It's hard to write about art when you aren't doing much of it lately (although I have some ideas for crafty stuff to put on Etsy).
I've spent the last two weeks driving back and forth from Portland. I have secured a nice apartment in a nice area and I am super excited to move. I like the city better every time I go there. Every single person I've told, (with one exception) has been excited for me and exclaimed over how much they like the city. I've spent the last six years Seattle or Tacoma (which is like Seattle but with self-worth issues). There's lots of stuff that I like about Seattle, and I've always said that it's a nice place to visit...but I wouldn't want to live here.
Portland just seems like a friendly and pleasant place. Plus it has Powell's. And a volcano inside the city limits. A volcano. There's a vet hospital and/or pet store on every corner where there isn't a park, and they have public transportation. I mean, Seattle has buses, and I'm from a place with no public transportation besides the one little bus that drives students and the elderly the 45 miles into town so they can go grocery shopping, so Seattle's public transportation seemed good enough to me. But other people from other cities seem to constantly complain about it, so I'm excited to see how much difference it makes.
The only thing I'm not looking forward to is the actual moving. I need to throw a lot of stuff away, and send more to the Goodwill, and maybe sell some stuff on Craigslist. My really broken laptop that I've dragged around for the last three years or so, I decided to send to cashforlaptops.com. They recycle/properly dispose of them, which I was never sure how to do, so even if I don't actually get cash back, it'll be out of my hands and in the hands of someone hopefully competant. I'll let ya'll know how it works out.
And speaking of just random stuff, I just started playing PMOG! It's a Passively Multi-Player Online Game, where the whole of the internet is your game world, and you play by surfing the way you normally do. I've been enjoying it.
I've finally got a picture of my cardboard dragon in progress, but my internet lately seems to be thrashing in its death throws (I hope it's the internet and not my computer...) and uploading it is currently an impossibility. Next time. I should finish it before I move, I can really justify hauling all that cardboard that far...
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Friday, February 6, 2009
Crazy Kinda Poetry
Yesterday my girlfriend and I went to see Lucy's Legacy, the current main exhibit at PacSci. It was really, really cool. The first half covered the history of Ethiopia which was pretty cool in its own right, 3.8 million year old bones found there not withstanding.
The second half was about fossils, and how they're dated, and how they could tell that Lucy was a biped based on the position of the skull in relation to the base of the spine. There was a cool CGI animation of the skeletons of a chimp, a human, and Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis), and how they (probably) walk. There were cool skulls from various species of bipedal primates, some of whom went on to evolve into us, some of whom did not.
The actual Lucy was, well... a box of dimly lit bones. But the exhibit did a fantastic job of making you feel the import of this discovery. I got teary. There was also a really cool life size sculpture of Lucy. There was an exhibit past the gift shop (where I manfully did not buy the "I Love Lucy" t-shirt, no matter how awesome I thought it was) all about the sculptor and the work he's done around the world for various history museums and things and that was pretty cool too.
Anyway. After the exhibit we went to the ballet (Jewels, for people who know stuff about ballet). The GF is a ballerina and she was excited that this one had no plot, just choreography. She said when she listens to music she imagines the choreography in her head, so this would be simple since she wouldn't have to make it up herself.
I had never been to a ballet before. Well, ok, I went to the ballet version of Edward Scissorhands at the 5th last year, but I'm not sure that counts. I shall be honest. This was not the best ballet ever. I enjoyed it, there were some cool parts, but the music was too quiet. You have a stage full of people floating around basically doing insane things and making it look ridiculously easy, but when you can hear each "thud!" when they land it ruins the illusion somewhat.
In the first movement though, they were wearing the style of costume that all of Degas' ballerinas had, and watching them I itched for my sketch pad. No wonder he spent so much time studying them. And of course being a genius and a bastard he was able to capture all the perfect floaty movements they made. I am now doubly resolved to get permission to sit in and draw at the GF's dance class.
But the really nice part of the evening was the walk back to parking. We discussed the ballet, and I decided that though the ballet was not as awesome as the exhibit (and perhaps a bit of a let down to the GF) that there was a beautiful symmetry to all of it. We started with the very roots of humanity. Walking upright freed our arms and fingers from bearing loads, allowed them to become more delicate and dextrous, and to use tools. It freed up our diaphrams so that we could develope speech, and song. And then to close the evening we rejoiced in a pure expression of all those qualities and abilities that are unique to our species.
Lucy's legacy indeed.
The second half was about fossils, and how they're dated, and how they could tell that Lucy was a biped based on the position of the skull in relation to the base of the spine. There was a cool CGI animation of the skeletons of a chimp, a human, and Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis), and how they (probably) walk. There were cool skulls from various species of bipedal primates, some of whom went on to evolve into us, some of whom did not.
The actual Lucy was, well... a box of dimly lit bones. But the exhibit did a fantastic job of making you feel the import of this discovery. I got teary. There was also a really cool life size sculpture of Lucy. There was an exhibit past the gift shop (where I manfully did not buy the "I Love Lucy" t-shirt, no matter how awesome I thought it was) all about the sculptor and the work he's done around the world for various history museums and things and that was pretty cool too.
Anyway. After the exhibit we went to the ballet (Jewels, for people who know stuff about ballet). The GF is a ballerina and she was excited that this one had no plot, just choreography. She said when she listens to music she imagines the choreography in her head, so this would be simple since she wouldn't have to make it up herself.
I had never been to a ballet before. Well, ok, I went to the ballet version of Edward Scissorhands at the 5th last year, but I'm not sure that counts. I shall be honest. This was not the best ballet ever. I enjoyed it, there were some cool parts, but the music was too quiet. You have a stage full of people floating around basically doing insane things and making it look ridiculously easy, but when you can hear each "thud!" when they land it ruins the illusion somewhat.
In the first movement though, they were wearing the style of costume that all of Degas' ballerinas had, and watching them I itched for my sketch pad. No wonder he spent so much time studying them. And of course being a genius and a bastard he was able to capture all the perfect floaty movements they made. I am now doubly resolved to get permission to sit in and draw at the GF's dance class.
But the really nice part of the evening was the walk back to parking. We discussed the ballet, and I decided that though the ballet was not as awesome as the exhibit (and perhaps a bit of a let down to the GF) that there was a beautiful symmetry to all of it. We started with the very roots of humanity. Walking upright freed our arms and fingers from bearing loads, allowed them to become more delicate and dextrous, and to use tools. It freed up our diaphrams so that we could develope speech, and song. And then to close the evening we rejoiced in a pure expression of all those qualities and abilities that are unique to our species.
Lucy's legacy indeed.
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