I just had to share this picture that my mom just sent me from her trip to the Yale Art Gallery. Where she demonstrates how tricky a lot of these “classical” poses really are. I’m ashamed to say I’m having no luck identifying the sculpture. It’s embarrassing since it looks familiar enough that I keep thinking I SHOULD know it.
Well last night a visit to a friends after spending some time at the Asian Art Museum led to something I wasn’t planning to get to do until sometime next year… See the premier of Game of Thrones season three!!
As mentioned earlier is I’ve been going through the books at a fairly good pace and one of the things I’ve been finding about watching the adaption is all of the little changes that had to be made in order for the show to work. All of the smaller subplots that had to be trimmed away. Minor characters who had to be removed because while it is true a book can have a cast of thousands a television show can only afford a cast of hundreds.
Of course the problem… or at least the challenge is that these changes begin to add up and after a while begin to snowball. While not necessarily a bad thing as long the creators know what they are doing… But I figured that this season would be where the effects of all of these changes would become unavoidably apparent.
Based on what I saw last night it looks like I was right. I won’t go into any details to avoid spoilers, but it looks like Sansa’s storyline is going to be very different as well as certain details with Daenerys (for example a character who spends a good amount of time in the book in disguise is introduced as himself immediately (though slightly later than he was in the book) for the unfortunate fact that disguises don’t work quite as well on screen as they do in text.
Another thing about this season that interests me quite a bit is the fact that they are going to be splitting the third book, A Storm of Swords into two seasons. I’m very interested to see how they do this, how this effects the pacing and where they are going to make the split (and most importantly which season shall have the Red Wedding)
But all and all I liked this beginning of the third season a lot. It suffers slightly by having to put down quite a bit of groundwork but that always happens in first episodes. My favorite part so far (Not counting the special effects involving giants and dragons) was the interaction between Tyrion and Tywin Lannister. Peter Dinklage and Charles Dance have some great chemistry together even when the chemistry involves mutual loathing in their two characters and seeing the two argue while the leitmotif of “Rains of Castamere” is played slowly in the background is breathtaking (another example of snowballing I’m noticing is Charles Dance’s version of Tywin Lannister comes off as noticeably smarter than the character in the book and I’m having trouble believing in him performing the blinding acts of hubris that he does in the book.
But anyway based on what I’ve seen so far it looks like it’s going to be a good one and I can’t wait to see what they do with the material next.
Well I did another day at Sakura-Con. I can’t say I got quite as many good pictures this time around. While there were plenty of people in costume there weren’t many of the “professional” cosplayers so there wasn’t that many good poses for me to work with. The best (at least from my perspective were a group of musicians playing music from video games and My Little Pony.
Still it was fun to watch and a useful exercise.
I must admit I haven’t done Sakura-Con for a while. I used to, in fact I was the official photographer for the first three years back when it was still called Baka-con. I’d spend the whole weekend there and when I say that I mean the WHOLE weekend doing a totally masochistic marathon mastering the art of sleeping in film rooms (Sit near the projector that way security is less likely to notice things provided you sit up straight and change rooms frequently) But gradually I stopped.
There were several reasons the fact that they started having it on the same weekend as Norwescon and with Youtube and anime going mainstream. I no longer was dependent on it for discovering all of those hard to find titles. On a more embarrassing level all of the cosplayers started triggering an instant midlife crisis for me. While I’m not so pathetic as to go to a con to find love at the same time realizing that you’re probably going to have to ask anyone you talk to for ID begins to get to you after a while. After a while I’d find that the only reason I’d really want to go was to look for hard to find art books in the dealer room and I refuse to pay for the privilege of shopping.
However it was a nice day and it occurred to me it was a nice day and I could probably zip downtown and do a little bit of people watching and maybe get in some extreme sketching in. If it didn’t work out there’s lots of other things to do on a nice day in downtown Seattle. Turned it worked out pretty well there were lots of cosplayers hanging out in the Freeway Park behind the convention center and I was able to get at least three pages in. 
Well as everyone else is counting the hours til Sunday’s premier of season 3 of Game of Thrones this Sunday I have my own treat I finally got the audiobook for A Feast For Crows from the Library.
It took me a little while for me to get into Game of Thrones… (Yes I know the actual name is A Song of Ice and Fire but thanks to HBO it will always be Game of Thrones) Most of this can be blamed on me doing most of my recreational reading these days through audiobooks and unfortunately some books lend themselves to this format then others. The main reason for me is that in a regular book you can increase the speed of your reading. You can linger on the interesting bits and more importantly you can gloss through the bad stuff as quickly as possible (and let’s be honest with ourselves, Game of Thrones has lots of bad stuff.) You can’t do this with an audiobook (well you can but it’s not precise and unless you have the actual times written down you miss more than the bit you want to miss) Therefore everything occurs at the same pace which means you have to go through things like the fate of Ned Stark and the Red Wedding at the the same excruciating pace as all of the stuff you enjoy. Because of this I lost interest after the third hour of the recording.
However for the most part I knew my initial disinterest had nothing to do with the quality of the material and most of my friends told me I should give it a second chance and I did… after I watched the first season on HBO.
Now I’m totally geeking out over it.
It’s funny, normally I’m one of those really annoying critics who insists on being familiar with the original material before he watches an adaptation so that he can judge it as an adaptation as well as a work in its own right. I’m finding reading the book after I watched the show I’m finding it fascinating to see all of the choices and sacrifices the creators made in order to turn all of this text into a show that works.
But back to the audiobook.
One thing I’m enjoying is that for all practical purposes Roy Dotrice‘s reading counts as a different and separate performance from the HBO production. As an example let’s compare his Tyrion Lannister with Peter Dinklage‘s… Dinklage (and make no mistake this is one of my favorite performances in the whole show) play’s Tyrion as bent but definitely not broken, pretty much the embodiment of the following quote.
When he opened the door, the light from within threw his shadow clear across the yard, and for just a moment Tyrion Lannister stood tall as a king.”
Dotrice reads Tyrion with a sarcastic high pitched voice in what I’m pretty sure is a Welsh accent. You can almost imagine him with a permanent sneer. This is an angry little man whose terrible life has left him bitter with the discomfort he causes in other people one of his main sources of satisfaction.
The rest of his interpretations on the rest of the cast are equally different and fascinating.
So since I don’t get HBO and I’m still waiting to get my copy of the second season I have the fun of finding out what happens next in the book.
Well as I mentioned earlier this week. The Seattle Art Museum was packed to the gills this Sunday so I didn’t really get into my zone at all as far as the sketching was concerned and so I just ended up doing a whole lot of people watching. The only pictures I finished the day with that were not complete disasters were these three from the museum’s African Mask.
The first is from the a Lipiko mask of the Makonde people. The middle one is Hemba and the Last is Congolese Luba.
