1x1 tubular castoff (for cie, jo and maya)

Hello busybees - this is my version of techknitter's beautiful tubular castoff. Obviously it has been done many times before (you will see related videos on YouTube). This comes after the two complete rounds of double knitting, which requires going round four times, working and slipping knits and purls alternately.



It's so much easier to keep track of where you are than it is on two needles, and it's so much easier to keep the gauge consistent, that if I had two pieces to be grafted together I would consider transferring them to a single needle in order to do it this way. But maybe that would crowd the stitches too much and make it too slow and awkward.

But mainly I took the video because I keep forgetting exactly what the path is - which leg of each stitch should be worked in which direction - if I don't do it for a while. Having watched my own hands do it on video several times over, I can now play back in my head what it looks like, and for some reason the memory problem is solved. I'm not sure that watching someone else's hands, or watching in lower quality, would have worked.

The Object being finished is another hottie woollie.

The making of a 78

Via the excellent Mike Lavocah, a beautiful film (in three parts, all three linked below the embed) depicting exactly how a record was made in the 1940s.



Part One (as above) | Part Two | Part Three

I'm just delighted with the brilliant ingenuity, the precision, and in some ways the simplicity and directness of this process, obviously the result of a long evolution yet to be continued. It's genius.

I also love the film itself, with the first-person narrative of its unseen narrator, and his innocent joy at the pure wax smoothed with flame, the electroplating, the giant glooping shellac mix machine, and the unexpected way the labels are put on. And as the sort of social-historical matter which would interest my mother, notice how the sex of the workers changes through the process. You can't draw any conclusions, as you can often only see one worker at a time, and some of the roles may well have been mixed. But it tells you something about how each job was perceived at the time.

Mike says:

What really struck me was how the finished record – being an analog process – contains an imprint of the vibrations made by the musicians at the time of the performance. In some sense, you are connected directly back to that time. This is something that digital music – especially with our attempts to “improve” the music with filtering and other kinds of post-processing – can never capture.

I'm not sure I agree that the connection is more 'direct' in any literal sense. And I'm not sure that I know what that notion of connection means or in what way whatever it means is important. But I sympathise with his sentiment about the physicality of this process, all the same. I once went to a public lecture on human biology, after which I approached the lecturer with some question or other, and was privileged to hold in my hand, briefly, a hand-axe 250,000 years old. A thing that was made by someone's hands, a quarter of a million years ago.

The 400 Club - Issue 5

They give me a mention so it's only polite to link back. Actually it's Naomi or Silvia (of 'Tango@33' - they've retained the brand without the building) who mentions in an interview my undisguised enthusiam for being allowed to dance somewhere that people agree not to body-slam me, use me as a battering ram, or act in ways that cause other people to do so.

I hadn't read the 400 Club magazine before. Other than the piece about George Bernard Shaw learning to dance tango, with a photo in which the embrace is slightly modified to accommodate his partner's hat, this is my favourite bit:

“The 400 club is an irregularly produced, amateur newsletter for the London Tango scene. ... The next issue will arrive when and if we have sufficient time and inclination to get round to doing one.”

A Long-Tailed Tit without a tail

A pair of long-tailed tits ('tits' in general are similar to the small birds that Americans call 'chickadees' - the word used to be 'titmouse') in my parents' garden. This particular species generally feed in pairs. One of these has lost its tail, perhaps to some cat or fox or some accident. It doesn't seem to cause it any problems flying, that I can see.

Spring Rain - Miscellaneous and reading

I love Spring rain, cool on my face but not cold, falling on the skin more than striking it. I love to walk in it wearing a hat and a good wool coat. So cool and gentle. Short of a friend to hold your hand, it's the nearest thing I know to ice for the injured soul. There may be hailstorms, too, but in the meantime, I love Spring rain.

Wonders of the Solar System is great telly. When he went up in a fighter jet and looked at the top of the atmosphere I wanted to compose music, to sing. Good documentary telly is about the subject, never the presenter, and apart from about ten seconds of boilerplate in the first programme which I daresay was foisted on him, Professor Brian Cox entirely gets that.

The Planet Money Podcast is one of the best radio programmes ever. They've bought a toxic asset. As a pet. You can watch it die. The podcast is outstanding and includes someone saying “Dude. This is a disaster” in connection with a financial instrument.

What happens if you ask Google a full-sentence question starting with "is ...". But you can take the experiment further - follow the "is" with any single letter selected at random and you soon learn that what humans with internet access mostly want to know about the state of the world is whether other humans they have heard of are married, pregnant, homosexual, Jewish, or dead.

From the Centre for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University, Medford, Massachussetts, a moving and fascinating qualitative study paper: Preachers who are Not Believers. "The loneliness of non-believing pastors is extreme. They have no trusted confidantes to reassure them, to reflect their own musings back to them, to provide reality checks."

I am going to be away over Easter, I am working on another project and probably won't be posting.

Ghost Guide version 2.0

Ghost, who I practice with from time to time and some of you know as a regular in the comments, has just rewritten his "Ghost Guide to Tango", his thoughts for himself and fellow students. The old version is still there as well so you can see where he's moved on.

Version 1 discussed his discoveries of can be done. Version 2.0 is about what a reasonable leader of moderate skill can actually expect to work, most of the time, with a follower of the skill level he will normally find himself dancing with. And conversely, which of the things that get taught all the time in classes may or may not be useful as practice tools but turn out to be rubbish at a non-professional level, confusing to learn, or just awe-inspiringly useless for social dancing.

I also think that people need to hear this, so I agreed to provide some comments from the follower's point of view. My comments are written in a different colour, and they're just the sort of thing I'd pipe up with if I were standing there when he said whatever he's saying.

Ghost also has a theory that professional demonstrations are difficult to interpret and often not that helpful to the learner, compared to watching your peers. So to make it all a bit more concise and clearer, he decided to add videos showing two normal-level social dancers, Ms. Pink and Mr. Bond, from the chest down, doing some of the movements that he is talking about. So the reader can see what he's on about (helpful if names in Spanish are meaningless to you - I've met so many people who thought 'boleo' and 'bolero' were the same word) and also what it looks like in real life.

I thought this too was a really nice idea, and I provided some video equipment and did all the video editing. That was fun and I learned a lot. I hope you enjoy the results.

I made a little kung-fu-comedy credits one at the end so it doesn't take itself too seriously. It might not be up on the site yet, but you can check back next week.

The whole thing lives on DB's site, here. (There's a lot on that site by many different authors, obviously not all of which I agree with. But you don't need telling).

Ganchos and sincerity

Here's the deal on me and ganchos.

My free leg technique isn't pro level.

We are never likely to be going fast enough or to have enough momentum for my foot to swing up high as a natural movement. There's always - always - a tedious moment of standing still and thinking “oh, here comes a tedious trick to make us both look silly” before it happens. I think, and I get bored, very fast under certain conditions. It loses the flow completely.

I've been taught to fake them quite well (I was taught to turn the leg slightly so the heel goes towards him, and to swing rather than kick or hold) but it's a completely voluntary movement. This, I think, is what most people do, and it's certainly what I do after the wait for positioning is over, the reveille has stopped sounding, and I get some sort of a lead.

I'll usually fake it at least once, as long as the man hasn't done too many other things to annoy me. If it's once in a tanda, the man dances with real feeling for the music (that is, having some apparent sense of the melody and phrasing and at least the most obvious emotional content, as opposed to just being on the beat), and it's in the right place, then, okay. At least then there are other reasons to do it, beyond whatever version there is of a lead.

If I don't really intend to ever dance with him again, I can fake cheerfully because it's just the once. It depends. If there's anything else so seriously wrong that I don't care if it annoys him, I probably won't fake. I'll just stand there and smile and pretend not to understand if he starts talking.

If he were a friend, I might fake for the sake of peace or the conversation. But in strict moderation.

Basically the reason I don't like them is that my limitations, quite apart from the difficulty of the lead, make them insincere, and I prefer to dance sincerely. That movement isn't something I would ever spontaneously do to express tango music, and it isn't something I would naturally do in response to even the best of leads that actually happen in reality in social dancing. It requires a higher level of technique than is going to happen. I don't like my moment being killed, and I don't like faking.

I prefer what I am doing when I dance to be faithful to a reasonably consistent overall aesthetic concept, and that means not faking things. That's just the way it works for me.

[Update: when I click Publish on a blog post, Blogger shows me a 'success' page with some ads on it. It reads what I publish to try to guess what I am interested in. On publishing this one, Ads By Google offered me the following:

The Top 10 Golf Mistakes?
Biomechanics Software
Gait Analysis Software
Golf Swing Technique

Wrong, but still sort of spooky.]