Last night my sister stopped over in Los Angeles en route to the Quechua village of Otovalo in Ecuador from Guangzhou in the Canton province of China and I strapped her down for an hour to ask her about her incredible crusade to study the textile trail for my podcast.

Vanessa is studying the semiotics of fashion in Halifax, Nova Scotia where she discovered the language of culture can be unzipped from the patterns found in textiles. From Chan Chan to Lake Titicaca in Peru to the mega-industrialized cities of Canton, there is a history of meaning woven into the very fabrics that under closer scrutiny reveals much about the culture. For example the pelicans find their way into Peruvian “mantas” – cloth used for everything from baby harnesses to satchels for carrying foodstuffs, because the behaviors of pelicans may reveal the stock of fish in a given body of water. The action of a certain animal running uphill may belie the coming of a storm. For these reasons, these systems of communication are transmitted in the images found in the weave.

Vanessa trekked four days up the Incan trail, not only laden with but constructed of a semi-precious green stone called Serpetina, to the mystic cloud city of Machu Pichu. She considered the flora and fauna along the way and how their colors and movements worked their way into the cloth.

At Lake Titicaca, the natives have created floating islands out of reeds where they have taken up permanent residence – powering their internet connection via solar panels. The implications of this are astounding and beyond the scope of this article. But consider what this means in light of a thing like the Principality of Sealand.

Although now some villages are using synthetic dyes and fibers, natural colors were created from insects to onions, from llama and alpaca wool – but now the global popularity of alpaca has forced prices to raise so high the the very natives who innovated use of the material can’t afford it.

A month later, Vanessa finds herself in Hong Kong en route to a tech convention in Guangzhou where the sky is, as she describes, a permanent ashen color from all the pollution to be found in the world’s central factory for technology. Nine-story high building filled with nothing but cell phone merchants bring on intense migraines and colossal skyscrapers – glass and steel wonders that put the best New York has to offer to shame follow the dictates of Feng Shui and yet these things remain virtually unknown and unseen by the Western world.

Textiles are made on looms and looms, which used punched cards to create the complex patterns used in textiles are essentially the precursor to today 8.9″ laptops, thus the patterns thereby created are miniature programs whose propriety belongs to those micro-cultures that developed them. To unlock these codes is to understand hidden knowledge about the world, language and development of a culture. In these times when thousands of unique languages are going extinct by the week, to learn to read these lines of code is to reveal much – to find the seeds for restoring their significance in the world.

I urge you to listen to this extraordinary interview with this designer on my podcast and explore further the possibilities and semiotics of fashion.

Listen to Episode 17 of the KeramCast – or subscribe at iTunes by searching for “KeramCast” in the podcast directory.

Crumb – Dir: Terry Zwigoff

This is the film that first made me hyper-conscious of self-imposed, voluntary corporate branding as illustrator Robert Crumb observes that “these days” everyone is walking around wearing t-shirts and clothing advertising one company or another.  But the effects of this film cast a far wider net than mere corporate aversion.

Crumb is a complex man from a complex family; his two elder brothers are geniuses in their own right but each is also more mentally disturbed than the next which leads me to wonder, in this case with much greater emphasis than normal, whether it is the the anomalies and deviations from what is considered a “healthy, normal” mind that give rise to great art or whether it is the life of an artist that give rise to mental instability.  Of course there is no definitive answer but this film’s utterly deviant subjects underline that the two are hardly mutually exclusive. Required viewing.

In the Realms of the Unreal – The Mystery of Henry Darger – Dir: Jessica Yu

Continuing on this theme of mental instability and visionary creativity, here we have as our subject an ascetic, anti-social man about whom even his lifelong neighbors knew very little.

A janitor and avid church-goer, no one knew, until he was moved to a convalescent home in his final weeks on Earth, that in his single apartment he had written a fifteen-thousand page fantasy novel with profoundly complex and beautiful illustrations wherein all the young girls who were the subjects of his very innocent-spirited magnum opus (and even that is understatement) had penises – more than likely because he didn’t know better.  The study of his work is a study of how the mind attempts to heal it wounds – Darger was sent to boarding schools and even a sanitarium in his childhood – all of which he works out in the course of his book.

Rivers and Tides – Dir: Thomas Riedelsheimer

This documentary about nature-artist Andy Goldsworthy will, unequivocally change your life. using only things found in the natural world, he synchronizes himself with the patterns found in the world and ultimately finds a way to render found objects in a manner that pursues and underlines their energy.

Not only is it a fitting introduction to this extraordinary soul, but Fred Frith’s score perfectly punctuates this delicate process throughout.

Highly recommended. Beautiful beyond belief.

Surfwise: The Amazing True Odyssey of the Paskowitz Family – Dir: Doug Pray

Dorian “Doc” Paskowitz is another man who turned his back on the conventions of society and decided to raise his nine children in a dilapidated RV, teaching them what he felt were the true values and virtues of life.  An expert surfer, and Stanford-educated physician who was head of the medical association in Hawaii, Paskowitz’ extraordinarily liberal views manifested different results in each of his children.  Living on a strict organic food regimen and making do with as little money as possible, this is a study in what it might mean to live virtually off the grid, for better or worse, and whether or not that is any longer possible.

The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill – Dir: Judy Irving

Concerning the life of homeless musician Mark Bittner who befriends a wild flock of stray parrots that live in San Francisco city proper.  What begins with a seemingly innocuous birdseed hobby becomes a life unto itself and he transforms into a kind of Francis of Assissi to this displaced, growing flock.  He conjectures the flock began as a group of runaway pets that found each other and eventually began breeding in the wild.  Mark champions them when public outcries by environmentalists to exterminate them so as to ensure the stability of the local ecosystem take on City Hall.  This film teaches a lot more than birdkeeping, however, as it observes what dynamics may unfold when we open our arms and our hearts to realities of the present and the abundance that exists in our ever changing world.

Man on Wire – Dir: James Marsh

I get vertigo even thinking about this film, let alone looking at the cover photo.  But yes, it is real – Phillipe Petit, a French tighrope walker, conspired, coordinated and ultimately manifested his ultimate dream – to walk a tightrope between the very top of the World Trade Center Twin Towers.  He pulled this off without any sanctions from the city of New York or permits whatsoever.  This document of the event is made even more amazing by the fact that the Twin Towers are no longer there.  Likely to be nominated for an Oscar in 2009, this is easily a film that will irrevocably change your expectations of what can be done while here on Earth.

Sharkwater – Dir: Rob Stewart

Speeding along on the inspirational humans train, we come to Rob Stewart’s Sharkwater that I had the great fortune of seeing when it had its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival several years back.  Rob Stewart was, of course, in attendance, and confided that he simply set out to make a film about the ocean, and his love for sharks.  What he ended up with, however, is a precursor to Al Gore’s much more ballyhooed Inconvenient Truth; Stewart discovers that his beloved predators are being siphoned out of existence by the hundreds of thousands as the illegal shark-finning trade (that is, hunting the sharks for their prized fins and then dropping them, alive, back into the ocean) becomes ever more voracious.

Stewart gets arrested, deported, threatened by global blackmarket gangs and even goes undercover in some very dangerous locales after all of this, to bring us a critical warning: if we wipe out the top of the food chain, we wipe ourselves and everything below it out as well.  Suddenly Jaws seems like the worst kind of demonizer.  Much like Fatal Attraction did for empowering women back in the 80′s.  Shark Week will never be the same.

The Devil and Daniel Johnston – Dir: Jeff Feuerzeig

My favorite short story of all time is not The Lottery, but rather “Light Verse” by Issac Asimov wherein an irreplaceable broken robot is discovered to be the secret source of an artists unrepeatable holographic light sculptures.  When it is repaired, as a favor, by a visiting robotics specialist, she murders the man for having tinkered with her glitchy android worker.

Daniel Johnston sees devils, fears more things than you can count on your hands and contends with all manner of mental illness ranging from manic depression, schizophrenia, narcissism and bipolar disorder, and he is also considered to be one of the musical geniuses of our time by such luninaries as Curt Cobain and Thurston Moore.   Utterly self-obsessed to the point of exasperation, this doc provides an exahustive insight into Johnston’s world.

Dark Days – Dir: Marc Singer

Whoa.  Just – whoa.  I am not sure which is the real documentary I am referring to here: the film about secret underground village of homeless people living in an abandoned train tunnel in New York City, or the making-of documentary about director Marc Singer who gave up everything to make this film and ultimately find these people something better.  Perhaps because I was playing Bethesda’s Fallout 3, a first-person-shooter about the world after a massive nuclear holocaust, that tempered my response to this film.  Even then, I was still picking my jaw up off the floor.

The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara – Dir: Errol Morris

A composite interview with Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, a former president of Ford Motors, and a chief manager of the Vietnam war, reveals the complex decisions that must be made concerning war, career and the bottom line.  Regardless of your political leaning, exposure to McNamara’s perspective on all of these will expand and diversify, and perhaps even muddle your own arguments and considerations when opining on what is best and what is acheiveable in the fog of war.

The film won Morris the 2003 Academy Award for Best Documentary.