The Chronicles of Buttercup

I put the photos in two groups so far: The Driskill and 6th Street & Town Lake; coming soon: New Year's Eve.

Click here for photo fun.

I made a brief outing to the Austin Museum of Art. It currently has a showing of two illustrators: Tom Lea and Dr. Seuss.

I'd never seen Lea's work before but was very impressed with it. Here are a few examples, but note that without their real size and seeing the brush or pencil strokes they don't represent the artist well: Two Thousand Yard Stare is from his stint as a war illustrator with the Navy. Some of the work on display at the museum was very bloody and harsh. Here is some of his landscape work the bottom one of the horses was on display in the exhibit and was stunning. And while none of his murals were on display, they did have about 10 of his mini proposal versions of his murals, this one Stampede was amazing in person and reminded me of Picasso's Guernica. It appears that the version in the link here, that ended up on the Post Office wall, was not as visceral as the artist's original concept piece, but no shock there.

The Seuss stuff was all fun and great with a few of his darker pieces and some of his "taxidermy" collection I had never seen before. Basically, Seuss world animal heads on plaques. I thought one might look good on my wall at home, but felt that one from California with purple hair does not do that in Texas. Maybe the collection will come to LA.

So I'm venturing out of the hotel room, only because my three days here are up. I think I've successfully freaked out the room service staff by taking breakfast, lunch and dinner in my room for the past three days and wondering back and forth to the ice machine with my purple hair in my pajamas and my bare feet. And wondering the halls after midnight, same ensemble, with my camera looking to get a picture of a ghost. "Pardon me, do the ghosts show up here?" "I was hoping to see a ghost."

David was supposed to pick me up this afternoon at check out time before we go on to stay with friends Craig and Sally, but he's late as usual and if I can't get in touch with Craig or Sally then I will ahve to wonder the streets with my roll along baggage taking pictures and avoiding the scrutiny of the locals and probably the police. To top it off I managed to throw my lower back out somehow...probably from lack of movement the last thee days, unless walks to the ice machine count as exercise, and I'm in constant pain so walking the streets and sitting on bar stools hold less joy than usual.

Craig built the Tesla Coil that cracked and danced all night in the backyard at my wedding reception. When none of the neighbors complained, I knew we had found the right place.

Sally is a very talented artist who did an instillation for Austin's First Night (like First Friday artwalk only not on Friday all the time) called Reflecting Timethat also features, among others, my poetry. I can't wait to see my words on 65 foot screens flowing across Congress Boulevard, home of the Capital building. First Night is new year's eve and given the location of all the artwalk sites in the Capital/Warehouse district, it should be a good time.

Austin is excellent despite it's most recently famous fortunate son. I especially love the Warehouse district where the Driskill is, it has a strip of 6th street starting at Congress that is Texas's answer to the Big Easy. Here the streets are wider and the fun doesn't start till the sun goes down though. There are at least 6 ATM machines on every block with their own sign peeking out onto the sidewalk. My favorite business signs so far are the unnamed "oriental" massage" parlor that features a banner that reads "Modeling Upstairs" and the pub a few doors down from that which appears to have no name unless it's "32 Beers on Tap."

Pictures pending a chance to download.

Has anyone been reading Aaron McGrunder's comic The Boondocks? He's been doing a running commentary on the racial implications of the remake of King Kong. All of which were present during the original version of the film, but not as up for discussion. I was struck by the thought that one viable reason for film remakes is to allow social critics that might have been forced to be silent at the time of the original to speak for the silent this second time around.

Thoughts?

Greetings Everyone,

Yes, I'm still alive, which is amazing considering my work schedule over the last month as well as the last two weeks I've spent getting, fighting and suffering through the last dredges of the flu.

My ideal holiday vacation started yesterday when I flew out of LA to Austin, Texas to stay in the wonderfully historical Driskill Hotel. It's billed as one of the most haunted hotels in the nation and I'm starting to believe it. Tuesday when I checked in there were brownouts and electrical cut outs interrupting my TV watching and pissing me off which I put down to the age of the room. I had asked for a room in the original part of the hotel built in the 1880s. After about 7pm it stopped and I forgot about it.

Note here that my ideal vacation, without the husband, consists of checking into a cool hotel room and staying there for three days watching TV, in room movies and ordering room service with a brief venture out to find a liquor store.

So day two arrives and I make my trip to the liquor store and come back to the smell of cigars in my room. I put this down to some Texas idiot smoking in a room near mind. Then I settle in and I'm half way through my second glass of wine watching my 30th episode of Law and Order and the large brass lamp on the nightstand on the opposite side of the bed moves about 6-inches rattling the lampshade heavily and scaring the pants off of me.

Weird? Drunk? Overworked and getting much needed rest? Probably...who knows, but it was strange. Tonight I'm going to go wonder the hotel and look for the child on the stairwell and the elevator ghosts, which you supposedly see. For me it's just been movement and smell. David, of course, wants pictures.

ocvictor posted this, but I thought for those of you unfortunate enough not to know him, I'd pass these on:

Leonard Cohen's
Seven Immutable Laws
of Business.

BY KEN KRIMSTEIN

- - - -

One: If it seems like it's too heavy, it is too heavy—unless it's your brother, in which case, he ain't too heavy.

Two: If the rain is flowing like tears from the sky, call in sick—it's cool.

Three: There's nothing you can do behind your desk that can't be more effectively accomplished with a beautiful, long-haired, chain-smoking woman lying naked next to you in bed.

Four: It really is a good idea to import tea and oranges all the way from China—especially the way the world is going these days.

Five: Scrap all the words like "maximize," "incentivize," "amortize," "enhance," "enable," and "team-building" from your vocabulary and replace them with "sorrow."

Six: Suits are cool, as long as you wear them without shoes or socks.

Seven: Yearning, that's the ticket. Yearning and heartache. Yearning and heartache and longing and—well, you get it.

From the Surrealist Complement Generator:

"You are the sound of one lip kissing."

"You are as frightful as an engine developed solely for the countenance of sexual inuendo by country music."

"The goats you buy shed a perfume that makes Marxism so terribly clear to me."

Somehow my weekend has gotten completely out of control:

Saturday:
8am to 3pm working (ugh...free lunch, but so what)

3pm Picking up blithe_satire and we're going downtown for an art/street festival where my friend Jason Madsen is showing the remainder of his Dream series at the FAB Market. No liquor there but that's what god made flasks for... did i mention this great flask I got with a KGB emblem on it for carrying around my vodka? No. Well, now you know.

After Jason's show there's more art as it's off to see Gronk's new show at his gallery downtown and then no doubt a drunken take on Paris in the 1940s at his loft.

Then it's off to the Mountain Bar in Chinatown for a publication reading of Jim Ruland's new collection of short stories "Big Lonesome." Jim asked me to read a creepy lesbian stalker story that's part of the collection. He said that he thought it would be perfect for me...hum. I've never thought of myself as creepy. Oh well.

Finally we end our evening at an unpublicized reading for Arthur Rimbaud, poster boy of drunken homosexuality for the beat generation and a hearty drinker...there will be drinking.

That's my Saturday, I don't have the energy to write about Sunday. I need aspirin...and a snake bite.

I find I have an unnatural attraction to Tivo. More than penicillin, more than drive through mexican food, more than the fact that I live in a city with over 30 vodka bars, more than having an entire master bedroom to keep all my cats in, more than bestwhip.com, I love Tivo.

I have 4 television sets, 1 large Princeton monitor that serves as a dvd/game/video monitor and two Tivos. I need the new extra large storage Tivo that burns DVDs, and unlimited income and more cats. And some chocolate.

Another one of my cats passed away, Princess. She was 25, which is pretty damned old and she had a good life once I took over her care and feeding. Before she got to me she somehow acquired a broken tail, and busted jaw that gave her an Elvis style sneer (which looked really cute on a 6 pound calico cat), ears twisted from a nasty ear mite infection and a general distrust of other cats. She lived in the master bathroom and liked to sleep with her head against the water bowl.

She now rests between two very luscious bird of paradise plants beneath a palm tree a few feet from Zauzoo and Puppy who died earlier this year.

I have 11 more cats and went through their ages (oldest is 14, youngest is 1-1/2 years) in my head and depressed myself mightily wondering, calculating and dreading who will be next. I have to ask myself is the joy of knowing I make their lives better more important than living (I hope, if hope is the correct word) to watch all my pets die?

Rhetorical, I know but makes me lose a wink of sleep now and again.

Life, so sucky sometimes.

...my hair is purple now, and looks fabulous.

There is not day or time that the Surrealist Compliment Generator can not make me laugh:

Cry for the stiffness of the earlobe. The turtles are fallen and the rain stands still. How long must I suffer with your undergarments?

Yesterday I stayed home from work (I was sick, really) and did the usual channel surfing. The best coma like sleep is induced by the fabulous local KDOC channel 56, which is somewhat like the old channel 52 in the valley where I watched Kimba, Speed Racer and Gigantor as a child, which makes me really old as that was free TV, and you had to go up on the roof to move the antenna to get good reception and still there was fuzz...but we didn't know any better.

Anyway, I digress. So I'm sick and I'm napping to KDOC which shows detective series like Hawaii Five-O, Perry Mason and Matlock all day punctuated by commericals for Bryman's Medical Assistant school (you can be working as a medical assistant in as little as 6 months!) and commercials for ambulance chasing law groups (have you taken one of these drugs? you may have legal rights...what the hell does that mean?). Then I woke up and decided to channel surf and this is what I found.

The Tara Banks show. She of America's Top Model fame has been so disturbed by rumors that her tits aren't real that she had a plastic surgeon and his assistant on the show. There were two lounge chairs on the stage and Tara and another girl with confirmed fake boobies reclined on the chairs in silk shorty robes. The "doctor" basically felt Tara up then his assistant did an ultra sound on the fake boobie woman so we could see what the scan looked like on the ultra expensive medical equipment that had been imported for this fiasco. Then it was Tara's turn and the ultra sound showed and the doctor said he felt, that Tara was natural. She bounced her boobs around under her robe and gave a Rocky-esque turn around the stage.

I'm horrified to be (a) a woman, (b) a human, and (c) in the entertainment industry.

Found this web site. It's funny.

Since I told you that Mark Whalberg was my new daddy after seeing Four Brother, I've broken up the horror of 11 hour work days, or as I call them "Dances with Dunces," by seeing the following films:

The Sound of Thunder - a review I read of this said that "the sound of thunder will be heard in empty theaters everywhere." My answer, not empty enough because I sat through it with impudent1 and was very underwhelmed. All the actors looked uncomfortable too. Ed Burns, who plays a brilliant (yes, brilliant) scientist, usually looks uncomfortable because he is cheating on his girlfriend (in films) but I got the feeling that this was definitely the discomfort of watching your career go down the toilet.

Red Eye - a really good B+ thriller. Well written. Cillian Murphy is so creepy great as the bad guy. I love his line when he tells our heroine his name, and she comments that it was unkind of his parents to name him such, his reply delivery is cold and yet subject to a lie detector is "That's what I told them before I killed them." Sexual tension, rocket launchers, the bond between a father and daughter, and the lengths to which a one time victim will go to avoid be the victim again make the movie believable within the context of the film.

The 40 year-old Virgin - possibly the funniest movie since Zoolander, but it did it just a little better in that it was an amazingly human portrayal of fallible, funny people just trying to find someone to love despite their own bad decisions. The musical number at the end had me on the floor. No cruel humor here. The laughs were all a "laughing with you" type of thing and it was, dare I risk my cynic membership here, refreshing. A definite 10.

Wedding Crashers - Funny but not as funny as 40YOV. It had some dynamic humor and great lingering shots on Owen Wilson's pretty eyes and fabulous hair that was distracting in that I kept thinking, how long did it take the hair crew to get his hair to look like that --and Vince Vaughn has some fine rants.

Also, watched the entire new Battlestar Galactica (mini series & season one) over the long weekend. It's really, really good. The acting, effects and mythos of the storyline are all top notch. I'm really looking forward to season two.

I'm on to season two of MI-5 (Spooks in the UK).

b-out

Quentin Tarantino Your film will be 40% romantic, 26% comedy, 69% complex plot, and a $ 59 million budget.

He hasn't really made many films, but each successive one is a bigger and grander project ... and more violent. Karate CHOP! Your life story will probably star Michael Madsen, Uma Thurman, or some TV or movie star from the 1980s for which your film will be the comeback -- let's say Emilio Estevez. Maybe. Now that the QT is dating Sofia Coppola, maybe he'll get some tips about putting some lump-in-the-throat romantic moments in his films. Quentin's short directing resume includes Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, and Kill Bill Vols. 1 & 2.

My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 3% on action-romance You scored higher than 20% on humor You scored higher than 99% on complexity You scored higher than 99% on budget

Link: The Director Who Films Your Life Test written by bingomosquito on Ok Cupid

I just saw Four Brothers, John Singleton's new film about four brothers, 2 black and 2 white, who come together for the funeral of their mother who was the victim of a robbery gone wrong. All of the brothers were adopted by the mother when they were in the foster care system and were that baddest of the bad, blah blah. It soon becomes evident the reasons for her death are not random at all and the brothers get to use their badness for good...or something like that. It just came out so I won't disclose details but suffice to say that Singleton, the actors and the writers of the film make a heartfelt story, rich in character and environment detail, out of what could have been a really horrible cliche with a lot of male posturing and gun play.

And Mark Wahlberg is my new daddy, placing slightly ahead of Christian Bale and Johnny Depp for the passion he shows as an unapologetic bad boy who comes home to do in the gangsters who killed the only woman who ever believed in him.

Also saw March of the Penguins last week. It was really interesting and enjoyable. I don't know if it was as amazing as people say though. I was raised on Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom (Sunday's before the Wonderful World of Disney)...god I'm old...and Jaques Cousteau specials so it takes a lot to impress me in the field of nature films. It could be that the general public (read: young) is not accustomed to well told nature tales. It would be nice to see them make a come back though.

Time for a hair cut. G'bye.

b-cup out.

Because I've been so busy, I can't possibly recap the last month in detail, so here is a speed journal entry (like speed dating, only all about me...wait...nevermind.)

Comic Con San Diego: Loved it! Stayed at the Marriott Gaslight which had a view of the convention center, the baseball stadium and the jocks on the elevator in the hotel, on their way up to the meat market bar on the roof, hassling the nerds on the elevator on their way back to their rooms to oogle pictures of princess Leia. Met douglasbot an amazing comic artist from Australia (who has quite a bit of my money from purchases) at the Nucleus booth. Best buys: a real live Buttercup cel from the PPG cartoon (the first two years they used cels), and a cel from Guard Dog, an Academy Award nominated animated short from last year. I chose "insane squirel on a swing." Also, the trip was work related and my room was paid for. Of course I actually had to work part of the time.

Managed to watch the BBC series League of Gentleman, which is flipping hilarious. See it if you can.

Bought the DVD of Constantine and love it. Bought the DVD of the Director's cut of Chronicles of Riddick and love it, though not as much as Pitch Black.

Siggraph: Driven to heart palpitations by the political in fighting at work. Almost killed one of my bosses; almost quit; almost moved to Mexico where you can buy valium over the counter. On top of helping to prep the Sony booth for the convention, coordinate the conversion of our demo reel to HD and monitor the stills and how to stuff for two shows that were wrapping, I was also volunteered to make a slide show for (a) and Academy animation presentation, and (b) the roll out of Beer Club (don't ask).

Still here and have moved on to concentrating on our next three releases: Prize Winner of Defiance Ohio (very good film, due out 9/23); Zathura (great FX, due out 11/11); and The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (just read the script and it's actually very good, due out 12/9, but wraps 10/28 for us).

Whew, there it is.

Meanwhile, I owe ocvictor some editorial work; my website an update; all my friends phone calls; my cats some quality time with a string; and my husband about 1000 apologies.

B-out

Siggraph...I'm drowning...conventions. must. stop.