Crafting Hyperbolic Hats for Sly and the Family Stone

A true story of insane beauty

Everyone looks better in a hyperbolic hat. Me in 2007.

Of the several rock-star greats who passed away last month, surely the most enigmatic is Sly Stone, he of the “Family Stone," a tribe to which we might all want to belong.

Though I was a tad too young to experience the rise, and Rise, of Sly, I well remember his fall, and Fall. Thus it was to my astonishment that in mid-2007 I received a phone call from one of his representatives asking if I would consider being part of his soon-to-be-announced come-back.

The woman on the line introduced herself as a costume designer who’d been engaged by the Family Stone to create stage outfits for their upcoming reunion tour, and Sly had announced he wanted to be seen in a hyperbolic hat. Would I be willing to come to Jamaica, the lady asked, and teach a bunch of Rastas to crochet non-Euclidean headgear? Sly himself would be sporting one on stage, but they thought it would also be great to sell hyperbolic chapeaus at the tour Merch store. Could I see my way to helping out with this project?

Thought Number One: Sly’s making a comeback!?! Reaallly? I mean Really? Last time I looked he was being arrested for drug possession. Sly had supposedly been making a comeback several times before, only to disappoint us all.

Thought Number Two: Explosion of Joy!!! My name, realllly – I mean Really – being invoked in the same sentence as Sly. Me, sitting on a beach smoking spliffs with the dudes and assuming I’ll get a back-stage pass to one of the premier concerts of the decade.

This fantastical scenario had been precipitated by an article about my work which had appeared several weeks before in the LA Times, a piece about my Crochet Coral Reef project – LA Times article (May 6, 2007).

On the cover of the Times’ Culture Section that weekend was a photo of myself and my crochet-reef co-creator Christine Wertheim with hyperbolic crochet models on our heads. When the paper sent a photographer to our house to get some shots of our artwork no-one had fashion statements in mind, but as the guy was leaving I mentioned that everyone looks better in a hyperbolic hat and we flung some onto our noggins. He snapped – I think – one shot, and that’s what the editors settled on for our artist portrait. They promised they’d send me a copy of the pic, but never did. So I asked a friend to take one of me instead. Sly had seen the article and was taken by the concept. Hence the Phone Call.

For an afternoon I was in a state of delirium.

Sly and the Family Stone in 1968. Sly second from left. (Photographer unknown)

Then reality set in. What were the chances of Sly touring again? Close to zero in all likelihood. Then again, rumors had started to circulate. In January that year he’d made a guest appearance with The New Family Stone band at the House of Blues. In April, they’d appeared at the Flamingo in Las Vegas. Lo and behold, a few weeks later The New Yorker ran a piece touting that This Time it was happening. He’d cleaned up. Gotten sober. It was On!

And so was I.

One astounding fact the costume woman explained to me, which helped to nail the fantasy, is that in Rastafarianism guys must crochet their own Tams – the distinctive hats they wear. It’s a religious committment, she said. So they all know how to crochet and I wouldn’t need to teach that skill; we could leap straight to the hyperbolic part. Workshops on the beach, she suggested?

Image courtesy flickr.

Of course it never happened. Sly was too far gone. Indeed, the great funkadelic genius rarely appeared in public again. But for a few weeks I was in full-on plotting mode imagining the supplies I’d need to take to Jamaica; thinking about how to explain hyperbolic space between puffs of weed.

My sister pointed out, to her discredit, that my tolerance for cannabis is also close to zero and I wouldn’t be doing anything "between puffs” except passing out. Yet as Werner Herzog tells us, “there are two kinds of truth: the accountants’ truth and the ecstatic truth.” Herzog calls himself a champion of the ecstatic truth and that’s what I will go with here. For a brief period in 2007 it was Me and Sly and non-Euclidean space wrapped into one ecstatic bundle.

Perhaps what the phone-call woman said was all a lie. Perhaps she’d been smoking too much weed herself. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps… Yet I think there is moral to this story: 1) The world is bound by secret knots. 2) Never underestimate the power of handicrafts. Crafting is a bridge between cultures, peoples and intellectual domains, defying academic tendencies to divide our knowledge systems and reminding us all of the wisdom in our fingers. Sly expressed that wisdom through musical instruments. Me, I’ll go with yarn.