Saturday, January 08, 2005
Installment the second of the RantBlog will be up, erm, at some point in the near future. Possibly tomorrow, if by some miracle I get an idea for my drawing homework and get it done early. Until then, I present unto you some tidbits.
1. I was pleased to note that my painting professor for this semester specifically required us to get Mars Black acrylic paint. A politic move. Mars Black uses, as its pigment, synthetic black iron oxide. This is as opposed to the more old-school Ivory Black, which uses for pigment 'amorphous carbon produced by charring animal bones'. That's quoted off the tube. Lovely. Just what I want all over my hands and clothes at the end of a 3-hour studio. So, Mars Black-- excellent.
2. Ryan Estrada, whom you may recall from such insane endeavors as the 48-hour comic, has created a new level of comic book madness. He made a 72-hour comic. That's 72 pages in 72 hours. There aren't sufficient words to describe what he's doing anymore. You can read his updates of the event here, and you can see the actual comic here. I don't think he's uploaded all the pages yet, but they'll be there eventually. Like I said, there's really no way to describe this stuff. I can't draw one full page in 4 hours... to do 72 in as many hours... less, actually, since he apparently finished up around hour 64... heck, just to be drawing for that long...
Everyone go give him some love and check it out.
Oh, and he's apparently planning a 96 hour comic day for February. In color. Ryan, we're preparing the cemetary plot now. Would you like it in Korea or in Michigan?
3. I finally got time to check out the faculty show in the Slusser gallery. I'd been meaning to do so for a while, because a faculty exhibition is like a fantastical windfall. You get to see what all the professors are working on, and, best of all, you can see if some of them are making absolute crap. It's one of those things that makes art school so different from the rest of the university. I'm not sure if there's anywhere else in the school where the students have access to their professors in this way, a look at what they're working on and what, in a very real sense, their consuming interests and passions are. It's much more immediate than working with some chemistry professor in his research lab, or even reading some of your english professor's poetry. Plus, you get to be totally judgemental about their work, which is an awesome amount of power to give your students.
I thought all the video stuff was bad, but possibly that's just me. I'm not really inclined to like video art in the first place. I skimmed over the industrial design stuff, because it doesn't particularly interest me. There were a lot of really cool sculptural pieces, some excellent scientific illustration (thank you, Joe Trumpey-- the beetles, especially, were glorious), and one very good painting (Jim Cogswell. The only painting there worth noting, all the others were very ho-hum). Maybe I'll post up a review of the whole show at some later date, with the graduate students' show thrown in for good measure.
4. Dan Shaughnessy is an asshat. Either you're a Sox fan and know what I'm talking about, or you aren't and I really don't want to get into it. Suffice it to say, I think the whole thing is getting ridiculously overblown, I'm almost dead certain Mientkiewicz was misquoted by Ye Olde Curly-Haired Fop, and I don't think it's a bad thing for the player who caught the last out of the 2004 World Series to keep the ball so long as he's willing to show it around to the fans of the winning team, which by all accounts Mientkie is perfectly willing to do.
I just don't want to see this thing become another Pedro- or Nomar-gate. I know that Mientkie might not be back next year, what with the logjam at first base and all, but if he goes I want it to be on good terms. There's no need for all this rancor. The only reason, really, is Shaughnessy scraping the bottom of the barrel for headlines in a relatively quiet time of year.
I could say something like, "Well, now, I don't like to wish people harm," but that would be utter crud. I am very much in the practice of wishing people harm, and have spent many a boring lecture keeping myself awake by imagining overly sharpened pencils interacting rather cuttingly with the crania of any sorarartists in the vicinity. This stuff makes me angry. So I wish Dan Shaughnessy all the best in the most sarcastic way possible, and hope he gets crippling carpal tunnel and can no longer write this crap.
5. I picked up some groceries a couple of days ago, including a pint of WholeFruit peach sorbet. It is the king, queen, and royal jester of sorbet. It is the quarterback and star runningback of sorbet. It is so good. Allow me to croon softly about how good it is. SooooOOOOOooooo good.
6. Star USC quarterback and this year's Heisman trophy winner, Matt Leinart, has a blog. Stuff like this just makes you want to do a Manny Ramirez double-point up to the heavens and thank de lawd above that the internet exists. I wonder if he'll keep it going after he gets drafted by the NFL? Also, Braylon Edwards: start a blog now! You want to be outdone by the damn Trojan? No. Get going on this!
7. I'm surprised I haven't mentioned this yet, but the boys over at Surviving Grady are getting published. Clearly a must-purchase book, both because it will be a hilarious read and because it is a wonderful victory for the Red Sox blogosphere. Also, Beth from Cursed to First is going to have one of her short stories published in a Red Sox fiction anthology.
As author John Cheever once said, "All literary men are Red Sox fans—to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life."
I was going to save that for the 'writing quality' portion of the RantBlog, but it was just too perfect to pass up for use here.
8. I'm watching the Chargers/Jets game right now, naturally. Herm Edwards just attempted to attack Bishop Harris, his own runningback coach. Weird. I've no idea what that was all about. Regardless, this has been a good game so far, it's 17-10 Jets but the Chargers are within a couple yards of the endzone. Right now both teams deserve to win about equally, but we'll see.
Hup, and we're in overtime now. So there you are.
9. Some links for you.
- Chromasia. Photo blog. A very, very, very good photo blog.
- The Perry Bible Fellowship. Online comics. Extremely odd, extremely surreal, extremely hilarious. So random. So delightfully drawn. A good thing all 'round. Check it out, or you are no proper internet user.
- Oracle of Baseball. You know the whole Kevin Bacon six degrees of separation thing? This does the same, only with baseball players. You enter two names, and see how connected they are. Hours of simple fun for the simple among us. For example, I wanted to connect Kevin Youkilis and Shawn Green (the Jew connection!). Youkilis currently plays with Mike Timlin. Mike Timlin played with Shawn Green on the Blue Jays in 1994. Zing! Connected!
- Raiders fans are gross. And I have photographic proof.
- Vitriolica webb's ite. Like a sketchblog, by a British lady, that is filled with stuff which is awesome.
- OMG new Red Sox scouting reports are out. Thanks to Kyle from ECA for the heads-up. I'm mostly posting this link so I can find it again later. There goes my free time for the week.
10. As you may or may not have noticed, this blog has acquired a shiny new parasite. Behold! Commenting has been enabled! Now you, the intrepid reader, may prove your intrepidness by commenting directly on posts. I get the feeling some of you will still be doing the emails, but this is a whole new frontier of communication for me. If no one comments I'll probably go digging in the template and gouge it out again, so give it a try. You might even like it.
10:12 PM
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