Tarsila

Trissy's portrait was a real jewel. I mean, I don't believe it'll have any value to the galeries, like Tink's, but I'm extremely proud of the outcome. The whole technical concept came up while I was organizing things in the atelier. I found these tiny canvases I did in the third semester of the art course, when we were tutored by Yolanda Bessa. She had this huge knowledge of materials and methods, and taught us about toxic materials and a few techniques. She gave us ten easy lessons in oil painting, perhaps the only lessons in oil painting my class ever had. One of them was a technique used by old renaissance painters. The image is modelled in ochre, black and white, resulting in a monochrome yellowish image. Then, once dried, it receives all the colours applied in thin, diluted, transparent layers of paint. In my little exercise, my doodles looked like one of those watercolored photographs from the early 1900s. You know, the artist would take someone's black and white picture, then color it using watercolors. There's some kind of irreality in those colors: they're vibrant, and yet so dirty. See the way her lips and her hair shine and the way the background seems dead...

So, here you are. If the Fairy's portrait left much to be desired, I think Trissy's will make amends.

Kasparov vs. Deep Blue

Rafaella

So, this is the Fairy's portrait. I admit it isn't the best I've done lately, but I'm begining to get extremely critical about my own stuff... Tried a few experiments in this one. It's a diptych (a composition with two canvases), the one on the left is a computer generated image printed on canvas paper or similar (I still haven't printed it, though...). The one on the left is acrylic on canvas. The choice of acrylic instead of the usual oils has it's reasons. I wanted to try the media I used when I started painting, to see what I'm capable of doing with it nowadays. In fact, I wanted to paint Lilly in acrylics too. See, acrylics, once dry, turn into a thin layer of colored plastic. And the action of painting these girls I barely know carries a shallow and artificial undertone to it, like a perversion or obssession: no need to actually know these girls, just to worship their image. Plastic and artificiality seem to walk hand in hand. The idea of creating a diptych comes from this challenge: I wanted to see the diferences between what a machine can print and what a human can print. I'll admit, the computer version (on the left) looks better...

Para Eliane:
Tédio. Então ela foi andar. Garotinha de sete anos, talvez oito, andando no cemitério. Enterro de alguém que ela nem conhecia, de uma família amiga dos pais. Ao lado de toda aquela cena parada, logo ali, um outro caixão branco. Um diminuto caixão branco. Ela chegou mais perto pra ver: era uma garotinha. De sete anos, talvez oito. Nem se parecia muito com ela. Mas naquele momento, algo aconteceu que ficou tingido, cicatrizado, cauterizado nela para sempre.
Paremos a cena pra dar uma olhada. Garotinha frente ao caixão branco da outra garotinha. Ela e a outra. A meiga e a morta. O começo e o fim. O pessoal subjetivo e o impessoal objetivo e inevitável.
De lá em diante, ela passou a ser duas. Em tudo. A vida dividida ao meio com brutalidade dissonante.
Avançando para um futuro mais próximo, ela toca guitarra em uma banda de punk rock. Com unhas delicadamente pintadas. Ela se veste de cores escuras, seu cabelo negro nanquim. E chora porque se emociona, e não sabe bem o que dizer. Ela fotografa polaroides de estética de decomposição, coisas quebradas e terrenas. E coloca lado a lado com belas fotos de um céu azul zen. Ela desenha siamesas com traço pueril, seus olhos num tédio de cemitério.

Felicidades, Eli.

Yet another personality test...

Disorder	Rating
Paranoid:	High
Schizoid:	Moderate
Schizotypal:	Very High
Antisocial:	Moderate
Borderline:	Low
Histrionic:	High
Narcissistic:	High
Avoidant:	High
Dependent:	Moderate
Obsessive-Compulsive:	High
-- Personality Disorder Test - Take It! --

Results are as expected...

Blog da semana:
Oba, mais uma na onda de personagens de histórias infantis!
O espelho de Alice

Li pouco e, pelo que entendi, é uma garota de 26 anos que trabalha na UOL. Tem um jeito gostoso de escrever e um layout interessante.

On further news, I'm taking a crash course on italian next month. Part of preparations for spending a few months in Florence at the end of the year studying art history (straight from the horse's mouth!). With my current level of spanish, it shouldn't be too hard. Although word has it that, once you learn italian, any spanish you once had tends to get rather fuzzy. It's because both languages have many similarities. I remember getting that between spanish and portuguese. Once I learned spanish, my portuguese grammar went haywire. I was building sentences in spanish structure, with portuguese words. Mayhem!!

Coisas que não mencionei do feriado:
Na sexta, fomos eu e a Tink a uma academia de escalada. Muito bom! Todas as paredes e até o teto são cheios daquelas pedrinhas aparafusadas para escalar. Cordas penduradas em pontos estratégicos para que um segure o outro enquanto este sobe. É um ótimo exercício: saí de lá com os braços e as pernas detonados e me sentindo ótimo! Com certeza irei mais vezes. Outra dessas coisas que eu sempre quis fazer. Agora só falta rapel e outros espotes radicais.
No sábado, aniversário da Trissy. Festa na casa dela na Serra. muita gente que eu nunca vi na vida, amigos do curso de administração dela. Ela está com um rolo com um professor de francês/artista plástico. Ele tem um jeitão requintado de francês e cozinha muito bem. Tink ficou ajudando-o enquanto eu aproveitava a ausência do pai da Trissy, que também é artista plástico e foi meu mentor na pintura em acrílico (por onde comecei), para usar o ateliê dele nos fundos da casa. Precisava dar toques finais no retrato da Fairy e minhas tintas já tinham acabado. Descobri as maravilhas do medium acrílico (espécie de solvente para tinta acrílica). Dei de presente para Trissy o retrato dela. Ela adorou. Já estou terminando a cópia, que ficará comigo.
Por último, vi Todo-poderoso (é assim?). Não tenho muito a dizer, apesar de ser um filme bem divertido. Tá certo que faz uma apologia ao cristianismo, mas com esse tema, não tem como evitar. Não vou criticar muito.
Planos para ir ver Spirited Away com Nana-chan, Thelus e Tink no fim-de-semana que vem.

Surreal revelations IX:

What if there was a way to implant and erase memories into the brain? Yeah, I know this is old science fiction, but I started wondering about it in closer details. In the old sci-fi movies, when the individual discovers that all his memories are false, he starts questioning his own identity (anyone seen Total Recall?). We are not only what we remember to be, but what others tell us. I might have not seeked an art course after all if people hadn't told me I draw well. And if lies can be told and memories can be implanted, how can we trust anything? How can we trust ourselves?
But you see, it gets really weird when you realize that anything up to this exact moment could be a lie implanted into your brain. What you did just a second ago, even the meaning you comprehended from what you read just now, could be an idea implanted into your brain. Go ahead, read it again just to be sure. For all you know, you could have been placed in that chair just now by a bunch of men in white clothes who just left the room and flipped a switch that turned you on. They left you with no clue of how they erased your memory, nor of how they implanted the new one, making you believe that such procedure is impossible. All they gave you was a dim puzzle of recollections that tells you who they want you to be. Your identity.

*Sigh* The cliché of 1990's sci-fi.

So I rented Animatrix this week.




Nine short films giving some background information on the Matrix Reloaded plot, as well as some other poetic developments on the whole idea. Here are the ones that drew my attention:


The Final Flight of the Osiris, created by the same director of Final Fantasy: the spirits within". Nice CG graphics, and a cool story that ties with the main plot of Reloaded. They even mention the Osiris on the movie. It was the ship that discovered that the machines were digging towards Zion.




The Second Renaissance, directed by Mahiro Maeda, the same director of Blue Submarine 6, tells the story of how AI was created and took over the world. Makes you regret being a human...




Kid's story. In Reloaded, there's this kid who keeps following Neo, saying he saved him. I guess this is that kid's story.




Beyond. About a house in the middle of a city that seems to be filled with matrix glitches. Weird things happening. The house is said to be haunted. Cool anime style and humorous antics.




Detective story, directed by Shinichiro Watanabe, the same director of Cowboy Bebop and Macross Plus, about this detective hired to find a hacker called Trinity (yes, the one and only...). It has a Blade Runner feel to it, that mix of futuristic hi-tech and 1950's style.




Matriculated, by the same director of Aeon Flux, Peter Chung. And you can tell even without reading the credits just by looking at the way the robots move and their design. Chung switches the roles in the plot, showing us these human rebels who capture an AI robot and plug it into their own matrix, making it believe, once inside it, that it has gained a human body and even causing it to love a human. In this case, it will serve humans dearly in the real world as a guardian, fighting other AI's. So, in a way, man creates machines to use as tools. Machines overpower man and enslave him to use as a tool, a power source. Chung takes the next step, as man overpowers machine and enslaves it to use it as a tool. It's a complicated thing. Chung is one of those directors who make you question if you actually understood th whole thing. Just as I like it. Obviously why this is the longest comment.

Neste exato momento, uma criança está brigando com a babá lá fora. É um garotinho de não mais que cinco anos. A babá quer levá-lo para casa e ele se recusa a ir. Ele grita a plenos pulmões que ela é chata. E quando isso não basta, desenvolve o protesto para chamá-la de "chatonilda". A plenos pulmões. Esse tipo de cena faz você entender a relevância de xingamentos, palavrões. Um "puta" tem mais impacto do que esse menino vai conseguir com seu "chatonilda", mesmo gritando desse jeito. Aliás, o impacto da palavra compensa o volume da voz. Ou seja, nem precisa ser dito em voz muito alta. Mas obviamente ainda não ensinaram essas coisas da vida a ele. Tudo a seu tempo.

Dadaist revelation IX
Three of them faced me today, as I was leaving the university. That same old bulshit about me invading their turf. The moon was full as in a prophecy... I wish it hadn't been such a good day: I went so well on my marketing presentation, that I was willing to ignore them. I was so blissful that I didn't feel like facing three of them at once. Two others could be heard somewhere. Five at once. Had it been a crappy day and had there been fewer of them, I would gladly beat the shit out of them to let off some steam. I would have done quite a lot of damage before they gave up. And I would have taken quite a lot as well. But those adrenaline-ladden moments kinda make life worth living.

But there'll be worst days. And more full moons...

Once again, control over the aftermath. No one was going to show up. So we could just stay there and hold each other on the verge of sleep. This time, the tiny red and blue dots were substituted for green and black: the alarm clock shone a dim green neon. 7:43pm. All the rest was darkness and an even dimmer light of an ominous full moon. We lay on our backs and she would quote passages of Nabokov' novel that she was reading. Wide pelvises... And I would tell her of my childhood. Of body hair and more bizarre issues. Green neon. Did you see "Run Lola, run"?. Same thing. Only the lighting was a different colour. We engaged on a conversation about breasts somewhere along the way. And I kept thinking of particular breasts that had been present in my life. God, that was lame... Anyway, she had had enough of my old ghosts. So I kept this to myself. 8:04. Perhaps there's still time for...

E o blogspot entrou em uma nova versão que agora não me deixa publicar qualquer tipo de acento ou trema ou coisas o gênero. Ele substitui qualquer desses por um ponto de interrogação. Estejam avisados.

Tempos modernos...

Gente, a festa junina do clube perto da minha casa virou baladinha! Antes era uma coisa t?o tranqüila, a maior parte do p?blico era quase senil e ficava sentada admirando "essa juventude de hoje". Dava pra andar numa boa e aproveitar as brincadeiras das barraquinhas, as comidas, dançar um forr?. De repente, de dois anos pra c?, a tal juventude lotou o lugar! Um bando de patricinhas de dezessete anos, com vozes estridentes e celulares com brilho de neon azul. Cabelos alisados com chapinha e uma atitude nojenta de superioridade. E eu que costumava ir para a festa durante os três dias de duraç?o e ficar l? até as ?ltimas horas, n?o consegui passar da terceira hora de festa...

This week`s anti-cultural tip is:
Happy Tree Friends.

It`s not as terrible as it sounds... Basically, it`s a bunch of animations (be patient on the download...). They start out with cute little critters who all of a sudden turn psycho on each other! WARNING: lot`s of blood and gore...

Another gallery, besides the one that contacted me at the end of last year, has shown some interest in Tink's portrait. It's a prestigious instituition, so I dealt with them with all the care in the world in this first phone call. We're scheduled to meet this friday. Once again, I'm expectant, but scared. Whenever something like this happens, you can't avoid asking yourself if you're doing the right thing. I mean, with all the people at the foundation saying galleries are bad for young artists and all that crap... Could they have a point? Do I agree with their point? Well... I guess I'd rather be a known artist in a gallery than some nobody preaching against institutions... And besides, I doubt that any of my fellow anarchist classmates would say no to galleries that should contact them. So, I guess this is a good thing, right?

Look at me... I'm talking as if they'd actually hire me for the gallery. Probably all they want is to buy Taís, Tink's portrait.
This brings up another interesting discussion for you few who are interested in artistic ethics. The people at the foundation state that galleries are bad for the young artist because galleries seem to guide the artist's production, as in telling what is good and should be developed further and what is bad and should be abandoned. First of all, I don't think that's any different from what happens in the art course. Except perhaps for the fact that you deal with an average of six different good/bad opinions every semester in the foundation, whereas you'd be dealing with one or two in a gallery. On second place, I feel the need for guidance!! Some time ago I mentioned I'm not a good artist, in many senses. One of them is my lack of common sense. An artist must tell relevant aesthetic researches from useless nonsense. And I yield to my fancies in detriment to developing more important things... I believe the gallery's guidance is a kind of lesson in what is relevant and what isn't in that era in art. Last but no least, I feel no need to rebel against institutions. Needless rebellion is a conduct of teenage. And some people seem to be stuck in teenage forever. (ironic for someone who names himself Peter Pan to say this, right?). Any comments on this? I want some feedback here...

For my fellow countrymen:
Isto traz à tona outra discussão interessante para vocês poucos que se interessam por ética de arte. As pessoas na fundação dizem que galerias são ruins para artistas novos porque elas guiam a produção do artista, ou seja, dizem o que é bom e deve ser desenvolvido e o que é ruim e deve ser abandonado. Em primeiro lugar, não acho que isso seja muito diferente do que acontece no curso de arte. Exceto talvez pelo fato de que se lida com uma média de seis opiniões sobre bom e ruim a cada semestre na fundação, enquanto se estaria tratando com uma ou duas na galeria. Em segundo lugar, eu preciso de orientação! Há algum tempo eu mencionei que não sou um bom artista em muitos sentidos da palavra. Um deles é minha total falta de senso comum. Um artista deve saber diferenciar entre pesquisas estéticas relevantes e besteira inútil. E eu cedo aos meus caprichos em detrimento do desenvolvimento de coisas mais importantes... Acredito que a orientação da galeria é um tipo de lição do que é relevante e o que não é neste momento artístico. E por último, mas não menos importante, não sinto necessidade de me rebelar contra isntituições. Rebelião desnecessãria é uma conduta da adolescência. E algumas pessoas parecem presas à adolescência para sempre (irônico alguém que se denomina Peter Pan dizer isso, não?). Algum comentário sobre isso? Preciso de algum retorno...

Alas, General Anarchy broke up with his girl. It was something that was on the brink of happening for quite some time now. I found him on ICQ, in shambles. And soon I found myself talking to myself. He had the same speech, the same ideas as I had when I broke up with Makel. The same ideas many people have when they break up with someone that has changed them forever. And through all that, I began recalling Makel. How it all ended.

After she was gone into the arms of another guy, who was blatantly better for her than me, I was left alone and so incommunicable. I spent the first six months of her absence in that state. I had learned to communicate with her and no one else. And in that circumstance, she seemed like everything in the world to me. It hurt. But what hurt the most was knowing that I was the one to blame for her loss. This hurting never stopped. Even now, two years later. I loathe myself for what I did, and I hate the man she's with now for being so better than me. But I learned a LOT from it all. Learned not to do this again. And I learned that no one is everything to anyone else. Because, after those six months, I met other people who were so much more than her. And I met her again. And this time, I loathed her. Her pompous burgeoise arrogance, her hipocondry and hipocrisy... And I learned to let her go...
I still glance at her photos with nostalgia. I miss a few things: her flesh, the perfectly round breasts, her quirks and moves, those oddly old hands and wide smiles. I miss her confidence and her seduction. But above all, I miss her elegance. Few girls can be that fatale. She was a grown up pretending to be a child. And never a child pretending to be grown up...

Trying to get a little more... content... into my life, I've begun renting all those movies I ever wanted to see by myself. One every weekend. To start with, I piched something that was grinning at me from the shelves of the video store with huge teeth and yellow claws:


The Maxx


A word play there: Maxx can allude to qualificatives like maximum, and to substantives like mask.
I love stuff this dense. I love the feeling you get a the end of such movies that you haven't figured everything out yet, but you're not completely lost either. And you strugle to keep all that much information on your mind. Even as I write things down here, important parts are fading. So enough diversion...

This movie is deeply psychological, yet clad in comic super-hero aesthetic. The main character in the plot is Julie Winters, a freelance social worker. Back when she was 8 years old, she would pretend she was a jungle queen. She built herself a little house of clay and popsickle sticks. One day, she found a rabbit injured by a car in the road. She took it home, in a box, and hid it under her bed. The miserable thing was agonizing, yet would not die. When her mother found it, she took it away to the garage. She tried to explain to Julie about death as a part of life, but Julie wouldn't hear it. And here's the psychological bit: to shut herself from this real world where her mother would tell hear those aweful things, she would just concentrate on brushing the hair on her awkward wooden doll. A doll that reminded her of her uncle Artemus P. Gone, who usualy visited them from Australia. And she brushed that doll to the point where it lost all it's hair. Then she brushed it's head off.
One night, the rabbit was crying really loud in the garage. Julie's mom, assuming everyone else was aslep, went out to the garage and put it out of it's misery with a shovel. Her way of taking care of things so that people wouldn't have to deal with it: just kill it and bury it away. Julie saw the whole thing. And she learned to do the same thing.
Years later, Julie was raped and left for dead. She recovered, and used the money she had saved for the university to start her own business as a social worker, bailing people out of jail and rehabilitating them. Actually, she was using an elaborate psychological way to buty the trauma of her rape. I'm not entirely sure how it worked, but it involved buying (bailing) people and controling them. Perhaps, if she could control all these scums, she would no longer fear them. But I still don't have that part straight.
At some point, weird serial killings begin to happen. This murderer rapes it's victims and calls himself Mr. Gone... Anything familiar? He phones Julie ever so often to say he does it all for her. At about the same time, she bails Maxx out of jail again. They seem to be old-time friends... Maxx is a homeless nutcase who dresses in a costume, wears a mask and believes he's a super-hero from a place he calls the Outback (Australia..). And that he keeps returning to this world. Back there, he's the protector of his jungle queen... Once again, it rings a bell, doesn't it?
Mr. Gone starts making contact. First with Maxx, whom he calls Br'er Lappin and I have no idea what it means... Then, he kidnaps Julie and tells her about her inner world, the place where she (and everyone else) hides from the uglyness of the real world. And that she has a spiritual animal who guides her in understanding it. And then he begins to tell her of her past, of the rape and the rabbit... And that about the time she cuts his head off (POP! Just like a doll's head...). Oh, she'll do it again on so many other occasions. See, Mr. Gone isn't dead. He lives in other dimensions, other inner worlds. He's just mutilated in the real world. But Julie mauls some other manifestations of him in other worlds...
Everything he said brings her closer to madness. To the point where the barriers between her inner world and her real world are not clear. By that point, it is pretty clear that Maxx's imaginary world is, somehow, her own. In some point, the Maxx from reality ends up in her inner world, while the Maxx from the inner world ends up in reality. That's when his mask falls off and reveals his face to be a rabbit's face, revealing him to be her spiritual animal. Of course, this is the immaginary Maxx, from Julie's inner world. The real Maxx is a common man. His face, however, never shows up on the movie.
After all the catardic revelations, it gets clear that Maxx and Julie's psyches are attached, hence dependant. More acurately, July sucks Maxx into her psyche whenever they come in contact with each other. So, the only logical thing to do, would be to leave. To allow Maxx to figure out who he really is when she's not around (and if he's actually a rabbit when she's not around...). And so, she leaves. And the story, kinda, ends there. Although I heard the comic book goes on.
Of course, I left a few characters out of this essay. But, to me, they seemed rather pointless. Must have some important role in further events on the comic book.
I was interested in some things. But I guess I can't really discuss this with anyone who hasn't at least seen the movie. I like the psychological obssessions such as Julie's knocking Mr. Gone, aka the doll's head off every time she's about to hear an ugly truth. I liked the relations between Julie's past and all her inner world. I see some of that happening to me... One thing was particularly interesting: the whole costume that Maxx wears isn't in any of her childhood memories. So this makes it a reference from the real Maxx's subconscious. As if their psyches had really fused toghether.

...and I know you haven't the slightest idea of what I'm talking about...

Recently got this funny little tip on my e-mail:

Try this, it works!!
Open your internet browser and type in ANY adress. At the end of it, type .mirror.sytes.org

as in...

http://eternalchild.blogspot.com.mirror.sytes.org

Voilá!!

I had written in the Timeless place posts (starting 1/10/2003 and ending 1/11/2003) about how dad and his generation had grown old. But back then it was merely a remark and I didn`t give it much thought. But then we were having lunch this weekend and he behaved in a way that made me think heavily on this issue. He was dominating the entire conversation during lunch, as usual, from topics like the war on Iraq to the current economical situation of the country. And up until then he had behaved as usual, like the role-model he had always been. Then man I wanted to be. But then our conversation ventured into more specific topics and I saw in my father not my inspiration, but an old, bitter man, who had grown tired of being a law-abiding citizen in a lawless country. He nagged on about clients who were not paying him and finding legal loopholes that prevented them from getting caught, and then he`d say he should do the same. Was this the same man who taught me to be correct not through words but by setting an example? Was this the same man who believed in being righteous and reasonable?
And then, when the subject turned to the family, he dished out the fact that an uncle of mine had a mistress and everybody knew it... I didn`t need to hear that. There goes the whole "happy family" utopia. But then again, it`s been gone ever since my generation ventured into teenage... Oh well, I must say that does explain a lot of things, including their current finacial status. And besides, with a wife like that, I guess I`d have a mistress as well...
There, now I`m being bitter...

I thought I could perhaps excape it all by spending some time with another model family. So I ventured to my girl`s home. But as the weeked unraveled, I found that it was no sweet home either. Of course, I shouldn`t write about that...

I don`t know... Maybe it`s me and I`m venturing into another dark phase. This time, it seems I`m annoyed with human presence. Everyone seems to get on my nerves with their own quirks and opinions. It`s as if I was annoyed by the simple fact that they are different from me. That they are not me. Anybody ever felt like this? I feel a need to immerse myself in myself. To tread upon the subjects of long ago. Those things that no one understood. Those things that everyone always thought were stupid and so I cast aside. I want to be myself again. I want to be alone...