narcissism on paraaaaaade...
Jun. 12th, 2003 02:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oakenguyResponding to questions from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
amare:
1. If you could go back and be a founding member of any of the famous art movements which would you choose and why?
Ooooo, toughie! It would be utter hubris for me to think that if I’d been involved in the Romantic movement I could have in some way prevented or changed the Victorianism and worst parts of the Industrial Revolution that followed, isn’t it? Besides, I don’t even care for that style of art very much.....gah.
Okay, assuming I spoke fluent french, life among the Impressionists...well... I mean, the food would be good, and all that genius concentrated in such a small space...but on the other hand, so many of them were so needy, and you just KNOW Van Gogh would be latching on like a psychic vampire, and it’d be one drunken 3AM ‘no, really, she doesn’t hate you! You’re not a loser! You’ll find somebody, you really will!’ conversation after the other....and there’s Pop Art, but that would mean living in the fifties, and who wants to do THAT?...
2. You are asked to design the perfect companion animal that will then be geneticly engineered to your specifications. What is it like?
I’m picturing a winged lemur. (Though the image of a pug with dragonfly wings is really really tempting, too). Small enough to perch on a shoulder or go all sorts of places, nearly-opposable thumbs, perching in treetops and rooftops for dusk sing-a-longs.
And rainbow-colored, too. Like tropical fish!
3. Writer or Actor? If you had to choose one to excel at to the exclusion of the other which would it be?
Oh, writer. Easily. Who’s remembered today, Richard Burbage or Will Shakespeare? As intoxicating as performing is, writing...the exchange between the writer and reader...just has so much more potential, so many more possibilities. A much better chance of truly making a difference in the world.
4. Do you have any Heros? Who are they and why are they important to you?
Gah, this seemed like an easy question until I really started thinking about it. There are folks I worship for their inherent coolness (John Stewart, Tina Fay, Muhammed Ali); folks whose talent I’m awed by (Hendrix, Terry Pratchett, Bill Irwin, Paula Poundstone, Mark Twain); and folks who’ve done brave and inspirational things (Michael Moore, Martin Luther King Jr., Cesar Chavez, Gandhi, St. Francis, Toussaint Louverture, Harvey Milk, Jane Adams, Sakharov, Mandela). All these folk are inspirations in one way or another (some of them in very different ways)...and I know there are a thousand others I’ll think of as soon as I post this.
5. What experiences from childhood and/or early adulthood have had the most affect on who you are today?
Woo, good one! How many pages have I got?
Hmm...my parents’ near-divorce, and watching them as they announced it in front of the congregation, was a big one. I’m still trying to unlearn some of the things my parents taught me about relationships, if you know what I mean.
My first big life-shaping trauma that I can remember came when I was really young—four or five, young enough to still have total faith and trust in the world. God up in heaven punishing the bad and rewarding the good, parents and happy friendly police down on earth doing the same thing, and when bad things happened everyone rallied around and fixed them. This, I was sure, was how life worked.
I was the proud owner of the Golden Book Encyclopedia, an encyclopedia for wee ones, maybe 19-20 entries per book. So I was just browsing through them, learning about bees and cactus, happy as a clam, and I reach ‘Extinctions’.
And I find out about the passenger pigeons, and how settlers used to blast them out of the sky and harvest them in baskets. I learn about the dodo, and the great auk, and all the other critters on little islands who died, who never even knew they were in danger, who just stood there...
Crap, I still get upset thinking about it. So imagine me at five reading this. Finding out for the first time that really bad things happen, that sometimes being small and innocent gets you killed.
I spent the rest of my childhood being *much* more cautious. And I've never really shaken the feeling that my species owes someone, somewhere, a huge apology.
amare:1. If you could go back and be a founding member of any of the famous art movements which would you choose and why?
Ooooo, toughie! It would be utter hubris for me to think that if I’d been involved in the Romantic movement I could have in some way prevented or changed the Victorianism and worst parts of the Industrial Revolution that followed, isn’t it? Besides, I don’t even care for that style of art very much.....gah.
Okay, assuming I spoke fluent french, life among the Impressionists...well... I mean, the food would be good, and all that genius concentrated in such a small space...but on the other hand, so many of them were so needy, and you just KNOW Van Gogh would be latching on like a psychic vampire, and it’d be one drunken 3AM ‘no, really, she doesn’t hate you! You’re not a loser! You’ll find somebody, you really will!’ conversation after the other....and there’s Pop Art, but that would mean living in the fifties, and who wants to do THAT?...
2. You are asked to design the perfect companion animal that will then be geneticly engineered to your specifications. What is it like?
I’m picturing a winged lemur. (Though the image of a pug with dragonfly wings is really really tempting, too). Small enough to perch on a shoulder or go all sorts of places, nearly-opposable thumbs, perching in treetops and rooftops for dusk sing-a-longs.
And rainbow-colored, too. Like tropical fish!
3. Writer or Actor? If you had to choose one to excel at to the exclusion of the other which would it be?
Oh, writer. Easily. Who’s remembered today, Richard Burbage or Will Shakespeare? As intoxicating as performing is, writing...the exchange between the writer and reader...just has so much more potential, so many more possibilities. A much better chance of truly making a difference in the world.
4. Do you have any Heros? Who are they and why are they important to you?
Gah, this seemed like an easy question until I really started thinking about it. There are folks I worship for their inherent coolness (John Stewart, Tina Fay, Muhammed Ali); folks whose talent I’m awed by (Hendrix, Terry Pratchett, Bill Irwin, Paula Poundstone, Mark Twain); and folks who’ve done brave and inspirational things (Michael Moore, Martin Luther King Jr., Cesar Chavez, Gandhi, St. Francis, Toussaint Louverture, Harvey Milk, Jane Adams, Sakharov, Mandela). All these folk are inspirations in one way or another (some of them in very different ways)...and I know there are a thousand others I’ll think of as soon as I post this.
5. What experiences from childhood and/or early adulthood have had the most affect on who you are today?
Woo, good one! How many pages have I got?
Hmm...my parents’ near-divorce, and watching them as they announced it in front of the congregation, was a big one. I’m still trying to unlearn some of the things my parents taught me about relationships, if you know what I mean.
My first big life-shaping trauma that I can remember came when I was really young—four or five, young enough to still have total faith and trust in the world. God up in heaven punishing the bad and rewarding the good, parents and happy friendly police down on earth doing the same thing, and when bad things happened everyone rallied around and fixed them. This, I was sure, was how life worked.
I was the proud owner of the Golden Book Encyclopedia, an encyclopedia for wee ones, maybe 19-20 entries per book. So I was just browsing through them, learning about bees and cactus, happy as a clam, and I reach ‘Extinctions’.
And I find out about the passenger pigeons, and how settlers used to blast them out of the sky and harvest them in baskets. I learn about the dodo, and the great auk, and all the other critters on little islands who died, who never even knew they were in danger, who just stood there...
Crap, I still get upset thinking about it. So imagine me at five reading this. Finding out for the first time that really bad things happen, that sometimes being small and innocent gets you killed.
I spent the rest of my childhood being *much* more cautious. And I've never really shaken the feeling that my species owes someone, somewhere, a huge apology.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
what was that again? 98%?
Date: 2003-06-12 11:56 am (UTC)Yes a lemur! I love lemurs.
Re: what was that again? 98%?
Date: 2003-06-12 12:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-06-12 12:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-06-12 04:42 pm (UTC)Bri! Interview *me*!
Ooooo!
Date: 2003-06-12 07:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-06-12 08:51 pm (UTC)I was deeply affected by them too,.. but in different ways.
It was the p edition I think specifically.
The covers on those books were very disturbign and sucked me in as a child.
I would obsesson them.
The p one had a potato and a perisope and so on,.. bu tmor eimportantly it had a puppet,...
A PUNCH PUPPET form punch and judy.
The cover of that book dug it's way into my skin and stuck with through to adulthood,.. affectign everythign i ever created.
Just so ya know
KK!
Re:
Date: 2003-06-13 05:34 am (UTC)Those covers in general were very funky, especially for the seventies--I remember seeing my first 'Sandman' cover art about fifteen years later and wondering if it was the same designer.