“Nobody knows what a dollar is, what the word means, what holds the thing up, what it stands in for… what the hell are they? What do they do? How do they do it?”*…
From this website QuiltBank, a “subsidiary” of master quilter Nina Paley’s Pale Gray Labs, money– a $1000 “bill”– that one can actually use…
Each individually numbered bill is lovingly stitched by our robot Behemoth, which labors for over eight continuous hours at up to 1500 stitches per minute. Slowed down by the many twists and turns of the design, along with thread breaks, bobbin changes, and mysterious mishaps, each bill takes about two days to stitch. Nonetheless we achieve a pattern far more complex than any commercially available quilt.
The individual bills are painstakingly bound by Nina Paley, using a hundred-year-old foot-powered treadle sewing machine. This soft and tactile bill contains over 360,000 stitches through 100% cotton fabric, lofted with quality polyester batting – the best type for this purpose, though cotton or wool can be used on request. QuiltMoney can be machine washed like any other quilt; this is known as money laundering.
The design is based on a 1934-series $1000 bill featuring the portrait of Grover Cleveland, the only US president to serve two non-consecutive terms…Each $1000 bill is 40 inches high by 90 inches wide (3’4″ x 7’6″, or 1m x 2.3m) with bound edges. A rare uncut sheet of two is 92″ square, suitable for use on a queen or king size bed.
More at QuiltMoney.
* Boggs, (“money artist,” quoted in Lawrence Weschler’s wonderful Boggs: A Comedy of Values)
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As we cozy up with our currency, we might send rebellious birthday greetings to Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin; he was born on this date in 1814 (as recorded, O.S., in Russia; it is also rendered, N.S., May 30). A student of philosophy who immersed himself in Hegel, Bakunin moved to Paris, where he became first a friend, then an antagonist of Marx. While Bakunin shared Marx’s dedication to justice for peasants and workers, he disagreed that acting through the State was the remedy. Rather, Bakunin, an anarcho-socialist, argued for the replacement of the state with federations of self-governing workplaces and communes. Their rivalry came to a climax at the 1872 Hague Congress, at which Marx and his supporters expelled Bakunin and his from the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA). Bakunin then held a rival conference, and recruited a larger faction of IWA members than Marx. In the end, of course, while Bakunin was right to predict that Marxist regimes would be one-party dictatorships over the proletariat, not of the proletariat, it was Marx’s approach that enthralled Lenin.
Bakunin argued that, post-collectivization, money should be replaced by labor notes, recompense for work democratically-determined according to time spent and difficulty; still, he would surely have approved of Paley’s hand-crafted currency.
