bleedingyarnbrickhouseliberal

I read once in a biography of Aretha Franklin that when Aretha first saw what a skillful airbrusher could do to a photograph of her, she decided to say Fuck It (more or less) to dieting. What Aretha so glamorously asserts here the magical belief in a body of discourse: that an airbrusher’s lovingly spraying away her double chin on a two-dimensional version of her body makes Aretha feel as if her in-flesh body is twenty pounds lighter. Feeling like a natural woman, indeed!

Aretha’s photographic “diet” plan is philosophically equivalent to the challenge that Donna J. Haraway poses to us in her “A Cyborg Manifesto”:

“Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin?”

Being a biological boy who is trying to grow a girl’s skin through words written and spoken (OK, and occasional yards of choice cotton and wool) this idea of the body that reaches past the fascistic embrace of the epidermis is necessary to my survival.

As my loved ones know, I’ve been feeling a bit depressed lately; it is hard to be a single woman searching for boys who like boys. I’m someone who has always been happy in solitude, but solitude turns to loneliness when the skin that hugs me to sleep every day starts feeling too tight, when it becomes chokingly encapsulating. In the last few weeks, I’ve been feeling nervy in my own skin; I’m an 8-minute egg left in the boiling water for 9 minutes. My emotional yolks and whites are going to burst soon!

So this pic above is a portrait of the girl I want to be at this time, mid-October 2008. As Aretha’s airbrushed photo makes her feel thinner, producing this picture with my cavewoman skills with Adobe Photoshop has helped me feel like, not what I am right now, but what I would like to be. It combines two images: me wearing my newly arrived Barack Obama shirt from moveon.org with a pair of vintage Levi’s 701 “Student Fit” jeans, and the politically matchy-matchy blue-and-white banner created this past weekend at RISD by Knitting Nation Phase 5.

First, and as always, the jeans: these I bought for $24 at the American Rag Company in San Francisco this summer. I bought them even though they bear a personal fashion hate: intentional distressing. This kind of thing makes me very angry: taking a perfectly beautiful worn pair of jeans and mutilating it with rasp and sandpaper so it can resemble the season’s artfully distressed Martin Margiela jeans. ARRRGH!! But these particular jeans were so soft and worn, it was like a one-eyed, three legged puppy: I just had to adopt it. But I’d not worn it often because I hate the way the intentional rips on the thighs look. So I’ve actually been thinking about patching it, but with knit swatches—loose stockinette, maybe in intarsia. I like the idea of yarn sputtering out of holes in jeans. It would naturalize the tackily intentional shredding. Suddenly, it would be as if I’d ripped the jeans by falling down, and rather than bleeding flesh-bone-blood, I’d be bleeding mohair-wool blend.

While planning this patching project, kismetically, I saw the Knitting Nation Phase 5 piece. Founded by Liz Collins, a professor of textiles at RISD (and my dear comrade in fashion), Knitting Nation is a collective that produces both product and performance through the powerfully feminine art of knitting. This particular piece was created by the Knitting Nation out of mylar balloon-dotted white and blue textile on the roof of the RISD Museum’s Radeke Building. As it grew, it draped over the roof and down the backside of the building. When I saw it completed on Saturday evening, it moved me in some way that I couldn’t quite identify. I tried to verbalize it into words to Liz: “It reminds me of a cross between a garter belt and a spider web.” As soon as I uttered it, my own words started to weave a new skin around me. What moved me so was that the square red block with windows began to take on hips and legs. It’s not that I thought of the building as some humanoid giantess. Instead, I thought about my own self as a tiny and epidermal-bricked version of a red brick building. I thought about how great it would be the ultimate big girl, the true “Brick House,” as Rick James would say: the Radeke Building, who has a gang of knitters knitting her a garter belt dotted with balloons, better with which to fly away, like Joan Crawford in Our Dancing Daughters.

A building that’s like a teeny flapper? A skinny femme thirtysomething faggot who is like an annex of a museum? Why not? In the 1988 film Bull Durham, Susan Sarandon’s baseball groupie supreme, Annie Savoy, persuades an embarrassed minor-league pitcher to wear her garter belt under his uniform:

“They’re garters. They’re gonna hug your waist and snuggle and dangle off your thighs and buns in such a wonderful way it’ll help you see things differently.”

I want to be a kind of girl who is like a building that houses art, artlovers, artmakers. I don't know what that means in flesh, but I'll find out...or learn. I want to see my own tight-skinned life in a different, more expansive way. I sooooo wish I could borrow the Radeke Building’s knitted garter belt!

moveon.org

barackobama.com

joony’s economic stimulus plan

Like a war wife, my solution to the recession and shitty economy is to spend pennies while feeling like spending millions: self-delusion through handicraft.

As I wrote here a couple months ago, I’ve had this long-term project of knitting myself a version of the beautiful cobwebby cardigan from Rodarte’s Spring 2008 collection. As shameful as it is to admit, I hadn’t done a single click of the needles since then...until last week, when I started and finished the damn thing in about 8 days.

In between, I actually had a couple chances to touch the cardigan in person, once in New York at Opening Ceremony back in April, and then again at the Barneys in San Francisco a few weeks ago. Each time, of course, I was filled with a desire to just take the thing off the rack and run, because the price tag is roughly $1200. I began the project of knitting up a version of the cardigan because of simple sad economic reality: I’d have to go without rent one month to buy this sweater.

When I first saw the price tag for the sweater, I was filled with a predictable sense of indignation. For $1200, you’d expect the sweater to mitosis itself into a pair of pants, double as an MP3 player, or at least have, as Thelma Ritter says in “All About Eve,” “diamond collars, gold sleeves.” But this sweater has no such tricks. From a knitter’s point of view, it is a simple babe: of standard stockinette stitch, no ribbing or complicated cable work, and a basic stripe pattern. To get the huge hole-y effect, you just have to use very thin yarn with very fat needles. A sweater that looked like it could be pretty easily hand-knit that costs over a thousand dollars? Is this cardigan a symbol of what is totally fucked up with capitalism?

Well, yes and no. The experience of knitting this sweater has actually given me a full appreciation of the original. My feeling now is: to charge $1200 for a mohair cardigan that looks like it was hand-knit by a giant spider on acid is indeed very sensible.

When I finally cast on the first row of the piece, it was activity for the bedbound: I caught a nasty summer cold. Laid up in bed, my throat filled with phlegm and delirious, I popped in the first tape of a Korean drama called “Jogang-Jichuh Club” (roughly: “First [as in concubinage rank] Wives’ Club,” about mismatched marriages that were falling apart because of socio-economic reasons), and began knitting this overdue sweater. Knitting and purling, I began to think about the fantastical and bizarre translation that happens between human labor and money. I started to think, was it really so crazy to tag as $1200 a sweater that was probably hand-crafted by a gang of Asian ladies, who hopefully did not go blind(er) in the process of knitting? In this day and age when $20/ barrel gasoline feeds cars the size of small apartment units, does the phrase “impractical spending”—or “splurge”—even have a sensible meaning anymore?

OK, so I can’t right now spend $1200 on a cardigan, but if I were an heiress, I would, because the handiwork of the knitting ladies are worth it. Knitting the pieces and seaming them together takes actually a lot of more thought than it appears. You have to handle the pieces delicately, and it takes a bit for your fingers to get used to maneuvering spiderweb-thin yarn on needles the size of flag posts. If it took me—a mediocre knitter—a week to finish this, how long would it take a skilled knittress to do it? Let’s say, maybe a couple days? Who are we to say that her two day’s worth of ladyfinger work is not worth at least half the retail price?

Make no mistake though, when I say “worth” I do so in a kind of hypothetical, fictional realm, because I’m sure that the knittresses were not paid $600 a garment (I hope they were). But come on, $1200 is not bad if you think about the cardigan as a gallery piece. The finished cardigan falls and puffs out just so around the body so that you feel like a little moth, hyperaware of the fragility of your own flesh. In this, the experience is similar in a weird way to wearing a corset, but the difference is that wearing the cardigan, you are comfortable. The piece is a powder puff, so mass-wise, it doesn't even feel like you are wearing anything. But you become so sensitized to your limbs because a wrong move can shred the sweater like wet toilet paper. You feel as loosely knitted as the cardigan next to your skin. The Mulleavy sisters of Rodarte cite Japanese horror films as a reference for the collection that housed the cardigan. I have to squint my imagination a bit to get that reference, but I love it that they challenge my brain to do that. That is art to me.

So even though I ended up spending about $40 for the yarn, it makes me feel good to think that my days of fingering yarn and plastic is worth $1160. Having knitted through, I no longer feel resentful of the price tag on that gorgeous original cardigan. In fact, the next time I’m in Barney’s, maybe I will, in the style of 19^th Century salon-goers—or actually, more like Rindy Sam, the Cy Twombly-loving fan (who is also Asian!) who left her red lipstick stain on his painting last year—go up to the rack and give the price tag of that Rodarte cardigan a good, long, wet kiss.

In the spirit of DIY femininity, I now give you the lipstickvomit pattern of the hurl-couture spiderwoman cardigan. Enjoy!

This particular pattern is for someone who is a size 10 above the waist and size 0 below...

Also, be prepared to inhale a lot of mohair. You will be covered with loving, pawing traces of knitting.

The YARN should be very thin gauge, basically tapestry-thread thickness that would regularly be worked on needles US 3 to 7. I used: Alchemy “Haiku” (silk-mohair; Blue/ purple), one ball, $21; Karabella “Gossamer” (mohair; white-gray-glitter) one ball, $8; Twinkle “Kid Mohair” (wool-mohair; peach), one ball, $6.30.

The NEEDLES should be very large, US 17. I like the look and feel of the Japanese “Clover” needles that are made of bamboo, but actually the yarn usually likes them too and the stitches have a tendency to stick. So with this project, I think it’s better to go with slip-&-slide plastic needles.

BACK PANEL: 18” top, 20” bottom, 28” length from top to bottom : Cast on 60 sts of the white/glittery yarn. This will be the bottom of the cardigan. Knit some rows (no ribbing) until you feel like changing color. For me, this was around 6 inches.

Switch to the peach yarn, knit a few inches, about half the amount of the white.

Then switch to the blue/ purple yarn, for another few inches. The width of the striping is up to you. I did about 6” (12) rows of the blue/purple then switched to about 2” of peach then 4” of white, then back to a few of blue. But the striping pattern should be intuitive...you should stripe as wide or thin, regular or irregular as it feels right to you.

When the piece gets to be about 18” (36 rows), begin decreasing: decrease one stitch at the beginning of the row (by knitting the first two stitches together)and another at the end (knit last two stitches together. This is a total two stitches decreased per row. Do not decrease for another 2” (about 4 rows); decrease again on 5^th row. We’re only decreasing 2 inches, which is 6 stitches, which means we only have to decrease twice more.

During the decreasing, you may want to do some striping between the peach and white-glitter yarn. I did about two rows of the peach with the first decrease, then switched to the white-glitter till the end. I thought about the peach as a kind of transition yarn between the blue and the white-glitter.

Stop decreasing at 54 St. Knit until the entire piece is around 28” (56 rows). If you go a bit over, or if you’re tired and stop a bit earlier, no biggie.

FRONT RIGHT PANEL: 8” top, 10” bottom, 28” top to bottom: Cast on 30 st. Knit, using the same intuitive (LAZY?) striping pattern until the piece is about 18” (36 rows).

Begin decrease: decrease one stitch by knitting the first two stitches together, knit row. Again, only a 2” (6 st) decrease so spread decrease out reasonably. But remember to only decrease at the BEGINNING of the kt row. The decreased end of the row will constitute the “draped” collar of the cardigan. Stop decrease when row is 24 st.

Knit until piece is around the same length as the back piece.

FRONT LEFT PANEL: same dimensions as right panel: Repeat the same knitting for FRONT RIGHT PANEL. When ready to decrease, decrease at the END of the row: knit the LAST two stitches together, so that the draped collar is on the correct side of the panel.

SLEEVE: 20” at the shoulder, 11” at cuff (to be halved, because the sleeve piece will be folded and joined when completed): In blue/purple, cast on 60 st. This will be the shoulder seam-joint of the sleeve. Knit first row, then purl the next row. On the third row, begin decreasing one stitch on each side (knit together first and last pairs of the row, subtracting a total of two stitches per row). Purl next row without decrease. Decrease two stitches every other row (so, on each knit row).

Knit until the piece is about 16” (48 rows). Switch to peach for two rows, then switch again to white/glitter till the end. The white/glitter part should be around 8” (24 rows). Stop decreasing when the row is about 11” (33 st). Continue knitting until the entire sleeve is 24” (72 rows).

GET IT TOGETHER: The process of putting the sweater together is much like its final look—it will feel like sewing together cobwebs, but hopefully you are black widowy enough like me! Even though it is tricky, I suggest NOT wet-blocking the pieces, because wetting the mohair will take the float out of the yarn, and take away its signature pussyfurshedding quality. (If you don’t want the sweater to shed on you, you can certainly “kill” it by wet-blocking it) Instead, stretch out the seams to be joined so you can get a clear view. I used the white-glitter yarn for seaming because it is of a slightly heavier gauge than the blue/ purple. Without blocking, it is nearly impossible to matress-stitch the thing so I simply use a whip-stitch (sometimes called “African stitch”). It is not as sturdy, but it is more sturdy than you’d think. Plus, the whole weave of the piece is vulnerable anyway, so it actually gives the piece continuity to use a “weaker” stapling technique.

The sleeves: fold the piece in half lengthwise and seam up the length, lay them aside. Seam the front panels to the back piece first by joining the tops of the three pieces. The seam should be about 5”, leaving a few inches for the flap-away collar.

Lay the sleeve against the joined torso of the sweater. The sleeve’s whipstitched side should be facing south. When you lay the thing out, the sleeve should just lay perpendicular to the shoulder-line of the torso. This is the way that kimono sleeves are joined; when the sweater sits on your body, it will limp down and give you chicly sloped shoulders. The first stitch should be the triple-cross point where the outer edges of the front and back panel meets the FOLDED edge/ corner of the sleeve (the side of the sleeve that was not whip-stitched). Safety-pin the bottom hem together so that the once the sleeve is joined, you don’t accidently end up with either front or back panel longer than the other. Join the sleeve to the back, and then the front of the torso.

Once one sleeve is joined to the torso, seam the sides of the sweater. Repeat for the other side, and then you’re done, ready to put on the thing over a ragged-out concert t-shirt and go have some drama!

knit a sweater (,) girl!

I started knitting for the same reason I started smoking at age 16: I wanted to look like a chic bad girl. To this day, I still love the way my wrist moves around the cig dangling off extended fingers. I decided to teach myself how to knit a few years ago, not because there was a plethora of what I find to be kind of inane trendy knitting books (I won’t names or titles, but they seemed to be basically self-help books disguised as hipster guides) but because I learned that Joan Crawford used to knit compulsively on the sets of her movies. Crawford claimed that knitting calmed her nerves, but her friends suggested that she used the click-clacking of the needles as a strategy of bitchery: to annoy and distract co-stars she hated. I love this idea of conceptualizing a craft traditionally associated with grandmothers or grandmother-aged bachelorettes, as an aggro-femme act. Yarn reminds me of the slyness of clawing cats; the needles themselves are blatantly weapon-like. In Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities,” Madame Defarge knits up a hitlist of aristocrats headed for the guillotine. In her story “Devil Finds Work,” the British mystery writer Ruth Rendell creates a character who kills her annoying husband (who is annoyed by her obsessive knitting habit) with a sharpened steel knitting needle—driven straight into his skull. Knitting is a dangerous craft that creates dangerous girls.

When I knit for myself, I imagine that I am creating myself as a sweater girl. This doesn’t just refer to the fact that I am a girl who makes sweaters, but it refers to the specific feminine skin I am knitting for my body. “Sweater Girl” is an American sexual persona of the 1940s and 50s. It named saucy girls who wore tight sweaters that emphasized their breasts. The filmmaker Ed Wood famously fetishized the angora sweater as a major medium of his transvestite identification. The original sweater girl was most likely Lana Turner, who cemented her fame as a Hollywood sexpot and bad girl (Turner developed a penchant for fast and dangerous boys, one of whom was eventually murdered by her lesbian daughter). As a teenager, Turner appeared for a few minutes in the 1937 film, “They Won’t Forget," bouncing across the screen in stiletto heels and a tight sweater, her breasts bouncing up and down. Interestingly enough, “They Won’t Forget” was not a sex-comedy but a serious film about lynching: a girl (Turner’s character) is raped and killed and the suspects and potential lynching victims are...a Jewish teacher and an African-American janitor. The sexuality of the sweater girl originates from a crossroad of race and power.

Then there is my favorite sweater girl of all time: Kim Novak in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo.”



Novak famously plays a double role in the film—as the icy blonde Madeleine, and then, the earthy, raw Judy. Judy is a sweater girl: in contrast to the high-toned Madeleine, she’s a working-class girl who admits to a clueless Jimmy Stewart that she’s been “picked up” before (by guys). But the costume: Novak wears a tight sweater but clearly, no brassiere. It’s kind of amazing to see a film from 1958 in which the nipples of a major Hollywood star is on brave and reckless display—thanks to some blue-green wool. The feminine sexuality enabled by the sweater is a weird one, despite its obvious exploitive effects. Even though it allows male oglers to cop a peek at a woman’s nipples, the sweater itself is always totally opaque. Not only that, it is often opaque and prickly. If the knit is supposed to simulate a second skin for its feminine wearer, and if the sweater is made of angora or mohair (as it often is) then the vulnerability of the nipples have been given a kind of thorny, burry life. The sweater girl sweater is the unsupplicant cousin of the wet t-shirt. If ogling boys want to eroticize the nipples of a sweater girl beyond pure voyeurism, then they must brave a tongueful of itchy wool. The nipples of a sweater girl are simultaneously revealed and armored by the angora-mohair sweater.

So when I knit, I feel like a bad girl in the tradition of Madame Defarge and Kim Novak. Right now, I’m working on a cardigan that I spotted back in January: a Rodarte cardigan that is hand-knit out of multi-colored and tinsel-flanked mohair yarn. To achieve that huge, functionless weave I’ll use very thin yarn with a fat-ass needle (US 17).



This cardigan is actually not a traditional sweater girl sweater: it’s not tight, it’s not a pull-over. But I like that it is made out of mohair, and looks super-itchy: it’s a cross between a cobweb and a porcupine. And its designers Kate and Laura Mulleavy admit that they've been inspired by Japanese kawaii ("cute") culture and horror films. I find Asian cuteness and horror to be appropriate inspiration for a nouvelle-sweater girl. I went through a whole knitting phase of working only with milky cashmere blends, but I think I’m over it now. I’m totally loving the itchy bitchiness of angora and mohair. I imagine that rashy discomfort of the braless 50s sweater girls and would like to replicate it on my body—or at least cite it a bit. I would of course wear the cardigan with my standby t-shirts, but my arms at least would feel the prickly femininity of the yarn. But I’m so lazy: I haven’t actually begun knitting the thing yet. (I’ve made the swatches...) I’m still writing the pattern, which is my favorite activity of knitting: converting measurements of the garments into stitches. It’s rather like lo-fi pixilation. I’ve measured my favorite cardigan, and multiplied them by the stich/inch ratio of the yarn I’ll be using. To figure out the final size of the shoulder seam, I have to recall geometry--how do you figure out the hypontenuse of a triangle? And it’s kind of like reading: breaking down the thing I love, and then converting it into another language, and then building it up again, to be wrapped around my body. I’m going to try to finish the damn pattern this weekend, and hopefully I’ll be done with this sweater and be able to upload some pictures of your Joony Schecter actually wearing the thing...maybe by July? Oh, angora in the summertime...how masochistic is that? Feminine masochism can be romantic—provided that the girl in question is talented in brain, imagination, or handiwork. But because I am not Billie Holiday, Lauryn Hill, Judy Garland, Sylvia Plath, or even Amy Winehouse, my level of feminine masochism stays in a very small level: knitting in the summertime. (OK, so it’s not officially summer yet; but the temperature today is as if it wanted to be summer—warm and sunny and threatening balminess.) There is something self-flagellating about constructing a garment out of wooly stuff during a season of show-offy near-nudity. While others are scheming ways to strip off layers, I’ll be scheming ways to add layers on—layers that will give me sweater girl-nipples made out of itchy-witchy angora and mohair.