Giant Robot Store and GR2 News
Mall Santas never die, they just grow real bellies made of jelly. In the process of doing some Lunar Eclipse cleaning, I came across some photos I brought back from a trip to Korea. They were pictures that my grandfather had. The photos were sent to him in Korea by mom, so he and my grandmother could see how our lives in the US were shaping up to be. There were lots of Christmas photos in the mix, and seeing them was the first time this month that I really started to reflect on what Christmas has meant to me over the years.
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On Sunday, I tried my hand at figure drawing for the first time since 1995. A friend has been hosting a semi-regular live drawing session at his place with several of my favorite LA artists. It was a privilege to be invited, and a chance to get my drawing muscles back in shape. Couldn't pass that up, even in the rain. We had an incredible model who gave us dynamic poses and exuded CALM, which was perfect for all the internal stressing out I was doing about making the most of this opportunity. Working with so many talented artists makes it hard to think about creating my own art again. Seems odd, but that's the way my brain works. I'm inspired on an almost daily basis to do it, but the doing part is hard sometimes. This session was structured perfectly. We started with five minute gestural poses, 10 minutes, and then graduated on to 20 minute poses that let us spend more time with our work. It couldn't have been better. I was working in charcoal to keep things loose and it worked. I tried switching to pastel at the last minute, but decided against it. It was hard to switch to a harder pigment, especially when I had finally, after almost two hours, finally reached a point where my hand was continually moving on the paper. This whole experience was more proof that it is vitally important to return to the passions that you may have put up on a tall shelf and forgotten. There are so many experiences that pass through our lives, and there's no reason that we can't find them again and discover that they're still a part of who we are.
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I think I'm late to the Nina Paley party, but I'm crashing it anyway. Just watched Sita Sings the Blues after it came up in a dinner convo with old friends and new about recent break-ups. Par for the course topics: how to channel something bad into something good, how to make sense of the non-sensical, and how to cope with the challenges of dating creatives. One of the hosts of the evening (there are three inhabitants of The Clown House) mentioned an ex who made a brilliant film about the topic at hand. It has a space phone app that he showed us, and the graphics were compelling enough to watch it as soon as I got home. You should watch it too. There are better ways to watch it, I just needed to see it right away. Who can resist a movie with the subtitle “The Greatest Breakup Story Ever Told”?! Now, just to be clear, this story doesn't speak to my recent experience, but it's still worth sharing here. Top 3 reasons to watch, share and support Sita Sings the Blues, from someone who isn't really a film critic, she just likes what she likes: #1 – The animation and the music. I'm lumping them together because they play off one another throughout the film in the same way. Nina juxtaposes iconic Hindu art with a more modern illustrative style, that still manages to reference animation of the past. Her storytelling makes it pretty seamless. The narration (totally unscripted) does most of the heavy lifting though, and even her use of narrators is a nod to tradition. The music is used the same way. Sita is voiced by Annette Hanshaw, a jazz singer of the 1920s and 30s who I have many a tune from in my own music library. It all works – the sculpting of the love story with the lyrics of those old love songs is brilliant. #2 – I'm the number one fan of taking religion, especially the ones that seep their way into cultural identity, and making it your own. It's how I live as a Buddhist. It's the only way I'd ever recommend being religious. It appears that Nina Paley ran into some trouble with this film and bummed some people out with her take on the Ramayana. I get the critiques, I truly do. I've read my Edward Said, but I think it's unfair to assume that there aren't a ton of people who find their spiritual path by taking in texts like the Ramayana, and processing them through their own filter of culture and memory. I do get completely weirded out by people who identify as fill-in-the-blank-Eastern-religion that they have little or no cultural connection to, but Nina Paley was wise here – she let the telling of the tale (a tale that has been retold about a thousand times in some of the most grossly commercial ways ever, and gets re-imagined all the time) be told from three...
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Internet friend, Ian Bogost just released his videogame project, A Slow Year. On a cold (LA temperatures withstanding) winter night, at the end of a year that's been rife with quiet contemplation, this concept sits well with me. I never had an Atari growing up, or a Nintendo. When other kids had videogame consoles, I had a Commodore 64, and then later a 128. If I knew then what I know now, I would have learned to love it.
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