Last week I sent my landlord pictures of a pretty nasty roof leak. Today the repair guy shows up (sporting an intense Dali handlebar moustache) and 3 hours later he's all done, patched the roof, fixed the ceiling and painted everything. Pretty fantastic.

This last weekend I went to SheVaCon in Roanoke Virginia. I wasn't sure what to expect at this con, but it was an amazingly well rounded event. Sure, there was an overabundance of Star Wars geekery and costumery, but overall it was a good con.

We arrived kind of late on Friday night so we didn't get to see much of anything then except the art room. I was smitten by a picture of a baby dragon and a kitten reading a book together by artist Alan Beck. I bid on it and won it for the low low price of $12.00. :D

( Kitty and Dragon )

Games

Saturday was primarily games day capped off with shopping and anime. I went shopping at the dealer room and was drawn to Arkham Horror. The dealer was a huge fan of the game and was telling us all about it, and I broke down and bought it. We wound up playing it twice this weekend it was that good. It's long, but it's definitely good.

After my shopping spree I play tested a game called "Black Death." The developer was there trying to get feedback on the game and I was more than happy to help kill off half of europe as a virulent communicable disease. Basically it plays like Risk, only you're a virus. Not bad, a little slow, but I would play it again.

Then we went to lunch and decided to play Arkham Horror. Well, I shouldn't have expected anything less than something outrageously complicated that's damn near impossible to win. I mean, come on, it's a Call of Cthulhu Game. So, this game has like 8 million little pieces and they're all the size of a fingernail. You play one of about 20 characters who are somehow steeped in the mythos of the Lovecraft world. Some of them are dames, some writers, some scientists, some doctors, some vagrants... It's a nice mix. You have stats, you have pieces, there's a hugeass board and it's totally awesome. Admittedly, there are some frustrating elements. For one, if you've never played the game before it's VERY complex and the rules are VERY over done. It's really frustrating to learn, but once you're in the rhythm of it it's pretty fantastic. It takes about 4 hours to play though, so you've got to be willing to go there. In the end though, it's worth it. The first game we played we actually stopped the apocalypse from occurring. The second game... Not so lucky... We were all hospitalized, the town was riddled with monsters and there were only 5 signs left to go before Azathoth drove everyone to madness. And that's about what you should expect from Lovecraft.

Anime

Later on in the day we went to the anime room. I missed Gurren Lagann because we were playing Arkham Horror, but turns out they didn't have a copy of it so they didn't show it anyway. I came in while they were showing Dogtato. Let me tell you, there was a lot of snarking going on with that one! Dogtato was described to me as a kind of Shinto crypto-racist veggie tales. While I could see it being interpreted that way it seemed more like harmless childhood fun, that at times bordered on the existential.

Then we watched When They Cry. Holy fucking god... This was the most disturbing anime I have ever seen in my life. This was a horror suspense anime about a town where strange things are happening, people are dying in horrible ways, and those horrible deaths are shown in vivid gory detail. I have never been so freaked out at an anime, or hell, even in a regular movie, as I have been with this. It puts Takashi Miike to shame... I mean to have wide eyed anime school girls stabbing themselves in the head with giant butcher knives... It was too far. The sick thing is that I want to know what the hell was going on. So I kind of want to see the rest of it, and am also totally afraid of what may be in there...

After the disturbingness of that we watched something a lot more subdued called Kino's Journey: The Beautiful World. Kino is a young girl with a motorcycle who travels from town to town discovering what the world is like. It's a modern-ish steampunk-ish fantasy world. The art and tone of the show is remeniscent of Hayao Miyazake. It's a soft sepia tone world, quiet and lovely. Not everything is perfect mind you, the first story is about a town of hermit telepaths, and the second is about being stranded, starving in the snow. But overall it's a gorgeous show.

Sunday was about wrapping it all up. I bought my artwork of kitty and dragon, and I got an Arkham Horror Expansion set for the King in Yellow.

Workshop: Human Face Casting

Then I was trying to figure out what to do when I walked into a room and saw a woman covered in garbage bags. Of course I was intrigued. As I said to everyone it was a little "Boxing Helena" to see her like that. But what they were doing was making a full plaster replica of her face. They started with a gooey layer of alginate, which is what they use at the dentist's office to mold your teeth. Then they put a plaster cast over the alginate. Then they popped it off, filled it with plaster, and bam. 35 minutes and you've got a replica of someone's face. It was incredibly cool.

More Anime

We ended the con with watching a hilariously funny show called Shinesman. Shinesman is about a corporate Sentai unit called Shinesman who battle alien forces and keep earth safe from harm, and pretend to be average business men and women. Their weapons are business cards that slice through flesh and various other campy things like that. My favorite line was "Step into the glowing green box Shina." But it was full of fabulous one-liners like that.

The trip back was lovely, the conversation was good, and we played Arkham Horror a second time that very evening! Overall, a fantastic weekend. Totally worth it.

Yesterday I had the pleasure to look at Shaun Tan's wonderful and award winning book "The Arrival."

I say "look at" and not "read" because there's nothing to actually read in this book, there are no words. However, it's definitely full of some wonderful and engaging artwork that tells the story.

The Arrival depicts the life of an immigrant trying to make his way in a foreign land where nothing makes sense, not the language, the customs, the animals... Nothing at all. Also, because there is no actual written component to the book, the art puts the reader in the same shoes as the main character, lost in a city of incomprehensible things.

The artwork is richly detailed and sepia-toned, giving it the mystique of older days. The arrival port was one of my favorite moments, because it makes me think of those old pictures of immigrants coming to Ellis Island and encountering the Statue of Liberty. The port scene here has two colossal statues depicting people in boats and greeting each other. It's the moments like this where you get the feel for this fantastic country and the hints at what their values may be. Rather than one lady as a beacon, you have two travelers, greeting each other, shaking hands. This shows openness and cooperation, hospitality, and that this country appreciates its immigrant population. You also see that there are animals as major features on these statues. This country lives in a very symbiotic way with its animal life, and as you follow the immigrant story you see how integral the animals are in this country.

The artwork depicts a world that seems to me like a gentler vision of the H.P. Lovecraft mythos (lots of tentacles, but not very scary) and something akin to the Codex Seraphinianus. It's truly a fantasy world, but one that is loaded with details of actual life. It's that interplay between these two facets that makes this such a memorable work.

I'm totally going to buy a copy of this book. I would highly recommend it to anyone.

I dreamt of the hokusai painting "The Great Wave"



I was watching digital reproductions of waves, comparing them to Hokusai. There was something important about the pattern, about the arc of the wave. I was seeing it everywhere. There was a parade with neon waves. Then I was trying to close out a computer program. It had a black screen and there was a voice that I don't recall very well. I shut off the program and I woke up.

A charcoal sketch artist drew this picture of me on the metro this evening.



One of the more realistic likenesses of me that I've had done. The bad thing was that I didn't have ANYTHING to pay him for it. I would have gladly paid him. I had a penny and I gave him a handpainted button of a goldfish that I bought at Otakon. He gave me his contact information and I plan on sending him something next week when I get paid.

Beautiful.

I know that folks are dying to see how the cover art turned out for RFD. And while I do have the full file on You Send It still, I haven't heard from the folks at RFD to find out if they've downloaded it and what they think of it. BUT, what I can do is post the front cover and the back cover and tell you that the border we put around it is a gradiated black to blue to black. So, here we go!

Please be advised that this cover art is TOTALLY NSFW!

( RFD 131 Front and Back Cover Art )

* This gathering was both fantastic and lousy all at the same time. The fantastic was the people and what they did and the lousy was the veritable plague of flies and how they annoyed the shit out of everyone there.

* Took two workshops, one on drawing, one on pysanki. Both were fantastic. Though I left my eggs on the farm by accident. Oh well. A blessing upon the hermitage.

* I always lose a hat at the hermitage. I resolve to wear only bandannas from now on there.

* The auction was great and at $65.00 I got away with all kinds of stuff for a steal. And I've got a very lovely piece of artwork that I swapped out in the living room of a very tasteful watercolor nude. God I love art.

* Everyone who bought drag in the auction (and a few who didn't) participated in a fashion show as the opening number to the talent show. Sweet Jesus it was amazing! Oh lord, the attitude, the bitchery, the posing, the dancing, the visions of cracked out queens was just absolutely priceless. It's going to make it to YouTube eventually and I can't hardly wait!

* The talent show was fantastic. It included lots of songs, poetry, poetry adapted into songs, a stripper/comedian, and a fursuit sexy adaptation of "rubber ducky." It was madness and genius and everything in between. Along with the fashion show I performed "Carmen Miranda's Ghost (is haunting space station 3)." It was highly apropos.

* We had a fun little piece of dance time after the talent show and I was taking requests on my iPod. I was doing on the fly dj'ing and it was faboo.

* There was an INTENSE fire circle. It was so amazingly powerful and holy that I just fell to the ground in thanks and praise and prostration to the fire. I was moved. Seriously, deeply moved. We're talking drumming and chanting and dancing and offerings and giant smudge sticks and prayer and beauty. It was just so much for me to take in that I had to give thanks.

* Made a lot of good friends, re-connected with some old friends, and just got to know people a lot better. And that's really why I go.

Artwork, Madness, Bizzarity. And that's only the beginning of the strange and wonderful world of the Codex Seraphinianus. The entire 350 pages are a trip into a world with its own unique language, its own flora and fauna, towering cities, games, people, customs and costume. The Codex is like a gazeteer of a bizarre world, written in its own language, with its own alphabet. There are charts of what may be hybridization experiments, illustrations of strange metamorphoses, Rube-Goldberg-like devices and species the likes of which have never been seen. As to the artwork, I think it's a cross between Hieronymous Bosch, M.C. Escher, Rene Magritte and Alexis Rockman. One page may be a deconstruction of a strange bird, and the next page how that bird is really a part of a machine.

The Codex is unlike any other book I have ever seen.

I first encountered this title in a little volume called "The Happy Mutant Handbook" which is where I first learned about Burning Man, Billboard Liberation Front and various other countercultural and subversive things. I've since lost the handbook, and thus the title of the Codex was lost to me for years. Thanks to the magic of the internet we can now look at it in its entirety. I recommend watching it as a fast slideshow, because there's just too much to go through.

Enjoy.

Thanks to rimrunner for pointing this out

It was a beautiful day today. There was a cool breeze outside all day and it felt just right in the shade.

Yoko Ono put up a sign on the Verizon Center. It says "Imagine Peace." I can't help but think that imagining is only the first step. Be Peace. Don't stop at imagining.

So I joined Greenpeace. That's a start. I'm doing positive local work at the library. I ate a vegan sandwich for dinner last night. I'm living a quieter life.

I'm slowly moving toward living peace.

And that, I love.

I'm going to work backwards on the collage cards, because I think that it makes more sense to look at them from the lowest to the highest. So I'll be interpreting the cards from the bottom right corner (card 16) to the top left corner (card 1). The numbering will look weird, surely, but it'll all become clear as we go along.

( 16: Memento Mori )

As part of the journey and experience of WinterQuest I wrote that we made a collage from pictures in magazines that would in turn become something of a divination deck. Well, I like mine more as art, but I think it does speak to my soul as well. So rather than using it as a divination deck I'm going to blog the images over the next couple weeks and talk about what's happening in them and see how they relate to my life. I'm going to start with the big picture. It's a little askew because the resizing in the scanner was a difficult task (they weren't all exact cuts). The image is huge and it's behind this cut, so look only if you wish.

( Collage )

( My Interests Collage! Lots of graphics )

If you do this meme, be prepared because some of the images can be really racy. I'm told they're pulling them from Yahoo Images, so sometimes there's a piece of flesh you may not want to see (or you may WANT to see it, just not at work). You can edit the collage by clicking the offending image and it'll cycle through up to 10 different images. I guess I've got a lot of interests. :)