On Self Portraits
"Wherever we go, we are friends" -Sloth and Manatee
Sloth and Manatee
Various literary folk are quoted as saying that we see the world not as it is, but as we are. Which is to say, we project our stuff. Which we do.
Long ago, in one of my oil painting classes, we were working from a model and the professor had us stop and look at one another’s paintings. He pointed out, accurately, that each painting looked just a shade more like the artist, than like the model.
We co-create our world. In it, we see what we look for and find what we feel. It is easy to forget that right alongside our accepted reality, whatever we have decided is “how it is,” live infinite, or infinite-squared, other possibilities. As many as there are creatures and points of view. Left turns instead of right. Even a tree has a point of view.
Point of view is not a demographic or a data point or a one or zero or a check mark on a survey. It is not likes or shares or scrolls or habits. It is a unique and impossible confluence of, well, everything, all the time, spinning forever into greater entropy. The more that happens, the more that happens.*
What if we do not like what we see? What if we want to change it? We have to find a way out of our regular britches. This is much harder than it sounds, because it requires acknowledging those britches in the first place. This is what art is for, and what having friends is for, and what trying things is for.
We shall not look upon your like again.
* My extremely short version of the Second Law of Thermodynamics
Brainwaves
Best of Brainwaves Volume One: The Fountain of Stuff
Best of Brainwaves Volume Two: Mom, Dad, I'm a Cat
License Cartoons from CartoonStock
Art!
This is by a second-grader, who explained to me that this is the 9th planet, which is too far away to see, and is a water planet, and was inhabited by sharks, but then they burned up even though the water is not hot, and the planet has two hundred or so moons, and there’s a black hole and red hole and blue hole and the two dots are storms, like on Jupiter. There was also a lot about time moving at different speeds and traveling through wormholes and also his dad has been to this planet, but didn’t tell him right away but instead told him on his birthday as a surprise.
BunnyFrogCatSnake
In which there might be a bunny and frog or two lurking about and also perhaps a cat
Things Of The Week
Some very excellent creative advice. (Hat tip to Kevin Smokler who has a new book available for preorder).
If you were sentient in the early 2000’s you knew of the viral YouTube song, Chocolate Rain. This revisiting of that period, and the person at the center of it, on the Sixteenth Minute of Fame Podcast, is not just fascinating, it is brilliant. Listen to him take apart everything that was going on, first with himself, and then with the Internet. Two parts so far, I think there will be a third.
Another great piece from Animation Obsessive about a very poignant piece made by animator and storyteller Jiří Trnka who was extremely famous in communist Czechoslovakia.
Okay! That's enough nonsense for now.
May you make some cracking good toast, may you travel to a secret planet, won't you be my neighbor? - Betsy
HELLO AND THANKS FOR READING!!
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