Working on the earthished overalls

I have been hacked on Instagram, but I am still working on the earthished overalls and still a visible mender, although I am not as visible as I wanted to be. Much more work to be done. They are very fragile

I got a kind of second stroke last Monday

I feel I got a second stroke last Monday when my instagram account was hacked and I lost my connection to almost 3000 friends, a social network build up through a decade, just lost within seconds, just like my stroke in my brain in 2017, when I lost my capacity to participate in physical social life on full scale. I simply don’t know what to do now. I lost a very important, a critical part of my life, just like that!! I have so far tried in vain to make a new account. The hackers seem to be very efficient. I might need to leave Facebook completely, get a new phone-number and then try to reestablish my connections. Until now I will try to keep mending and stitching enjoying to wear the magical overalls, I got from Jacki in Australia or the osage overalls naturalized by Kriss in our overalls art collective or some of the many other overalls in the overalls art collective, which will survive somehow, right Evelyn?

From instagram back to the old blog

I am trying to get something good out of sad news, that my instagram-account was hacked and misused. I am very sad about making trouble for my lovely friends, who have followed me for years, but I will do my best to be alive online, now through this blog. Since last time I was active on this blog, I have started to make my own mending and stitching. It means that a lot of what I will write about is about wild embroidery.

I am back on the blog

Hello everybody. After a break of 4 years I am back on the bibprofessor blog.

Back on blog – overalls art

Hi everybody,

I have been quite silent here on the blog. I have more or less left the blog and Facebook, but I will try to come back. Since the last post much have happened and I have more or less turned myself into an overalls artist as you can see from the photos, more to come.

10th international overalls weekend is coming up

A few days ago, I thought, well, it may be over, all that overalls celebration stuff, and then things happens and here we are again

and overalls are just getting older and more beautiful , here some overalls in 2009

and here are the same overalls today

you see clearly the difference, the wornness and the growing patina! and I will conclude with a photo from my walking week in Montmartre

 

First year of my new life

Here I am blogging about the day exactly one year ago, on July 14th 2017, at 5.05pm/17.05, when I suddenly couldn’t walk and keep the balance. I probably had a stroke, even if the doctors couldn’t find the blood clot in the scannings, still not sure what happened, eventually caught by stress. In any case, the fact is that in the days after July 14th 2017, I had trouble with walking and only slowly went back to walk and keep the balance and could not come on my two wheeler bike anymore. In addition,  I started to become very tired after even small social interaction. If people started to discuss or tried to take me into a discussion, I withdrew completely, and got confused, if they started to insist. If we had guests or went to social events, I had to rest 1 or 2 days to regain a kind of normalcy. That’s still the case one year after.

Anyway, all my life, I have been very glad to interact with other people, to take initiatives to start and lead new projects, to organise, to teach by discussing and working together with my students, to organise research projects involving international collaboration, to organise conferences etc. etc.  even to organise an international overalls day, having overalls party etc.

All that is history for me, with a lot of great memories, but it’s past, it’s over. If I’m going to be involved in any collective project in the future, it will be in small doses, in slow motion and eventually behind the scenes.

It does not mean, I am withdrawing from the world, but I’m connecting to the world in a new way, in which I can be more on my own and sit quietly at my favourite place in our garden and do the work while enjoying birds and plants around me here at the small farmhouse.

From here I can watch the birds, drink my coffee, draw, write and stitch in my own tempo and then publish it and show it to people on instagram @dokprofessor

sdr

dav

The coffee is not new, but the rest is definitively something new in my life. I did some stitching and patching in the 70ties on my jeans jacket, jeans and I also draw a little bit in the 70ties, but besides that, I have never done that except as a kid. Now I’m really into it and love to make a kind of painting with stitching, visible mending on my overalls and making a kind of graphic novel with drawings and texts (In English), right now about Jens Hansen in the 18th century #jenshansen1746.

bty

bty

It is really fun to do all this, giving me a new kind of connection to the world, so again, all this does not mean I am not collaborating and connecting with other  people anymore, on the contrary, but just means that I’m doing it in a much less intense and direct way than before. This gives  me actually an opportunity to continue with my historical studies, documentation studies, music etc., just in new interesting ways.

So all in all it may actually be better than before, so what started as a bad thing may turn out to be a good thing! and you can go on, even if you need to do it on 3 wheels!

A life in overalls

Here I am in 2001, standing on Crescent and Murray with Holly Park in Bernal Heights in San Francisco, when I taught at UC Berkeley and stayed in a studio on Crescent Ave. I had just recovered from a heavy stress period and found my new energy and new way of breathing throughout my body and found MY FAVORITE CLOTHES: OVERALLS FOR EVER SINCE. I have had a much better life since, and the overalls follow me, and now I am retired and live in a small farmhouse in Denmark, and still wear the same overalls as I do here: now with white hair and beard, and overalls enriched, mended and stitched by Michelle Hoffee, http://www.livinganddyeing.com/

It is really a privilege to be so lucky to have an enjoyable life in overalls and I hope to have that in many years more. Currently I’m waiting with excitement to get an enriched pair of these overalls from Michelle

stay tuned and enjoy the international overalls weekend over all

9th international celebration of overalls

it is here tomorrow, are you ready to wear your overalls. Some of us wear overalls every day year round for years and years, but somehow it is fun to celebrate our favorite clothes on a special time, in the weekend close to November 20th, the original day Susan and I decided in 2009 to make an international celebration.

I have had the pleasure to celebrate it with other people, here in New Orleans in 2013 but I also celebrate it just with my dear wife as I did at the first celebration in 2009, and these overalls are the same I’m wearing this weekend, hope many of you will join me where ever you are, have a nice overalls weekend

A letter to an overalls friend

Dear Farmer Meg

I have followed you from being bee-farmer on the roof in Brooklyn to now farmer in New Jersey and I’m not sure if we met in 2010 on Café Royal, but in any case we were close at least, we both wear overalls, and I have really enjoyed following your life journey and been inspired of your struggles and fights. I also follow you on Instagram and I know it is not always easy and you asked your followers: how to keep direction, focus and not just think of money!

Today I’m a retired professor receiving my pension and can afford to live happily in our small farmhouse, visit our family and friends. I feel privileged since that it is not  a given thing and has not been for sure in the past.

My grandfather, my mothers father, was a son of a farmer and became himself a farmer in the beginning of the 20th century. He actually got a big farm and many kids, but it was hard work to run a big farm, and you are not in a world of your own. Sometimes you also need to help other people, like your brothers, who also might have a farm and then they might fail due to fall in prices or other economic issues, and that pushed my grandfather to give up his big farm and then they family went from place to place, quite small, but they tried to keep up the spirit, even if it was very difficult at times.

My other grandfather was also born on a farm, but became an urban guy, into the railways. His son, my father, wanted to get back to farmlife and started to work in the late ’20ties on some real big farms, Danish manors, with a lot of farm workers. He had big ambitions and wanted to be really educated in big scale farming by going abroad. At the same time, many Scandinavians went to North America for trying to get their own farm and make it well. My father planned to be just half a year in Western Canada, Alberta and went there 20 years old in 1930. This was at a time when they tried to break new land in Alberta and my father worked hard.

He tried hard to settle down for good in Alberta after he found a fiance, but his health could not like the very cold humid winters right next to Rocky Mountains, so after 3 years attempt he had to leave and go back to Denmark. There he found my mom, found out that he was quite good at drawing houses, so slowly but steady he became an architect, became an urban guy, but never forgot his dream of having a farm, not just for fun, but for real. When he had made enough money as an architect, he bought a farm and turned it into a big farm (of course) and started to have sheep, a lot of sheep, both for meat and wool. He tried to do a lot of things at the same time and it didn’t work and the health still did not cooperate well with that, so when he was about 60, he got ill and at the same time, he made some risky investments involving other people and then too many bad things happened beyond my fathers control and forced my father to give up and he settled down on a small farm for his last 9 years before he passed away at 69, but he was a fighter, wrote a number of books, for instance this book on sheep farming.

Compared to my grandfather (my mothers father) and my father, my life has been relatively easy although I have also met challenges through life. As young academic in the 1970ties I very soon got a teaching position, but at a certain point, I felt there were too many restrictions, too much top-down management on how you should teach, so at one point I got enough, but it was not easy to leave. I didn’t have another job, but I had  a family with 2 small kids to take care of and a wife with a part time job as librarian, not especially well paid. That was not easy, in fact it was pretty  hard times for all of us, especially when we  for instance could not afford to go by train, (we have never had a car), and only had very little to our kids etc. I might have done different today, but I did what I did and I thought a lot of what to do in life and walked a lot wondering what next, but I also had a dream of making it even better than my first teaching position. So in the middle of a lot of problematic things, I kept a focus on what is right and important and finally, I got a position in Northern Norway, and became professor at the Northernmost University in the world. Then I could take care of the family and my wife studied and did as she still does, a lot of fiber art / textile crafts. We still didn’t have a car or a lot of clothes and things like that. We still lived a simple life, but within a nice comfort zone able to do most of what we wanted to do, in the most beautiful surroundings.

It was also pretty hard work, but in a different sense. It was perhaps like starting your own business, your own farm, because I was the first one in our department, in the beginning the only teacher, administrator etc. so at one point I met the wall and got stress and could not cut my bread, lift my cup etc. My body said stop, but I went through a physiotherapy and went back to normal life and one of the great things about being professor, was the ability to connect to colleagues around the world and I  started to go to US to visit my American colleagues at Berkeley and in 2001, I stayed in San Francisco for half a year and taught at Berkeley. It was fantastic, not only to be able to teach smart students, but I also fall in love with the life in Mission / Bernal Heights, my spiritual home.

especially for 2 things, the cafés and of course the overalls. It was a kind of heaven for me. To sit all day and work on the cafés in overalls, able to breathe all the way through, that was a new life for me. Here I am in 2001 in my first overalls and many years after, in 2013, in Philz Coffeehouse in the same overalls!

Today, I can sit outside in my coveralls, next to our shed on our very little “farm” in Denmark, perhaps more correct to say farmhouse with a garden 🙂 but surrounded by farms in the Danish countryside. I can sit here with good health at the age of 68 and not worry about money and enjoy my life in (c)overalls and writing. I feel very privileged compared to my father and my grandfather, but I’m not sure if I have been able to do that, without being struggling for what I found right earlier in my life. I might have been frustrated, if I had kept a job without possibilities to do what you would like to do. It was not always easy, but it was a matter of doing something you like to do and in which you could find yourself! in which you can breathe all the way through.

I don’t know if this makes sense to you farmer Meg and Niel. I know it is not easy for you, but you can do it, and I look forward to follow you and perhaps we will meet not only on FB and IG, but at one of our bigger or smaller farms 🙂

Overall greetings Niels