Sunday, February 24, 2008

Now, now

I felt like a truck ran over me when I got up this morning, but a prescription of knitting, napping, and live music went a long way in curing what ailed me and steeling me for the hectic week to come.

I ripped out everything I knitted on the project I started Friday. I'm not sure how the item I'm knitting in the round got twisted, but had a Mobius strip twist where I split the stitches for magic loop. After seven rounds I'm beginning to think I've done the same thing again. GRR! For now I think I'll just knit for awhile and see if everything is fine once I have more to show for my effort.

I decided that today was going to be hopeless for getting any work done at home, so I gave in and rested. I didn't feel like going out this evening, but I had a ticket to see St. Vincent, which I was looking forward to.

Multi-instrumentalist Annie Clark, who performs under the name St. Vincent, was joined on stage by a violinist, bassist/keyboardist, and drummer to play songs from her debut album Marry Me. It's an eclectic and detailed record, one that doesn't necessarily translate to live, small-scale performance, but I was really impressed with the expansive sound they generated and recreation of the songs' complexity without relying extensively on pre-recorded loops.

The 70-minute set saw Clark doing some interesting reworkings of her songs as well as covers of "Dig a Pony" and Nico's "These Days". She was the only one on stage as she ripped through the fuzzed-up Beatles song and cooed the quiet song written by Jackson Browne, which served as a fitting encore. I'm a fan of American Idol, but one thing I wish the show's singers (and producers) understood is that you don't have to bludgeon a song to death to sing it well. It was such a pleasure to hear Clark sing well technically without overdoing it. Her singing of "These Days" was like a whisper, yet it was absolutely riveting.

Ah, live music... For as rotten as I felt at the day's start, this concert did its part in restoring my energy.

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1 Comments:

At 9:37 PM, Blogger donnadb said...

Maybe your Moebius strip effect isn't from twisting when you join, but from doing unintentional yarnovers when you get to the end of one side of the Magic Loop? That is, if you move to the other side and the yarn isn't coming out of the wrong side directly at you, but is instead looped around and over the cable, it can pull the side up and cause a twist (or an extra stitch). I've done it more than once.

If it happens again, post pictures.

 

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