Anyway, here’s me in an Auto (rickshaw) driving through an intersection. In total it took about 5 minutes to drive ten feet; here’s the final minutes of claustrophobic, smelly traffic chaos. Par for the course in India.

[quicktime]/random/20080110/night_traffic_ahmedabad.mp4[/quicktime]

Jean Giraud, aka Moebius, is the single greatest influence on my art. Born in Paris in 1938, he is in my opinion, by far the greatest illustrator to have lived. Moebius doesn’t have a particular style; rather, he has thousands of styles, often unique to the project he is working on. One of the founders and lead contributors to the seminal 1970′s comic magazine, Metal Hurlant (better known on this side of the Atlantic as Heavy Metal Magazine), his career has been as prolific as it has far reaching and influential.

You may know him indirectly from his contributions as storyboard artist for movies such as Alien, Abyss, 5th Element, Tron or countless others. His short comic with Dan O’Bannon, The Long Tomorrow, influenced the phenomenal movie Blade Runner as well as the writings of William Gibson, my favorite science fiction author.

I’ve learned so much from seeing and absorbing Moebius’ works. I’ve focused on drawing speed and line quality. I’ve learned to embrace the surreal and non-clich� in my own work, I’ve learned to adopt countless styles of drawing and creating, I’ve learned to play with narrative flow and just make stuff up as I go along. But my own work pales in comparison to the master.

I’ve long since stopped reading comics, and long since stopped drawing, yet the Moebius influence pervades my work even to this day. He was my last, and single greatest, influence in drawing.

There is precious little of his work on the web, and I don’t have a scanner, so alas I can’t provide many good examples of what he is capable of. Suffice to say I have at least 12 of his graphic novels, my favorite being his and Stan Lee’s epic Silver Surfer: Parable.

A thing of beauty, Silver Surfer is graceful, angelic and renaissance-inspired. Galactus is a massive false god who attempts to destroy human civilization. Page after page of jaw-dropping futuristic cityscapes, glass citadels and epic battles for earth’s fate.

Jean Giraud is a fountain of creativity. He is unto drawing, what Michelangelo is unto marble sculpture: pure genius. Horror, eroticism, fantasy, sci-fi, gorgeous desert landscapes, surrealism… he does it all, and better than I’ve seen it done before or since.

A documentary about Moebius is posted online at drawn.ca.

To see how strong an influence he was on my teenage mind, check out the old drawings at the bottom of my portfolio page.

A lengthy interview with her has surfaced on the web. She’s a very eloquent, brainy spokeswoman! She is certainly role model material, and I’m glad the Firefox people do what they do.

Check it out.

Moral of the story: most web hosts have ‘gotchas’ and this is Godaddy.com’s. Bluehost.com has their own catches, but are a much better choice. Maybe I’ll move stimuli.ca to my account with Bluehost.com.

I also love my wage, which is generous and is just the starting wage. I’ve had my eye for years on a pair of audiophile-grade, floorstanding, unique and incredible speakers called Ohm Micro-Walsh Talls, which sell for over a grand US plus shipping. Not only can I now afford them, I can afford a new pair every paycheck. I’ve got my Visa bill licked after the first payday. I’m not sweating my student loans.

Work hard and play hard. And sleep hard. That’s always been my lifestyle and I get to live it every day. Nothings as great as getting up at 7 am and being stoked about the day ahead.

Happiness is feeling appreciated, and I do.

The middle piece was horrifying! But in a good way! It was by a female Russian composer who Vadim worked closely with many years prior. I’ve never taken a liking to Shostakovich, who always seems to fall short of the mark for me. It’s just not extreme enough for me.

Sofia Gubaidulina’s masterpiece Offertorium was compelling, anxious, and terrifying, like the soundtrack to a Hitchcock thriller. Not everyone there loved it (most people prefer beauty to horror; I like both), but I was riveted. Astounded. Sofia has more balls than any male composer I’ve ever heard. It was the most maculine, unyeilding, strong piece I’ve yet heard in a classical music setting.

Awesome!

Many people have expressed interest in how my 3D work is progressing. I’ve got just over a month of classes left, and just over two months until Industry Night – when my classmates and I unleash our skills upon the world, and in particular, potential employers. I’m pretty excited.

Part one of my demo reel is just about finished. I’m modeling the final character, and am well underway with rendering out my final movie sequences.

Here’s some random clips and screenshots of part one – tentatively titled The Floating Islands. Yes, the little boy bears some resemblance to me as a kid ;)

My favorite pieces were the life-size whale skeletons made out of sawn white plastic lawn chairs bolted together. Beautiful, massive, mysterious, eye-candy with an implicit, but not too trite, message about what we leave behind when we’re gone. Sad, silent, ivory white behemoths suspended from the ceiling; a reminder of the past.

The other highlight of the show was his West Coast aboriginal masks made from Nike ‘Air Jordan’ shoes stitched together in creative ways. Which sounds daft but actually works; the back, white and red are the traditional colour palette of native art here. These are beautiful, weird, grotesque, majestic… I could go on. Instead, check the photos I took before (and after) a security guard informed me that taking pictures is not allowed.
I will be the first to admit that I’m not a fan of West Coast native art. Living in Vancouver, it’s everywhere; from the tacky sculptures and paintings at airports, hotels and parks to the boxes that smoked salmon comes in, to tasteless T shirts in tourist districts. I cringe when I see Emily Carr paintings (and thusly avoid the top floor of the VAG). I also find art that plays the white-guilting racial card irritatingly clich?. So it was great to see a show that was not “native art” but rather contemporary art that is strong, thought provoking and about as unclich? as any I’ve seen.

You owe it to yourself to check it out.

The photo gallery options out there are numerous and very frustrating. Virtually none of them integrates with WordPress in any satisfactory way. For a month now I’ve tried various options, settling on Gallery2, a solid image gallery for sure, but I’ve recently given up in frustration. Using the WordPress-Gallery2 bridge scripts has resulted in an error-prone website (try enabling path rewriting in wp-gallery2 to see what i mean) that has really ugly site-design-breaking non-integration with wordpress. I’ve also come across no desireable themes for Gallery2, save PGtheme, which looks neat, but destroys all html standards compliance, has endless, confusingly named configuration options, etc. And through no fault of PGtheme, it made my ‘embedded’ Gallery2 page stick out like a sore thumb. And all this sits atop Gallery2 which has far too many configuration options, and mediocre layout and usability.

Side note: Someone really strong in graphic design should tackle the user interface, layout, icons, logo, etc, of Gallery2 and pare it down to a simple, aesthetically pleasing, small software package (Gallery2 is currently 20+MB uncompressed) with sane defaults (ie: no visual clutter, uneccessary information, stuff no one cares about, etc.). Don’t make me do it, people!

But the nightmare is over: Gallery2/WPG2 is uninstalled, and all is right with the world. Why am I so happy? Two reasons: the jPortfolio and Flickr Photo Album plugins. Both are brand spanking new. Both allow me to do exactly what I always wanted with my photos. Easily. Beautifully. Instantly.

I use jPortfolio to show small square thumbs of recent photos from Flickr on the ‘footer’ (lower) section of this site. I very easily specify how many images to show, their dimensions, and when clicked on, the ubiquitous and clever Lightbox javascript dims the page and loads the image selected on top. Neat!

The Flickr Photo Album plugin allows me to create a virtual page, which when called, loads thumbnails from my Flickr account (cached locally of course) and displays them flawlessly integrated into my site. So flawlessly, in fact, you’d have no idea the images are on flickr.com, not stimuli.ca. And my Flickr albums are preserved, to boot! No scattering unrelated images all over the gallery page. [edit: I've tweaked Flickr Album to work with Hemingway better. Get it here.]

If you’re a WordPress user looking for a sane, easy to use method of integrating photos and images into your blog, you owe it to yourself to check these plugins out. They are the icing on the WordPress cake of fun!

I should also mention I’m not super-huge into house; most house is a little too “flaming” for me… a little too disco-ish or tacky or whatever. I’m generally not into vocals either.
This guy doesn’t just do house; he does druggy, spatial, liquid, freaky, groovy house that ripples and smears with tracers, that hovers in the air between your speakers and you. This guy does my kind of house. This music reminds me of coming home high as a kite as a teenager and listening to CITR 101.9 FM in Vancouver and listening to the alien sounds of house, drum and bass and techno until the wee hours of the morning, or until the drugs wore off and I could sleep. Music so far out there as to be almost inaccessible, yet strangely seductive. True human creativity in its rawest, purest form.

This music actually makes me feel high, the highest honor of any urban art work. It makes me nostalgic. And speaking of drugs, I’m guessing Joshua Collins did his fair share of acid back in the day.

Whoa.

linky

more linkage

Songs I bought:

Without You, Mesmotized, Mesmorize, Never Let Go, Nastiness, Feel It In The Air, Must Please You, Last Chance, World Keeps Turning, Evolution (Josh Collins remix)