Yarn Bombers, Wooly Taggers and Guerilla Knitters

It was way back in the good old days of 2008 that I first learned of them. I was in San Francisco to give a scholarly presentation at  the Popular Culture Conference at the time.

The conference was a wild event. Popular Culture includes, well, almost everything. Somebody does it, whatever it is, and they were all there, gathered together in the town that defines Popular Culture. Lots of people dressed as their favorite Star Trek characters, lots of sessions about Spider Man, lots of research papers about Professional Wrestling. The guide book listing all the sessions, times and locations was three inches thick for a four-day conference. There on page 472, down in the corner, was my session: Screenplay Writing in the College Composition Classroom.

It went well. But after all the preparation and planning for my presentation, I found that the best part of the conference was everything else. I spent day after day enjoying all the other presenters' scholarly talks on things I would not have thought could be scholarly topics. One that I attended was "Post-Modern Clothing Design and Marketing." A member of the panel  had failed to show up, so I stepped in and gave an impromptu talk about making shoes, with the self-made shoes on my feet as examples.

But what made that session most memorable, what ultimately changed my life, was a slide show about the Church of Craft.

























 The Church of Craft believes that people should make things. That's it. No hymnals, no ceremonies, no prayers or dogma, just handcrafts. Rather than listen to a preacher, their spiritual convocations involve sitting in a circle in somebody's living room, the coffee table piled with tools and materials and, usually (from what I can tell),  cookies. They just get together and make stuff and talk and eat cookies. They figure this is  enough spiritual enlightenment for anybody.

Every major city around the world has a branch now: Houston, Tokyo, Athens, Des Moines--the photo above is in Prague--and the list goes on. They are everywhere, and they pose a threat to America's Corporate Value System. They seem peaceful enough, but as I listened intently to tales of heroic exploits of the great Crafters of yore, my spine tingled. This, I thought, this is how the Industrial Revolution ends, not with a bang but with a crochet hook.

I guess any fanatical sect is going to have a dark side, and the Church of Craft does not keep theirs a secret. They are so reckless, so driven, so willing to risk everything to spread their faith that, well, I'll let these photographs tell the story...

Portland

London

Montreal

Perth

Saskatoon

The Black Forest

What began as a seemingly harmless social organization has grown to be a worldwide assault on the very foundations of our lives. They are all around us, quietly undermining the institutions that we Americans have come to take for granted: television and shopping. Sometimes their gatherings take a turn for the dark side, and the church will go out in the wee hours of night, raking the coals of hell with their knitting needles. People wake in the morning to find that they, their houses, their pets, their bicycles or their trees have been "yarn bombed." All of a sudden their entire world is covered in coozies.

For the remainder of my visit in San Francisco I kept noticing knitting in the oddest places. They--the Guerilla Knitters, the Yarn Bombers, the Wooly Taggers --call their nocturnal creations by many names, but one of the more prevalent is "coozies." I saw a bicycle that had been parked in the same place for too long fall victim to the wooly taggers: its handlebars were tagged with a nice warm wool handlebar-coozie. Trees, telephone poles, and handrails are particularly defenseless when a gang of yarn bombers goes out late at night looking for something that will stay still long enough to get bombed.

In their own fuzzy way, the Church of Craft is offering the world a new vision, a  radical, fanatical, twisted (spun?) vision of what life is all about. They seem to believe that it's not about gasoline or electricity, not even about power at all. They think it's about knitting.

I returned from San Francisco a changed man. The very next semester I began  to preach the new gospel, thinking of ways to work the Church of Craft into my writing assignments. I had high hopes for one student, Beatrice. While the rest of my students spent their class time texting, Beatrice sat on the back row knitting. She was covered in knitwear from afro to All Stars, and seemed to be as placid and peaceful as a summer breeze, never perturbed by the small stuff like homework and grades. Beatrice operated on a higher plane than the rest of us. Unfortunately, when I assigned a research paper on the Church of Craft, Beatrice disappeared. I later learned she got pregnant and her parents  had dragged her out of that school. I'm sure her kid will never want for baby booties.

If you do a little research, you'll find that Church gatherings are unevenly mixed: mostly women, not as many men. I suspect they'd get more guys to join if they changed the name to something more male-appealing, such as "Concealed Carry Class of Craft" or "Chain Saw Soul." But maybe the issue is something more inherent in male-ness itself. Guys tend to do forms of craft that make it hard to keep up a conversation, and even harder to keep metal shavings and sawdust from getting into the cookie jar. But the Church of Craft remains at least ostensibly open to all comers, regardless of spiritual or mechanical preferences. Their single, all encompassing commandment is "Do Your Own Thing, but Don't Burn the Cookies."

Me, I would love to live in a world where everybody just did their own thing. It gives me no thrill to see a row of people who look like little business clones, dressed for success, or mile after mile of men in chinos and polo shirt. People who have a "my own thing" to do are far more interesting. The interesting people in life are like the interesting places, interesting foods, and interesting experiences: unexpected, surprising, richly textured. These are also the characteristics that make for great stories, great life and, if you think about it, great coozies.




To view some of the author's own creations ... visit his shop, Shibumilife, at ETSY.com.

Orcs R Us

“Do you know how the orcs first came to be? They were elves once. Taken by the dark powers, tortured and mutilated, a ruined and terrible form of life.”
          

The more I learn about nuclear power, genetic modification of foods, and the rise of technology in almost every corner of life, the more I believe we are torturing and mutilating ourselves. It would be hard to create a more perfect hell than the one we are moving toward. Endless war, where everybody is a potential enemy. Guaranteed cancer—unless you do what you are told and get the magic pills. Already, any cell phone can be activated without the owner knowing, anytime Big Brother wants to listen.... the perfect panopticon.


The "panopticon" was originally an idea for prison design. In 1975 a guy named Michel Foucault had the idea that prisons could save money by using an architectural design in which a central tower was glazed with one-way windows. Guards watch through the windows, but prisoners never know whether or not there is a guard watching them, because the windows are one-way.  The resulting psychological uncertainty meant that prisoners would tend to play it safe. Fewer guards would be needed, fewer problems.


Cell phones have made America a giant panopticon. With a cell phone in every pocket, and making no secret of the fact that they can be monitored, you get the prison effect on an entire population--and the people pay you for their imprisonment! It's a sweet deal if you are into unlimited power.... The only thing better would be phone implants.

Now, into this environment, add constant pollution, radiation, genetically-modified foods, and you end up with birth defects, cancer, a million drugs to "treat" a million sicknesses, and you have created a perfect hell right here on earth. The icing on that rotten cake is the cult of the "beautiful people."  Whom to you serve?

High-Allicin Garlic Butter the LastCathar Way

I’ve been all about garlic for some time now. I’ve always heard that garlic has many medicinal characteristics, and I can attest to some. When I get sick, a clove or two eaten raw is usually all it takes to cure me. I grow garlic in my garden and use it in a million recipes. One clove of garlic has four (4) calories. That means that the flavor any recipe gains from this ingredient comes at a very low cost in terms of calories, not to mention that garlic has zero fat and zero cholesterol.

Recently I read a paper on the process that forms allicin in garlic. Allicin is the ingredient that gives garlic its smell, but it is also the ingredient that gives garlic its magical healing and preventive powers. It seems that allicin is only formed when a clove is chewed, cut, or crushed. Various ingredients of the garlic are then released, and they combine to form allicin. This is thought to be garlic's defense mechanism against pests. Allicin is quick to lose its potency and easy to destroy. Microwaving completely negates all of garlic’s health benefits. Cooking in an oven does the same damage, but not nearly as fast: baking for 60 minutes leaves no measurable allicin in the garlic. 

So I have devised a recipe that I believe maximizes the health benefits of garlic. The preparation is fast and easy--if smelly--but it is designed to work with garlic's powers, not against them: it takes into account all the above characteristics of garlic, resulting in a wonderful and versatile spread for toast or vegetables like squash, spinach, kale....

After removing the skins from two heads of garlic, crush the cloves. You should end up with a big pile of very smelly crushed garlic. Cover this pile and let it set for ten minutes. The sources I read suggested ten minutes was enough time for the formation of allicin to be complete. 

While the crushed garlic does its thing, soften one stick of butter, and heat two tablespoons of olive oil in a shallow frying pan.

Fry the garlic in the oil. Garlic burns fast, so keep it moving in the hot oil. The idea is to cook the garlic as rapidly as possible until it is soft, and avoid overcooking, in order to make the garlic palatable while minimizing damage to its allicin content. The crushed garlic is ready when it just begins to brown. Take it off the heat, add the softened stick of butter and mix together using a fork, until the shreds of crushed garlic are evenly distributed in the mashed butter. Cover and store in fridge.

The resulting garlic butter will be both flavorful and healthful, and should remain good for a week. It is wonderful on toast, on corn, on veggies...

This basic way of preparing garlic can work in a number of recipes, with or without the added butter. Just be aware that any additional cooking will tend to reduce the effectiveness of the allicin in the garlic.

For an excellent overview of the current research on garlic’s health benefits (and the occasional unsubstantiated claims of same) visit Oregon State’s website.

 and now that I'm thinking about it, I wonder what would happen if I left out the butter and just used the garlic as a spread all by itself? I'll let you know how it goes...

Last of the Cathars

Once, long ago, I set out to find any remaining adherents of Catharism, the ancient Christian religion that was wiped out by the Catholic church almost a thousand years ago. When I say “wiped out” I mean exactly that. The Catholics spent over one hundred years in crusades against them. Cathars worshipped Jesus but did not do so the Catholic way, with big buildings and fancy outfits. They believed in open-air worship. After eventually defeating the last Cathar stronghold at Montsegur in 1244, the Catholics invented the Inquisition as a way of rooting-out any remaining adherents. 

I figured if anybody was a practicing Cathar now, they would probably have some kind of annual get-together at Montsegur on the day Cathars had celebrated as Christ’s birthday—March 13. So I flew to France, drove to Montsegur, climbed high up in the Pyrenees to the peak of “le pog,” and spent the day freezing my butt off in the ruins of the castle. Nobody showed up. 

Since that day, I have considered myself the Last Cathar.

Some time after the above adventure, I learned that there is in fact a very active Cathar community in France. Just as I expected, every year they gather at Montsegur, but their annual event takes place on March 16, the day Montsegur fell to the Catholics. I had gotten there ahead of them. But I get to keep the title. They’re celebrating the wrong day.

June 6, 2012

Today, diversity is on my mind. God made diversity. People don't seem to be able to afford it. We aim lower. We unify and minimize and standardize and mass-produce. But there I go saying “we.” On my own shores, I don't minimize or standardize much, but I look around and see it happening, and then my shoreline dissolves and I find myself standing in line in some air-conditioned bank lobby, walking on a bleak cement sidewalk, or staring dumbly at the magazines and candy bars in some grocery checkout. All these places have been designed to keep people in order, and I'm people, too, I guess. So I have to say “we” sometimes, but it seems to me that “we” and “me” are two different people, and one of us is out of order.
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One summer while I was in college, I worked as a peach-picker, at an orchard on a hillside overlooking Lake Dardanelle near Russellville, Arkansas. Mornings were spent walking tree-to-tree, picking the peaches that looked ready, filling the owner's ancient Ford flatbed with battered wooden crates of fresh peaches. Afternoons were spent under the rusty tin roof of the sorting shed, where the morning's pick was sorted and packed. Based on size, peaches were rolled down a chute into a nicer, slightly newer crate. There were four chutes: Small, Medium, Large, and Bad. Bad peaches had a gouge or a rotten place or some other unsellable flaw. When these crates filled, they were loaded onto another truck, to be hauled to the train station or a local grocery store. 
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Us workers could have all of the bad peaches we wanted; the rest went to the local churches for distribution to the needy. 
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Now, I mention this because I go through life being sorted pretty much the same way those peaches were. I feel like my value is determined with only a glance, except instead of  physical dimensions, it is economic dimensions that count: do I have a Small, Medium, or Large bank account. But I must be none of the above, because I always seem to end up rolling down that fourth chute. 
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Like I was saying, God made diversity. The grocery stores of Russellville had nice little displays of perfect peaches. But you could step outside and look down the street, where shabby people were milling around at the back of the church. Blessed were the poor, who got the assorted “bad” peaches, the ones that wouldn’t sell. Their lunches (and mine too, that summer) were not so predictable. 
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Let me close with my only other peach story: As I said, the orchard had been located on a hillside above Lake Dardanelle where, as it happened, a nuclear power plant—Arkansas Nuclear One—was under construction. All summer as we walked through the orchard picking peaches, we could look down the slope and watch the bulldozers and the cement trucks below, going to and fro in the earth, pushing dirt up and down in it. Almost twenty years later I was telling my peach-picking story to a friend, and she got all excited. She knew something I didn't. She had been a news reporter at the time, and had interviewed the owner of the orchard. She told me this: shortly after Nuclear One was fired-up, the peach trees started dying. Within months the entire orchard was dead. The owner sued the power company. The lawsuit made headlines (thus the interview) but ultimately he lost the case, since he was unable to prove beyond a shadow of doubt any connection between the nuclear power plant and his dead trees.
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So I guess I have to admit that there are times when “we” can be a very worthwhile point of view to espouse. But the owner of that orchard got stuck with being an “I.” We all did.
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