Cryptozoolacalafragelisticexpialabullfuck

One thing that surprises people about me is when I tell them I hate surprises. Probably because I enjoy being confounded, caught off guard, outwitted, out played etc. but these are all processes that I am actively engaged in.

Whereas yesterday I had a cryptic day, and being cryptic (even unintentionally) annoys me. It started off with a contextless notification from facebook to my email that I had been mentioned. Here was the mention: 'tohm ******?' the stars are blanking out my last name, I don't mean to be hypocritically cryptic, I just don't like putting my last name up on a blog. When I went to facebook though, there was no such notification of such a mention, creating the exasperating illusion that this contextless message was made in a context worthy of deletion. I'm sure it's nothing, but this is the kind of cryptic bullshit that drives 'facebook anxiety' the most powerful argument for getting the fuck off facebook.

Then later in the day my phone goes off to notify me I have a message on voicemail, even though my phone didn't ring. I checked the message to find 'hey tohm, this is Misaki. You know what I'm going to call you again later?' I haven't spoken to Miki-swan since I left Shizuoka last year. Furthermore since breaking up the responsibility of who has to carry the load of keeping in touch has always been unambiguously on my shoulders since she is the kind of masochistic workaholic that puts my masochistic workaholia to shame. So her calling me must be for some reason.

Now watch my mind unravel. Has her father died from his lung cancer? Has her beloved Grandma died of Alzheimers? Has she gotten engaged to one of her suitors? Has she misremembered my birthday? Is she coming out to Australia? Has her business folded? Is she pregnant (not mine)?

There simply is no fucking information as to why the fuck she is calling me for the first time in a year. Her tone was perfectly neutral as well. Miki isn't deliberately trying to stress me out, she speaks her own brand of English and lives in her own brand of reality.

Now I have to carry my phone with me at all times and keep it by me when I sleep because I have no idea or indication of when she will call again (or even if the call will actually come through or go straight to voicemail) but just in case it's one of those unhappy scenarios...

I don't believe in appetisers, I see them as pointless, just serve the main already. I find it a pity Russian service has displaced French service worldwide. I am not tantalised or intrigued by mystery. A good story is one that is captivating without obfuscation in my book. I don't mind making decisions on limited information, or gambling, or risk taking. But I like to be able to participate, these half-sentences and contextless messages just get under my skin and drive me insane with speculation, knowing I can't actually know what they are about until somebody condescends to tell me.

Hate is such a strong word, obviously, Miki is really important to me, somebody I will naturally worry about when there is any doubt as to what is going on. And I should state, the contextless facebook notification and Miki calling me on the same day are totally unrelated. Most of the time I just find cryptic shit annoying and or boring, like the cryptic crossword puzzles.

I hate cryptic days though.

Commission #1

So last week some time I finally finished my first commission. I was commissioned exactly upon October 14th, 2010. So I just made it within two years overdue. Here was the original brief:

My favourite book of all time is ‘The Prophet’ by Kahlil Gibran. I consider it my soul on paper and it is very special to me. The basic premise is that a wise prophet. Almustafa, has been living in a community for 12 years waiting for a boat to arrive to take him home. The book begins with the arrival of the boat through a thick mist and as he makes his way to the sea wall the townsfolk ask for his wisdom on various topics such as love, justice, death, pleasure, beauty and sacrifice. There is a woman, Almitra, a seeress (prophet) who has a deep love for Almustafa. At the end of the book she stands on the sea wall and watches the boat disappear into the mist. She knows he must go: ‘our love would not bind you nor or needs hold you’. I want a picture of Almitra standing on a sea wall. In my imagination she is very beautiful and from Lebanon -otherwise it is up to artistic interpretation. I want it to be at least A3 in size.

Because of the delay, I blew it out to A1 or 4x A3. But I thought I'd take this opportunity to talk about what I have learned about commissions by doing them/not getting them done.

1. I work best under pressure and short deadlines. Which was reinforced by working on hairspray. The longer I have to do a task, the larger I make the task in my head. And then there's just straightforward procrastination issues. Flexible deadline meant there was no urgency and hence hendersforth, as soon as any other project came up, the commissions dropped in priority.

2. On procrastinating, I believe it be perhaps a necessary phase in a profession like visual art etc. that almost inevitably the people that support you early on will be people near and dear to you. And there's a temptation to treat a commercial transaction as an act of charity. That is to say, you are so grateful to get the commission that you just want it to be the best piece ever. This drives the '3 Ps', perfection, procrastination, paralysis... of which there's a great write up to be read here. And I mean you can read the commission above, I am bringing to life my benefactors 'soul on paper' of course I want it to be perfect, and this overwhelmed me for ages. I didn't spend two years on this piece, but it did take me two years to get enough knowledge of what I was and wasn't capable of drawing to come up with the above representation.

3. There are many types of artists, I'm not most of them. Two years ago, I was literally taking on any project, fuck, six months ago I would take on any project, and did, without doing really basic research. I had only the vaguest impression of what hairspray was when I agreed to do it. I draw pictures of people, in a very comic inspired style, but even then the comic style is away from the 'realism' end of the spectrum. And that is almost exclusively what I have been drawing for the past year and a half. And yet with this and all my other commissions, I've accepted tasks that don't reflect my existing skill base... I think... my next commission (almost as overdue as the first) seems so foreign to me that thinking about it feels like this memorable seen of George Costanza's career:

I am going to throw myself at it though, and be inspired by my commissioner whom just takes on tasks and lets them evolve on their own. But in future I am going to put a policy on the subject matter, because asking me an illustrator for example to do a sculpture or oil painting requires me to learn whole new skillsets, which is fine and valuable and good, but do I build that time consuming past time into the price? I haven't even learned perspective yet.

4. Pricing, pricing, the most stressful part of it all, for commissions #1 and 2# prices have never been discussed. Originally I thought this was smart, a risk reducing strategy for both parties since I felt they were dealing with an unknown. Meritocratic payment. My first two commissions also pre-date my exhibitions so I had no reference point. In hindsight though, this is one of the major things that blew my mind out into the pieces needing to be perfect, a notion that my clients would given their love for me, probably overpay hence I needed to make the pieces so perfect they couldn't possibly overpay. Which when you write it out and read it sounds completely fucken crazy, but when it's just in the back of your mind (because despite whatever philosophy you adopt, more money is always useful) it plays you. Whereas if you have a fixed price like my 3rd commission then you can quantify just how much work and what quality is expected of you to put in. It's easy to share an understanding of meaning in that case. You can even reduce it to an hourly rate - if you are getting paid $400 and you put 10 hours into the piece then you are a $40 an hour artist, I'm not a $40 an hour artist, I think I remain a $20 an hour artist, and of course there's materials etc to take into consideration. But a firm price agreement I think reigns this shit in.

In summarium, it's about keeping the task real, understanding that you are being commissioned based on the work you have done, not on the work you imagine you are capable of. Not idealising the commission itself, but gaining some perspective on just what you are expected to produce and capable of producing. A commission should be rigid rather than flexible. At least for me, and how I work. I don't think I am the kind of artist that people want to go away and just wait on to get around to doing the best possible piece. At least not yet.

Vergo

Permit me to nerd out. I fucking love Eichiro Oda, just fucking love him. One day oh I wish, I wish, I wish I could just sit in his studio and watch him draw. To my knowledge he has no DVD like Takehiko Inoue (the best in comics probablutely ever). But this is good, it gives me impetus to try and make something of myself so I can be the kind of person that just calls up and is all like 'moshi moshi, Oda san? hai! ore wa tohm desu. eto ne, moshi chance ga atara anata no studio ni kitemoiidesuka?'

Anyway, Eichiro Oda is the fucking best in just a totally different way to Takehiko, Vagabond, Real, Slam Dunk, these speak to the deconstructionist in me, they are very much about the human condition in a way that brings depth and understanding. Oda is all heart, both appeal to me as an animist, but the difference to reveal myself as a fantasy dorkas malorcus (as the latin scholars say) but the difference is the same as Robert Jordan and George R.R. Martin, GRR is Takehiko, you feel vulnerable, art imitates life, you project all your hopes onto a character only to be confronted by the reality that nothing works out as you expect. Deconstruction of the narrative tropes that create our expectations not just of how stories are supposed to be, but how life is supposed to be. Cruel and caring at the same time. Oda is like Robert Jordan, he gives you exactly what you want.

And right now, it's just a great time to have Thursday's in the week, where I wake up and 4 times out of 5 the new One Piece has come out, and right now, there's this character Vergo that has just captured my imagination.

It's just a constant smack down. I should say, I have a really anti-intellectual bent, I don't know why, but around the time that my friends were discovering the masters of film like Kubrick and Coppolla, I had reached the resignation that I just wanted to watch Jackie Chan films and then, largely for the last 40 minutes of final fight martial art choreography.

Gesture is something that dominates my own artwork, and in the character of Vergo, Oda is just doing week on week all the shit I wish I could capture, and delivering it beautifully. Vergo is 'hard' literally 'hard' the character has an unyet unnamed ability to harden himself up into iron or something. But he's also a master martial artist, and I just like the unrelenting way he says stuff like 'I will have to destroy them', ultimately his hubris will come undone, Luffy will get to Vergo eventually. But over the past three weeks he has gone up against Sanji (always just a visual delight of gesture when Sanji fights) and the two of them fighting, it was like the best thing I've ever seen. Then Vergo took out Law this week, and it was just perfect, perfect exposition of this guy as a physical quantity, and this fight was preamble for Vergo taking on his betrayed subordinate Smoker.

You know, I just admire so much about Oda's storytelling, I can remember exactly in the Skypia arc where I just went 'woah' at his ability to foreshadow and create real emotional impact in such a tried and tested genre as 'the hero with the thousand faces'. He is really advancing a field that you just thought as one of the oldest stories to have been told, couldn't really innovate any further.

But Oda just has this incredible foresight, the late Robert Jordan got caught out by constantly expanding the WoT universe until the story got away from him and his own fanbase got frustrated with the 3 or so volumes of his epic that were just boring sidetracking. There are often times where you become convinced that Oda is doing the same, (the series has already gone double the time he imagined, but he stated he was simply 'having too much fun' and the readers are too) but every questionable character he introduces, he just makes work until I question how I can ever doubt him.

Vergo is an excellent case in point. He seemed so poorly designed, I thought he was a 'waffle' man because he just wears a quilted coat, and appeared to have some kind of waffle armour piece on the side of his face when introduced. The waffle stayed there for three weeks before another character asked Vergo if 'he liked hamburgers' and he replied 'yes they are my favorite' and it was revealed that he had a whole hamburger patty stuck to his face (which he then ate). Just the fact that an artist goes to that effort for a gag. A fucking gag, just makes me love Oda.

It's also that way of blending the visceral excitement of a 'intelligent thug' archetype (like Bane from Batman) and keeping him a light part of the universe by illustrating such a simple character flaw like forgetfulness. 'Where is my sword?! I must have misplaced it!' ... 'But Vergo, you aren't a swordsman?' ... 'Oh yeah!' I just love that ability, that accessibility Oda brings to the intricate mechanics of good narrative.

I just fucking love him, and wanted to document that right now is a great time to be a One Piece fan.

Chipper

I went to a chip music gig last night, something about chip music speaks to me. Also my friend Kikuyu was playing who technically isn't chip music, but certainly electronic. I don't know what it is, certain things get into your head and just pluck the neurons as if they are high tensile strings. I think it's shit from way deep in my childhood memories, like the closing credits of Turricane and stuff, chip music sends me to a safe place.

Doing one of the most popular pieces from the Black Exhibition 'Physics is Great' I listened to Gary Numan's pleasure principle all day, and it was one of those special moments. It's strange but just stringing together a bunch of electronic beeps can just pierce through all your conscious noise and create moments of great peace and stillness.

Case in point: there's a refrain at like 4:19 of celloesque music that is really quite special.

room for both

The Shawn Kemp piece I did for the black exhibition, I tossed up between several ideas to put for wording on it. But one was about Hip-hop being the only musical genre that really truly embraces sport, as if b-ball were the unofficial 6th pillar of hip hop or something.

Sometime sometime I 'liked' a facebook status to the gist of 'thumbs up to those enjoying live music tonight instead of football.' this is a common sentiment, not universal some kind of 'arts vs. sports' sentiment, I mean it's generally probably a minority opinion, but amongst artists it is (allegedly) common. My former colleague Ollie was a huge footy fan, but as a muso felt he copped shit if he was open about his love of the game.

This took me aback. What are we fucking morons? music vs sport or art vs sport is a bogus dilemma, perhaps more ignorant than a disbelief in bisexuality. perhaps... I guess I come from a meritocratic schooling system where you generally had high achievers and no achievers as the dilemma, overachieving snot faced pukes like me with all kinds of artistic, sporting, academic achievements embroidered on our blazer pockets, and then kids with none. I actually hated the colour system and was furious when my mother made a 'scab' out of me by getting my blazer embroidered when the school posted my achievements to her.

But I digress, my point being that people going to the footy on a friday night are not the enemies of people going to the northcote social club on a friday night. Sure one person can only be at one event at one time, but the real status update that I feel deserves 16 thumbs up is 'thumbs up to those enjoying live music OR sport and not staying at home tonight.'

My artistic friend Bryce wrote a wonderful piece on how much community theatre had to learn from community sporting clubs in their ability to engage a whole community, that unfortunately seems to no longer be available. But really, both exemplify a way to get out there and connect and contribute to people pursuing dreams.

I get as much mental stimulation out of following NBA and AFL as I do from listening to music, they are really different and really the same. I mean sport is where true improvisation occurs, season after season, game after game, you will never see the same basketball match twice, it's what makes a great game so great, where you clasp your hands to head in the glory and despair that you will never again witness Ron Artest sink a championship winning 3 and turn around and thank his psychiatrist.

Music is probably more obvious, particularly live, the venue changes every time, the crowd, you have the vicarious euphoria of an album launch to the intimacy of a quiet residency gig on a tuesday night. Admittedly, the AFL provides a number of people with a perfect excuse to sit at home and watch the game in HD rather than going out. But having booked in two exhibitions, I can say, it isn't the people who don't come because of clashes with other concerts, birthday parties, housewarmings, sporting comps, or other exhibitions, it's the people who don't come because they just can't be bothered that have a bigger impact.

It's not music OR sport, it's something vs. nothing. Those people kicking a ball round a field are just as much the kid of proud parents as the kid behind the bass guitar, drum kit etc.

Look I am a jealous and competitive person and I say there is room for both, I can joke about having nemises and rivals but the fact is, there's plenty of love in this city to go around. So much in fact I could use a whole heap more competition. Most of my friends I suspect have attended 1 art launch in their life - mine.

So it isn't the families clogging up the train lines on weekend decked out in the woolen colours of their favorite team, that are lapping up 'free' posters in the herald sun and making the copies at the McDonalds restaurants well and truly more well thumbed at the back that bother me, it's the people streaming breaking bad, game of thrones (especially since if you bothered to read you could read something truly great) and any infinite number of activities you could do just as easily in Donolly or Yass as you can in Melbourne's inner suburbs that twist my dick.

And at the same time, I don't care at all, they are an anonymous silent mass, not even notable in their absence from the cities culture. We don't think of them, hence how we can be suckered into thinking it's art vs sport.

But the point is there's plenty of room for art and sport and all the people sitting at home to get out and enjoy this city.

room for both

the black exhibition

still haven't grabbed my photos from h-wang. but let's just say, the best thing I ever did with my life. even though I've done a notch for a solo exhibition, this gets one too because this time I financially backed it, upping the risk.

Inspired

It seems all the bands I love are waking up from their winter hibernation and gigging again, and I for one am super glad. For some reason seeing bands more than anything else just fires up my inspiration, makes me see solutions and just want to rush home and get to work.

I really can't recommend seeing live music enough. There is some great shit going on out there, and you don't need anybody to hold your hand, you are achieving so much more just by being there than streaming HBO shows in a socially accepted solitude.

Permutations

To quote the now defunked Mr John Blog's 'if you want a good explanation of game theory read Richard Dawkin's "The Selfish Gene"' which isn't a quote at all but a paraphrase because I couldn't be bothered looking up the post (I think it was about Pascal's wager) on game theory type stuff.

Anyway, the prisoners dilemma, the old chestnut of game theory, let's review for those who don't play games or alternatively think playing Angry birds makes you a gamer.

Two friends are held prisoner. They are kept isolated from eachother. They are each offered the same deal - if you cooperate and testify that your friend is guilty we will reduce your sentence to a year. If you don't cooperate, you get 10 years, BUT the thing is that they have no hard evidence on you or your friend, if neither of you testify you both walk free.

Here are the various outcomes.

Both cooperate - 1 year sentence each. AKA lose-lose
One cooperates - 1 does 1 year, the other 10 years AKA win-lose, lose-win.
Neither cooperate - both walk free AKA win-win.

Accept presumably justice, these win-lose evaluations are all from the prisoners perspective.

The thing is that because neither prisoner knows how the other will react, game theory predicts that their desire not to be the 'sucker' - the one who naively cooperates while their friend is ratting them out for a 10 year sentence, they will cut their losses and cooperate, so both cooperate and both lose a year of their lives.

But what I like to believe, and law enforcement has discovered with organised crime and such - is that cooperating is rarer than you would think. People are far more trusting, or you will discover have crazy value systems like 'they would rather do 10 years in prison than betray a friend' making processes like waterboarding and 'going to the dentist' popular.

But anyway, the point is that you have all these permutations of outcomes of the various 'games' we play. Dawkins applies it to evolution, many apply it to gambling/investment (it's hard to tell the difference these days, gamblers though tend to be less superstitious) but I had like an epiphany yesterday of no practical value, just descriptive value. You see -

win-win
win-lose
lose-win
lose-lose

these are the outcomes. Believing people to be good and decent, you could say that everybodies 'golden rule' in life is to create win-win situations. Of course, some people get trained into the naive belief that somebody winning entails somebody losing, but this is not what has built all the good shit in our civilisation.

That's one except, but it occured to me that most people act on the assumption that people want to 'win' and generally in interacting with others we defend against 'win-lose' or 'lose-win' situations and aim for 'win-win'.

My housemate of yesteryear wrote a whole honours thesis on whether somebody could have agency over an act they genuinely believed to be wrong, and now I will do him a slap in the face by just asserting that somebody may actually want to lose. That is what fucks you up, throws you off your game.

Of course, I don't believe, or choose not to believe that people who play to lose, or tank, have agency over it. They simply have no concept of the winning paradoxes.

Salient in my mind, almost always are Mark Horstman's 'Avoiding failure is not the same as seeking success' (failure and success have pretty much identical preparation processes a lot of the time) and Dr Gordon Livingston's paradox 'the ultimate risk is taking no risk at all'

and I think ultimately, those that to me appear to be playing to lose, are most often actually playing 'not to lose' in their own minds, not realising that playing 'not to lose' ensures losing.

And remember those hypothetical people I asserted that say things like 'I would rather do 10 years in prison than betray a friend' they fuck up the game because to them, their friend winning is equivalent to them winning. These people live in a world where almost every game looks 'win-win' to them, and are genuinely the most wonderful people. Economists tear their hair out trying to figure out 'rational incentives' for them to play the game.

But when these people meet somebody who plays to lose - they get caught out by the lack of permutations. When you are playing with somebody who plays to lose you only have:

lose-lose
lose-win

This causes economists AND real people to tear their hair out. It's a crazy fucking game. Your friend is sitting in prison, and you have to accept that the moment the guard tells them 'you're free to go' they are going to throw themselves down and confess, anything to keep the security of prison around them. So what the fuck do you do?

2.38 pm

It's 2.38 pm, today I still haven't made it through my morning routine. I'll write about the exhibition and stuff later, but for now, I just want to I dunno, something. I'm thinking now that between this and I think the last post where I was trying to watch 'The Sitter' while writing a blog post I have written two sleep deprived posts in a row.

I hope you don't get the impression I am suicidal or some shit, quite the opposite. This is 'good tired' the tired I imagine climbers of everest feel when they make it back into base camp after summiting. Or the tired a soldier feels when she is sent back from the war for a little R&R.

It's the tired that follows great productivity. Last week I was getting up at 6~6.30am and going to bed at 12~1pm and then lying awake stressing for at least 2 of the hours I would refer to as sleep. A sleep where you can't recall losing consciousness, but instead wake up to the alarm clock already stressed out and knowing everything repeats again.

I went to strange place in my mind last week, and it wasn't till about 6.20pm saturday that everything was finally in place and I was able to relax. And that lead to a couple of hours of 'normalcy' then around 11pm when everything was done and the exhibition was packed up, I sat down on a couch and immediately felt my body shutting down for hibernation. it was the first time I could comprehend having nothing to actually achieve the next day in like 8 months.

Despite procrastinating early on in the hairspray process, I really came out of my first exhibition with hairspray weighing on my mind, and that just got heavier and heavier from march thru to July, then as soon as I was done with it I was already onto my second exhibition. It was crazy, and I only really have this month off.

But I had Jordan on the brain or something and was up again at 7am on Sunday, rode to the beach on a beautiful father's day and did a 12km run from St Kilda to Brighton and back.

Riding home the long way round the Merri Creek trail I ran into a primary school friend who was doing a 32k practice run for Melbourne Marathon, which is only two weeks before the New York Marathon, from memory I was always faster than Swanny in primary school. But in highschool he became a real meat-axe, a Ballifornian rower type. I felt incredibly bad about stopping him with 5km to go, and he put me to shame. I have to step up the training. He's running with a hydration pack and looks like he has about 10kg's of muscle on me.

So this morning I did a 25k circuit, it was fucking hot and I lost most of 2kgs in fluid in the process, but I've been wrecked since. Moral of the story, I'm going to bed.

Life is good.

Beautiful Artists

Not so much for their work, which is beautiful, but because they are beautiful people:

Bobby Chiu

Sean 'Cheeks' Galloway

James Gurney

John Martz

Tim Sale

Skottie Young

Humberto Ramos

Francesco Herrera

Bill Presing

...

there will be far, far more. This list is by no means exhaustive, but I am to one day own originals by all the above artists and have them where I work, and to emulate their lives and careers.

I am so fortunate to live in a day and age where the 'com-poo-tah' can bring them into my world.

Playlists

What did I call this post? I forget why I called it that? I'm incredibly tired. it was a good productive day. I was up really early after doing shit really late last night, pictures. I drew a lot of pictures, Nietzsche, they were all good. Now I'm watching a movie because I want to go to sleep but I don't want to wake up too early or sleep too late I'm now not sure what my fucking plan is. I'm watching the movie now, and it has Sam Rockwell in it. so I will stick to it with the end. I'm actually really struggling to put together sentences, I won't be drawing any more tonight. I was already putting typos into a bunch of my desktop is covered with ink. Its going to take a lot of time to scratch off.

Ted Roosevelt said '  In life there is no reward greater than working hard at work worth doing.'

there are greater rewards, but they are not readily accessible. What the fuck is this? I get distracted by the movie all the time and then I can't get my eyes to read back further than whatever I'm writing.

this is a trainwreck. Should I press publish now? No, trebuchet is a fun word to say. now.

State of the Art(?)

The bias that immediately degrades all arguments I may present here, is ... I don't know the name for it, but I suspect it is cousin to 'recency' bias. That is the last argument you heard carries most weight.

You see, I'd love to have a gripe about the 'art scene' except, when I think about it, the art scene is dominated by artists like me. It just doesn't feel that way. I use Google reader, of which I track about 5 friends blogs, only 2 of whom update on any semi-regular basis, and I would guesstimate in the order of 400 art blogs.

One art blog that pops out to me is in itself an agregator like google-reader. That is a blog that scours the internet looking for art and collates it into one RSS feed. This blog is Collossal and it is actually well worth checking out. You'll probably love it.

The thing is, this is but one blog of 400 art blogs I look at on a daily, and sometimes twice daily basis. Firstly, as an agregator, it is far more likely to update than the blog of somebody who like me, tends to go months producing nothing, then gangbusters for a month, then dissappear for months again. Secondly, it stands out because it is markedly different to the other 399 art blogs I follow.

Collossal's 'About' page doesn't really shed any light on it's selection criteria. Just the preferences of the editor. And it's fair to say, our preferences differ. And because of this difference, I feel like drawing the sweeping conclusion that the kind of art featured on Collossal defines the trends in the art scene. Combining this with the kind of art I am seeing being done in Melbourne, I have an impression of the art world that with conscious thought I can surpress.

You see there once was a VCE Studio Art student (not me) who sat in a chair and looked up and saw a fellow students work and remarked 'I like that.' and their teacher asked 'why?' and thereupon, the student could not really fashion an answer. Or so was told to me, another art student. And on the one hand, I don't think you need any reason whatsoever to ever validate the statement 'I like that.' but on the other hand it was a valuable lesson, because although the piece looked nice, it was completely vacuous just a reproduction of another image, because it looked nice. The piece of art in question bears no resemblance to what I probably feel unfairly is the stuff trending in the art 'world' at the moment.

The only similarity, is that for the exact opposite reasons, I think a lot of art that springs to mind when I think of the word 'art' is similarly vacuous.

But here is what I caught myself doing almost immediately. I discounted the other 399 blogs.

But first go check out wikipedia's page of 2010 in film. Not all of it, just the top 10 grossing films for 2010. You may note that 5 out of the top 10 were computer animated features, including Toy Story 3, the number one grossing film of the year. Then if you include movies that used 3D animation like Iron Man 2, Alice in Wonderland and harry potter and the Deathly Hallows, then 8 of the top 10 highest grossing movies of 2010 employed a lot of concept artists.

Concept artists make up probably 30% of the blogs I follow. Then a whole bunch are comic book artists, which I naturally discount because that's what I want to be, and it's easier to anticipate failure if you believe the industry is downtrodden. The rest are painters, illustrators and 2D artists.

Most of the 'art' world infact are gainfully employed artists for movie studios, doing concept, animation, storyboarding, character design, sculpting, set construction etc. or Game Developers (doing much the same) or comic book artists (many working on creator owned stuff, touring conventions and/or employed by DC, Marvel or Image). I mean sure, the aren't winning $200,000 prizes for portrait competitions, or selling works at Auction for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But so many I know are selling their daily warm up sketch for $120 a day plus shipping and handling. If I could make $120 clams from 20 minutes work a day, I probably wouldn't get round to doing anything else. I wouldn't need a $200,000 cash prize either. But for these artists it's kind of pocket change. I mean sure they are world class, but the fact is they are drawing a paycheck most of the time or getting preorders for their next graphic novel.

It's a word association error I make that I suspect I am not alone in. When you say the word 'art' I think of 'gallery' 'instalation' 'AV instalation' 'large scale reproduction of other image using interesting material' and particularly 'government grant' etc. etc. I don't think of the vast majority of practicing artists that are working on products that are commercially viable.

Furthermore, I'm acutely aware of my preferential bias, I like sentiment, I like narrative, I like accessibility. I am an animist first and classisist second. The artists I find it hardest to relate to are the 'iconoclasts' even though I don't know anybody who is a bigger deconstructionist than me. To me Marcel Ducamp's 'Fountain' is an all encompassing statement that Art cannot be defined. I love the piece, but most of what I see iconoclasts do I feel is simply an inferior reiteration of the same statement. Like I find most of iconoclast's works paradoxically, incredibly cliche. I get the originators, like Andy Kaufman, I'm a big fan of his body of work, but I feel no need for the world to have 'the next Andy Kaufman' in the same way as I see the need for 'the next Groucho Marx' or 'the next Mark Twain'. Same with the Sex Pistols, I loved the statement they made about music, but now that it has been made I don't feel any strong desire to get deep into punk culture. Although of all the forms of iconoclasts, punk musicians have probably produced the most stuff I actually appreciate, but I'm not sure if they are iconoclasts when you have bands like the Vandals producing one of the best drummers on the planet.

Anyway, I am at least aware of the trap I could fall into, that is, misconcieving that the art industry doesn't welcome an artist like me and feeling like it is out to get me. That's all in my head. But I feel the art 'scene' isn't aware of the same trap. The best argument I heard is that much of what I dislike about the scene is actually rationalised failure. Art cannot be defined, and it IS perfectly legitimate to produce stuff that almost nobody can relate to, that breaks all conventions of aesthetics, perhaps even mediums, and you can put it on display and if I or anybody else don't like it, that's okay. It's even okay if nobody likes it.

The success or failure boils down to intent. But if you intend to communicate something, and it doesn't get across, that is your failure. Communication is what the listener does. People who blame the listener for not hearing them I regard as, well to put it bluntly, fools. Success or failure isn't so bad in itself, as long as you are aware enough to learn from it. In fact one could even be encouraged to pursue failure, as you can be fairly certain about what doesn't work relative to figuring out what does.

But what I call 'blaming the audience' is just 'loser talk' and far less acceptable than 'well I came with nothing...' and 'I can say that I tried my best...' So whether you succeed or fail doesn't matter so long as you give credit where it is due. What kind of artist can ever succeed when a couple of people shuffle around their piece and shuffle right out again? How is it constructive to say 'well they just don't get it.'

I suspect the vast majority of artists actually do employ an approach of 'my purpose as an artist is to create an audience' and a significant chunk think 'my purpose as an artist is to create customers.' and find in these approaches very little compromise of artistic integrity.

Just as Islam is now dogged by the impression created by a small number of men on September 11th 2001, I think at least in my mind my impressions of the art world are dogged by the very small number of artists that exhibit in gallery space.

Anyway, I'm going to try and correct my word association so that 'artist' is associated with all the things I am into. Even gainful employment. I mean one has only to go to Italy and see that all the Renaissance Masters were essentially 'concept' artists for the Church and Wealthy families. And they are better remembered than their patrons.

Catastrophies and Blessings

I've finally got into the drawing zone, and seem fingers crossed to be able to combine it with the Marathon regime, so now I am doing both ludicrous amounts of exercise and ludirous amounts of drawing. The bad news is if you are a friend reading this, you probably won't hear from me till the flipside of my exhibition. The good news is, my masochism is relearning that you can draw so much you litterally can't grip a pen anymore!

But I had a minor catastrophe last night, got home from work, couldn't find the Major Tom's gig I was supposed to go to and resolved to stay in and draw all night. I had refilled my fine tip 1mm marker that morning which has been doing most of the heavy lifting, and I'm using these 'graffiti' inks that are 'buff' proof in 'paint markers, that come stock in 2mm tips but I had bought a pack of 2 x 1mm tips to sub in, which is the finest line I can get with uniformity of ink and especially blackness. I can't stand non-uniform blackness in my inking utensils.

Anyway, for some reason I have been getting progressively worse at refilling the pens, and yesterday morning was the extreme of which, rather than the exception to that rule. As far as I can figure, I had overfilled the pen and this had caused a bunch of ink to leak out of the valve and dry into crappy bits that were small enough to be sucked up by my fine tips but gunky enough to block the flow of ink once in there.

So my fineliner stopped working.

I panicked.

Then I was all like 'calm down tohm, you can use the spare one...' then I turned around and realised I'd made the foolish mistake of cleaning my studio. I had no idea where I'd put the spare tip, now everything was clustered into neat arrangements rather than a spatial constellation that is easy to memorise.

I began turning my room upside down, going through bags of old markers looking for the tiny ziplock bag with the tinier spare nibs in it. To no avail, I became so desperate I picked up an innoucuous bag that has been sitting in the room since Janice moved a bunch of my shit into it, it seemed to be filled with random crap. In this innoucuous bag was another innocuous bag, which seemed familiar, and then I opened it up and it was in turn filled with heaps of tissue paper, which seemed almost too familiar, that I hastily but tenderly unwrapped to discover the object not of my desire, but that I thought I had forever lost and was cursed to a life of misery and isolation because of which, I'm not going to go public on what the item is, but let me say, even though it is a purely symbolic object, it made my fucking night, it made the past 4 years all much much better.

I found the spare tips in a cupboard. But foolishly I took my one precious spare tip and put it in the pen that had gunked up the last one, and it gunked up too. That's when I figured out what had broken the first one.

So after a few hours of trying to cleanse them to no avail, I just did as much pencilwork as I could.

Thought I had to Share

ironic failure does not equal actual success.

Foreboding

All you need to keep grounded is a .txt file somewhere you can access it. Janice told me about some 'choice' theory that is A) highly theoretical and B) merely being floated now that says a lot of 'mental illness' is in part a choice made.

As in the theory posits that you develop depression/ocd/anxiety even schizophrenia as choice rather than dealing with whatever stimulus drives that choice. I mean the potential for such a theory to be highly offensive I will openly acknowledge, because I in part find it offensive. I really like Livingstone's definition of mental illness as 'mental health requires freedom of choice'.

And I don't know much about this 'choice' theory, but I imagine it doesn't naively claim that people are merely 'pretending' to be depressed, anxious, schizophrenic etc. but I suspect it refers to the possibility that our own minds are capable of building up a resilience to falling into these mental states. Certainly I imagine there is documented evidence of how to avoid many forms of depression. There is even a book urging people to move away from dealing with depression via anti-depressants.

Anyway, my psychologist tells me I have a clean bill of mental health, and exhibit no signs of any kind of mental disorder. And she is more qualified to make this call than I am.

So apparantly I'm not at risk of falling into depression, anxiety etc. Indeed in my new years thankyou I remarked at how impossible it is beginning to seem for me to stay in a bad way for any period of time. My lifestyle, and subsequent life seems to pull me upwards whether I like it or not.

At the same time there are situations that make me anxious, a couple of months ago, I had a situation that induced almost instantaneous panic attacks, and that situation I feel safe to say, resolved poorly, but it's not that bad, as I knew at the time either way it would be fine, and it is. But back then, just the transition from possibles to certainties induced perhaps the most sever panic attacks I can recall.

I like most people am prone to superstitions. My brains hardwired predisposal for looking for patterns, my human failings that lead me to rationalise, and the denial that is an almost universal coping mechanism for life's dissappointments lead me ever onwards into superstitious behaviours.

Good superstitions (lucky underpants) that build confidence in turn helping one to succeed are counterbalanced by bad superstitions (bad omens) and in time these can come to dominate. This is as close as I get to unravelling mentally - 'choosing' not to cope.

And the easiest way to cope I find is to just record the superstitions, the feelings of foreboding in a document whenever they arise. Think of it as a very brief, very succinct diary. Every time I get one I can put it in, and naturally I will turn to reading back over past incidents I have felt foreboding and conclude ultimately, that my sense of foreboding is one of the least effective predictors of whether something bad will happen.

The upshot to overcoming garden variety superstitious behaviour is the positive bias of doing so. What I mean is that you realise all your successes weren't generated by some magical rule of the universe (if it rains I am going to have a good day) but were attributable to you. You gain the benefit of the lucky underpants without having to wear them. But also you dismiss any notion that fate is hampering you, you become more confident in spite of the patterns you percieved lead to your downfall.

It is hard for us to admit how much of our life is determined by opaque randomness, but very rewarding.

The Upside of Smoking

Smoking is a completely irrational undertaking, ultimately it is adopted for emotional rather than cognitive reasons. A need for affiliation, or simple indoctrination by the habits of ones parents. The one single life extending decision a person can make is to quit smoking. Yes, not much good can be said of smoking.

But I will say this, at the risk of sounding like a 70 year old academic, we live in a time of great social disconnect. In every organisation I have belonged to, smokers have been the bridges between clicks. The non-smokers do not step outside during winter, nor will they interact with anybody there job discription doesn't force them to. But something about smoking is very communal, smokers share lighters, papers, even cigarrettes. When trying to suck a cigarette down in a 15 minute alloted break, they engage eachother, talk to eachother, find out about eachother, and the only necessary common ground is that they smoke.

A smoker is somebody we are conditioned to recognise as a person of ill repute, a peer pressurer, a passive murderer trying to suck you into their world of cancer. But health, expense and inconvenience aside, smokers are often the friendliest people in an office or at a party. The easiest to approach, engage and initiate conversation with.

My grandfather took up smoking to make himself a better salesman. Back in the day, the social advantages to smoking were obvious. Nicotene may powerfully compel people to smoke, and spend money and time on the habit, but it is alsoa powerful compeller to be social. Ironically the increasing restrictions on where and when one can smoke have pushed smokers into this social cohesian. I wonder if the advent of smart phones, the omnipresent excuse to never be engaged no matter where you are will impact this one last upside to smoking?

Or will regulations kill it first? I'd like to argue we should all learn from smokers, that non-smokers should take breaks with people they ostensibly have nothing in common with and take the time to expand their social horizons, but I just don't see how, I don't see how anything can replace smoking as an arbitrary introduction for who can be your friend.

I mean, I'm a non-smoker (and an introvert) and I make a collossal effort to engage everyone I can, and so often I discover that for all my efforts people have effortlessly befriended a smoker first (not that being a smokers friend excludes you from mine, but that they just do so with ease).

I've Taken Risks

Is a phrase you never hear. Nobody ever exclaims it, nobody, but nobody who takes risks seems to ever be in a position where they have to whine about the risks they've taken to get where they are.

I'm a true believer that risk is the only way to be rewarded in life, and that most people are truly risk averse. And I know I'm skating back into the negatory territory, but I've just always found the claim 'I've worked hard for blah blah blah' to be laughable. Sadistically laughable.

Because generally people work hard to avoid risks, that is where the majority of our societies efforts are channelled. But life doesn't reward hard work, our society doesn't reward hard work, well I mean it does, but not nearly so much as it rewards the risk takers.

I find the nature of the generally accepted notion of 'hard work' paradoxical, generally when ever people are encouraging you to work hard, it is n the service of some mythical 'risk free' future. In almost every case it takes the form of subscribing to an institution of some kind. The most common is studying really hard to get top marks to advance someday to a well paid salaried position. Whether it is a legal monopoly (medicine, where licenses and training colleges limit the supply of doctors, as well as ensuring quality) to landing a lucrative sallaried position at a top law firm, investment bank, consultancy group or global brand.

The tone of upset, distress and betrayal when people exclaim 'I've worked hard' evokes limited sympathy in me, in that they usually bought (and were sold) a lie. A lie that any instution can offer certainty and security. I have no problems with people sweating and toiling for a salary, allowing somebody else to take the risk. But all instutions are ultimately hypothesis being tested to see whether they match an ever changing reality.

Ultimately the uncertainty has to be assumed by somebody, and these people, the risk takers are the ones who recieve most of the rewards life offers. Furthermore they are unlikely to ever whine when the tide turns against them, because there is no lie in taking risks. They knew the die could come up snake-eyes.

Nothing can offer you true certainty, true security. They may resemble it for long periods of time, but the point is that you need to portion some small part of your psych to accepting that your world may one day crumble about you, that others may en masse think differently to you, that everything you have is a privelege and not an entitlement, so you aren't devestated into unbecoming victimhood when the institution that promised to protect you fails.

Gordon Livingstone's observes that many paradoxes apply to our lives, the greatest risk is taking no risk at all and perhaps even that we gain control by relinquishing it. The people truly in control of their destinies are the ones that signed no contracts with their life, that so and so would pay them so much for whatever services they may render. They simply render the services and hope somebody values them enough to pay.

Fortune favors the brave. Simply working hard can be an act of cowardice.

Nolan

So I got round to seeing TDKR, and I said this blog was going to be positive and I'm known as a hater of the Nolan Batman adaptations, which I don't think is true, but inevitably because I take an adversarial role in critiquing them and almost everyone else I talk to will assume the defensive, I guess this is how it's gotta be. So let's get the negativity out of the way:

1. Nolan needs to learn the 'show don't tell' principal in dialogue, nobody else seems to notice that Batman Begins and The Dark Knight Rises consist almost entirely of characters delivering a constant stream of dissertations.
2. Act I = Act II minus the hubris (as I will concede to my brother) alternatively Act II = Act I minus the humility. The scenes where Alfred implores Bruce not to go up against Bane in Act I reminded me too much of Jimmy imploring Rocky Balboa not to go up against Clubber Lang, it was like Rocky III had been sandwiched into the film.
3. It could be my personal dislike of Ann Hatheway, and the fact she is constantly presented by Hollywood as a 10 when she is at best a 6, but I picked up no sexual chemistry between Catwoman and Batman.
4. Less is more, I didn't care about the inevitable twist, in my view you could have cut Act 1 completely, lost the entire league of shadows, focused it on Act III (Gotham under siege) and it would have been a better film.
5. I've never waited longer in a movie nor wished harder for a character to die than Blake. I would have ditched his character completely, he necessitated sidelining the compelling James Gordon so he had something to do and is furthermore just an annoying fucking twerp.
6. Transformers 3 and the Avengers all had the same 'Act III' city under siege, hereos go to war under the threat of Mass Destruction, and Nolan didn't do it better, even with the virtue of having better characters than those franchises. The cops charging the league of shadows for me is Nolan's second attempt to recreate those moving scenes from Spiderman 1 & 2 where the New Yorkers rally around their hero, and he just fails to hit the emotional frequency Raimi did.

Done, and longer than I would have liked. Here then is what I like and admire about Nolan.

Firstly, and most significantly, while not a fan of twists Nolan has created a new way of introducing twists specific to the comic adaptations. The twist in TDKR caught me geniunely by surprise, but the thing is that to most of the viewing public, the twists should come across a bit deus ex machina like, because I think most of the viewing public would never have heard of Bane, he is a second, if not third string villain in the Batman Rogues Gallery, and similar to Doomsday in superman was litterally pulled out of somebodies arse to fulfill a marketing function.

The first thin Nolan does, is create twists in the world of IMDB websites, and constant cast leaking by officially listing actors as playing characters they are not, namely in Batman Begins listing Ken Watanabe as Ra's Al Ghul and Liam Neeson as Ducard, as far as I know this is the first time such a tactic has been pulled that feeds directly the fanboys desire for sneak peaks into the film during the production phase. You got a bunch of photos of Ken Watanabe dressed up in a very traditional looking Ra's Al Ghul costume.

The Dark Knight, saw the first cutting of film clips to conceal the movie you were actually seeing, all the promotional photos, posters and trailers showed a film that was purely and simply Batman versus Joker. Then when you went to see the film, Joker was kind of incedental, a cog in the machine, you can still call him primary antagonist in terms of screen time spent as an antagonist, but the climax was centered around Two Face, the plot all driving towards the creation and destruction of two-face. The story was ostensibly Tim Sale and Jeph Loeb's 'the long halloween' but simplified to the point where Joker played the function of the entire Rogues Gallary, the mystery of Holiday was dropped and essentially it was the Batman, Gordon and Harvey Dent alliance that caused Harvey to go off the rails and become a very short lived Two Face.

TDKR combined both, I think by now you should have been able to actually see the film, but in case the twist functions around screwing with your knowledge of Bane's origin (a child born in prison) and the fact that it isn't a faithful adaptation to succeed, as well as miscasting. Then also combining this with trailers that feature footage almost entirely from the 3rd act, the city under siege such that the film I saw was not the film I expected to see, and the twist caught me off guard.

All this is to say, that the tactic is new, it probably has limited application to adaptations of comics that skew towards realism (and thus reinterpretation of characters that by necessity have to break cannon). I personally don't like twists, and the twist in TDKR caught me off guard, which was beautifully done, and with so much investment and foresight in order to do it, but alas ultimately elicited the response of 'and why do I care?' which is why I could have done with at least an hour (and two characters) being cut out of this film entirely.

Second, Bane is probably the most compelling villain I've seen post original Starwards Trilogy. Or Colonel Kurts in apocalypse now, and I like him because he is incredibly simple done well. He achieves what George RR Martin achieves with Gregor Clegane in A Song of Ice and Fire (Now better known as 'A Game of Thrones') in that Tom Hardy's performance of him makes you feel sick and anxious whenever he is proximate to any other character.

The opening 'signature' scene didn't have the impact of Bane's (I think) second appearance where you immediately know what you are dealing with when he crushes the throat of one henchman with almost no warning and instructs the other to 'search him, and then you will die' which the guy complies with. Bane is in essence a 'Type B' villain, being a strong thug, that DC tweaked into a 'B+' by giving him nefarious scheming powers, and in the comics, he is fairly crap. Bruce Timm in the excellent Animated series of Batman reinterpreted Bane well by actually reducing him to Type B, and just made him menacing and kept his appearance to one episode ever.

Tom Hardy and Nolan succeed in creating this menacing incarnation of Bane, that you just don't like characters interacting with at all, because you don't know who he is going to hurt or kill. Furthermore, structure wise, he's an improvement on the Joker, because it's established early that Bane's followers are fanatics, whereas I found it implausible that the Joker from TDK would inspire loyalty in anyone given that in most scenes he needlessly killed his own henchmen and indeed his motiv was killing people for fun, where your chances of being killed increases with your proximity to him. With Bane you got the sense that for his henchmen it was an honour to die in service to his cause, or alternatively be justly killed for displeasing him.

All my favorite scenes involved Bane, the best probably being when he reveals to his rich backer that he was never in control, Bane was. Even the dissertations made sense from Bane, he was the character to lecture becuase he was the character with the most far reaching agenda.

Thirdly, vehicle designs, I don't give Nolan enough credit for his vehicle designs, they are a highlight of the films, The Batmobile, the Batbike and the Batwing are all just way out there, way cool interpretations. The Batmobile as 'Tank' I'm sure comes from the least credited inspiration for Nolan's trilogy 'the Dark Knight Returns' by Frank Miller, but I mean it took guts to choose this reimagining of the most iconic car in comicbook history, and kudos to him he did.

The second movies revealing of the Batbike and the thirds Batwing, the give you something truly new and impressive to fire the imagination.

Fourth, while The Wire can be forgiven for it's finale montage, TDKR would have been improved 40% if it had cut the last 5 minutes of the film, but I'm glad that Nolan at least used the opportunity of a concluding film trilogy to give us all hope the Bruce Wayne could escape his own grief and achieve a life of normalcy, in that he let Bruce have Selina. And even though I find Ann Hatheway unappealling, it's a kind of relief Tim Burton denied us with the tragic ending of Batman Returns, (and the more tragic continuation of that franchise) it makes me happy, because in terms of mental health the neverending holy war of Batman against crime in Gotham makes for a poor role model for children, and induces pessimism. I'm glad he got to find some happiness.

I also look forward to Nolan working on his own intellectual property, so I can enjoy it without emotional investment.

Perfect Days

I had two whole perfect days last year.Perfect. Days where you can go to bed and drift off with the whole 'I could not have spent today any better.' And to describe what constitutes a perfect day for me would I'm sure fall short of describing a perfect day for you. Just that I thought I'd note that it's an extreme privelege, it's a lot. I'm sure there are people that get more, I'm sure that there are people who are still waiting for one in their lifetime.

But consider, if life is indeed a Hobbesian nightmare of struggle and suffering, the alternative (death) is an experience of no sensation at all, I don't believe life is struggle and suffering, but assume it is, if you just get a perfect day to enjoy here and there, it makes it all worthwhile. It makes it ALL worthwhile.

I certainly enjoyed those two days, I'll remember them more than any others of the year.