea to go and see Mister Lonely? Why, having disliked with a passion every other film I’ve seen by Harmony Korine did I still go and see it? I suspect the presence of Samantha Morton swung it for me, but that was two hours of my life I will never get back again. If I start going on about just how bad a film this was I’ll never stop . . .but it was seriously vacuous twaddle, made all the worse the worse for thinking that it actually had something to say. I soon got bored of noticing James Fox and David Blaine, or wondering what on earth Werner Herzog was doing there &c &c, and had to divert myself for the last hour and a half of the film (groan) by thinking about the design and construction of the lacy cardigan worn by the Shirley Temple impersonator. One final thing, though: by anybody’s standards, Diego Luna makes a terrible Michael Jackson.