the blackstar passes/#trulymadlydeeply

I had been worried about David Bowie for months, since I saw Blackstar, the profound and haunting music video he released in anticipation of his album that came out last Friday.

Juliette@ElusiveJ actually sums up how I feel about it best: We don’t cry because we knew them, we cry because they helped us know ourselves.

I began rehearsal with a moment of silence on Monday. I was already going to base Oberon on Jareth but I’m going to be much more explicit about it now. Maybe I will base all the fairies on a different Bowie .

******************************************************

It’s a few days later. I based all the fairies on different Bowie personas.The costume and makeup people are besides themselves with joy.

You should buy the new Bowie record. It’s amazingly good but I am not an objective critic and in any case I’ve only listened to the song ‘Blackstar’ repeatedly this week. I started to watch the ‘Lazarus’ video but I turned it off. I wasn’t ready for it yet. I’m going to dole out the new songs over the course of the year.

Tonight I held a long moment of silence for Alan Rickman.

Alan Rickman was a tremendous actor.
He played the sort of villain you wanted to root for, which is a real trick, and he embodied Severus Snape with the sort of humanity that made him the most interesting character in a series full of very interesting characters. He was an actor’s actor; an original.
One of my favorite films is ‘Truly, Madly, Deeply’; if you want to understand the difference between Hollywood films and independent film, watch it along with ‘Ghost’. They were made around the same time with a very similar premise but could not be more different films. Watch it this weekend.

 

 

The Pretty Things Are Going To Hell

***NOTE TO ‘THE HOSTAGES’ OR WHATEVER THE ‘INNOCENT BYSTANDERS’ ARE CALLING THEMSELVES THESE DAYS-if you don’t want me to notice you, repeatedly linking to my blog is kind of stupid. I’m just saying. WD-4/20/09***

‘The Pretty Things Are Going To Hell’ is the name of the Bowie tune that was playing the other night when one of the posters at ‘Innocent Bystanders‘ blew my mind. Why don’t you go over to I Tunes or whatever and download it. It’s a great tune, and Dave just gave 10 grand to Jena 6 Legal Defense Fund, so go buy it and play it real loud. It sounds best that way. It’s how I feel right now. It’s been a good week so far. Right now I’m watching ‘South Park’ and laughing my @$$ off-Cartman fakes Tourette’s Syndrome. It’s brilliant. Now these are guys who can do jokes about disabilities-Jimmy and Timmy are two of the best portrayals of disabled people in tv history because they’re people. The twist to the episode is that Cartman starts blurting out what he’s really thinking, and it’s killing me. Check it out. It will hurt your face with laughing.

One of the things various posters at their site kept challenging me to provide was evidence of my allegation that anyone there was mocking disabled people. I pursued the thread for a while, and then this post appeared:

266. Cuffy Meigs – October 2, 2007 Yawn, let’s digress into art crticism:   

dearlord, I scribbled crap on the back of my high school calculus notebook better than this. Is he about to nail a transvestite linebacker with a butterfly tramp stamp? Check out the shoulders on his date.

 

 

  

 

 

 

Of all the craptacular slop on my site, Cuffy Meigs chose this one to mock. And not mocking the sloppy art or ridiculous story, but rather the physical attributes of the model. It was so ironic to me that I was stunned at my good fortune and so fed them the rope of honesty in full faith that they would tie their own noose and wrap it around their own neck. They cheerfully followed through.

269. winstondelgado – October 2, 2007

Cuffy-
What can I say? I like full-figured women. I like big butts, and I cannot lie…-WD

271. winstondelgado – October 2, 2007

Cuffy-
Also, I should note that the model for that piece has a rare genetic disorder that causes her to have extra bone growth all over body. Her rib cage is entirely solid and she has had to have several surgeries to shave off extraneous bone in her legs, hips and arms. She has fine white surgical scars over most of her body. She’s quite beautiful, actually. I’m currently working on an oil nude of her. It won’t be finished for several months but I’ll be sure to post slides of it. Thank you for showing an interest in my work; do you still have your high school calculus notebook? I would love to see it.
-WD

272. Cuffy Meigs – October 2, 2007

Somewhere there’s a college course just for her and her beastly bones.

 

276. winstondelgado – October 2, 2007

Cuffy-
She doesn’t go to college-she’s in a trade school to learn auto repair. She wanted to stop stripping and started working as an artists’ model. She’s very good at it and as I said her body posesses an unique beauty. She’s very comfortable with herself-the slime that used to paw her in the strip clubs had far more crude things to say about her than things like ‘beastly bones’ (which at least has alliteration). Still, I won’t pass your remarks on to her if you don’t mind.
-WD

 

 

282. Cuffy Meigs – October 2, 2007

How much does she bench?

283. winstondelgado – October 2, 2007

Cuffy-
It’s difficult for her to lift anything too heavy. She tried waitressing but kept dropping the trays. That’s why she ended up stripping.
-WD

 

 

I did that figure of Julia in January. It was originally just a study of her looking into the mirror. It is one of several I did that session but the only one in ink. The rest were charcoal and one in pastels. The drawing is from life and captures her form perfectly. I like the solidness of it. That was why I chose it for that page of the strip: I was looking for something very solid to come back from the breakdown before it. I remembered the ink study of Julia, added the background and whatnot, and then hurriedly sketched out the preceding pages of the story. Of the sixty-odd pages of the strip, it is the only figure that was precisely drawn from life. Everything else is sloppy stylized stuff from my head. Every physical characteristic he commented on is accurately portrayed in the drawing, and everything I said about her in the posts was accurate as well. The reason her shoulders look like that is because she has masses of bone tissue erupting from her shoulder blades and collarbones that also restrict her range of movement, to say nothing of the constant pain she feels throughout her body. Her legs and hips look like that because there are knobs of bone growing where there shouldn’t be. As I said, her ribcage is not a cage, but solid, which makes breathing difficult. Her jaw is slightly assymetrical and none of her fingers match proper proportions-her middle finger is shorter than her ring finger and she has terrible arthritis in her hands and arms. If it weren’t for the surgeries the masses would be even more visibly deforming. I do find her beautiful-her eyes and smile are magnetic. She scrambles to survive and I have suspected that perhaps she has prostituted herself to get by and know that she has definitely been abused throughout her life sexually. She has some issues with her self-image. She has a hard life.

I am certain that Cuffy Meigs chose that page from the plethora of truly mockable garbage (you could have gone off on the bubblejuice scene-I mean, all of the stupid hippie stereotypes were just sitting there!) because they thought they would be hitting me in my sex. But rather than insult me or the artwork, they degraded the body image of the woman they saw there.

Well done, Cuffy Meigs, well done. You certainly proved all those stereotypes about conservatives wrong. Oh, wait, no, that was Sarcasticus speaking. No, what I meant to say was thank you, Cuffy Meigs, for providing a natural ending to the thread. I mean, to dig through my site and come up with that image and then to not even insult the ridiculous writing, absurd situation, or hilariously unflattering sketch of me but instead degrade the body of the model; well, you just may have well put a bow on those posts!   

The Prof asked me why I was bothering with these people and said that they were ‘too smart’ to be baited. Prof, nobody is too smart to be baited. The trick is to find the most appealing bait. In this case, I just used myself and they were all too eager to bite. I certainly didn’t expect them to use my own art to make the point, but that just gave the whole thing a touch of poetry. After my dialogues with Selwyn Duke I staged a few performances of them-they were hilarious. This was back in the Frankie J days. There was this amazing maniac who was a dishwasher for the restaurant downstairs, worked the door upstairs and when he got onstage performed brilliant lunatic monologues that were nothing more than him talking about his upbringing. His name was Vernon and he was this gangly kid from Tennessee who had been raised by a character out of a Tom Waits song. His stories about his dad were true crime tales that should have made you weep for the child who was dragged through them but when he told them it was all you could do to keep your pants dry. He played Selwyn. It was great fun and the audiences loved it.

All I’m saying is that ‘Winston Delgado vs The Innocent Bystanders’ has a great ring to it.

My unlimited love to y’all,

-WD