#jean heron my spirit animal

[meinqiwu]

my losing dog

[crabbarts]

people you'd like to know better

@evanox THANK YOUUU for tagging me angel!! 💚💚

3 ships 1) Harumichi from Sailor Moon they're the ogs,, the blueprint,, and for good reason!! I love the playful, silly dynamic they have with each other, and how they're the biggest haters with the most drip in Sailor Moon S and Sailor Stars…10000/10 I love them and wish they had a much bigger role in the 90s anime

2) Jean x Clare from Claymore this is a recent one but it has me in a chokehold right now, they had only a handful of chapters together but what they had was Insane,, jean "you may use this life however you wish" and clare "your life is still your own to use." holds head in hands. eats them. (self promo, I just drew this pairing for the first time :3c)

3) Teo x Maehwa! Not from a show, my own OC teo and @evanox's oc maehwa drive me absolutely insane and I'm constantly cooking up scenarios for these two :') they're both very earnest and sincere and theatrical and NERDS and I adore them sm <33 if you'd like a better idea of tm's dynamic I have a tag dedicated to them!

first ship first ever ship? spirit and rain from spirit: stallion of the cimarron, maybe? either that or milo and kida from atlantis.

last song smoke rings by laurie anderson

currently reading claymore by norihiro yagi, I'm on volume 18/27 rn. I'm also very slowly reading the curse of chalion by lois mcmaster bujold but enjoying it immensely.

last film I don't watch a lot of movies, so probably the boy and the heron from last december! I quite liked it, the surreal scenery and the bright colours were right up my alley, and kiriko was def a highlight among the cast. I'd love to watch it again sometime!

currently craving a slice of garlic bread sounds really good right about now,, that or a cream cheese bagel Tagging @sweet-milky-tea705 @womenenthusiast2 @skijjiki @ashi-cookie and @verac!! feel free to do the tag if you want or pass if you don't!

[tilbageidanmark]

Movies I watched this Week # 153 (Year 3/Week 49):

So on Monday morning, as I start preparing my "Viewing schedule" for the week, I stumble on a new space documentary The making of JUICE, and two hours later, I already know that this will probably be my most emotionally-rewarding film of the week. It chronicles the final years of development of The European Space Agency's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE), which took off to Jupiter on April 14, 2023. It’s a deeply technical dive into a topic I know nothing about. But it’s absolutely exhilarating - 10/10.

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I really struggled with Scorsese's new saga Killers of the flower moon. It's an indictment against America's original sin, the genocide and dispossession of the ingenious population, and the systemic evil it shows is deeply unpleasant. Had De Nero ever played such an sinister character? His Jimmy Conway was also a ruthless murderer, but he didn't come across as Machiavellian as here.

It's a stunningly beautiful film, but the tragedy should have been told in two hours, not 3.5.

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While waiting for Miyazaki's latest 'The boy and the heron', I caught Castle in the sky, one of the last Ghibli Studio features I hadn't seen yet.

An imaginative retro-futuristic adventure, its drawing style is somehow primitive compared to his later films. As always, many of its themes and tropes were repeated later nearly-verbatim: The old woman pirate who become Ubaba in 'Spirited away', the many fanciful steampunk airships, the strong female protagonist and her sidekick, the magical journey, the beautiful scenery, the ecological destruction, the sumptuous food.

(Unfortunately I could only watch it in the bad English dubbed version).

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From the '30 best mobster movies' list, the classic French Noir Touchez pas au grisbi ('Don't touch the loot'). Cool Jean Gabin is the honorable gangster, a refined, quiet, responsible, thoughtful criminal with an impeccable looks and manners. 8/10.

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3 by German-born French director Dominik Moll:

🍿 The Night of the 12th, a patient award-winner cop thriller that follows an investigation into an unsolved murder. A young woman is burnt alive, and in the quest to discover who did it, quiet dynamics about misogyny and gender roles are being exposed. Reminiscent of 'Memories of murder'. The rural areas outside Grenoble were mouth-watering beautiful. 8/10.

🍿 Moll’s previous thriller, Only the animals, was even a tighter thriller. Like ‘Rashomon’, it tells seven diverse stories that don't seem connected until the very last scene. This one is worth watching without any knowledge about it beforehand; it's so surprising, and shocking, and fresh. My 6th film with Denis Ménochet. Best thriller I've seen for a while - 9/10.

🍿 His earlier hit, With a Friend Like Harry, disappointed me greatly. "Harry" meets an old high school acquaintance at a roadside restroom, and invites himself to stay with the friend's family. Without any clear motivation, well-to-do Harry decides to buy his struggling friend a new car, and as some days go by, starts killing everybody around him, "because they irritate him (?)". It opens with a long grating scene of the three children crying in the car, and continued with none of the characters becoming appealing or interesting. A terrible Hitchcock at best.

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2 about cute French swimming instructors:

🍿 The five devils, My 5th uneven film with Adèle Exarchopoulos. It's a mixed up magical fantasy which is also taking place in the eastern mountainous part of Rhône. At its core, there's a tender bond between a mother and her daughter, and the 10-year-old has a extra-strong sense of smell. But then a slew of confusing subplots emerge. They include pyromania, clairvoyance, disintegrating marriage, supernatural time travel, lesbianism, trances, and what have you. 4/10.

🍿 Sink or swim, my 10th film with gorgeous Belgian actress Virginie Efira. A low-brow and predictable 'comedy' about a depressed group of suburban, sad-sack losers, each with their own midlife crisis, who join a male team of synchronized swimming. Efira is their trainer, and the whole premise is ridiculous, and sloppily-made. 2/10.

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First watch: Vincente Minnelli's turn of the century Gigi. A lame musical about a teenager prostitute school... Sorry, "Courtesans". Hard to fathom that in 1958 it swept all the 9 Oscars it was nominated for! It opens with 70-year-old grandpa Maurice Chevalier singing “Thank Heaven For Little Girls", an ode to 7 year old girls with a sly smile on his face. Disturbingly creepy, it's explicitly about "grooming", or, how to train a young woman to be a mistress. 1/10.

At least it got me interested enough to read about the "Belle Époque", the "Golden Age" era from a century ago, which had so many similarities to our recent past: A period "characterised by optimism, regional peace, economic prosperity, colonial expansion, and technological, scientific, and cultural innovations". And which ended so brutally by some certain historical calamities, the two World Wars…

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Make way for tomorrow, the "Saddest movie ever made"? An old couple loses their home in 1937 America, and none of their five selfish adult children wants to help them stay together. A real tearjerker that may have been the inspiration to Ozu's 'Tokyo Story'.

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“… This land doesn’t seem to have changed much…”

Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864-1916) was a symbolic, melancholic Danish painter. Michael Palin and the Mystery of Hammershøi is part of the travelogue series that Michael Palin used to host. Palin was fascinated by him, because many of his Vermeer-inspired portraits featured a mysterious woman shown from the back.

He lived mainly on Strandgade 30 in Christianshavn, [which I passed on many times], and painted the interior of his home more than 60 times. Extensive use of Bach's Prelude No. 1. But the documentary itself was not very insightful.

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2 Black Mirror-like Re-watches:

🍿 Melancholic Black Mirror S1, E1, Be right back, voted as "12th greatest TV episodes of the 21 century", an unusually tender story.

🍿 Soderbergh's tight conspiracy fire cracker from last year, Kimi, his nail-biting Covid-19 'Black Mirror'-style thrill-ride. Like Hitchcock's Rear Window about our digital life today. With Derek DelGaudio as the murderous heavy. Terrifying 9/10.

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"Off with everybody's heads!"

A 1915 silent film version of Alice in Wonderland, using faithful costuming to the original John Tenniel's illustrations. Some of the animal characters were creepy.

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Hatchi X 2:

🍿 Hatchiko, a new Chinese remake of the famous real-life Japanese story about the faithful dog, waiting to his owner at the railway station, even years after his death. Adora and I watched the Richard Gere's 'Hatchi' many times. Here, the dog is not an Akita, but a mongrel and his name is BaTong. There's also a scene where he is saved from a dog meat restaurant, just before being made into spicy stir-fry. Very sentimental, with Joan Chen.

🍿 I also tried to watch the original 1987 Japanese original of Hachikō Monogatari, but this turned up to be a insufferable Olde Tyme, super sweet version, and I had to abandon it midstream.

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2 more by The Obama's:

🍿 American symphony documents a year in the life of musician Jon Batiste and his wife, as she struggles with leukemia. I've previously seen five other films that were produced by Obama’s Hollywood company, 'Higher Ground'. But as much I adored him 15 and 18 years ago, this 'heart-felt' documentary was boringly pedestrian. 2/10.

🍿 I devoured Leave the world behind because I always seek realistic stories about the end of our world. It started slow and small, with some highfalutin cinematography and sound edits, surrounding the lifestyle of the upper middle class well-to-do and un-famous. But it quickly lost steam as it turns into a mixed-up conspiracy nightmare, that tries to get all the possible apocalyptic tropes into one giant pot. A generous 5/10.

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The Realest Real, another short parable with Mahershala Ali, about fashion, social media, status. Produced by the Kenzo brand. 2/10.

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Fast Charlie, a new Mississippi/New Orleans crime thriller, with Pierce Brosnan as an aging, omnipotent hit-man, dreaming of retiring to Tuscany. Like a mid-range Elmore Leonard caper with high body count. James Caan's last paycheck.

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"...Wait. Not the homeless person that fell down the stairs?..."

What does it say about me that one of my favorite romantic comedies of late is Long shot, and that I've seen it probably 10 times, including last month, and that I felt 'forced' to watch it again today?

The Boys ll Men groove is how this movie appeals to me. But it's so well-done on every level. 10/10.

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Nahum Gutman and his world, the only documentary I could find about the greatest Israeli painter, my childhood’s hero. But the banal voiceover gave the most incomprehensible gibberish analysis for the visuals: Worst Art Talk ever!

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(My complete movie list is here)

[howardschatzphotography]

On Seeing, A Journal. #278 Andrew Moore, "Dirt Meridian,” a book review.

Sun Through Rain.  ©Andrew Moore

Schoolhouse, China Pasture. ©Andrew Moore

I receive, daily, the internationally informative photography news site

The Eye of Photography from the former editor-in-chief of French Photo Magazine and now editor-in-chief of The Eye of Photography, Jean-Jacques Naudet. This daily posting is phenomenally valuable, covering all sorts of photography events, portfolios of photographers throughout the world, gallery shows, museum exhibitions, etc.  

The site is free, though as an aside they can use financial help for their service. Apart from having contributed features from time to time, I have no affiliation with them, I’m only interested in seeing the on-going success of something that publishes so much information and imagery every day.

Other important sources include AtEdge and Graphis.

Each of these open up to a wide world of brilliant photographers, designers, and other creatives.

A recent post contained an article about the The Yancy Richardson Gallery in New York City. The images of Andrew Moore who is represented by the gallery particularly caught my eye. I went to his site ((http://www.andrewlmoore.com)) and was so moved by his body of work that I bought his recent book, "Dirt Meridian.”

I do that, buy and collect photography books. Along with the internet, books are my major source of self-education. I am well aware that if I am to grow in this visual art, it’s imperative that I study, continually, tenaciously. It’s essential to gain, maintain and expand a vast visual data bank if one desires to create unique, original and exciting work. For photography, one needs to look, study, and look even more, reviewing and surveying everything available in galleries, web sites, periodicals, museums, presentations and, yes, books. Our brains are such that images drop out; constant replenishment is needed for any sort of positive development, success, and even survival in this challenging art. It’s essential to recognize what’s been done before in order to avoid repetition. Knowing what hasn’t been done, or done well enough, comes when one has seen – and keeps seeing -- a vast range of imagery.

When “Dirt Meridian” arrived, I opened it and couldn’t put it down, studying every image.  And, as I always do with a new book of photographs, I left it out, opened, on a counter I pass daily, so that I could look at it again and again and imprint the images in my memory.

This is not the kind of photography I endeavor to create in the controlled environment of a studio (or a pool, my particular kind of  studio).  Moore’s work is done outdoors, in this case in the vast, almost empty space of the great plains of middle America. What he shows us are sand hills and sky and weather and cattle.  And the Badlands and old abandoned barns and buffalo and meadows and creeks, windmills and wildlife. He also shows the determined struggle of the human spirit against the toughest elements, and the effect of those on deserted homesteads.

America, its 100th meridian.

Moore’s epic visions of the vast treeless space in the 100th meridian, cutting through North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, are all about space -- empty sprawling and seemingly infinite space. The images are intoxicating, filled with magnificent beauty in the loneliness that is the trackless expanse of seemingly endless land. From his Acknowledgement: “…the land’s beauty lies in its vast and sublime emptiness."

I wrote to Moore and learned, happily, that his NYC studio/office is located only a few blocks from mine. So, I invited him for lunch and an in-person review of his magnificent photographs.

Working on this book project, he spent weeks at a time on many trips from the East, met many individuals and recorded their stories, histories, lives. Each photograph is accompanied by text containing fascinating information which provides a rich understanding of the work.

Moore made many of the photographs from a Cessna 180 single-engine plane flown by Doug Dean. They attached his medium format digital camera to one of the plane’s wing struts, using a screen and remote control from the passenger seat.

They flew low, yielding a unique perspective. This technique is one important reason why the images look so different from photographs of this area I’ve seen before. He spoke of the emptiness as a spiritual reservoir, a spiritual landscape.  He wrote in the Acknowledgements, “the intimate seemed conjoined to the infinite."

During the project he moved from north to south, contrasting open spaces with cluttered, claustrophobic interiors, rich with poor, immigrants and native born, industrial scenes with mythic landscapes, all of which he explained was a metaphor for the sense of possibility, of hope that tomorrow will be a better day.

In the book his pilot wrote, “I hope you take pause, if only for a moment, to consider the story of this land, where second chances are few, and how the decisions we make today will impact the generations to follow."

Moore allowed me to choose images I personally wished to use for this review.

Storm Blow.  ©Andrew Moore

From the book: “Sheridan County, Nebraska. These dry, fallow lands and terraces lie to the southeast of Clinton. The wind coming out of the north was blowing at over 70 mph. When choosing the angle approach to a subject, Doug Dean piloted us, if possible, into a headwind, since that slowed the plane down and allowed a bit more time for picture making. On this day we had little choice but to let a powerful tailwind take us on a Nantucket sleigh ride if we wanted to catch this billowing cloud of white dirt."

Pronghorn Antelope. ©Andrew Moore

From the book: “A herd of the wild antelope, which in wintertime can number into the hundreds, roams the high plains that stretch toward the Big Horn Mountains in the background. Early pioneer cattlemen noticed that the native grass animals roaming this area tasted particularly good, and to this day Niobrara County grass has become famous among livestock buyers for the finish it gives cattle.”

Riding Fence.  ©Andrew Moore

From the book: “Sheridan County, Nebraska, 2013. Heidi and Brock Terrell and their son Royal (led by their red heeler) ride fence along their land in Sheridan County. They not only raise both cattle and sheep but they also farm soybeans and sugar beets.   Heidi is a sixth generation descendant of Jules Sandoz, among the earliest homesteaders in the area. Better known as ‘Old Jules,’ legendary for his cussedness and his justly famous tenacity, he was immortalized in the biography of the same name written in 1935 by daughter Mari Sandoz.”

First Light.  ©Andrew Moore

From the book: "Cherry County, Nebraska, 2013. Cattle and heron share a drink at the tank in the residual morning fog. Much of the success of cattle ranching in the Sandhills is due to the shallow reach down to the Ogallala Aquifer. In some places it's only six feet to water, so one can easily and cheaply put down a windmill in order to water livestock anywhere in the vastness of this terrain. (There are many sub-irrigated meadows that provide hay at the driest times.) The hilly landscape provides the herd with protection from the wind and snow. However, the quality of the grass is not as good as on hard soil land, so it can still take 20 to 30 acres to support just one cow/calf pair."

Round Up Number 2.  ©Andrew Moore

From the book: “McKenzie County, North Dakota, 2005.   Branding day at the Hepper Ranch outside the town of Keene. In the shadows of the Blue Buttes, amidst lush May grass, family, friends, and neighbors (and several dogs) help round up this herd of 300 cow/calf pairs. The large crew included five heelers, six sets of floppers, branders, vaccinators, and iron tenders. The older more experienced cowboys do the actual branding while the younger folks who wrestle the calves are known as floppers.”

In the book’s introduction, Kent Haruf wrote, “These are wonderful photographs, clear, and evocative, unsentimental, they seem to understand the sacredness of the country. They suggest its holiness."

Howard Schatz,  November, 2018.

[meinqiwu]

you got a 9 to 5, so ill take the night shift