i thought it had already happened because someone posted this on facebook last week: http://25.media.tumblr.com/fa2be97efc72f6f96e3cd1f5a8b2d51a/tumblr_mm1wefWH9y1rfk4qho1_500.gif and i made a spoiler-y comment on it and people got maaaaaaaad at me.
i have not seen game of thrones the television show, but i have read the books! watching the internet and facebook explode over this has been a distinct pleasure.
no, i don't think it was a statement. he was super goth, he was like, celebrating the things that he loved. it was just really amazing because in a sea of talentless people desperately trying to make "good" art, he was effortlessly turning out technically amazing work that didn't have all the obsessive "stretching towards making a statement" thing that everyone else was doing. plus there were very few actually talented painters in the program, so it was really weird whenever you'd see a group show, because the five or six amazing painters really stood out, and he especially stood out because he was so obviously just doing his own thing and not really all that concerned with adding to the pantheon of american painting. i'm willing to bet he's making a killing as a niche artist right now, to boot. i would try and look him up but i don't have the faintest recollection of his name.
i struggled through years of art school to get really great at drawing and painting, and then when i graduated i just completely stopped doing it and now i'm terrified i don't know how to do it anymore. secretly i wonder if i became a photographer because i thought it was easier. which it is not, as gabe pointed out above, it's actually really hard and filled with self loathing.
there was a boy i went to art school who was a PHENOMENAL photo-realist painter, which is duh super difficult, and all he would ever paint were these elaborate tableaux of goth girls lounging around in graveyards. huge huge huge paintings of these! and super cheesy looking! but also really amazing. it was very confusing.
i've had a pretty decent day and a really great week so far. i've been getting a lot of really positive feedback for my current creative project, which is always super gratifying and a huge relief, since it means you're not just wandering around yelling about stuff and no one is listening or caring. and i'm gonna go eat cheap oysters with friends tonight, so the forecast looks pretty good!
i felt really sweet and supportive for this kid before the "ain't nobody got time for that" meme showed up cuz that meme makes me feel really conflicted.
y'all. so apparently rahm emmanuel and a bunch of chicago businessmen launched seed chicago via kickstarter, which is supposedly a way to facilitate small place-based business development in poor neighborhoods in the city. i feel really, really weird about it. i've been thinking about it for days and i can't quite put my finger on why, except for maybe that it strikes me as people with legit power and money (the mayor and world business chicago) trying to push the responsibility of supporting neighborhoods that were basically destroyed by shitty local, state, and federal decision making that determined how economic development played out over the past 50 years in those communities onto everyone else. thoughts? help me through this one, guys.
http://www.kickstarter.com/pages/seedchicago
i am seriously dreading the political analysis that's gonna be spewing for the next couple of days and weeks while the news tries to figure out how to make a logical story out of these two fucked up boys being some vanguard of chechen terrorists.
i think i'm saying something similar to what leec is saying down below- that violence is a real undercurrent of the film, and you spend the whole time anticipating violence against the four female protagonists. but it doesn't really emerge- yeah, the one girl gets shot in the arm, but overall they mostly get out of their vacation unscathed. they are able to pick and choose how they experience st. petersburg- they're tourists, slumming it with sex and violence, whereas the totally unnamed black characters who get murdered left and right at the end of the scene basically, plot wise, the climax of the girls' vacation- are more bound to that specific place and bound to a specific role. they're invisible people who are so thoroughly dehumanized that i feel like their deaths weren't supposed to make the audience feel anything, which i think is how the vast american audience feels in general when thinking about "gangsters" and "the drug war" and the homicide rate in black america. does this make sense? i might be reading too much into everything, but as someone who lives in a city (new orleans) that has a massive tourist economy and a massive homicide rate, especially among black males, i feel like it was commentary on that dynamic. come to new orleans and party your ass off and don't worry about the kids dying ten blocks away, they're not a part of this experience, they're not even a part of this city.
YES. seriously, the fact that the lecture right before they went on spring break was about the civil rights struggle was DEFINITELY a thing. and the fact that the end of the movie was two white girls just MURDERING the HELL out of black people. i actually think race was a way bigger and way more interesting theme in that film than gender.
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