oddbill

No child can outlast me. I have the inexorable dedication of purpose that nature has only otherwise granted to glaciers and the withering sands of the Sahara.

East Side Foodies Need Men!

The pool here is strangely coffin shaped. Otherwise the ambiance is very life affirming.

A sure fire gift: Winter Wet Suit.

And, a brief, improvised dramatic performance via Facebook:

Yousha: Yousha is restless.

Oddbill: Me too – lets go punch some strangers.

Yousha: Haha that’s exactly what I feel like doing…how did u know? I shoulda came for a drink but I was working : (

Oddbill: Maybe it’s good you didn’t, the both of us punchy, it would have ended up like an old west saloon. Someone would have gone through the plate glass window.

Lien: Ok. William I don’t know you, but that is the funniest comment I have read in long time. kick some booty Yousha!

Oddbill: If you want, Lien, you can start punching them from the Bay Area and head south, Yousha & I will swing and bludgeon our way north, and wherever we meet up, we’ll get a drink there.

Yousha: Bill-we are fun drunks. We would punch people and then run away laughing : )
Lien-the word ‘booty’ is even funnier than Bill’s comment. Yes! We’ll meet in Pismo Beach!

Oddbill: All the clams we can eat!

Yousha: Don’t make me take off my stiletto…someone might end up with it in their skull around the central valley area!

Oddbill: Whoever gets the stiletto heel to the skull, I’d like to see him explain THAT to his wife when he gets home.

Yousha: LMAO, he’ll have some splainin’ to do!

Oddbill: “Honest Honey – two crazy people from Los Angeles came punching their way up the coast looking for clams!” “Tell it to my lawyer, dear.”

Lien: the word booty makes every conversation better, more interesting and in one-on-one combat, a hell of a lot more fun. Stilettos also add to the je ne sais quoi.

Yousha: Well I’ll resort to using my arse, stilettos, and clam shells to throw at and punch people with!

Lien: Thats the fighting spirit!

Fight on, good readers. Fight on.

Arthur Rackham, illustration for Alice In Wonderland uploaded to Flickr by Foxtongue. She has many cool vintage photos you should look at!
 

It’s January 27th, which on the Oddbill Almanac is known as Rabbit Hole Day…

Both the idea for and the description of this day have been shamelessly cribbed from the LiveJournal entry of someone called Crisper.:

January 27th is the birthday of Lewis Carrol, author of ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND. Alice fell down a rabbit hole into a place where everything had changed and none of the rules could be counted on to apply anymore. I say, let’s do the same: January 27th, 2005 should be the First Annual LiveJournal Rabbit Hole Day. When you post on that Thursday, instead of the normal daily life and work and news and politics, write about the strange new world you have found yourself in for the day, with its strange new life and work and news and politics. Are your pets talking back at you now? Has your child suddenly grown to full adulthood? Does everyone at work think you’re someone else now? Did Bush step down from the White House to become a pro-circuit tap-dancer? Did Zoroastrian missionaries show up on your doorstep with literature in 3-D? Have you been placed under house arrest by bizarre insectoid women wielding clubs made of lunchmeat?

Let’s have a day where nobody’s life makes sense anymore, where any random LJ you click on will bring you some strange new tale. Let’s all fall down the Rabbit Hole for 24 hours and see what’s there. It will be beautiful.

I’ve modified it to make it a bit more universal, as it is a fantastic idea:

Instead of your normal daily life, do bizarre things you might never otherwise consider doing. Say yes where you might usually say no, and no when you might usually say yes. Is there a food you don’t eat on principal alone? Eat it! Is there a person you have always been afraid to talk to? Talk to them! You can do that today, because the upside-down rules of the Wonderlands are seeping out of reflections everywhere today.

(P.S. – while you are figuring out what to do, take a look at these amazing pictures. This is exactly the kind of beautiful strangeness you should be giving to someone today.)

What are these things? Photo-sketches, I guess.

I’m going to ramble about a book for a little bit. A few days ago I started reading Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace’s madhouse of a semi-satirical epic. I’ve heard nothing but praise for this book, but frankly I’m not enjoying the experience of reading it. I’m something like a hundred pages and several multi-page endnotes into a thousand page commitment, and so far I’ll be damned if I could say with any confidence who anybody is or what is happening. It’s not that the prose is opaque, it’s more that the segments about wildly different and unrelated characters jump threads from one to another with seemingly arbitrary whimsy, and each of these threads consists mainly of incredibly long-winded rambling descriptive passages that just give you nothing to hang anything on.

World-building in a novel is a plus for me, and this one certainly has that. It may be that nothing much concrete has happened because there is a lot of world-building groundwork to lay. I’m giving it the benefit of good recommendations and plowing forward in the hope that this is what is going on. But another annoyance here is that the world-building is largely satirical, which almost automatically makes me less than interested. It’s not that I can’t appreciate the cleverness of satire, it’s that satire tends to counter my ability to intellectually invest in any of the characters or arguments the book might advance. It’s as though the pose of disdain required for satire causes me to take the author himself less than seriously, and I guess mockery comes easily, and suggests shallowness.

Not that I think this book is callow. From all I’ve heard it is profound and moving. I just haven’t come across the profundity yet, and I’m very far from moved. It is really a chore to pick up again. This is definately a case, I think, of an author’s style working against his intelligence as far as my engagement with the piece is concerned.

Thomas Pynchon is another one who I’ve been unable to penetrate as a result of the fog of his style. I’ve got two of his books lined up to try tackling again after DFWs. I must be feeling masochistic.

An interesting side-note to this: When I’m reading a book that is either amazing or confounding, I’ll usually Google around looking for people’s opinions to see if they help me figure out where I stand in relation to the piece. It’s usually eye-opening, there are usually facts or observations I did not know of that deepen my understanding. So, though it’s early for it, I did this for Infinite Jest and found a couple of blogs that people set up to journal their reading of this book.

A little later, unrelated to this book, I came across a couple of blogs journaling readings of the equally challenging idiosyncratic comic book epic Cerebus by Dave Sim.

The idea of blogging your way through a reading of a large, difficult book is interesting. Sort of like a critical seminar of one. I imagine it must really help to assemble a lasting understanding.

There is a large art show in Los Angeles every year – it used to be held in a couple of hangars at the Santa Monica Airport, but this year it was down the street from me at the LA Convention Center. I’ve missed too many interesting things at that Convention Center since I moved in here over 2 years ago, so I walked down to see it.

I didn’t take too many pictures, as there was a “No Photography” sign, though I probably could have. I’m kind of glad I didn’t though, since taking pictures often causes me to not really look at things until later, when I’m going through the photos. Then, it’s generally too late, as all the valuable lessons are really to be had from looking at the paintings and sculptures in person.

There were some really wonderful things there. In particular I loved Khang Pham-New’s sculptures. The large one they had there was Escutcheon, and it really is mesmerizing to look at up close.

There were both contemporary and antique dealers there, and I was surprised to find three actual Bouguereaus on display! I’ve never seen any of these paintings in person, and they were magnificent.

There was also a dealer who handled prints of old botanical illustrations. Those were gorgeous, but the way she had them framed was almost better than the drawings themselves. There were several galleries with pieces that took advantage of optical illusions, or the texture and shadow-casting of different materials (some fine-mesh wire horse bas reliefs with oblique lighting were stunning). There was also an abstract wood sculpture of a woman running with a horse that was stylized in a way similar to something I was doing in a sculpted bottle design for a client late last year. That design has remained a set of drawings, but seeing this sculpture really makes me want to bring that bottle into three dimensions.

I was struck by how high quality everything was, and not in a safe, tedious way (or at least not got the most part!). There was really good work on display. I’ve been going to the Downtown Art Walk here in LA for over a year now, and I rarely see work this skilled or fully formed at any of those galleries. I don’t know how to define it, but these pieces had substance.

It was a good couple of hours.

On the way back home, since I didn’t get to take many pictures at the show, I decided to try a couple of self portrait experiments.

This one is built out of a snapshot of my reflection in the convention center doors. I was going for a kind of playing-card feeling:

And this one I tried to make somewhat unsettling. I think of it as an illustration of a conscience:

A re-imagining of the 1930′s space adventure comic book character Rex Dexter.

In the picture, from left to right, are Cynde, Rex Dexter, Dr. Harvey and some guy who is Dr. Harvey’s assistant, but is never named.

I did this for Warren Ellis’ Whitechapel forum Remake/Remodel challenge thread.

Although this was meant to be just an exercise, I’ve grown really attached to these character designs, and have been thinking of ways to make them their own thing so I can do something more with them.

Several years ago I created some costumes for a short film a friend made based on characters from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Initially I did some design drawings, but as deadlines loomed I found that I didn’t have enough time, operating as a one man costume shop, to adhere to the discipline of concept design, working drawings, build. I ended up just going with my gut and building pieces straight up, with little or no design work. I worked around the clock for many days. I called in “sick” to work so often I was afraid I’d lose my job. At one point I became so fatigued I lost the ability to distinguish color. I could see that things had different colors, but I couldn’t tell what they were!

Despite (because of?) this madness, the costumes came out pretty good.

Afterward, when the whole project was finished, I thought I’d like to go back to some of the characters and re-design them in drawings the way I might if the film ever got a budget and the costumes could be re-built closer to the heart’s desire.

I never finished this re-design, but some of the drawings are nice.

I thought I’d post a couple of them for you to see.

At some point I’ll go back and assemble all the photos, design drawings and stories from that experience and get them up here, because I think looking at the whole experience laid out online will be fun. I might even finish the re-design project.

Hope you enjoy looking!