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?
Past weeks' stuff: Atlantis / AMERIBROS
----------------- Poster Final (almost)
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The text was better laid out in the final, but I don't have a JPEG handy of it.
URGH some stuff is just so annoying. I think I'm impatient with life... on the one hand so many awesome things happened this week, but on the other so many GREAT things were just snatched away, and fell flat around me. I feel like I've become a little bit psycho recently.... I know good things are supposed to bring out the good side in you, but IDK that I HAVE that much of a good side. lol.
If it sounds cryptic, it FEELS even more cryptic. I guess like all good amateur soulful-hipster-creatives I'll channel my no-word-to-describedness into some vaguely life-affirming artwork.
To stick on other people's walls.
And become famous, rich and be able to publish wanky art books and travel the world airing my dirty laundry in delicate pen-and-ink renders of furry monsters and other calculatedly naive, wistful things.
US & Canada, of APH, and a skit from Colbert Report.
------------------ | Julia, Tony & Enough Rope from the Aus electorate.
---------------------- Errr re-levelled this & added texture coz it looked a bit washed out...
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HRM been feeling very political this weekend. Finishing the last work on Adamo while eating chocolate, watching back episodes of Gruen and Chaser, unwinding from the spin with some Daily Show & Colbert Report. Thankyou IVIEW for making it all available at my fingertips!
I used to prefer John Stewart but Steven Colbert's done a few really good ones recently. They're both lovely, really. John should watch his weight.
HMM so I'm gonna teach myself to draw things that aren't cute, spongy cartoons at some point. Again. From scratch. Look forward to it!
