Starlight express

This was originally written Saturday night.A Movie. Family. Old Ways.

I've been working on Carousel, which takes up a lot of my brain. Last night I watched Jet Li's Hero, and today I was color-coding sets from the play. They are color-coded, a little.
Hero is about a man, Nameless, who approaches the Emperor of the Qin empire with the weapons of three assassins that have plotted against the monarch. It's also about the story of how they were defeated by Nameless, in epically beautiful martial arts battles. We should make a martial arts movie in Stac.

Today is a family get-together, and I'm going to be interrogated about colleges. I've only heard back from one. My cousin has heard back from many more. She's uncomfortable with non-white people, I do art, she's a star basketball player, I write blogs. We are from different worlds all together. But she's still my cousin. I wish her the best.

I've gone back to my old ways. I've been listening to a collection of Essential Andrew Lloyd Webber. The music sounds the same. Sometimes bad musicals touch you in just a certain way. Starlight Express: a musical about trains. Longest running show in Germany. Some beautiful songs, but not 'up there'.

baked french toast

I still need to make a new Reading blog. I have been reading every night, and I've been marking up the everything. It's only Wednesday, but by Friday I need to have finished whatever chapter of Lord of the Rings: tTT ends closest to pg. 60, finish at least to pg. 100 of The Tombs of Atuan (Earthsea's sequel), and have the first chapter of the Stac book done.

By the end of break, I want to be 150 pgs into LotR: tTT, halfway into the next book of the Earthsea series, and I want to finish the next 2 chapters of the French flying book.

Baked french toast. A delicious recipe that I want to play around with. Because, in a perfect world, syrup is unnecessary for a lasagna-like slab of french toast.

It's still snowing.

Movies, in unconnected thought

Yesterday I saw The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
I fell in love with the characters, and sat through the whole movie. I really like Westerns, sometimes. It's like going to a baseball game or eating a burger- you feel so American. I'm also decently convinced that Clint Eastwood's character (the Good) from that movie might be almost as badass as Chuck Norris. And then there was the Civil War element to the movie. The drunken captain who dreams of the day a bridge would blow up, and save the lives of thousands of men. The war camps. The dust and mountains and deserts.
The movie reminded me a bit of The Seven Samurai. The movies are both so desperate. Warriors; water. Safety; gold. Also, no one in the western is entirely good.


Today, we saw Pandora's Box.
It reminded me that I should watch M again. There was a point, a closeup, when you could see the makeup on the faces of the people. I loved the characters, and I loved the time of the movie. I like waiting, seeing a movie in real time. You have time to breathe and think. I didn't like fast-forwarding through any part of it. And I loved the stage scene, because that's the true hell of being backstage.

Coan, Changing, Drawings.

I've missed a few important things. There was the Coan party, there are a lot of drawings, and there have been class changes, that have altered my perspective on the people around me. But switch 2 and 3.


Coan.
A lot of things were written on my page. I loved the format, and I know that we could never have pulled it off last year or the year before. Consider the truth written on your pages testimony to a Stac class of good people.
"Why can't life be simple and work my way?"
At first, I laughed a little at this, because of its truth. 'My way' is a childish thing, a safety net, and sometimes its the only way I know how to do something. And I know I always want things to be simpler. Even if something starts simple and is built from there, I know how it's simple. There's a comfort in that, too. Maybe 'comfort' is my third core value.


Changing People.
I learned a few things today.
One, there are nice idiots, then there are status-needing, womanizing, spineless idiots. I have no patience for the latter. This comes from an incident in class. I will not be the only kid who does work in a group.
Two, I'm not the only one who watches Jeopardy every day.
Three, I live in a different world than a lot of people. Today in Psych, we were asked to name all the seven dwarves. So I did. I didn't understand what the big deal was. It happens during Jeopardy, too. "Oh, I just saw a documentary about Biblical Wars a few months ago". There's a reality check.


New drawings. These aren't just from play rehearsal.
I like the Lord of the Rings movies, but I want them separate from my own ideas from the book. So, I drew a basic Legolas and Aragorn. Both are missing very important parts of their dress, but I wanted their faces to be not-pretty. Legolas is from the northern elves, and I got the idea that those elves have half-sweaters. Aragorn also actually looks old here. He spends a lot of him time looking towards Gondor and saying 'oh, how I wish I were ruling my fair nation' and whatnot. It's not finished. They're missing cloaks and all sorts of necessary parts.

These are doll designs for Carousel. I would love to have a made doll onstage rather than something from someone's house. It's very geometric. The doll is also like, what the character Louise is expected to be: quiet, demure, with a nice dress and apron.

This is what I worked on today, all in pen, all from memory. Originally, one of the girls on stage stood like this, so I drew the angles. Then it got out of control. I should get back to another figure drawing class. I need to give Ganes back his amazing pen. Hand and foot hiding. Her left shoulder bothers me a bit.
"Every time they make a Robin Hood movie, they burn our villiage down!" -Robin Hood, Men in Tights.

sum-ups.

Less blogging the last few months. I've been working on Carousel. And not at home.


My practice. Reading. I want to finish Earthsea by Monday, and start the Saint-Exupery book after that. Other than that, I need to finish the Lord of the Rings series. After the Stac book, Letters to a Young Poet, then the Accidental Masterpiece.


I think I'll post the pages I read each day, and a quote from each reading. And some line of reflection. That should be enough. All set to go on monday. After Superbowl, after finishing Earthsea.


A Wizard of Earthsea is basically about a boy with wizard talent, who goes to a wizarding school, releases a shadow upon the world, fights a dragon, fights a malign stone from before time, and needs to fight the shadow. It's a typical, simple fantasy book, and it sounds a lot like Harry Potter. Only, it was published in 1968. So a lot of children's fantasy is based on it. The world is a giant archipelago, Earthsea.
There's a moment when the dragon will not fly over a stretch of ocean to fight him, because dragons belong to wind and fire, and men of earth and sea.


By the end of the show, I'll make a giant post with all the possible sets I've drawn.

Peter Paul and Mary

An Artist's Statement.
Rough. It's wanting, the phrase is.

My art almost always includes a sense of movement. It comes in the form of a repetition of a shape or line quality, or a physical movement from a model. I'm also consistently moving in my own life. And, everything is moving all the time all around me. As an artist, I'm interested in converting movement outside an artpiece to movement inside and art piece.
    I'm also trying to form art and science together. I must have both, and I know there is a way to keep them both in my life and keep them in my art. At this point, I mostly use sciences and history to decide for or against keeping certain facts in my art.
   My art ends up with a sense of repetition. Sometimes it's intentional, and sometimes it creeps up. The repetition and movement often work together. I also love to work with simple shapes and colors. I want to paint my life with them.

Core Values:
Arts and Sciences, together
Movement, change and sameness
Finding and Keeping Knowledge (sort of like Resourcefulness)

Artistic Issues:
Repetition
Opposites
Misunderstanding and attempted communication
Simplicity

statement and procrastination

As the Artist Statement is being written, I'm thinking of questions I need to find the answers to (in relation to the writing of an artist statement). How do I blend my core values and issues into a piece about who I am and what I do as an artist? Is that what an artist statement is? How is the statement in time: is it about my past art, my present art, both?

I was thinking of time, and of the video game Braid where time is, in a level, represented from left to right. So I drew a forest (tie it in to fairytale somehow) with colors and shadows relating to times of day, in order. It also represents the past, present, and future of a day, where the present is in the middle and midday. I like this drawing, but I only realized after that sunrise and sunset are relatively short periods of the day.

Past, Present, and Future. With weird-looking 2D trees that are at different heights on the page, so they look 3D. And the shadows are interesting.

La Vie en Rose, on the soundtrack of WALL-E

There was an envelop today from New Paltz. I got in. I should have been more excited.

I've been reading blogs, and I say we have a STAC bake-a-thon. Just that there's so much creativity to be found in baking, and if people are putting it up online, let's get together some weekend and bake.

When does a discipline become not a discipline? This blog was a discipline, but now it's just a part of me. Maybe it's still a discipline.

I took the enneagram test again since before, and got the same result: 1w9,

Type 1 - 11.3
Type 5 - 6.3
Type 9 - 6
Type 2 - 2.3

Wing 1w9 - 14.3
Wing 1w2 - 12.5
Wing 9w1 - 11.7
Wing 9w8 - 8
Wing 5w4 - 8
Wing 2w1 - 8
Wing 5w6 - 6.7
Wing 2w3 - 3.2

I'm a little surprised '4' isn't up there. Perhaps the 'adventurous' parts of Type 5 were mistaken for 'I don't like standing still'. Or that's just a part of a 5.

    I was thinking about being a 1. And something hit me decently hard: there is the perfectionist, critical part of being a 1, and the good/evil part. Both parts lead to a need to improve. But I think criticizing is evil (because I do too much of it). Working against itself there. It isn't about 'accepting your fate', it's about 'what does this point to?'.

    So where does this point to? Core Values and Issues are intertwined in this. A while ago, I was confused by an Issue, something that I was stuck on forever. I've always loved superheros and villains. I love Batman, and old-fashion hero-stories. And that's all part of a fixation on good and evil. Myth hit me so hard, maybe because all the fairy-tale stories are strictly good and evil. All Disney movies.

Core Values:

Art and Science, without a distinct separation

Movement, change and repetition

This used to be Resourcefulness. I don't know what it is now. Something about observing, something about collecting knowledge.

Issues:

Repetition

It's everywhere. The painting we did last year with Cathryn was totally repeated: the same mode of scrape-painting. And the mural was repetition. Figure drawing is, essentially, repetitive. Animation is extremely repetitive. What are bookshelves? What are fishtanks? What is the pattern of the night sky? This may be a core value.

Simple Shapes

Simple Color-coding (secondary colors are for villians)

I'm still thinking of others. I'm still thinking of places to find others. Because it's not just about art, but life if based around these.