Music: Steady Holiday
I am so lucky to have found such intense lady power in my music in the past little while. Steady Holiday is a delightful band fronted by the lovely Dre Babinski. Her music is dripping with emotion, but somehow restrained. It's spooky, sad, joyful and angry. Sometimes all at the same time. I was lucky enough to see her open for Clap Your Hands Say Yeah this past week at the Horseshoe, and she killed it. She's also really good at power-clashing her clothes. Well done.
Accomplishment:
As I foreshadowed with a sketch on Instagram last week, I have completed the face empty states for FriendCanoe! Yep, that's what all the little doodles were about. It was nice to take some time to do a bit of illustration. I challenged myself to work with mostly circles and curves to build these faces, and to provide a different emotion for each one. But I'll let you decide what those emotions are. It's more fun that way!
I also finally scanned in some typography from my sketchbook. Just not too sure what I want to do with the sketches. You'll see some of them soon, if all goes well.
Finally, on a health note, I have been feeling a lot of back pain lately. I went to a physiotherapist about a year ago, and recently rediscovered the stretching guide she gave me. It has ten stretches to perform daily to strengthen my back muscles, and by George I'm going to try to do them every day until my back stops hurting. I have realized as I get older that exercise isn't just about vanity, but it keeps your body in check and able to do the things you demand of it every day. Wow, am I getting old?
Goal:
This week I'd like to start thinking about colours for FriendCanoe, now that I've got some momentum from the faces. I'm also going to finish cleaning out my hard drives.
Perhaps I'll vectorize one of my typography sketches and see what comes of that.
Random Thought:
I hear the same advice from time to time and never really stopped to think about it, until now. People often tell me that it's easier to do something and ask for forgiveness later rather than asking for permission first.
So who was Grace Hopper? Quite an amazing lady. She coined this and many other common phrases, was the developer of the first compiler for a computer programming language, and at the end of her service she was the oldest serving officer in the United States Navy. Hopper was a glorious lady, always looking for new ways of doing things. She said, “Humans are allergic to change. They love to say, "We've always done it this way." I try to fight that. That's why I have a clock on my wall that runs counter-clockwise.”
While I am a big fan of Hopper and her lifestyle, I suppose I started off feeling a bit squicky about her quote. If you think that a person may hesistate to give you permission to do something, wouldn't it be disrespectful to do that thing anyway? The chances of them forgiving you seem low enough to risk their feelings being hurt, or worse.
On the topic of forgiveness, it's kind of a difficult concept to put into practice. It seems somewhat unfair to expect forgiveness from someone, as it's not an easy thing to do for a lot of people. Myself, I have been struggling with forgiveness pretty much my whole life. I've only recently come to terms with the reality of true forgiveness of someone who has hurt you.
The more I thought about it, I realized that many people don't have a good concept of what's good for them. I know that some of the best experiences I've had have happened by chance or because someone (who cares about me) has pushed me to do something I was hesitant about. I'm not completely sold on the idea, but I think there's more credibility to this piece of advice than I originally thought.
Inspiration: Girls
Well, this is a weird one. It has been quite the guilty pleasure to absorb myself in all six seasons of HBO's Girls, a show that I often cringe, yell, and tsk my teeth at as I watch. I can't really say what about it has been entertaining to me beyond the clothing and set design (often my favourite part of any television or film), as the characters are quite vapid and in my opinion, give a bad name to hard-working, intelligent and kind young people who happen to be approaching young adulthood in the early 21st century.
Yes, the term “millenial” has been made to feel rather dirty in the past decade or so, and I have often wondered whether Lena Dunham has been helping or hurting the stigma associated with people my age. While I certainly don't identify with the characters on the show, in fact I sometimes abhor them, I have come to realize with the episodes of the final season of the show that Dunham is trying to dig deeper than the shallow storylines of the earlier seasons. Where once her character Hannah would cry over being denied an allowance from her parents to bail her out of a stupid decision (you're a grown-ass person now!), she is currently exploring her agency as a female writer and as a feminist. And while I still find many of her antics downright disgusting, I can attest without any spoilers that Dunham is exploring issues that align with my own life at the moment.
For example, Hannah spends an entire ‘bottle episode’ in the apartment of a famous author and one of her personal role models. She takes the half hour exploring whether she could see the side of this author, who has come under fire from young women accusing him of sexual assault. While he appears to be innocent, convincing and bashful, the somewhat shocking end of the episode remains poignant that misogyny is still rampant, even if carefully hidden behind silky words and kind smiles.
In today's world, I see importance in women finding strong role models in other women. We need to see things from a perspective other than the one that's been rammed down our throats our whole lives. And if I have to get it from Lena Dunham, at least I'm getting it somewhere.
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