I thought I had taken them all...

MORE QUIZ RESULTS!!



You are a muse.

What legend are you?. Take the Legendary Being Quiz by Paradox


I WAS A GIFTED CHILD
i had my niche.
intelligent. creative. or artistic.
what kind of child were you?
(brought you by april)


Well, that's revealing....

Taking the bus recently, I've noticced people. It's that casual way of noticing someone mostly out of repetetion rather than for any other interest.
For example, every day, as I head to the art course, there's this german in the bus who always sits in the same place. He's an old man, I'd say in his mid-fifties. I know he's german because of the face and because of a german novel he has been readin for the past week. I can't seem to remember the title. Nor do I think I'd understand it anyway. He sits in the same place every day: the only seat turned towards the back of the bus. He gets off on the same stop I do: a busy commercial street. Then he heads down into the subway and vanishes underground. Every day. He has a calm, serene face. Looks like a jolly fellow to have a conversation with.
As I head on to the next bus stop to take my second bus, I walk by an oriental beggar. Even though she wears a cap and some sort of surgical mask and is always looking down, I can tell she's oriental because of the tone and smoothness of the skin. I've never seen her eyes... She sits by a construction yard, aluminum gates painted blue with some company's logo on it. She holds a round transparent plastic container with both hands. It's got three, sometimes four coins in it. She tilts that container in a way that two of them keep rolling along the sides of it. And she stares at them relentlessly.
If I manage to get into the right bus, at the right time, I'll find this girl in it. She studies at the same foundation where I take the art courses. But she studies something else. She's a pretty blond with a round face and very blue eyes. Her cheeks are always red, but I'm not sure if it has to do with excess make up or natural blush. I wouldn't neglect the first, since she seems to wear a lot of make up on the rest of her face.

Father´s day come and gone.
We spent the day with him, saw a few movies, had some fun.
It had been a while since I had spent so much time toghether with my entire family. And it felt good. I felt safe. No depression or anything.
By the end of the day, I had made my dad a watercolour:



A few years back, I made up a personal game of mine. I would give to my dearest ones these pictures of mythical creatures: the Guardians. Each Guardian should be given a name by it´s owner and placed somewhere where they´d be seen every day. I never knew exactly the names of most of the Guardians I did. Their owners never told me. Some never even named them. But I handed them out to many people. Some never even knew they got Guardians. Guardians were identified by the necklace they all carried around. This particular sorceress has hers on her left hand, along with her staff. Some held it in their hands, others wore them on their necks. Some tied them to their belongings.
I had made four Guardians for my family. One for each member. Dad got the sorceress, mom got a dwarf, my brother got a mermaid and I made myself an angel. I was amazed when, while painting my Blonde Muse's portrait, I found many similarities between her and my angel. Perhaps that´s why I obssessed with her so.
Anyway, dad lost his Guardian when he moved to another company. So I decided to make another one. It´s nice to upgrade the Guardians. It´s an undescribable feeling when you confront the old and the new. You prove that your technique has evolved. My angel has followed my technical evolution in drawing for quite some time. She gets better every year. Dad´s sorceress evolved from a corny acrylic on paper to a more realistic watercolour. And I´m thinking about upgrading my own Guardian to watercolour. I tried to model her in clay, but my abilities aren´t that evolved yet... Perhaps in a near future!

TWO VERY GOOD MOVIES SEEN RECENTLY:

Insomnia:
The first movie to feature Robin Williams without corny little jokes... I guess we can scrap him from that list of actors who always do the same role. He plays a very good vilain. The misunderstood, perverted, pityful type. Also, you get to see both him and Al Pacino doing a fair bit of running around and a lot of action for two fifty-something-year-olds. Although the plot is the basic cop movie thing, the psychological part that deals with Mr. Pacino's guilt is quite impressive.

Memento:
The entire thing goes backwards. And it´s brilliant, since the main character has this mental disorder that keeps him from remembering recent events. The entire movie flows at the same time like a long recollection of how did he get to that final image while keeping the viewer as perplexed about things as the main character. In the end, all things explained, you find out how allies are actually foes and victims were actually there to help. And this weird sense keeps buzing in your head that your own memory isn´t good enough to deal with the entire movie. Your really get in touch with your memory´s feebleness. All you can say after it is: "thank God I do remember things... But can I trust them?"
My cousin got the DVD. He says he can play it in the correct order... That ought to be enlightening!

Against my better judgement, I´m posting the picture of my latest painting... And the picture I used to paint it. I guess this image posting thing has become another addiction.

This one is from the latest series of portraits.



And this is the picture I used to paint it...



Now that I look at it... It looks even better when you compare both pictures like this...
Guess who this is!

Ok, I know you're fed up... But check this out!





What's *Your* Sex Sign?

As Ionce said: "Heck, no one's complained so far..."

And so, I crashed my car... Again.
This is the third time. And the second serious colision: this time it was so bad, that I had to push it into the sidewalk because it wouldn't work. The engine started, but it didn't move.
I remember the feeling of crashing my car the first time. There was a sense of disbelief compared to being shot or stabbed, I guess. That surreal sense that this isn't really happening. When you drive, you synchronize with your car. Your car becomes your body. So you sense when your car will fit in places and when it is moving or motionless. So you can imagine how it feels when all of a sudden part of your front is smashed in. You feel like part of your body gets smashed in: a wound. But it didn't really happen to you. It happened to the car. That's when your connection breaks. It's pretty much like riding EVAs in Evangelion.
This time it felt a bit different. I could feel the solid material breaking. Kinda like feeling my bones break but without the pain. I close my eyes and I can still vividly remember the sensation of the shock between solid parts. It comes to me very vividly along with that sense of frustration, of knowing I'll have to take the bus for some time. Feeling that I lost my car temporarily carries the desperation of having lost someone. Geez, that sounded cheap!

Well, I'm determined to make something good come out of this. I've checked out bike shops to repair my old bycicle. I'm planning to go to the art course, maybe, riding mybike. That ought to be a start on the whole exercise thing. Since I now know I'll never have time for squash... It'll sure beat spending ten bucks a day on bus rides to the art course and to the university. And when my car returns from the repair shop, I'll probably stick to the bike whenever I can. It ough to cut down on my expenses with gas and still keep me healthy. Plus, It had been long since I last saw the city. When you drive, you tend to see very little of the city around you. Your attention is strapped to traffic lights, speed limits and such balderdash. Taking the bus or walking puts you in touch with the people, the curious little things, the ebb and flow of energies.
One thing is certain: even though mom is still trapped at home with her operated foot, I don't want to use her car. It's a matter of responsibility. I feel like I must somehow be held responsible for the crash. Having to take the bus or other means of transportation will be a sort of a punishment I'll inflict upon myself. But also a way of correcting my habits. I want to change from the spoilled rich kid that takes mommy's car when his car isn't available. The sloth that worries about the meaning of life but not about his own health.

I just had the first day of the new semestre... And what an exhaustive day it was!
I went to the art course first. And boy did I miss that place. I missed the girls that study with me (apart from me, there's one more guy... stereotypes). And I missed the stimulation of the art course... Since we're comming to the end of the course, teachers tend to respect our personal works and philosophies. The assignements will deal much more with our individual works than with subjects the whole class will deal with.
Right from the star, we had some sort of sculpture class. As my theory goes, we won't be taught traditional sculpting. This semester we'll learn about instalations (I don't know if that's the correct term...). I gotta remember to bring the pictures of the one I did last year with strings and the aid of Makel... The teacher seemed awefully nice. He related to us in a person-to-person sort of way. Not in the usual teacher-student thing. He seemed like quite a nice guy. And the way he talked of things was so interesting that a thousand ideas popped into my head. So many ideas per minute and I only got to write down two of them on my artist's notebook. But anyway, I feel like I'm really going to enjoy this class. And I'll probably get to like this new way to express myself that I had been neglecting. Other classes that dealt with the subject seemed such a bore...
I had to write about the walls. The foundation where we have the art course has white plaster walls. Throughout the semester, some of the students use those walls to hang canvases, instalations or even to paint on the wall itself. Non-art students do their own mindless graffitti too. When the semester ends and the works of graduate students are to be displayed, the walls are painted white again. And it feels sso nice to come to the foundation and see the bare walls... It's interesting to see all the graffitti and sstuff evolve too. And all the works hung on the walls throughout the semester are most stimulating. But seeing those white walls is a totally different thing. It has a feeling of possibilities. And I already want to preserve a little corner on one of the rooms for my first instalation. So many ideas regarding white walls!!

And we have a new reader!
It´s a guy who used to live on my building. Punk is the only name I can give him. It´s the nickname we all know him by.

So, right now, that I know of, the following people read my blog:

-My Lioness
-Blue-eyed Teddy
-A Foreign Elf
-Alex
-Moviemaker
-Punk

Anyone else I´m not aware of??

But the thing that most amazed and inspired me in those albums was seeing so many pictures of me. I was a strange little baby. An ugly baby, I´d say. My stomach was perfectly round but my arms and legs were too thin. Brother seemed almost like me. This is something I´d like to introduce on my photographic ghosts: the little animals we were when we were children. We were never land animals. In land, when we stood up, we arched our backs and our round stomachs hung down in a bizarre way. Our arms were ridiculously thin. An the whole thing seemed too much for our legs to bare, so we spent most of the time squating down on our heels or crawling somehow.
When we dove on water, everything changed. We were very graceful. It seemed we moved with ease on water and awkwardly on land. We´d swim effortlessly, like sharks. Our bodies flowing limply in the direction of the current and our heads sticking out of the water. We loved to dive: the deeper the better was our motto. Seldom did we use our arms: instead, we seemed to use our whole body in a limp motion that resembled a long fish tail. It optimized our use of oxigen, since the body didn´t demand so much. And with exercise, our endurance grew. My brother once spent two whole minutes underwater!

I turned the page and suddenly there was a photo that marked the beggining of teenage. We were both standing on a coral reef, foam of a crashing wave flying into the air. But we were different. We stood straight, not arching our backs. Our stomachs had evolved to a more civilized aspect (abdominal muscles!!). Our legs looked stronger. Wish I could say the same about the arms, though... But we looked really good! From then on, things changed. Every photo showed how our individual characteristics evolved, making us into what we are today. My attitude, his relaxation. We still swim like that. And I guess that´s what´s responsible for our arms never getting much stronger. It makes the swimming easier. And it has helped me to have gentle painting moves. It did wonders for my brother and his piano too.

I want my ghosts to be like that. Water creatures. To crawl in land or stand up awkardly. I do hope I never look like I did back then, and that´s something I´ll have to manage without in the ghosts. But I must someday take pictures of us swimming.

I spent most of yesterday looking at family photos. I was looking for one in particular about my mother, to paint a portrait. But alas, it wasn´t exactly the way I wanted it... Guess I´ll have to take one myself.
But I came across endless pictures of grandmothers, grandfathers, uncles, aunts, cousins and such. It was quite impressive to see my brother´s eyes on a teenage mom, or his pose in all of grandfather´s photos. His lips on my grandmother´s smile. He´s like a colage of many members of my dad´s family. Even his overall aspect, as a child, seemed like a miniature of my dad´s younger brother. I, on the other hand, look like a fusion of my mother´s family. Mom looked like a female version of me as a child. My overall aspect looks like her father, the famous actor. But I must say that my father is the best fusion between me and my brother. There´s a picture of him when he married mom that has my hair, my deep eyes, my brother´s cheeks and lips and other strange similarities. Plus mustache... Nowadays he's gotten a little... wider... around the edges. And the similarities have faded. But they are still there somewhere.
Mom´s mom was very fun to see. There was this whole album with photos of grandmother. Ever since she was a baby. I told mom that grandma (the one from the atelier...) always looked a decade older as a child. Then when she got into theatre and wore make up for the plays, she´s look a decade younger. After she reached her sixties, she seemed to stop in time. She´s in her mid seventies now. But still looking like a sixty-year-old.
There were albums about our visits to the north-eastern part of the country, to visit a part of dad´s family. We usually stay at this big house owned by two aunts. I´ll call them Grumpy and The One with the cats. The names explain themselves. Out there, time seems to have stopped altoghether. i was looking at photos that were a decade old, sometimes even older, and they were all the same. Grumpy even wears the same kind of clothes and the same hair. Nothing ages there. Heck, everything seems so old already that a decade won´t make any difference. The only thing that ever changes are people who die (mostly servants... the family stays intact), children who are born and children who grow up. And the family out there is so huge, that every year, when we come to visit, there´s some aunt or uncle I´ve never met before. The most hilarious case is the one of two twin uncles whom I thought were the same person ´till I was around 15 years of age...

Before we went for sushi last night, I remember my Lioness on my bed, her fingers caressing an unfinished painting on my wall. I seemed somehow vaguely preocupied that her nails would chip away the fragile plastic-like acrylic. But if it happened, it would mean I didn´t paint it correctly.

And then she said in some tone of wonder that I was very talented.

She asked me if I was ever afraid. Afraid of not being talented enough. I know my own talent. I know my limits and I like to expand them. I´m not afraid of not being talented enough. My talent is supposed to be something that will grow as years go by. So, if I´m not talented enough for something now, I guess I will be, in time.
No... My fears are different. I fear having taken the wrong path, adopting the wrong talent. People (including father...) have often told me that I can write better than I can paint or draw. For it seems easier to impress with a drawing than with writting, so it seems harder to prove that one is a good writer. And father thinks I´ve proven it at my age. Even though I´ve never published none of my books... I fear having taken visual arts when I should have studied writting... Or acting, for that matter. Another thing I´ve loved to do.
Regarding visual arts, I also fear that I may reach some point where there´s nothing more to learn. I can already illustrate just about anything from photographs or real life objects. Now it seems that the only way is to find some new form of expression. Picasso was a good illustrator before cubism. But you see, when you illustrate something, it´s easy to tell if it´s good or bad by it´s likeness to the real thing. But new forms of expression can´t count on that. There will always be people who love and hate cubism. But I depend so much on other people´s opinions that I don´t think I´d be strong enough to defend any new form of expression.
For instance, what the Lioness said just put a grin on my face that´ll last me all through the week.

Yesterday, my Lioness came to my place. We went for sushi and then my friends showed up and took us both to a party all of a sudden. That´s what I like about the whole Pasta Gang. They are always on the move. There´s a party every weekend and they know the places and the contacts. This time, it was a farewell party for Little Wonder (check the dictionary for a new entry!!). She studies to be a vet and now she´s going away to study some sort of large animal veterinary somewhere. It had been so long since I had last seen her. And here she was: as short as ever and with those wonderful gipsy/scorpio eyes of hers.
I went dressed somewhat like Marcus, with my new trench-coat. Since they all know the character, I thought it might have looked kinda funny in a way. Or that it might have given them a chill to see him amidst the crowd. But all in all, with the dim lighting, I don´t think they noticed...
We left rather early. The sickness found it´s way through my mental defenses and struck me right in the middle of the dance floor. Panic: the bathroom was straight across a sea of wobbling teenagers. I looked the other way: across another identical sea was an open area with fresh air. I made my way to one, and then to the other. No accidents. And my venture to the bathroom was pointless: I´m starting to understand that the sickness is just a discomfort, a panic attack. I never threw up and I don´t think I ever will... Now if I could just make this nausea go away...
On our way out, trouble over the bill. I don´t seem to sound prejudiced, but the cashier was some jackass who looked like he never went to a disco in his life. He charged me for admission plus my drinks, when they had told me at the entrance I´d be charged only for what I consumed. My brother tried reasoning with him, but it seemed obvious that he knew less about the business than my brother did... I left, after paying some abusive price, swearing never to return again. On my way out, feeling highly frustrated, I called to a girl from the staff and asked about the bill, about why they were charging for things they weren´t supposed to. She sighed in an obnoxious way and told me to call for the manager. Something took hold of me and I yelled at her. I never did that. I never took the aggressive way on these misunderstandings Hence I was never taken seriously. In the end, I left without bothering to wait for the manager. I should have waited and made a whole fuss about it. I guess that´s what I learned from the whole thing: finish waht you start. But I have to say I felt proud of being able to let out my aggressiveness. I don´t know if I should thank my shrink, Marcus or the beast for that. Maybe all of them.

Well... I´ve signed up to a site that will host some of my images so I can post them here. To get things started:




This is Marcus.



And he´s Azrael.

These were supposed to be on a site of mine that never existed. They were done some two or three years ago. The larger images were drawn by me and painted in coloured pencil by Makel.

Yesterday, as I was undressing to take a shower, a thought of Makel suddenly struck me. I remembered her face. And the thought that had come apparently for no reason at all made me put my pants back on and run over to my room. I had remembered her face in astonishing detail. One wouldn't expect less from a person who spends two years seeing her every other day. But the thing is, even with all that detail (and mayhaps bacause of all that detail...), never did her face seem more foreign to me. I digged up all the photos we had toghether and stared at that face for quite some time, the distant sound of the shower in the background. It was as if, despite all the seemingly endless memories I had of her, a part of me did not recognize her. As if we had never happened. I needed some sort of undeniable proof. I went through all the photos of right-angle-right-lighting moments and I could see her beauty. No doubt about that. But it was somehow a beauty that I could not conceive to have been mine some day. It was the beauty of a girl on the street. You know, one of those girls we men see and make gross chauvinist remarks about. I finally gave up and took my shower. The disbelief still haunted me throughout the night.
Makel and the Lioness had both talked about similar feelings before. Makel usually said, when we were dating, that often there was a sense of disbelief that we were toghether. She said it was too good to be true and hence a part of her would not allow her to believe it... And the Lioness once talked about the weirdness of us both being toghether after school. We studied for years in the same school. I remember seeing her there and she remembers me. But we never spoke. I guess there was simply no reason to. And then we met in the university and everything happened. It feels like we wasted time somehow. And now it feels strange to her that I, someone who used to be so distant, am so close now. It feels borderline unreal.