Crafts & Politics

So I got my absentee ballots a couple of days ago and thus have been gnawing down my fingernails over who I should vote for for the Democratic presidential primary. Thankfully, my mother sent me this very in depth quiz you can take to find out which candidate suits you best based on issues at Glassbooth. The results didn't surprise me terribly--of course its Dennis Kucinich, the candidate least likely to win. The candidate who runs every time just to make a point. Oh well. I found a compromise. It's John Edwards that I agree with on the most important issues, which are health care and education. I wonder if a democrat gets elected they'll take care of health care right away so I won't have to pay for health insurance when I leave school. Anyway, it's a cool quiz and I guess that as an Illinois resident it doesn't matter too much who I vote for because Obama is sure to take the state he's senator to and Illinois is sure to go blue in the overall election because of Chicago. Thanks for the link, mom!

Also, here are some pics of the table I painted and decoupaged for my parents for Christmas. It was a week late because the paper on top was all warped and bubbly for a long time but it settled down and turned out pretty well I think. The watercolor painting took too long to do normally, but I think I'm going to get these tables ($9.00 at Target) paint them and bang them up (the funnest part! Finally an excuse to hit something with a hatchet!) and decoupage some pretty paper on top and sell them on Etsy.




Listening to: Fox Confessor Brings the Flood--Neko Case

Maine and RISD

Well, school's started up again but whatever about that. I'm making a book this semester, so we'll see how that goes. Anyway, the last seven days of my break were occupied with going to the beautiful state of Maine to visit my auntie Caroline and Tish and their four dogs (Rosie, Sky, Strider, Molly) and their two cats (Little Bit, Sandy Bit). My mother has always claimed these animals as my cousins in lieu of human cousins. Anyway, we first stopped off in Providence, Rhode Island to check out Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). There was a graduate studies lecture at 8:45 that I went to that was somewhat informative but also ridiculously boring so I skipped out a little early and we explored the campus on our own. The area of Providence it's in is actually pretty cool, it reminded me of a smaller, more compact Chicago. They have a trolley system and there are hills (that was a little San Fran, actually) and it's right next to Brown University which is, you know, all ivy league and such. There are nice little houses with apartments right on campus, and best of all? Their logo is pretty kickass.
Imagine that on sweatshirts and mugs in pretty colors. The plus side of an all art school is that the artist is on the forefront of the school's thoughts. We don't get the Mad Max building with bats and ceiling tiles falling all over the place and a wireless plan never. We get nice big facilities that are very secure and pretty. There is also a printmaking MAJOR which I'm psyched about because you KNOW that means their printing lab is stocked. I might even get to *gasp* take another class and fully figure out photo emulsion silk screening. They also have this year long program which teaches you how to be a better teacher without actually getting a teaching degree, which I would take advantage of because one way I can make good money before I become published and wildly successful is by being a professor. It's not my ultimate goal, but if I do it I want to help kids out in the best way I can and be the best I can be. There's nothing worse than a shitty teacher. I'm pretty generally stoked about it, actually. The only major downside is a price tag of $32,000 a year. I'm not planning on going for another five years at least, so I think I'll apply a year ahead of time so I can find out what sort of scholarship and assistanships a poor white girl like me can expect. I'm not getting $60,000 dollars in debt, that's for sure.
Anyway, I didn't take many pictures, but here is the reason I didn't want to leave Providence until after January:

Who can resist Liza?? Someday I will put on a musical of Caberet at Ol' Gaffers and I will get Liza Minelli to play the part of Sally Bowles if it's the last thing I do. I don't care if she's got vertigo and she's 90.

The rest of Maine was great. I always love visiting Auntie Caroline and Tish. We hung out with the dogs, went to the L.L. Bean headquarters in Freeport that's open 24 hours a day in case you need a flannel shirt at three in the morning, and Auntie Caroline and I went to see Atonement which was playing everywhere there even though it was playing nowhere in Illinois. I'll write up a review on it later, but it was brill. We also went to see the Andrew Wyeth exhibit in I forget where, but there was this irritating lady who followed us round and kept telling us we had to stay two feet away from the paintings even though we weren't touching them and they were under glass. The whole point of going to see artwork in person is so you can look at the details, lady! That was cool, though, he had some really stunning watercolors that were pretty inspirational. It was funny, there was this painting that I recognized as one that had always been in the Hillside, a restaurant that my family frequented during my childhood. I had always quite liked it but only then realized that it was a Wyeth.
Andrew Wyeth, Braids, tempra on paper

His paintings work best when they are haunting and dry, dark and subdued. When you can see how he painted in some parts and not at all in others. This is why I particular like his watercolors more than his temperas. Even still, there is something about this painting. She is a Nordic woman, a little rough but full hipped and fertile. She lives in snowy lands.

Anyway, that was fun. I really like it out there. It's near the ocean (they're twenty minutes from a great rocky beach) and the landscape is so different from the midwest. There are hills and marshes and forest everywhere. It's rugged and beautiful. I talked to them and it looks like I may move out there for eight months or so and save up some money working before I travel and head to grad school. I'm training right now for a career, not a job. There is no job for me to fall into like and education student falls into teaching or a med student falls into being a doctor. I have to work my way up there and find out exactly what I want. To do that I need more school. I think I have a strange path in comparison to a lot of people who will be looking for real jobs where they have a ladder to climb instead of schilling coffee to save up for more school. I'll figure it out.

listening to: Pride and Prejudice Soundtrack--Dario Marianelli

Earliest Memories

I was looking for writing exercises to practice with while I'm between projects (I could do a rewrite of my latest, "Father Fox", but I need to think some more about what I really want the story to be about) and I came across a website called Earliest Memory where people have posted their earliest memory in a couple of sentences. For some reason my breath catches when I read these. They are succinct, raw, and very real. It also takes me back to when I wrote about my earliest memory a couple of years ago:

"A pink room (gray magenta). Panic. My little brother has fallen again. He’s small, small enough so he can’t walk, small enough so that his hair is still wispy golden white. He’s been cut on the head and they need to give him stitches. We were visiting a museum. Or a planetarium. Or an aquarium."

I wrote that slightly over two years ago. I would have been two months into my first year of college. It just shows that even though I didn't really feel it as much then, I knew that I wanted to write and I did it on my own. I tried to get into a creative writing class the next semester, but they filled up too fast. I think it was good that I didn't. There was a gradual build up over the next year and a half of me realizing exactly how much writing meant to me and that I wanted to make it part of my career. This desire is what gave me the confidence to pull through the rough patches of my first semester in narrative writing. I know what I want and I know what I have to do to get there. Constant reading, constant writing, and constant thought.

Now if only I knew exactly what I wanted out of "Father Fox".

Creeper of the Year

Creepers are everywhere, guys. Some are easy to spot: they lack any social niceties whatsoever and so get hitched with the nickname "Creepy Joe" or "Creepy Tom". The worst, however, are the ones who manage to come of as charming to the otherwise unaware. They permeate society and try to make their brand of creepiness acceptable.

And so, I award Joe Francis, the entrepreneur behind the Girls Gone Wild videos who commercials haunt my viewings of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report with Creeper of the Year. While I certainly protect his first amendment right to videotape girls with low self-esteem, he is also misogynistic, completely unstable, and most likely a rapist. It also doesn't help that he made a website for himself in order to give himself a new family friendly image. His take on the situation? "It seems that my chief sins have been 1) having way too much fun and 2) having discovered a way to make money doing it." It also features a FAQ section where he is asked questions like, "Would you consider yourself the new Hugh Hefner?"

An extremely interesting and perverse article on the matter here: "Joe Francis: 'Baby, Give Me a Kiss'" by Claire Hoffman of the LA Times.

Coming in a ridiculously close second? A blog post calling itself a parable by the name of "Just Love on Her" and its myriad of comments. *Shudders*

Horizon

They whipped down the I-88 at 80 miles per hour. The sky out the dusty window was a brilliant blue and clouds frothed over the sun down to the horizon.
“God,” Sophie said, “the sky is so beautiful. In flat places like this, the land has its own sparse beauty, but because of its simplicity the sky becomes the interest. In mountainous places the land is the interest.”
“Yeah, I miss it,” Vanessa said.
They listened to a play list Sophie had made for the five-hour journey to see Maddi. They were relaxed because at the moment Wilco was softly playing so they could still talk to each other.
“I’m not worried about being caught speeding,” Sophie said. “Because where do the cops hide? We could see them a million miles away its so flat. They hide in the middle between the two lanes. And sometimes behind bridges but not really because there isn’t often a road bit they can pull off on.”
“I’m not worried about being caught speeding because you’re the one driving,” Vanessa grinned.
Sophie scrunched up her nose and stuck out her tongue but her eyes never left the road. Vanessa took out her knitting. She only knew how to knit not to purl but she hadn’t dropped a stitch yet. It had taken Sophie an hour to teach her how to knit the night before because her fingers weren’t used to twisting and turning yarn. They had awkwardly stumbled over each pull until the coarse acrylic yarn had formed uneven ugly stitches. Now her movement wasn’t fluid, but it wasn’t confused yanks either.
“I want to make a scarf,” Vanessa said.
“Why? You’ll never use it.”
“I can use it when I visit in during Christmas.”
“True.”
Vanessa had left. Now she inhabited bleak highways littered with cars and outlet stores. In the distance were craggy blue mountains speckled with snow. Their beauty was overwhelmed by the smell of gas, smoke, and rotting lettuce. Sophie never wanted to go back there. There was too much filth. But she remembered one sunset on the Pacific that had looked like Turner painting. The sun had scattered yellow light off the ocean and there had been a hazy purple pier that felt miles away. They had been ankle deep in wet sand and for a moment the only noise was the soft rock of waves and the only smell had been salt. She hadn’t realized that she’d been holding her breath until a car alarm suddenly screamed in the distance and she had cried out in surprise. They had slumped in the sand to watch the last glow of the sun disappear over the horizon while high-pitched shrieks sounded into the night.

One of my final personal essays for Rhetoric 243. The painting above is one I just did this past summer of the Merritt Prairie for my mother of a picture she took. Putting together the writing portfolio is literally the last thing I have to do . . . at this point I'm more revising enough to get an okay grade. It'll all right if I get a B in that class because I'm pretty sure I have A's in everything else. I got my essay on Faulkner's "Barn Burning", Tin Ore Man (last punny title!) back and I got an A-. Plus the final for that class was ridiculously easy. I just hope I'm not stuck here tomorrow because of this horrid winter storm.

Weird moment last night: Vivian and I were waiting with Christine for her train when Christine called her parents because the train was really delayed. She started speaking to them in Chinese. Then, Vivian's mother called and she started speaking on her phone in Spanish. I suddenly felt extremely white. The only thing I could do if my parents called would be to speak in a British accent and say the words "loo"and "lift". Oh well. At least I know what Marmite is!

Also, I don't really speed, Mom. I swear.

listening to: Feist--1234

Almost Done

This is the holiday card I made for my mother. It was pretty simple, actually. I just traced out a design in pencil (I traced the text from the computer screen) and blocked it out with a watercolor mask (basically a waxy liquid that dries and protects the paper from watercolors when you're doing broad washes or something), did some atmospheric junk in the background, erased the mask, and voila! Simple and pretty enough to print out easily. A good card for people who like the color blue and peace.

So. I have my one final tomorrow afternoon and then I've got to revise four personal essays before too late on Saturday and then I'm done for another semester. I've still got loads of cleaning to do, but I've been sick with a horrid cold for the past couple of days and since most of my friends are too busy studying for their finals, completing papers, or leaving campus to hang out with me, I've been lolling around in bed reading and watching Miyazaki movies that I've downloaded for free from Veoh. They're all in Japanese (I prefer it to the horrid large names they usually hire to voice the Miyazaki movies in English) so that and lonely bedridden-ness have me muttering to myself in Japanese occasionally. It's a little weird and I'm looking forward to going home on Sunday and the human interaction that will follow.

Memories of the 7th Grade

Oh Robert Jordan. I stopped reading this series in the 8th grade after they made Egwene head Aes Sedai (that was the breaking point--she was severely unqualified), but I do remember the good lunchtime conversations in the 7th grade about it. It was next step up the fantasy maturity ladder after Redwall, after all. It's funny to look back on the days of my youth (youth! I'm 20!) when I read fantasy all the time. I was also really into The Mists of Avalon. I then went through a period where I only read high literature (i.e. Dostoevsky, Faulkner, Woolf, Garcia Marquez) but I have recently been looking back at the genre. I like to think that in every genre, there is some great, some mediocre, and some bad. I do still have roots in Fantasy. I love the work of Miyazaki, I read folk tales and religious mythology, I'm exploring graphic novels, and texts like Le Petit Prince hold a special place in my heart. I (obviously) also love Harry Potter, Narnia, and His Dark Materials. I think that by accepting fantasy again in my life I have matured because I am opening myself to all sorts of literature that I might have turned my nose up at before.

However, I would classify Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time as bad fantasy. It suffers from the same thing that a lot of fantasy books suffer from: lack of creativity, lack of depth, lack of character development, lack of originality. I suppose on some level it works as an escapist text, but I have trouble escaping into such a trite world where I am annoyed with all of the characters. At any rate, Robert Jordan died earlier this year and it looked like his ludicrously long fantasy series would remain unfinished. Hilariously enough, his wife Harriet decided to choose another fantasy author to finish the work in Jordan's stead. Evidently he's got notes and such compiled for what he planned for the remainder of his bloated fiction. Read the ridiculous interview with the luck author here: Memory of Light Interview.

Will I read it? Probably not as mostly all I remember from the series is that they called people "woolheads" as an insult, the main character Rand winds up in a threesome, and there was some female character (Selene? Something to do with the moon, I think) that all my friends who had read more than me convinced me was a man in drag. This totally brings me back to when I was ten and Maddi and I made little felt tunics and clay swords and shields for rodent Beanie Babies and named them after Redwall characters. Good times.

The Golden Compass

So I went to see The Golden Compass tonight. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't great either. I thought that it was generally quite well cast, but that when writing the screenplay the screenwriters forgot something fairly important: the book is third person close to Lyra the whole time. The first one, anyway. The second book introduces Will, but we really aren't there yet so never mind. Anyway, the scenes without Lyra, which made the movie third person omniscient, felt awkward to me, espcially seeing as they were made up, not in the book, and therefore assumptions. It also didn't help that characters would say things that sounded very awkward but were said to let the viewer know what was going on. One especially artless piece of dialog required Lyra to cry upon being rescued by the Gyptians: "You're Ma Costa! You're Billy's mum!" as though she was only just meeting the woman when they obviously had known each other for some time. I would have been much easier for her to cry "Ma Costa!" in delight and have someone say something later about her being Billy's mum. At any rate, there were several instances of this that just stuck out horribly.

Another problem I had was the fleeting introduction of characters and their sudden attachment to Lyra, and the almost cartoony vilification of the Magisterium (evidently it is a technical ecclesiastical term in the Roman Catholic Church referring to the teaching authority of the church). I mean, that was certainly there in the books, but not to this point of ludicrousness. It actually all reminded me a lot of Ivan's The Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, but to the extreme. The "church people" in the movie were barely under the pretense that they were doing it for the good of humanity. In order to make it more digestible, they changed the feeling of the Magisterium to that of a "big brother" a la Orwell's 1984, or to Stalinist Soviet Union. It felt like a bit of a cop out to me, actually.

Along with this, I won't spoil anything, but they completely cut the last bit of the book out. I suppose they wanted to end on a happy note or something, but without the ending Lord Asriel's character was flat as cardboard. I also think that the ending in the book is a lot more intriguing and would be much more apt to have me come back for more.



Okay, that was the ugly. Now for the good. I thought the girl who played Lyra was pretty much spot on. They have a great, very cool character in Lyra and they didn't let it go to waste. Lyra was well developed, as was Mrs. Coulter and Iorek. Everyone else basically gets their five minutes. Anyway, I'm supposed to be talking about the good, so I'll say that Iorek was completely kick ass. He made me want to have an armored bear of my very own. He's voiced by Ian McKellen so I was getting flashes of Gandalf all over the place. There was one bit where Lyra was crossing a skinny ice bridge and he was behind her and I kept expecting him to go "Fly you fool!" Man, that would have been cool. The fight scenes were also really cool and even portions caused Christine to duck behind her coat though there was literally no blood. She's just a pansy. It was oddly beautiful actually, because when the person died, their daemon would vaporize in a puff of glittering gold. Kelly and I both agreed that Lyra had adorable outfits throughout. I coveted a little knitted bonnet hat she wore in Norway, just in a different color.

Anyway, it was a bit clunky, but overall fairly entertaining. I'm just really picky and it really just didn't blow me away like I'd hoped (but didn't actually think) that it would. I think I was better able to understand and see depth in things because I'd read the books, too. I think they could have done a less ham fisted and artless exploration of the humanistic ideas that are inherent in the books. It also occurs to me that the people who are so frightened of this movie and the books and who wish to censor it are acting exactly how Pullman accuses the Church of acting in His Dark Materials. Like I've said before, if you can't read Pullman without giving up your faith, then maybe you didn't have any to begin with. It's not about how Christianity is evil. It's about the corruption that is bound to occur when flawed humans are given something as powerful, strange, and beautiful as faith.

Interesting article on it all HERE.

Atonement

I've been trying to get into contemporary fiction lately. After all, if I hope to get published someday then I should know what my peers are doing. I am starting with the much accoladed Ian McEwan and the novel Atonement. I'm only 7 pages in and already:

"She took her daughter into her arms, onto her lap--ah, that hot smooth little body she remembered from its infancy, and still not gone from her, not quite yet--and said the play was 'stupendous,' and agreed instantly, murmuring into the tight whorl of the girl's ear, that this word could be quoted on the poster which was to be on an easel in the entrance hall by the ticket booth" (4).

"The pages of a recently finished story seemed to vibrate in her hand with all the life they contained" (7).

It's just beautifully written, very true, and I feel so inspired right now. Someday I want to write something that makes people feel these very things. Right now I'll stick with what I'm calling my "Creepy Little Girl" stories. Perhaps someday they will be bound together in a book called, "Creepy Little Girls and the Mothers Who Love Them".

In all seriousness, though, I think I was a bit hard on my story the other day. It felt a bit irredeemable, but I've been looking at the work shop responses and it seems like its completely fixable. I'm just going to take a bit of a rest from it for a few weeks.

Whew!

I was haulin' all over the painting building today! After my final contemp art issues class (no more wiki! No more presentations!) I went on over to take a picture of my painting with a fancy schamcy Canon Eos 5D digital camera (12.8 megapixels!) which, incidently costs 2,100 bucks, when I realized that I didn't have the compact flash card necessary to save the photos onto the camera because my regular old 5 megapixel camera used a memory card instead. They don't lend them out at the Art and Design desk (where I got the camera, btw) because I guess people kept stealing them. It doesn't make much sense though, actually, and is really annoying. I mean, they check stuff out. Just charge the people who stole the compact flash card the amount the card cost on their university account. Now I have to spend twenty bucks to take high quality pictures of my work for the next year and a half. Blug.

Anyway, I used the tripod to get good, non blurry non shiny photos of the final product of Yellow Mountain, Iceland. C'est tout for this semester in my adventures in painting!








Also of note: Justin told me it looked like a "giant, throbbing cock". He also found a vagina in one of my paintings from last year. I'll miss you when you go to that South American country next semester, Justin!

Listening to: Bob Dylan--The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan