Kay Neilsen

I recently found out about an illustrator by the name of Kay Neilsen. He was active from the 10s through the 50s and is well known for his fairy tale illustrations. I just got a book of his work and am eager to share, so here ya go:



it's tough to see them & all their detail on the web. i do enjoy his use of white space and bottom-heavy layouts.

this is my cat ricky. i remember distinctly the night we sat down as a family and decided ricky's name. my brother wanted to name him frankenstein. but i think i started crying so we didn't name him frankenstein. why i chose the name ricky i have ABSOLUTELY no idea. which frustrates me now. but maybe it was just to prove to my future self that you don't have to find meaning in everything.

ricky is now 15 years old. i got him back in the summer of '91. he's in pretty good shape give his age. he's not running around after squirrels anymore, but he can still get up onto my bed. but in all those 15 years this cat has never once been affectionate. he's been cute plenty of times and he'll let you pet him (operative word there is 'let') but he's not a snuggler. and he doesn't like to be picked up. and he is most definitely not a lapcat.

either way, he's always been my grumpy little furball. and now i've got to make some tough choices. when i move to seattle, do i try to bring him with me? as of right now, i'm considering moving in w/ meg and she has a wonderful little cat by the name of sushi. but ricky is old and i hear that sush is a fighter. sushi will kick the living shit out of ricky if i tried to bring him with. not to mention ricky trying to adapt to new and much smaller surroundings. so do i leave him here? he and my grandmother are good company for one another while my mom's at work. but things have changed around here. ricky tossed his kibbles the other night and he's been 'marking' the house. (he used to be an indoor/outdoor cat so he got all that territorial shit out of him while he was outside. but a bad run-in with a gopher left him with a mangled foot and as a permanently indoor cat). my mom can't deal with all this mess and she's not going to. so ricky has been relegated to living in the garage. i feel incredibly sorry for him. but i understand my mom's anger too. he's been doing it a lot. so can i just leave him here? trapped in a garage indefinitely? i don't know what to do...

we feel fine = i feel exhilarated

once again, jonathan harris is amazing. (well, jonathan and his collaborator sepandar kamvar). go check out wefeelfine.org. my favorite forms of "organization" are the mobs and the murmurs. (that will make sense when you check out the site). i just leave the murmurs window open and occasionally check in on the world's 'mood'. (ps: i absolutely love the warm charcoal/black that they use for the background color. hurm... maybe for my own website...)

from the cold sunlight that's reflected off the moon

i wore a sweater & drank some hot tea this afternoon. i haven't felt this much "in my element" in a long time. this was also the first time in a LONG time that i had two days off in a row. i was actually productive! i feel like i *need* two days off, for my own. saturdays (even if they don't take place on an actual saturday) are for selfish endeavors. but it's sunday (irregardless if it actually is sunday) that is productive. that's the day you wake up feeling refreshed and on top of things.

Everyone's afraid of their own lives
If you could be anything you want
I bet you'd be disappointed, am I right? -mm

i am a procrastinator by nature (or probably more from nurture but whatev). and i've been terrible lately. most days i get off work at 5 with a notebook full of things to do burning in my pocket. but after i make dinner and sit down, i never get back up. i worry about myself. i know that i'm tired, but is that really what's keeping me from starting all these really important things (like a genuine job search)? i worry that the real reason is that i'm scared. i'm afraid to put my portfolio out there. i'm afraid to hear rejection. now if i were you, sitting there reading this, i would be saying "buck up kiddo" under my breath. there is no room for these excuses. but seriously, i think that's what's preventing me from getting up out of my chair and redoing the portfolio/getting my site together/sending out packages n' whatnot.

but the tide is changing. while last month i was content with this comfortable lack of responsibility, now i just feel like i'm stalling. and i can feel the urge to move on, to get on w/ my life. brad tells me, "this part is life too." but it doesn't feel that way. this life feels like a holding cell. i needed the "break" (if working 50+ hours a week is a break) but now i'm ready to move onto the next chapter.

"John Milton was a failure. In writing Paradise Lost his aim was to 'justify the ways of God to men.' Inevitably he fell short and wrote only a monumental poem. Beethoven, whose music was conceived to transcend fate, was a failure. As was Socrates, whose ambition was to make people happy by making them reasonable and just. The surest, noblest way to fail is to set one's standards titanically high.

The flip side of that proposition also seems true. The surest way to succeed is to keep one's striving low. Many people, by external standards, will be 'successes.' They will own homes, eat in better restaurants, dress well and, in some instances, perform socially useful work. Yet fewer people are putting themselves on the line, making as much of their minds and talents as they might. Frequently success is what people settle for when they can't think of something noble enough to be worth failing at." -Laurence Shames

now i'm not in any way comparing myself to Milton or Socrates but the point is there. right now, in this life, i'm doing fine. but i'm striving *real* low. i'm not doing what i love. i'm not where i think i want to be. i need to put myself on the line.

awake

this is not worthy of the first post in many months, but eh...
just humorous or something of note?

Beauty is anything that is difficult to obtain.

True?
I'm not sure, but I'd love to hear your thoughts. This is what I was thinking:
It used to be attractive to be large because it meant that you had enough $$ to eat. Now it is attractive to be thin since the least expensive food (both in terms of money and time expenditure) is sugary/greasy/calorie-laden crap. It's easy to be large now. It is difficult to be thin.
Blue eyes are stereotypically thought as an attractive eye color (although I don't know how true that is anymore) but the blue-eyed gene is recessive, i.e. difficult.
Are there other examples?

i'm not dead, just tired.
i have tons to write about and no energy to do it.
will write more later.

Hillman Curtis rocks my socks. (So does Mark Romanek)

Hillman Curtis does a series of videos he calls "artist documentary series" which he posts on his site. I love these things. I watch them over and over again. He interviews some of the most brilliant designers and artists I've ever seen. And every time I rewatch them, I glean something new from what they're saying. Sometimes you're just 'ready' to hear something. Sometimes certain phrases will just stick with you better.

So I was watching the Mark Romanek one this morning, and, well, I just had to record what he was saying somehow, so I started to type:

"One of the secrets of it is having things not be complete. Or having a certain amount of it being inscrutable or inexplicable or something that makes sense in your subconscious. But I talk all the time that things are "too left brain." Meaning it just is what it is. It doesn't have that enigmatic quality to it. There isn't anything open-ended about it. It can be understood too easily. I find that the phrase "right brain" or "left brain" comes up a lot when I'm working with my crew about making decisions about what we're going to shoot and what goes in front of the camera. It's something to do with leaving the audience with a question. What that does is it engages the audience. It becomes interpretive for them. And as soon as it becomes interpretive, you're engaged. You're not just watching something that's laid out for you. You're being asked questions or posed riddles. If a broken chair has more latent, resonate, potential meaning than an unbroken chair, then break the chair."

"At the end of the day, the only thing that's really important is emotionally engaging the people. And then at a certain point, if you're at all wise, then you go, nothing matters but that. It doesn't matter what I went through to get the shot. It doesn't matter how beautiful the shot is. If you're leaving people cold, it's gotta go."
-Mark Romanek

That's not all of it. You should watch the whole thing here. In fact, you should watch all of Curtis' documentaries here.

GO TIME!

soo... i have to finish 3 credits worth of work in 2 days. haha. tonight i'm designing an entire magazine and tomorrow night i'll be designing an annual report. and in between those two monstrosities i'll be doing some event graphics, a storefront and finishing up a website. oh boy... lots to do, so i think i'll blog for a second. (logic just jumped out my window).

i should be massively panicked, and while i have moments, i'm surprisingly calm, or apathetic, can't be sure. anywho, that's what i'm up to until wednesday. then i've got to layout the anthology for my writing class (not too worried about that) and finish up my resume and promo pieces.

blarg, i know this isn't that interesting to read, it's more of a laundry list for myself more than anything. but, for your enjoyment, here's a little something something that happened while i was trying to come up with ideas for ads/event graphics for my poetry slam thing:

There's been a lack of visuals lately...

the current state of my dining room table. no eating allowed! it's production time! if you look closely you can actually see 5 different types of adhesives in this one photo.



although i've been frantic lately, i still manage to take a few pics every now and again.

(this was taken awhile ago) I asked Meg* to wake me up and she thought it was hilarious when she found me sleeping on my sketchbook. so, she took a photo ;)

I've been so caught up in work lately. I eat, sleep and breath with my dayplanner on one side and my sketchbook on the other. ARgh. I hate that I feel like I'm missing so many other opportunities because I'm consumed with design, but I comfort myself with the fact that it is going to be over soon. I have less than 2 weeks to finish my portfolio now. Today in office hours, Bob looked me in the eyes and asked, "You're getting stuff done, right? You're going to finish right?" I muttered yes, yes but did not look him back in the eyes. I am scared that I won't finish everything. But then again, there hasn't been a semester yet that I haven't been scared that I won't finish everything.

A friend had this quote in their IM profile for awhile and I liked it. I haven't been one for quotes lately, (I was in high school, Andrea knows that...) but this one has sort of been helping me to keep things in perspective:

"To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Funny stuff

I had this as an away message:

"I've decided this design stuff is a sham so I'm going to drop out of school and become a bare-knuckle boxer"

And I came back to this (see below). Made me laugh so hard, hope it has the same effect on someone else.
(Names are omitted to protect the innocent ;) )


M: you need a NAME, that's the ticket
M: like...Krazy Knuckles KAT
M: Smashin' Sampson
M: .....the Towering Typographer
M: "Serifin' up some PAIN!"
M: haha..okay..."the TOWERING TYPOGRAPHER...I'm gonna go comic SANS on your ass" (someone in the audience : 'ooo, that's ugly')
M: the PENSYLVANIAN
M: ...time to go Dutch-Colonial on your ass
M: haha..."I'm the horse...YOU're the BUGGY....and I'm gonna take you to town BITCH!"

HAHA.... oh boy. Humor is necessary at this point. Humor and coffee. Yes, that's it.

None of this is new

Saw a little worm on the sidewalk outside my apartment today and I picked it up to put it in the soil. Not a big deal, helps the little guy/gal/both simultaneously out and I get bonus karma points along w/ a little worm goo. But long after I'd held the worm in my fingers, I could still feel the energy of its wiggling in my fingertips. That feeling is really awe-inspiring. The worm and I are filled with this same life force, or whatever the fuck you want to call it. We're made from the same sorts of cells. The magical mechanization of it all... We sort of take that for granted when we touch another human being, but because this worm was such a simple being, it really struck me. He is alive.

googlin'

I think this is pretty funny. (Don't ask my why I was searching for "names of small towns," it was something for the writing piece I'm working on now.) It makes me think of some random magazine article (or short story or blog entry or something) where a father was describing how he and his daughter were trying to find the most disgusting thing where the google side bar would read: Find what you're looking for on ebay! They found that they could "Find 'rotting corpses' on ebay!" Bill, my current design professor, mentioned in class this week that there are people who, as a hobby, try to type in two unrelated words into google and get just *one* hit. I casually tried it myself, couldn't find anything of course.

I've had many thoughts in the past week or so that I'd love to go on and on about, but I've got many miles to go... On the up side, this will all be over with very soon.

I'm missing ghosts

I miss the people I became so achingly close to, and never hear from.
I miss the people I became so achingly close to, and now we talk about the weather. I miss the ghosts I made for them.
Duration is irrelevant.
It matters how close we got.
I have countless stories. A gigantic heap of people who I became intensely connected to and who now, I rarely ever hear from. I comfort myself with the fact that I have countless stories to tell. But I don't want stories! I want friends! Real, meaningful, rich friendships.
So consider this a published call. If we ever knew one another tenderly, if we ever exchanged more than phone numbers and pleasantries, please come back into my life...

The start to some story in the future:

My feet were dark red with cold. I've had to sleep with socks on for the last few nights. The scary part is that it's not amazingly cold outside, as least given the fact that this is Syracuse New York and it's still only March. I'm not sure why my circulation is suddenly so poor. I crawled into bed and Sushi, my roommate's cat, leapt up to join me. As I set my alarm clock and the 3 additional alarms on my cell phone (I had to wake up at 6:30 the next morning) Sushi started chewing on my light blue fleece blanket. It smelled like my cat from back home, Ricky. I grabbed Sushi under his front paws and pulled him to me. “Stop it" I said squarely into his eyes. He blinked and licked his nose and I let go. I turned off the light and he padded down to the end of the bed and curled up near my cold red feet. I wish I could say I was grateful. That would make me a good person but instead I sighed at the thought that I would not be free to move my legs around for the rest of the night. This is the reason why I am bad at love.

remember me as a time of day

"If Kat were a time of day she would be early morning. Light blue and yellow, cold floors and silence."

Their stiletto heels seem to tap out
"I'm-more-so-phi-sti-cat-ed-than-you"
I'll take my silent sneakers.

Preference

It's funny (in the ironic sense more than the humorous sense) that what I look for in design is clarity. But in music I lean so heavily towards really orchestrated, lush music. Sometimes it seems that anything w/ only one guitarist is automatically out. ;)

Does that mean anything? Do I compensate for the sterility of the design I like with the complexity of the music I enjoy? Or is this all just preference anyway? Why do we like the things we do? And can our preferences in one aspect of our life affect our preferences in other areas? For example, do I love really meditative hobbies only because I feel so flustered by my work? Anyone else see this in their life?

Made Up Language

The other day I told my mom that I was really enjoying my writing class and she responded,
"Good, well, I hope it will teach you to stop making up words."
"Why? I like to make up words."
"I think you make up words because you can't think of a real one."
"Precisely!"


(ps: 15 minutes until it's my birthday. yay for 23.)