Buffy the Vampire Slayer was easily the most subversive thing on television, and possibly in all of popular culture, in its heyday, and I was a very dedicated fan -- a fanatic. Joss Whedon, creator of the series, knows something about craft in all its forms, and he gave an interview to Kim Werker, former editor of Interweave Crochet and a blogger at CrochetMe.com, that's very funny and endearing. (It's amazing what you find in the black-hole week betwen Christmas and New Year's Day, isn't it?).
I'm linking here to the full Q&A transcript of the interview so you get more Joss, less of the interviewer talking about herself. The Q&A format is tricky too, though, as any writer or editor will tell you; sometimes you get to see too much of the sausage being made, as in, the interviewer trying too hard to be cool and clever, and banter with the celebrity, and it's distracting. This one has some of that self-consciousness but all in all it's pretty good.
Werker asks a lot of leading questions to try to get Whedon to take a firm DIY/Craft 2.0 position, but his answers reveal something of a Slow Cloth aesthetic and philosophy:
Well, you know, at the end of the day right now, you can create something; what you can't usually do is make a fortune off of it. But if we're talking about the sort of people who are actually checking a crocheting website, we're talking about the sort of people who understand that part of what we're doing is in the process. That it's not about, "I'm going to crochet the most hats! I'm going to be the fastest! I'm going to be the most [mumbled] millionaire without enjoying the process and the product." Ultimately, the artistic expression can't be squelched; it's just they'll try to cut off any avenues for that expression to be, shall we say, monetized in a realistic fashion. Like I'm saying, the sort of people who understand the DIY mentality are more about the doing than the having.
Elsewhere this morning, the New York Times has a short piece about the opening of a Manhattan shop for Les Toiles du Soleil, a French fabric company specializing in gorgeous bright striped cotton canvas that will make you think of a summer house at the beach. The company has been making these fabrics for nearly 150 years. They're very . . . French, I guess, in all good ways. Creating a harmonious yet interesting stripe pattern is harder than it looks, and these are wonderful.
photo by Donna Alberico for the New York Times
I really think that every molecule of my being would be happy in France, but to date, I've never been there; I've had a few trips planned that became near-misses. Maybe 2009 will be the year.
And here's a small piece for the Moon of Long Nights: