A very happy birthday to two of my favorite historical figures!
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Well I had a fun Sunday afternoon at a model session at my favorite comic book shop, The Dreaming, featuring the cosplay modeling superstars, the Super Sirens! I really have to attend more model sessions since they always do me a world of good. Sure I get good workouts from the whole drawing from life thing be it at art museums or the great out doors but a series of five minute poses back to back are like doing a hundred pushups.
It wasn’t quite as long as I would have liked. I think I was barely getting warmed up when the final pose came and went but the opportunity to draw a quartet of cuties dressed as the Endless cannot be passed up!
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Today’s Sketch is a detail from Nicolas Poussin‘s Venus & Ares from the Boston Museum of Fine Art.
Poussin was one of the artists that introduced me to Greek Mythology. My mother was a docent at the National Gallery and she would walk me and my sister through the gallery showing us how to recognize the deities by their symbols and tell us all of the dieties by their symbols and telling us all of the stories that these paintings were illustrating. I was hooked for life.
Of course now that I am very familiar with the original material a lot of this stuff comes off as just a little over the top and tacky… but in a good way.
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As I work on tomorrow’s strip I am enjoying my Yoko Kanno channel on Pandora. For the most part I like Pandora. I fancy myself having fairly eclectic tastes in music, so while I can be an annoying snob about classical music, I also consider Metallica tame when I have my metalhead hat on. Because of this, there’s nothing I like better than being introduced to a new sound and on this alone Pandora has introduced me to numerous new musicians who I enjoy very much.
Unfortunately it is not a perfect system. While Pandora selects songs that are “like” the artist you are listening to they are not necessarily like the song you are listening to. This can be very frustrating when I am putting a new playlist together. For example I am always looking for new material for my “Tuesday Rhapsody” segment. I get most of my material going through library archives, but I’d like to find much newer modern material and I know that not all Rhapsodies have the word “Rhapsody” in their title. You would think that Pandora would be the perfect tool for this hunt. Regrettably I’ve found that this is mostly not the case.
Let me put it this way… When I create a channel around “Bohemian Rhapsody” what I did not ask Pandora for is a channel based around the “Best of Queen” For some reason it doesn’t listen.
I have to say one of the things that really scratches my blackboard are Young Earth Creationists. It’s not just that their dogma driven need to institutionalize stupidity is an attack on American exceptionalism it’s that listening to them go on takes all of the fun out of being interested in comparative religion 
and mythology. To make matters worse there is a complete lack of imagination behind their arguments that makes them fall back on scripture like a broken record thinking that if they only say their stale old talking points loud enough people might actually start taking them seriously. To make matters worse you get the feeling they haven’t really looked at their arguments very well. Take their favorite bit of proof of dinosaurs in the bible, the description of Behemoth in Job 40: 15 to 80
Behold now the behemoth that I have made with you; he eats grass like cattle.
Behold now his strength is in his loins and his power is in the navel of his belly.
His tail sways like a cedar; the sinews of his thighs are knit together.
His limbs are as strong as copper, his bones as a load of iron.
Yeah, I suppose that could be considered a good description of a sauropod but here’s the thing… It’s an even better description of a hippopotamus. And since the writer of Job very likely knew what a hippopotamus was (for all I know may have traveled to Egypt and actually seen one) well… I’ll take Occam’s Razor for 500, Alex.
Today’s Rhapsody Comes to us from Composer and violist Rebecca Clarke (no specific title given) for Piano and Cello. It has a nice haunting quality to it that I quite like.
http://youtu.be/AcYfjJt86Kw
http://youtu.be/fE2RHXdZRsQ
http://youtu.be/r4W-VzBd2DA
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