Monday – Dada

in

Nonapologist prawn, exhibit A: 'Being boiled alive does not mollify my rage at being captured!'

Headcrab: (thinking) 'Brains!'

At right, bottom: Vertical integration is no excuse for blazes of Dadaist glory! Dadaism...the product of feeble graspings at coherency out of incoherency indulged...ultimately recursively insolvent and bound to bring shareholder suits over reckless abandonment of substantive duty in a leveraged signifier-signified buyout. Remember: being a headcrab does not preclude being beautiful!

Sunday – This Side of Paradise

in

 

 

"The afternoon waned from the purging good of three o'clock to the golden beauty of four. Afterward he walked through the dull ache of a setting sun when even the clouds seemed bleeding and at twilight he came to a graveyard. There was a dusky, dreamy smell of flowers and the ghost of a new moon in the sky and shadows everywhere...Evening after evening the senior singing had drifted over the campus in melancholy beauty, and through the shell of his undergraduate consciousness had broken a deep and reverent devotion to the grey walls and Gothic peaks and all they symbolized as warehouses of dead ages. The tower in view of his window sprang upward, grew into a spire, yearning higher until its uppermost tip was half invisible against the morning skies, gave him the first sense of the transiency and unimportance of the campus figures except as holders of the apostolic succession...The night mist fell. From the moon it rolled, clustered about the spires and towers, and then settled below them, so that the dreaming peaks were still in lofty aspiration toward the sky. Figures that dotted the day like ants now brushed along as shadowy ghosts, in and out of the foreground. The Gothic halls and cloisters were infinitely more mysterious as they loomed suddenly out of the darkness, outlined each by myriad faint squares of yellow light."
– F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

Saturday – Greece and Sheep

in

On the left: "It was pleasant to drive back to the hotel in the late afternoon, above a sea as mysteriously coloured as the agates and the carnelians of childhood, green as green milk, blue as laundry water, wine dark. It was pleasant to pass people eating outside their doors, and to hear the fierce mechanical pianos behind the vines of country estaminets. When they turned off the Corniche d'Or and down the Gausse's Hotel through the darkening banks of trees, set one behind another in many greens, the moon already hovered over the ruins of acqueducts..."

– F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night

On the right: The opening bars to the theme song from OKHC, then... 'Mozart!' she moaned in her agony, sick. As the world gyroscoped inside her head, she fancied she could hear the pulsing of her stomach in the interval between each passing car's whisper, streaking past her ears like shimmering silver comets in the cool darkness of the night. She closed her eyes and sought stillness, but could only find it above. The nausea swept through her on the coattails of dismay as she wondered if the raw cake mix was more than mere funfetti, if it was in fact, dreaded salmonella.

Friday – Lion and Mad Hatter

in

  'My dear Royal Highness, the truth is in the details.'  'Hurm hurm, you may be right, Mister Haberdasher.'

Though I was conferring with a friend and apparently the last accepted common use of 'haberdasher' for a hat-maker was in the fifteenth century? Am I simply incredibly outdated? Apparently the correct use is 'milliner', which sounds faintly too agricultural.

Daily Moleskine Sketches

in

Two years ago, I made a New Year's resolution: take one photograph a day. I called it the 365 Project. That worked out quite well, and I managed it with the exception of a few memory card snags. This year, I wanted to do one sketch a day, but with taking a break from law school and holiday traveling, didn't manage to think about it until now. Which is sort of the point, I guess, that I stop and commit myself to one sketch a day.

The most ready medium for me is a plain, small Moleskine notebook. It's easy to carry around, and has passable paper even if it's not the Moleskine sketchbook. I'm most experienced in pencil and watercolor, but I think that sort of thing might have to be reserved for special weekend posts or end-of-month posts.

What do I use?
  • Kokuyo Calsh PS-131 0.5 mechanical pencil
  • Sakura Pigma Micron 005 and 03 – black
  • Sakura Pigma Brush – black

Now that I have committed myself to this, here we go!