Exploration

On the trip to the comic store mentioned in my previous post, a DVD on the rental shelf caught my eye:
Spring and Chaos: The life story of Kenji Miyazawa Can't say enough good things about this movie. It was really interesting. Miyazawa is one of Japan's most reveered poets and (in my opinion) very akin to Walt Whitman in a lot of ways.

I think perhaps the most interesting part for me was the realization of how much his symbology has been used in anime. To the best of my understanding, he is the one that wrote the modern legend of the train to the afterlife. There were, perhaps earlier legends where the train was a dragon or a caravan. The long snake-like body of the train and steam, smoke, and fire belching from it in a lot of ways made it a natural evolution of these ideas but he seems to be the person who tied the two into the steam trains of his time. (1900-1937) This train appears in so many animations: Galaxy Express 999, the train in 'Chinese Ghost Story', the trains in Totoro and Spirited Away, and dozens of others.

Miyazawa also drew a lot of cat-people. The character in 'A wind named amnesia' seems to be modeled almost directly from his original drawings right down to the face shape, fur patterns, eye shapes, propotions, personality, everything.

Now, of course, I'd like to read a lot more about him and his works so that I can be more aware of all these cultural references that I've been missing out on. :) Of course, I should also read more more general japanese folklore and find out what influenced his writings too. Definetely a lot of interesting things to study though and I strongly recommend the film. (As a side note, the film was done by the same guys that did Macross and Escaflowne so it's pretty decent work with a lot of abstract and surreal animation to boot!)

Pointless Activities

Been too angry to really focus on anything good all day but I needed to do something to work out this frustration so I tried playing with stylizing Bush into an icon and then using it in various ways. I think both of the logos behind the cut fail. I was going for something simple that would print out on a tee-shirt and look crisp.

( Political logos behind this cut )

To any supporters of Bush these are probably fairly offensive and I wonder what the legal ramifications of this sort of art is. The garden shears could be loosely interpreted to suggest violence although I think anyone who knows me would know this is not the case and the other is vulgar and might violate decency laws or something. Call me paranoid but this administration has had a rather bad policy of locking-up those who oppose them, so I'd like to know the ground rules before I officially enter the game.

The best weapons I have against the oppression of the Bush administration are the things I create. I strongly feel I can do more damage to them with art than I could do by any other means and it's well past time I started swinging back or they're just going to bury people like me.

As a side note, any suggestion on how to make the designs stronger or ideas for additional/better designs would be very much appreciated.

*sigh* Look what they've made me do! Political rants in my LJ. :/ I swore I'd never do this. Bastards.