Archive for January, 2010

Gibbon and Sedlec. Like Simon and Garfunkel, or Hall and Oates.

Friday, January 29th, 2010

Since nothing interesting is going on in my life right now except work, work and more work (with some work on the side), I figured I’d show you a video that has captured my interest right now. It’s of a baby gibbon who sounds like a cross between a songbird and R2D2. First of all, the gibbon is all kinds of creepy-looking, with extra-long fingers and spooky, wide-open eyes. And then it makes the beeping squeaking noises. I can’t get enough of this video for some reason.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_BvkVvOvEs

Also, I just booked tickets to go to Prague and Budapest at the end of March. Mainly Prague, but I’ll be hittin’ up Budapest for a couple of days, which will be a cool additional bit on my trip. I’ve wanted to go to the Sedlec Ossuary located right outside Prague for about fifteen years, and now finally I’m going to get my chance. Decorating with the local dead people, how can I not? I mean. really.

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Moon and etc.

Monday, January 25th, 2010

Not much has been going on in my world worth blogging about (you wanna hear how I cleaned my bathroom? And made a presentation for work? I think not), but I did see the movie Moon starring Sam Rockwell. No, really, JUST starring Sam Rockwell. Sam Rockwell is the only person in it. Kevin Spacey does the voice of the robot Gerty, but other than that, it’s like Castaway. I saw it by myself, and then I saw it again with my father, which was great because I missed a whole bunch of stuff the first time around. You spend the first watching of the film saying, “Where did that come from?” and “Isn’t he supposed to be dead?” and things like that. So when I watched it with my father, I got a chance to really catch all the things that had me confused the first time. Here’s a brief plot synopsis without giving away the ending: Sam Bell is an astronaut on the moon all by his lonesome. Some giant industrious company back on earth has figured out how to get clean energy from the rocks on the moon, so Sam Bell monitors the harvesting machines and sends the energy back home, etc. It’s a lonely existence, but in two weeks Sam will get to return to earth and see his family. And then… things start happening. Nee noo nee noo nee noo nee noo. No, it’s not really like that, there’s no Aryan princess sitting in front of a snowy TV screen informing you of the arrival of bad things. It’s an extremely well-done film and I hope it wins lots of awards. If you want a more detailed review, go here.

In a totally non-movie-related news, Cricket mocked me for talking about a “twig district” in New York. There isn’t really a twig district, there’s a flower district, and one can procure many a twig or branch there. I took a picture of one shop to illustrate that.

twig-district

That’s one of the things I truly love about New York, the districts. There’s the bead district, a restaurant district, the plastic district, a light bulb district, etc. And those are only the ones I know. Who knows what other wonderful clusters of shops New York holds?

The other thing I took a photo of is this gorgeous enclosed bridge that I walk by from time to time.

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It’s like an enchanted world. It connects two dull buildings with its ornate coppery multi-levelness. I would love to walk across it one day. In the meantime, I can just walk past it and drool.

Addition: Lookit! Brain-sucker cupcakes! How fabulous!

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Photobomb #2.

Monday, January 18th, 2010

Remember the photobomb post? Quick recap of my painting:

photobomb-lowres

And here’s my new one. I like sets of things, so now that there are two, I can move on to something else.

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Tee hee hee. I amuse myself.

Rubenstein D’Grumples. Part 4, The Finale.

Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

I finally finished the piece. I’m not totally thrilled with how the frame part came out, but I learned that it is very hard to make small curved or rounded shapes with one stroke of the pen. The pen kept catching on the fiber of the paper and causing the line to sneak away from me a little bit, making this not as close to perfect as I would like. That’s why I was going to scrap the whole frame. But as long as you stand further than 8″ – 10″ away from it, you can’t see the HUGE ENORMOUS APPALLING ERRORS FLAWS MISTAKES AAAHHHHHH sorry, I’m working on controlling that. It’s a good piece. I need to chill.

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Failey McFailpants. And life drawing.

Monday, January 11th, 2010

First, I have a cold. My nose is polished like an apple from all the tissue-rubbage. Then, you know that big thing I working on for work, all day every day for what seems like forever (about 100 days, in reality)? We didn’t get the project. And last night, I was working on the Rubenstein D’Grumples piece and I think I’m going to have to scrap the complicated frame thing that I worked on for twelvityteen hours. I’ll blog about that later. All in all, a week/weekend filled with FAIL. Which is disappointing. However, during New Year’s weekend, because of work I canceled all my plans to have fun with people – except one. I had found a list of inexpensive things to do in the city, and one was to draw burlesque dancers, life-drawing-style, for ten dollars. So, sure enough, on January 2nd, I headed down to the Slipper Room on the Lower East Side and attended Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art Class. I figured it was only ten bucks and one of two things could happen: it could be a not-very-good drawing class and I could have a cool story to tell later, or it could be great drawing class and I could have some drawings come out of it. It turned out to be a bit of both. A little back history first. I have been taking life drawings on and off for almost twenty years, and I love taking classes. The human body never gets old, and you always come out better than you went in. You improve at drawing hands, or you have a more fluid line, or you can increase your ability to define shadows, etc. Here are some drawings from some of my previous classes.

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See? I tried different things with each of those drawings, and in turn I got more gooder at drawin’. Back to the class: I trekked down to The Slipper Room and went in, where I was greeted by a person in a full-body chicken suit (of course! Why the hell not?). The chicken held up a small placard which said, “Welcome! if you are not on the list, it will be $12.” I spoke directly into the chicken’s mouth and informed it that I was on the list. After the chicken found my name, it picked up a second placard that said, “Thank you! Please take a seat anywhere.” (It was an extremely courteous chicken.) I found a seat up near the front where the stage was and proceeded to chat with the girl next to me who was a chemist and had worked for a soy sauce company. The place filled up pretty fast with a plethora of youthful hipsters (I wanted to yell at all of them, “Wash you hair! Pull it out of your eyes! Hey, you ever heard of doing laundry? Look into it!” I am old). Then the people in charge came up on the stage. Apparently there is a theme to every Anti-Art Class, and this one was Disco Bloodbath. For those of you who weren’t keeping up with your New York gossip in the mid ’90s, here’s a short history. There was a club kid named Michael Alig and he threw parties at major clubs in the city. He got into a dispute over money with his drug dealer Angel Melendez, so in a drug haze Alig whacked Angel in the head with a hammer, injected Drano into his veins, and put him in a tub full of ice. A few days later, Alig lopped Angel’s legs off and tossed him in the Hudson. Alig then proceeded to tell this story to EVERYONE HE KNEW, and no one turned him in. It took a while for him to go to prison (where he is now). His club friend James St. James wrote a book about the whole thing called Disco Bloodbath. And Macauley Culkin restarted his career starring as Michael Alig in the movie Party Monster. So that being the theme, the hosts of this event were dressed as characters from this sordid tale, and the model had props such as a hammer, a bottle of Drano, a comically large fake syringe, and a skull. The model was spectacular. Her name is Madame Rosebud, and really, she was the best model I’ve ever drawn. She looks like this.

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But she had her hair all spiked up on her head, and she was covered in strips of black and white electrician’s tape (which was very irksome to an old-school life drawer such as m’self; I couldn’t define her edges). She did the standard ten one-minute poses, then five-minute poses, then three twenty-minute poses. And she worked HARD. In one of her five-minute poses she had her tongue out, and she didn’t even drool all over herself. And in one of her twenty-minute poses, she had her arm straight out. For twenty minutes. That hurts so, so much. I tipped her a whole bunch, I was so blown away. I got three good drawings out of the experience. These are two five-minute ones.

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And this is the twenty-minute one where she had her arm out. Two things: that is not armpit hair, I had just started to incorporate shadows when the pose ended, and that’s as far as I had gotten. And I learned that when a slim model with spiked hair and no bosoms poses for you, your drawings predominantly look like AstroBoy.

madame-rosebud2

Happy 2010.

Tuesday, January 5th, 2010

Hey hey, Happy New Year! It’s been ever so exciting here at the ranch. I celebrated the new year by… working. Every day. For a minimum of 12 hours a day. It was kinda sucky. I did, however, work from home on New Year’s Eve, so Cricket and I took a break at 11:15 and wandered down into the center of White Plains to see the fireworks. I love fireworks. I will travel many, many miles for good fireworks and/or good Christmas lights. So we all counted down and then the fireworks started off the top of the mall. They were low-exploding fireworks, which was fine, so they had bunches of not-terribly-large ones go off in groups. They were like dense shrubbery, which was a nice change from the standard BOOOM! (pause) BOOOM! (pause) style we are all accustomed to. Here’s the problem: the first few were beautiful (“ooooh, ahhhhh”) but the copious amounts of smoke didn’t clear, so within thirty seconds we couldn’t see any fireworks, just occasionally colored and lit-up smoke. It looked like a Civil War reenactment on top of the Macy’s. Sorta disappointing. I’m hoping they resolve that by next year.

Okay, so first I’d like to share some of my newest spam comments. They’ve gotten very complimentary. I know they’re just form letters sent to everyone in the known universe, but every time I read one, I always think, “Why, thank you. Aren’t you a nice spambot. Knowing my name and everything.”

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I also got this very thoughtful porn one, which caused me to crack up.

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I feel like I’m reading a Trader Joe’s catalog. I have found that porn is very much “as described.” If they say the video is of two guys, three girls and a sheep, changes are that is exactly what you are going to get. I don’t know if we need this organic, free-range, quality-control website. Also, I don’t know if the panda was consulted on this. “Hey, your face will be a symbol for porn, but only good porn, nothing trashy. Everyone will associate your face with porn. Panda, porn. Porn, panda. How do you feel about that?” And I just realized something. Aren’t pandas dying out because they don’t like to breed? Oh, irony, I could cut you with a spoon. Because I have ten thousand of you, and all I need is a knife.

And my final spam comment amuses me because I love that it’s written by a grammar nazi.

spam-go

I love this new trend. I want all my spam to be like this. “If the name ends in an ‘s’, the apostrophe goes on the outside and no additional ‘s’ is needed. Levitra levitra levitra.”

By the way, this particular comment is wrong. I was taught a long time ago that in sentences like, “Go,” or “Look,” the word “you” at the beginning is implied, making it a full sentence, with both a noun and a verb.

Moving on from spam to holiday gift-giving, I’ve been stalking this woman on Etsy whose username is Geninne. I love her watercolors, so for Hanukkah slash Christmas I purchased three of her pieces, one small poster and two prints. I love them so very much.

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Aren’t they happy and wonderful? I’m going to get them framed and hang them somewhere in my apartment. I’ll take pictures when I do that so you can experience the delight along with me.