I’m overdue for this edition, but the “something coming on” I alluded to two weeks ago turned out to be a prostrating fatigue–type bug of epic proportions. Yesterday was the first day in ten I felt confident enough to walk to the store without packing a hammock, bug bivy, and space blanket lest I feel the need to stop en route for a nap, and while today, thus far, I’ve been more or less vertical in body, my mind has decided to take the week ahead off. Among the tasks I’d set myself this morning was the repair of noragi-type jacket (ok, it was a Kinori, but from 2016 or so, pre–Field Shirt–palooza, purchased used from one of the many pseudonymous kind souls whose help I require to get dressed). It is, I must say, well-made, with French seams and all the rest, though marred by the fact that the patch pockets are insufficiently broad to accommodate a Midori A6 notebook — then again, the material, a c.300gsm linen plain weave, lacks the structure to accommodate a Midori A6, so perhaps it’s just as well. Anyway, I’d been looking for something to wear over a t-shirt in overcast 19-degree weather of the sort we have today in Berlin, and it fits the bill perfectly save that, like every entrant in the hybrid noragi category, it has tape closures that serve no purpose other than to get in your way. I have yet to see a designer solve the noragi closure problem. Hiroki Nakamura at Visvim solves it by declining to include closures at all. Takuji Suzuki solves it with ingenious asymmetric inside-outside paired tapes that kind of work but feel fussy. Oil & Lumber opts for traditional mid-placket tapes … Prospective Flow, who knows, though if you’re not yet watching their boroboro handstitch videos, my god, what have you been doing with your time?
Anyway. Kinori’s solution is by far the strangest: bathrobe (‘dressing gown’)–style tapes sewn into the side seams. I had no idea what to do with these and resolved to take them off. This, with the help of my partner’s seam ripper and modest guidance, I proceeded to do — in the process, creating a gap in the exterior face of the aforementioned French seam on one side. The jacket looks much better without the tapes, and the seam is hardly in danger of coming undone. Still, this morning I thought I’d repair the damage. This should be a one-minute job. Instead, owing either to my aforementioned clumsiness or the shadow of prostrating fatigue (I feel something coming on …) it took some 20 minutes. But I was reminded how good it feels to draw a needle through fabric.
I will share that I improved my prostration reading an oral history of the San Francisco Tape Music Center and was consoled to learn that many of the early innovators in sample-based procedural music felt they had no facility with the actual splicing of tape, so perhaps there’s hope.