notageek

“It seems bizarre to me that anyone would design an appliance that sounds like it has indigestion when it’s functioning properly.”

All hail the coffee-maker!

In a corner of my drawer at the pharmacy, I have a pair of very small circular knitting needles and a ball of yarn I unravelled from a thrift-store sweater. I pick them up and work a few rows on especially low-volume days. Knitting calms and soothes me, with the added benefit of a soft, pretty product—sometimes even one that’s wearable. Also, its products don’t require dishwashing afterwards.

I am not an artist. I’m not even an artisan. Much as I learned to be a pretty good home cook—by close observation, by trial and sometimes catastrophic error, by extensive background reading—I have become a pretty good knitter. Like a weekend athlete, I’m just skilled enough to recognize what takes extraordinary effort and talent to execute. I have a much deeper appreciation of those crochet-cotton lace bedspreads my aunt used to make.

My mom is a quilter, so she’s trained my eyes for the difficult, the beautiful and the stunningly-executed in quiltwork. I know to look for the fine, even stitches, the squared corners, the repetition of motifs and the play of colour. It’s mesmerising, even though it’s a language I don’t entirely understand. Like knitting, it’s a low-technology production method traditionally practiced by women, often with ornate embellishment of objects with mundane purposes and until recently underappreciated as an art by people who didn’t practice it. I think the public has a better understanding of the skill and control necessary to lathework, or oil painting on canvas, than it does of that demanded by prepping, spinning and manipulating fibers.

Anyway, this is all to say that the use of modern artistic sensibilities and messages in conjunction with traditional fiber arts techniques can be powerful, even stunning, and as traditionally female-dominated media, I think their anthropologic and historical examination can shed light on women and power in traditional societies, the need for expression, the importance of the ordinary and a bajillion other interesting things.

Or, we can have crap like this:

The exhibit presents her bold, painterly, and abstract expressionist visual aesthetic as an outgrowth of her exploration of the quilt and the bed as emotionally and psychologically charged sites.

Actually, the exhibit presents ugly, unbalanced and lumpy quilts with no apparent unifying themes other than large, sloppy stitching, haphazard piecework and automated machine-quilting. They co-opt skilled women’s traditions and art’s language, and do justice to neither.

Radka Donnell offers an intriguing explanation why art historians, art critics and major arts institutions have, by and large, not taken quilts seriously as an art form.

I have a better one: maybe it’s because your quilts suck as art, and they also suck as quilts.

I realise that I’m more likely to remember the long stays and the especially grave prognoses. Still, a quick search of the patient names I can remember from the April rotation shows that most of those are now deceased.

This Googlestalking brought to you by newspaper headlines, seen on the walk to work, that unfortunately did turn out to be about the patient’s memorial.

What I did not say to a patient today:

Should I hang up now, or would you like to continue insulting me?

What I did say to a co-worker today:

You should have contacted the doctor for X. You should have documented Y. Z is a transfer patient, we need to retain him, and to do that we need to maintain a high quality of service.

Both calls were unpleasant. All the younger versions of me seriously overrated this grown-up thing.