reviews

Potter's Field Guide (PFG) is a forum largely devoted to my essays, reviews, articles, short stories, music, history, politics, travel, etc. Please feel free to contribute to this log. Thanks.

There’s no zealot quite like the newly converted. And I am a relatively new convert to the absorbing world of knitting. Now I have about three separate knitting projects lying around in various corners of the apartment. I sneak in a few rows while my son is lost among his trains and trucks. I neglect to pick up snippets of yarn coiled here and there on the sofa, the floor. I count my birthday gift of vintage knitting patterns as one of my favorites.

So, you know I got all kinds of excited to pick up a copy of the newest Slave to the Needles (issue #3). There’s an extensive series of interviews with crafty indie musicians, the requisite Vegan recipe, a couple of skill explanations, comics and enough patterns to keep you busy until the next issue arrives. I will confess that it was a specific barn bonnet pattern that sold me on this issue. Will this bonnet elicit compliments of cuteness or will I be mistaken for a Mennonite? My only gripe with this issue is that I would have loved to have had a little key to some of the more esoteric abbreviations used in the patterns.

I am too cool to listen to Everclear. Everclear, those crap mongers who would live beside the ocean leave you far behind in like 1995. During they're heyday I was listening mainly to Screeching Weasel, whose heyday was occuring at about the same time. Three weeks ago I was inexplicable drawn like a moth to a fucking lightbulb to the Everclear official website. And ladies, it's bad, too. I would not recommend a visit. Lots of soul patchery and fake fade jeans and band logo thongs--what Matt Dillon's character called "beer and lifestyle music" in the movie Singles just a few years before the mutual Everclear, Screeching Weasel heyday. I suppose I did appreciate them then for ushering out grunge, which I found and still find unrelatable. The radio was not so unsafe anymore.