An Interesting Weekend

by on July 22, 2013 at 2:43 pm
Posted In: Art

Well I had a fun weekend for the most part. Saturday was spent doing a little bit of catchup then checking a friends house while he was out of town and walking his dog. After that I spent the rest of the day at this year’s Bite of Seattle. at the Seattle Center That was fun more for the people watching than anything else.

Sunday I had been told about a Pow Wow at the Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center in Discovery Park which sounded a lot more exciting than a second day at the Bite so I had a very nice Bike ride over to the park only to discover if I had bothered to research it just a little bit I would have found it was not free to get in and had the necesary five dollars on me. (thanks to modern technology and a bicycle I am happily cashless most of the time but every now and again it bites me) So instead I took a walk in the Wolf Tree Nature Trail and did a few pages worth of thumbnail sketches of trees.

I took my own sweet time going home with a brief stop at Gasworks Park to draw sword fighters and then ran some errands and had a nice relaxing evening.

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Pacific Rim

by on July 13, 2013 at 12:49 am
Posted In: Test

Pacific-Rim-movie-bannerI have five words to say about Pacific Rim.

Get To A Theater Soonest.

Anyway I was certainly expecting to enjoy Pacific Rim after all I like Kaiju movies, I like mecha and most important I really like Guillermo del Toro. But having said that I was only expecting to enjoy it I was primarily there to give support to del Toro’s work because if his “paying dues” films don’t get enough love then the films he really wants to do might not get funded.

So I’m going in more for the art and special effects and while going out of my way to ignore the rule of cubes am looking forward to nitpick it to death. And for the first half an hour or so that was exactly what I got and I was having fun nit picking asking all of the usual questions like “if they have Jaeger technology why do they have humans working on that huge project” and “why is the cockpit in the robot’s extremely vulnerable head?” … and then it got better… and BETTER and I stopped asking questions and spent the rest of the movie gripping my chair in excitement and occasionally applauding.

In a way despite being very much a del Toro film I found myself thinking of it as a Tarantino film in that it was a love letter to a specific genre with all of the in jokes and cliches going down a long checklist… but in a good way. We had the damaged ace with a dead brother, we had the dying commander, the asshole rival, comrades sacrificing themselves for the greater good and Bushido all the way I don’t think a single thing was missed and I loved every minute of it.

So what did I like about this best ? This was a movie that ran on rule of cool all the way and I loved it for it everything from a future Hong Kong that made the set from Blade Runner look like a resort spot to robots using freighters as clubs it was glorious. It’s one thing for a movie to have spectacular effects it is another thing for an artist to know what to do with them. Also it was great seeing actors having fun for a while it was hard to see who stole more scenes Ron Perlman or Idris Elba.

An on a final not the Ramin Djawadi soundtrack is now on my list for jingoistic Fourth of July firework music.

 

 

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Friday Sketches

by on July 12, 2013 at 7:15 am
Posted In: Art

honkytonkers JessicaLynneGasworksThis week’s sketch is from the Seattle Peace conference at Gasworks Park featuring Jessica Lynne and several others which occurred on June 30th.

I really liked the way the Performers were framed by either the downtown skyline or Queen Anne Hill and the Aurora Bridge.

It was a lot of fun though a bit of an ordeal as it was in the middle of the first heat wave of the season. (Something I underestimated completely and got my first farmer’s tan of the year for my troubles.)

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Favorite Quotes – John le Carré

by on July 10, 2013 at 11:58 am
Posted In: Test

I just began rereading Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy  for the umpteenth time and it still remains my favorite John le Carré novel and probably my favorite spy thriller of all time. I’ve enjoyed both adaptations though I still like the Alec Guinness version the best. So today here is my favorite quote from the book; George Smiley’s frustrated complaint about bureaucratic rationalization (it still sounds best when Alec Guiness is saying it)

Reason as motive, or reason as logic, or reason as a way of life? They don’t have to give me a reason – i can write my own damn reasons! And that is not the same as the half-baked tolerance from no longer caring!

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Orson Scott Card has a sad.

by on July 9, 2013 at 2:06 pm
Posted In: Test

I confess falling out of love with Orson Scott Card was something I found unfortunate back in the day. I enjoyed Ender’s Game and I liked the first few books of Alvin Maker before the sermonizing got too blatant. His books on creative writing are very good and I still find the copy I own very useful.  Sure I knew about his faith and politics but back in the day I figured he was someone I could have an intelligent debate with and afterwords leave as friends.

But then he started getting REALLY crazy.

Empire had me raising an eyebrow and then I read rants from him about overthrowing the constitution and that was it for me. Generally I am not big on theatrical boycotts but that doesn’t mean I feel any obligation to give someone my money either.

So after being very amused by the crash and burn experience that was him being hired by DC to write Superman, it was very interesting to see Card’s efforts to keep people from avoiding the upcoming film version of Ender’s Game…

Ain’t schadenfreude grand?

 

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