I had to make an emergency milk and cookies run this morning (literally, and yes I was making all of the inevitable jokes to myself all the way up to Trader Joe’s) and to make things even more interesting due to some differences of opinion regarding coffee hour policy I was buying the milk and cookies seperatly.
Anyway, when i got their I found myself with a bit of culture shock looking though the dairy isle (albeit not thinking straight due to sleep deprivation and being in a rush) the fact that couldn’t find any cream. Sure there was heavy cream for whipping and there was half and half but there was nothing I would have called cream growing up for coffee. Even weirder to me, glancing down the isle, it was interesting that the vegan alternatives had become so ubiquitous I found myself consciously looking for dairy cream.
I finally got around to seeing the Settle Art Museum’s “intimate Impressionism” exhibit as something to do for two hours while waiting for another event (it was something I wanted to do, honest) Anyway when I got there the place was packed. This meant I planned to do the initial scan of the exhibit and then come back on a nice quiet weekday to take it all in at my leisure, preferably with a magnifying glass.
Still the whole thing just blew me away. I recognized a lot of the pieces either from the few times I went to the national gallery or from textbooks, but still this was amazing. Lately I’ve found myself drawn more and more to the “craft” of art and the brush technique of a lot of these paintings were amazing making me really wanting to stare at each painting for fifteen minutes. Looking at what some of what some of these artists did to get definition in white dresses not to mention showing slight with single brushstrokes.
I found myself falling in love with Renoir all over again, especially in one of his paintings, The Mussel Harvest 1879, where he does some absolutely fascinating things mixing greens and purples which briefly had me thinking about painted opals.
Ultimately I left far earlier than I would I have liked but honestly the place was that crowded. While I obviously don’t begrudge people the privilege of seeing art I really can’t get into my zone if there’s more than five people in a gallery. Besides my other event was about to happen.
By that I mean that Big John’s PFI, one of Seattle’s best kept culinary secrets,was having it’s annual food and wine tastings. This can not be missed since everything that Big John’s has from salami, the best selection of cheeses in the city, meatballs, stuffed tomatoes, Italian wines, cookies… all to the accompaniment of a guy playing old standbys like “That’s amore” and “Oh Marie” I left feeling quite full.
So all in all a pleasant afternoon and evening. (with the small exception of avoiding crashing on the Burke-Gilman on the way home when I got a face full of wet tree branch in my face.(Don’t worry, it had leaves.)
For finishing up this year’s october halloween theme I went with two films I’d been wanting to see for years but had not been aware of their availability. These adaptations of the H.P. Lovecraft stories done by the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society with the conceit that the films were done on the same year that Lovecraft wrote the stories.
The first of these two films, Call of Cthulhu was done in the style of a German Expressionist silent film. As with the book it follows an unnamed scholar as he researches a world wide plague of dreams while being drawn towards the terrible truth of the dread sleeping god Cthulhu.
You can tell the crew is in the process of learning their craft and it’s easy to spot technical errors if you’re in full critic mode, an obvious blue screen here some off lighting there… but this is just nitpicking. Otherwise they do a wonderful job capturing the mood and the period and any of my complaints of the other mistakes are easily forgiven by the way they were able to turn Thomas Street, in my home town of Providence Rhode Island, into a 1920s version of itself using a combination of masks, clip art and model cars.
The rest of time the style they are cribbing does wonders, allowing the team to do the non euclidean architecture of R’lyeh in cardboard and even the cheap stop motion animation of the Cthulhu puppet works to make it look like it’s something that exists outside of our perception.
Their next project, Whisperer in the Darkness brings us to the golden age of the Universal Monster. Telling the story of an academic who is contacted by a Vermont farmer who is fighting a loosing battle against an alien presence known as the Mi-Go, Whisperer in the Darknesshas always been one of my favorite of Lovecraft’s stories because it was the first story that transformed the mythos for me from something that was just a monster of the week, which I found mildly derivative of Edgar Allen Poe, to the disturbing cosmic horror that he’s known for.
The movie does a very good job following the story abandoning the harrowing correspondence that makes up much of the original short story’s narrative but at the same time embellishing not story extensively This is all well and good. If I have one main problem with Lovecraft as a writer is that while a master of building up the mystery and tension would frequently, for lack of a better word, blow the punchline. While this is certainly a constraint of the magazines he was writing for it usually spoiled the story for me. Here the writers give Whisperer in the Darkness, which suffered from one of those endings, a third act which makes for a more exciting and sit on your hands terrifying climax.
As mentioned before the team behind the HPLHS have done have improved their craft exponentially. The cast does a wonderful job in their roles and the look of the thing is spot on. The 1930’s vibe allows for realism to be a very relevant thing to the point where you are able to fudge quite a lot since things are supposed to “look fake” therefore they were able to hide a lot of the budgetary constraints in this format. Because of this The Mi-Go Look great looking like well made puppets when they are really fairly reasonable cgi. It also allows for very convincing makeup effects allowing for a very convincing Charles Fort to be a supporting character
Well I’m dropping the Mike cause I just finished Inktober!
I confess based on the rules I cheated today the first scrap of paper I drew from the Inktober Tupperware was a centipede. I assume I meant some sort of badass youkai, or something like Toshiro Mifune‘s coat of arms in Throne of Blood, when I was doing the list but somehow it didn’t feel Halloweeny enough. But for the last day I figured I have a surplus of selections, try again. So after drawing Cerebus my second time drew Edger Allan Poe’sRaven.
That works.
The Raven is one of my favorite poems in or out of it’s spooky context ( I especially like it when Vincent Price reads it, (though Walken, Lee and Jones also kick ass.) It’s always fun to try to see of ways to visualize it. (in this version I’m not sure if it would be right to have Poe drinking in the poem but it certainly would be in character.)
Well today I got another from the kiddy list… a scarecrow.
Seriously though, I like scarecrows, though I have too much respect for crows to think they’ll ever work. There’s something a iconic about them that triggers fond memories of New England farms. Also thinking them as effigies standing alone in the field is pretty cool.
