bloodygranuaile | Entries tagged with art

A few weeks ago my mom and I did a Weekend of Art out in the Berkshires, where we went to the Williamstown Theatre Festival, the Clark Art Institute, and Mass MoCA. I tried not to go too bananas at any of the museum gift shops (I have a severe weakness for museum gift shops, so this was hard for me), but I simply couldn't resist when I found Skull Sourcebook: Over 500 Skulls in Art & Culture at Mass MoCA.

Skull Sourcebook is literally just a big ol' coffee table book full of art with skulls in, which basically makes it the best art book ever, as far as I'm concerned. It is organized into sections like "Skulls in Music" and "Skull Tattoos," and there's also a "Skulls in Art" section for skull art that doesn't fit into any of the more specific categories. The "Skulls in Music" section kicks off with a multi-page Grateful Dead spread, which I appreciated. There's a bit of introductory text at the beginning of each section, about a page or two of it, and this is where my only real issue with the book comes in: This book badly needed an additional round of proofreading. I am incapable of not noticing these things.

All the same, it was excellent bedtime reading—pretty, mildly informative, lacking any sort of plot or story to get all caught up in until next thing you know it's 2 a.m. and you have to get up in four hours, far less upsetting than politics. I'm glad I bought it, and I'm looking forward to keeping it around the house for years so I can periodically look at random skull art.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was published in 2005, the summer between my junior and senior year of high school, when I was 17. By this point, I had largely stopped rereading books on any sort of regular basis, which is why I've only read this one three times: Once when it came out, once when I reread the series before Deathly Hallows came out, and this winter. My strongest memory of the summer it came out was that viral video of some guy yelling spoilers out of a car and making people cry. That never struck me as a thing very much in keeping with the spirit of the series, frankly.

Anyway. Considering I was not inspired to reread it very often, it turns out that Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is just as devastatingly good as all the other books. Clearly it's me that has changed, not the quality of the story.

It is worth it to say that the lighthearted, whimsical children's book world of Sorcerer's Stone is by now nearly gone, in the same way that the safe, economically stable, end-of-history world of Bill Clinton's '90s as viewed through the lens of a small nerd girl is now gone, and we are now maybe a vassal state of Russia and China is going to declare war on us by Sunday. Half-Blood Prince is DARK. The war is on, everyone knows Voldemort is back, people's family members are starting to go missing, and somebody is half-assedly trying to commit unnecessarily elaborate murders at Hogwarts. We do meet our first halfway decent Slytherin, a schmoozy type named Horace Slughorn who, while frequently annoying, is more of a regular kind of status-conscious rather than being murderously evil.

In this year at Hogwarts, Harry mysteriously becomes good at Potions due to help from a heavily annotated used textbook; Snape finally becomes the Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher; Ron is still having self-esteem issues about being Keeper; and Harry starts taking private lessons with Dumbledore.

The private lessons in question are basically all trips into the Pensieve, a sort of magical receptacle for memories. It turns out that Dumbledore has been painstakingly piecing together the backstory of Tom Riddle and his eventual transformation into Voldemort. It's a fascinating, Dickensian story of pride, resentment, alienation, greed, revenge, fear, and ambition. It also illustrates well the self-defeating cycle of poverty and bigotry that occurs when people hold onto the idea that they are "better" than others when they don't have anything else to hold onto, but the resulting entitlement makes them such lazy assholes that they refuse to do anything to better their circumstances or develop any kind of community that could help them. (There's even an excellent dig at Merope Gaunt's father and his refusal to do housework.)

There's still some funny bits, though, and the best ones relate to the magical luck potion called Felix Felices. This includes one of the funniest drunk scenes I have ever seen — at Aragog's funeral — and an interesting study on the placebo effect on Quidditch performance. But overall, the experience of reading this book in one day was emotionally exhausting in ways I haven't been emotionally exhausted in years. I cried a bunch of times (ESPECIALLY AT THE END), because I am officially a sappy old lady now. I felt like all my feelings had been beaten up. It was great. This book is a freaking masterpiece.

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: "Felix Felices," Harry and the Potters

On my mother's coffee table there is a book.

It is a beautiful, beautiful book, a perfect blending of the best of old and new book styles, with deckle-edged pages and full-color illustrations and a glorious Baskerville-esque font.

It is the Hamiltome.

More properly known as Hamilton: The Revolution, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter's history/look behind the scenes/giant scrapbook of the making of Hamilton: An American Musical is pretty much everything an obsessed Hamilton fan could want. My mother had this thing pre-ordered almost the second it became available for pre-order. The only thing that would make it better is if it came with a pair of tickets to the show, but alas, that would probably also raise the price several thousand percent.

It contains, obviously, the full lyrics of the show, annotated with goofy good humor by the Internet's wacky uncle himself, Lin-Manuel. It also contains biographical sketches of and interviews with nearly everyone involved in the show -- cast members and producers and designers and choreographers and all the other brilliant, dedicated people who make theater magic happen.

The story it tells is pretty awesome, and it's aware of its own awesomeness, but not in a smug way. It's just full of joy and pride and nerdy LOOK AT THIS COOL THING WE DID and it's great.

I almost cried multiple times, although frankly that happens when I listen to the soundtrack too, so it's not surprising.

If you are not an obsessed Hamilton fan and want to know why everyone else has suddenly become one over the past year, this book will certainly answer that question at length! Although I do also recommend just listening to the soundtrack and letting it eat your soul.

Anyway, book and soundtrack are both recommended for any and all humans who like musical theater, history, hip-hop, weird genre mashups, strange new things, clever wordplay, displays of genius, sass, joy, laughter, crying, or any combination thereof (I am particularly fond of sass + crying), and also for people who do not like or are unfamiliar with any or all of these things, because even if you don't like it normally you'll like it here. Like, I couldn't tell hip-hop from a hole in the wall until I heard Hamilton, and it doesn't matter.

Some lovely person bought me a copy of Maggie Stiefvater's The Raven's Prophecy tarot deck off my Amazon wishlist. While most decks come with a little pamphlet that fits inside the card box, with a bare-bones explanation of each card -- usually one sentence or less -- this deck comes with a proper instruction book, although the result is that the box does not really fit the deck of cards. I'll need to find something to wrap them in.

The instruction book is called Illuminating the Prophecy and it's shorter than my main Tarot instructional book, but it's still more than enough to get a beginner started, and it's an excellent supplement to other materials. Stiefvater explains the artistic choices she's made for this deck in particular, which makes it easier to remember the card meanings when using it to do readings, It's also a very good explanation of tarot in general, so it should be useful to use for other decks, if you have other decks that come with useless tiny pamphlets like most of them. Each card is given a couple of keywords, then a page or two of explanation on how it fits into the greater patterns in the deck, what it can mean in different parts of a reading, how Stiefvater feels about the card personally, and anything else that she deems highly relevant. The personal stuff is quite useful--tarot readings are very personal and how one person reads something might not quite fit in the same way with how someone else reads it, based on a reader or querent's life/personality/relationship to the concepts represented by the card. The booklet also has much of Stiefvater's characteristic voice, if not quite as nutty as the one she uses on Tumblr, so it is quite entertaining as well as informative.

I've started entering some of the notes from this book into my own tarot notebook, which is a jumble of things I've learned from different sources but overall draws heavily on Tarot Plain and Simple, which has been my main instructional for years (I lost most of the notes I had from when I first started reading tarot, so now I only use the things I remembered from back then, which was more than a dozen years ago, so that's not a huge amount and it's not nearly enough to do readings from memory with). I think I'm going to end up incorporating a lot of what Stiefvater says into the way I read; I think it's a bit more on my wavelength than some of the tone of the other book.

Overall, A+ deck, A+ instructional booklet, would occult with again. Also, the Queen of Pentacles card is so preeetty.

Current Mood: tired

Soooo the most recent book I read is probably more properly a pamphlet, but it has an ISBN so it's a book for my book-counting purposes, especially since I am running behind. This is not cheating.

The book is called Dublin After the Six Days' Insurrection and it was originally published in 1916. It is a collection of photos taken in and around central Dublin by a chap called T.W. Murphy, who was apparently a fairly in-demand newspaper photographer back in the day (and whose nickname/pen name/something was apparently "The O'Tatur"? I don't know, but it's on the front cover). The photos are in black and white, but are pretty crisp for photos of that era.

The photo selection seems to be organized by least bombed-out buildings to most bombed-out buildings, and then a chunk of photos of people at the back. While I am sure this was not the point when the book was first put together, it has the effect of aiding any modern reader who has been to Dublin, by situating them among the still-existing buildings before introducing the areas that have since been rebuilt.

The booklet also contains a mostly-illegible handwritten note in the inside front cover, which serves as a useful reminder that people in history were, in fact, at least as bad at doing most things as people are now.

While the booklet's price has been the victim of severe inflation over the past century, costing five euro ninety-five instead of its initial price of sevenpence, it was still a good, cheap souvenir for being in Dublin during the centenary commemorations and is a very worthwhile set of pictures to have on hand for anyone interested in the Rising.

Last Monday night and Tuesday I stayed at my mom's place because my brother was in Iceland. Mom had bought a book for him and by the time he got back Tuesday night we had both read it. It took me an hour.

The book is "The Crossroads of Should and Must," by Elle Luna, and it's a fast read because it's heavily illustrated--the writer is also an artist, and the book is beautiful, vibrant and expressive, in a colorful big-brush-strokes-y style that reminds me a bit of the "Max the Dog" books that Tim had when we were kids and a bit of the rainbow-lettered line of life advice inspirational things popular for families in the 90s, of which I still have the "How to Be an Artist" mug.

The specific genre of this book is one I tend to derisively refer to as "inspiration porn," a genre I am generally somewhat dubious of as I find it often to be pretty shallow and frequently victim-blamey ("Feeling stressed out about all the stressful shit going on in your life? That's your own fault for choosing to be stressed! Just, like, stop feeling stressed out about things, maaan!") and I have developed the admittedly cynical belief that, in large part, the role of self-help/productivity-boosting literature in our culture is to deflect attention away from the structural and cultural shenaniganry that keep us a society of permanently stressed-out unhappy people and set us up for a life of constantly "improving" ourselves instead of the society we live in (worst offender: "Who Moved My Cheese?"). But on the other hand, I am also all for self-improvement and continual growth and lifelong learning and all that sort of thing, which is probably why I end up reading so much self-helpy stuff anyway even though I end up hating most of it.

That said, this is a pretty down-to-earth book as far as inspirational writing goes. It's full of "actionable" ideas--so many that you're free to pick and choose and combine them and make up your own if any occur to you, rather than being dictated to that this is how to do it--it's not one of those One Weird Trick to Becoming a Happy Healthy Hyperproductive Capitalist Robot And Liking It pieces. And it doesn't promise any quick fixes--a lot of it is about planning, asking questions, and developing awareness of things you might be thinking or doing unconsciously (what the rest of the self-help game calls "mindfulness", I guess, and academia calls "deconstruction"--what am I actually doing right now and why am I doing it?).

This book would take a lot longer than an hour to read if I actually stopped and asked myself all the questions, which I didn't. I should read it again and do that sometime, although it's likely I won't. I should especially do this because I have far too many interests, so I have trouble settling into a "passion" or a "calling"--sometimes I feel like I ought to say it's writing because it's the most productive and has the biggest community of people for whom it is also their passion around it, rather than because I myself actually have stories to tell. I feel like most of the time I more want to acquire things than produce them--acquire stories, skills, languages, experiences, knowledge--also some actual stuff, to be honest, like a Disney villian mansion--and that I feel like I ought to produce or create rather than just consume, more as a moral imperative than an actual drive of my own. And I procrastinate on writing fabulously--I go to the gym every morning, I read about 75 books a year, I write reviews for all of them, I've started taking Irish and I keep finding myself actually studying outside of class, I have too many friends (HOW DID THAT HAPPEN) and I guess I clean a lot now? Reading this book made me want to write, but also to draw, and also to study Irish harder and practice Tarot and write better reviews than I've been doing. What I actually did was finish the bowl of ice cream I was eating and wash the dishes, then I picked up my paper journal and wrote the first draft of this review. It's been nearly a year since I used my paper journal; I think I need to journal more as well I think--I always feel better when I do. And now I'm thinking about how I've tied up all my writing stuff SUPER ORGANIZEDLY into a whole complicated mess of computers and it's made it difficult for me to write if everything isn't just so--if I don't have all my shit with me but also am out of the house. That's dumb. I should make it easier for myself to write, not harder.

I really should reread the book and make myself a plan. I like to plan. I should probably create a system of incentives, too.

Ach, weel. As of when I first read this book I have suddenly become extremely broke, so I am sure I will have plenty of time to sit around and work on all the things as I must necessarily give up all my optional spending for a little bit.

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Music: quiet

So far, one of the most-hyped books I've seen this summer was Shadowshaper. Granted, I deliberately sought out a bunch of the hype because I loved Daniel José Older's adult "ghost noir" fantasy books, Half-Resurrection Blues and Salsa Nocturna. But then it was actually released, and even more hype appeared, in places I was not expecting it--Holly Black's review in the New York Times, for instance, or Kate Beaton praising it on Twitter.

I had deliberately chosen to avoid preordering it so I could buy it at Readercon and get the author to sign it. I had deliberately chosen to torment myself.

After a brief heart attack when the Crossed Genres table said they only had limited copies available so we should all hurry up--I had to be late for the con because of work so this scared me--I finally arrived at Readercon, and ran immediately to the dealer's room to get two copies (one for me, one for a friend) before I keeled over dead.

Now recovered from Readercon (except financially) and not deaded, I can say that I have read Shadowshaper and it was quite worth all the running around and flailing.

Shadowshaper is the story of Sierra Santiago, a 16-year-old street artist in a rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn (i.e. the current one). Sierra's project for the summer is to paint a mural of a big old dragon on the side of an abandoned monstrosity of a development project in the Junklot, near where all her old dude neighbors play dominoes. Things start to get weird when she notices that one of the other murals in the Junklot, a portrait of a now-deceased neighbor, is fading--and crying. Also, her grandfather--who hasn't spoken coherently in over a year, since he had a stroke--suddenly starts apologizing and telling her to hang out with Robbie, a tattoo-covered Haitian kid at her school. And then a thing that's basically a zombie shows up at a house party and chases her, at which point things are definitely weird and she's not imagining it.

This confluence of weird things is how Sierra finds out she's a shadowshaper, a type of sorcerer who can channel whatever spirits are present into art, bringing the art alive and giving the spirits form and herself access to the spirits' power. It's a very original and thoroughly enviable form of magic power, and one that I (and probably every other reader of the book) instantly coveted. The shadowshaper community is in a sorry state, though, having been hijacked by male chauvinism and anthropology over Sierra's lifetime, which is why she didn't know about it.

Sierra, her awesome wisecracking friends, tattooed cute shadowshaper Robbie, Sierra's brother Juan who is in a salsa thrash band, a librarian at Columbia, and Sierra's possibly-a-gangster godfather all must band together to find the mysterious, powerful ancestral spirit Lucera and save the shadowshaping tradition from the machinations of a power-hungry anthropologist named Dr. Wick, who has gotten a little too deep into multiple of the spiritual traditions he studies and is, apparently, miffed that he hasn't been accepted as the #1 most powerful leader in all of them, like the sweeping-in-late-outsider white dude always does in stories like Dancing with Wolves/Dune/Avatar/any of a number of others. He's convinced that the shadowshapers need to be "saved," for a value of "saved" that apparently involves killing a bunch of them, and he has to be the one to do it.

Daniel José Older is not shy about his political views, especially the view that white people need to learn when to stay in their lane, and while he is extra not-shy about them on panels and on Twitter (seriously, everybody go follow him on Twitter), the book is also a pretty explicitly political book (all his books are). Because he is a very smart dude, he doesn't believe that there's such thing as a non-political book, just books that don't acknowledge their politics or explore them intelligently and ones that do. This particular book explores issues of gender, race, gentrification, the imperialist history of anthropology, street harassment, ethnic identity (this is different than race), plus the YA staples of family, finding out unflattering things about grown-ups in your family, and taking on adult roles and responsibilities. There is a lot of a lot of stuff going on here, is what I'm saying. It is both built into the fabric of the plot and, often, called out explicitly, which I know is not necessarily everyone's bag but would probably be kind of weird not to do, because I think most people occasionally do try to talk about stuff that's going on with other people. It also establishes Sierra as an intelligent straight-talker who's not afraid to call out bullshit--or in some cases, who becomes not afraid to call out bullshit, which is a vital growing up skill.

A big part of the book is Sierra's sense of identity and place as a black Puerto Rican in Brooklyn, and as an outsider to all of these things (seriously, I think the last time I went to Brooklyn was when my great-grandmother was alive, for her surprise 90th birthday party, which is not what killed her don't worry) I am not in any way qualified to be having opinions on how this is approached or portrayed--the author knows more about this than I do, for obvious reasons--but what I will say is that, to someone not very familiar with this milieu, it's very vibrant and grounded, with a palpable sense of place and culture that permeates everything and makes it all feel cohesive and natural. Like, sometimes people know exactly what they're talking about but they're not very good at bringing it alive for other people, and this does not seem to be one of those cases. And I love, love, love that the city functions like a city--and especially like a city at this current moment in time for U.S. cities--with street-harassing douchebags yelling gross things at you when you walk down the street, and public transit taking like ten goddamn years to get anywhere, and the lightning speed of gentrification turning things into Starbuckses every time you look away for a second--all that I am in a place to tell you is all VERY TRUE STUFF these days. (The place is Boston, supposedly the most rapidly gentrifying city in the U.S. right now.)

Anyway, all of that is wrapped up in a big loud fun fast-moving ACTION FANTASY PLOT of FANTASY ACTION, with FIGHTING CHALK NINJAS and SNOTTY OLD CHURCH GHOSTS and DRIVING REAL FAST and SNEAKY INFILTRATION OF LIBRARIES and ZOMBIE ATTACKS and WITTY BANTER and all that fun stuff. And a lot of stuff about music, which I personally sometimes find a bit weird to deal with in books because my imagination fails me, but in this case I now really want salsa thrash to be a thing. (Is it a thing? Can someone make it so, if not?) And there is of course an Obligatory Romance, which, me being me, I believe has two main things going for it: it is blessedly straightforward (no triangles! no creepy starting-off-hating-each-other!) and the dude is not an overbearing twit. (For anyone unfamiliar with my general reactions to romances--which are divided into "wanting to punch one of the parties" and "not wanting to punch either of the parties"--that was a positive assessment.)

Oh, and the librarian character was the best, because librarians are the best. Except for sometimes when Sierra's friends are the best, because they are all full of hilarious one-liners.

Sometimes, you read a biography or memoir of an artist because you’re already a big fan of the artist. In fact, that’s probably the case most of the time people read biographies or memoirs of artists. But other times, if you’re me, you read the biographies of artists whose work you’re not familiar with because somebody told you the book was really good, and then afterwards—if the book was as good as they say—you go check out the artists’ work.

This is a long-winded way of saying that I’m just today listening to Patti Smith’s first album, Horses, because last night I finished reading her memoir, Just Kids. I read it on my dad’s recommendation, because I had embarrassingly little idea who Patti Smith is.

Just Kids isn’t quite a memoir in the traditional sense, in that very little page space is given to—well, most of her life. It also doesn’t focus on her time being famous. While there is a bit of childhood stuff in the beginning, mostly for background, and some more on her adult life at the end, quite briefly, the bulk of this book takes place over the space of maybe five years, her first five years in New York after running away from home in 1969, when she was broke and obscure and struggling to get by and make art. These are also the five years that she was living with Robert Mapplethorpe, because really, the book isn’t about Patti Smith so much as it is about Patti and Robert. It’s more of an elegy or a very long love letter than an autobiography.

The book is full of awesome, crazy little stories about Patti and/or Robert meeting all sorts of interesting, weird people that were famous or would be famous later, from Jimi Hendrix consoling her about being too nervous to attend a party to Allen Ginsberg buying her coffee and a sandwich because he thought she was a pretty boy. The two “kids” are very interesting characters in their own right, as well—two dedicated artists and absolute kindred spirits, whose devotion to and support of each other managed to weather quite a lot of things that would have ended an ordinary couples’ relationship, such as Robert being gay and both of them getting involved with other people. Patti in particular is quite relatable in a slightly dorky way—apparently people tended to assume she was either a junkie or a lesbian or generally a lot more “wild” than she really was, due to her appearance and the “scene” she was part of, but she apparently didn’t even drink much, and was happy to spend a lot of time home reading and writing. That isn’t to say she didn’t have adventures, but they weren’t sex and drugs adventures; they were totally artsy nerd adventures—like, she went to France by herself without either speaking the language or booking a hotel first, to visit Rimbaud’s grave.

A lot of the book is about clothes, which, as a Goth, I approve of. Patti Smith has a bizarrely specific memory for who was wearing what at what event, even for someone in the sort of artsy scene where people consider dressing to be a form of arting oneself up. Some of these remembrances may be aided by photographs, of which there are a bunch of adorable ones included in the book, but I am still very impressed.

Patti Smith’s poetic sensibility and identity as a poet first and foremost infuse her prose writing. She has wonderful, lyrical ways of describing things, both physical things and emotional experiences, and she’s smart without being dense, and full of references without being pretentious. She definitely comes off like someone you’d like to have a glass of wine with and listen to her tell you stories about When I Was Your Age all day.

I would strongly recommend this to anyone interested in the seventies, or rock and roll, or art in general.