080808
Something I did while watching the Olympics opening ceremony. WHOAX damn cool. I missed the opening, but the painting/dancing, the word thingy, the fire light up was WHOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAZ.
“Open open eye boundary.”
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Hip Hop and me.
Was thinking, thinking about why hip hop mattered to me after I read this book by Patrick Neate “Where You’re At”. In the book he visits New York City, Tokyo, Johannesburg ,Cape Town and Rio De Janeiro to find out the Hip Hop culture there to fulfill some personal quest. In the book, I could relate to only Tokyo. Hip Hop there is based on superficiality. Neate put it well. Don’t read superficiality with “nooo” but “exactly!” Essentially, with their identities so dependent on their public image, Japanese youngsters turn to hip hop to keep it real but in the end, they work the same magic of superficiality on it. They have no idea what “keeping it real” or “representing” really means. Exactly. But of course, there are a few heads there…
I can’t say I appreciate hip hop more than the tokyoites because I just don’t know the meter. But what I know is that my relation to hip hop is shallow. Reading about the blacks using hip hop as a way to affect change in their post apartheid ridden cities was mindblowing. Heck, I hadn’t even realised that hip hop was a huge network that connected so many people. Back to the point. I don’t come from places like this. The discrimination I got/get is nothing compared to theirs. I’m not into funk bailes or anything. So what do I have to say that I’m worth being part of Hip hop?
When I was thinking this, it was in bed… For some brain shot reason I started thinking about last year’s trip to Calcutta. Then I started comparing it with the stuff that my friend wrote in her blog when she went to India to attend a marriage. And I was thinking that all that was really sick wealth. The way she was describing it sounded higher than the shoppin malls. Big house, big cars, lots of maids, lots of food, lots of carpeting. Sick sick sick wealth. That money could’ve done something better. But that’s exactly where it’s hypocritical. Back in school there’s a lot of slacking and complaining (that I may never stop) like I don’t give a shit that I can just go to school.
When I thought a bit more, this became an analogy for hip hop and me. The real hip hop heads are in an unstickable situation, but I’m in peaceful singapore, in a… good… school, with a much better chance of affecting change than them, but I’ll probably never give enough of a damn to put in any effort to do it. Sick sick sick wealth.
Hip hop has power. It also has content. This is what I think of it: Lots of it is violent, misogynistic, ego-boosting. It’s also about the rapper making himself a character in the song and narrating his story. (I’m not just talking about eminem here. I’ve expanded my vision to a couple of other rappers, but I know it’s limited, but I don’t know any other rappers.) Those bigger stories probably narrate my much smaller, softer situations.
Go To Sleep Em feat Obie Trice and DMX
(Obie Trice)
We got you niggaz, nervous
On purpose, to hurt your focus, you’se not MC’s, you’se worthless
You’se not them G’s, you’se a circus, you’se no appeal, please
You’se curtains, you use words, cool heard, slurred in two thousand third
You’se purpin, you’se no threat, who’s ya servin?
We lyrically oughta bury you beneath the dirt when
You f*** with a label overseein the Earth
Shady muthaf***a, O. Trice’s birth
And as I mold, I become a curse
Ironically, further up in the song, eminem says this
(Eminem)
Me do this one all by my lonely, I don’t need fifteen of my homies
When I see you, I’m seeing you, me and you only
We never met, but best believe you gon’ know me
When I’m this close, to see you exposed as phony
Come on, b****, show me, pick me up, throw me
Lift me up, hold me, just like you told me
You was gonna do, that’s what I thought, you’re pitiful
I’m rid of you, all you, Ja, you’ll get it too!
Of course hip hop is more than this. It’s about reality. “It’s the voice of the alienated and disenfranchised.” to quote Neate. He got into hip hop because there was no other teen culture for him at the time. But our ministers got it wrong. The teens here are more pop than hip hop. Even guys are wearing more pop than hip hop. I was probably just engaged by the idea of hip hop, and it became a catalyst for many other things I’d rather not say. But it gives an appreciation for other things, more respect for other things, as with experiencing different cultures. It also gives unfounded confidence. One of the lesser examples would be the class debate that I took part in. The one about whether or not the govt should make natural burials mandatory for those who opt for burials. Scared as dope, and the script I wrote suddenly sounded so dumb, “but f-damn it I just don’t give a f-damn piss bout’ the script” and in the end I gave two ridiculous analogies and backed them with such ridiculous explanations, but at least I made content in those minutes.
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General Odoch
Erm this is an ugly guy I thought of after watching Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. Eh the movie was much better than expected cos I thought it’d be as lame as the first movie. But no! They had sword fights and beaches.
So who is General Odoch? He’s quite ugly and has very long p—c hair, which is why he needs a horn mask and cloth to wrap around his waist. Eh, no, it’s not for such innocent reasons. He wears a mask because battling people wear helmet like thingy’s just that he thinks he only needs to protect his face. He is a narrcissist, you see. He actually has a very manly face. Strong jaw, big nose, all that stuff. The mask is made out of some animal skull, explaining the horns. That piece of cloth is thick because he has more than just a broad waist. It needs to be thick and strong so that it doesn’t break from the weight, seeing that he always has a hard on to kill. I am laming. I am having a dull conversation with myself. I am procrastinating.
Anyway, I was suddenly struck by the phrase “hard on to kill”. So I’ll be back. Soon.
Ah, 15 minutes later… or rather, 15 hours in the awful world of Narnia, General Odoch emerges victorious from battle. He is drenched in blood, from his enemies, his comrades, and his own. He is wounded badly, even his hard on which continues to twitch from adrenaline even though the Ice Witch froze and broke it. However, he is alive. Soon Lucy will come with her magic water and save him when he finally expires. He will be made the fifth of the Kings and Queens of Narnia even with his age.
Now one will wonder why he didn’t wear shin guards, fore arm guards, heck, even dress in armour. But look, he bears wrist guards, hard core sandals, a stomach plate. It is as if he is afraid of commiting seppuku halfway through battle. Behold, he would have if he’d been cornered by a ton of polar bears. It would be more glorious. Well, the reason why he isn’t better dressed is for the same reason why he shaved his armpits: VANITY.
Okay. I’m off to lunch.
Back from lunch. As I was eating, I realised that good characters are 3d. All you’ve seen is Odoch’s 2d character. Don’t think that his pose is kiddy and shallow. Try to remember that he is a General, he must strike poses that will inspire his soldiers. Also know that he is illiterate, his pose was taken off the drawings people carved on walls.
Now, let’s examine who Odoch really is. The Odoch we must know, is the one in battle. Peter Parker managed to get a shot of him in action. Oh crud. More laming.
Eyes filled with bloodlust, adrenaline makes everything slow down for Odoch. Even color. Everything is saturated, divided into black and white, and the only thing filled with color, filled with life, is his eyes. They say what that’s behind a person’s eyes is who he really is. Stare deep into his eyes, and know how much of a fighter he is, why he is the general and not some black haired prince.
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Medley of Craziness
I did this last week during our career talks. 
Wn suggested that I upload it here, so here it is~! Yeah, there is a connection with my coursework, which means that it’ll go down in the history of my blackbook.
I really enjoyed drawing them; it was fun, but I won’t start naming them or anything.
P.S. The pic can be magnified. Just viewing it from afar doesn’t bring out the craziness…
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Harlot’s Beast
This was inspired by “Bat Country” by Avenged Sevenfold. Which you can listen to here:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=VTqgKEErjOg
A friend I met last december introduced the song to me, along with other pop-rock songs that drew me away from rap for a while. The song can be interpreted in anyway you want. You can personalise it’s meaning to connect with your school life, or whatever, as music should be anyway. But “Bat Country” is sort of about a guy using, which gave a different representation of what Shady gave me with “My Fault” or “Drug Ballad”, to be explicit in meaning.
This is the first line: “He who makes a beast out of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”
P.S. Yes Dolly, you aren’t dreaming: that’s Reaction 2.
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MC: Host
Ahhh… I know that this doesn’t show the MC that I see in my mind. What I see is just a guy in gray baggy pants, an overly big plain white shirt… But I wanted to try out different stuff… I borrowed a couple of books from the library and just wanted to do something with markers and the COLLEEN pencils I had since primary school but never picked up. (But the color pencil stuff doesn’t really show up from the scanner, sadly)
But well, I like the colouring because the coordination is not bad… and there are tones and stuff.
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Alien
The occasional alien dropped by on paper again. Thanks to kindergardens I have LOADS of rough paper to doodle on. Goofus alien. He’s Joker in Batman.
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Pleasantville
We watched Pleasantville today for AEP!!! I was about to start on comparing counter culture and one of the lines in the movie “There isn’t a way of how things should be”… but apparently that’s old stuff.
David was a real dorky nerd about Pleasantville. He had this straight, set thinking that Jennifer balanced out for him: “Pleasantville should be kept pleasant, kept the way it is.” Somehow, the show was appealing to him. Maybe life seemed simpler, more direct, because he was an outcast in school and he didn’t have respect from his mom or sister. Jennifer was the typical blonde at first until she changed… Anyway, when they first got into Pleasantville, it was annoying because they were always trying to impose their opinions on others for annoying reasons. David because it was his fantasy, and Jennifer because she was overwhelmed by people as “dorky” as her brother. Then the people around them started changing. There were the Coloreds who were finding satisfaction in their individualism, and the Non-coloreds who were trying to keep things at peace and order.
At first, I had David’s opinion about preserving Pleasantville because life at Pleasantville seemed easy compared to now. You’re ignorant, so you do work, that’s your satisfaction. Until their rebellious meeting at the broken up cafe, I just felt that they (coloreds) were superficial faddists. But putting myself in their shoes, it’s just like when I first found out about rap. It was the june holidays, but after that I just pored over Youtube finding, listening, and just replaying songs. The more I played, the more I searched, the deeper I got to know the rapper and the style. Before that, I rejected songs like “Still D.R.E” or “Kim” because of the empty melody, but now I welcome the beat, and I appreciate the lyrics a bit more. In the same way, I think that Pleasantville’s Coloreds were just fascinated with what “Bud” and “Mary Sue” had to offer. Living their own life, the way they wanted it to be, could have been just fascinating compared with the monotony, like when (was it Bill?) the painter-waiter said something like “It’s just the same thing everyday. I flip the burger, I wipe the counter, everyday, and what’s the point?” to “Bud.”
It was very surprising, actually, that someone as dense as Bill, who couldn’t even think for himself about finishing burgers, could paint and color so well… Maybe because he was open to “Bud”’s assertions, and in the same way he was open to the creativity in art.
Onto other aspects of the movie… The use of color was the same as Far From Heaven. Although Far From Heaven used color codes to symbolise immorality, anger, or desolation, such as the gay pub lit with green, it also had the progressive aspect. In Pleasantville, the town was gaining more and more color as the people realised that they had something that they really wanted, and that it was truly their own opinion, they did not need to act out of obligation. As for FFH, it was the American Dream’s perfect family losing its glory, and the colors used in the later scenes were less saturated and more dull. The introduction of color to Pleasantville’s grayscale world was significant because it added excitement and more personality to the characters when you know what colors they wear, and the surroundings. One example would be when “Bud” drove his girlfriend to Lovers’ Lane for the first time and red leaves were falling over the road in heaps. If the red leaves had been in grayscale “red”, their journey would be less interesting or romantic. It also emphasizes the importance of Pleasantville’s citizens climbing out of their monotonous lives by leaving monotonous colors and accepting the “real colors”.
The TV mechanic, his TVs, his remote control, and his van was a very fantastical element of the movie. Even though his van was painted to look like a typical advertisement, it just didn’t seem to belong. The sense of space in the van didn’t match, and the remote control was futuristic and stood out in both worlds. The shop selling television sets looked like something out of Dr. Seuss storybook because all the TVs were placed to face “Bud”, they would all play the same thing, and the shop was empty, only crammed with TV sets. This made the movie even more graphic novellish and more light hearted. But many times I felt that the TV mechanic’s addition was just to fit the Pleasantville idea into the movie: He created a situation, a solution, and represented an obssessed guy who was converted just like the town mayor into a “colored” (when he started showing scenes from around the world on the TV sets, and in color”.
Watching Pleasantville was like being introduced to 1950s America’s counter culture once again even though we just handed up our lit essay not long ago. Why does that period’s counter culture seem to affect us so much, and what about now, with lip-syncers and voice edits coming even more into the pop mainstream, what’s the current counter-movement? The only answer that Pleasantville offered was that a group of people will always find their lives dull and seek something even more fulfilling.
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Spill!
Based on a lyric: Spill my heart through this pen.
I was gonna make everything planned and proper, but then I thought: Making everything neat and pencilled first would be defeating the purpose of trying to include the lyric in the drawing, right? So I just went in with two blue pens and put the MMLP on. I tried to make the eyes look as if there’s the reflection off the laptop screen. Because I’m usually looking at the screen doing work when I’m listening to music (see the headphone?). And when I take a break and look through blogs or just blank out for a moment, or if I procrastinated like crazy, then I’ll start feeling the stress and all… Hehehe. The person should be me, because I remember being in the hall and seeing the hoop like that. And the button of the hongzi is spoilt, and skirt is slanted because there’s something wrong with the zip, and she’s wearing a stupid ankle guard…
Haha I sound weird. Maybe because I’ve toned down after being a little high after tuition.
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