thepeopleseason | Entries tagged with art

...and name him "Kandar." From Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book:

In Krakow, on Wawel Hill, there are caves called the Dragon's Den, named after a long dead dragon. These are the caves that the tourists know about. There are caves beneath those caves that the tourists do not know and do not ever get to visit. They go down a long way, and they are inhabited.

Silas went first, followed by the grey hugeness of Miss Lupescu, padding quietly on four feet just behind him. Behind them was Kandar, a bandage-wrapped Assyrian mummy with powerful eagle-wings and eyes like rubies, who was carrying a small pig.

There had originally been four of them, but they had lost Haroun in a cave far above, when the Ifrit, as naturally overconfident as are all of its race, had stepped into a space bounded by three polished bronze mirrors and had been swallowed up in a blaze of bronze light. In moments the Ifrit could only be seen in the mirrors, and no longer in reality. In the mirrors his fiery eyes were wide open, and his mouth was moving as if he was shouting at them to leave and beware, and then he faded and was lost to them.

Silas, who had no problems with mirrors, had covered one of them with his coat, rendering the trap useless.

"So," said Silas. "Now there are only three of us."

"And a pig," said Kandar.

"Why?" asked Miss Lupescu, with a wolf-tongue, through wolf teeth. "Why the pig?"

"It's lucky," said Kandar.

Miss Lupescu growled, unconvinced.

"Did Haroun have a pig?" asked Kandar, simply.

The E3 Trailer for Prince of Persia that I downloaded a while ago on my Xbox 360.
The haunting music from the trailer: Saeglopur by Sigur Ros.
The Android app Shazam (originally developed for the iPhone) which told me what the music was without the need for me to do various permutations of the search: "Prince of Persia trailer music."
My Playstation 1 memory card has somehow lost my save game data for my not-even-through-with-disc-1, but-spent-over-a-week-of-playtime game of Final Fantasy VII.

Based on a recent request for movie recs to add to a Netflix queue, here's a couple from my 5-star rating list: ( 12 Angry Men... )

Watchmen succeeds in capturing the main plotline of the comic, and there are some lovely sequences where Snyder emulates the slow-paced pull-out that Moore and Gibbons created when introducing a new issue. You can tell that Snyder used the comic as storyboards, using the art to set up angles and shots. There's a bit of over-exposition in a couple of places, where the script has characters Legolas the plot points. The guy playing Ozymandias is at times so soft-spoken and wooden, it robs his particular scenes of power--Ozymandias is supposed to be cool and emotionless for the majority of the plot, but there are a couple of scenes in the books where he emotes more, and I didn't really see any of that in the movie. I would have preferred an older, more mature actor in the role.

Pacing was odd--for a three-hour movie, it flowed pretty well, but emulating the comic in plot and focus gave the movie a certain meandering quality, pointing the audience in different directions as to who to empathize with or pay attention to. Not a problem during a 12-issue comic series, but an issue for a largely single-threaded movie. Part of me thinks this would have worked a great deal better as a television mini-series.

There were some changes to the ending that I would have preferred unchanged. I'm not talking about THE BIG THING, but the epilogue. I think the changes undermine some of the themes of Watchmen, but for the most part, I thought the movie a very, very good adaptation of the comic.

Incidentally, for those of you who haven't read the comic, both the movie and the source are very, very dark and violent. You have been warned.

As I've twittered way too many times, "3 out of 4 'HURM's."

( And now, a tagged meme... )

Upon learning that his The Graveyard Book (listen to it free here) had just won the John Newbery Medal, widely considered the most prestigious award for children's literature in the United States, he posted the following messages to his twitter feed:

About to drink second cup of tea without Marmalade this morning. Also, I just won the Newbury Medal for THE GRAVEYARD BOOK....

Newbery, not Newbury. Also FUCK!!!! I won the FUCKING NEWBERY THIS IS SO FUCKING AWESOME. I thank you.

He posted a followup blog post in which he described his most amusing experience of the announcement.

If you haven't read The Graveyard Book, I highly recommend it.

super_donkey's cat Dooey got sick, and he's offering artwork to help pay for the treatment.

Why hasn't anyone ever told me that there's a band out there which consists of four dudes with cellos who like to play Metallica covers?

You are all fired.

Over on the Suicide Girls Newswire, some person named "TheCoolerKing" has a list of projects that The Coolest Man in the World should be contributing to. An excerpt:

Making and selling handcrafted, custom belt-buckles. Yep... Maybe this one isn't immediately obvious. Basically, I'd like to be at a party sometime, when a random lady looks me up and down before saying, "Nice belt buckle."

At which point, I'd get to say, "Why thank you... BRUCE CAMPBELL MADE IT." I don't know what would happen at that point. But I can tell you it would be awesome.

batnandu: btw, for the record, any story--movie, book, tv show, song--that's 100% historically accurate isn't a story, it's history
batnandu: which is why i like batman

In a clear example of the problem with Wikipedia, following my viewing of 300 Monday evening, my search through the content surrounding The Battle of Thermopylae has lead me to the urge to listen to Iron Maiden's Somewhere in Time. Points to whoever can trace the train of thought...

A few notable stories from Angry Asian Man

A marketing firm, SnapDragon, has released Ten Things Every Brand Should Know About Asian-American Youth. Of particular note:

The 15 minutes of seemingly benign American Idol fame for William Hung had a surprisingly negative effect on Asian-American students. There's a feeling that Hung perpetuated the worst stereotypes about Asian people and gave non-Asians permission to indulge in two years of racial stereotyping and mocking.

To which I say, NO DUH.

I didn't watch the Oscars, but the announcer indicated that Best Adapted Screenplay winner The Departed was based on a Japanese movie. Bzzt! Infernal Affairs (with Andy Lau from House of Flying Daggers) is a Chinese movie. Yes, I know we all look alike, you uninformed, ignorant round-eye.

The New York Daily News reports on a Chinese students' participation in the recent NYU College Republicans' 'Find The Illegal Immigrant' stunt. The piece recounts some of the troubling history of Chinese immmigration in America:

( As early as 1850... )

Beau Sia, an Asian poet, posted an open letter to all the rosie o'donnells in response to her defense and half-hearted apology of her own 'ching-chong' remarks on The View. O'Donnell, after viewing the piece, has apparently taken his message to heart and sincerely apologized, all the racist, sexist, and ignorant shitcocks on YouTube, notwithstanding.

Pinky and I caught the sneak preview of Marie Antoinette last night at the Midtown Art Cinema. Contrary to what she thought of my opinion of the movie, I thought the time spent watching the movie was worthwhile--the movie itself is quite picturesque and the characters likable. I've never been one to criticize a work because of historical inaccuracies (indeed, the movie does get points from me for including a pair of Chuck Taylors in the shoe montage).

We found ourselves, however, lamenting the movie's interminable length. Sofia Coppola seemed far too enamored of the aforementioned picturesque locales and actors. It may be a novel conceit to pair the scenes of this historical drama with modern, new-wave and punk hits. She lingers too long on these moments, however, basking in her own cleverness. I found myself in supreme discomfort as the last twenty minutes or so ticked away thinking, "Good heavens, cut off their heads already!"

A group of girls behind us thought less of the film than I did, but as Pinky and I worked our way out the entrance to the theater, I heard better reviews from the murmuring in the crowd. It made me pause to consider if my bad review was a result of the seating we ended up in--2nd row from the front with retro-fitted cup holders jutting into my knees from the row in front. Perhaps we would have enjoyed the movie more if we had seen it in a theater with stadium seating, where our legs could stretch out comfortably, and our necks weren't sore from craning to watch the screen.

Or perhaps filmmakers should make films where you can enjoy it from any seat in the house...

But I discovered that watching the latter part of The Iron Giant is quite effective when in need of catharsis.

You remember learning how to play soccer during P.E. in grade school? You remember how they told you if you wanted to stop the soccer ball's motion in any direction, you could pretty much just step on top of it?

I learned a long time ago that doing that with an out-of-control superball will just leave you with a formerly-spherical crunchy mass of rubber.

So if you're going to drop two hundred fifty thousand superballs down a street in San Francisco to make a commercial, you should be sure you know a way to stop them all.

I challenge you to watch the commercial without smiling.

Sweet: a 2.5 minute long version of the commercial

Aside from receiving Ai Yori Aoshi Disc 2 and Love Hina Disc 1 from Netflix yesterday, I hit Oxford Comics after work last night, and along with the Dark Horse Book of the Dead and Volume 9 of the Ai Yori Aoshi manga, I managed to pick up Chromaphile, the until-recently-out-of-print art book from Ragnar. I love this guy's stuff--a sort of retro-modern design pinup. Unfortunately, his main site's down for a redesign, but you can see some of it in an interview he did with CrownDozen.com. It even compels me to buy and iPod, despite my car already having a built-in MP3 player. Chromaphile is a bit thin for its cover price, but Amazon's got it for about fourteen dollars. Part of me wants to buy another copy to de-spine so I can frame specific pages, but the book-lover in me argues against it.

Edit: I just found this link off of the Make Magazine Blog. If you scroll all the way to the bottom (past the photos), you'll see there are links to "Full length pictures of the robe and tunic." Check out the photos, and tell me what's wrong with them.

Pinewood Downstairs print by Ragnar.

Hell, pretty much everything by him...

Since I'm taking the time to upgrade my current work machine (a sub-500 MHz machine, no less) from RedHat 7.3 to Fedora 2, I figured while waiting on the machine to quit thrashing and start the damn install I could drop an update.

Los Angeles is a neat place to visit, but aside from the tourist traps, it's not really all that pretty. For the most part, driving around Los Angeles, even during non-rush-hour hours, approaches the most infuriating kind of Sisyphean Hell. Los Angeles has all of the bad traffic of the New York area without the benefits of a far-reaching rapid transit system.

As far as neat things in LA:

The Getty Museum is way, way cool. Now I've been to the Louvre, the Musee d'Orsay, and a bunch of other museums, but my architectural tastes tend toward the modern, so this campus of buildings was just as interesting as the art it housed.
Took the WB Studio Tour, and walked around the inside of the Dragonfly Inn. I even touched Sookie's kitchen phone. I thought briefly of stealing one of the pictures of Davey that were in magnet frames on the fridge, but I'm too much a niceboy.

No Lauren Graham, Alexis Bledel, or Scott Patterson sightings, although our tour guide did bring us around the left (mostly-unseen, not the same wall as Doose's) side of Luke's Diner. He mentioned that they might have been filming scenes inside, and I made the crass move of pointing at the window, so if you see some idiotic Chinese guy through the wooden blind slats pointing during an episode, that's me.

I'm disappointed I didn't get to dress up as Santa, but hey, that was a fucking pipe dream anyways.
Saw Jason Priestly at the Farmers Market with what I assume was his exceedingly hot girlfriend/spouse/lover.
Saw Ty from Trading Spaces get on my flight back to Atlanta. I would learn later that the man lives in Grant Park and is a frequenter of 97 Astoria where my buddy Blake is a bartender.
Also on my flight, Linda Blair, looking shorter than I imagined. Luckily, Captain Howdy didn't make an appearance, so no spontaneous crucifix-wankery.

From

ludditerobot: ( that interest thing )

I guess this list might have been more interesting if more people listed the interests that I share with no one or one other person:

24-hour revenge therapy, big slick, burrito bros. taco co., chen-style tai chi, free radio gainesville, jon resh, maybe it was utah, pastacore, rock concert movement

I've fallen out of the addiction of doing memes, but I think I had to fill this one out, simply because I'm nothing if not a sinner.

Ganked from

kawaiiryuko
( The Seven Deadly Sins Meme )

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A Winter's Tale

The pursuit of Happiness

Entries tagged with art

Why I should get a teacup pig...

Three Awesomes and a Suck

Movie Recs

Spoiler-free Watchmen Review (and a meme)

Why Neil Gaiman Rules

Repost: Help Please

Pixar-bottled emotion

You fired!

This man speaks truth

Regarding the relative historical accuracy of 300

Marching on

A Being Yellow Roundup

Marie Antoinette

Don't know about you...

Some things you should plan in advance

Even more media

Yet another entry in "Things I want"

The Angels

Interest Meme

Se7en