"I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now."
-- Henry David Thoreau
A little while ago, President Obama swatted a fly during an interview. (It made Clip of the Week, btw--you can see it here, if you missed it when it was on Living Loud.) Apparently, the PETA people (the most militant group of time-wasters EVER) expressed discontent. (Which prompted this art by Phil Hansen, yesterday's Clip of the Week.)
Anyhoo, I digress. What I really wanted to share is this. It is a cool little online art gadget that replicates the famous Obama poster with any image you care to upload. As a little homage to current events, I created this one:
But you can use any photo, and any word. Go check it out and have fun!
I don't know that Dr. Seuss would have had hired his own personal interior design consultant for his home or not. But if he had, I imagine it would have been the guy who designed these:
The marvelous pieces above are a quick photo montage I did of work by Vincent Leman. Click here to see more of his work. Please. Because it's all really wonderful. I'm going to buy at least one of his pieces when I win the lottery. 'Cause I don't think you could do a whole room with furniture like this. Or could you? ;o)
So, I logged on to Google yesterday--they often have some sort of artistic treatment of their logo as a nod to something significant that day. Here is the splash page from Saturday, June 6th, 2009:
It was apparently the 25th anniversary of Tetris yesterday. Now, I am a big fan of that game (if you don't believe me, you must not have read the blog entry I wrote about my addiction to the little blocks). But June 6th also happened to be the 65th anniversary of D-Day, the allied invasion of Normandy to save the Europeans from the Nazis. (Still waiting on that 'thank you' note, France.)
Of the two, I would have thought that the latter would have gotten the nod. But I guess it says something about our society that a video game was considered more significant than the liberation of Europe. Or maybe that the number 25 is more important than 65, in terms of anniversaries ("Silver" versus "ten more years until diamond"). Or maybe a Tetris version of the Google logo is just more visually interesting than a Normandy version. Whatever the reasoning, I thought it a little weird. Ah, America.
I was reading an article on Cracked.com (forwarded by my dear friend the Manhunter from Mars), when I tripped over a different story they wrote about plagiarism. Apparently, some outfit in Mexico stole some of their material and posted it on their site in entirety--including linking directly to the images in the Cracked data files on the web. Not terribly smart. The article is about the retribution visited upon them, and is rather funny (you can read it here if you want).
Anyway, the whole thing struck me as rather funny (funny weird, not funny ha-ha), because my girlfriend had just a few days earlier quoted Paul Gaugin, who said: "Art is either plagiarism or revolution." I really like this quote, especially since one of my most deep-rooted fears as an artist is that my work will end up derivative. I find it inspiring, and it challenges me to take chances and make bold leaps.
My previous favorite motto (one I used with dripping sarcasm) was one I had always attributed to Mark Twain: "Creativity is the art of concealing your source." But when I tried to look it up on Google last night, all I could find was "Originality is the art of concealing your source," credited to a Franklin P. Jones. Ironically enough, Answers.com says, "Unfortunately, the identity of Franklin P. Jones is not clear. Some ... refer to him as an American businessman who lived from 1887-1929, while others refer to him as an American humorist who lived from 1853-1935. A bit of research has identified a Franklin Pierce Jones ... who lived between 1874 and 1953 and had a successful furniture store in Clinton, Oklahoma, after working as a farmer in Missouri." I entered just the quote into google, and found it attributed to Norman Lear, Coco Chanel, and--perhaps most disturbing--a Pastor named Rick Warren.
This prompted me to look up what other people said about creativity and originality, and here is what I found:
"Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory is too good." --Friedrich Nietzsche (the "What doesn't kill me makes me stronger" guy)
"What is originality? Undetected plagiarism." --William Ralph Inge (the edgy clergyman)
"Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it." --Laurence J. Peter (the guy who read a lot of Nietzsche in college but forgot it all)
I trust you find the humor in a post about plagiarism composed entirely of others' thoughts on the matter.
...sometimes he installs beautiful new stained glass and curtains.
Recently, my friend the Manhunter from Mars (his online musings are on the blogroll at left) tried to get me into a game called Spore. It appears to be some sort of weird hybrid of avatar-creation, Pokemon, and Myspace--you create creatures, attempt to evolve them, and can visit other worlds to see what the rest of the Spore community is up to. Sounds like fun, no? It did to me, too, but since I barely have time to eat, I couldn't imagine getting hooked on yet another addicting video game.
However, what he did not tell me is the story of Ken Walters, one of the digital artists Electronic Arts (or "EA" for short) put to work on this new game. Walters was an engineer in the UK before he was in a terrible accident--a forklift driver crushed him into a wall, fracturing his spine. He was wheelchair bound, without work, and living off the state for almost twenty years, and had two heart attacks during that time (as if the initial injury wasn't enough).
It would have been even more depressing to add a stroke to the list of things that have plagued and depressed him over the last two decades, had it not been for the stroke's bizaare blessing-in-disguise. After recovering from it, he began to doodle. A self-proclaimed non-artist in school, Walters was suddenly drawing. A lot. His doctors encouraged him, saying that sometimes the brain can be partially "rewired" after a stroke, unveiling previously hidden talents.
His doodles grew to digital imagery, and he began selling art on the internet. He even developed his own software, which he used to beef up his portfolio, before EA (the video game giant responsible for just about every good sports-oriented game on the market) snapped him up to create creatures for the Spore game for a cool 30,000 pounds British Sterling. (And counting, he has a share of the merchandising for the game.)
It's a custom word cloud application called "Wordle" that takes the text from any webpage and makes art out of it. Mine is generated from this blog, as of today (you probably already figured that out). You should go try it yourself.
I used a different application to try this for my tags (if you checked in here in the last couple of days, you may have seen it) but wasn't happy with the result. Instead of just clouding tags, it clouded everything on the page, and not as pretty as Wordle does. If you know of anything that might work, I'm in the market, as it were. ;o)
I'm going to make one out of the front page of the New York Times, just for giggles.
...are you still here? Because WALL-E may just be the best movie I have seen in a decade. It was heartwarming, but not in a sappy way. It was visually stunning, but not in a cartoony or over-CG way (I have issues with studios that don't dirty up their images a little to make it look less digital). It addressed meaningful issues without bludgeoning you over the head with them. (Remember Fern Gully? ::shudder::) It made you think, made you happy, made you sit on the edge of your seat.
And, to tell you the truth, I didn't even realize it until I read some "professional" critic's preview later tonight, but there are no spoken words for the first twenty minutes. That, ladies and gentlemen, is storytelling. If you can keep an audience's attention riveted using just visual means for that long without them even knowing it...well, my hat is off all the way to the folks over at Pixar.
It is scary to me to think what the movies will be like in the next decade, once the giant thumb of Disney makes its presence felt more, but perhaps they will leave well enough alone and we will continue to get gems like this one out of the big P and not regurgitated swill like Pocahontas. But this digression is for another time, place and blog.
I don't like to recommend movies much, because I think getting someone's hopes up is a surefire way to doom their movie watching experience. But this one is a must-see.
So, I wanted to do something fun today since we didn't get to go camping (see truck woes here). I thought that weather-wise it would be a fantastic day to go to the city and play, and the kids haven't been to the Metreon in forever, so I got on the net and looked it up. They have a Sony playstation store there, an IMAX theater, a video arcade, a great noodle shop, and the top floor is devoted to an experiential learning exhibit of something (they had a Maurice Sendak exhibit there when Thing 1 was little; a year back they had one on the Titanic--both were great).
Whilst trying to find what the current exhibit there was, I stumbled on the Zeum website. The Zeum is only one block away, and I had heard about it, but never been. There is an amazing carousel next door, and the ice arena on the other side of the park, so I figured between the Metreon and those two attractions, we would still have plenty to keep us interested even if the Zeum was a bust. But the added bonus was that they were offering a weekend workshop (free with price of admission) on drawing your own comic books. Both my kids are into that stuff, so I thought 'why not'?
It was amazing. The workshop was sort of a bust--not very much guidance, just some artist wandering around and commenting on our own improv, and not helping or directing us at all. But the place itself is INCREDIBLE. There are four main areas there: an animators' studio where you can create your own claymation character and film it, a music production lab where you can karaoke and make your own music video, a digital workshop where you can make computer art, and a "main gallery" with various and sundry hands-on creativity stations. Think Exploratorium for the right brain.
Anyhow, we spent the entire time (when we weren't at the comics workshop) in the claymation studio. In addition to making your own character, there are four "studios"--sets that you can change the background on, and film your character doing stuff. Here's one of Thing 2's movies:
They were getting ready to close, and Helene and I were taking too long artfully crafting our characters, so we made one together (hers is the cat--mine is the dinosaur/horse-looking thing):
I got a family season pass there, so we will be going back. I may even go myself once or twice in the next year--incredibly fulfilling art therapy. And after this week, I needed it.
