Unraveled

I've been seeing all sorts of frothy knit scarves recently, using yarns with crazy confetti bits, glittery strands or fuzzy extrusions, and they gave me a powerful hankering to take up knitting again myself.

So last week I popped into Vancouver's own knit shop, "Unraveled," and managed to escape after dropping only $20 - enough for two scarves. Thought I'd make a festive one for a friend's birthday which is Dec. 4th. I had maybe a foot done when it occurred to me that I'd better get cracking if I wanted to have a six-foot scarf by the weekend. So I took my knitting with me to the movie theater.

I used to be able to knit with my eyes shut, so theater lighting wasn't really a problem. But after another foot of length and an hour of Good Night & Good Luck I decided I better inspect my work in case I'd dropped a stitch during a tense confrontation with the despicable Joe McCarthy. And I had. About 8" back, right on the outside.

Mess in hand, I went back to Unraveled this morning and asked the proprietress if I could do a sort of crochet-on-an-extra-stitch-up-the-side maneuver so I wouldn't have to take out 8 precious inches. She clucked sympathetically and told me that by the time I'd executed my clever fix (which would never look right) I could have ripped back and redone the 8 inches properly.

"Mistakes are part of the knitting process," she said. "Why do you think I called my store 'Unraveled'?"

Gahhh. I HATE redoing all that work.

Good Night & Good Luck

Saw George Clooney's movie about Edward R. Murrow this evening. Powerful and chilling.

Many parallels between McCarthy's accusing any critics as being "pinko" commie" or "commie sympathizer" to the Bush administration's squashing of dissenters as "unAmerican" and "unpatriotic" "aiding the terrorists" that began when they started ramping up for war in Iraq.

I still remember watching both Murrow and the totally creepy-scary McCarthy. I also remember the hearings in which the cherubic attorney with the bowtie, Joseph Welch, brought McCarthy down. I was only in 9th grade in 1954 and had never cared about current events until those hearings, which my family watched like the soap opera it was, growing increasingly fond of Mr. Welch... a real hero.

Murrow gave many powerful speeches in his day (and in the movie), but the only one I could find a transcript for was this:

"If we confuse dissent with disloyalty — if we deny the right of the individual to be wrong, unpopular, eccentric or unorthodox — if we deny the essence of racial equality then hundreds of millions in Asia and Africa who are shopping about for a new allegiance will conclude that we are concerned to defend a myth and our present privileged status. Every act that denies or limits the freedom of the individual in this country costs us the . . . confidence of men and women who aspire to that freedom and independence of which we speak and for which our ancestors fought."

Good night and good luck....

Drunk under the Streetlamp

When I read the news these days I am reminded of the story of the drunk who is on his hands and knees searching for his lost car keys under the street light. A passer-by tries to be helpful and asks, “Where do you think you lost them?”

“Back in the bar,” says the drunk. “But the light’s better here.”

As it is with the drunk, so it is with the Republicans in power. Today’s most important issues -- providing affordable health care to all, reversing global warming, creating peace in the Middle East, for example -- are so complex and difficult that this administration prefers to keep the public focused on the trivial – protecting the flag from being burned, keeping Terry Schiavo alive, teaching “intelligent design” in the schools.

Trying to protect embryos and fetuses from abortion or stem cell research is also, in the grand scheme of things, a tremendous waste of energy and resources. Ditto gay marriage.

I too would rather follow every thread on DailyKos as if by becoming more informed I were actually doing something meaningful. I'd rather answer (or generate) email than write a chapter in my mythical book. Maybe I'll just have another drink.

Fritz Richmond, John Herald RIP

My old friend from Club 47 days in Cambridge died last week of lung cancer. He was a school chum of Buz Marten's at Newton High School, and a sweet modest guy who played the heck out of the washtub bass.

He took the lowly washtub, a folky imprecise substitute for the upright bass, and transformed it into a real instrument by using a steel cable for its string and adapting a sturdy steel-lined leather glove for his left "fretting hand" so he could adjust pitches without slicing up his hand. Aside from the kind of whomping sounds that a tub makes you could hardly tell it wasn't the real thing.

He was similarly adept on the jug, although that needed no adaptation.

He was one of the original characters that made Jim Kweskin's Jug Band so popular. The picture on the left is one of John Cooke's taken at the 47.

When Garrison Keillor did PHC in Portland a few years ago, Fritz was one of his musical guests. I was so proud, even though I'd only run into him once since we moved here - at a Geoff Muldaur concert a few years back. Somehow our circles never crossed after those intense Cambridge years.

From John Foyston's obituary of Fritz in The Oregonian

"By playing the jub and the washtub, he reminded us that music was once homemade, a sharing among friends on a porch, not a corporate profit center. By making his own instruments and playing them with finesse and soul, he championed music of the most human scale."

- - - - - - -

John Herald, the wonderful guitar player and tenor from the Greenbriar Boys, another old friend (boyfriend briefly) also died this year. Suicide, evidently. So sad...

This is a picture from 1977, some twelve years after we hung out together. He played a couple of years ago at the White Eagle Saloon in Portland and I went to hear him. He seemed genuinely thrilled to see me and invited me up on stage to sing a duet with him - at this moment I don't remember what. As far as I know he never married, had no kids, never really made serious money as a musician after the 70s. I wonder if he didn't just say fuck it, life's too hard and too lonely...

Made it to DailyKos "Recommended Diary"

Wuhoo! Silly to be so excited, but I was. The Rec List is pretty illustrious company.

Of course, I cheated and used a bunch of quotes from Garrision Keillor as examples of first-class anti-Republican rants. It wasn't my own brilliant analysis of some arcane political tidbit. Still, I had my few hours of frontpage fame - 75 people recommended the diary and something like 50 wrote responses. Read it here...

Open letter to Garrison Keillor - 30 years!

Garrison -

I have been your devoted follower for more than 20 of your 30 years on the radio. Prairie Home Companion is my chore companion every weekend. I put on my headset, charge out to the garden and pull weeds to your stories. I wash the kitchen floor to Pat Donahue (or just dance around the kitchen). I hoot raucously and inappropriately to the rhubarb pie skit (my favorite) as I wheel my cart down the supermarket aisle.

It was therefore something of a shock to see you & Co. on TV last night. It was like looking at myself in the mirror after a couple of years without one. We have gotten older. We no longer look like my mental image of us.

I also found myself wanting to shut the doors of my TV cabinet so I could continue to hang out with my imaginary friends, Guy Noir, Barb and Jim, Lefty and Dusty, Carson Wyler and his creepy brother Larry, all of whom are ever so much more vivid in my mind than they could be on TV.

On the positive side, when you sat back on your stool to weave perhaps your thousandth Lake Wobegon tale, I witnessed how it is you create these vivid worlds for us. As you got into the story you closed your eyes and it was obvious that behind your eyelids, the entire scenario was laying itself out - and all you had to do was report the details of what you were seeing. Amazing to watch and hear.

Thank you for so much pleasure, so much silliness, so much great music, so much exultation of the common man/woman. My one regret: that you laid off the Republican bashing.

Stay well. The world needs you now more than ever.

TWO in ONE day! I'm on a roll...

I did two chores today that I've been putting off for months, and neither of them took long, and neither was difficult. I repotted a couple of potbound houseplants (ten minutes) and I washed my downstairs windows inside and out (one hour).

Both look soooo much better. Both made me feel soooo virtuous. When will I learn that it's much faster to just DO THE DAMN CHORE than to put it on to do lists and castigate myself for continually moving it over to the next day's list.

I also wrote in this blog - first time in over a month. What kind of writer never writes except on paid assignment or short emails? I want to learn how to post photos more easily - which I bet would just take a few minutes if I stopped wanting to know how and actually LOOKED IT UP.
Duh.

Evangelizing on Thanksgiving

Over on DailyKos there was an active discussion on Unitarian Universalism that resulted from a diarist mentioning a rightwing blogger who made fun of ND Senator Kent Conrad for his UU faith. This prompted a lot of questions and sharings about being a UU. Not surprisingly quite a few came out of the woodwork to participate, in fact I counted 35 who said they were UU and felt very positive about it. This prompted several people to exclaim that UUism sounded like just what they were looking for and they wanted to check out a congregation. Later I posted a diary myself, asking for UUs to identify themselves (with poll). 179 folks took the poll - 90 of whom were active or lapsed UUs, and 35 of whom were planning to check out a congregation soon.

I posted a note on the UUA PR listserve about this, suggesting the UUA would do better spending their ad dollars on DailyKos where hundreds of thousands of like-minded souls visit daily, rather than hoping to catch someone's eye on a Times Square marquee moment. Well, that got someone's attention, because this morning I had an email from the UUA pres' right-hand man wanting more info. This made me very happy.