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June/July Update
Jul. 1st, 2021 10:22 amStaying in this Canada Day for various reasons.
Still job-hunting. My only recent accomplishment I feel like talking about is to have improved a fairisle vest I knit a couple of years ago but almost never wore because I’d made it a little too short. This week I carefully snipped the ribbed waistband off, picked up all the stitches around the bottom of the torso and knit an additional two inches (because it was fairisle I could do this without having to worry about matching the yarn exactly) before grafting the waistband back on— I picked up the stitches around the top of the waistband, knit one round in off-white yarn to match the last round I’d done at the bottom of the torso, and then threaded a thin white elastic cord through the top stitches of the waistband and the bottom stitches of the torso (normally I’d have used yarn to do this, but I was worried the join wouldn’t have enough stretch).
The only tricky part was that this join was right where I’d originally made extra stitches as I began the torso part of the garment, so in reassembling it I every so often had to thread through two stitches above for one below in order to match everything up. I’ve no idea whether this description has been comprehensible without photos.
I also found David Byrne’s True Stories (1986) and watched it a couple of times. I’d say this movie falls into the mock-documentary genre, with the clarification that in this case it’s not “mock” as in “mockery,” it’s mock as in mock turtle soup or mock apple pie. And of course, it’s a musical.
Byrne plays an awkward but non-judgemental narrator who begins his history of Texas with the Devonian era before racing through more recent, often bloody, events, before stepping through the projection screen behind him and into the movie proper, where he meets the townsfolk of Virgil, TX, gearing up for their state’s sesquicentennial with a town-wide “Celebration of Specialness.”
“But this place is perfectly normal!” exclaims the Narrator, just before we go into the VeriCorp building (“It’s cool. It’s a multipurpose shape— a box”) and meet the sentimental Cute Woman (Alix Elias); Ramon (Tito Larriva), who claims to pick up other people’s emotions in the form of radio transmissions; the engineer (Matthew Posey) whose love for computers is as poetic as it is practical (suspect most of my STEM acquaintances will agree); and Louis Fyne (a young John Goodman), who is the closest thing this movie has to a protagonist. Lewis desperately wants to find a wife; he has a big light-up WIFE WANTED sign outside his house, and places an ad on local tv; he never comes off as an incel, though, mainly because he takes “no” for an answer, even when it’s not directly stated— there’s a heartbreaking scene where a date with the Cute Woman seems to be going well, until Louis sings her his heartfelt, half-finished song, and her face falls: the song is sad, and therefore Not Cute. “I’ll show myself out,” says Lewis. He bows and thanks her for having him over, before withdrawing.
The background extras for this movie included fifty pairs of twins; only one pair is ever directly pointed out. The local voodoo practitioner (Pop Staples) is as devout in his religion as the conspiracy-theorist preacher (John Ingle) or the town’s de facto mayor Earl Culver (Spalding Gray) who turns dinner at his house into a half-lecture half-ritual about the new start-up economy, but far more down-to-Earth and far less scary. A lot of the socio-economic stuff in this movie is uncomfortably prescient.
I forgot to mention the woman (Jo Harvey Allen) who constantly claims psychic powers or past love affairs with everyone from JFK to Burt Reynolds, and the woman (Swoosie Kurtz) who’s rich enough to stay in bed all the time. The least realistic thing about this movie, imo, is that the town parade contains no floats or horses (otherwise it’s basically the parade my town of origin held each year); and yet their talent show gets a live tv broadcast rather than being recorded with a single consumer-level video camera and shown on cable access a month later. It’s necessary to the story that it be so—maybe VeriCorp hooked the town up with some electronics.
Still job-hunting. My only recent accomplishment I feel like talking about is to have improved a fairisle vest I knit a couple of years ago but almost never wore because I’d made it a little too short. This week I carefully snipped the ribbed waistband off, picked up all the stitches around the bottom of the torso and knit an additional two inches (because it was fairisle I could do this without having to worry about matching the yarn exactly) before grafting the waistband back on— I picked up the stitches around the top of the waistband, knit one round in off-white yarn to match the last round I’d done at the bottom of the torso, and then threaded a thin white elastic cord through the top stitches of the waistband and the bottom stitches of the torso (normally I’d have used yarn to do this, but I was worried the join wouldn’t have enough stretch).
The only tricky part was that this join was right where I’d originally made extra stitches as I began the torso part of the garment, so in reassembling it I every so often had to thread through two stitches above for one below in order to match everything up. I’ve no idea whether this description has been comprehensible without photos.
I also found David Byrne’s True Stories (1986) and watched it a couple of times. I’d say this movie falls into the mock-documentary genre, with the clarification that in this case it’s not “mock” as in “mockery,” it’s mock as in mock turtle soup or mock apple pie. And of course, it’s a musical.
Byrne plays an awkward but non-judgemental narrator who begins his history of Texas with the Devonian era before racing through more recent, often bloody, events, before stepping through the projection screen behind him and into the movie proper, where he meets the townsfolk of Virgil, TX, gearing up for their state’s sesquicentennial with a town-wide “Celebration of Specialness.”
“But this place is perfectly normal!” exclaims the Narrator, just before we go into the VeriCorp building (“It’s cool. It’s a multipurpose shape— a box”) and meet the sentimental Cute Woman (Alix Elias); Ramon (Tito Larriva), who claims to pick up other people’s emotions in the form of radio transmissions; the engineer (Matthew Posey) whose love for computers is as poetic as it is practical (suspect most of my STEM acquaintances will agree); and Louis Fyne (a young John Goodman), who is the closest thing this movie has to a protagonist. Lewis desperately wants to find a wife; he has a big light-up WIFE WANTED sign outside his house, and places an ad on local tv; he never comes off as an incel, though, mainly because he takes “no” for an answer, even when it’s not directly stated— there’s a heartbreaking scene where a date with the Cute Woman seems to be going well, until Louis sings her his heartfelt, half-finished song, and her face falls: the song is sad, and therefore Not Cute. “I’ll show myself out,” says Lewis. He bows and thanks her for having him over, before withdrawing.
The background extras for this movie included fifty pairs of twins; only one pair is ever directly pointed out. The local voodoo practitioner (Pop Staples) is as devout in his religion as the conspiracy-theorist preacher (John Ingle) or the town’s de facto mayor Earl Culver (Spalding Gray) who turns dinner at his house into a half-lecture half-ritual about the new start-up economy, but far more down-to-Earth and far less scary. A lot of the socio-economic stuff in this movie is uncomfortably prescient.
I forgot to mention the woman (Jo Harvey Allen) who constantly claims psychic powers or past love affairs with everyone from JFK to Burt Reynolds, and the woman (Swoosie Kurtz) who’s rich enough to stay in bed all the time. The least realistic thing about this movie, imo, is that the town parade contains no floats or horses (otherwise it’s basically the parade my town of origin held each year); and yet their talent show gets a live tv broadcast rather than being recorded with a single consumer-level video camera and shown on cable access a month later. It’s necessary to the story that it be so—maybe VeriCorp hooked the town up with some electronics.
