Some days this is my mood.
I feel like I should have a toilet category. A recurring symbol in my dreams and life.
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Plant dyes, having a smell, odourlessness in general.
Lump indigo (blue)
Old recipe from Outer HebridesBoil wool with onion skins till clear yellow, then let wool dry. Have an old pail filled with urine at least two weeks old, or until skin forms on top… Put lump indigo in a muslin bag, heat the “bree” by placing a hot stone in it. Squeeze in the blue bag. Wet the wool and place in the liquid. Cover the vessel and place where it will keep warm… For navy blue, 11 to 21 days are required. Fix with boiled sorrel roots as rinsing water.
— Dye Plants and Dyeing, Brooklyn Botanic Garden Record, 1964.
Books about natural dyeing have a lot of lore I hadn’t foreseen. So many smells! Boiling weird fungi, soaking fiber with onions (“It will take at least four washings to eliminate the odour”), fermenting urine. One book detailed an argument between the author and her editor about whether traditional Harris tweed, dyed with lichens, smelled “musty” or, less judgmentally, “earthy.” I had no idea that tweed used to have a smell. I am fascinated by this, and want to dye all my clothes with different plants to get to know the smells.
Why don’t I expect my clean clothes to have a smell? Not a laundry scent, but a part of their nature. I can remember talking about the smell of my clothes like a normal thing, all the time. Wool sweaters smell sheepy if I get wet in the rain. A couple of weeks ago I told someone (who?) that I liked the smell of raw silk, because I was knitting with a silk blend yarn. I can recall the scent of cotton in my mind’s nose: wet, dry, or hot. Why did I still think of clothes as odourless?
Heather wrote once (or maybe we spoke) about why people are so obsessed with genital odours. Do they smell right? Do they smell too strong? How to keep the smells in control? She suggested that this was partly because we have come to expect the entire rest of our bodies to have no odours at all. Healthy hair, feet, armpits, mouths, and skin in general all have smells, too, but between washing and deodorizing they’ve been redefined as ideally odourless. It’s total fantasy, bodies still smell, but we expect odourlessness. (Like my clothes!) Compared to that, genitals are almost getting smellier by contrast.
Thinking about the more familiar politics of body odours makes me even more interested in knowing what smells are required to make the colours in my clothes. These plant dyes seem like an opportunity to make experiential connections, to know things by observation. To have know what clothes smell like and why, instead of not knowing what shocking petrochemical smells are happening at distant textile factories. It feels grounding. Educating my mind’s nose. I have some pondering to do, regarding wood smoke and other smells that have been banished from modern, civilized, classy life.
I think I will start slow, though, with tea and lavender dyes. Fermenting a bucket of my own urine is going on the “someday I will peek behind this curtain” list along with attending a pig or goat slaughter. Someday.
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Digital Love
This spring I’ve been doing a lot of concrete activities, to balance out the last two or three years of mostly thoughtful time. I had a lot of thinking and reading to do, but I’ve been getting more and more itchy for action. So, taking the advice that any real activity can help you stop living inside your head, I decided to learn to play and sing a song.
It’s been about twelve or fifteen years since I made music for myself instead of relying on my musical friends for occasional sing-along opportunities. It’s strange to realize how much I backed off singing when I met all these trained musicians who perform for money and applause. (At this moment, while I’m typing a draft of this, I’m recording my partner performing live on the radio.) I used to lead music with kids and sing for fun quite a bit. These days I don’t even sing in a group without listening for a long time first, and maybe being drunk. So besides being a skill that happens outside my mind, learning a song seemed like a way to balance out my self-consciousness and intimidation about singing “well.”
The easiest way I could think to start was with a ukulele— tiny and rarely dissonant— and house music— something I listen to a lot that most of my friends don’t seem to pay much attention to. I thought it would be helpful to start on my own personal power territory. Then I thought it would be even more helpful to start with something really ridiculous and also guitar based, i.e., Daft Punk.
Galen helped me by working out some ukulele chords while we were bus camping a few weeks ago. (You know, being digital.)
Here are the chords we worked out, if you too want to play Digital Love by Daft Punk on the ukulele.
Camping style, aka, being digital:
Movies I watched in June 2009.
I was going to quit making movie lists this month, but I keep them for myself on paper anyway. As long as I post other things too, I don’t mind them being on here.
Movies that passed the Bechdel Test
- Star Trek (Barely. One chat between roommates.)
- Away We Go (Lots of varied conversations. This movie was… fine.)
Movies that failed
- The Neverending Story (Does someone have a movie test where two guys cry about each others’ feelings in a movie? This would pass that.)
- The Hit
- Wrath of Khan (Makes a perfect double feature with the new Star Trek.)
Titles in bold are things I’m especially glad I watched.
Garden glee, this week's haul, bracing for the serious harvests.
Above, greens and herbs. Below, veggies. You can see the piles I put them in, but not the little dance I did while I was piling them.
Those first beans and zucchini are a warning signal. Dust from an impending avalanche. Last year, the co-gardeners took advantage of growing zucchini in the back yard of a music store by giving extra squashes to customers.
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Spiders, new to me.
This little white spider came in on some fava beans from the garden. We are finding spiders that none of us recognize, at the shared garden. Very good.