giant hello kitty

random drawing and quote

Click for Gapingvoid quote source, the dependable Hugh, who also says:
'Being a book author is not important to me. Neither is being a blogger or a marketing guy. Drawing cartoons is important to me. I know that if I keep on drawing the cartoons, interesting things will come out of it eventually, so my plan is to to just keep focusing on that.'
Something very wonderful in this.

ah well

I wanted to systematically think about the integration between art and living in my downtime today. This was in response to a blog that I have flagged but not yet read. However, my difficulty concentrating and focusing continues. I did keep thinking about the integration, though, as I crossed paths with James Alison, Donata Wenders, and Michael Chabon.

the english surgeon

I have not been able to get this drawing right at all. Not sure what this is indicative of, though the first go clearly shows that I am finding it hard to stay focused at the moment. But I start the week feeling very upbeat about everything(???). More on this to come.

The doctor looks like quite an amazing character. (Follow the link and see how far off my drawing is from what I was working from.)

'vision over visibility'

Beautiful person Pip has a lovely post on Bono and the song The Moment of Surrender:

At the moment of surrender
Of vision over visibility
I did not notice the passers-by
And they did not notice me

Bono looks good in a hoodie. I think this is my favourite sweetly smiling picture of him.

where I find myself

Looking for work is hard. I do wonder if the biggest thing holding me back is a fear related to the one described here. I have no idea what project or job it is that I would give myself to but the thought of starting along a new path is daunting. I am not scared of losing out on other pleasures. I'm just more scared of not getting things right than I should be. This goes against the position I want to be in, the attitude I want to have; but, if I am honest, it is where I find myself at the moment. Of course, finding myself at the moment is a topic that is taking some of my time as well.

cats, flies and congressional hearings

The cats spotted a fly during Sonia Sotomayor's hearings.

And Agnes Varda (who has an affinity for cats) was a welcome find last week and also made me smile. Hooray for cats and people.

the genre artist

Jack Vance, from a NYT article, here.

As with most of my drawings, this looks like someone - just not exactly the person I set out to draw.

'to love cinema is to love...'

This feels like a nice counter to JLG. Another side of the new wave.
Here's an A. O. Scott article on Agnes Varda and her films.

And, as a footnote to yesterday's post, Krzysztof Kieślowski's films - particularly The Decalogue - are deeply theological. I was just thinking the other day how good it would be to get together a group of people to watch The Decalogue, eat, drink, and talk.

'at the cinema, we do not think, we are thought'

'According to Godard, the cinema was, is, more than itself; it is both a supreme aspiration and an impossibility, a repository of history and intimate memory in the age of celebrity and forgetting, a lost golden age of self-transcendence, self-discovery, and a noble, doomed mission of folly for those who would attempt, as Godard himself continues to do, to recover and restore it.' (Everything is Cinema, p. 625)

Have just completed a slightly frenzied reading of Everything is Cinema, Richard Brody's book on the films of Jean-Luc Godard. Actually a biography of Godard refracted through his films (the two being inseparable). While there is a lot that is unsettling and, at best, distasteful, in Godard's developing philosophy through fifty years of work, he is a fascinating, even compelling figure. His early absorbtion in film and his development of narrative and thought that could only be expressed in cinematic terms are inspiring. One wonders what a theology developed, or at least expressed, only in film image and narrative would look like. (And perhaps someone else can think of someone who has done this over the course of a career - Wim Wenders is the only filmmaker who comes to mind immediately, though there was a long interesting period when Scorcese's theology was also to the fore - his more recent interests have been less compelling to me.) Definitely a huge amount of food for thought. It is an amazing book.

I love the high esteem that Brody holds film in. (And his monkish look in the author photo on the book jacket. He looks like he stepped out of a scene in Andrei Rublev.) In reference to the title of this post (a quote from Godard) Brody says, "This observation was less an avowal of passivity than of the will to self-transform through the movies."