Homeless Man's Mom

I drew this on a lark last night because my friend had a fairly funny Facebook status. She said she looked like the mom of a homeless guy. So, taking that as a prompt, I followed it up with this drawing.

More Than This

I asked my friend Steven for something to draw and he told me to do Bill Murray looking classy and drinking some whiskey. This isn't that picture, but I wanted to make sure that I could actually draw a Bill Murray that looked something like Bill Murray.

I think I didn't do a bad job of it at all.

I inked it all with a brush and I'm also fairly pleased at how that turned out. It's probably because it's a fairly large drawing.

This is For My Hibernians!

I kid because I love.

Caught up in the Frenzy

I remember years ago in high school, my church small group leader told me to read the liner notes for "Fight For Your Right" on the Beastie Boys' The Sounds of Science anthology. I did and I was kind of blown away by it. As the years went by I realized just how true of an observation it was. I guess Nietzsche said something very similar along the same lines, but I'm a much bigger fan of hip-hop than I am of unstable, German philosophers. So I think I'll stick with what I've got.

Anyways, here's the excerpt:

We thought that a history of the band would be incomplete without this song. Because, oddly enough, I think that it is still the work we are most well known for. The reason I say oddly is because, by my recollection, it was a joke that went too far.

. . . It began in clubs. We were drinking Budweiser on stage and playign the role of these snotty kids. No one expected us to act that way so it seemed really funny.

But as the record began to explode, things changed. People did begin to expect us to act that way. . . We found ourselves playing in the same arenas that we'd opened for Madonna and RUN-DMC in. But now they were filled with a new fan base, frat kids. I remember looking out at concerts and seeing these huge drunken football jocks pushing their way up to the front and screaming the lyrics to our songs, and thinking "What the hell is going on here?"

But it was too late to turn in any other direction; we were caught up in the frenzy. The shows were sold out. It seemed like there was nothing to do but keep coming out on stage every night drinking beer and playing the role. The strangest part about it was that after a short time I think we actually became just what it was we'd set out to make fun of. By drinking so much beer and acting like sexist macho jerks we actually became just that.

So I guess that the story might have a couple of possible morals. One might be, "Be careful of what you make fun of or you might become it." But the other one, the one that I like is, "All of the sexist macho jerks in the world are just pretending cause they're caught in a rut, and maybe, at some point in the future, when all the planets line up in a certain way, they'll all just snap out of it."

Reading this now, year later, I'm struck by a few things. The first is that the line about becoming what you make fun of is just as true then as it is now. More true, I think. Maybe its the state of our culture or maybe it's that I just know a wider array of people, but I know these kinds of people intimately. It's a lesson that's stuck with me forever and that's because I keep being reminded of it, sometimes even by myself.

The second is that I never remembered what the second moral from the passage was. And now that I think on it, I think that's the one I like, too.

I'm also struck by the fact that the single clearest and most practical lesson I learned from my years in church was from the Beastie Boys.

Comicry for the Devil

Look at this shit. Look at this madness. Just look at it!

Hater Gonna Hate

As of the past week, there's been a bit of a backlash against The Hurt Locker. I happened to really enjoy it and I hope it wins best picture, though, like anything else, I'm willing to hear the other side of the argument so long as it's a reasonable argument. In this case I don't happen to think that they're very reasonable.

Most of what I've read strikes me as rather spurious. Of course there's lapses in reality in the film. It's a drama and not a very high budget one. Film making is, as I understand it, basically a form of creative lying. The Hurt Locker isn't a documentary and I don't know that anyone in the production ever claimed to be trying to make anything but a well put together, believable, and intense movie about the Iraq War.

Katheryn Bigelow might have been talking a big game about how realistic the film is supposed to be, but I don't know how relevant that is. Movies should be judged on what they are, not what its director or whoever is. Seperating the art from the arist is a difficult concept to understand and it's an even harder one to actually practice. Lord knows that I've either avoided or hated a film primarily on who is in it or who has made it (then again, I know that I've enjoyed movies by artists I hate and I've hated movies by artists I loved, so who knows what my problem is)

Sure there's plenty of thing to criticize in the film, but what I've read in the press seem to be nothing more than eloquent nitpicking. Plus, when you start to get sanctimonious or judging a character's intentions based off your own personal experience, your opinion goes from being disagreeable to being nonsensical. Lastly, if you think that there's only one way to read a situation, especially when art is involved, then you're a silly, silly goose.

I guess people are just bored with ripping on Avatar.

But, most importantly, I really liked The Hurt Locker. So fuck 'em.

At least one blog I follows threw up a counter argument, not that The Hurt Locker is in dire need of defenders or anything.