What is the hottest thing to do on a chilly Saturday in February?
Seth and I trekked into Jackson Heights to spend some time with friends over samosas from the Jackson Diner. At the end of a long snowy week it was a bright fiery highlight on my calendar.
Good company, good conversation, good times – I highly recommend this as a great way to warm up for spring.
Have you gathered with your friends lately?
Get ready for spring
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As dusk fell, my eyes followed the last boat from Ibiza disappearing into the distance with, at the time, all of my worldly possessions. Thankfully, that was the only inconvenience of the day. I considered my situation and the Cap Ferrar sent over from the mysterious gentleman at the bar.
Things could be worse.
Well, what do I need to survive, to live, really? Or, to really live? I wondered.
Being much more intrigued with living, I knew the answer immediately.
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My Whisper Wrap.
Inspired by an elegant lady from Shanghai who told me, “You were born to wear beautiful things, custom silk dresses. Revel in your destiny and find something fabulous to wrap around your shoulders.”
Something like a breathless summer stole, perfect for cool evenings in the casino, buying pomegranate tea in the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, and sipping my second Cap Ferrar in a seaplane to the mainland.
This wrap was mean to be hand knit on large needles, preferably bamboo or some dark exotic wood, in a lace mohair using a simple open stitch that offers a glimpse of a tanned bare shoulder. Long enough to skim the hem of my silk cheongsam, it is pure romance, pure rapture to wear. Sensuous, and simply gorgeous.
Take your time and knit something that enchants the eye and caresses the skin like a lover’s eye – The Whisper Wrap.
Everything else, like my luggage, can wait.
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How to Knit the Whisper Wrap
What you need: 500 yards lace mohair in a startling color. One pair of size 15 bamboo/wood knitting needles
Directions: Cast on 70 stitches. Knit first row. Continue to knit all rows (garter stitch) until you have reached the desired length. Cast off loosely. Weave in loose ends. Fling magnificently around your shoulders. Follow with a smile.
Pedestals. Platforms. Places held aloft. These words fall from your lips, shapely, softly, so much better than – heels. How flat that sounds and how it deflates my vision of me in my lovely shoes.
You know that not just any pair of beautiful shoes will do when it comes to love. And when that love leaps into the lap of obsession, you can be sure I will lose even more sleep and closet space – actually Seth will lose what closet space he has left – maybe he should just move out, although he was the first one to suggest I learn how to make my own shoes without even considering how absolutely aufregeht I could be with that kind of power. What was he thinking?
Too late.
Now what?
You probably guessed correctly. You know I am an artspy and a nonstop nonprofit knitter. We do not take things lightly. We take journeys.
I am on a journey. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. A single stiletto, to be perfectly clear.
I am on a journey to master the art of shoemaking. I am going to become a Mistress of Shoe Art, a Shoe Shiva.
I am going to create a pair of shoes, mules, to be precise, in a beginning custom shoemaking class on April 8th. My instructor is Lloraine Neithardt who was “born among birds and makes magic”. We are to bring sketches, inspiration, ideas and dreams to our first class to transform into footwear. You know how wonderful, how sexy, how beautiful a perfect pair of shoes can make you feel. I am determined to learn how to mould and tape and fuse that power into a pair of magical shoes.
Stuff I want to show you
Everyday I am going work on designing my shoes. Some sketches, some research, some soul searching. This post is part of the journal of my journey that I want to share with you.
Tonight I looked at the work of selected shoe artists. Fantastic creations of character wrapped in luxurious leathers, feathers, flights of fancy. Instinctive and uninsured inner soles. Breathtaking in their arched boldness.
I am dreaming of a pair of mules, with rounded points, rising on slim, slightly impertinent, curved heels. Burnished in a brilliant peacock feather blue, the front of the upper part tufting languorously across the front of the ankle – for the left shoe only. I see a myself striding, unleashing my left shoe with its curled back frontpiece followed by my demure right shoe, the peahen to the peacock. Unmatched, unexpected. This is when I realized what I am really designing. A moment. My momentous moment. And what my moment demands are my inner shoes, the vehicles for my vision.
Why get so crazy over shoes?
There were long ago women in my family – first wives, concubines, martial matriarchs with bound feet living with a very different kind of relationship to their shoes. Their tiny sculpted shoes were a symbol of aristocracy that held women as prisoners of wealth, hobbling in painful privilege. Like them, I imagine that I, too, look upon my shoes, torn between love and hate.
Last Wednesday, I spent the day in Queens with David Gonzalez who writes for the New York Times. He brought with him two things:
1) a desire to know how and why art is important to people in communities
2) a prayer for parking spots.
Sounds like a journey. Or a knowledge quest. I immediately saw it as a Dance Floor and Balcony moment.
I read about this intriguing metaphor on Beth Kanter’s blog which is a must read for anyone with a passion for changing the world. The term comes from titled Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading with Marty Linsky and Ron Heifetz .
The idea is the “balcony” is the overarching, big picture and the “dance floor” is when we’re in the thick of operations or “on the ground”. Creative thinkers need to shift between the two viewpoints to be effective.
In our case, we were shifting between perspectives from the single unifying train rumbling above us to the densely diverse neighborhoods below the tracks.
We went to three places located along the route of the No.7 train, “the International Express”, and the sites of our upcoming Queens Art Express spring festival this June. David’s dance card included a business owner, a local gallery dealer, a community activist/art presenter, a cafe owner and the community development manager from Queens Public Television.
In Long Island City, we had coffee at Dorian’s Cafe with Brian Adams of the Hunters Point Merchants Association and Mark Dean of the Dean Project. An interesting question we discussed was: Is art the reason or the vehicle for people to cross the river to Queens?
Thank God for GPS.
It got us to Jackson Heights where we found the place we were looking for and we found a parking spot. Azval Hossein, the owner of Espresso 77 and Bryan Pu-Folkes, a lawyer and a presenter of the Jackson Heights food and Film Festival talked about how the closing of the only two theatres in Jackson Heights forced the festival to cancel its events last year. However, what the members of the community were doing to seek alternative spaces and holding impromptu artist gatherings are perhaps blessings in disguise.
Finally, in Flushing. We met Catherine Lee of Crossing Art Gallery and Ros Nieves from Queens Public Television and got into a conversation about niche. Catherine will be holding a workshop to interest doctors in investing in art. Her building is filled with doctors who are currently not investing in real estate or stocks. That sounds like a niche to me.
David got to talk to a lot of people with all kinds of relationships with art and community. What did I get?
I have dinner with an amazing group of people once a year who come together at every Grantmakers in the Arts conference. At first blush it looks like a roomful of Asian women and friends, which is how this gathering originated, but after a few rounds of drinks and appetizers we become a roomful of Asian women and friends having a fabulous time and our true identity is revealed -
We are the Joy Bucks Club!
We are all involved in the nonprofit arts universe, we represent foundations, funders, artists, policy makers and government agencies and we can often figure out and talk through things together as girlfriends, and gourmands.
Early this morning I got an email invitation from the Rockefeller Foundation inviting me to attend a lunch for the NYC Cultural Innovation Fund Grantees.
“We are hosting this lunch in order to allow our NYC Cultural Innovation Fund grantees to meet one another, share their experiences with their projects and to advise the foundation on our efforts to catalyze innovation in New York’s creative community.”
The Foundation believes in supporting the creative sector in projects that “fire our imaginations, enrich our neighborhoods, and inspire us to envision and build a better tomorrow.”
What an amazing lunch this will be! And – clutch the pearls! – what a brain trust!
Imagine a roomful of gatejumping restless creative people connected to each other through the Rockefeller Foundation reconnecting to check in with each other and the progress of our projects.
The NYC Cultural Innovation Fund has supported 49 organizations. Innovative projects that include an open-air festival celebrating the year’s innovations in architecture and urban design, incorporating extreme action techniques such as high wire and skydiving to spark new dance forms and the application of new income-generation models to individual artists.
But what fires my imagination is the opportunity to listen.
The Foundation will also be listening for advice from this group on their efforts in catalyzing true innovative creativity. We will all have our ear to the ground for messages from the field. Our field. Our creative community.
In her report, Paul Light of NYU suggest four possible futures for the nonprofit sector:
the rescue fantasy
the withering winterland
an arbitrary withering
transformation
Are you kidding? Those choices are about as appealing as a root canal.
I would like to strongly suggest lunch as a contender for a nonprofit future. We are a resilient, risk taking, fearless and creative field. By gathering us purposefully and in a well catered way, Rockefeller will:
gain invaluable learnings from us that will enable them to be more agile and adaptive in their support of the creative sector
change the mindset from scrambling for limited external resources to harvesting inner abundances
encourage us to build and support the passionate experiences of our work together
I will be bringing a healthy appetite and hungry ears with me to this lunch and I hope to take away a sense of what great stuff is going on among all of us. But what I really want to do is give away as much as I can to be helpful and to be part of the answers.
I am a momspy, artspy and nonprofit knitter. Hi! Welcome to hoongyee.com, my blog where you will find style notes for people who change the world. read more>
