Day Dreams

Whenever I'm on a long car trip and not the one driving I have the same fantasy. I imagine a horse running at breakneck speed alongside the car.

Not right alongside, further off in the distance, but it keeps pace with us. Leaping fences and creeks, weaving in between trees...

I've done it for as long as I can remember. Perhaps as a way to ease boredom. It's a bright sorrel (red, that is). Sometimes there are other horses but he's always out front. Next up behind him is a palomino paint mare, and the rest of the herd is brightly colored with paints and appys and buckskins all manes and tails flying.

I had trouble for a while just recently. My interest and background in animation has had me analyzing the way things move. The animators in Jurassic Park used cheats to make the T-Rex move at 25 mph because it didn't look right. The same with my horse that used to run 60+ mph easily. Now he still runs, but pushed back in the distance in a kind of never ending cinematic pan.

I will share something that very few people get to see. When I was small, about ten, I drew a mare, bright red with a black mane and tail. Her head was too small, and her legs had too many joints, but I thought it was the best drawing I had ever done. I'm still rather proud of her actually. I named her Hurricane Janet, and she formed the foundation for a new breed of racehorses. I called them "Superior Breds," a weak pun on thoroughbred. The first few were pretty thoroughbredy, but I brought in Appaloosas and paints to create a super flashy brightly colored horse. Then I decided began bringing in draft horses to give them feathering and bulk. I kept track of their bloodlines and made crosses back and forth to make sure that the breed stayed pure to itself but could still continue to improve.

I have two notebooks full of hundreds of drawings that (in general) get progressively better. Each one is labeled with its name, gender, and parentage. I kept the thing up for years, well into college. I haven't added to it for a couple years now, but that doesn't mean I'm done.

Mostly I'm glad that I've kept them all. Some of the drawings are pretty awful, and there are a couple that I decided were bad enough that they should be removed from the gene pool, and this is noted on their pages, but I never got rid of a single drawing. I don't have very much of my early artwork, but I'm glad I've held on to my horses.

All Together Now

I have been a neglectful blogger this past month. It's shameful. But things have been rather crazy.

Basically, my time limit for finding a job in Portland ran out. I don't even really feel bad about it because I tried really hard, and I've heard that there are plenty of other people there in the same boat. There just aren't any jobs in Portland right now. Last I heard, Oregon had the second worst unemployment rate in the country. So, not my fault.

So that precipitated a mad scramble to move before my savings ran out entirely. I didn't want to leave my roommate high and dry. Now I'm fixing up a little house in Walla Walla, home of world famous sweet onions, and Bugs Bunny. Also my hometown.

I have very mixed feelings about moving back here. But it does have a good job market (or as good as any job market currently) and I'll have my own house with its own washer and dryer and yard and everything. It's got a great kitchen.

Or it will once I'm finished cleaning and painting. The lady who lived there for the last two decades was a paranoid chain smoker. She never left the house and was terrified of anyone seeing in so she nailed bars (and junk) across all the windows. She also had two dogs that she never let outside. To say that it was gross in there would be the understatement of the year. We scrubbed the walls and ripped up the floors and painted everything with Killz to prevent the stains and smells from coming back. I just finished painting the living room yesterday and I only have the trim in the bedroom, and that'll be half the house done.

I need to paint in the kitchen and figure out what to do with the cupboards. They are a beautiful dark wood, but they still need to be scrubbed thoroughly. We've doen a few tests and the cleaning products seem to be taking off the finish as well. Plus the dogs scratched up some of the bottom ones. I think the wood is beautiful, but painting them would be a lot easier than refinishing them. On the other hand since the electrics and heating system need more work than we anticipated, I'll have plenty of time to work on everything, so I've got time for more complicated projects.

The bathroom is also ripped apart and needs more ripping frankly. The tub surround is completely rotten. Fortunately most of the subflooring is in good shape. I was afraid we'd have to replace some that looked particularly pet stained, but since we pulled out the carpet the urine smells have vanished.

I've painted the living room a creamy pale orange color and the trim is a darker orange called "Tangerine Dream." My grandmother hates the color scheme, but I like it a lot. I'm excited to pull down all the painter's tape in the living room tomorrow. The kitchen will be a pale leaf green with turquoise trim. I think it will set off the dark cabinets nicely. Assuming they stay dark that is. If I paint them they may end up a honey yellow which I think will lighten up the kitchen a lot. It's very dark right now with the dark cabinets and a huge tree that is pretty but blocks any light from getting in.

It's a tiny little house, with just the three rooms (plus bathroom) but it's a good size for me. It has a little yard that is about as gross as the house was, but we'll get it fixed up too. There's also a little garage for my car and another bigger garage that is full of crap right now, but could be emptied out and used as studio space. That would be beyond awesome.

I've got a job interview tomorrow and possibly another one next week. So all in all, things are looking up. I will be glad not to have a roommate anymore and my house is in a nice little neighborhood, that also in the dead center of town so nothing is far away. It's also a short walk from the park and just down the block from my grandmother (not the one who hates the paint). So all in all, things are looking up.

The Liar

I need to get to bed as it's late and I have work to do tomorrow (more on this later). I just wanted to get a quick note down about my immediate impressions having just finished The Liar by Stephen Fry.

I've taken multiple literature classes and had discussions about unreliable narrators. The book is called The Liar, and it is (not surprisingly) about a chronic Liar. Still, finding out towards the end that you've been lied to is a surprise and a bit of a knife twist in the gut. Because it was all so engaging, so good, you want it all to have been true. And of course if some of it is a lie, then all of it might be a lie, and that would be so depressing. It would make our interesting, witty hero into someone boring. I would rather have the lie.

I haven't finished a book and felt the desire to immediately go back and reread it for a long time. But with this novel I feel like I need to go back at once and scrutinize because there are multiple unreliable narrators in this story and I want to rifle through the layers and see if I can determine what is credible and what is not. How much of this story was a lie?

Of course it's fiction. So all of it was a lie. Having read Stephen Fry's autobiography Moab is My Washpot, I know that bits of it are taken from his life, but not much of it. The international espionage was not autobiographical.

I just don't know. I am baffled. I'm not even sure if I find the ending satisfactory or not. I can't tell if it was really clever, or just confusingly muddled. It's a first novel, so perhaps it's a little of both. It was good though. I do know that I like it.

Up in 3D

Not having a job is really stressful. And it gets increasingly stressful the longer it goes on. 

So last Thursday I took a de-stress day with some birthday money I got from my grandparents. Got a haircut, saw a movie. 

The film was Up, Pixar's latest offering. It was quirky and charming and sweet, and blah blah blah. 

I love Pixar and everything they do, don't get me wrong, but I didn't love this film. I mean, I really enjoyed it, and I'd watch it again. But every other Pixar film has wowed me somehow, even Cars. I always come out of the theater blown away by what they've managed to achieve. And this time, I guess it was just stuff that I already knew they were capable of. I do love the storybook world of the film, where absurdities are just taken for granted but even that wasn't really breaking new ground. 

The thing I enjoyed most was the 3D. I love stuff in 3D because I'm a dork like that. But until recently, this film in fact, I have never seen it used in a way that ad

ded anything to the movie. It's always three effects that shoot stuff towards your face in a way that is more distracting than anything, and nothing else because you wouldn't want all the people watching in 2D to miss out on anything. But the 3D in Up wasn't distracting, it was used elegantly (the way Pixar does everything) to enhance the world of the film. 

I'm especially excited because there were previews for a Disney movie in 3D (and a couple others) as well. In the previews before the previews we saw a 'making of" featurette about the movie (about Guinea pig spies) and it looked pretty lame (at least to anyone outside its target demographic). But when we got to the actual previews and saw the thing in 3D it actually looked pretty cool.

I've always ranted that 3D could be a great tool if people would just start using it, instead of making it into a gimmick. And now it looks like they're starting to, which makes me kind of excited. 

Calzone!

If you haven't checked out the blog  BrokeAss Gourmet, you really really need to. I use the site on a semi-daily basis for recipes or just ideas. They have this amazing pizza dough recipe that you can use a million ways. 

Thus far I've made pizza, bagels and donuts with it, and I intend to use it to make an approximation of these puff pastries that my mother used to make. 

But by far the best use I've put this stuff to is the calzone. I did not take a picture of my beautiful and delicious calzone, so I have stuck up the first calzone that turned up in a google image search. This one appears to be pepperoni. I'm sure it's lovely. 

Mine was spinach and mushroom. I had too much spinach left over from another thing I made, and so I shredded it with a knife and piled it with some chopped crimini mushrooms on one half of a disk of pizza dough. I threw in some minced garlic and some chopped onions and some basil (left over from making pesto), then piled on mozzarella and parmesan cheese. I was afraid that I had piled it too high and the dough wouldn't stretch enough to close it up, but it did. I brushed on some olive oil and sprinkled some sea salt and ten minutes later I had a really really good calzone. The bread cooked faster than I thought it would and I was afraid the insides would be under done, but it was perfect. 

The article at BrokeAss suggests you always have a ball of this super easy pizza dough kicking around your fridge, and I am inclined to agree. Especially since all it takes is some dough and some cheese to turn a bunch of leftovers into something elegant and delicious.

Damned Biological Accuracy

You don't have to know me very well to know that I love dinosaurs. I loved Land Before Time, I loved Jurassic Park, I didn't love Dinosaurs, but c'mon. It was terrible. I still thought it was pretty though.

One of my favorite little doodles is a raptor guy I made up after I had a nightmare (well anxiety dream, not so much a nightmare) about being stranded in the desert outside Las Vegas and being chased by raptors. In my dream they were extinct everywhere except right outside Las Vegas and when I woke up I wasn't sure if they still existed or not. It was a unsettling at the time. Anyway, this guy is the result.

Try as I might, for some reason I'm having formatting issues with him and his colors will not come out right. But this is the basic guy. Body of a turkey, hooked claw, lots of fangs. Adorable mostly. Here's his film debut...





This piece was my first experiment with soudn effects in my intro to 2D animation class. I like the stick figure version of this guy. So, everything was great. All was well with the world. Until I saw this episode of Nova. The episode surrounds the discovery of the four winged dinosaur.


Now the awesome thing about this guy is he pretty much proves (though there are still doubters, see the episode) that birds descended from dinosaurs. The awesome(est) thing about this is that it indicates that dinosaurs, at least of the carnivorous two legged variety, had feathers. Which is really cool. The downside is that it means every portrayal of raptors in the media from Jurassic Park on down to my little guy, is wrong. They should have feathers. Which means I need to do a total character redesign. Well, not total. The shape is the same, but instead of buttery leather skin or rough scales, he needs downy mostly useless chicken feathers.

So now I am toying with ways to convey this killer flamingo but still retain a little of that reptilian dignity. It's pretty hard.

But I'm working on it.

Politics; Old and New

I just watched 1776 a few days ago. For those of you unfamiliar with it, it is a musical about the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It is really good, despite the fact that most of the musical numbers are tedious (the only really good ones are the one about how John Adams is obnoxious and disliked, and the first one between John and Abigail Adams). 

What I like about it is the way that it portrays the characters who made up the Continental Congress. Names we've heard of and sometimes know anecdotes about but that mostly remain shrouded in a dull textbook fog. I think (hope) everybody knows that Benjamin Franklin was a hell of a character, but what does anybody know about John Hancock except that he had a large signature? And the thing seems to be sunnily patriotic, just as you'd expect. 

Thomas Jefferson, for instance, is portrayed as a distraught lover pining for his bride. And while that's entirely believable, you can't help but think of Sally Hemmings, the slave with whom Jefferson had six children.

But the film gets to that. Because of course it would be impossible to skirt around the issue of slavery in a discussion of the founding of our nation. The turning point of the film comes when the issue is forced by the southern representatives. Jefferson included a passage in the Declaration that declared that slavery was a violation of the inalienable rights of man. Adams, Franklin, and Jefferson (perpetually tortured by the fact that he owned slaves while believing that it was a reprehensible practice that should be outlawed) were staunch abolitionists, but were forced to concede on the issue of slavery because otherwise the South would never have agreed to the revolution.

As the film ends you are infused with a patriotic pride at the high ideals of our founding fathers, and the simultaneous awareness that the issue of slavery will come to a head only a few decades later and split the country in a bloody civil war. And you sort of wish that those high ideals could have been a little higher, that we hadn't made that first concession, especially in the name of freedom.

Over the past couple weeks more and more evidence has been coming to light about the U.S. use of torture on Guantanamo Bay detainees. Remember months ago when it there was a debate about whether or not waterboarding even "counted" as torture? Then debates about whether or not torture could be "legal," Geneva Conventions not withstanding.

Most recently has been the position (usually voiced by somebody on Fox News in a spooky voice) that, "If Your Family was In Danger and you had A Scary Forgiener with Information about the next 9/11 wouldn't you be morally obliged to torture that guy?" The answer is no. Torture, like slavery, is wrong. Period. No matter what the extenuating circumstances. Plus now we have people testifying that first of all torture doesn't really work, that conventional non-illegal interrogation techniques work a hell of a lot faster, and most recently, that people were being tortured (after it had become clear that there was no link between Iraq and 9/11) for information that would tie al Qaeda to Iraq, rather than (as has been claimed) for information about other imminent terrorist attacks. And our Brave New White House, the one that has inspired so much hope and optimism, seems to be adopting the stance that we just shouldn't think about it. "Look to the future," not the skeletons in our national closet, even the ones so fresh they're still kicking.

Simultaneously, there are stories about mistreatment of our soldiers in Iraq by the companies that the government is paying to take care of them. Rachel Maddow has reported two stories recently that I found deeply disturbing. One was about servicemen being electrocuted by their tap water, because of some incredibly shoddy electrical work. The other was about servicemen (in the desert mind you) not being rationed enough water. The water they had was over treated with chemicals and made them nauseous. When they drank local water they got dysentery, and when they appealed to their superiors they were instructed to get it from the supplier, and were forced to steal it.

This is outrageous and disgusting on so many levels. I'm sick of it. And I know lots of people are sick of it. But we can't just shut our eyes and hope this goes away. We have to own this, as a nation. This war, the treatment of our prisoners, the treatment of our own soldiers, is a new national scar. We can ignore this, we can pretend that it didn't happen, but we'll be betraying the core principles on which this nation was founded. We're still struggling with the wounds left by the civil war, the repercussions of that very first betrayal of principle, before the ink was even dry. 

We're supposed to be better than this. We're supposed to be a shining beacon of truth and justice and freedom. We screwed that up, and if we're ever want to represent that again (even just to ourselves) instead of towering hypocrisy, we have to admit our own fallibility,  and we have to do what we can to make sure this never happens again.

I don't know yet quite what this means for me personally. I expressed myself through my ballot last November, and I'm doing it again now. I could buy a bumper sticker, or protest on street corners in my safe and liberal city and be reasonably sure that most everyone who saw me would agree with me and that those that didn't would ignore me, just like I do when I see protestors or bumper stickers. The only thing else I can think of is to donate money, because that's what talks. But I don't have any. So I don't know what else to do besides point these things out. There are lots of other people, more articulate and with louder voices, but my hope is that every voice helps. That if we keep shouting, "We are here! We are here! We are here!" that something will get through.