Reportage - fat quarters

journey notes as follow. not v case related though. Wed. train south. cute girl with boring boyfriend at eleven o'clock. (geographically not temporally.) her eyes shut looking out of train at england passing. long dark hair. another guy in front of me reading a shatner biog (semi-auto). I catch a few paras of it over shoulder. always trust a discrete nose piercing. shapes of interesting faces. sad businessman with laptop and shiny shoes like manacles. pedacles?? pin stripe. red stripe preferable. this is coach C. pass thru yorkstation thinking could have arranged this better. the swan smooth neck in soft green while reclined tired on arms. sludgeholders in edgeland of doncaster. sad river of england. other people's conversations. 'she lost it in a factory'. hmm. i think of handmaids tale. that was days back though. princes street gardens in july heat. her face shape is dreamlike. long sleeves fingers peer out of, slender. they're talking about joshua and elizabeth. oh for steamtrain seats of grosmont all over this rail network. real wooden wood. buddlia in wasteground. shatner, I read, canoed with 6 other boys from canada to new york. i haven't changed since age 5 in this respect. england oh land of pylons and motorways. iron rails between graffiti parking lots of industry. red brick of olden false glory. weirs and knotweed. i am a fool never to converse. girl in green top departs at sheffield. he may not be dull really. are the beatniks growing stronger in cellars here? or are they turning into consumers of money? roll mats could save us.
case notes though: middle england is devoid of mirth. will report further findings soon.
-/-
top room of circa 1500s house in leicestershire is a secret production room of needlework, quilting, felting - fat quarters everywhere; works on wattle and daub walls around random queenpost timbers. apple tree in secret garden and ghost pine beyond. youngsters practising forward drives with tennis ball. tomato plants outdoors. I watch brief encounter after sepia wartime portraiture. it wasn't the film I expected - before sunrise is the true version. on now to more stations. the buddlia seems more friendly now. Cut. Fri. Hotel lobby foyer watching second test (ashes) with ultra-£3 boddingtons well enough earned. buddlia in sight as I write hanging into holiday inn parking lot. the sky turns purple grey from a mixture of broken weather and july dusk. 111 for 3. make that 111 for 4. the lobby carpet is bus seat-esque enough to dream into. I see a big red indian bird and a wallaby mouse. the lobbies are the best places to run into interesting people. 111 for 5. I figure I can still score another 2pts from the ten pound note i started with. or a sneaky carryout from supermarket over A road. discover that the oldish couple, looking like dapper MCC folks are actually aussies, staying in lobby to watch the cricket like me. i should have known. they're both on pints. now also eating salted nuts. i ponder hiding my journalistic pad. some people it would loosen their tongues, some it would tighten, but who's to guess how many of each and which more important. I see many younger outer edge knitwear types opening up and the few harder core experimentalists silenced on sight of a pad. (rain falls outside.) Perhaps the few are more worthwhile than the many, but I think I'd have more fun plumbing the shallows or depths of the many - the end dealers and users, the rollers of fat quarters for pleasure and collegebook ideals. I get in conversation with the aussie couple - turns out only one is aussie - the guy is from aberdeen. only story I get is of a german backpacker they met - was trying to learn english but landed up staying in a hostelfull of germans. no obvious leads into much.

next wisdom to come is from my contact J, prearranged to meet her at hotel. met in lobby and ventured to their room. she reveals what I already suspected- that second only to Totnes, this spa town I'm in, the mother of all spa towns after saltburn, is the UK hippy central. I suspect this must be why I came. if there is a UK tahoe contingent in above ground existence, it may be here. my plan is to hit the charity shops tomorrow and see what leads I can pick up. always go with a hunch, even in notre dame. I'll go tomorrow on the pretext of acquiring quick wedding guest threads - a perfect way-in to any fabric and needlework subterfuge. i know a girl previously on the US music touring circuit who had/has a pad here. since gone further west, also with a farm in spain I think. if her homemade tipi is anything to go on then this is indeed a likely junction for red and orange cottons. note to self. also try to acquire a cheap baby acoustic guitar. a fat quarter-size. a good way into the local sngr-sngwrtr coffeehouse scene.
-/-
Sat. no acoust found after a run around town. but another language anecdote heard to reinforce that of the aussie scots couple re german. this time a trip to amsterdam by dutch girl trying to ask directions in dutch but noone there understanding her because all are tourists. I hit the fleamarket with M. Some vinyl inc. live janis and live joan baez and coney island baby. little antique stall - chipped pottery vessels, discoloured spoons, faded jewelery, strange objects awaiting a detroitfix use ['upcycling' is a new fashion mag term for it, seemingly]- but no baby acoustic guitar, banjo or similar. a surprise. directions to oxfam from a studentesque blonde. no records. stalls of hip garmentry en route. back via frock exchange shop. some nice threads. colour co-ordination in the basement. cut to evening. post wedding in barn. 'yes we even had correspondence' I hear, from cambridge undergrad I briefly exchanged letters with about illusory theory of time and intergalactic stick.
cut back to hotel room. i awake at 4am. a whole bottle of cava still unopened. subdued hotel washroom lighting. i glug milk from cool window sill. 'forget something? un oubli?' asks holiday inn. yes, probably, I think. halloumi pastry wrap. playpark. soil field over stream. i tell ten-to-twelve yr old you can get thru to playpark at top of field edge. he says he already knows. the youth are ahead of me - good. what insights? i add the word 'not' to make: 'throw yr soul at this day because it might not be yr last'. I must have been reading too many self help books.

investigations on the northeastern seafront and further inland. whitbywool circle has gone to ground. there is a french connection. grosmont steam line. I sat in tree watching cafegoers. squeakiest voiced girl in shepherd's purse. those chips taste good though. apple juice in glass litre bottle from purse, served by non-squeaky dark haired girl. will give full report in due course. no news is news itself.

Sonia on TV

That sonia is the Queen of wool by all accounts. Was interviewed by Andy Warhol on his TV show. Hung out in Saint Germain. Chic woollens in black. Good write-up of her Paris show by all the girlie knitter cognoscenti.

I must try to get the world turned on to pink dentist drinks (cocktail devised a while back. Not quite figured out ingredients yet - with jellybellies its root beer and strawberry cheesecake, so with liquor I guess - what's dakari - has that got strawberries in it, or is that just strawberry dakari the dessert which has? - I guess it's got root beer in, maybe cream soda, maybe strawberry milkshake (poss just the pre-milk concentrate), maybe scotch or burb [...].

nb. Friday I go south. I could be hunting out Sonia Kyteil's daughter Natalie, whom I suspect may be part of the knitting circle crowd. I will take a crochet hook and try to get in on a meeting. Either the whitby branch or elsewhere. Perhaps patchwork in Eskdale.

Sans Frites - Whitby versus Paris

right. back in case room.

I am intrigued by the identity of the knitter Sonia Rykiel, who yourgroup met in Paris. I wonder if she is an associate of Paul Kosyra fromthe Minsk days. Perhaps she was in Paris on geo-beacon work at the eiffel tower. I recall hitting the left bank crepe scene at 11pm one week in February 2000, I think it was, and sniffing out the avant garde borgeouis scene in old churches and alleys. I ordered some suzettes.
Do you know what my main thought of Paris was? Shall I tell you? I thought: this is like Whitby, only without the chips...

On that basis alone I prefered Whitby. Nothing beats warm greasy chips.
Although the Sacre Coeur had something to it in the evening sun overthe red light district of Montmartres which isn't equalled by the Abbey or the East Cliff. The East cliff has its own magic though, over at the funfair above the khyber pass in august... Under the whale's jaw...
I shall research Sonia and see what I can drag up.

Live Transmission

this investigator reports:
That wickerwork ball of wool is spooking me. that whole back alley scene in the whitby I know and love is suddenly giving me shivers like its something from the wickerman. that quickly-removable knitter wanted advert gives me the jitters more thananything. Something I can't identify quite... I mean, who are these people?
I am sitting here in my caseroom with a mug of wine pondering frictions and situations and events in some order...
I will tell what I can: My comrade identifies a certain episode of a certain nineteen seventies show entitled 'the ojuka situation' which involves geoffrey palmer as abad guy in a grey suit with a grey mood. The michelson morley thing: in a certain science periodical onlineresource, a posting was placed on a registered-users-only section, entitled 'failings of the michelson-morley model'. It attacked themichelson morley model (cf. luminiferous aether theory circa 1890-1920?) on two main fronts - the first being the theory that light slows downwhen it is, or its effects are, being observed, such that measuring speed of light waves at differing angles of movement within the aether will not necessarily reveal much as the light will behave differentlyunder observation compared to unobserved. Anyway, the real mystery is the response to this posting, which was posted a few days later underthe name 'michelson morley'.
I will return to the whitby area, all being well, a week saturday.
My email order to my man in edinburgh did not reach. I had to chase up the order by phone. If melody reaches me I will let all parties know, and glean what I can.

transmission ends. Refil mug. restroom, then plunge in nearby loch circa 17 degrees C at dusky 11pm. Pearl jam just fades out. I am not a knitter so cannot apply. I may go in as a crocheter. offer them analternative take. One hook instead of two sticks. I am sure there is a fair haired girl in floral cottons in a recess of a whitby arcade called something like ... sympathy, or sky, waiting with a consignment of silks or angora. I will investigate...
-/

The Fringe Donut

the circle is a ring avoiding the middle, the X is a crosshair upon the middle. but then the X deletes, the ring highlights. could read eitherof them either way. the centre could be land - the ring of coastal zone could be the fringe donut. or the centre could be an ocean and the donut the ring of land... in the late 80s/early nineties a whitby schooner illegally travelled to iceland and perhaps beyond, and is now an object of folklore. i forget it's name. but i bet it was something woolly...

Lines of Enquiry

lines of enquiry for Parks...

does he know when reagan came to the wolds?
does he know of kozyra? does he think reagan and kozyra's presence in the wolds is linked? [surely it is]
what does he know of the whitby scene? is he aware of any coastal folk known to be/have been in the area/s regan and kozyra are thought to be active? has he ever seen the ball of wool and needles emblem?

i will add more as it comes to me.

case notes and vinyl supply

case notes follow from earlier this week to present day.

5.05pm-6pm
Walked past campervan glimpsing pair of people at modern camper van following mountain walk. the pair I met a while back - barworker singersongwriter and boyfriend on the run. She was in an orange floral bandana so I knew it was her. I say hi and walk on. don't think theyrecognise me in daylight. few mins down the road they catch me up in the van and offer me lift. I climb in on passenger side next to her.he drives. he does more of the talking but both friendly and hip. ahot day. i'm all sweaty in unbuttoned colourful cotton shirt. They're camping at site on my route so I skip bus stop and stick with them totheir campsite track end. (they've got one small tent they say,surrounded in multi-room canvas affairs of others. but they have thevan as well. they were living in countryside near halifax (n.s. or w.y.) but she has a family static or somesuch permanently located atwhitby n.y. since childhood. she knows whitby well. as we move towardsdrop-off, one of this year's lambs lies in road, other sheep near - theyfear it's dead; stop van. I get out to shift it and it hops off from alazy doze. we're all glad. they give me a twinkle and nice to see andI'm away. on foot. past 3 guys i know sheering sdheep in the sunshine. I hadn't talked boston mass lyrics with her. just soaked up thevibrations. thoughts following on from wolds incident: bees pass onpollen without knowing it. just from sitting next to each other.especially in floral print.

today: 5.10pm-present time
my man (actually a female, but a good supplier of information kicks) tells me there is a sale on at the record shak. this place is nopicnic. no ordinary second hand joint. if records were alive and thiswas a petshop it would have been closed down long ago for mistreatment,one suspects. boxes and crates of vinyl holding vinyl holding vinyl in leaning towers. no passing room along the randomly formed aisles andmachete paths in what is only a small room to begin with. god knows what the BACK ROOM situation is like. but the man he has a system. hecan find stuff in there., he knows which hamster is in which cage andhow to get at it... a one in one out customer system is in voluntaryoperation.so... a sudden sale. half price i now find out. message from my man is that if i get a list to her partner's account they will collect the merchandise and deliver saturday. today is thursday.
just off fatpipe. my man she is with chocolate and wine at half ten, awaiting order. skip straight to her address now for quicker purchase of goods tomorrow pre 6am cheap ticket north... i now leave notes quickly to put together a wishlist and mail to gmail.

quick thoughts on latest notes though.

yes. the cross needles are now a world wide phenonemon, it is evident. i know shepherds purse myself and have contacts near there. i'm sure i used to hit it for tvp.
more soon.

Gold Cogitation

Just cogitating on the gold from Whitby - incidentally, not a millions miles from my own investigation zone. Meanwhile, plan is for a re-visit to Nelson Parks in the Wolds village within the next 10 days. aim to clarify some ideas arising from initial contact and Hexx-d visit previously. If there are any lines of enquiry you have, let me know and I will pursue them with him. also, trying to find the lost/disappeared notebook - or else ply Parks with enough micro-brewed ale to re-sketch them. Also. The nickname, Surly Early sounds too much like a sop to Searly? Too obvious...I'm in no mood to discount anything currently.

Whitby Discovery

Investigations in the Whitby region of East Cleveland UK have yielded vital clues and possible heavyweight evidence relating to the case. A task force was dispatched there by myself on a hunch while looking for Dan Stairs' presence in East Cleveland Ohio, USA. While reserching the US East Cleveland in Ohio, I came across various mentions of Whitby in East Cleveland UK. The town's name rang bells in the investigative chambers of my brain due to its similarity to the name of the WhitbyBoat company first identified in Michigan in the early days of this case. My hunch proved to be correct and the team returned with ample evidence of activity in the town. Here one of the team recount their experience first hand.

A handwritten cardboard sign was found situated on the lower step of a building entrance which opened onto a busy shopping street. The sign read 'part-time sales assistant wanted - must be a knitter - apply within'. This immediately struck me as pertinent to the case. I was tempted to go inside and apply for the job myself, to test the reaction of the staff already present, but my lack of knitting knowledge would have been a dea giveaway, so I settled for the covert approach, secretly photographing evidence whenever I got the chance.

Further up the steps were two permanent signs which read 'wool' and 'crafts'. Alarm bells were ringing in my ears as well as my brain by now. These permanent signs indicated to me that the building is being/has been used for woolcraft purposes for a long period. The handwritten sign is obviously temporary and can put on show or hidden away at a moments notice, allowing the group operating from within stractegic options as to when to advertise for 'help'.

More handwritten signage covered the walls of the corridoor so I walked in to take a look and found another handwritten sign, this time for 'Bobbins Postal Service'. The sign described a 'british wools yorkshire service' which can, and does, 'post wools, kits and exclusive design (in denim) all over the world'. The global aspect of their contact details suggests they are by no means an isolated operation and are in touch with other groups and/or indivuals potentially spanning the entire globe. Another sign, this one painted on a wooden A-board, showed that their output was not limited to deniim, with pure wools, aran and rowan yarn all represented.

A quick flick through a pile of second hand paperback books sat on a bench in the entrance corridoor revealed a book called 'warrimoo' by a Mary Patchett. The author's name struck me in its similarity to Melinda Packett, possibly an early version of the alias, or even inspiration for it, though this could just be coincidence. I cannot recall the subject matter of the book.

Stepping back outside the building in to the street (I noticed I was drawing attention to myself hanging around in the corridoor with camera being swivelled and pointed at every sign in sight and feared my intentions may be about to be discovered) I looked up to see a large model of a ball of wool with a pair of knitting needlers crossed through it, hanging above the doorway like a chandelier. The structure was pretty big and I was surprised not to have spotted it on my way in. My guess is it is the craft circle's emblem used to identify themselves to others. A hand-drawn image of he same structure appeared on a poster in the shop next door to the craft centre circled by the words 'Knit Happens In Whitby', which by now was sounding like an understatement to this investigator. It advertised a meeting for a 'newly established craft circle' to which 'all members were welcome'. Unfortunately, this is not occuring until the end of the month and it is unlikely we will have any agents in the area to attend. I can only surmise that the operation is being expanded in the aera, hence the need for new recruits. I wonder if the timing of the expansion relates to the beards presence on the UK festival circuit in any way. Incidentally, the shop this advert was placed in is called 'The Shepherd's Purse' which brings to my mind Regan's quote about the relative riches of the shepherd and the banker noted earlier in the case.

The other piece of possible evidence discovered was an advert placed in the window of a disused shopspace (opposite the Shepherd's Purse) which mentioned a 'cargo shed relocation presentation' something which sounds vague but ominous. Could be related to shipping cargo out of whitby to elsewhere, or the relocation of sheds (or other buildings) possibly mirroring the Michigan housing re-plan.

I have listed much evidence here but little theory. I shall tackle the evidence in this manner now...

The first thing I must focus on is the ball of wool and crossed needle motif the Bobbins group are using. It seems very similar to the marks of crossed needles made on the great lake cave paintings found in Lima by EPPS, as described by Safelight. This cross motif is the opposite of the rings found drawn around the great lakes on the wallmap of the military man who Phipps (the woodland ranger in Maryland) had contact with. This leads me to conclude that there are definitely military and counter-culture operations active in the same field - the military using the circle as their power symbol, and the underground group using the crossed needles as theirs. So, we are dealing with a game of noughts and crosses. As is known by anybody who has played the game, the centrespot is by far the most effective position to hold on the grid; without taking control of this spot, the game is almost lost by default. In our investigation, any form of midpoint seems to be empty. I do not know what this means, so draw your own conclusion. One thought occurs to me - if the military are aligned with the circular sumbol, it seems likely that closed-loop production methods are the realm of the military, not the counter culture. This seems all the more probable due to the amount of resources the military has compared to the likely resources of any kind of underground operation.



The existence of the Whitby group could well explain Regan's presence in the Wolds. My guess is that the Bobbins operation is being bankrolled by Kozyra and Reagan is there to oversee operations. A further guess is that the Whitby location was selected as a UK site due to the similarity of the name to Whitby Boat co. Searly is the most likely candidate to have chosen the spot, I would imagine. Whitby is also a harbour town, and with boats and water having much to do with the case this would seem to be a key feature of most locations. The water/boating savvy group no doubt chose the place as it provided a means to ship goods out to sea privately, avoiding official border crossing points. The synchronicity of the town's name providing confirmation that is was the right choice for the group to run an operation from.




Bobbins co. are no doubt shipping stuff to USA and also recruiting other craft circles in some global craftweb. It is highly possible that new recruits do not know the intended purpose of what they are making, knitting purely for pleasure or for social reasons. My guess is that only a few top brass in the organisation know the true agenda. The most likely suspects for this are Searly, Reagan, Costa, Kozyra, Melody Nelson, Melinda Packett, Cate, Grant, De Leon and Vandeloo. Some of these names may be aliases for the same person, but further research is required to confirm this.

in response

sounds interesting. bound to be linked to the case [what isn't?].
people may have moved underground or perhaps they have all just been arrested and sit in prisons across the usa.

either way, this actually sounds like a cover for the soft michigan operation, now most likely expanded to the ring of activity we identified as the north-eastern donut. the project is going live now (just as the beards touched down in the uk and just as bss begin their us/canada tour - all beyond coincidence, no doubt. perhaps they have reached the stage where the project can no longer be kept from public view, so some 'official explanation' is required to cover up for noticeable activity.

i believe i may have major findings from whitby[boat] this weekend, including a brazenly open uk operational centre and much photographic evidence. will write up later.

am also wondering when lone wolf's 'mentally composed' email, the 'esoteric drawings' and the evidence he uncovered on 'regan's dalliance with the Fix' are going to be disseminated among the investigative team. they sound important with regard to the case.

Urge For Going

I failed to locate Sad Sack last night while traipsing Whitby charity shops in the rain, however, in the shelves and boxes of a cramped sidestreet bric-a-brac shop, I did find a secondhand CD box set sampler of material from Joni Mitchell’s 4 ‘missing’ early albums, including the album ‘bisonine and …[?]’ containing the song ‘Urge for Going’. This was a really important find. I had heard ‘urge for going’ once, several years ago on radio Scotland. The song does exist outside of dreamland. I have often tried to locate it, but now know why I have failed – it is from one of 4 missing early albums, dating from the days of live performances in Greenwich Village coffee shops in the early sixties. I believe the song was one of the first to make Joni her name on the NY coffeeshop scene. The radio Scotland playing of it indicates that a genuine recorded version does exist in the mainstream. The presence of 4 whole albums of such early material is as the Grail itself to this early-Joni-ite. Albeit if they exist only in dreamland. I must channel the material somehow.

I feel that in reference to our current quest the finding of the teaser box set from Joni’s lost albums in the dream represents missing soft core road trip mixtapes being discovered. At The Haberdasher’s Request may be about to resurface.

Nb. In the dream I didn’t purchase the CD set (priced I think at £39.99). The knowledge that somewhere the 4 albums exist is for now enough. I will hold out for the vinyl of the full 4 albums, and will expect Lake Tahoe needlework references on them.