"Can anyone be unhappy, really? Oh! what does grief matter--what does misfortune matter, if one knows how to be happy? Do you know, I cannot understand how anyone can pass by a green tree, and not feel happy only to look at it! How anyone can talk to a man and not feel happy in loving him! Oh, it is my own fault that I cannot express myself well enough! But there are lovely things at every step I take--things which even the most miserable man must recognize as beautiful. Look at a little child--look at God's sunrise--look at the grass growing-- look at the eyes that love you, as they gaze back into your eyes!"

-The Idiot

I just got back from a presentation by Pixar. Very cool, given by a couple of ag's who now work at pixar, and a few other pixar employees. They basically re-enforced how cool of a place pixar is to work, did Q&A, talked about their jobs and showed some clips. I loved their description of the production pipeline "We use computers and Billy Crystal." They showed their new short film "One Man Band" which will show before Cars this summer. Excellent as usual, perhaps my favorite of their short films since Geri's Game. Two of the guys who talked were in the shading dept. which is basically in charge of texturing and materials. At pixar of course, "Story is king." and they talked about how texturing is storytelling: you tell the history of a prop or character by it's materials, this nick in the paint is where the car was in a life-changing wreck 3 years ago; that faded paint is from all those summers in the car lot, etc. This re-enforces my thought that world-building is story-telling and storytelling is worldbuilding.

Plus I got a Mike Wazowski toy!

This morning as I ate my granola, I thought of fields, and cows, and bees who made my breakfast possible, it reminded me of a land flowing with milk and honey.

Kinkade

I love how accurately Douglas Wilson describes Thomas Kinkade paintings: "where all the puddles on the ground have their eerie radioactive glow, and all the bungalows look like the living room has just caught on fire."

There is an enlightening article in the LA times on this self-proclaimed painter of light.

"Last month, however, a three-member panel of the American Arbitration Assn. ordered his company to pay $860,000 for defrauding the former owners of two failed Virginia galleries.

...In sworn testimony and interviews, they recount incidents in which an allegedly drunken Kinkade heckled illusionists Siegfried & Roy in Las Vegas, cursed a former employee's wife who came to his aid when he fell off a barstool..."

How could someone who who makes so much money on so much kitch in the name of God, not be immoral?

That is the story of our lives: helplessly, hopelessly pushing and pulling, squeezing and stretching, kneeding and needing this thing we call time.

We try to stretch out moments try to cover the hole in our hearts.
We try to squeeze an hour of pain into the time it takes to down some pills.
We try to cram a day of bordom into 1000 bite size bits of commercials, sound-bytes, images, and IMs; thinking that it will seem smaller if we chop it up.
We try to fit our lives in the space between tomorrow and the grave.

Why can't we just leave it alone?

Links

There's a great essay at the worldmagblog on How we experience movies, it is built on the work of two people I have heard alot about, but have no first hand experience with: Michael Polany, a philosopher who is famous for "we know far more then we can put into words", and Andre Tarkovsky, a Russian Christian Film-maker in the first half of last century.







Lines and Colors is a great blog on "drawing, painting, comics, cartoons, illustration, digital art, concept art...", etc. Always links to great eye candy and skilled artists both traditional and digital








Tween is an interesting blog on animation and motion graphics and contains links to hundreds of beautiful commercials, movie title sequences, demo reels, etc. It's basically about good graphic design, only with the element of time and motion, which is really interesting.

James Jordan on Trees in the Bible

"Trees arrest our attention in the earliest chapters of the Bible; we are told not only that the Garden of Eden was planted with all kinds of trees, but that there were two special trees in its center, the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Adam's interaction with these two trees almost doomed humanity, had not the Shoot of Jesse come to die on the Tree of the Cross. As a result, God's people can be replanted and flourish 'like a tree planted by streams of water, which yeilds fruit in it's season, and it's leaf does not wither.'"

-Through New Eyes