How cool was it that of all days to have a power outage we have it on Halloween?
And it wasn’t even just one building, seemed like the whole freaking campus went down for a while. The first time it went out for only a little while, and then it went for the long outage around 11:30. Both times I was in Drawing Studio and guess what we were drawing…SKELETONS! Freaking. Sweet.
OK honestly drawing a skeleton is actually a real pain, but still. It doesn’t get much better than drawing a skeleton AND losing power to make for a spooky Halloween.
If you didn’t see me I totally dressed up ALL day on Halloween, I’m just that hardcore. It was pretty cool actually because Cesley dressed up too and we have all of our classes together. On top of that we were both wearing versions of school girl outfits. I was a Hogwarts student and she was Gogo from Kill Bill.
We all went to the back to back plays at Shafer Street Playhouse that night too. They were both short (one hour) plays with an intermission. The first was “The Love Talker” and the second was “Vampire Lesbians of Sodom.”
Both plays were great and very well done. The first is a more serious and eerie play. The second is simply hilarious, look it up if you’ve never heard of it and definitely see it if you get the chance.
So that was my Halloween, it might not sound like much but I had a lot of fun. I hope you all did too. Until next year, Happy Halloween!
While perusing The Living Room Candidate website I decided to brave the ads that accompanied the most damaging election of my life thus far and looked at the ads of the 2000 election. You would never believe my astonishment, nay, horror, when I saw this ad:
Who knew? George W. Bush is a freaking psychic! He knew there would be a gigantic deficit. He just got the tiny detail of WHO would make it happen wrong!
Talk about 20/20 hindsight. Someone should have dug up this ad during the 2004 election and been like “HELLO!?! HAVE YOU SEEN THIS?? HAVE YOU NOTICED WHAT’S HAPPENING?!?”
O well. Soon I won’t have to worry because the messiah will be sworn in and everything will be better. Speaking of the Inauguration, I was really hoping to go so I looked into tickets. They are SO EXPENSIVE! The cheapest I could find was over $500 and that was for the parade not the swearing in ceremony. For the actual ceremony the cheapest tickets are over a $1000!
I couldn't really connect "Tsotsi" with "Those Who Walk Away from Omelas" in any specific way. There is the underlying theme that some kind of second class citizen is necessary so that the wealthier class may live and enjoy their lifestyle, though that does not really correlate well to "Tsotsi" because we don't see any evidence in the movie that the slum and those living there are a necessity to those who live in the nice neighborhoods.
Oddly enough, more than anything this story reminded me of the book “The Giver.” It too was a utopia but it was opposite of “Omelas” in that the majority of those living in this town did not know what was going on. In this case the big conspiracy was that all memory of life outside and before this town was made, even memories of color, had been removed. The Giver was the one who held onto those memories and passed them on to the next Giver. *SPOILER ALERT* At the end of the book the boy who was the new Giver takes his baby brother and leaves the town to find the outside world, which he knows is filled with flaws as well as beauty.
In general though, the theme of sacrificing one or a few for the many is nothing new and it often seems to depict Pagans in a bad light. Oddly enough I was just watching an episode of “Supernatural” (I know I know) that dealt with the same issue. The name of the episode, if you’re interested, is “Scarecrow,” and turns a town into yearly murderers, sacrificing a couple each year to a God inhabited scarecrow. I usually let what has become one of my favorite TV shows slide because I know they have to take creative liberties but there are certain episodes, like this one, that do bug me.
The movie “Wickerman,” both the original and the remake, is another one that really annoys me and follows the same motif. *SPOILER ALERT* It ends up murdering a man, along with a ton of animals, in a huge wicker effigy that the town sets on fire as a sacrifice to some pagan god so that, once again, the town (in this case an island) will continue to prosper. After looking on the internet the only evidence I found that Wicker Man effigies ever held humans in them was written by Julius Caesar about the Druids. However, as most people know, the Romans and Gauls never really got along and to assume that this was anything other propaganda against them would be, in my opinion, very naïve.
I knew it was going to happen and here it is. I had been saving this blog post for a day when I really and truly could not think of anything intelligent to write about. Yes, it’s true, I have blogger’s block.
In general lately I’ve felt that my blog entries have become more and more about nothing. I write on whatever I have going through my head at the moment. I checked, I have four entries in a row on my front page that are essentially me rambling about what I did that weekend, even if it’s just watching YouTube videos.
It’s as if I’m losing steam. When we first started blogging I had so much to get off my chest, even I didn’t realize how much. Something would come up or set me off and I would write a blog that I think had been writing itself for a long time and just didn’t have an outlet.
Maybe it’s just that time of year; I know it was like this in high school. As we get closer to Thanksgiving and winter break people, especially students, start to check out mentally I think. That break, all that food, presents, everything seems to be so close you can taste it! So why am I still sitting in a classroom doing work when all that food is waiting for me? We can’t let it get cold!
Can you tell I’m looking forward to Thanksgiving?
This past week has just been nuts anyways though, and not in a good way. It felt like everything was leading up to the election and Obama won and it was so awesome! I was going to blog about it and celebrate and be happy all week…and then Wednesday came.
Despite only being three days long, last Wednesday through Friday seemed to suck enough to last an entire week.
I won’t list everything that happened, I bet it wouldn’t even seem that bad, but when you know how it is, when you’re in the thick of it experiencing one little, or not so little, thing after another it just seems to build until you’re ready to just give up and cry.
What could have happened that was so bad it over shadowed the amazingness that is Obama’s election to the presidency you ask?
Well, on Wednesday, at about 1:30 in the afternoon, I thought I was having a heart attack.
Chest pains, left arm/hand felt strange plus a pulse of 112 ads up to me freaking out. I’ve been keeping track of my heart rate because we’re pretty sure I have tachycardia, a fast heart rate, and I’ve been keeping a log for my doctor. So when I started feeling these symptoms one after the other I didn’t know what else to think. I called my parents and they agreed that should get checked out just in case.
It was nothing of course, but that didn’t stop me from worrying like crazy, and it really wasn’t a good start for the rest of my week.
I’m sitting here not reading the article assigned in class because I’m too upset to concentrate on it. I was just sent the above video in an e-mail and now I know I won’t be able to do anything else until I get this off my chest. So much for blogger’s block.
Since I’ve come to college I think I’ve actually been more sheltered not less. That’s the only I conclusion I can up with for why I haven’t gotten this upset until now. I knew about Prop 8, and I knew it was passed and I didn’t really feel anything. Maybe it was the whirlwind of Obama winning and just being too high to notice something low but I don’t think so, I think it’s that I’m here. I’m not watching the news at dinner anymore; I’m not 20 minutes outside of D.C. hearing about protests, – there’s one on Saturday – I don’t hear my mom and dad talk about what how disgusted they are, I’m not talking to my goddess (both women) parents who got married in Toronto and have been together for about as long as I’ve been alive, instead I’m here, in my own little oasis where something like this seems to be so far away that it really didn’t sink in until ten minutes ago.
I don’t think I can do a better job than Keith Olberman but I think I’ll try anyway.
For those who voted to pass this law:
What’s wrong with you?
Are you worried there’s only so much love in the world that if you legitimized theirs yours will disappear?
There is no reason you could ever come up with that would make me agree with you, and frankly, there’s not much you could say that could ever make me think well of you either.
My only conciliation is that Obama is our President-Elect now and hopefully will set this right, but then I’m fairly certain that those of you that voted for this proposition voted for McCain, and that brings a smile to my face because you may have won the battle but you did not win the war.
Election night was awesome. Not only did Obama win but we took to the streets and marched! How amazing is that? Here are some pictures and a video. All the pictures were taken with my cell phone so I apologize for the bad quality.
Outside Johnson where the whole gathering started. We blocked Laurel, a bunch of cars just stopped in the street and people got on them cheering.
At the Siegal Center where the march stopped for awhile before tuning back around. There was someone there with an Obama mask. He and a guy with big drum kept the crowd going.
The marchers back from the capital, outside Johnson again. This is about 1:30 in the morning and they were still going strong. My friends and I got off the band wagon when we passed Laurel again about an hour before this.
Same scene but I tried to zoom in.
Footage from when they came back. Most important is the noise, and this was taken from the 8th floor!
Since the semester is almost over I thought I’d update everyone on my drawing progress for class.
Drawing has been pretty intense lately but still going well. Since my last blog about drawing we covered a lot of different topics. We did a very long drawing of drapery to learn how to draw cloth so when we draw clothed figures it’s easier. We did faces, or portraits, and had to do a self portrait which was not as hard as I expected it to be. And right now we’ve been doing gesture and figure drawings of nude models.
This is my drapery drawing. It was one of those pieces that eventually I felt like the more I worked on it the worse it got. I’m pretty happy with it overall now though, and I honestly don’t know what I would do to fix it at this point.
My teacher was pretty happy with it but she said it has a softness to it that, though it works, the drawing may have worked with some parts being more rough.
I think that is something of my style now; to make things look soft.
This is my self portrait and the same softness appears in this. I started with just the head and no gradated background, as well as several things that needed fixing such as the hair. But when I showed it in our class critique, they all suggested I gradate the background to balance out the image since I made the head so small in comparison to the paper. I think it really helped and I’m quite happy with the final product.
What surprised me about this one was how much my teacher liked it. She said that though some of the facial features aren’t quite right the drawing as a whole does the best job of creating an atmosphere and it’s really nice. She also said I look like Scully from The X Files in this, which I can see.
I was really worried about doing a self portrait since I’m not great at faces anyway and doing your own face is supposed to be very difficult, so I’m quite pleased with how it turned out, and of course I’m very happy that my teacher likes it.
This is one of my many nude figure drawings. Right now it’s the only one completely finished. I’m very happy with the body, especially how the skin came out. I feel like it really looks like skin in most places.
The face is alright, not great. The face kind of bothers me, along with the hair. Both of which though didn’t need to be included in this particular drawing, we were focusing on the torso and were allowed to crop as necessary, but still.
I exaggerated certain things, mainly the ribs, on purpose to show the musculature of the body, which we’ve also been focusing on heavily in class.
Whenever I tell someone we’re drawing nude models they always ask “Isn’t that awkward?” So I’m going to tell everyone: No, it isn’t.
When you have a nude model in class, for the most part, they don’t talk. Not a big surprise sine they’re trying to stay still for long periods of time. At least for me, because they’re not talking, I almost forget they’re people. I know that sounds terrible but after you’ve been staring at someone for about half-an-hour you just think of them as still life, probably because you’re doing all the same things that you do for a still life drawing, the only difference is that every so often the still life has to get up and stretch.
Also, being able to draw a real nude person is so much better than having to work off of a picture. We had a homework assignment where our teacher gave us a packet of nude figures but told us that if we could get a model to do it. I started drawing from the packet and then found out that not one, but two, of my friends would be willing to pose for Cesley and myself. It was much easier and went faster with a model. I think the main reason is that the model is closer and there for close up and than a Xeroxed handout making certain details much easier to see.
As most of you know, my research paper was on legalization of prostitution, and how it would be beneficial to society. On the Friday before we had to turn in our papers I was surprised to find several things on prostitution in the news that day.
The first was an interview on 20/20 that Cesley alerted me to, with the former prostitute, Ashley Dupree, who was the last prostitute to be with former Governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer. Unfortunately Dupree was a almost the stereotypical prostitute in that she got into prostitution because she got into drugs and needed the money and now regrets it and would never do it again. Though an insightful interview, not exactly helpful to my claim.
However, the piece on Nightline later that night was very helpful. It was a look into one of the most famous brothels in Nevada, the Mustang Ranch, and how the economy has affected them. It also followed a girl who at the moment was named Kimberly, who was just joining the brothel because after sending some twenty or thirty job applications with no interviews or call backs, she had nowhere else to go. She had applied to anywhere from department stores to day care centers and ended up taking a job as a prostitute, not because she’s addicted to drugs, or was abused as a child, but because she simply needs the money. I was even able to use this in my paper piece in my paper.
The most interesting piece of news I came across though was online. It was about San Francisco in this latest election and how they voted on Proposition K, a proposition to decriminalize prostitution. Though not the same thing as legalization, simple the fact that an entire city was voting on prostitution is quite a landmark. Even more so though is that the proposition only lost by 16 percentage points, a startlingly small number.
Though I am against decriminalization because it does not include regulation of the industry and mandatory STD testing, I am impressed with San Francisco’s open mindedness, though I suppose if any city in the U.S. would be open minded it would be this one.
I saw the Twilight movie on Friday with about ten people, never a good idea. Anytime you get a big enough group of friends together then just about any movie becomes funny at all the wrong places. The only exception to this is probably the Harry Potter movies just because we’re such diehard fans.
My friends and I have all read the Twilight series so we knew what was supposed to happen and believe it or not I don’t think our expectations were that high, and yet it still managed to disappoint. None of us could take it seriously; we laughed at all the wrong parts and knew it.
It wasn’t just silly though there were legitimate issues we had with the movie, and I am going to outline them for you all.
1) What is up with Edward’s hair? I’ve overheard a lot of people complaining that Robert Pattinson isn’t attractive enough for the role of Edward, I think that’s kind of silly because he’s very attractive and was so in Harry Potter 4, but when you see his ridiculous hair it’s no wonder people think he’s ugly. The guy has longish hair and the stylist took it the front and made it go up and back so it’s like five inches high. See? He looks ridiculous.
2) Speaking of strange looking, Carlisle, Edward’s “dad,” looks really weird when he first shows up in the movie. It looks like they were still experimenting with how much makeup to use and really overdid it at first. Carlisle is a doctor and when we first see him he’s wearing a lab coat, I kid you not; his face was the same color as his coat!
3) Another weird thing was how all the vampires moved. We’ve all seen movies or shows where a character is supposed to move so fast that you can’t see it, usually they just have the character be in one place one second and then another the next second, in Twilight they showed Edward all blurry motion, but only on the bottom, so it looked kind of stupid. Also, when the vampires are crouching, especially during the fight seen with James (try to look in the background where they’re setting the fire) they kind of sway back and forth and they look like monkeys, not vicious predators.
4) Some of the cinematic choices were also dumb. The whole movie, though you get used it, is put through this odd filter that makes it look like they filmed it on the wrong light setting. I get why they did this though, they were trying to make it look even more over cast and gray. In the flashbacks, they used a sepia tone and made the film look grainy. This made it look like a fake old western instead of a flashback. In the book Edward just tells her what happened, they didn’t show it, and they didn’t need to show it in the movie. On top of that, the flashback with Edward being bitten by Carlisle comes off looking more than a little homoerotic, not the best idea for a father/son dynamic.
5) It didn’t feel like a movie. It felt like the pilot of a TV show. It’s clear they’re just setting up for the next movie, but each movie should be able to stand on its own. Another friend said she felt it was really choppy and that if she hadn’t read the book she wouldn’t know what was going on. Oddly enough my mom, who has not read the books, saw it and liked it a lot, and was able to follow it, so who knows.
6) I did not like the actress playing Bella. She’s very pretty and definitely looks like what I pictured Bella to be, but she is not a good actress. She didn’t have much range of emotion. She seemed to portray kind of angry and in pain and that’s it. I think she cracks a smile like three times the whole movie.
7) You don’t feel that they’re falling in love. Above all this is a love story and the movie just doesn’t make you feel that. There are a few scenes I think that if they had included them or improved them you would have felt them falling for each other a lot more. They just seem like two teenagers flirting in this movie.
I’m sure I could come up with more if I think about it but I think that does it for now. I would like to see it again, maybe by myself, to try and just take it in without judging it, if that’s even possible.
As a final note, if you don’t know what Twilight is then first off, you’ve been living under a rock, and second, here’s one of the movie trailers to give you an idea.
