a little red hen

Knitting and the "Startitis" Issue

This is Loom in Essence yarn, flower silk mole, naturally dyed with indigo.  Currently 44 inches long and about 20+ inches wide, garter stitch on #10 needles.  Two balls at 280 yards, garter stitch, will give me a commodious shawl for summer.  Using straight Bryspun needles, a "special plastic" claimed to be easier on arthritic hands.  Maybe, anything will make my right wrist hurt:  computering, knitting, slicing bread.

Last summer at Knitty City I saw someone knitting with same yarn in green, admired it, learned the texture created the lovely appearance, could be done in mindless garter.  Called the store where she'd bought it in Portland, Oregon (now carried by Knitty); its origin is a studio in Sedona, Arizona.  Phone was answered by woman who used to work in another yarn store there, one of the longtime ones-- near my daughter's home.  Indigo always speaks to me in all shades and permutations--fabric from India, Mexico.  It is lighter than it appears here, a first-day photo on my new digital, Canon Power Shot Elph, 800.* 

Startitis is a common affliction among knitters.  Sahara Briscoe, a local little red hen in Brooklyn, blogging at Sistah Craft, gave me the diagnosis.  Among projects waiting are those with highest priority-- sweater for Roxie (seen here on former camera) and an 18-inch Condom Amulet doll.  Every day I add a few more rows to my indigo shawl.  The true fantasy is my hope of using it this summer.   With global warming, that could stretch months ahead.

*Note to Claude, Blogging in Paris, who answered my questions about cameras:  yes, I settled on another small one, fits in purse, slightly more challenging.  In another life, my digital understanding will begin sooner and my camera competence be more like yours.

Societal Change by Women, Part Two, or what happened?

Old  age  transfigures or  fossilizes.-- Marie von Ebner Eschenbach (1830-1916), Austria's premiere woman author. 

This tiny 3 x 4-inch book was purchased for its pretty cover and size.*  Contents came second.  Partial to images in posts, this one offers its own text-for-all-attitudes.  The one I selected reflects my response to a speaker who had been brought to The Transition Network  on "Why the Media Ignore Us."  Myrna Blyth, former editor of Ladies Home Journal, founding editor of MORE magazine, had much to share with us. 

All of it was dark.  I will sum up:  old people do not count in the media because they have no bucks.  There!  Don't you feel refreshed and relieved to have a tidy anwer to such an important issue?  Did she have suggestions for change?  Give me a break.  This was not Maggie Kuhn.  I was looking at a very thin, very blonde over-sixty (?) former heavy hitter, quite stylish in black and white jacket, black skirt, black heels.

Yes, I had the audacity--she really did not want to call on me, one of two gray-haired women in the crowd, sitting in front row, taking notes--to suggest that it was significant her listeners were a new organization of older women in search of revised approaches to retirement.  She was unmoved.  Ohmigod, I thought, I remember women like this from my young life in New York.  Hardly ever met them because I mostly worked in the non-profit world.  Advertising, fashion magazines were their domains.  Periodically read about them.  They continue to exist.  Wasn't Meryl Streep in a movie recently?

To be fair, some of her talk was fascinating; she knows how to get audience attention, and I admire that.    She spoke of the restlessness among fifty-plus women who want a more active role in American culture as a result of their earlier activist experiences. But there was always contempt in her voice, as her snarky (she used that word a lot when talking about the internet and blogs) refernence to the way More magazine readers could always relate to the words "ageless" and "reinvention."  She found this amusing.  Be aware, if you began reading that publication at its start ten years ago, More is not aging with you.  "Celebrating women 40+" is where they have frozen their marker.

Myrna surprised me when she pointed out that "...no one talks about getting older."  Said she tried to get interest in a new magazine for widows.  I imagined there was a more sensitive woman struggling to get out.  But got over it when I read her mean-spirited blog, a column at the conservative National Review site. 

Finally I wondered why she did not validate older women as change agents--particularly ones like herself and many in the audience who no longer had to make a living, could give time as many TTN members do.  She was consistent:  it is all about the dollars, period.

I hope for my daughter's generation that other organizations emerge, ones that value the changes needed in this country.  Perhaps it will be both women and men who have the energy and passion.

*Next door to the South Street Seaport Museum in the New York harbor is a delightful 19th century shop with more letterpress books miniature and other.

Societal Change by Women, Part One

For your edification and in memory of MAGGIE KUHN, I post here an historic document from the organization she founded, the Gray Panthers.  It was published 14 years ago, following discussions on age stereotypes in the media at the 1981 White House Conference on Aging and was a call to action based on work done in the preceding decade.  As a feminist, the 1980s was a time I could believe that individuals could bring about real change in American society.  The impressive on-the-ground work done to produce this 74-page booklet is a testament to my belief.

In the 1970s, the late Lydia Bragger, led the Gray Panthers' New York network-- several chapters around the City--in the evaluation of radio and TV programming.  Known as Media Watchers, they contacted Gray Panther chapters around the country to evaluate radio and TV programming for against content. 

The result was that the National Association of Broadcasters added "age" to their code of subjects to be treated with sensitivity--along with race, sex, creed, and color. This Guide was then produced to outline how others could form groups for similar activity around cable radio and television.  Of course, there was no internet at the time.

In 2004, as part of re-invigorating the New York GP chapter, Judy Lear, Beni Price and I asked this question at our meetings, "How are older people represented in the media as part of the larger American society?"  We added print (newspaper, magazines, free papers, cartoons) and movies to TV and radio.  Our goal was to have responses lead us to the one medium we'd concentrate on within a new Media Watch effort.  To our surprise, depictions of older people in print were the most offensive. 

We ran a lively workshop, open to everyone, invited attendees to bring examples of offending print--newspapers to greeting cards.  That was the end of our effort:  this was not the world of Lydia Bragger, the membership was much older than her time, more interested in one-time protest activities. 

[Maggie Growls is a recent documentary about Maggie Kuhn, her remarkable life and how it merged with that of Gray Panthers.]

Weaving Under the Influence

I found my voice and my footing in my small work. It enabled me to build bridges between art, design, architecture, and decorative arts.”     Sheila Hicks, the fiber artist, posted about here in November '06, continues to have major influence on life in my space.  When Ron joined me on a second visit to her show at the Bard Gallery, he was completely enamoured by her work--and its size.

That was a particular surprise, since he'd been drawn in the past to making large, very large objects.  Most memorably, in the 1960s, an imposing coffee table with slate top that challenged us at each household move.  We left it in Baltimore.  Before I knew what had happened, he'd built a small tapestry frame, began experimenting.

Next, the extravgantly beautiful and image-filled catalogue from Hicks' exhibition became his favorite book.  Here it is, turned on its side (over two inches wide)with his paper bookmarks protruding to indicate those small weavings that particularly speak to him.  His fascination with color, texture please him greatly. Perhaps it's unintended consequences of women's influence--his seamstress mother, my years of knitting, Hicks' imaginative leaps.  Whatever--it has all come together in a creative life especially pleasing for its unexpectedness.   

                                                                                                                              

Resident Spinner Now Weaves

The people in this photo are doing ridgid heddle weaving.   Their looms are made by Kromski; Ron, seen here in his final class, has added fiber craft to his spinning.  Still does some knitting.  He's been eyeing these looms for a couple of years.  The rag rug weaving he did last fall at the John C. Campbell Folk School  brought him closer.  But it was something more modest in size, a loom that would also fit in our New York apartment, that he chose.

It's a challenge to find weaving instruction here but Linda La Belle is a very popular teacher at her studio, The Yarn Tree, in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn.  Ron took spinning lessons there last year.  After ten weeks, he produced a 6-foot sample of techniques now hung in our living room.  Here are sections from it-- using yarn he has spun.  His racquetball partners are as impressed as I am!

Lulu, your usual particular cat

Is this not an irresistible design for a catnip bag?  Would you purchase it while traveling, your cat left back home?  At the Mt. Pleasant Food Market in Washington, D.C., I bought it from Audia of Audia's Farm in Woodbine, Maryland--close to our own farm friends visted the day before.

Because Steve and I had tried to make tea with rose petals the night before, we asked Audia for advice.  She explained the ins and outs of sterilizing them first to get rid of the moth eggs, that only rose hips are used for tea--petals for sachets.  Now we knew why our experiment had not produced much flavor.

 

Jonathan, our other host, was disappointed that generously-blooming bushes in front of their house would not provide something culinary.  From my other life in Baltimore, I recalled making a cake from rose geranium petals, an 18th century recipe.  This link offers many recipes for cake, pudding, and more with geraniums.

Back to Lulu and the cute bag of catnip.  Totally ignored it!  We noticed it did seem to give off an onion-like odor.  After a few days, I dumped the contents, added other catnip from Port Townsend, Washington purchased for her on another trip.  Now she was interested.

Here's hoping Audia's Mint Tea will be a bigger hit with the humans.

Travel Southward

If you take the word of Arianna Huffington, "With each passing day, Washington, D.C. is turning into the Land That Time Forgot."   But personally,  a different story.  It can also be a respite from megacity.  Here's an homage to greenery from the car window as we left NYC to drive south.

Many agendas were ahead.  First, a visit to Ron's 85 year old sister recently moved to an enormous retirement community in suburban D.C.  We brought in Chinese take-out to her apartment.  She appreciated a respite from the usual task  of taking a number to await  a place at dinner.  She had resisted leaving her home of 40 years.  This is always a hard decision but serious physical problems made it necessary.

Spending time with her made me think again about how I'd make that choice...a discussion few are willing to have.  This became clear when last summer, when a little red hen tried to facilitate a conversation about where to live in what might be called "post retirement."  The following day we visited friends not seen in many years on a farm near D.C.  The matriarch here is the same age as Ron's sister, in far better physical shape, aging in place.  Grown children live with her in a modest house.  Another option for some.

In the 1970s our family had wonderful times here.  Our children learned how to bring in the cows, Ron drove a tractor, and my favorite memory:  crushing apples in an outdoor press for cider.  We were honored to be their "city cousins" from Baltimore.

On to the District and looking at pictures in The Phillips Collection where we met up with Mary Ellen Carew who blogs at Xtreme English.  We could exchange more this time than on her April visit  to New York.   Additional programs have been added to her cochlear implant device.  I took this picture of a Calder mobile mostly to see how it would turn out.

More talk over coffee then on to meeting up at a Thai restaurant with friends we'd be staying with. Food was fine but the place was too noisy for M.E. and me.  But the rest of our tour was a respite from New York's increasingly ringing sounds--from kneeling buses (ping, ping, ping) to brakes on the tourist buses as they slow down at Amsterdam and 125th.

Chester, the cat, greeted us from his imperial post at Steve and Jonathan's.  They live in a large, early 20th century row house in Mt. Pleasant.  Saturday we walked two blocks to the Farmers' Market where everything on sale was grown locally--including these stumpy carrots--delicious in our vegetarian feast.

How about this bakery that makes "D.C.'s best baguette," calls itself "Bread Line." Not sure if that's post-modern or what.   Other favorite sign, only one we saw on their dignifed street, belonged to our friends.  We talked politics late into the night. 

Final stop: Baltimore, our old neighborhood, Mt. Washington.  Was it a 19th century conceit to name high spots in the landscape "Mount"?  We brought the rain to the delight of Judy and Carol.  Here's my attempt to memorialize the end of a dry spell.  More political conversation, exchanges about aging.  Carol told me about a book by Jane Jacobs, "Dark Age Ahead."  I've ordered a used copy and will write about it later.

Judy, who knows much about things digital, sat me in front of her Mac--effectively moved my thoughts along re departing the PC environment.  Ron and I decided we could not leave the talk and put off our visit to Baltimore's best, the American Visionary Museum.  Next time.

Lost & Found, June in the Big Apple

Last week in Soho, this sign on a building on Prince Street reminded me of the brief life of the blog, "Found in NYC."  It was one of many projects by H.A. Page during her short residence here.   As part of her Master's in Media Studies at the New School, she enlarged our knowledge of women and blogging through her study, "Female Blogging: Issues of Identity, Relation, and Play."

With over 500 responses from women bloggers, the study did a content review of Mom blogs.  I was particularly interested in issues of motivation for blogging and the commercialization of blogs.  Women's homecrafts-- quilting, rug-hooking, knitting--and familial concerns such as child raising--have always been a magnet for entrepreneurial men dating back to the early 19th century.  A recent change: more women themselves, see www.BlogHer.com, appear to initiate and/or encourage the marketers. 

There is important work.  The subtitle, "Female Blogging as a Virtual Bridge of  the Self, " opens many doors of investigation. 

Though Hattie has left NYC, we can still connect with her through  Mother Pie, her primary elderblog (she is one of the younger among us) and experience the southwest through her prism.  Should be intriguing.

Who would have thought there were "hollow sidewalks" in Soho?  Here's another discovered yesterday.  Because it is less subtle than the one above, sharp contrast with the upscale display window display, I think its a more effective warning. 

                                            

It's a challenge to get attention in the Big Apple. Down the street a grafitti from 1989. Don't you wonder where Reve "the best artist" is now?  Maybe blogging?