I make a point of keeping my politics to myself in public, but nonetheless I watched last night’s debate. Since it was safer than participating in any drinking games, I spent quite a bit of my time sketching.
Along with the practice, I’ve found they do amazing things helping me focus on the debate themselves. To the point I can almost consider this journalism, after a fashion, or at least very good notes. (the last time I did this I didn’t need The Stranger’s cheatsheet for any of the candidates for city council.)
I had a slow start of the week on Monday. So I did what I frequently do when facing creative block, go to the zoo and draw gorillas! Drawing Gorillas has been a bit of a mixed bag since November. With the arrival of newborn Yola, the Gorilla enclosure has been the biggest draw in the zoo. If you’re going to sketch it is difficult to get any line of site at all.
Fortunately I came at a quiet point and was able to get a nice spot at the corner that gave me lots of vantages. Since I lucked out and came at feeding time. It was an amusing sight watching Leo, the silverback of the group looking up worshipfully as the bags of vegetables and flowers were about to be tossed down to them.
Later I also went and sketched the Orangutans. I had a revelation that their heads are much easier to draw if you imagine them as two balls stacked on too of each other like an uneven peanut. Despite this I don’t really have anything good to show off for them today. For people who’s primary skill seems to be impersonating orange shag throw rugs they sure move around a lot.
For this week I decided to look into films about the cutthroat industry of fashion.
The first on my list, The Devil Wears Prada tells a predictable fable about sacrificing everything that matters to you for the sake of a career. Anne Hathaway plays Andy, our token innocent. Who scores what everyone says is a dream job working for the the great and ruthless editor of world famous fashion magazine, that she has never heard of, Miranda Priestly, played by Meryl Streep. Andy see’s this as a stepping stone for a career in journalism and all she has to do is stay on for a year. Easy, right?
I don’t think I was really the target audience for this because I was never really got into it. But the visuals are interesting, especially the recurring montage sequences that I think do a better job commenting on the scenario than the actual story.
Also Meryl Sreep is great as Miranda who is simultaneously brilliant at her job and the eratic boss from hell.
The next on my list is the musical Funny Face starring Fred Astaire, Audrey Hepburn and Kay Thompson (of Eloise fame). It’s essentially a Cinderella story about a bookstore clerk with a “funny face”, played by Hepburn, who’s discovered (nearly shanghaied) by a fashion photographer, played by Astaire. This leads to a trip to Paris, beautiful clothes courtesy of Edith Head, song and dance, and beatniks.
This film is an adorable example of form over substance, the design and look of it is gorgeous with a very theatrical quality to it. Kay Thompson steals the show as the editor of the fashion magazine, ironically coming off as a more comical version of Streep’s character (though Thompson did it first.) As for the rest of the rest of the film… meh.
Sure Fred Astaire is up to form, and Audrey Hepburn is adorable, most of the film and the plot seem to only be there to hold the musical numbers together, and even though Astaire’s choreography is fantastic the actual music is only average, (though that might just be me having ridiculously high standards knowing it’s a sample of George Gershwin’s tragically short Hollywood career)
This weeks rhapsody is courtesy of Fritz Kreisler and his Viennese Rhapsodic Fantasietta performed by Nai-Yuan Hu on the violin and Claude Cymerman on the piano.
One of my ongoing projects that shall never be completed is the maintenance of my Visual Reference Folder. Because tagging pictures takes forever I generally create an endless variety of folders with as accurate and specific labels I can think of. Very frequently doing this reveals a lot of the shortcomings of the english language to me. Case in point, the biggest folder in my visual references is the pose folder where I try to have a reference of just about anything a human being is capable of doing (as I said this is an endless project) and frequently I find myself frustrated by the limitations of what to call these things.
Currently my pet peeve is the verb “sitting” mainly because it’s an act I have been having happen quite a bit in the strip and have the hardest time’s finding a reference for. Now you will say what are you talking about? There’s tons of pictures of people sitting!
Yes, I reply. But those are pictures of people sitting, as in the act of resting their buttocks, as their center of gravity, either on the ground or piece of furniture specifically for this purpose. What I was looking for are references of people slowly lowering their buttocks down onto the ground or that piece of furniture to achieve the former.
Try explaining the difference in a Google image search. It’s nitpicking I know but I still say their should be two separate words for two separate verbs.
I’m afraid I kind of botched this one. The title of my planned them was “Don Quixote will kill us all” The idea being film attempts at Don Quixote being complete disasters for the creators. Unfortunately that particular bit of karma seemed to rub off on me causing a mix up that left me not getting my center piece of this exercise, Lost in La Mancha, the tale of Terry Gilliam’s disastrous attempt.
Fortunately I did get the second film on my list, Orson Welles unfinished, Don Quixote.
This was an interesting mostly done at Welles’ level of skill. But otherwise lacking. For whatever reason be it experiment or technical difficulties, a lot of the images were extremely high contrast frequently obscuring peoples faces in other things… Frequently things seemed to be going wrong with the texture, leaving me to wonder if there was anything wrong with the film development.
The film itself was weird. For the most part it reminded me of The Gospel According to St Matthew where, for better of the worse, a lot of the original text sounds a lot different when spoken out loud.
The main conceit of this film is that Don Quixote and Sancho are existing in the modern spain as confused anachronisms. This mostly works with even more people thinking they’re crazy as they wander confused across the Spanish landscape.
The second half of the film seems to lose interest on Don Quixote himself and focuses on Sancho himself wandering though a town festival looking for his master all around the film of Don Quixote is being filmed in the background with Welles as a self referential character.
All in all while I don’t think this would have been a masterpiece if it had been successfully completed but an interesting experiment none the less.
