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Thursday, February 25, 2010

Reflections

What if the birth of our consciousness is the death of our soul?

What does it mean to be human, if being human is inhumane?

Static Fish is an anthology produced periodically by the energetic, ambitious, and aspiring cartoonists at Pratt. The upcoming issue is going to be full color. The editor-in-chief is the charming Jane Wu, who happens to be taking my Sequential Art course this semester. I am helping them produce this issue, and I hope to continue helping out in an advisory role.

Here then is my submission for Static Fish Spring 2010, in full color!

Reflections, starring the indomitable Brothers Sunrays:

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Blizzard

Last Wednesday we had a blizzard in New York City. I took some photos of my friends Thorsten and Nikolas Nicodemus Sunrays playing on my roof. It snowed for around twenty four hours non-stop. These photos were about twelve hours into it. Enjoy.



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It should be large enough to read the text, but I have noticed in Safari it opens up fitted to the screen size.

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Red Riding

Friend of Thursday City, Kosta Stratigos, and I recently went to see a marathon screening of the Red Riding trilogy. If you haven’t heard of it, it is a BBC Channel 4 production that is being pushed onto the big screen in America by the good people at IFC. The individual films are entitled 1974, 1980, and 1983. They are directed by three different directors and, inexplicably, in three different formats. The screenplays were all written by the same man, Tony Grisoni.

The films were filled with bleak atmospheres, truly terrifying characters, violence, intrigue, and more. In typical British fashion they are unafraid to cast actors who actually fit the part, rather than a collection of beautiful people. The characters are ugly and scary and tough and grim. And they match their landscape. There were easily three of the most convincingly terrifying villains you will ever see on the liquid landscape of moving images. And they were terrifying, because they seemed like real men. Men who would stop at nothing to have their way. Men who looked and sounded like they had been birthed of coal mines and rock quarries not women. When they say: “To the North where we do what we want.” you believe them and you don’t want to be anywhere near the North, where they are doing what they want, because what they want may destroy you.

Having watched all three of them back to back I find it difficult to separate them from one another entirely. They are all set in Yorkshire, and have recurring characters throughout, though in each film different characters are in the lead. The background for the films are a series of kidnappings and murders that terrorized and horrified Yorkshire during this time period. Tentatively the attempt to solve these murders by several different people is what the films are about. But in actuality they are about the devastating impact that ruthless and unscrupulous men can have on every aspect of life in a community and society. The films explore the way that ruthlessness and drive for power creates a seemingly inescapably self-reinforcing matrix, for both the perpetrators of power and its victims. Most people are likely to watch these films and see them as typical conspiracy theory paranoia or gratuitously violent. And the films don’t do much, explicitly, to sidestep those interpretations, but in truth the actions that these men and women choose are woven together in an inevitable and inextricable mesh. The mesh is very messy and there are many loose threads, but this only suffices to make the films more life like. Life never really resolves itself in the neat ways that the entertainment industry would have us believe.

As ruthless as the characters are in their drive for power, the films are just as ruthless in exposing the workings of human character. Over and over we see the way that man’s actions doom or fate him to certain other actions, and how those actions reverberate throughout the lives of communities. We see the way that, whether explicitly or not, we are all caught up in a conspiracy. In truth it is the tacit conspiracies that are the most binding. Just as the Fenris wolf was finally bound by the most ephemeral of bonds, the Yorkshire of these films is bound by invisible and unbreakable ties. As communities turn a blind eye to domestic abuse, police brutality, corporate plunder, vice, etc. they doom themselves to being preyed upon, abused, brutalized, plundered, and victimized. One of the few redeeming characters in the trilogy, journalist Barry Gannon, says at one point something to the effect of: “The devil wins when good men do nought.” This is a paraphrase of Edmund Burke’s aphorism: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” For me this scene and this line was the moral axis that the entire film revolved around.

As an aside, we were two rows up from Wallace Shawn. If you don’t know him by name you have definitely seen him in Woody Allen movies, “My Dinner with Andre”, or his most iconic role, as Vizzini, in “the Princess Bride”. I spoke to him while waiting for the theater to open and he was quite nice and gracious. You can see him here through the hole I blasted in Kosta’s head, sorry Kosta:

Thursday, February 4, 2010

And another one

I started up yet another blog, this one for my Spring Sequential Art class. It should be good since we started it at the beginning of the semester instead of the end. Hopefully, there will be a lot of good posts for several months to come. The name of the blog is So Sequential. Go check it out: sosequential.blogspot.com. There is already some good stuff.

This is a round robin that our guest of honor, Jane Mai, started.
She was visiting.
Perhaps a bit lost?

Monday, February 1, 2010

What is given

Thorsten and NikNic love to exercise their physiques and their psyches. And amazing natural landscapes are conducive to both.
So, just try and stop them.