Rummaging for answers in the pages

2012-01-16T03:05:00.010-05:00

Sometimes i draw shitty comic things:

Meanwhile, sketchbook.

Scanned vs. photo. The scanner makes some colors downright ugly to look at (like this magenta-pink; the scanned version makes me feel ill); others it washes out.

2012-01-04T02:06:00.013-05:00

With everything that's been happening, you might as well remember the above.

Meanwhile, some scanned sketchbook pages.

I was really tired when i did the Lion King comics. They just kind of popped into my head.

More pictures of final litho prints

2011-12-21T15:28:00.009-05:00

Pictures of some of the best ones of the bunch (of the 9 edition final). But as you can see, had a little trouble with the glue.

And the final story/concept/idea was the Morrigan as the Washer at the Ford.

Finished finals yesterday & have slept lots already YAY

Forgot to put these up.... final Litho prints!

2011-12-19T00:42:00.012-05:00

I got all my final litho prints done Friday the 9th! I stayed in the print shop all day, first finishing up cutting out the paper for the chine-collé (which i'd started Thursday night, as well as finishing up the etches), then putting the glue on the red paper (which caused it to curl up & was messier than i'd have liked), then actually printing. Twenty in all, with, obviously, some variations, as you can see. I took some video of the process, which i'd like to edit together into a little video & maybe put up on YouTube-- nothing special, of course.

I was really glad with how they all came out; only a few were really messed up with the chine-collé registering badly & all. I watched the moon rise while i worked, & finished in time for free cocoa & cookies, & then to accompany friends to the movie theater so we could laugh at Breaking Dawn.

Tomorrow is the final crit! Litho was so difficult, but now i think i can kind of finally appreciate it. It was kind of bittersweet to roll up the last time for the final print, then tuck my stone (i named it Steve) back into its cubby.

Now i just have to worry about all my other finals. Considering the fact that my paper due Tuesday is still not finished, i'm going to be worrying a lot. I suck at writing papers.

Photography, Fall 2011

2011-12-17T13:12:00.020-05:00

Untitled (contact sheet as image)
8x10"
Gelatin Silver Print
2011

Untitled (photogram 1)
8x10"
Gelatin Silver Print
2011

Untitled (photogram 2)
~4 & 3/4 x8"
Gelatin Silver Print
2011

Untitled (photogram 3)
5 & 3/4 x8"
Gelatin Silver Print
2011

Untitled (scopophilia 1)
8x10"
Gelatin Silver Print
2011

Untitled (scopophilia 2)
8x10"
Gelatin Silver Print
2011

Untitled (light 1)
8x10"
Gelatin Silver Print
2011

Untitled (light 2)
8x10"
Gelatin Silver Print
2011

Untitled (light 3)
8x10"
Gelatin Silver Print
2011

The Scream
8x10"
Gelatin Silver Print
2011

Untitled (final 1)
8x10"
Gelatin Silver Print
2011

Untitled (final 2)
8x10"
Gelatin Silver Print
2011

Untitled (final 3)
8x10"
Gelatin Silver Print
2011

Untitled (final 4)
8x10"
Gelatin Silver Print
2011

Untitled (final 5)
8x10"
Gelatin Silver Print
2011

Untitled (final 6)
8x10"
Gelatin Silver Print
2011

things are getting kinda gross now....this is not real this is not really happening

2011-12-14T01:47:00.001-05:00

you bet your life it is

I keep thinking about bad things. Woke up this morning, & my thoughts were already on all the terrifying things that are starting to happen in this country. If it's not internet censorship, it's the NDAA bill or whatever with its cute little bit about essentially turning the country into a battleground on which the military can act with impunity. No more Bill of Rights. No more search warrants, not even knocking, not even explaining; just bursting into your house to come take you away for whatever supposed "terrorist" things you've been doing. Criticizing the government? Middle Eastern descent? Dropping the flag? You terrorist. We're detaining you somewhere indefinitely. No rights. No right to a lawyer, no right to a speedy trial of your peers. No more rights.

So while yeah, the GOP are showing themselves to be their usual assholic selves, i feel like that all acts as diversionary tactics. I feel like the real worries & dangers are the laws that are trying to passed nowadays, that strip everyone of their rights, & then go further into it to strip other people of their rights based on the color of their skin, what's between their legs, who they choose to make out with, &c. I feel like they're trying to pass these while everyone thinks they're doing their American duty by making Rick Perry into a meme. Yeah, fine, we know he's a jackass piece of shit. What about these laws that will rob of us our rights? What about the fact that it could become very real for the military to knock down your door just because you made a ranting blog post about the government? And for them to take you away somewhere & hold you indefinitely? It's the Patriot Act on steroids. I've also seen something that claims FEMA is building detainment/internment camps in all 50 states. While the site it linked to seemed somewhat questionable, at the same time, i feel like it wouldn't surprise me at all. After all, once they drag you off, they've got to have somewhere to dump you & keep you for the rest of your life. As you're forgotten utterly by the outside world.

And people are pointing out that the fact that these laws are popping up after Occupy got started isn't a coincidence. And that today's protesters are going to be the first arrested & thrown away, & they'll be forgotten. Left to rot.

I'm legitimately scared about what the next year might bring, never mind the next few years. Will we even still be around? Maybe the internet will be cut off from the rest of the world. Maybe i'll be locked up somewhere for waving a flag upside down. Maybe they'll start executing people. What's better, to be locked up indefinitely & forgotten, or shot by a firing squad?

I want a hug. I want to be told that these things won't happen, & to have it be true. But that's not going to happen. And when shit starts to go down, will people wake up then? Will they just bow their heads, stay low, "Don't draw attention & they won't bother us"? Will people rise to the occasion, & will they suffer the consequences? Will people rise up after that happens? Will those of us who grew up on stories like Harry Potter & Lord of the Rings live up to our fictional heroes? I don't think i'm really a Gryffindor. Could i ever be as brave as Harry? As Neville? Would i ever have the courage to stand in front of someone who could easily kill me & say, "Fuck you, you won't bring us down"?

And then, people want rest. There's the simple fact that some days you have to tune things out to get through the day. What happens when that no longer becomes an option? What happens when we can't say "Let me just curl up for the day, get some work done, read a book, drink some tea/coffee/cocoa; i need an off day, it's an off day"-- what happens when we get burnt out & scared & tired & frustrated? What happens when we no longer have the luxury to tune things out? What happens when we get crushed? What happens when we find out we can be broken even more than we already are? What happens when we get tired & weepy & want to cry & curl up away from the world? We already want do, don't we? And things can-- & fuck, probably will-- get much, much worse. I'm already scared. I already want to turn into a two-year-old again, go crying to somewhere big & safe. I want to be told everything will be okay, & it will be true.

How do the heroes manage? How do they keep moving forward, going on? How do they not stop & get so scared they run backwards instead? How do they not get tired & just stop? The simple, cynical answer, of course, is that they're fictional. The story will go in their favor, because that's the way it's "supposed" to be. But that doesn't happen in reality. More often than not, in reality, the good guys lose & the bad win. Overwhelmingly so. We grow up on stories of good triumphing over evil, & then we grow up & see how false those stories are, even as we hold onto them for hope & to find a path, some way to cope & move forward & try to win. It's like how my generation was told "You can be anything you want to be, do anything you want to do!" We grew up on that, grew up believing it; now the illusion is shattered, but we still try to hold onto it. We were told we could all be good & great & brilliant, & even after we've been shown that this is not true, we still want to hold onto it somehow. We still want to try. We still want to rage against this bullshit, still want to make something of ourselves, even as the proverbial wolves close in around us. Even as we see everything becoming even more horrible & moving backwards, we still seem to want to believe that we can become something, that we can win.

Because, oh, well, Harry won. The Free Peoples won. The good guys win-- the good guys win because the authors make it so that the good guys win. Harry only gets a happy ending because JKR wanted him to have a happy ending. Happy endings & survival aren't guaranteed in the real world.

I don't want any of this to be real. I really fucking don't. But i can't help myself. I start to think, & i start to be convinced, because what other result could there ever possibly be? And i can't see ways of fighting any of it. And i get scared, & then i feel like a coward, & then i get angry at myself for being a coward. I'm scared to be grabbed by a police person & slammed to the ground. It would probably break my glasses, if not my nose, & i can't see well at all without my glasses. I read an account of someone who was arrested at OWS, & how she wasn't allowed to use the bathroom, that she was in pain because of it, & only after much begging did the police let her use the toilet, & even then, they watched her. I have bladder issues; i couldn't go without freedom to use a freaking toilet. I'm scared; i'm a coward. I'm no Gryffindor.

Of course, when i'm not scared, i fly into rages. Which is pretty unhelpful. I wouldn't be the most peaceful protester; i'd end up being the one trying to beat the police back with their own nightsticks. And by the sounds of police jackassery in many various situations, some of the fuckers deserve it. Some of the fuckers who abuse their power deserve to be maced in their faces, slammed onto the ground, handcuffed to the point of losing feeling in their hands, beaten, called horrible things, degraded-- because they've done it to others. I don't want to fucking play fair & nice. Do i look like Jesus? Buddha? Muhammad? Quan Yin? I'm a vicious, heartless bitch when i'm not terrified, & sometimes i really do think certain people deserve it.

But now i'm getting just scared more & more & i just don't know what to do anymore.

[originally typed up somewhere else 12/12/11]

Color prints + first new oil paintings in over a year

2011-12-04T17:50:00.015-05:00

First off:

Really cheap stuff over at my Etsy! Like, really cheap. If you don't believe me, go look & see.

These are most recent: test photolitho prints + watercolor.

And finished the color prints. Unfortunately, none of them were as on register as i wanted them to be.

The crap test prints were more on register with the key than the actual prints:

And now, the first two (oil) paintings i've made in over a year:

Both done for my medieval art history class (better than having to do a 7 page paper). Modernized Byzantine icons! Hippie Pantocrator & Social Networking Theotokos. Unfortunately, my artist statement was tyoed up at 3-3:30 a.m. & made no sense whatsoever. But people responded to them very positively, which surprised me. I was expecting at least one person to get mad about it & accuse me of something or other.

Mary was first, & Hippie Jesus was second.

2011-11-25T02:59:00.005-05:00

Light and shadow Photo assignment. A triptych. Don't think it ended up working too well.

And sketchbook page:

I've painted a little bit tonight. The gold paint i'm using (it sounds tacky, but there's a reason, honest) smells so toxic that i've had to put my fan back in my window to try & air out my room. So i'm really cold right now & wondering if i should sleep in a room with this gold paint....

Yay carcinogens!

sketchbook update

2011-11-13T23:23:00.009-05:00

FaerieCon + Litho update

2011-11-11T17:40:00.014-05:00

First off, here's all that's left of my Marauders pumpkin:

Got to go FaerieCon this year, & got to meet Charles de Lint! He's one of my favorite authors.

Charles Vess giving a bit of an art history lesson:

They had a nice free afternoon tea type thing, which was great.

Meanwhile, litho:

They still aren't finished, but as of now:

Three colors!

And i got painful blisters from all the ink rolling. Fun times!

This year's pumpkins

2011-10-30T20:33:00.015-04:00

Today, finally carved the pumpkins.

And the foliage was really amazing, too.

Halloween for me = the Marauders, so my personal pumpkin is pretty much always Marauders flavored, since at least a few years back.

My father bought one, but wasn't going to carve it. Lame. So i made a two-faced pumpkin.

2011-10-30T18:40:00.018-04:00

First is the "Scopophilia" diptych:

And the first contact sheet for the current "light" assignment (the last one all the way on the right in the very top row, i really want to make into a print).

And these are all the current litho prints. First is Actaeon, again:

The Actaeon counteretch:

When printing Ammit, there was one that i ran through twice to try and get the darks to go darker, and it made a kind of double effect, which i thought was cool enough to keep the print around & give it a name.

And Ammit:

And the most recently completed one, Skadi, from Norse mythos/religion:

And some sketchbook stuff:

2011-10-17T01:31:00.012-04:00

Ammit is finally printed after a lot of difficulty, upset, & a third, insanely hot etch. (The above picture is not what the stone ended up looking like, after the third etch.)

And if anyone ever finds this mug, i want it:

First lithography print

2011-09-25T16:36:00.009-04:00

First litho print; using an aluminum litho plate. Printed on Stonehenge paper.

It's difficult to tell (i guess i didn't plan it out as well as i thought/ought), but it's Actaeon.

Am still fighting with my stone (a different, larger, heavier one). Can't seem to get it level at all. And our second print is due this Friday (the first one was due just this past Friday). mfw:

Stress is fun, right?

2011-09-16T09:04:00.003-04:00

The final Alumni Show Closing in the old CCAT building was the thirteenth (this past Tuesday). This is what i put in it. I'm upset about the fact that they're razing the old building, but it was nice to be reminded that the new building's "inaugural show" would be the Alumni Show.

Here's my camera for Photo. It's old; from either the 70s or 80s. The lens i bought used because the camera's own lens was broken (the focus). It doesn't count out the frames, so i need to make tick marks whenever i (hopefully) take a shot. Won't know until Tuesday if anything came out (& only then if i manage to develop the film correctly).

2011-09-13T12:49:00.004-04:00

I'm pretty sure my litho stone is trying to kill me any way possible. If not by how heavy it is & how unwieldy the grinding thing is, then by constantly getting scratched. Hopefully it's pretty level; i mean, i check it every time, but i don't trust myself. And my camera for Photo has a new, used (lol what), working $20 lens, but the things that counts the frames may be broken, so i get to try & keep track of how many times i hit the shutter, just in case... How will i know when the roll's truly started? Crapshoot.

A lot of shit seems to be going down, especially in the past month or so, with issues & now college related stress. Sometimes this stress works; having to work & concentrate & get things done can push everything else out of mind. It worked well yesterday; today i seem to be a little more off. I kept screwing up grinding the litho stone today. And i still need ideas for what to do this semester...

Right now, the only thing that's really been keeping me sane is, actually, Yu-Gi-Oh. Particularly the Abridged Series (despite its own flaws, namely the transphobia that frequently pops up) & Season 0-- which, really, is holycrapamazing. It's not all children's card games, & sometimes it can be pretty fucked up, & "Yami" (oh don't get all upset over it) is, as some people have eloquently put it, batshit insane. It's glorious; i love it (i've taken to saying "CRAY CRAY" whenever he shows up & is particularly mental). The voice acting is superb, too, & i love the characters. If you saw me watching an episode, you could probably accuse me of having a relapse into fangirling. It's somewhat embarrassing; on the other hand, i think it's really awesome & it's fun & cool & dark & fucked up & it's helping to keep me sane. Having no one to discuss it with makes me feel kind of sad, but it's okay. It's what i'm getting out of it that counts.

I also made a graphic in GIMP; it's nothing special (i never learned much about doing art stuff on the computer, & i've forgotten a lot of it-- plus GIMP is difficult to me, being used to Photoshop), but i kind of like it.

And a variation:

I even ordered the first three manga (used, of course) off of Amazon because i still had some gift card money left. Haha!

Speaking of money, i'd really appreciate if you guys would check out stuff i'm selling still. Thanks so much!

2011-09-11T12:39:00.000-04:00

Because of my schedule, i switched out of sculpture I for the semester & am now in a Lithography class, my only class on Fridays. I figured that with the sculpture class ending at 10:50 & being expected to be at work at 11, it wouldn't work, especially if getting even remotely messy (ie sawdust) was involved-- i would probably have to clean up a bit earlier, i would have to constantly keep track of time & i couldn't lose that track at all, & i just didn't see it as working out. So i met with Trace, because i couldn't just drop the class; if i did, i'd no longer be full time, & i need to stay full time. After a while, we found some options, & i chose the litho class.

Only now, holy shit, am i realizing that it may kill me. By this Friday i need to be ready to print. I'm seriously considering just starting with one of my aluminum plates, as opposed to the stone, because the plates are easier to prepare; all i still need to do to them is cut the corners so that they're rounded, not pointy.

With the stone, you're reusing someone's stone from the past semester, so you have to grind it down to get rid of the etching. You have to take this heavy stone & essentially sand it down with varying degrees of grit. Since i wasn't in the first class (oh, that sole Friday off), i ended up having to find out how to do this from the two people who were doing it this past class. And only two people at a time can do it; the area's not big enough for more. You have to wet things down, sprinkle some of whatever grit you're on onto the stone, & then use this huge thing to grind it, moving it in circles. Apparently it makes you really sore. The ultimate goal is to get your stone smooth with absolutely no remnants of the previous person's drawing on it, & it has to be level. You check that with a metal bar & a piece of newspaper; if the newspaper at any point fits between the bar & the stone, it's not level & you have to keep grinding. If the stone's not level, it can crack & break when you run it through the press. And, if you end up scratching the stone while you're grinding it, you have to grind that scratch away.

Guess what i'm doing Monday morning before work! I don't think i'll get it done. AUGH.

And then, since we're expected to print Friday, i have to do the drawing on the stone (or plate) & then do the etchings. That's where i'm running into an even bigger problem than just grinding the stone down, if you can believe it: i don't know what to do. Like, apparently we need to have an overarching theme for the semester, & all of our prints will be based off of that theme. My first problem is that i really can't work in series. There have been assignments in other classes where we need to work in a series, & i get sick of whatever it is i'm doing pretty quickly. Even if at first it captured my attention, i very quickly feel tired of it & want to do something else.

But the primary problem is that i just really don't know what to do. I don't know what theme to hit upon; further, i don't know how to go about translating that theme. Even though this is a new process, it's not as new & different as stained glass was, for example. I've taken a printmaking class before, & in order to do anything to make a print, you have to draw onto the stone or plate. With stained glass, it was new & different enough that i took a different kind of approach; my three windows, you could say, aren't really in dialogue with the stuff i was doing in my painting class. For stained glass, it was more like a design approach (which is funny, because overall, i'm pretty freaking bad at design) & an aesthetic approach-- the latter being something that once used to preoccupy me a lot when i was younger, but as i've gotten older & found out certain things, has kind of been pushed to the side. When i was younger, i wanted that element of beauty; now i feel conflicted about it, based off of my own feelings & because of the "what would others think" kind of thing. Not beauty in the hackneyed, boring, but apparently "fashionable" way of taking photos of skinny white girls whose faces you usually can't see & variations on that theme. Like, if you know Charmaine Olivia: i used to like her work, but now i feel like it's a major rut, it's very hackneyed; it's not really saying anything. I'm worried about running the risk of making something where it come off as empty-headed & just "pretty"-- maybe that's why i hate it when people look at something & say, "Oh, so prettyyyy!" especially if it's art. Especially with the language being used. But it worked well with the stained glass, & it didn't feel frivolous or ridiculous to me at all. Part of our grade was based on aesthetics, & i have to say that when it comes to something like stained glass, that's really one of the first things that hits you about it, is the beauty of it all.

So after that whole little sidetrack, my point is that i'm just stuck on what i should do. I'm trying to think of things, because i need to be able to start thinking it out in my sketchbook & apparently the professor (who is apparently a recent graduate) wants us to have references. (~~Apparently.~~)

I've been thinking of certain things, but the problem is that they sound more like theses for essays. Like, i was thinking, especially in ancient religions, the relationship between the religion & law, justice. The only example i can point to off the top of my head, not being learned in ancient religions, is the weighing of the heart(/soul?) from the Book of the Dead. Where the deceased's heart was placed on a scale opposite the feather of Ma'at, & if their side was weighed down, their heart was eaten by the demon Ammit-- &, according to Wikipedia, at least, "the person undergoing judgement was not allowed to continue their voyage towards Osiris and immortality. Once Ammut swallowed the heart, the soul was believed to become restless forever; this was called 'to die a second time'." And, knowing nothing about ancient Egyptian culture & law, ultimately, it makes me wonder what this says about their society & concept of justice overall. Of course, then it makes me think that there must have been variations (like how there's different sects of Christianity, Judaism, &c), but for simplicity's sake, i'm sticking to what has been put down & preserved & is now seen as "this is what people back then believed."

So while that's all well & good, like i said, it sounds more like something i'd look up if i was writing a paper for a class. I don't have any idea as to how i would go about interpreting or using this as a base to then go on to make something out of it. I can't just copy scenes from the tombs of pharaohs; it's rightfully expected for me to take the theme & make things that are my own, with my own style & points to be made. Not a mindless reproduction. But that's just the problem: even if i did choose to do this, where would i find my way in? How? How could i take this kind of basic interest & say, "Okay, this is what i'm going to do with this"?

So i can't think of a theme i might do (except maybe what i mentioned, which would require research & i just don't know about that this semester), & even then, i can't think of a good execution that would make sense. Help.

....this semester is going to kill me. I'm already feeling crazily tired & i don't understand why.

Selling stuff! (Mostly books.)

2011-08-11T13:18:00.004-04:00

I need to get rid of stuff. I’m hoping you guys can help me. I’m selling some stuff for really crazy cheap; take a look through & see if there’s anything you’d like! You can send me a message in my Tumblr ask if you want to get anything. Prices are in US$; shipping & handling depends on how heavy your total purchase weighs & where you live. For payment, i accept PayPal.

Links to my sales posts here! :)

(I also have some old prints of old art that i need to get rid of, if anyone's interested.)

2011-07-25T03:25:00.004-04:00

Older sketchbook page. New York City; Ocean City.

Saw Harry and the Potters at the MLK Library on the 19th. Took a few pictures, & some video, which you can see here.

2011-07-18T02:08:00.005-04:00

I dunno just thought it might be funny/interesting (re: ppl’s reactions/what might happen to the canvas)

Trying to not fall down a flight of stairs is certainly interesting.

i don’t even care what anybody thinks pffffffffffft

New York, New York

2011-06-28T11:44:00.064-04:00

Went up to New York City this past Friday to finally visit my friend Maggie. Came back Monday, but we had an awesome two (& maybe a half?) days. It was a lot of walking.

Took a Chinatown bus there & back. Some clouds on the way up to NYC.

Got to the city past 9 p.m.; on schedule.

34th Street

Finally off the bus (it was a numbing experience).

I think i had taken a shower when we got to Maggie & Hilary's apartment, & when i got out, Maggie was online & said, "Gay marriage passed?" We checked on Google, & the top story, posted 38 minutes before, indeed said that New York state had legalized gay marriage! We were happy. It was a pretty awesome day to arrive in NYC, i think. (We didn't go & run around in the streets, no. We were all pretty tired; i was really tired.)

I like The Bean.

We stopped by the Strand.

And looked at the Farmers' Market.

The Met!

We found Voldemort! (Doesn't he look like movie Voldemort? Look at his facial structure! I could not stop laughing.)

I liked this guy's hair.

Canoe prow-- Iatmul people, Mindimbit village, Middle Sepik region, Papua New Guinea
(After reading Neither Wolf nor Dog, however, i couldn't help but question if it was really right to have these art pieces here, in a museum. It reminded me of a lot of things Dan said on the subject, and made me a little uncomfortable, even though it is an awesome sight to see. But still.)

Finally got to see a Chagall in person! The Lovers.

Detail of The Seine at Chatou, Maurice de Vlaminck

La Negrésse, Atelier of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux

Perseus' butt

Andromeda and the Sea Monster, Domenico Guidi

You'd be pissed, too!

Cupid and Psyche, Antonio Canova

Inside the studiolo from the palace of Duke Federico da Montefeltro at Gubbio

A mail shirt: "The inscription includes the 'Prayer to Ali,' a talismanic prayer often used in times of danger."

Lamassu! The Palace of Ashurnasirpal II.

The Death of Socrates, Jacques-Louis David

Young Woman with a Water Pitcher, Johannes Vermeer

Autumn Landscape, design attributed to Agnes Northrop for Tiffany Studios
YEAH, HOLY SHIT

View of Oyster Bay, Louis C. Tiffany, Tiffany Studios

Mourning Victory from the Melvin Memorial, Daniel Chester French

The Angel of Death and the Sculptor from the Milmore Memorial, Daniel Chester French

Then we went to a little ramen place. This is my food; shio tsuke-men.

The next morning; Sunday. This is a tiny alleyway type thing, & pigeons apparently like it. We woke up to pigeons talking every morning.

Prospect Park, where we found this awesome tree growing sideways.

We also found an old Dutch church (founded in the 1600s!) that had an old graveyard. The most recent tombstone was from someone who had died in the 1880s.

We also went to Peanut Butter & Co.!

And we went to NYC's Pride!

It was awesome; there were a lot of happy people. I saw a middle-aged couple where one man wore a shirt saying "33 Years"; the other's said, "Together." People were holding signs; on the one side it said, "Thank you Governor Cuomo." On the back it said, "Promise kept!"

We walked around the festival for a bit, but it was too crowded to really enjoy it. We ended up taking the subway back because i'm a wimp & my feet were killing me past the point of endurance. (I got one hell of a blister.)

Monday. I wanted to go to The Bean one last time before i left. Their chai latte is really freaking good.

Back on the bus. I didn't manage to get any postcards for anyone, so i figured a picture of an NYC taxicab would do.

And a picture of what most people must think of when they think "New York City."

The bus ride back was better in the fact that it was nowhere as crowded as the ride up, & i didn't go numb at all.

I already want to go back! Geez.

Goodbye, our Sarah Jane.

2011-04-20T00:49:00.003-04:00

I don't know if anybody who stops by here is into Doctor Who-- well, more specifically the old school stuff. I can't get into the new stuff, personally, but old school Who... yes.

Elisabeth Sladen, who played Sarah Jane Smith, passed away April 19th. She had cancer.

First Nicholas Courtney (the Brigadier) died, & now Elisabeth Sladen.... But i like the tweet i screencapped here. Off with the Brig, & everyone else who went before them to the big TARDIS in the sky....

</3

Ugh

2011-04-18T21:51:00.042-04:00

The Reckless Drawing show, April 11-15. Reception April 14th.

Based off of Keri Smith's Wreck This Journal.
My shit:

“Do a drawing on regularly sized paper where the picture space is only 2” by 3”.”

“Do a drawing inspired by Bill Powhida’s work.”

“Come to class with a cup of coffee. Pour, spill, drip, spit, fling your coffee on your paper. Bring materials such as sticks and pens to draw with the coffee.”
“Make a drawing of negative comments. (What is your inner critic saying?)”

Noah and the Whale.

Way back in spring break.

Skippy the Wonder Iguana.

Most recent:

Keep forgetting the giant freckle.

I need to clean out my phone. What are some people still doing in there?

Yeah, i got nothing. Story of my life & this semester.

Jackie's Strength

2011-03-02T13:29:00.002-05:00

Can't stop watching the video/listening to the song.

Visual art + language-- "Pretty"

2011-02-26T03:18:00.002-05:00

I have an annoyance, i guess a pet peeve, with how people call images "pretty." I was thinking about this in the shower & came up with a web of things related to this.

I'm not sure if it can be explained with "we're just so inundated with images that we've begun to write them off," though i think that could be a reason. But personally, i've noticed that writing & the various performing arts, as well as cinema, seem to get more thoughtful responses than most of visual art, especially online. It seems more likely to me that people will consider, dissect, & speak at length about a movie, an actor's performance, or how a song makes them feel & what they think about it/what it's about. But a lot of the time, especially on a site like Tumblr, when it comes to images, you get a lot of single-word responses, & quite a few times you just get "pretty."

I feel kind of conflicted about this word, actually, i've come to realize. Kind of like "cute"-- with both, my gut reactions are somewhere along the lines of "UUUGGGGGHHHHHHHH," but then i feel bad. I feel bad about being mean about a word. If you can get past that, the kind of connotations that "pretty" immediately conjures are more along the lines of superficiality, shallowness, childishness, even frilliness. It feels like, on the whole, it lacks substance, that it's a poor way of communicating. (And then i feel bad for saying that.) It doesn't go in depth; in a way, in its feeling of being a passing comment, it feels almost dismissive. And i think that visual art gets this a lot more than something like a piece of writing. You don't often happen across someone presenting something written with the simple comment of "pretty" on it. I'm not saying it hasn't been done to the other arts, i'm just saying that i've noticed it seems way more prevalent with visual art. Other one-word responses kind of annoy me, too, but i do feel that "beautiful" has a connotation of being "deeper" & maybe more thoughtful than "pretty."

There's an Art:21 episode where one of the featured artists is James Turrell, & at one point he says that when you're reading a book, you can get so engrossed into it that you don't even notice people walking by. You come into the world that the author has created. The problem with contemporary art-- & i would expand it to all visual art, personally-- is that "people look at it"-- they don't actually enter into it, the way they do with a book, a movie, a play, a musical piece. Which could also be another explanation as to why, then, the reaction is different, because the experience (of a piece) isn't there, & so then how are you supposed to really speak of any sort of reaction?

I also have noticed that people seem to really like to treat images with disregard. Recently, i ranted online about a photo of three skinny white adults wearing Native American paraphernalia, including the war bonnet, which is just intensely disrespectful. First the photographer decided to tell me to "grow up" & it was a photoshoot; someone else said "Does everything offend you?"; someone else asked me why i was so mad & when i told them i had explained previously, they replied with, "It's just a picture?" And it's like, you really can't talk to these people. Or maybe you can, if you're good with words, rhetoric, & have insane amounts of patience (YOU USED UP MY PATIENCE QUOTA FOR THE DAY).

But really, i can't understand that people don't get the fact that an image is very rarely ever "just" a picture. There are so many layers of meaning: not just the meaning that the artist or imagemaker has considered, but also the meaning that the viewer perceives, based on what they bring to the table: their own perceptions & experiences. (Obviously, the person who photographed the aforementioned picture obviously knows nothing of history & the levels of disrespect inherent in their image, so there's that, too.) It seems to me that people are much more willing to do this with respect to, especially, the written word. You always have discussions in English classes about "what does the author mean". Well, unless said author wrote anything explicitly stating what they meant, you have to realize that "what does the author mean" may very well truly be "what you think the author means"-- you analyze & interpret the work based on your own filters. The author had their own ideas & intentions, their own symbolism & meaning & reasons for doing what they did, & while it can be disheartening when people don't pick up on your meaning ("Oh great i can never communicate anything ever well fuck"), you also have to leave things open for interpretation. The same goes for songs. It's actually kind of ridiculous to have arguments over "this is what this means!!!" because what you think something means is most likely going to differ from someone else's view-- & that's as it ought to be. It's also another great example of Why You Shouldn't Read YouTube Comments.

So people will do this for writing. For songs. For plays, for actors, for movies. But it seems very rare that people will do the same thing for visual art. Which personally doesn't make sense to me, because if you can interpret & analyze all those other things, i feel like you should be able to do the same for a sculpture or painting or installation (&c). But a lot of people seem to be content to just stop at "pretty." They even use it negatively; i saw something on Tumblr once where the person claimed "Tumblr is where the written word comes to die" & they spoke of "pretty pictures"-- which made the negativity pretty blatant, to me. Why is it okay to talk about images like this? Since when has there been a hierarchy of the arts (& i am including writing in this)? I also noticed this when people posted an image of an altered book & started railing against it, basically saying how whoever had made it was essentially a terrible person & don't they know there are people who would be grateful for that book & how dare they deface it! They didn't seem to consider the more positive possibilities &/or the more conceptual ones (like, i don't know: the question of what is a book? is this a book anymore? has it transcended any boundaries? what are the implications of altering a printed book?). And it seemed to me that it derided visual art in favor of the written word; the book as something precious & almost downright holy. How dare you touch it so!

And i'm not saying that some things aren't meant to be "pretty" or beautiful or "nice" or calming, or any of those things (or funny or the like). I'm not saying that they're not legitimate or bad because they're meant to be "pretty" or "nice". Like the pieces of music that you listen to because they're calming & you don't feel too compelled to go into them too deep conceptually, but they're nice & they give you nice feelings. Like images of things that you like-- like (personally) blue things, water, stars, trees-- that are around because you like them & they're nice & they give you nice feelings. I'm also not saying that i don't understand the feeling of looking at something (or even reading/listening/etc. to something) & feeling like you can't respond to it for whatever reason, & if you do, all you can manage is something like, "wow." And with visual art, this seems really applicable to me, because i consider it to be meant as a form of communication that can (& should?) be largely conveyed without words. That's the whole point, i feel, of it being visual; you can't express it in words, so you're going another route. So when the experience leaves you feeling inarticulate, i think that's understandable, too.

Ultimately, i'm talking about my opinion, based on my feelings & experiences. And so i'm talking about how it seems that people don't, for whatever reason, give the same thought to visual art that they do to the other arts. And by extension, how people seem okay with talking down to visual art, or about it, as though other forms of expression are more important or more valid.

And i think i've covered the points that i can think of, & it's 3:08 a.m. now & i'm exhausted & my shoulders & back muscles are so tight that it is very painful. Which is pretty normal, but still unpleasant. And my right hand & wrist have started to hurt a bit, & i can now actually stretch my hand & wrist, & things will start clicking. It's obvious i'm using the laptop too much, but it's like i can't tear myself away from it, which is... pretty bad, obviously. And since my right hand is my dominant hand, if it & the wrist start to hurt, writing & drawing & the like become uncomfortable, too.

So yeah, i wanted to comment/reply to people online & stuff, but i'm so tired & stuff like that right now that it's just time to turn this sucker off & faceplant into a pillow & roll into a blanket & sleep.

we did the last of the two-person improvs today

2011-02-25T13:14:00.001-05:00

(after i had said again that i had no money)
Mike: Well... what's that bulge in your pocket?
me (still looking at him pissily): .....i'm just so happy to see you.
Mike: -breaks character & laughs-
class: -lolz-
me: -still glaring-

2011-02-18T13:08:00.001-05:00

The 2011 Sketchbook Project tour starts this weekend in New York City.

more sketchbook

2011-02-12T23:36:00.027-05:00

Going back a ways, since i realized i hadn't put any of these up here until now. The new scanner is really bad at scanning colors, though, so think i'm going to have to go back to taking pictures of some things...again.

2011-02-02T02:24:00.003-05:00

Nightfall by ~abeloverdrive on deviant ART

This is freaking awesome.

this was written a while back, but:

2011-01-28T15:57:00.002-05:00

(12/17/10)

So my mother was "watching" (read: she had the TV on but was on her laptop) something about, i think, France in the first half of the 20th century, & all the vibrant things & people who were inspired by it, especially Paris (oh wait, maybe it was all about Paris). And Marcel Duchamp came up & at first i had my gut reaction in my head of "EEEUUUURRRGGGHHHHHH DUCHAMP" because Fountain i just really kind of want to stick it out a window or something somewhere. Not a major fan of "readymades." But then it was mentioned that Duchamp felt like art was already there in the idea, that something like painting was merely an "accessory." And i find that really interesting, actually (& then i'm like, "BUT IT'S DUCHAMP WHAT AM I DOING AGREEING WITH R. MUTT BOY ARRRGGGH" & then i rip my shirt & epic stuff like that. i know, right?). Concepts are kind of interesting to me right now, especially when i go through my stuff & find something that i made back when i was a kid, but now it's loaded with all this extra stuff (meaning, baggage, whatever) caused by the passage of years. That was obviously never intended, but it's there. And i wonder if i could now put it in a room with blank white walls & a little piece of paper next to it, with a title or even "untitled," & call it art & would others accept that? Would i accept that?

-----------
Also, unrelated but important:
-Whole Foods Supports...GE Alfalfa?
-Hell Breaks Loose: USDA Allows Genetically Modified Alfalfa
-The Organic Elite Surrenders to Monsanto: What Now?

Nice to know Obama & Whole Foods & the USDA really care, isn't it? That's sarcasm, by the way. I'm absolutely disgusted & pissed off right now.

What's actually going on with Betelgeuse

2011-01-26T15:18:00.002-05:00

Betelgeuse and 2012
“The actual science in the original article is pretty good; they talked with scientist Brad Carter who discusses the scenario of Betelgeuse going supernova. The whole story is pretty interesting — I wrote about it in detail the last time there was nonsense about Betelgeuse blowing up — but in a nutshell Betelgeuse is a red supergiant star in Orion with about 20 times the mass of the Sun, and it’s very near the end of its life. When stars this massive die, they explode as supernovae. The distance to Betelgeuse is unclear (it has a very puffy outer atmosphere which makes distance determination somewhat dicey) but it’s something like a bit more than 600 light years, way way too far away to hurt us.

“It’s the question of when that the two articles [the news.com.au & Huffington Post articles] go off the rails. Betelgeuse may explode tomorrow night, or it may not go kerblooie until the year 100,000 A.D. We don’t know. But given that huge range, the odds of it blowing up next year are pretty slim. And clearly, the original article was really trying to tie in the 2012 date to this, even when it has nothing to do with anything. The tie-in was a rickety link to scuttlebutt on the web about it, but that’s about it.”

If you’ve read the original Australian article (from a news source that is apparently the Aussie version of Fox News) &/or the mentioned Huffington Post article, you should probably read this one. We’re not going to die; Betelgeuse could go now or way later, & we’re not going to get a Tatooine twin sun effect. Also, try to spread it around, to counteract the false science being spread around all over the place, even on "serious" news outlets. It's really pretty pathetic when you think about it.

(Four days till spring semester. :((((((((( )

2011-01-19T04:29:00.003-05:00

from my book for the sketchbook project 2011 tour.
here is a map of places where you can go to see it in person.

please visit it if you can.

also, cow mug:

looking like the simple dog from Hyperbole and a Half

2011-01-17T15:58:00.014-05:00

Today is kind of a crappy day, so here are pictures of the paintings of the fall '10 semester. Why not, right.

The spring semester doesn't start until the end of the month, & i'm not looking forward to it. Maybe other people do, or can, but i think the best feeling is when you finish your last final & the semester is just done, over with, & gone. I never look forward to them. More like dread.

oh my

2011-01-16T16:25:00.009-05:00

I have a few more followers now. Crazy!

Anyway, the last bits of stained glass. First, a kind of better picture of the second window:

And finally, a few of the third & final window (Nov-Dec '10):

For the final window, i documented most of the process in pictures-- just in case. I kind of think it'd be nice to do this again in the future, but the tools are all so expensive.

Also did more paintings in the course of the semester (well, duh), which was really hard to get through, all things considered. But i don't really feel like uploading all those pictures right now (i'm about to actually turn the computer off; isn't that nice), so here's a group shot of them all.

second window

2010-11-08T19:12:00.007-05:00

Blood: The Last Vampire

2010-11-04T09:03:00.004-04:00

Just as an fyi, this clip has blood & violence, albeit animated. Just in case that squiks you at all.

This is from-- i guess it's an OVA; it's shorter than a movie-- Blood: The Last Vampire. The title pretty much gives away the "surprise" at the very end, but i really kind of sort of don't care. I missed the very beginning, but this is one hell of a thing: there's moments where you go, "That is so fucked up; Japan what is wrong with you?" but at the same time, you're completely engrossed in what's going on. The animation is amazing (it was made in 2000, i think?), it moves along at a quick, crazy pace, & there isn't a shit voice actor in the entire thing, which is surprising, to be honest.

Actually, one other thing i really like is that this is default bilingual. When i walked into the room, i heard English. Okay, i figured, maybe Netflix streaming instant stuff doesn't allow for the option to change audio tracks. Oh well. The voice actors seemed pretty okay anyways. Then, a scene change, & all of a sudden, there's Japanese & subtitles! It was confusing for a split second, but since the movie takes place mostly at an American military base in Japan (just before the Vietnam War breaks out), it makes sense. So Saya, the main character, speaks both English & Japanese.

This video is probably my favorite part of the OVA (is it an OVA i am confused). I like dramatic things (i grew up on old school anime & the like; what do you want of me), for one thing. This doesn't quite show the really fucked up parts (awkward to be watching with your dad, kind of?), though if you're adverse to spurts of blood, it's already fucked up enough. (But, er, a short phrase to illustrate: body used to keep doors closed. You can barely see it in this, but it's there.) But it does show the crazy amazing animation, & the shockingly good voice acting.

And i appreciate the fact that Saya is a total badass, & the fact that there isn't one idiotic underwear shot in the entire thing. When she gets the school uniform she's wearing, she actually plucks at the bow & goes, "What the hell is this?" in a total deadpan voice. It's like, hah, take that, hentai: not going to be playing into your little fantasies today.

2010-10-18T10:01:00.014-04:00

Lalala stuff. I went to some small galleries in Washington DC this past Saturday; they were all in these awesome old homes.

Saw a lot of really awesome stuff, though something happened right at the end of the trip that kind of ruined my mood. Trying to get back into the feeling of, "awesome, now i wanna make stuff" is really difficult.

For Painting class this semester, we're supposed to have a kind of theme, i guess, to work with. My original idea was something like "identity," but i don't even know what i'm really doing anymore. These are just the first two.

This is the painting that this is all about.

This is just random from going places.

I have no idea what this one is doing. The teacher expects it to be more "finished"-- her idea of "finished", i guess, because i feel like it could be finished...?

Also, stained glass this semester! It's very laborious.

But the first window came out pretty well:

Etc., etc. Crazy.

this is bothering me.

2010-10-05T16:21:00.000-04:00

Today in Painting III, we had critique the entire class. I went last. The mood was generally pretty good all through the crit-- surprisingly good, maybe, considering how crits usually feel (anyone who's sat through a critique knows what i mean). The teacher had brought in coffee & donut holes; i suggested this was her way of trying to get us to talk in the crit, & someone named Margaret i talk to sometimes said she talks a lot when she has caffeine & was generally being pretty funny ("These brushstrokes just speak to me! Such poetry!" in an exaggerated way). And really, all through the crit, that seemed to be the general mood. People were talking & laughing & it was actually pretty nice.

But my critique is bothering me. I had three canvases up; one apparently the teacher wants to see more finished, one i've just started. The problem i have is with the first one.

This is all going to sound ridiculous, but i feel uncomfortable with how people are perceiving it. Like, genuinely uncomfortable, & it keeps sitting on my mind. (Maybe it's the fact that i've basically had three cups of coffee today, but i don't think so.) People are perceiving it as being humorous, as, i think, poking fun.

I'm sure anybody reading this just went, "Okay, why the fuck is this such a big deal; jfc."

Part of me finds it somewhat interesting. Like how people misread what she's holding & what's in her mouth. I genuinely don't understand where people are getting the humor from, even though i myself have a sort of ambivalence towards the subject matter. But i feel like... i don't know, i didn't mean this to be funny, & this is kind of worrying me. If i paint someone dressed in a geeky sort of way, will people then assume that i'm lampooning geeks? I didn't mean to paint this in a way that reads as "funny" to people; i wanted people to draw their own conclusions, yes, but i also wanted people to see a person. Which maybe seems at odds with my usual views towards society & people, seeing as i'm so cynical & crap; you'd think that i'd be like, "Yeah, funny! Make fun of this person! Yeaaah $7.99!" I mean, the $7.99 was a mere starting point because i had no clue what to paint. But really, i can't quite put my finger on it, but this kind of reaction unsettles me.

I think i might be able to explain it when i mention that my teacher says she sees humor in my sketchbook. I have never seen myself as a humorous person; i have never seen my sketchbook as humorous. I put in some things that are funny-- things that happen, things people say-- but overall, it's kind of a catch-all, & more & more i find myself putting in things that are the total opposite of "funny" or "humorous," even if it's not obvious. And other times, i just put things in, without any ulterior motive.

Just, listening to everyone saying, "Oh, this is humorous. You have a certain kind of humor. Maybe that's part of your artistic lexicon, even if you don't feel it's 'you,'" made me feel uncomfortable. And maybe, maybe it's because i feel like, here i am, once again unable to articulate myself. I don't want to make humorous work. It sounds bad, somehow, putting it like that, but i really don't. And i always feel like i can't express myself-- can't even do it now-- & so, to kind of get this major sort of misread (i feel like that) on something that i'm "supposed" to be "good" at by now is just demoralizing. It's like, Great, once again, i've fucked up & people aren't picking up what i'm putting down. People just sort of go, "Oh, she's funny; look at her trying to be standoffish; what a funny picture." Maybe i expect too much of viewers, but i was hoping for a wider read of it. Of, yeah, maybe she's funny, pathetic even.... but aren't you, ever? Can you seriously laugh at her? How do you know you're reading her right, in her clothes, her stance, the $7.99 floating over her head? You guys thought she was smoking when she wasn't. How do you know you're not seriously misreading this? Can't you step back & think a little more on it?

I also feel almost affronted to have my sketchbook mentioned as humorous. It sounds stupid & i know it, but it's really, just... I feel like it's a misread plus an assumption. It's like assuming that everything i have in there has some sort of spin on it, when really, a lot of the time i think that most of the stuff in there is really genuine, more so than anything i may make out of the book. I don't want someone looking at the "replaceable" page, for example, & thinking that there's some humor in there because of how i made it. There isn't. There's, i don't know, irony, maybe, in the stickers & bright colors, but i would feel really upset if i was misread that badly. Because of the emotion in it. I feel like "emotional" might sum up at least my sketchbooks, & i feel upset by the idea that people are reading it as "humorous." Because really, i find so little humorous.

And it all just makes me feel like now i have to do things in a certain way in order to get my point across. It's like in the rest of my life: what do i have to do to get people to fucking realize how i feel? How am i supposed to get points across to people, that i'm not trying to be funny, that i don't want to be? How am i supposed to be able to paint certain subject matter without people instantly assuming that there is humor there, that i'm lampooning someone or a certain group of people? Can't you have a bit of lampooning but try to get the viewer to see that, hm, this is another human being? Instead of just, "hey, humorous!" & seeming to leave it at that, not read further into it?

Seriously. Nothing i ever say or do seems to get across to people. Not verbally, not through writing, not visually. I never seem to be able to articulate myself well enough; i'm always taken the wrong way, words are always put into my mouth. I'm just tired of it.

2010-08-26T09:57:00.001-04:00

Well, this is how i feel & i'm tired of people belittling my feelings

Biceps, triceps, and even Abdi

2010-08-16T08:31:00.002-04:00

This is a painting of a plastic trash bag, but look at it. You cannot tell me that it is not amazing. This is seriously probably the most inspiring thing i've seen lately.

I didn't watch "Work of Art," because i don't really do TV, nor do i do "reality" shows, or whatever you want to call those shows where people compete & get voted off. But i was already acquainted with Abdi Farah's name. He's an alumn of my high school (ye olde Carver, or as they like to call it now, GeorgeWashingtonCarverCenterforArtsandTechnology), & he was already good back then. He was the primary student that the teachers would bring up when they talked about people who had graduated whose work was amazing. I guess they were trying to get us to be inspired, to want to push ourselves to be as amazing, but more often than not, for someone like me, it kind of makes me want to say, "Oh what the hell i give up; i'm no good at this shit anyways."

I really wasn't surprised when i heard that Abdi had won. I dunno, i just kind of expected it to happen. His solo show at the Brooklyn Museum of Art opened this past Friday, & Mrs. ~~McDaniel~~ Shovlin (she remarried & i will never get used to the new surname) went up there with Mr. Cypressi, so the photo of the painting is from her Facebook. To be honest, at first i didn't really care much about any of this-- i mean, Abdi is a genuinely nice guy (it's not just an act; the few times i've spoken to him he;s been so crazy nice & he doesn't even know me; he has no reason to be nice to me or anything), & he deserves to be recognized for his crazy amazing work, but i was just kind of feeling disconnected from it, i guess. (My mood, lately, perhaps.) But now, i don't know, it's like... yeah, i guess i would like to see his show. I mean, seriously, i know Abdi's work is amazing. I've seen it before (see last year's Alumni Show hanging & the "oh shit you have a huge freaking gun in that we can't hang it"-"can i name it the hope gun?"-"grab a sharpie & draw a heart on it?"). But that freaking trash bag-- i can't even. I mean. Look at it. For once, seeing something like this makes me want to make something, as opposed to feeling like saying "why should i even bother?"

Once in class-- i was a senior stuck with juniors in Painting III, because i hadn't taken it when i was a junior-- we were to go out & paint landscapes. The annoying transfer from BSA said something about how boring the grounds were or something. Mrs. Shovlin (then still McDaniel) looked at him. "That's the job of an artist," she said. "To take the ordinary and make it extraordinary."

I guess this is what she meant.

2010-08-08T04:36:00.013-04:00

Some old pictures:

Drew this in the morning after having been up all night. It's on a small piece of flimsy cardboard & i have two more left, so i'm going to do other faces on them. I didn't have anything like Jem in front of me-- no, the inspiration was the tail end of the "Alien From L.A." episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Also, last week was Shark Week! I forget what i was watching, & a point on the map said "Great White Cafe." I guess that's a place where a lot of great white sharks congregate? But i thought first of a cafe for sharks (where no dishes are ever done because the tiger sharks willingly eat them), & then of a shark-themed cafe for humans. So these are the good pictures, as opposed to the crappy webcam one.

I have no idea which is closest to the actual colors, so...

And this is last night. Sitting in the car, reading The Two Towers, & i liked the light.

And looook at this crazy amazing music video:

"It was (directed) handmade by IRINA DAKEVA @ WIZZ. It is composed of approx 2000 images watercolor painted one after another."

Great White Cafe

2010-08-05T18:18:00.001-04:00

Bad webcam picture for right now. It's watercolor & ink on a piece of wood, so it would never stand up to the elements, ever. It'd probably melt off.

2010-08-05T08:33:00.001-04:00

Aw.

2010-08-03T05:05:00.002-04:00

I ought to pay attention to this blog again, like i said i was going to do. Especially since the last time i posted here was while i was still in California, & that just kind of depresses me.

It's funny, because yesterday i was really jut sitting around, when i started thinking about all the things i did in CA, & with so many friends, & the absence of that was... I don't even know how to describe it.

2010-06-25T00:44:00.012-04:00

Just spent ages trying to recapture a hamster. It was definitely an Event; Kat has battle scars.

2010-06-23T02:52:00.011-04:00

A while ago, i did the first two pages in the sketchbook for The Sketchbook Project:

This is completely unrelated:

Later, will have to take pictures of the pages drawn while flying to California. Nice weather here, while back in Baltimore it was, what 91 degrees yesterday & it felt like 98? But here it was 74 or 75. So niiiiice.

finally!

2010-06-17T01:49:00.001-04:00

got my sketchbook for the Sketchbook Project in the mail today, & it comes with a library card for the Brooklyn Art Library, where the sketchbook’s going to live once i send it back. The library card even has “2011 Participating Artist” on it!

no pressure. :\

Goldie

2010-06-14T06:48:00.003-04:00

2010-06-14T02:23:00.000-04:00

2010-06-13T05:59:00.015-04:00

Saw Janna this past week because it was her birthday:

And this past Friday, i went & investigated a nice little coffee shop in the Towson Public Library:

And i bought this handsome sketchbook at Plaza:

It's roughly about 8x5" large & fairly thick. It's obviously modeled after Moleskines (as i think quite a few note-/sketchbooks are nowadays, like the cheap Piccadillies Borders at least used to have), but the cover is cloth(?), & the ribbon that marks pages is orange. It also has more pages that a Moleskine sketchbook of the same size, &, as i have found upon opening it, the pages are thick & have a nice texture to them (the wrap-around on the book says, "Contains 128 pages of heavyweight buff drawing paper with a good tooth"). It too has a pocket/envelope in the very back, only its is see-through. Originally, the price was $15.99 (ridiculous, & yet still about a dollar cheaper than a Moleskine of the same size), but with the 50% off coupon, all told, it was $8.47. Besides the mocha i got earlier, it was the only thing i bought.

Anyway, a few more pages from the sketchbook in use now:

Based off of this song, as well as the fact that this weekend marks one year since the "elections" in Iran, & rise of the Green Movement in Iran.

Saw Fritz Lang's Metropolis at The Senator-- with missing footage reinserted & everything. I really liked it, & i definitely think that it still has relevance nowadays. Afterwards, i looked through a book of Anh Duong's self-portraits (bought for much less than its list price), & her lines made me want to draw, so i tried to draw Gayle & Amy while they talked about reality TV & Prince lyrics with a guy whose name i don't remember (oops).

i keep forgetting

2010-06-08T10:21:00.010-04:00

these were my last two paintings for this past spring semester:

close ups:

also, drew this on 5/31:

2010-06-08T10:07:00.001-04:00

and some more

2010-06-06T09:06:00.005-04:00

I'd also like to mention that this sketchbook may look like a Moleskine, but it's actually a Piccadilly book. They at least used to always have them very well-priced at Borders, though the past few times they haven't had any but some lined ones/the grid ones. (I've developed a bad (bad?) habit of collecting blank books. I have quite a fair few lurking in a bag under my bed, waiting to be used.)

Anyways, just a few more from ye olde sketchbooke:

Also! Who else has heard of the Sketchbook Project? You can sign up for the upcoming one up until the end of October for $20 (which pays for the fees of the sketchbooks going on tour), & you either choose a theme from their list or you let them randomly pick one for you. Then they send you a sketchbook in the mail, you fill it up, & send it back before January 2011. After the sketchbook (& all its friends) go on tour, it stays in Brooklyn, which may feel a little weird, but you can choose to have it digitized for $25 more so that you can at least see it.

I just signed up for it; it seems like a good way of putting something out there & hoping someone will see it. I tried to do an earlier Sketchbook Project & failed miserably, so. Here's hoping this one doesn't suck, i guess? (I'm also trying to convince myself that the $45 ($20 for signing up; $25 to get it digitized after the tour) is well-spent, i suppose. I'm part cheap Scot; what do you want? I dislike spending money!) After much waffling, i also decided to let them randomly pick a theme for me, & i got "Trading forever."

To be honest, the first thing it made me think of was trading Pokemon cards in fifth grade. Hoping i'll be able to think of something more than that. :I

oh, blog.

2010-06-05T07:47:00.013-04:00

teaching me to think backwards & take my time.
these are a little old, as there is more in this sketchbook now, but i haven't got those pictures on my computer yet.

i was wishing a little bit that there was a blog or something that would post new, exciting art every day or something like that. there are a few sites that do that, of course, but i'm looking for some specific kind of art. i can't quite describe it, but despite the huge amount of sites i have bookmarked under "art," nothing seems to be catching my eye much lately. (maybe i'm just tired of being online so much.) except, perhaps, for something like this.

so anyway, i'm not exactly my own stuff's fan, but i figured i would just put these up because, really, why not, right? i might even pay attention to this page more often. gasp.

i have not slept at all, & just drank a cup of coffee a short while ago. i'll probably be crashing come 9 or 10 o'clock.

Okay, seriously

2010-05-26T18:00:00.004-04:00

Blogger is being really aggravating.

If i put images in a post the way i usually do, they get cut off by the HTML, & i can't figure out how to fix it. If i try to do the "Add image" bit by uploading to Blogger, it constantly puts things at the very top, so you have to think backwards if you want to show things in order. And the dragging around bit barely works, & the entry box is too small to accommodate it.

So yeah. Blogger is causing a constant headache right about now.

2010-04-12T08:25:00.002-04:00

McCarthyism.

Book of the dead & detained of Iran in recent months. Far from finished; when finished, will not even hold all the names/faces.

Like a painting.

Jesus, Buddha, & Mohammed chilling out while Edward Cullen gets ground into sparkly sugar

From Maggie's last visit.

seemingly random & unrelated note: have been listening to a lot of Tori Amos' music.

2010-04-04T18:02:00.003-04:00

Brownie in a mug! With ice cream. I feel so gluttonous, but it actually came out well! It's kinda spiffy.

This is the recipe i found for it. I just ended up using the dark chocolate cocoa instead of the regular.

some stuff

2010-04-01T10:20:00.002-04:00

Much of these are also on my DeviantArt account.

2010-02-07T11:57:00.002-05:00

Far be it from me to keep anyone from doing something they like, especially when it comes to visual art. But i feel like the words "art" & "artist" (& maybe even "creative") get thrown around a lot. Maybe it's just me. And i'm the person who doesn't call herself an "artist" despite years of magnet school + college major classes. It just feels pretentious to me to call myself that. (But i'm also extremely uncomfortable with labeling. Like, i really don't like labeling at all.) And since i find that pretentiousness stupid, isn't it hypocritical kind of be like, "dude, why are you just gluing magazine pictures in your journal/sketchbook & then making little swirly doodles & then writing quotes"? It's hypocritical, stuck-up, & rude of me. I mean, if it makes them happy, right?

To contradict myself even further (liek omigod dont u just luv it???!!!11!!??/), i have discovered something else art related that aggravates me: the whole "oooooooo mystical; ooooooooo muse" thing. I feel like i've read quotes pertaining to this sort of thing. Really, seriously, art is not this ooooo wiggly fingers mysteeeeeerious thing that only certain people can do & ooooo the muuuuse, the muuuuse & diviiiine gifts & inspiration-- No. Really. Seriously. Maybe there's such a thing as talent, maybe not (i once saw, in high school, something in a friend's sketchbook about "What is talent?" & how it probably doesn't really exist; it's haunted me ever since). Maybe talent is dependent on how you take & use (or choose not to use) what you've been taught. Because, honestly, without classes or self-teaching, how many times is someone going to tell you that you have "talent"? Exactly. It's called "taking art classes that teach you stuff, or teaching yourself stuff."

Maybe the fact that i'm such a non-religious heathen also plays into why this idea annoys me, but really, it just makes it seem ohsomysticalandmysterious, when really, anyone who either has access to good visual art programs or the drive to teach themselves can learn how to draw. (And even then, like art in general, "learning how to draw" is probably subjective. Though i would assume that most people take it to mean drawing representationally?) It's not some gift from some god, it's not "divine inspiration." If you want to wax philosophical on the "magic" of something being made that wasn't there before, okay fine, i can see that. But all this new age-y mystical stuff that seems to still persist & surround visual art (&, what do i know, maybe other art as well) is just eye-roll inducing. Maybe not everybody can do whatever they consider to be art, but everybody can probably learn, one way or another.

contadictscontradictscontradicts

2010-01-18T21:46:00.003-05:00

So on the eighth, i went to the public library with a list of names, of books, authors, & musicians, to go check. After wandering around for an hour (i thought they opened at 8; they open at 9 a.m.), i was finally able to go & complete this mission. Alot of the names weren't there, but a few were, & i came away with three books & five CDs. I wandered around Towson the rest of the day, & only bought The Golden Compass (used at Ukazoo), a turkey club wrap at Trader Joe's (i was so hungry i felt sick), & a cinnamon latte at the resident Barnes & Nobles' Starbucks cubby (& drew & listened to people whilst eating & drinking).

The books & CDs are due back a little more than a week from now, & i'm only just now actually getting through most of the CDs, i'm in the middle of one of the books, finished another, & the third i still need to do. But i already roughly know the plot of the third, as it is The Thin Man, by Dashiell Hammett, & i'm more than well acquainted with the movie. So i've just kind of flipped through it, & i think i might like the movie better, if i ever get around to reading this: there's a lot of "Jesuses" in the book, it seems, & while i'm One of Those Horrible Little Heathens more often than not, the feeling of the book doesn't seem the same as the movie.

The book i finished is Haruki Murakami's After Dark (if you want to write his name the Western way). I think Murakami's name is fairly prevalent when it comes to books, & so i picked up this book based off the dust jacket's little summary; it sounded interesting enough. It's also not a long book (just shy of 200 pages at 191), but i still didn't fly through it because i kept falling asleep early. And, as the setting is nighttime, i thought it only proper that i read it at night into the small hours of the morning.

The whole book takes place over the course of one night, starting at 11:56 p.m. & working its way on from there. After reading it, i can say that while the jacket's little summary could be called correct, it's also way off the mark. It makes everything sound like it follows a very linear plot, the kind that's recognizable in most stories. And there is something like that, but mostly the book reads very realistically, in that there are many unsolved things & people walk in & out of it the way they might over the course of a night. The summary claims that one of the characters' sleep is "mysteriously tied to the businessman plagued by the mark of his crime," but there's no revelatory part in the book where this is displayed. Maybe it's something tucked away in the story, something that makes you go "oh" when you make the connection. There is something of an obvious connecting bit, but it doesn't go beyond that; it doesn't elaborate.

There are some stranger bits to the story, concerning the sleeping character, Eri, & the unplugged TV in her room that turns itself on. But the majority of the story focuses on her sister, Mari, a little younger than she, & the events & people she meets when she stays out away from home one night. At first, the rhetoricalness of anonymity might be annoying, but if you keep reading, it steadily gets better. You can also pick out the differences between countries-- for me, between Japan & my place in America-- such as the convenience stores (konbini in Japan, apparently, genuinely live up to their name) & the concept of love hotels (&, i may be wrong, but i don't think Denny's over here stay open quite as late as the Denny's in the book?).

The characters are from all walks of life, as hackneyed as it sounds: Mari (a freshman college student herself) meets Takahashi, who's in a band; Kaoru, who is the manager of the love hotel Alphaville & works alongside Komugi & Korogi there; & a young Chinese prostitute, who ends up being beaten by a man who comes to the love hotel. Eventually the man who beat her comes into play, as well, & reading about his thoughts & doings, you wonder why he did it, what kind of man is he, really? But you don't ever find out much about him. Much is left unsaid & unknown about pretty much everyone in the book, & certain issues never climax. It's in a somewhat stark contrast compared to most other books, where authors try to try everything up neatly by the end. In that way, it seems more realistic: you're only seeing a portion of time that these people are all passing through. You discover bits about their pasts, but not everything, & you don't know their future. There's forboding signs for some, hopeful for others, but you don't know what's going to happen to them. The reader just simply isn't told. In that way, it's a fairly open-ended novel.

Of course, the fact that the book is translated from the Japanese can leave people to wonder about discrepencies between the original language & the one it's being translated to-- philologistical stuff like that. (At some point, i found myself wondering just how Takahashi & Mari were speaking, if they were using anything that got lost in translation.) But even with that in mind, it's well-done. It's written in the present tense & describes things as "we recognize the bed," & is very easy to read, &, i want to say, personable. I was kind of expecting it to be written the way many modern novels seem to be written, which i can't quite describe, really, but it's very often off-putting. But i didn't find anything off-putting about After Dark. The beginning made me despair a little, thinking that it was going that route, but as time went on, i was proven wrong. It's a strange kind of point of view: sometimes the reader knows things the characters in the story don't, but very often, the reader knows just about as much/little as anyone else.

For some, it might seem like a strange book written in a kind of strange way, & maybe the lack of a real definitive plot & resolution to things-- & there's something at the end that's a bit of an eyebrow raiser, maybe-- but overall it's an extremely likable, well-written, intriguing & interesting book. I think i'd like to buy it, myself. The only thing was that i did feel rather distanced from the characters-- not that i always take to characters in every book i read, but something about these people felt more distant than from other books. I mean, i liked them all, & at one point i definitely had worry flare up for Takahashi, so there was connection. It just felt odd to have such a palpable feeling of distance.

The last book is a book of short stories by Lorrie Moore & is called Birds of America. I am three stories away from being finished, but... i don't even know. This book is probably partially the reason for my current mood, & it keeps doing that. The praise for the book that they put on the cover talks about how it's "fiercely funny book," & "at once sad, funny, lyrical, & prickly." I don't know where these people are getting "funny" from, & maybe it's unfair of me to basically review & critique the book before finishing it, but i've read enough to say that i probably can't quite land on how i feel about this book. I think i like it, but i also think i hate it.

I can't decide if i like or dislike Moore's style, either. (This book is one huge ball of "i like it.... i hate it.") It's the kind of modern writing that i was worried After Dark would be filled of, & i don't feel like i can pick out any passage or sentence that would work as an example. Looking through, it feels like it has to do with how the story as a whole is written, & how it sticks together. I don't know how to put this "modern writing" into words: with Moore, i guess, there's a lot of weird-ish descriptions, a lot of depressing situations. I can't describe it, seriously; just find a copy & read it yourself. Or just one story, if Amazon or someplace will give the story list.

The feeling of so many of the stories is just so bleak & sad; as the back of the book says, they really are about "the lost & unsettled of America." A few of them end in a way that leaves you confused, with a lot of strange descriptions, things happening suddenly & confusingly (was he dreaming? is he hallucinating? why is she a bird all of a sudden?) & just kind of left there. It's a different open-endedness than After Dark's. It's not the kind that implies that time moves forward & you as the reader won't see all ends. This is just a confusing open-endedness, like at the last moment, the story took a sudden strange & inexplicable-- sometimes inexplicably unrealistic-- turn. At the absolute end of the story. It gives you the feeling of, you know, it's bad enough i just read this depressing short story, but now the ending makes no sense whatsoever. The only story i can think of off the top of my head that had a slightly more uplifting end was the second one, "Which Is More Than I Can Say About Some People."

I'm not saying, "How dare Lorrie Moore write sad stories!" Who doesn't write or make sad things, & who doesn't listen to/watch/read/look at/whatever sad things? They're completely relevant & needed. Maybe for me, it's more the circumstances that Moore's characters seem to end up in that i find frustrating. A lot of it has to do with relationships, it seems, including the occaisional mention of an affair somewhere & that type of emotional wreckage. The woman at her family's over the holidays with her dyslexic husband. The woman whose boyfriend confesses that he slept with another woman who was of the 1960s. The woman who moves away from Hollywood & her bit as a small-time actress & starts going out with some guy & it seems like her what can't even be called a life is just crumbling & old & decrepit & that story makes no sense, i tell you. I think maybe the misunderstandings & the feeling of overanalysis are what i find frustrating. No, nothing's ever simple, but why can't people just believe in some things a little more? Reading these stories seems to hit on a lot of things that make me sad, & so they don't put me in the best mood ever. I even took ages to read two today, in front of the TV while MythBusters was on, thinking maybe that could counteract the sadness. Needless to say, it didn't. But at the same time, i can't help but like the book. I don't understand, really.

2009-12-15T09:07:00.000-05:00

eurgh, why do i look vaguely like some hipster or something? & you can't even see the bracelets in this.

i'm just really sick of hipster indie cleverness. i mean, i'm a cynical person, but apparently i have my moments of optimism (perish the thought), & this "cleverness" that just seems to pervade most sites i end up on seems somewhat opposite of feeling, if that makes any sense...? like, okay, fine, you can write some word or some quote in your neat little artsy lettering, or you can get some skinny-ass girl to bend over like she's in despair or something, but guess what? your "indie-ness" is hackneyed. it's overused, it's not fresh. i'm uncomfortable now with some of the images i've saved onto this thing (still-unnamed-laptop) because they're the kind i'm starting to get sick of. or just, i don't know, it's difficult to describe.

i'm not trying to insult anyone, or their way of being or ideas of beauty. it just seems like there's some sort of glut on such images, where some sort of modern writer's quote has been written in fancy lettering in a moleskinnie, next to either some "artsy" drawing or a model cut out from a magazine. and, just, i'm sure many, if not all, of such images are still made from feeling & honest intentions, but you see it everywhere now, so that it feels forced, it feels overused, & you find yourself asking, now, is this actually the person's style, or are they just trying to be "artsy," & trying too hard? it feels hackneyed & dull, & devoid of true feeling. this obviously goes into what each individual thinks is "art," of course, which is a discussion i always hate to get into, because people can get so angry (it ranks up there with religion & politics, which seems kind of odd, if you think about it) because it's so individual to a person. i found myself backed into a corner one day when i made a face at mentioning Thomas Kinkade, & was asked why i felt that way. i can't even really name it; it's just something about that stuff that turns me off & away. but that doesn't hold up as an argument. it all depends on the person, & oftentimes, likes & dislikes don't come with a nice explanation tacked on. sometimes dislikes can be very mean & hurtful.

but really, all in all, i just feel sick & tired of seeing these "artsy" little things that don't feel right. they feel like they're trying too hard, more like they're trying to fit into a lifestyle more than anything else. they don't feel sincere, they feel jaded. i think that's what's bothering me the most. me, a total pessimist, feels like these things are jaded in the most uncomfortable way. i can't describe it; i feel like there's a difference to my cynical pessimism-- in which i can be very mean, very uncaring about pretty much everything-- & the weird, artsy jaded feeling that i get from these drawings & pictures & things. i feel like outright, "fuck-the-world-because-it-sucks" pessimism feels more real than some overused quote in fancy lettering next to some skinny pretty magazine model. i mean, hello. how the hell does that add up, how does that work?

i'm probably being contradictory in my arguments, & a hypocrite to boot. but i really fail to see how these are so liked, when so many of them feel like void. i think you can tell when someone's bullshitting & when they're not. when they're trying too hard to sound or look or seem "artsy" & "different." i'm not saying i'm any better. oftentimes i feel like one could look through my own sketchbook & see that. but then, on the other hand, you have to try out new & different things, & not feel shackled to one way of making or doing things. apparently, writers get told there is a finite number of plots; music students get told there are a finite number of scales. you don't really have that in visual art. maybe that's why so many people just go & do whatever. on the one hand, i know what things make me roll my eyes, but on the other, how bad would it be if we were told, "well, you can't do x, y, & z." and that does get said, i think, in some places. what, you want to do narrative art? that's illustration; ewwww-- like it's any less of an art? simply because it's narrative & not artsily abstract & filled with the current "artsy" trappings, & is devoid of an artist statement like, "i am interested in the spaces between people and the planets and birds sitting on wires." (i dunno, that doesn't illustrate my point, i don't think.)

what it comes down to, i guess, is just that i have these certain preferences. i feel like certain things try too hard to be stereotypically "indie" or "artsy," & that this seems to be the prevailing idea nowadays when it comes to art. it seems more about some sort of lifestyle that's been glamorized that people want to have. it's not about making things, or you can tell when it's sincere & when it's bullshit, when it's just about "omg look i'm so, like, different & artsy." maybe i'm being mean & hypocritical & maybe i just need to shut up & let people just be. but it's just been nagging me a little bit more recently. it's like, it wants to try & be artsy & maybe glamorizes a lifestyle & emotions & things (especially more depressive emotions, because i guess that's artsy too. i don't even know. don't glamorize feeling like shit, come on), but it feels jaded & devoid of actual emotion. like, i mean, going with the whole idea of "feeling depressive is suddenly cool or something"-- i think there's something behind the idea that more creative types have issues (or whatever you want to call it), which lends itself to creating (when it's not debilitating), but i think that there are people who have taken that notion & glamorized it, like it's cool or something, or the hallmark of a true artist. of course, most people might say they wouldn't give up such horrible feelings, because when they're happy, they can't make anything worthwhile. i'm not talking about that, not about people who actually feel this way because that's just their temperament, how they are; i'm talking about people who, it just feels like in trying too hard & trying to have this lifestyle, they reason that, well, they ought to feel depressed too, but oh, what a lovely thing it must be. they romanticize it & turn it into something more pleasant. some romantic ideas, you know, may feel near the mark or close to home to someone who really actually has such feelings, but the whole idea of it being "cool" & marketable somehow, & of "collages" consisting of pretty, skinny, kind-of-worried-looking model girls & oh, just look at the depths of my emotion-- it's worthy of many an eyeroll. and i'm probably being mean again. have you seen me capitalized anything but proper nouns? most might chalk this up to be being "artsy." i call it being in a chair that demands you switch positions, one of which is not very condusive to using the shift key very often, so i get lazy. the point of that tangent being, really, that i probably cannot talk, that i do & maybe even feel things that could be exactly what i claim to dislike.

and even so, it is all simply my own feelings. and really, i wouldn't force them on anyone. not even when i see a canvas painted white would i want someone to decree what you can & can't do in art. because really, it's awesome that it has room to do so much in, & is so flexible, & all that. that doesn't keep me from feeling aggravated with certain aspects of it. and the same could go for anything (& really, i'm pretty annoyed by a lot of things): "artsy" things, clueless preps ("what does 'habitual' mean?" swear to god. and we are in COLLEGE), vulgar gangsta boys, vulgar males in general (remember, i want to deck the douches, which include at least two of my cousins!), &c., &c. and at the same time you have to remember that there are exceptions to the rule, & that people are people, with lives & feelings. but a lot of the time, it feels so aggravatingly unfair to have to remember that when you're fed up with things, when other people are so carelessly unthinking. so, i don't know, OH WELL, we're going to get angry & annoyed with people, & we're going to bitch. that's what i do just about every single day. and i get accused of making sweeping generalizations. so you see just what kind of a person i am.

all this because of some derpy-ass webcam picture; what the hell. and my japanese final is soon, & then russian one is at 3, & i'm tired & feeling kind of lonely & cold & hungry. yeah, i know, "b'awwwww, poor baby, now shut the fuck up." oh well.

errrr.

2009-12-03T18:50:00.001-05:00

So i put my monotype of post-being-bombed-by-Luftwaffe England up on DeviantArt, & got this comment:

Very powerful image, the technique works well with your style, what kind of printing technique is it?
War is so sad, you can see it in his pose/body language too!
It would be interesting if you did an image of the bombings that happened afterwards in Germany, it would be like seeing the repercussions of our actions, and how no one wins in the end. lol maybe Im getting too deep there XD

I always end up getting comments like this from people who know more about certain things than i do. Like, my “Mythology for England” thing, & someone commented like, “Why not do one for Greece with the myths? :)” The last time i admitted that i didn’t know a Classical story (it was Theseus & the Minotaur), the reaction was, “Oh. Where do you live? ….Oh. :|” Of course, i’m American, so i’m an ignorant asshole! OF COURSE!

So yeeeaaaaaahhhhh…. it’s just kind of sort of really awkward. ._____. Just kind of.

2009-11-29T17:21:00.002-05:00

I got a Tumblr. So now i can put a bunch of photos & quotes & videos & stuff on there.

-sigh-

november sucks too

2009-11-25T15:49:00.000-05:00

Music to write about the Habsburgs by:

2009-11-18T08:18:00.001-05:00

Korean pop music.

HABSBURGS ORIGINATED IN KOREA!

Except not. Kono obaka-san ga!

:(

2009-11-16T19:30:00.002-05:00

our car died & the new one is probably going to be a cr-v. i don't like big cars like that; they look gross & wasteful. i'm already embarrassed.

i have a bad feeling that i still don't know what to do for my history paper.

i woke up at 4:30 pm today, & i still feel tired.

my stomach doesn't like me very much right now.

i wish i could go somewhere to see the leonid meteor shower.

2009-11-15T04:12:00.003-05:00

fucking god this is the THIRD TIME I'VE TRIED TO POST
FUCKING ALT CODE GODDAMN YOUR ASS FUCK

now i'm PISSED OFF to couple with the lonliness & sadness & the thinking too much on EVERYTHING including something i thought i could get over easily. i want to get on a plane & just go somewhere. right now.

fuck

"calm" playlist (typing this bitch up is what keeps fucking navigating me away from the goddamn page what's the point of autosave if it DOESN'T SAVE YOUR FUCKING DRAFT by the time this works i'll have the list memorized)

1)Candyland-- CocoRosie
2)Slow Me Down-- Emmy Rossum
3)Shiaull Ersooyl--?
4)Arrane Ny Niee--?
5)Trees Lay By-- Josephine Foster
6)Monday's Rain-- The Clientele
7)Haunted Melody-- "
8)Lamplight-- "
9)One the Death of the Waters-- Shearwater
10)The Hunter's Star-- "
11)Return to Me-- October Project
12)Heart of Chambers-- Beach House
13)Rose-Red-- Woodland
14)Wild Child-- Enya
15)One By One-- "
16)May It Be-- "
17)Song of Nimrodel-- The Tolkien Ensemble
18)Gabriel-- Lamb
19)Beautiful Girl-- Poe
20)The Call-- Regina Spektor
21)Lullabye for a Stormy Night-- Vienna Teng
22)Shine-- "
23)Bonny Portmore-- Loreena McKennitt
24)The Lady of Shalott-- "
25)Temptasyon-- Mediæval Bæbes
26)Canon-- Johann Pachelbel
27)Last Night, Good Night (duet)-- Vocaloid song
28)Karenai Hana-- Shimokawa Mikuni
29)Istudemo Nando demo (Always With Me)-- sung by Kimura Yumi (composer: Hisaishi Joe)
30)At the Beginning-- Anastasia soundtrack
31)Fireflies-- Owl City
32)Allegria-- Cirque du Soleil

"sad" playlist
1)The Perfect Ending-- Straylight Run
2)Any Other World-- Mika
3)Speeding Cars-- Imogen Heap
4)Colorblind-- Counting Crows
5)Makka na Ito-- Plastic Tree
6)Field Below-- Regina Spektor
7)Chemo Limo-- "
8)Ode to My Family-- The Cranberries
9)Empty-- "
10)Wall of Silence-- October Project
11)Pilgrim-- Enya
12)The Godfather: Part II-- Harry and the Potters
13)The Legacy of Odio-- In This Moment
14)Carry Your Cross and I'll Carry Mine-- Tiamat
15)Eva-- Nightwish
16)Nemo-- "
17)Frutto del Buio-- Blind Guardian
18)Amity (live)-- The Gathering
19)Adagio-- att. to Tomaso Albinoni

"fuck you" playlist
1)Curse of Fëanor-- Blind Guardian
2)Leader of the Rats-- Arch Enemy
3)We Will Rise (live)-- "
4)Bye Bye Beautiful-- Nightwish
5)Stick it to Dolores-- Harry and the Potters
6)(never) Do What You're Told-- The Remus Lupins
7)Fat Fatty Fuckin' Pigs-- The Underneath

and then i had one for October & there's one for Hetalia, which is shorter than it should be. it's only got england's & america's Maru Kaite Chikyuu on there, & both of england's character songs. i never go on the lj comm to see if anybody else's has come out, orto go back through the tags to get any more. & i never listen to "einsamkeit" anymore; ffff gomenne, doitsu. that would fit on the "sad" playlist or something; a hurr hurrrrrr.

and now it's almost 5 am. thursday night i actually fell asleep at 10, woke up at 3 for a second, then fell back to sleep until 5:30-ish. it was unprecedented.

and so now here i am, sleeping in till almost 2 pm on saturday & then staying up till 5 am sunday morning. but i had this stupid idea to do a sketchbook of drawings before i went to sleep, so i have to do that before i go & keel over. & they're self-portraits, too; why; i don't even like self-portraits. i hate looking at my fucking face. maybe that's why. that makes no sense, probably. orz

meanwhile, we set stuff on fire at the senator yesterday & it got really terrifying at one point. like as in, excuse me while i have visions of the place going up in flames as Gayle dropped the bowl to stamp out the fire. i took pictures & put them on facebook. here's one

o yeahhhhh

...going downstairs, just asked mother if we were doing anything interesting today. her mouth was full, so she looked like some sort of gerbil or something & she shook her head & i was like, why, & she shrugged. i just said it was lame. because it is. extremely lame. i'm tired of being stuck in this house because i can't drive & i don't have any friends around who do. i don't have any friends around period. but i'm sick of being stuck here & never having adventures & shit & doing the things you're told you're supposed to do via quotes from (sometimes dead) famous people (like Mark Twain) & i'm jealous of people who are actually out there living. i don't like this. i don't like life. i hate this, i hate it ALL. goddammit.

actually had an interesting dream yesterday that i remembered & wrote down a quicky kind of outline about & it didn't do too many weird things. it had a plot & characters, actually, & i knew things that were plot points & stuff, like the fact the protagonist had pretzel sticks would get her in trouble because she wasn't supposed to have pretzels.

i need to stop refreshing facebook & sleep. ooo anastasia sooong. i want that movie on dvd or smthg. oh hey something else i can put on my wish list. it is absurdly difficult to think of a christmas/birthday wishlist, & i get aggravated when people bug me about it

yeah, well

i've put on "america &/or england's character CD"

decipher THAT ohohohohoho <-sounds more like france oh god wat

i clearly need sleep & will regret this post in the morning.

OI, NOVEMBER.

2009-11-01T01:32:00.001-04:00

YOU BETTER NOT SUCK AS HARD AS OCTOBER DID, YOU FUCKIN HEAR ME, SON?

The picture is semi-relevant to my feelings; haha.

October, you letdown.

2009-10-30T23:18:00.002-04:00

This week has turned out to be bad in the way that a weekend won't remedy. And in varying degrees, as well: quietly as well as very noticably. And in ways that i don't know how they'll resolve, if at all.

Meanwhile, while at Barnes & Noble, saw a tall guy with the teeniest little coffee mug i think i've ever seen. Eee.

Kind of about that size & style.

And regular mugs:

And, lyrics that currently seem to fit how i feel at the moment, for the most part: these & these.

buhhhhhhh.

2009-10-23T14:03:00.008-04:00

So apparently it'll be best if i drop the Jewelry class. My grades are apparently not so good, especially since i can't powdercoat the wire thing (it would make it into a color) because..... the thing broke. HAVE I YET MENTIONED THAT I SUCK AT WELDING? AND THAT I HATE IT?

Meanwhile, in an attempt to distract myself from frustration/anger/worry (yjsdvhfhbefvrguerhdaweubcwahdbewlrigbs): mugs. Mugs are awesome. I don't know why. They just are. If you don't believe me, you must be shown & convinced. (Hopefully none of these will be broken/taken down or i won't be roasted alive for direct linking? ehehehhhhh;;;;;)

Mustacheoed mugs, seriously.

Mug with legs.

Retro mugs

I wish i could buy these.

What's also awesome: Interiors like this.

Also, a good way to waste time (well, maybe not waste it) is to go around on people's Tumblrs or this site. I've ended up saving a bunch of pictures & spent way too much time online instead of doing anything else. :\\ Though did watch Prisoner of Azkaban last Friday & i want to watch it again already.

........damn it, i'm hungry. I think. Vacillating between hungry & nauseated; charming.

2009-10-11T18:39:00.002-04:00

I HATE WELDING.

And i can't design to save my life (which is not the best thing in Jewelry/Metals), & Google can be immensely unhelpful at a time like this, when all it manages to find are the most boring light fixtures ever made. But then it does sometimes manage to get a few good ones, ie:

what is this thing, anyways?

Big-ish.

Actually, i think i like the busts more than anything else in the room.

I like the idea of dangly bits. I don't like the whole "encrusted with whatever that is" idea so much.

These are awesome

Something completely different!

~~~~~

why look where it is

HOKAY SO YEAH.

2009-09-28T16:59:00.002-04:00

The CFA machine has the best cheap hot cocoa. Unfortunately, even 75 cents builds up quickly over time. But it's really nice-- especially now that it's finally getting cooler.

....in other news, augh welding why, & printmaking has foiled me yet again. And i think i missed the rain outside. Darn it. And tired & headachy & IS THIS SEMESTER OVER YET?

But for some things, i really can't be complaining. /////

2009-09-09T18:39:00.001-04:00

The things you forget you've uploaded....

2009-09-06T05:36:00.001-04:00

oh hi there

2009-09-02T13:46:00.002-04:00

So that was summer. In which Things were Actually Done.

And now fall semester. derp derp

2009-01-16T02:40:00.003-05:00

I've decided to stop the picture thing. For one, no one reads this, another thing is that i didn't take a photo yesterday or the day before, & really... not doing anything worth taking pictures of. Plus, it's not even my camera, so if i did go anywhere interesting, i couldn't really take it with me.

So instead, here's an awesome new blog: Here.

2009-01-10T02:28:00.002-05:00

Jan. 9

I just liked the light.

Look who arrived:

You can see some more of the seller's items here; go see. She even sent a little magnet along, too. :)

2009-01-08T23:12:00.002-05:00

Jan. 8

Some of my art books.

Have decided this isn't exactly "art." Plus, these only serve currently to exacerbate the fact that this break of doing nothing is maddening. I don't do anything...

2009-01-08T01:05:00.001-05:00

Jan. 7

2009-01-06T23:46:00.000-05:00

Jan. 6

Are you kidding me?! So F.A.B.!

2009-01-05T23:54:00.001-05:00

Jan. 5

..........

FIVE. HOURS. LATER.

And no, that is not a joke.

ARTH 109 Success: This class has been added to your schedule.
GEOG 101 Success: This class has been added to your schedule.
HIST 484 Success: This class has been added to your schedule.
JPNS 202 Success: This class has been added to your schedule.
MATH 105 Success: This class has been added to your schedule.

It only took five hours & a million phone calls before i found someone who actually helped & removed the hold.

2009-01-04T23:09:00.000-05:00

Jan 4

2009-01-03T23:47:00.002-05:00

Jan 3

We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers-- thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams. -Peter S. Beagle

Happy 117th Birthday, Professor Tolkien!

2009-01-03T01:45:00.002-05:00

Jan 1

Jan 2

Happy New Year

2009-01-02T01:37:00.002-05:00

I want to try to do the thing where, for an entire year, you take a picture a day. Not that it would quite be like Jamie Livingston (for obvious reasons), but still.

I did take a picture yesterday, but then the camera's batteries died & they're still charging. So you'll have to just trust me when i post pictures not on the day they were taken.

lalala

2008-12-19T13:45:00.001-05:00

Seven years ago...

This is the best day in forever, right now. (Deutsch final may wreck it.) I caved & had a latte or w/e from Starbucks this morning, reading through old captions on Council of Elrond, reviving the Barrow-Downs' "Crazy Captions" thread, watching Annelli's vlog, &&& TVN has streaming video of them out tracking winter weather! Plus, it's pretty funny when one is watching Destroyed in Seconds & they do a bit about tornadoes, & you know it's Reed Timmer & co. before they say a thing because they're capering about with glee.

Not much has changed, then, since 2003. "BACK UP!!!!!!!!!" XD

Bad thing, though; really can't concentrate for some reason on practicing for Deutsch. Das ist nicht toll. Also not getting snow. I mean, Las Vegas got snow. I mean, rain is all well & good, but when the temperature is pushing the upper 40s in December... meh.

Pouring rain!

Two hours until going to go fail Deutsch final; yatta. But i did somehow manage to get an 80 on the Kapitel 3 test, so who knows. Maybe i'll have retained something. But the problem is 1) i can't take 102 next semester because it doesn't fit, & 2) i don't think things are really sinking in, because of the grammar jargon & lack of time, because the semesters are short. It's more just regurgitating information than being able to recognize what to use in a certain situation. It's not like really thinking about how to use the language, which makes me sad, especially since i've got a plump, happy elephant looking at me from my textbook, saying, "Ich mag Kinder." とてもういです. :( I want to be able to be multilingual, but begin to wonder if i really have the brain for it. Especially right now, not being able to concentrate. Stupid, stupid.

...and no more streaming video from TVN. かなしそうなかお--> :[ かなしい--.

(Oi, what is the difference between using うい & かなしい? Typical, using Japanese when i'm supposed to be concentrating on verb-noun & verb-verb combinations. (It's 1:32.))

Maggie should be coming over to get her presents. I wrapped everybody's stuff last night, & have one more card to do & mail, that i managed to completely forget about. (Stupid!)

Mm, not so good day.

Some stuff

2008-12-15T12:23:00.006-05:00

->Armsrock

He's also in the December issue of Juxtapoz magazine, which is how i found out about him in the first place. It's a fascinating interview, especially because the language is so eloquent. A nonnative English speaker (? yes?) is able to use the English language to more effect than a native speaker, & seems to have more respect & care for the words how they are used. What does that say?

->Sketchbooks?

I really, really like looking through people's sketchbooks. Being able to look at them via the internet, while not my preferred way, is the next best thing. There is a link to the site in the blog entry; right now am looking at Chad Kouri's sketchbook (long live analog indeed!).

And speaking of sketchbooks, after more than a year (maybe about a year and six months?), i finally finished my most recent one. Now i have a huge new one. If it took over a year to fill a book half its thickness, how long will this one take...? How much more will it be falling apart?

->Santa Claus Conquers the Martians MST3K

Here's a nice little disturbing thing for the holiday season. And if that isn't enough, here's another: Santa Clause MST3K.

Or, if you prefer extreme weather this holiday season, there is always the season finale of the second season of Stormchasers.

->Am finishing rereading The Return of the King. Remember the Decembers of 2001-2003? Good times.

And then next, back to The Silmarillion. Am especially fond of this drawing. I shudder to think there may still be fangirlish vestiges left over from eighth grade. Gnaugh.

It never gets old, does it?

2008-11-13T14:32:00.004-05:00

:)

Tornado Chasing by ~miraje on deviant ART

Also, also: here's this past Sunday's episode of Stormchasers:
Part 1

Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Watch it! I've watched it twice today. (eheh)

"Are we running away?"
"Yeah, we're running away. And proud of it!" xD Good old TIV!

Aw, i wish i could stormchase come spring...

Remember, kiddies: Do not ever take shelter under an overpass. Find a ditch by the side of the road, away from the tornado & your car, quoth meteorologists. The overpass will increase the wind speeds as they move through that tiny opening created by the bridge.

ZOMG TIV1! XD

"He have his goodness now..."

2008-11-02T01:38:00.000-04:00

You cannot watch The Crucible-- as a play-- and laugh. At all. You might read it, watch a movie of it, & have inside jokes about Mary Warren & John Proctor's name. But you cannot when you sit there and see it unfolding. We didn't laugh. At the end, my legs were shaking & i felt like crying. Feel really, really drained.

In short: It was amazing.

pumpkin time...

2008-10-27T18:45:00.000-04:00

The link will take you to the downloaded image, which actually shows what's going on on the pumpkin. (Here's its actual page.)

So this is this year's pumpkin, featuring the Marauders in their Animagus forms (plus one werewolf). Images from left to right: The back, which says "Up to no good"; the full Moon, Wormtail, & Prongs; Prongs & Moony; Moony & Padfoot; & what it looks like from the porch, thanks to the street light. Roughly.

And here's last year's pumpkin.

Also, if you don't already know, i put up a Marauders Halloween fanfic that is apparently mildly creepy, if nothing else. You can read it on any journals by going back to the entry before this, or you can read it here, as well as on Fan Fiction.net (i've been neglecting it, so i put it up there, too). So please read it & let me know what you think! (Please.)

Think i may try to be Janet for Halloween, from the poem Tam Lin. I do not have a mantle green, nor fair hair (i think that's mentioned?), but it's appropriate & i could kind of maybe do it... I mean, come on, i don't have a Tam Lin either, now do i? :P

2008-10-17T01:26:00.001-04:00

The discussion concerning Los Angeles on last night's (Thursday's) new episode of Ace of Cakes worries me. Don't leave Bmore, guys...

I swear, if Food Network ships them out in the middle of the night in a Mayflower truck... HA HA. Not. :|

Towson's theatre company is doing The Crucible. Hopefully Kayleigh & i are going, & will stifle our giggles from every single inside joke ever spawned from that play. "Come down, Mary!" "You're raising up a whore!" And Kate said she did all the bonnets, as well as Ann Putnam's dress.

Was absolutely spacy in Japanese yesterday, & was horrific in German Wednesday. I think i'm worse at German than i ever was at Italian, which is saying a lot. Speaking of Italian, lost my "Ciao!" pin from senior year. No idea where; if it was Philadelphia or the Walters on Sunday. It makes me really sad. Damn pins falling off all the time.

Also went over to the Center for the Arts to look at shows. Stupid me for not going to the Korean one until the third to last day of its showing. Wanjin Kim's work is really, really brilliant; think it's assemblage. She uses a lot of antique things, like antique Korean rice cake stamps. I got close enough to sniff one, which sounds odd, but it smelled really good. In the vein of smells, the smell of Maggie's house followed me all day, i swear. I think it was my pants, which sounds horrifically wrong & laughable, but i couldn't really trace it, even then.

Anyway. I don't think she's on the internet, though, which is the annoying thing about nearly all the shows in the CFA: you see something that makes you essentially go "omg," & then the cards don't have it on them & it's not on the internet anywhere. So yeah. No real way i can show her work, since she has no website. If you put her name into Google, you get someone's Facebook account; if you go to images, it's just pictures of other people with a similar name.

The MFA thesis show & the one in the "Art gallery" (that's its name) changed, & i don't know when that happened, so missed their openings, obviously. The MFA one now is interesting. The one upstairs in the art gallery runs till November 8th; should go see it. It's called Particularities and Abstractions, & features the work of three artists. They're really very amazing.

And, wonder of wonders, at least one of the artists has a website: Christine Gray. Look at Oracle Four; it's amazing. Though moreso in real life. It's so shiny & smooth, probably half because it's on wood & probably half due to whatever medium she used. But seriously, if you can get to the actual show, you should. I kind of stared at all of them. Meanwhile, the girl watchung the gallery was in an argument with someone on the phone concerning the Presidential debate. Forget politics! Look at the smooth art. The other artists, besides Gray, are: WC Richardson, Erling Sjovold (amazing color), & Fiona Ross.

This video & its song keep getting stuck in my head, but they're both really awesome. Does anyone have the song that i could download, maybe? Or Snow Patrol's "Chasing Cars"? Maybe? But yeah, now i keep drawing people with their faces obscured by their hair floating/flying around it. It's just brilliant; wonder how they did it. It gets firmly lodged in my head, like during History when i was falling asleep.

So tagged along with the parents because i needed to buy a new wallet. Have been using an old one from when i was little, with an Asian (Korean?) theme to it, but the wear & tear is really taking its toll. The amount of coins already ripped the zip compartment for them, & now, the outside-- think it's silk?-- is really beginning to fade. So i went to Five Below & got a cheap Gryffindor wallet that just barely holds all those coins. Also got a pack of mechanical pencils, just in case. The cashier didn't pay attention to me; the two of them were discussing her new cell phone.

Had gotten a Best Buy gift card in the mail for filling out a quick little survey ($25), so then went there, since it was right next door, & ended up getting two CDs. Saw In This Moment's new CD ("Dream," i think?), & kind of guilted myself into getting it? Also got Beach House's "Devotion." So i have sixty-something cents left... i'm horrible. Consumer.

So, haven't truly listened to "Dream," but... it feels different from their first CD, & i kind of don't like it. Their first one felt like Metal, & Maria (i think that's her name. Cannot remember names) went back & forth between singing smoothly & grating, gutteral, growling singing, as well as screaming that wasn't shrill, but still growling. On this CD, it feels too light, not as heavy. I skipped through song after song, & finally, on the third to last, found a song with the growling. I was alone in the car, so i went, "Yes!"

I mean, granted, i've yet to listen to it all the way through, but... it just doesn't feel like it has the same "oomph" that the first CD had. I really liked Maria's ability to switch between smooth & gutteral, which seems to not be showcased as much on the newest CD. Just a lot of smooth singing. And the instruments sound lighter, not as Metal-like.

As for the Beach House album, keep listening to the entire thing over & over, now that i've ripped it. They're a Baltimore-based band, so that doubled my interest. They're classified as "Alternative," & maybe one could draw parallels to other bands/singers/&c., or similarities. They make slow, quiet, realxed-sounding music with a airy, soft vocals. Slightly akin to Private Eleanor? A tiny bit like Regina Spektor or Tori Amos at times, vocal-wise? I know it's undesireable to list such parallels, but figure i may as well get there before anyone else does, & says it in a negative way. (Maybe a bit like Cat Power? Almost got one of her CDs, too; don't know why i didn't. Oh well.)

But it's really very nice. It has a nice feel to it, which is reinforced by the art & design of the CD & tiny pamphlet. Kind of reminds me of her work.

Have been keeping DB waiting; very bad of me.

2008-10-09T15:05:00.007-04:00

But we who have need
of those huge mysteries
we who can sometimes
draw up from
wellsprings of sadness
rejoicing and progress
how could we exist
without them?

Rainer Maria Rilke. From Duino Elegies, the very first Elegy.So not only are there no jokes in heaven, but i'd assume no art, as well. Unless you like pointless, sappy, pasty, Kinkadean kind of junk. If heaven is supposed to be the aspiration & hope of mankind on earth, then why does it seem more deplorable & pointless than hell?

And read about this today:

Late, but:

2008-10-07T15:04:00.002-04:00

He is the one named Sailor Koon.

Third time giving blood; fwee. Into a baggie it goes.

2008-10-06T09:13:00.001-04:00

Meanwhile... DeviantArt is mad. Seriously. Someone suggested that maybe there's a group of people just going around reporting Deviations, & i'm inclined to agree, although it'd be nice if the artists were given a moment's notice, maybe to defend their work? Last i checked, we had freedom of fucking speech.

The most recent thing that happened was the deletion of yet another thing that was already under a mature content warning, & marked as sexual. (Question, DA: What's the point of that option if you delete everything with sexual content in?) It was a comic of Calvin & Hobbes, only in the future, with Calvin & Susie making out, & the idea was they were obviously going to do it, but even moreso was that Calvin had obviously lost touch with Hobbes. It was a little disturbing, but really very sad.

Long story short, it got deleted. Now, i understand the whole "minors" thing to an extent, to try & deter pedophiliac freaks, but they get off on a picture of a little girl fully clothed, so. But apparently, one cannot depict a fictional character who never comes of age in the original storyline, or who only does so in the last episode. Which is ridiculous.

Amd let's be honest: the people we consider "minors" are fucking. There it is, blunt & vulgar. Fourteen-year-olds are having sex; wake up. I'm not saying that's completely right or whatever, but far be it from me to police anyone else's life. The fact of the matter is that puberty hits & guess what! That means your body can become sexually active! Imagine that! And when does puberty typically hit? Hm, let's think...

Fine, it makes sense with the pedos. But on the whole, it doesn't make sense in reality. A pedo is going to get off on anything related to their thing, & you can't really police them. There are, apparently, people who get away with posting entirely unartistic photos on genitalia just for the hell of it. Oh, & people who do pictures with masturbation in them that DA doesn't take down, despite their rules. It's like they decide what to ignore or not. Fine, ok, they can't be everywhere; they don't know it exists unless you report that. I know that. My point is, the rash of recent deletions have largely been undeserved. They were tasteful, or not showing anything. The Calvin one-- it was all implied! He wasn't raping her; they were doing it willingly! They looked like high schoolers, & by then, you know, quite a few people have had sex. Older people may still consider someone a child until a certain point, but that doesn't change the fact that, really, by middle school, you're already thinking about certain things, whether you act on them or not. Come puberty, it's largely inevitable that you are going to start thinking about sex, unless you are asexual (& then you don't care).

So really, they're being extremely unrealistic about this whole thing. You can't police the freaks. You can't keep people from having sex. You have to realize that people aren't going to wait till they're "legal" to have sex. Welcome to reality.

And what if someone wants to use it as commentary, how they feel about things? Do they get reported & screwed over (HA) too? Sex & art kind of end up going together; maybe it's just post-Freud thinking, but they're very much intertwined. Not all those nude paintings were pirely artistic; men would buy them & show them to their male friends. Painted porn, essentially. Hence the feministic approach in art of challenging the male gaze. And then there's people who explore that sort of thing, or the nude, & they get screwed over (ie Scott G's senior show), because people can't distinguish, they get up in arms, they can't handle the fact that people do these things. Instead of going after the crude things, they go after the things that really aren't that bad at all.

And yes, i realize that it all comes down to individuals & differences are legion. I still think it's pathetic, childish, & infringes on freedom of speech. To quote Anonymous (they come up with good quotes, don't they :p): "Censorship offends me."

So i've been anxious about this, because am just waiting for someone to report it. And so i probably won't put up Toriko's drawing when i finally send it to her, because of the sexual overtones in that. (My god, it makes us RuFeg shippers seem like such pervs, doesn't it?) Nevermind that it's two consenting adults, it's implied, & you don't see a thing. I could probably put it under a mature content filter & it would still get deleted, & i'd have no opportunity to defend it. Because that's what's been happening. Who cares about the history of art; who cares about it being implied, &c. &c.? Can't take it, don't like it, must censor it, must get rid of it; bad, bad, bad. Pathetic.

2008-10-05T01:57:00.002-04:00

come find me
i am very sad

The reply:

I found you.
Please don't be sad anymore.
I am giving you a hug (on paper).

Something like that. :)

....thank you. I wanted to take it with me, but decided against it...

random thoughts

2008-09-21T01:42:00.007-04:00

I don't even know what i was thinking of, when my brain wandered over to two rude/raunchy/naughty/whatever words: "dick" & "pussy," as used as insults. And i realized that their usage typifies gender stereotypes.

When you call someone a "dick," you're generally meaning that they're an asshole, that they're rude or mean somehow; when you call someone a "pussy," you're implying that they're weak, wimpy, & pathetic.

Then think of how certain genders are seen. The stereotypical male is generally brash, thoughtless, loud, prone to getting in fights. The stereotypical female is seen as weak, meek. It's society's double standards. A big difference is, though, that the stereotype of the male is generally more acceptable. With females, one can't win. You're reminded of centuries of being seen as wrong & bad somehow.

I was looking through the reader for my History 101 class, & what the Greeks thought of women is extremely venomous. Generally, people look at the ancient Greeks & only look at the better points. The art, for one example. For someone who champions gay/lesbian equality, they might like the fact that ancient Greek males were encouraged to take male lovers. Civilization (whatever that may be) can, apparently, owe a lot to Greece.

But when one looks at the attitudes towards women, this becomes more worrisome. Women in ancient Greece were seen as almost livestock. They were seen as baby machines. While their husband went off with his lover, who he may have loved over her, she was expected to bear children & take care of the house. They believed that the first woman was made by the gods to plague men, & they had all sorts of horrific things to say about women, who were seen as no better than a plague. It becomes confusing, really, when one takes into account the religion & art. They had goddesses; the female form was depicted in their art quite a lot. The Muses are pretty much always depicted as female. It doesn't make any sense.

It's really disturbing how most societies do this sort of thing. People like to base their societies & countries & things off of ancient ones, using their ideas & the like. Unfortunately, it seems that double standards are another thing inherited from most ancient cultures. Anyone who tries to deny that it continues today is blind. I mean, such phrases as, "you throw like a girl" & "scream like a girl" are used to imply that someone is weak & cowardly. They are unmanly, they are not staunch, they don't have what it takes. If someone said, "you throw like a boy," it wouldn't be taken the same way. People talk about "becoming a man" & "take it like a man." No one talks about "becoming a woman," & if no one says "take it like a woman," & if they did, it wouldn't have the same meaning. Women still seem to be seen as inferior & weak. Most creepy males don't think a girl will fight or snap back.

It bleeds over into art. There are times when a female nude isn't as artistic as one tries to make it seem. Such works were often bought by men to show their male friends when they came to visit. They were for their viewing pleasure, porn masquerading under the guise of being "artistic." Hence the idea in modern women's art of challenging the "male gaze."

This doesn't mean that there aren't double standards everywhere, on both sides. It's not as clear cut. The best illustration would be Scott G.'s senior show. A small group of us had stayed behind at school, waiting for the time that the shows were supposed to officially be open, but for some reason we decided to go down to the lobby, where Scott was setting up his show. His work all featured nudes, both male & female. Whatever, right? It's an art high school, & there's Figure classes already; who's going to care?

Mr. G, one of the painting teachers, told Scott that the paintings of the male nudes would either have to be censored or removed. This wasn't Mr. G's personal opinion, this was because of the school being a public county school, & apparently, this means one can show breasts, but no penises. (Random question: why not "peni"?) earlier in the year, a guy named Zach had done female & male sexual parts as a "differences" kind of assignment, & people had acted so immature about it he was forced to take them off the wall. He had seemed more dazed & quiet than anything else when the discussion came up in Studio. Not so with Scott. He fought & fought to keep his paintings up & unmolested by censorship, to the point where, if he wasn't crying, he was close to it. Mr. G just shook his head sadly & said he was sorry, but those were his only options. Scott made the very good point that, by censoring the penises, it would only make it more obvious, but in the end, he opted for the censorship, so they would stay up. I felt so bad for him; he was so upset.

This, therefore, begs the question: Why? Why do you have to censor a nude male but not a nude female? Is it because of the "male gaze," that the nude female should remain so because then people can look at her & objectify her? To make the male seem more restrained by his lack of nudity, and make the female seem sinful, lustful, & unable to control her urges? Or does it imply, in a bizarre twist of society's usual workings, that the male nude is more dirty & wrong than that of the female? (Usually it's the other way around.)

It also doesn't seem to matter how a woman acts. She can act demure & princessy if she likes or act rebellious &, as one would put it, "one of the guys" (because certain traits & actions are linked to males in this culture), & no matter what, she'll still get dumped on. I once caught something on Metal late at night on either MTV or VH1 (my God, they were actually showing something about music, imagine that!), & they had a bit where they talked about women in Metal. They talked to the lead singer of Arch Enemy, whose name i forget, but she is brilliant. She absolutely growls when she sings, so it was odd to hear her speaking in her usual voice. But if i remember aright, she mentioned how, even she has had people calling to her from the audience such things as, "Take your shirt off!" Here she is, a rough & tumble-seeming kind of woman, who can growl with the best of them, & she still gets comments like these. Why? Why is this seen as acceptable?

A girl can't even have her body do what it does every month without getting flak for it. Many cultures & religions see one's menstrual period as being dirty & unclean. Aside from the obvious fact that blood is messy; it's more of the "spiritual" idea, i suppose. For some reason, what your body does naturally makes you dirty & unclean in the eyes of your society & chosen god/s. One may then say, "Well then, why would a god have made someone that could be dirty & prohibited from temples & the like," but that's forgetting people like the ancient Greeks, who thought women were a plague, & those who want to blame Eve for all the world's ills (as if Adam hadn't taken a bite too), & that Lilith was bad & evil because she wanted to be Adam's equal. I was on IM once with an online friend, & she found a Feminist writing that said if males had periods, it would all be the exact opposite: It would be "manly" & ok & not a taboo subject.

Sure, there are a few peoples who have ceremonies for a girl's first period. The ones i know of generally involve chanting & possibly being buried halfway in the ground. Contrast that to the Muslim boy's circumcision day, where he is treated "like a prince" for the day & given presents. Maybe it depends on one's culture, religion, society, values, etc., but really, which option sounds more appealing to most people?

Have there ever really been any societies that have seen the woman as an equal, as being on equal footing? I can only think of people like the Celts, & Anglo-Saxon women had quite a few rights. One's mind immediately goes to Boudicca, who was a warrior queen if ever there was one. The Romans whipped her & raped her daughters; she literally fought back, gathering many people to her cause & wrecking many Roman cities in Britain. They scoffed at her because she was a woman, & the Romans had about as much respect, it sounds like, as the Greeks. Unfortunately, she did end up losing because of Roman battle tactics, & no one knows what her fate was. But she was relentless & unforgiving in her anger, & her people tarried around her. They didn't look at her & say, "Oh, she's a woman; what does she know?"

Then, something i read in a book about the Celts: A woman was kidnapped & raped by a Roman. For some reason, somehow or another, he returned her to her home. She then beheaded him. The woman's husband remarked on this, & she said something to the effect of, "Better only one man who has slept with me."

Of course, double standards are everywhere. If a man doesn't act "manly," then there's something wrong with him. But even that seems to point back to the feminine, back to such derogatory words as "pussy." (And when did slang for genitals become derogatory?) It all goes back to the idea that male=good & female=bad somehow. You're looked down upon if you act girly, you're looked down upon if you act more rough (maybe even seen as either a "fake girl" or "fake boy"?). You can't win. Years of sufferage & feminism still don't seem to have changed much at all. How can such ridiculous ideas be gotten rid of? Will the ever be gotten rid of? As long as there are people who consider women inferior & wrong, & as long as that mentality is passed down to the next generation, nothing will change.

Even my male cousins, who i spent my childhood playing with (as my girl cousins are all fairly older than me), are not immune. At an emergency gathering this past May, i felt the overwhelming desire to kill two of my cousins. They think of sex in such a cavalier fashion; the one said, "I probably have a bunch of kids that I don't know about!" And he laughed. The older of the two of them turned to me & said, "Don't listen to him, he's a bad man." Like i am a child. Inferior. Stupid. I regret not having something to fire back, i regret not snapping & telling them what i fucking thought of their demeaning, misogynistic words & thoughts. I thought that being raised by single mothers would have instilled some sort of respect in them, but i obviously was wrong, as they so stunningly illustrated. I also thought their mother's religiousness would have played into it, but if it did, it was in the way that people suppose Catholic school kids will turn out to be hypersexual from being repressed. But, then: i have absolutely no respect for them; i get so angry that i seriously wish them ill. They absolutely disgust me.

How is it that a male can fuck around & somehow be considered manly, but if a female does the same, she's a slut? How is it that males think they can do things like force themselves on a woman, or that she somehow deserves it because of how she dresses? Why is it ok for a male to oogle a woman? Just because she's wearing a short skirt doesn't mean that she was "asking for it." How come male sexuality is seen as this manly, good thing, but female sexuality is seen as bad, wrong, sinful, lustful, dirty, slutty, desperate? Why are women expected to be meek & demure & submissive; why are assertive, aggressive women seen as negative, when the same traits in males are seen as positive? Why? It makes me so unbelieveably angry. There are supposedly decent guys out there, but sometimes it doesn't seem like it at all.

In other news, it is fifty degrees (F), last i checked. I'll be glad when the daytime gets as cool as this.

Uffa

2008-09-12T00:49:00.002-04:00

Non mi piacciono i cretini. La lingua stranieri non uguale illegale. Uffa. Non c'è peggior sordo di chi non vuol sentire.

Tired.

2008-08-21T23:20:00.000-04:00

If anyone lives in Britain or Wales.

Photobucket selling things without consent.

Plane crash in Spain killing upwards of 153.

And schools using electroshock "therapy" as punishment. Humanity is disgusting.

But. BUT. Did anyone else see Usain Bolt win the freaking Gold for Jamaica? He came around the turn & just ran. There was no one else in the frame. It was absolutely bloody amazing. Of course, it was depressing that the US guy & the Nethelands guy ended up being disqualified, when at first they thought they'd won the silver & bronze. (They both stepped on the lines seperating the tracks numerous times. But they didn't find out until later. It was depressing.)

But it was freaking amazing. He set a new record, something insane; nineteen point somethingorother seconds. "I'm number one!" he told the camera. So amazing.

And i didn't the end of the volleyball match, but what i saw was pretty intense. And diving was pretty ace, too. Having been seeing enough of the Olympics; missed the opening ceremonies because i was at Otakon. Typical; heard they were so amazing that, supposedly, no one will be able to top them.

And talking to Lauryll, though while still a little... wasn't too bad. A little like normal, actually.

The songs off the old Shoebox Mix zip reminds me of back when, the cold, & before Shoebox started to show the signs of decay within relationships, before everything got serious. I'm horrible when it comes to moving forward.

Ok, remember that photo meme? When people say "I want to see a photo of ___" & i post the results in a seperate post? Let's try that. I'm bored enough. I'll give it a week, i guess?

Watch this. A little late, but hey.

2008-07-26T03:02:00.003-04:00

Said a commercial yesterday, "We're a country of consumers. And that's ok." I scoffed & sneered & rolled my eyes. I thought, How disgusting.

But what did i do yesterday? Consume.

Got almost no sleep & was told if i wanted to get up to be able to go to Towson, i had to get ready in five minutes. Family thinks i can't move fast, can't get ready fast, ever. I was ready to go like that.

Got to father's office & watched some MST3K on YouTube while eating Pop Tarts that were a dollar from an upstairs vending machine. Watched Final Sacrifice, & despite the fact that it's a bad movie, kind of like the feel of it.

Then finally walked; unfortunately, one of my socks had a hole in the heel, so i got a blister. Remember to check your socks for holes. Oh well, whatever. Went to Ukazoo & sat around reading & being indecisive; finally got a copy of The Book of Lost Tales 2 that may as well have been newly bought, it was in such good condition. I generally don't want to get Tolkien secondhand (it feels odd, somehow; i got another copy of FotR once at the Book Thing & had to take it back because the marks weren't my marks, & it just felt wrong), but this was so minty, it was fine. And only $2.49 (no, that isn't including tax. Political bastards). Then went next door to Record & Tape Traders & got a $2.99 (again, price tag) CD, just because i'd seen it there before, i liked how it looked, & it was by a Baltimore band, so i figured i'd see if it was any good.

Then went over to Plaza because i had coupons. Got two pens, a yellow & an orange one, a little sticker book, & another little Moleskinnie. (The only time i'll buy them is when i've got coupons, so.) With the coupon for the Moleskine (40% off) &, i'm assuming, my Plaza card, all told, it cost a few dollars less than the little Moleskine does at full price. Went over to Trader Joe's-- after signing a petition to improve working conditions for Baltimore teachers so that, you know, their students don't beat the shit out of them or whatever-- thinking to maybe buy food, but... i don't spend my money on food. (I won't eat during Otakon; hehe.) I stood around agonizing, then realized it was time to go anyway, so didn't get anything. Dinner made me full enough to never want to eat again, fell asleep, woke up, & argued a little with mother to get her to let me have net time, then came down here. And i've eaten toast & feel very, very stupid. Nothing new.

But look: Shark Week icons!

And, seeing as it is 3:13, i should really probably have been off long before now.