It's been ages huh? It's funny how when you're busy enough for three people you always find time to blog or draw or other things like that, but when you have time to yourself you always waste it...
Anyway I've had a few different plans for what I wanna do but one of them will be to build a new blog (one about words more than pictures) and sort of revitalise this one. after trying other formats like twitter and tumblr and that but in the end, blogspot is still my favourite format...
Anyway.
The proudest thing I've done recently is working on a design for an arts organisation (still unfinished) where my friend is a member, and doing a mural on the wall of my friend's cafe. That I wanna show you guys, seeing as I have some new photos.
----- Mural! Including coffee flowers and coffee birds and coffee beans, everywhere....! And also portraits of all the staff...
I'm kinda happy with it, although it's taken a while and it's still not finished (cos I need a ladder to get to the top of the rest of the wall). It's a collaboration with some other talented artists, some of them classmates of mine, one of which contributed a good 40-50%: Brian, who's a pretty talented guy.
In fact all of my classmates are really talented in one way or another, and most of them are doing more about it than I am. Even my semi-estranged dad chewed me out about it, hahaha.... time to get my act together!
Alright, I am totally free! And marginally broke, and possibly in a lot of student debt.
I have relatively few decisions to make about life because until March friends from Japan will be coming to stay with me, so that means I have to be living at my house to like... accomodate them.
Right now priorities are to:
Build up the WP version of my homepage
Fix up the missing links and overall add bits to my HTML homepage
Then write up a resume and apply for jobs citing said homepage
And besides that, I am free!
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Now in terms of art, the other exciting thing about the end of 2011 is that I've pretty much finished my VISUAL DIARY, which is a sort of collage of the bits and pieces I've found over the years and a mix of notes, angsty prose and drawings of ideas and people I've had and met over the years. It's an A5 spiral bound book of cartridge paper, the kind that'll set you back maybe $5 at Officeworks.
This year marks the finishing of my third visual diary, which has been actively accepting submissions since about halfway through the 2nd year of uni until now. The first one began in 2006, and covers the time I spent travelling in Japan. The second started in 2008-9 once I got back, and covers my third winter there as well as the first year and a bit of uni.
They've been a great way to get things off my chest and to get ideas down on paper, as well as document my journey and bits and pieces of what I saw where. I find when all else stresses me out to no end and when I don't know what to do, collaging is a fantastic way to restart. Writing is great for getting things off your chest, and drawing sort of focuses you in too, but collaging lets me think about absolutely nothing while I fiddle with bits of scraps and arrange them on to a page.
Sometimes I'll make a page in one go, and sometimes I'll stick one or two things down to find a few months later that I want to stick more over the top. Old pages with bad drawings or irrelevant prose (I keep even the embarassing stuff, so long as it's compelling!) get pasted over with new cool things I've found and in the end the final product is always a little more than the sum of its parts.
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Some pages from the 3rd Visual Diary.
I've done something a bit different this year in keeping a bunch of POSTCARDS separate from the VD, where I usually would paste them. The problem with cards is that they're quite thick, and can expand the volume of the diary to something quite heavy and padded. As time passes it becomes a nuisance to carry around with you. And I don't mind that, because any old bit of paper will do - I can just stick things in aftewards anyway.
So now I also have a CARD WALLET, or an a5 display folder where I can keep just postcards. I used to have them on the wall but thanks to the inspections and revamping of our house for sale I've had to take them down.
Yeah, these books are a big part of what I do (to me anyway) and one day I'd like to digitize them and make them browsable on the internet. Maybe after my website is properly put together, that is.
Somehow with every passing week at university, even though I could tick those weeks off and even though every day did actually bring me to the end of the degree, who knew that one day it would actually finish?
So all the due dates have come and gone, all the last minute disasters have been rectified and even the exhibition has ended in an anticlimactic disassembly of the showspace. And now life is back to normal. Where university used to occupy the front and centre of pretty much everything (much as I'd jostle for this to not be the case), now there's an empty space.
The shoulders feel lighter, it's true, but also that sense of purpose is gone. The design world is no longer on our doorstep and it's up to us now to drudge our way through the early, unexciting and unforgiving years of our chosen career in order to one day someday get to be and do something really worth talking about.
How many of us will stick it out 5, 10 years after starting? How many will follow our dreams, those tenuous things that we all feel we ought to have seeing as we have some sort of talent and all, to their natural conclusions? How many will fall short, or go beyond?
It's a tricky question. I'm glad in a way that university ends here in time for Christmas, because everybody's December is a mad mix of last minute rushes and businesses and the popping of the cork off of a year's worth of pressure heading into a slow and laid-back, leave of absence overseas vacation January.
So really I don't have to decide anything or (worse) do anything until February. Riiight...?
Anyway, in the meantime, I've done some portraits and things to keep my hands busy. Besides that I've been trying to figure out which platforms are the best for which of the things which I want to do.
10 people who could make it to my birthday party.
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Besides that, it's all been doodles on the back of old faxes that I use as timesheets at the office. I guess in the end that's all that life is really about. Dream or no dream, we all gotta make a living...
It's taken months, and another bout of AGIdeas to get me off my lazy bum and to the computer. Not even to DO anything... just to blog about it. Lol
Have I been busy? Have I not been drawing? No, not really.... well, not much until recently. But I feel very bad having not put what I HAVE done here, as I always meant to do.
I have some other great ideas buzzing around my head for blog-like projects, and a website maybe too, but I think CD will always be a place just to put stuff.
None of these are fanart though.
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Maybe that's why I haven't opened my blog in such a long time...
Also! Because of AGIdeas, I once again have a set of AGIdeas notes. Mostly just names of speakers and tidbits I found worthy of being written down.
Anyway. I thought about doing a blog all in pen, since it's my all-time favourite medium. Maybe one day I'll finally find time for it. In the meantime my priorities are:
- Save money for Japan!
- Make some self-promotion stuff / get a bit more professional
- Find my missing/stolen Ipod (or prove difinitively that it's out of my hands....)
- Anything else
- School
As you can see, school is right up there. Also for projects (and this is VERY tight...):
- Finish EASTER mailout (due tomorrow)
- Finish MUM'S DAY booklet (due sunday)
- Some more PORTRAITS for FB
- Annual Report brief progress
- Professional Practise logos & speech work
- Typo 3 brief progress
- Anything else
HRM actually the lines took insanely long on it... and so did the colours (went through 4 color refs to find a good one)... and the filter party afterwards.... I'm kind of honoured that people like it, but I spent AAaaaages with it, always stopping to think, "Do I give up at 'okay' or keep going till I find 'good'?" So I kinda feel it deserves love. Though, you can see signs of my struggles in the messy colours, lol.
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A seedy lookin' morty. HURHUR. Takes you back to the teenage years doesn't it?
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After sleeping in till midday (like I always do these days), I dropped friends AND work just to have some private time with my graphic tablet. Finally.
Head buzzing with ideas, and there's only so much time before you die to get them all onto paper, dopey though they might be. It's scary and sobering, really.
ALSO Terry Pratchett is awesome, and owns pretty much my entire adolescence AND English education.
I love and respect the real world, and sometimes I will come close within its gravitational pull, but we don't often get along. I don't think I could ever live there.
Another FB Profile, w. the susukino maid dress.
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WIP that shouldn't have happened with my todo pile, but... did.
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HURM waiting for my finger to dry so that i can keep typing. I wish I could just throw some crap together but I can't. Call me a perfectionist... and masochistic... at least class starts at 1 tomorrow!
New profile. For Fb. ----------------------
That's how itchy my butt gets (pardon expression) when it rains and there's no plans on. I know I should be reading 5-line paragraphs full of 5-syllabic words by French theorists on what's wrong with our society today but I keep distracting myself & missing hanging out with people. Lately I just want life to happen faster and faster, lol... I feel like I'm 12, but I really enjoy just doing not much in particular with fun people.
SO! Deep question... should you go for it and do whatever makes you happy, or are you responsible for the happiness of others too? Family and friends, yes, but people you don't really know? Are the young allowed to make mistakes or should you avoid hurting/inconveniencing other people to the best of your ability? Should you listen to your heart, even if it tells you it LOVES someone one week and is over it by the next? Or should you listen to your head and bind your unbridled happiness for the sake of everybody's sanity?
I'm thinking about this coz I've been reading a lot of bullshit girly manga and if you've never touched the stuff, it's like a terminal sugar high. As heavily manufactured over the decades as a chocolate bar or mackers burger, as calculated to keep you hungry and addicted enough to look past the sheer plasticity of it all.
Music Being Emo
How do you make a song sad? Bit of piano, down tempo, warbling strings if you're really in the mood? Or angry guitar and screaming, raging, PAINED falsetto? It depends on the artist, audience and style. Lyrics also have a lot to do with it.
At worst these emotional cues, simple enough to trace back to the messages that our minds infer in them, can just be pulled out of a hat to throw together a "sad enough" song and sell some records. Coz every pop singer tends to stick to a ratio of one ballad every couple of upbeat songs in releases. Kind of run-of-the-mill, right? At best though, they can really be moving, and all the more so when it's not a pile of cues you already know but a song that could be about something else... but isn't. And some of the best emotional touches in songs are ones where it's pared back and withheld somewhat, so you feel the punch in this vocal struggle between saying and not saying.
Well, some awesomely sad (or pretty powerful, anyway) moments follow:
Ani Difranco - Dilate
Ani's lyrics are pretty amazing pretty much all of the time... when I first heard her I was amazed, coz here I was having grown up in late-90s creative ghettos where the nearest thing to her sound was Alanis Morisette, and girls with guitars was a bit of a cliche by then. And her lyrics were so much more of that, but pared down, and so much stronger. It's like poetry, spot on and evocative like words in songs oughtn't ever be, lest our brains either explode completely or just grow apathetic.
Dilate has so much in it as a song, that the only expression and image that it brings to my mind is a deadpan stare, full of despair, resignation, snarky black-humoured burnt pride. The look of one who knows enough to expect shitcakes from the world and yet always manages to be a little more disappointed. And when this person who's responsible for all that looks her in the eyes he knows all this, and she knows all this, you just have this look. LOOooove it.
Brand New - Jesus Christ
I'm not religious in the traditional sense, I don't really like the heavier rock sound that Brand New do. I heard this song on t61 and it was really quiet, and kind of builds this momentum of a conversation that's scarily honest, of the lost at 3 am on a cold night unable to sleep kind. And the beat travels more like harder rock songs do, which gives it something an alt-indie-folk-hipster band more at home in mellow sounds probably couldn't do. For a punk-pop act their voices are hushed till the end and that also kind of rocks... the punch is delicate, and that makes it all the more furious. Pretty much the first verse gets me, and it's a heckuva struggle even if like some suggest it's not his. These lines come back and back and keep this song on my lil' mp3:
Jesus Christ, I'm alone again
So what did you do those three days you were dead?
Because this problem is going to last
More than the weekend
Bump of Chicken - Taiyou
Under the guise of uptempo interesting-ish alt-rock tunes these guys plummet listeners to surprising depths and then drag us back out again. They are usually angrily, passionately willing to hope in the face of a faceless, meaningless reality and that strikes right close to home for a lot of people. Their stories are mostly full of heart and their message, usually to themselves as much as others, is to keep going somehow. To be real, to find meaning, realise your truth and forgive yourself your own shortfalls, in a world that offers you none of that.
Why I have apprehensions about this song is because I'd taken to the idea that it was another help-you-out song... that it was way bleaker and darker than the music promised (as usual), yes, but that they sang hopeful words of advice to an un-named other that they themselves wished fervently to believe. This is the standard BOC song; this is why they warm the cockles of a lot of disenfranchised, lost and searching hearts. Japanese is vague like that, and a few crucial cues can change the subject / narrator / object completely.
So actually, Taiyou is a song about the narrator that, trapped in his vague dark world, destroys the one thing that had any promise of helping him out. But it's more than that... because every line of meaning is a metaphor one step away from one or another telling detail of a chilling reality. Another evocative story, but instead of giving hope to a past self or chasing a best friend's train on bike promising to see each other again, it's a mute bleakness that seeps out and penetrates everything. I don't know how this song can be sung with a straight face or straight voice.
It really worries me that people say their next album's dark bits are even darker. Because if BOC can't keep hopeful, how on earth are we supposed to?
There's a project at work, that put itself together partly after my workmates stumbled upon my DeviantArt account. Not that snooping is the right word, because the internet is the ultimate public domain, but it still feels strange somehow when your relatives/people you know exclusively IRL intervene in the usual running of an online identity.
I don't know why, but it feels saner to keep those identities separate.
Apparently this is a big thing to Japanese net users, who treasure the anonymity (or more the disattachment from any face, body, geographical location / etc) that various social media / self-publishing sites grant them. Whereas in the west net identity seems more a matter of self-expression and broadcasting... every Gen-Y kid's grown up with a myspace/livejournal/facebook nowadays (and I'm in the top end of that grouping apparently), and the first thing you learn when you DO pour your soul out onto the internet is that by and large nobody listens.
But for the west, constructs like 4Chan that force (or at least enable) anonymity are an endless source of novelty. It's both a big deal and in and of itself the reason for acting as (self-consciously) disturbed as possible. On Japan's 2Chan people still seem to "behave" somehow, there are a lot of unwritten manners and culture involved there. Same as on 4chan, but it's like they don't have this pressing urge to make a spectacle of themselves.
Something else to add to my list of things that people have said are Japanese about me. Like cringing when I meet someone that's K.Y. (look it up!) and never being able to tell someone when I like them. Source of endless grief because Japanese people have this crazy idea that western girls are assertive and forward and stuff. PSH
Anyway, I don't know that I can share project bits with you but once it comes online I'll share a link. :>
Lots of remeniscing recently. Otaru (1 hour from Sapporo), 2 winters ago. ------------------------------------------------------------------------
