I'll Be Ready In A While

Adventure Time's episode 'Infinite Train' is worth watching in and of itself. It captures something universally human yet little addressed. The desire to waste time, lost in something utterly useless.

I've wasted maybe two weeks, but as of this writing I feel like I have saturated that desire. And I mean saturated, there's a self-terminal feature of all escapism. It doesn't make you happy, but it's not like the pressure builds up to the point when you boldly declare 'enough' just one day you find you want to deal with things.

Today is that day for me.

In the meantime I caught up on all of QI, watched a bunch of movies, caught up on Would I Lie To You and clocked 2 video games and today I found myself with no desire to go look at entertainment. I just plan to work.

I think what gets lost is that many, if not most, problems are simply transitional. Shit just seems to hit it's limits and stop a lot of the time, and attempts to identify a causal chain then try and optimise that causal chain into decision rules to be expounded on others are at best ineffective and worst counterproductive.

Patience is a virtue.

Artistic Disclosure

Last week I really hit a frustrated wall. Earlier in my development, such a wall would generally inspire me to give up. It was the result of basically not working on a comic for 3 years. Doing art that was almost exclusively figure san ground.

I had three panels to draw which I assumed would be no big deal, without giving anything away they are:

A woman sitting at her desk looking bored (face not visible)
A woman inspecting an item before putting it in her shopping basket (face not visible)
A woman waiting for a bus. (face not visible)

Not exactly mind blowing or groundbreaking stuff. But when I sat down to draw, it didn't come easily.

In fact the first one only came together yesterday. Here though is how wildly shit spirals out of control for me.

First I assume that I can draw it, it will come easily it's just a matter of sitting at a desk and putting pencil to paper. That doesn't happen, then I realise I don't know how to draw. Or more specifically, I only know how to draw a narrow range of things. I'm going to have to learn how to do this shit, from scratch.

Second, I start to compare myself to successful artists, established artists, then more generally the relative strategic position of everyone my age. I start to appraise the exact predicament I am in if my pathway to success is suddenly proved unviable.

Thirdly, I panic, and realise I have no retreat. My fall-back has lapsed. What I have to do has to work, and if it doesn't I am royally screwed.

I am, in other words, fucked. Completely fucked.

But these are all thoughts, normally kept private. The second position is actually where all the damage is, the third one while still being a negative illusion actually is the start of the solution. When you realise you have no retreat, you just breath out, let go of whatever easy vision you expected to happen and figure you are just going to have to take longer and do it harder than you expected.

For any comparison to be both valid and helpful, the only real thing that could differ between me and my comparative is luck. And that don't matter. They will be just as vulnerable to future misfortune as I am lacking in past fortune. Comparison is really useless.

What's confronting I guess is that I have a real job as an artist. There's stuff I need to get done, and sometimes I don't know how to do it. My job is to just figure out how to get some task accomplished.

I figured out these panels eventually. It wasn't pretty, but I did it.

Inconsolable Grief

You are standing at a party in a corner, looking at your conversation options and feeling bored already. Suddenly somebody you don't know and don't trust approaches you and offers you a pill for $30. He calls it 'IG' or inconsolable grief.

You take the pill, and then once it kicks in you will experience a perfect simulation of inconsolable grief for 6 hours. Then you sober up and you are assuredly fine. It just triggers the exact same nuerobiological reaction as losing something precious to you does. Without the actual loss.

Now, I would have my misgivings about taking that pill. Namely the $30, and better things I can spend it on. Also because I don't know this guy and don't trust him at all. And even my friends that I do trust I don't trust enough to get their drug supplies from somebody who should be trusted. I would also feel misgivings about arbitrarily building some association with something that happens to be around and inconsolable grief. I don't think XTC or MDMA works that way anyways, and if you hadn't clicked I'm more or less describing the exact opposite of MDMA.

The experience has more appeal to me. And I suspect, and know of at least one other, there are persons who like me are more interested in exploring the depths rather than the heights.

Such a drug has medical predecessors too. Namely the practice of mithridatism, which goes way back to it's namesake where you ingested non-lethal doses of poison to build up over time an immunity to poison. Much like fucking honey badgers can't be fucked with once they are grown, even with snakes and hornets and shit, they will just pass out for a bit and then get back to eating those snakes and hornets.

I don't have many good reasons not to try MDMA, I kind of just didn't feel like it in the end. Even if it offered a potential spiritual awakening. The only real reason I'd have now is that I don't like the idea of getting to unwrap all my Christmas presents without it being Christmas day. I don't in other words want to feel what it's like to have achieved something really great, maybe even impossibly great, without having to actually achieve those impossibly great things.

If I had PTSD I might contemplate experimenting with it. But I don't.

I'd have no objection though to experiencing something really terrible, without anything terrible having happened. I would look forward to the Sunday morning, not the Saturday night when I'm crying over a sandwich platter at the party. It would be to wake up the next day and say 'that was horrible, and it was alright.'

And drugs aside, I think we do have in pretty much any given moment a choice between IG and XTC. Not to those extremes of emotion, But generally it's always suffering now, to make the rest of the future easier, or pleasure now, suffering later.

Combos

I can draw and listen at the same time. I can draw and converse at the same time.

I can't read and listen at the same time. I can't converse and read at the same time. 

Casting Call

I remember hearing, I think, a triple J reviewer commenting on I Am Sam, and I basically took their opinion and that was mine.

It was this: I Am Sam, featuring Sean Penn in the titular role of Sam a downs syndrome single father. Also featured  in the same film were several actors in the role of Sam's friends, who actually had downs syndrome. The reviewer and I said for a long time (because honestly, how often does the need to rethink I Am Sam come up?) - why couldn't they have given the lead role to someone who actually had Downs Syndrome? The movie itself clearly proved that there were capable actors.

I thought it a valid argument, and on one level, the point is valid. But the money isn't.

You are or I am, thinking about with the following erroneous assumption - we are going to see the film. We see the film, and we are pleased to see a person with Downs Syndrome in a lead role of a feature film. Why couldn't I Am Sam have been made without Sean Penn?

Now think like an executive producer. You don't even have to be subjective about it. I Am Sam has probably been made with an actual downs syndrome lead many times, possibly a couple of times a year. Just nobody saw it, there was nothing there to sell the film, it never got earmarked for any kind of budget or any kind of release.

Find a way to put Sean Penn into that film though, and people are going to see it. See it and get offended. But they see it. As an EP that's a better outcome than the movie getting made and people not seeing it but being glad that it exists.

There is no big-ticket downs syndrome actor.

Move on to present day casting controversies. The new Moses biopic. It got compared to the Dreamworks Animated feature 'The Prince of Egypt' that I believe was a commercial success, the first judeo-religious film to do such in a long time and featured characters that looked like North Africans. Voices were done by African American celebrities like Mariah Carey and so forth.

The new live-action one features nobody that looks north african, or even African-American. It has Christian Bale in the lead role and Joel Edgerton as the lead antagonist. It makes hollywood look like it's going backwards, undoing the Prince of Egypt and getting back to Charlton Heston as Moses days. At best that live action hasn't progressed since Heston played Moses.

That's thinking in terms of social progress though, and not in terms of money. Recast the film with the biggest black names Hollywood has to offer, Denzel, Samuel L Jackson, go younger, Idris Elba, Anthony Mackie - there are great black actors out there to cast.

I don't know shit, but I would wager - that even with an Oscar winner like Denzel, there is a bottom line impact having an all black cast does to the box office. Oprah Winfrey's Beloved adaptation comes to mind.

Thus as ridiculous as it sounds if you had put Tom Cruise in Denzel's role for Training day, some EP would have one less Oscar and if stories are to be believed, $14 million dollars richer. And I would guess they would have done it if they could. I'm guessing Cruise can only do so many films a year and doesn't vet for roles that are really ridiculous for him to fill.

If you can't see where I'm going, or rather, have gone, I saw today on a tumblr feed I follow that 'Ghost In The Shell' is getting made into a live action adaptation, and Scarlett Johansen has been cast in the lead. some celebrity or somebody I don't know tweeted that they should have cast the girl from Pacific Rim to play the role.

Firstly, Ghost in the Shell doesn't need to be adapted into live action at all. It has very little potential to be improved by the experience. The only reason you make that film, or live action 101 Dalmatians, or Watchmen is to make money.

There's no artistic need to earmark the budget and time and talent to take a risk on 'Ghost In The Shell' it's low risk. It's almost certain to be not as good as the original. The Matrix borrowed heavily from Ghost In The Shell, and you know it blew SFX wide fucken open, so you definitely don't stand to gain much from LA Ghost in The Shell. Except to shake down nerds for their cash.

So you may as well cast a big name who's played an agent in the Avengers Marvel Franchise and cast her in the lead. And as an EP rue that the lead couldn't be played by Tom Cruise, who notably played the lead in Edge of Tomorrow, also adapted from Japanese IP.

In case though, you think I am saying that this doesn't make film casting a racist enterprise, let me be clear. It is. It is completely racist.

But the executive producers are doing their job, and I fail to think on the spot of an affirmative action solution. Maybe if the US Gov. guaranteed box office returns for ethnicly appropriate casting? Maybe. And maybe that is actually worth doing.

But the racist is the movie goer. And it's as racist as the fashion industry. It's a racist phenomena that has gone on so long, it has become entrenched. Such that other ethnic groups accept white models selling fashion to them, and white leads acting out their history. But not the reverse.

For some reason, a bunch of people will fork over $20 to see a white man play moses, a white man play a retard and a white woman play a Japanese special agent, but not the reverse.

And I don't believe in consumer activism.So there's your fucken problem pending a solution.

A Serious Comparison

What's the difference betwixt this:

And this?:

The answer be $$$. In the 1973 the Pollock piece was purchased for $1.3 million. I don't know if it was from the artist directly, I don't know what Pollock or his estate made out of it. The thing with art is that in most cases, art transactions are secondary market, meaning they have nothing to do with the person who made it.

According to Wikipedia, Number 11 or 'The Blue Poles' has been valued somewhere between $20-100 million.

By contrast Hello Kitty as of 2010 was worth $5 billion a year. Pollock paintings are reproduced too, I'm sure. Postcards, dish cloths etc. Hello Kitty is probably literally everything. Licensing is huge. The only way you could outdo Hello Kitty in licensing revenues was if you owned the question mark or some shit.

See many artists want to be the Rolls Royce of automobiles. A noble pursuit, but think of the Toyota Camry. Rolls Royce got broke, bought. Toyota Camry the highest selling car model in the world. Y

If you want to go pro, and not just indulge yourself some self-pity, masochism, consider trying to become the Toyota Camry of artists.