Wonderful wonderful

Since I've been home from Burning Man, I've spent most of my time resting and cleaning my studio/lab which was in bad disrepair after the months of projects. It took 3 days of almost constant work but it's finally clean...ish...

Anyhow... During all that time, I've been watching a lot of cartoons. Looney Tunes and Popeye mostly. Augh! How can anyone watch Popeye and NOT be driven into a frenzy to animate something? Popeye continues to be simply one of the most beautiful and amazing animated shows ever made. He's almost consistently fantastic to watch.

So last night I yielded to temptation and did a couple of little fiddly animations. Just playing around at the moment. It's been a long time since I've done any real animation so I'm just doing exercises. Surprisingly, I'm finding that for the most part, animation skills don't appear to rust as quickly as other skills. Or maybe I've just gotten so much better at observing and drawing that my animation has improved by osmosis. Or possibly, because I'm not heavily invested in the projects I'm working on right now, I'm stressing about them less and that makes them move easier. Whatever the case, while I still have a LONG ways to go, I'm not too disappointed with where I'm at right this moment. (Did I almost say something positive about myself? Yikes!)

Tonight I'm in for an extra special treat! Felix the Cat from the 20s compliments of Archive.org. Woot! The real Felix of Otto Messmer, not Oriolo's watered-down 'for children' version. Okay, I admit that I like the 50's Felix too but the 20's Felix is just simply amazing. Don't get me wrong. Disney did some beautiful stuff and Warner's animation is slick and expressive, but honestly, there's just something about the stuff that came from the Sullivan and Fleischer studios that just hits something for me. They're weird, surreal, strange, exotic, and completely unrestrained. They were animation for adults. They were made for the cities and the slums and the working class people. They're what I've always thought of as 'REAL' animation. They don't need to try to imitate realistic motion, they have their own life. I suppose sometimes it makes me kind of sad to see that more and more animation is moving towards being 'realistic' Particularly with 3D computer animation it's all about making something that's 'real'. Felix isn't. He doesn't need to be and I love him for it. He's the sort of animation I want to make.

Reversal

Death becomes life, life becomes death. Reversal is a powerful force.

Funny that someone like me who's a bit of a mycophile is also a complete mycophobe. Today I picked some mushrooms, brought them home, chopped them up, and preserved them in a jar. I did so wearing an organics mask and rubber gloves. I cut them with a disposable knife on a surface I could also discard. I then put enough warning labels on the jar that you'd have to be blind not to know what it contains.

I don't know why, but I have some deep primal fear of Amanita Phalloides. Sure it's a deadly deadly poison that kills you in a slow horrific manner and has NO cure but.. I have lots of substances around my house like that. Arsenic, Sodium Hydroxide, Hydrochloric Acid, Sulfuric Acid, etc. I think perhaps it's that none of those look anything remotely like food, or maybe it's just because I was taught such major fear of mushrooms as a child. Dunno. Whatever the case, Amanita Phalloides scares me and I feel pretty uncomfortable having it in my house.

So why do I, you ask? Well.. _BECAUSE_ I'm terrified of mushrooms. It's choc-full of deadly amatoxins and since I discovered the Meixner test and confirmed it works using this mushroom as a test and a plain old Safeway button mushroom as a control, I can now use this elixir as a control in future tests and compare the results of other unidentified mushrooms with it to detect the presence of amatoxins. This could protect me from misidentifying a deadly galerina as a tasty honey mushroom or something like that. It's no substitute for careful identification procedures, but added to the rest of my battery of tests, it's a darn nice safety net.

I must also confess that some part of me likes the fact that I've taken something very threatening to me and turned it into something that will protect me and, in turn, I've taken the very thing that usually protects this little nasty from getting picked. Its rather overkill and unpleasant defense has been turned on itself. Ha!

This is actually a good example of my weird mechanism for coping with fear. Whenever I have a fear, even if its perfectly justified, I tend to confront it, but not just confront it. Machismo doesn't do much for me. What I really prefer to do is take whatever I'm afraid of and turn it into something positive. By finding positive aspects in things I fear, I tend to lose my fear of them in a far more lasting way than merely challenging them. I still have a very healthy respect for mysterious mushrooms (amanita phalloides in particular) but a healthy respect is much preferable to an unchecked phobia.