“There once was a girl named Nicole Pennsylvania Snow
who, when she was ten months old,
slept in an abstract bed
designed and decorated for her by a famous artist.”
1954 book by Vance Bourjaily and Tobias Schneebaum, about the baby daughter of hipster parents, with a Reactionary Grandmother. It’s awesome. Illustrator Stephen Kroninger has scans on his Drawger blog. (via 50 Watts)
This sprained ankle has put a slight dent in my plans to get fitter, although it isn’t a bad sprain, so it shouldn’t be too long before I can at least do tai chi again. Meanwhile, I’ve been doing crunches and persevering with the ‘more real food, less crap’ plan. One consequence of the latter is that I’m at last learning to cook. I can now make a couple of quite edible fish-in-wok dishes, and yesterday I made devilled eggs according to the instructions on this site. The egg-boiling method proved to be excellent. Though I didn’t have any of the filling ingredients, I was able to rustle up substitutes (cheese/herb pasta sauce for mayo, wasabi for mustard, chilli sauce). I threw some capers on top and they were pretty nice.
I also looked up the calories in a banana. They’re lower than I thought. Good value. No reason to stop at just one banana a day, so yesterday I had two, and I think the second one helped stave off cravings for less healthy food.
I took a day off today. As well as making a quickie rough-draft model for another sculpture, I played with the dragon pic, scribbled a lady gunfighter with a random shape in place of her left hand, and attacked an old pic of Gwynn with lurid colour.
ETA: Ok, now she has something to do with her left hand while I finish her:
Kooky is a film by Jan Sverak about a boy who is forced to throw away his teddy bear, and the adventures he imagines the discarded bear having in a forest inhabited by strange creatures. The film combines live action, puppets and stop motion, with puppets and props designed by Jakub Dvorsky, the founder of Amanita Design, creators of the wonderful game Machinarium.
By the looks of the trailer, the film’s going to be a delight (or rather, is a delight in the Czech Republic, where it has already been released, and will be a delight for English speakers when the English-dubbed version gets distribution). There’s also an illustrated e-book of Kooky, sample pages at Amanita.
Still trying to organise lots of little points in the first third (or quarter…) of the tea master story. It occurs to me that the writing is getting in the way. I’ve reworked this so often that I’ve accumulated a lot of ornamental sentences and paragraphs. With them all in there, it’s like William Morris wallpaper — too thickly patterned all over for such a long piece of writing. There isn’t enough whitespace. I need to clear some. Then maybe there’ll be room for the material I have to fit in. This is Etched City world, so it’s with some reluctance that I strip ornament off it — but I’ve got so much that I doubt I need to worry. Ok, sharpen that blade…
Well, I got through another week without potato crisps, fruit juice or cheese. The ice cream ran out and I didn’t have an urge to buy more, although I’ve restocked on M&Ms. I had bad sinuses for a couple of days and thought I was getting a cold, but didn’t. I only did tai chi once a day this week, as twice a day was too boring. I’ve almost finished working out the left-hand version of the 24-step sword sequence.
I haven’t lost any more weight — in fact, I think I’ve put it back on, but it’s hard to tell, as my weight goes up and down during the month — but anyway, I’m still interested in shedding some wobbly bits! I was going to start jogging just a very little next week — ten minutes on two mornings, with a plan to build up very slowly over many weeks — but continuing the accident prone theme that’s been running through my life lately, I’ve sprained my ankle — not really doing anything, just walking on Bangkok pavements. It was going to happen sooner or later. So I’ll be doing a lot of sitting still for a few days. On the other hand, I can’t easily get to the kitchen, so this might work out. Fortunately I had a bandage — I bought it when I thought I was going to use it on a sculpture. Fun times!
After the Spock’s bedroom dream with the red padded floor, I had another dream featuring red padding. This time there was a monastery or church that was a place of pilgrimage, with an extremely tall tower — I think it was several kilometres high. You had to climb up inside it, but there were no stairs, just a very steep ascent inside the tower, which was about as wide as your average concert hall, leaning at about a 20 degree angle, and lined with soft, understuffed red velvet. It was very hard to climb, and I knew I couldn’t do it. Other people were climbing, but I had to give up. I have an inkling what the Enterprise dream was about — logic might not be a perfect refuge, but it beats other options — but this one, nope.
This is the big Pan I’ve started working on. These photos show the brown wax clay being replaced with green wax. I’ve put on a more detailed temporary head, and realised that the arms are too long and I’ll need to cut and re-bend the armature, as well as add bulk to the legs and do a zillion other things. I’m trying to get the pose to look good from every angle and thinking his head might need to be flung back and/or twisted more.
WIP shots:
In the dusk with the light behind him!
Photoshopped digital sketch. I want to go back and work on details like feet, and see if I can get a more dynamic face. And then maybe put another dragon or two in the picture.
I’m supposed to be working. And what am I doing? Headbanging to I Was Made For Loving You. That song is like the golden perfect child of rock and disco. Although there are plenty of clips out there with better sound, I bond with this one, which takes me back to living rooms of temps perdu. I mean, I don’t think I ever heard Kiss through decent speakers. There’s a deplorable lack of Kiss tribute bands over here. Come on, Bangkok! Your traffic’s like Sydney Road on a Saturday night times twenty, all day, every day; you also have a lot of men in makeup. What’s stopping you from going all the way?
Maybe I should just forget about writing today and go ice skating instead. Because the long-awaited big rink is open!
In this draft I’m trying to nail down actions and conversations and basically everything to do with the plot, so that it’s all exactly where it needs to be. And also to write well enough to see the story’s face more clearly. I’m pretty sure there won’t be room for all the stuff I want to keep, but I don’t know what to throw out yet. I just put back something I liked but had cut for logistical reasons, but I thought of a way to get it back in. However, by the time I’m done with this draft I only want the ‘keep or cut’ questions to be about basically ornamental material.
This first third (or quarter, gulp) has quite a lot of ‘what goes where’ and ‘now or later’ to work out. Now that I know everything that happens, it feels like time to try to put all the muscles on the skeleton in the right places. I’m kind of hankering to post a WIP extract, but I’ve told myself I don’t get to do that until I’ve got 10,000 words of this draft.
