i’ve been flagging since december of 1999, and was fortunate enough to have stumbled into having phillip seymour as the person to introduce flagging to me. additionally, i was surrounded by an impressive group of flaggers (chuck, greg, michael, scott, phillip, bobby) and while a mere amateur in that group, they showed me how to have fun flagging. i eventually ended up teaching myself how to flag, and then, as luck would have it, teaching myself how to fan.
there are a few people to whom i owe a lot of thanks for helping me with my fanning — candida, chuck, vince, squishies, franklin, truble and brian, bobby, melinda, eric, david fox, richie, gert, don.
i’ve been fanning since mid-2000 and it is pretty much what i do now — i still carry some of my rags with me when i go out, but usually i fan. there is something very introspective about fanning that i really like, something quiet about it in the midst of the noise.
regardless of fanning or flagging, i find a very decided sense of calm when i am doing it; a kind of calm that is hard to find and even harder to give up once it’s been found.
i make my own fans (and made my own flags). with both, i end up experimenting all the time, playing it by ear, but never straying too far from what past experience has shown to be a smart path. with my flags, i hand sew them. not that i am opposed to sewing machines; i like the act of sewing my flags. and with my fans, i usually end up sewing them too, around the spines, through the dowels, etc.
i once made a set of fans using rain slicker material. i named them "louis 14 — the sun king" as i cut the ends of the fabric to look like the sun. the fans fly beautifully and live now in nyc with my fan-instigator. i once made a set of fans using the tines from a japanese rake. even better, i made the fans in a car as my friend and i drove from sf to the russian river and then back — finishing the fans right as we were walking into pleasuredome.
i’ve made fans using the spokes from chinese umbrellas, using plastic strips, even using bamboo sticks from the garden. if it’s worth trying, i probably will.
