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Sketch of the Week: Rabbi at the Bimah (October 3, 2024)

Just a quick, loose sketch I did of our rabbi at the bimah while she was leading Rosh Hashanah services. (Our particular rabbi trained as a cantor before being ordained, and happens to play harp; harp isn’t a standard part of Jewish services.)

My son voted this sketch of the week because “I really like the curves on the harp. All the geometry in that one is very beautiful.” (I spent most of last week working on faces, which I’m terrible at; weak as it is, this is the best sketch of the lot 🤷‍♀️)

Sketch of the Week: Heading to the Faire (Sept 24, 2024)

My son voted for this sketch to share this week. He liked several, but “the fairies one is just too adorable”:

A pencil sketch of a woman and a girl standing together, both depicted with butterfly wings. The girl has a flower crown and the woman wears a wide-brimmed hat. A note next to them says "Heading to the Faire."

The reference is this photo of my wife and daughter dressed up to go to out local Renaissance Festival a couple weeks ago:

A woman and a girl standing in front of greenery, both wearing floral-patterned dresses. The girl has butterfly wings and a flower crown, while the woman is wearing a wide-brimmed hat.

Apparently this hat made my wife look like “Sadie Adler” from Red Dead Redemption II, which I guess bodes poorly for me 🤷‍♀️

Sketch of the Week: Barn Swallows (Sept 18, 2024)

My son nominated this sketch, noting: “That one in the back looks like it has strong opinions.” I can’t quite recall where I saw these little guys, just that it was in a Michigan State Park this past summer, as part of a canoe trip that went moderately off the rails (massive duckweed, inclement weather, thousands of dead fish blocking the river, etc.) This park was maybe our third choice, in terms of places we were supposed to be that night.

A pencil sketch of two annoyed lil barn swallows in their mud-and-straw nest

For the record, I was almost positive he was either gonna chose the Jubilant Sorceress or Captain Tenacity:

Pencil sketches of two comic book-style characters. On the left is a the "Jubilant Sorceress" with a long robe and a horned headdress. On the right is a character labeled "Captain Tenacity" wearing a cape, goggles, and a belt with an emblem.

Mostly I like how the two images interact (they were in adjacent slots on the spread). The reference for the sorceress is my wife in a Halloween costume she got for cheap at a thrift shop a few years back, while the captain is me about 20 years ago. Serendipitously, the ratio between their sizes is roughly our real-life size difference.

Sketch of the Week: Young Dali (Sept 9, 2024)

My best sketch from Week #37-2024 is this one of a young Salvador Dali:

Pencil sketch of a young Salvador Dali with slicked-back hair, a pencil mustache, and patented Dali Crazy-Eyes (tm)

My reference for the sketch was this picture of Dali and Man Ray I stumbled across on the Library of Congress website:

A picture of Salvador Dali and Man Ray, both giving Crazy Eyes. This picture was probably taken at the Théâtre de la Gaîté-Montparnasse exhibition in Paris by Carl Van Vechten on June 16, 1934.

Until I saw this photograph, it never dawned on me that Man Ray might be Jewish (which he was), nor that he was American-born (I thought he was French, because he was most famous for the work he did while living in France), nor that he thought of himself as a painter (I knew him for his photography). 🤦‍♀️

For the record, the Young Dali sketch narrowly beat out this space captain from Friday, September 13. She is taking no shit, folks:

A pencil sketch of a space captain aiming her blaster off screen to the right. Leave her ship!

Sketch of the Week: self-portrait of a portrait of a tree (Sept 3, 2024)

My son suggested I share this one, which he characterizes as “handception” . The sketch I’m highlighting is the lower one, but it doesn’t make sense without the context of the larger page, so here you go:

A journal page showing the days Sept 2 and Sept 3. The Sept 2 sketch shows a tree beside a sidewalk. The Sept 3 sketch shows a hand holding the journal, the fingers curled alongside the portrait of the tree from Sept 2. Beneath the recursive version of Sept 2 in the sketch there is a sketched version of Sept 3, showing a hand holding a journal, the fingers curled around the page next to a portrait of a tree…you get the idea.

Agustina Bazterrica’s TENDER IS THE FLESH: ★★★★★ would dine again!

(I do a fair bit of reading, which I track over on Goodreads. Trying to move some of that value over here, prior to the inevitable enshitification.)

Cover art for the English translation of Agustina Bazterrica's novel TENDER IS THE FLESH

This book is a little like heavy metal poisoning. Its impact is pernicious, deep, and likely permanent. You’ll be powerfully tempted to pigeon-hole this as an allegory (about world-wide overconsumption of meat, about climate change, about patriarchy, about the deadly tendency to humor wealthy idiots)—but, jeez, don’t. That’s just a defense mechanism, your brain’s white blood cells trying to contain and thus destroy an interloper. Don’t cop out like that. Just let the story fully in, let it blossom and consume you.

It’s really a helluva book. In many ways, this is the exact opposite of Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door, in that it blessedly lets no one off the hook.

For those interested in other art Dave compares favorably to heavy-metal poisoning, consider Merhinge’s film Begotten.

I should not have read Jack Ketchum’s THE GIRL NEXT DOOR (a zero-stars review)

(I do a fair bit of reading, which I track over on Goodreads. Trying to move some of that value over here, prior to the inevitable enshitification.)

This book was notorious when I was a kid for being so extreme and gruesome. Straight talk: it’s not that gruesome. Yes, there are graphic depictions of torture and sexual violence that are basically in the ballpark of stuff happening in conflict zones right now. That this really happens to real people is gruesome and outrageous; that some guy typed it up in 1989 feels trite.

Anyway, what really is truly extreme and gruesome in this book is its absolute moral cowardice. Ketchum sets up an interesting premise–not the sex torture of the orphaned girl next door, but the narrator’s (David’s) complicity, how he lets awfulness roll forward despite liking this girl, despite being a “good guy” and “All-American Kid” (echoes of King’s “Apt Pupil” there).

That premise is interesting, because it matches the vast majority of us: we’re good people, and we let bad things happen all over the world all the time.

The problem is that Ketchum pulls the punch. Inexplicably, he attempts to transform David into a hero in the final act–despite the fact that there’s no set-up for it, and Ketchum seems entirely incapable of pulling it off. That might be fine; it could still be a solid three-star book if David tried to play the hero, then faceplanted (as he does in the novel, as he must, because the situation is so hopeless), and Megan (the victim of these outrages and everyone’s leer, readers included) had poured her fury and rage out on him.

Instead Ketchum paints this kid–this coward, this bystander, this rapist-by-proxy and torture fanboy–as the hero, and forces Meg to be his forgiving damsel.

And it just makes me want to fucking vomit. It’s a mediocre book that’s only shocking if you’ve never read a newspaper’s international headlines. It’s an advertisement for never holding anyone accountable for anything–save for the victims; “What was she doing alone with those boys? What did she expect, dressing like that” and so on and so forth ad nauseam, ad infinitum, world without end, amen 🤮

Gerrymandering Solved Just Like Mom Used to Make!

Remember when you were a kid and would fight over who got the bigger slice of cake, and so your mom made one of you cut and the other choose, in order to ensure fairness and decrease the amount of kvetching and whining she’d have to deal with, so she could just get on with her life?

Well, turns out you can fix gerrymandering exactly the same way (more or less): Schneier on Security: A Self-Enforcing Protocol to Solve Gerrymandering

This protocol is self-enforcing (i.e., it requires no outside arbiter or commission or oversight board or judges), mathematically verified, and fair—all of which taken together basically guarantees we’ll never ever ever use it, because (waves hands) will-of-the-people-constitutionalism-orginalist-intent-textualist-consistent-with-traditions-blah-blah-bullshit.🤬🇺🇸🔥

“the only thing in life that’s really worth having is good skill”—Jerry Seinfeld

I do not endorse Seinfeld or Seinfeld (no deeply held conviction or ideological bone to pick there; he just never particularly worked for me, as a comedian or writer), but I do wholeheartedly endorse both the above sentiment, and reading the entire op-ed it came from (here’s a gift link 🎁🔗 ):

“Opinion: The life secret Jerry Seinfeld learned from Esquire“[*]

The takeways summarized in the op-ed are good and worth your time, and the core message is a fundamental truth:

Dedicating yourself to the mastery of a craft—against all odds and despite all distractions and obstacles—is the only path along which there is relief.

Along these same lines—delving into and reflecting on what it means to dedicate yourself to craft—I likewise wholeheartedly endorse this documentary (noting that, over the last decade I’ve revised my opinion on it in at least one important detail: although I still love the documentary, I no longer even mildly like any of these comics).

[*] I also don’t endorse Esquire—again, it never really worked for me is all. I do endorse the Washington Post, though. I read a lot of news reporting from a lot of sources, and there’s is consistently the most even-handed and makes the most honest attempt at being honest and accurate, in my humble.

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