I've just started doing spring cleaning for the first time in my life. Normally over the last few years I just ended up moving, but this time I have a house instead of a crappy apartment in the bad part of the city. I asked a close friend to help me out a bit, and she brought her 5 year-old daughter along to play in the back yard. It took about two seconds before her daughter found some old graffiti stickers I had laying around in a drawer and now anything that had even one sticker on it before is plastered in them, including the fridge, my laptop, my desk and an old skate deck I was saving to paint something on. Luckily, the fridge was already this pretty ugly goldenrod-coloured thing from 1960-something, so I might actually just continue her work and keep covering it and hope the landlord I'm doing rent-to-own from doesn't freak about it. I'm thinking I might just clear coat the skate deck and sell it with the coating of stickers as the design too. People usually go nuts for anything done by a kid. 5 year-old art is the equivalent of having a budget Damien Hirst on hand with art collectors. For whatever reason, anything a little kid makes is just so much more pure and inspired than anything an adult artist could possibly create in their lifetime.
Start publishing on
DD Comics!
Advertise with us
Comic Talk and General Discussion *
Rant, moan, rave and share - for all your chatter, natter, ETCETERA!
Gunwallace wrote:
The HMS New Zealand had a similar fate to the Australia, also being scrapped in 1922 to our disgust. The most annoying thing for New Zealanders is that we were still paying the British for the cost of building the damn thing when WWII broke out. It was a very sore point. (A friend of mine did his M.A. on the social and political history of the HMS New Zealand, which I had to proof read for him).
Exactly! It's things like this that were pretty massive but have been forgotten in history by people who have sort of misunderstood their importance and impact.
@Gullas- Well the ship never really got the chance to be as iconic as that. It's more of a historical episode now, to those that get the importance. :(
—————
OK, the pages of the the 2012 DD Radio play continue to pour forth their brilliance! And now mine in finally in, page 5!!!
http://www.drunkduck.com/2012_DD_Radio_Play/5390764/
lba wrote:
For whatever reason, anything a little kid makes is just so much more
pure and inspired than anything an adult artist could possibly create in
their lifetime.
Oh I get why people have a kid fetish when it comes to "art". It's about insecurity and inadequacy: art from a pro is intimidating because the ideas behind it were big and deep and clever and dangerous… supposedly. but from a child it's all pure "art", it's natural, safe, unmediated. Also about creating fake value on the cheap in what is a very silly and nasty little industry.
Pretty pathetic really. I'd be suicidally embarrassed if I developed a taste for "art" created by kids. It's basically giving up on even pretending to like art. It's saying "yeeeeaaaah… I'll never get it, but I know art involves spending heaps of cash so here's a bundle for any old crap with no thought in it so ever".
If they collect both child and adult art at big prices, then that's actually worse.
Now that's NOT the same thing as admiring work done by children, especially your own. There is a massive distinction between that and paying thousands of dollars for kid art, elevating it to the mystical heights of Hurst etc.
- which is generally pretty thoughtless too, but the distinction is that it's supposed to be, it's part of the art game. The artist has status and you pay for that with the work and get an investment piece.
Kid art collectors (who know what they're doing, not the idiots who get it because they think they love it) think they can fake that status and create an artificially valuable art piece, bypassing the artist status thing with the pretence that because kids are "pure" (or some made up crap) that they already have all the requisites that make famous artists so valuable.
It's the equivalent of spray-painting stuff gold and pretending it's real gold.
That pretty much sums up my opinion minus the thought that it's a very special brand of stupid collector that believes there's anything remotely pure or significant about the thinking in a child's artwork really.
I know kids pretty well, and they don't have nearly the thought process that way too many people try to attribute to them. They're not thinking about it, they're just drawing something cool or familiar to them. No brilliant genius and deeper meaning behind it. That's why I use the example of Hirst. In my view, he's probably the first artist out there to successfully take full cynical advantage of the art market's attribution of value to fame. The guy makes little to no pretenses whatsoever about the fact that there's no brilliant concepting behind it all and that he doesn't even touch the vast majority of things attributed to him, but people buy it up like crazy and add their own views left and right about his personal worth and what his art is.
I like the analogy of painting things gold. You're basically paying for a bunch of dots that's only valuable because the guy who commissioned some intern to do it happens to have a recognizable name. It's probably not a very safe investment because eventually the game
is likely to fall apart, but that's not going to matter to him with the
numbers he's pulling down. I think we've gotten away from the value being attributed to the artist's skill and he's definitely the first artist I've seen who makes no pretense that that's his game. For that, I'm in awe of the guy. He's brilliant. He's not much as an artist maybe, but he's marketed himself and his brand to the point that he could probably vomit on a paper plate and still get it to sell because the work itself has no value. It's totally in his name, and I wish I could be so good at that game to pull a living out of it.
@Katch- you need to accompany that post with a pic of an angry fuming chibi, with a big swolen sting on the side of her forehead ^_^
@lba- yeah, that's pretty much it exactly. Although quite a few artists have reached that same point before Hurst. He's just getting more cash now than anyone did before.
That sort of thing probably goes back to the first celeb artists back in the Renaissance, where work of students and workers was always attributed to the master, so the price would always be high because his celebrity ensured it.
In the 20s the Daddaists exploited the whole system and deliberately made work from crap. People still attribute deeper meanings to it as well as stuff about WW1, but they were cleverer than that.
Piero Manzoni literally sold his shit to people… in tins.
Salvador Dali and Piccaso were well known for signing basically anything because they were well aware their signatures were the only value they needed.
Andy Warhol was well known for exploiting his fame to sell work.
Jeff Koons was famous for basing most of his career on subverting and exploiting the art industry.
And many more.
Yeah, I just think he also kind of embodies a new level of cynicism in the art world and culture in general. Even Koons pretended at one point he was making a point taking advantage of the art world and there were articles and people taking him seriously when he said it. Hirst doesn't say it at all, and I've never once seen a positive article about the guy, yet he sells schlock for millions to someone. He's like the hipsterdom of the art world. Nobody seems to want to admit to liking him, but someone sure as hell does for him to even exist.
People seem have become jaded towards anything the creative world pumps out lately and it seems like everyone is kind of taking this "ah! the hell with it!" attitude towards things. I meet more and more designers, musicians and film makers whose philosophy is basically "I don't much care what I make so long as I get paid to do something". I see a lot of advertising that's pretty much just the company acting like they don't care if you buy their product too, like they're so cool and secure in their place in the world they never care if they have another customer again. And it's just been within the last few years that I've been seeing this. It's like we're about to go through the late 80's and early 90's all over again when the reigning sentiment was that everyone felt like they were living through the plot of Clerks everyday. I'm still debating if it's just local, national or whatnot, and what exactly seems to be causing it. Maybe it's just me seeing this.
Hahaha, I like your take on that! ^_^
Yeah, that'd fit. Things have been aping the mid to late 80s for a while… time now for the 90s to come back again. I know you're right.
And that's not just a mystical thing like arbitrary decade periods of time just naturally repeating themselves on human conciousness in some magical Yungian way, it's actually people deliberately making it happen that way:
- It's easier to separate fashions and fads into decade periods so they why we group them like that.
- it's WAY easier to create new fads and styles out of old stuff that's gone before.
- It usually works best when there's at least a 10-15 year gap (quite often longer) between revivals so people have had enough time to get sick of the previous fads and enough time to forget about their distaste of the one from 10-15 years ago.
- Also, it's probably about people generations moving on and getting all nostalgic for some period in their youth.
…says me listening to Urge Overkill and Tracy Bonham, watching my Daria DVDs and rocking my 90s influenced 70s revival flairs and tight T-shirts
NOooooooooooooooo… self awareness is a horrible thing.
And that means you can get the jump on it now man! ^_^
Start digging back into the mid to late 90s for the good stuff, it's what everyone's going to be basing everything on in the next few years. Better get in early!
BTW, what was good in the 90s? There was some decent "indie" rock… fledgling hipsters, LOTS of BAAAAAAAAD dance music when every pimple thought he was a "DJ", and the whole 70s revival thing was well under way back then of course… Haha…
Honestly rather than going back 20 years to relive something that was barely tolerable the first time around why not go back 100 years. Let's all live like it's 1912, not 1992.
Wow 1992, will we be getting retro four-inch-thick lap tops with tiny screens? And Barney?
I'm going to go out and see if I can find some Bicentennial of War of 1812 events and maybe the reinactment of Napoleon's invasion of Russia and then the 150th of the American Civl War and relive shit worth reliving and fuck the 1990's.
bravo1102 wrote:No. But I do predict a marked increase in interest for Looney Tunes, Space Jam, Fanny packs, obnoxious colour combinations, thick-rimmed glasses ( admittedly already somewhat popular due to hipsters ), Nickolodeon / kids game shows, Teenage mutant ninja turtles, transformers, power rangers, rounded-off, smooth design styles for everything, aggressive post-grunge and Seattle sound music but now with a hint of folk music thrown in, "Reality TV" being replaced by "Reality Gameshows" ( Topshot, The Amazing Race, Etc. ), a desire for larger vehicles as birthrates go up again ( Lotta 20-somethings been waiting on the economy for the last few years. ), Nostalgia in videogaming I expect to become quite common again, the return of the side-scroller, penny games like angry birds, arcade format games becoming more popular as an option for cell phone gaming, the development of story-based gaming, grinding in games, dance music will likely see a slight resurgence in Rave and techno hooks being used in hip hop, graffiti will become the new camo print as more and more designers try to appropriate "urban" themes, the next 8-12 demographic will be introduced to Star Wars, after a generation of millenials who missed the original trilogy, as their parents ( now in their late 20's and early 30's ) decide to introduce them to their childhood, design and style will see a resurgence of the 1970's ultramodern "new design phase" and everything will be simplified again, Disney will see their stock go through the roof like it did in the 70's and 90's, despite Pixar doing all the animation and them stealing the credit for it, Someone will create the next Toystory and change the way we look at movies forever once again, the youth of America will become jaded and disappointed in their elders again, they will resign themselves to working jobs at gas stations, the elder crowd ( now panicking about social security again ) will not retire when they should, black, blue and grey will become prominent and desirable fashion colours again,
Wow 1992, will we be getting retro four-inch-thick lap tops with tiny screens? And Barney?
And most of all, not a bit of it will matter, because the world is going to keep on going.
Now come back in 10-15 years and tell me how much of that list is accurate. It's probably going to be pretty damn scary.
I predict a huge resurrgence in magnificent dramas with a whole crop of stuff for the cenntenial of the Great War none of which will be released in the USA. There's already been a huge ton of stuff for the Cenntennials of the Russo-Japanese War as well as the 60th anniversary of WWII in Europe none of which has made it across the oceans seperating America from anything worth watching on the big screen.
Considering the huge critical success of the Artist I have a feeling we'll be seeing heavily retro-dramas even silent films that'll eschew computer graphics for old-time model work to purposely look old-fashioned or worse yet CGI that purposely looks like old-time model work.
Star Wars will be made into a Broadway musical. You just know somebody is working on it in the depths of Lucasfilm somewhere.
—
Meanwhile my digestion sucks. I have to clean up a bunch of rooms so the windows can be measured and have therefore totally destroyed my right arm from shoulder down to wrist. I have never felt such exquisite pain in all my years of feeling lots of physical pain. Then there's my fractured vertebrae from my elevator accident a couple of years back. It's a weird sensation of feeling like there's this little hole in your neckbone and that's what hurts. But then the weather in NJ has been jumping all over the map lately and I've really been feeling the April showers bit.
And you know what? I'm completely out of pages for the comic and the stuff coming up is so involved digitally that I have no idea where to begin in compositing the images. And I thought blue screening space battles would be so easy.
WOW Hippievan sorry I'm so late on this but I'm from Ontario and sorry, totally missed health Canada on there… it had been a crazy week :P what province are you from? I try to avoid working directly with the government when I can… I think trying to work with Transport Canada back when I was in Aviation kinda spurned me. You learn of such delightful poorly thought out rules such as "You must only have this one specific kind of one time use life vest on an aircraft and you must test them once a year"…. wait… how do you test a one time use life vest??? and that wasn't even the worst part :P
.
Anyways, I'm not gonna lie, I didn't handle my last semester well but I'm happy to say it's OVER! Just 3 more credits and I have a business degree… I don't know if I'm excited or terrified… Also I decided to take Java. At almost 1000 pages the text book is a little frightening but I'm finding it really interesting stuff… It's kind of like a mix between excel and HTML… I never was any good at HTML but excel I rocked at. I'm kind of curious as to what the upper limits of Java is because it seems pretty flexible even though it doesn't seem to make the prettiest programs from the examples….
.
How is Star Trek Online? I have a lot of faith in Cryptic since playing Champions Online but never actually tried that one out. Always looked cool though
So I finally just went ahead and finished Mass Effect 3.
I'm not sure what people were complaining about…? The ending seemed fine to me, a little long, but no great issues. Maybe it was because I had all the download content already installed so it seemed better? I have no idea.
I suppose better end music would've improved things, the stuff they had was a bit of a downer, something more triumphant than the introspective sounds would've made people feel better at the end.
No great complaints. It's a very "final" end to a nice long series. Maybe a bit too final I suppose, but not awful.
So after a couple of weeks of things getting easier and generally looking to be on the up… it all comes to a grinding halt. I'm now at thatt horrible position when it feels as though everything is about to fall through my fingers and there's next to nothing I can do but hope for the best.
Well, FIU Law and Stetson University both denied my law school applications. Feh. If I was a drinker, I'd probably be drowning my sorrows in a bottle of Jack right now… both of those schools were my top choices. Oh well; time to stop moping and start applying elsewhere. I have a goal I'm working towards, and two rejection letters from my preferred schools aren't going to get in my way!
ozoneocean wrote:
So I finally just went ahead and finished Mass Effect 3.
I'm not sure what people were complaining about…?
I commented about that in the media thread.
Edit: Nevermind. I noticed that you already commented there.
My laptop has decided to start doing this obnoxious thing where it suddenly just starts scrolling down the page at random whenever it get humid out. Or at least I hope it's just because it's humid out today. It's almost guaranteed a result of the coca cola damage from a month ago, but it's not coming at a good time. I haven't had any work coming in for the last two months more or less and now is not the time for my laptop to start playing it's own version of the "cat on yer keyboard" game. Hell, if I wanted to be unproductive for another couple days, I'd go back to playing Team Fortress. That game has already sucked up enough of my life of late. It's rediculously addictive for something I've been playing since I was six.
@Genejoke- That's horrid! I hope things sort themselves out in a better rather than worse way ASAP!
@NickyP- try, try, try! Someone will have to let you in! Charm them with your voice ^_^
——-
YAY! I ordered something I've been wanting for a loooooong while last week and now it's here:
A British colonial pith helmet!
-The kind the horrible troopers of the British Raj wore in India. They're different from standard pith helmts in that they're pointy and very large, without the wide brim.
I fell in love with them when reading an old reference book years ago on the Raj. I's been hard to get one though because they're not the general pith helmet style… they're rather historically signifigant. However, with the rsing popularity of Steampunk they've become more widely available again! ^_^
Anyway, what I MOST loved about these helmets wasn't just the style itself, it was the turban like modification that British troops would decorate them with. I saw heaps of pics of it once (in a book) but can't find them now, Google is being a prick.
BAVO1102!
Please get me some pics of British troops in India or Afghanistan wearing the pointing pith helmets with the turban type thing on them.
Real black and white photos in preference over Osprey painted pics please. ^_^
The helmet in question is the Foreign Service Helmet. I did a google search and these are two images. The top one is from the 1880-1900 era and the bottom one is the real deal worn in 1879 by a lieutenant in the South Wales Borderers (24th Foot) from the Zulu wars. The wound thingee around the middle is called a puggaree which means turban. It could be unwound to make a neck cloth. But that was right sloppy and not to be borne by so many RSMs!
There has always been a steady supply of these helmets for fans of the movies Zulu and Zulu Dawn. Hundreds were made up for the movies and they're readily found among militaria merchants. I've found them at American Revolution reinactments right next to World War II SS camouflage tunics.
Here's a looser cover. This also shows why the puggaree was worn. Made the cover nice and tight like the rubber band issued with US helmet camouflage covers. THough initally issued in white troops often died the helmet covers in tea to make them that wonderful khaki color. Later on they were issued in that color along with the khaki tropical uniforms.
Since you said "without the wide brims" I assume this is what you meant as opposed to the later Wolseley Helmet worn in World War One as below.
Thanks for that!
But it's not quite the thing I wanted…
You see I had all these pics of British troops on patrol all over India and Afghanistan in the very late 1800s and instead of the proper style puggaree thing, individual troopers would often have these much more bulky things wrapped around the helmets, made out of a sort of patterned woven cloth. It looked like it would make the helmets a lot heavier.
The thing I liked about it was that it was one of those very individualised things soldiers might do, like US Vietnam era soldiers with cards and things on their helmet bands.
I just can't find any pics of it right now :(
AS I said in my post that wound turban thing was messy and not to borne by proper sergeants. It was an early field adaptation before the proper helmet shown in the top picture of the Lancashire Fusiliers at Spion Kop (1899). That lump under the khaki cover is the issue turban.
The one you're referring to is the individual modification made from local cloth in India and Afganistan to modify the original pre-khaki cover Foreign Service Helmet.
The above pretty thing that is hardly practical. They were dyed in tea and local cloth wound around to make a neck cloth. You won't find the images on the internet you'll have to go to Osprey. Since most reinactors do Anglo-Zulu or Anglo-Boer War the messy turbans won't be found easily as they weren't worn in those conflicts.
And to the rescue comes good old Bryan Fosten an artist featured in many Osprey titles. It's probably the white one you're referring to.
The above image is from the website for the Queen's Royal Surreys. here's the original caption:
19th Century. Second Half.Top row: Shako 1846 (Albert), Shako 1855 other rank and officer, Shako 1861 (Quilted) other rank and officer. Second row: Shako 1868 other rank and officer, forage cap 1860, Linen covered cork or straw helmet 1857 (India). Bottom row: Foreign service helmet 1875 and 1890, Glengarry 1857, Field service cap (Austrian) 1895, Slouch hat 1900, Home service helmet 1879.
Damn!
Thanks for the info and the effort.
I'm pretty sure the book was published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson. I have another in the series about The Rajputs of Bikaner, but it's only about Indian royals mainly… the only pictures of Brits are people like King George V or misc British politicians- extremely formal. :(
Advertise with us
DDComics is community owned.
The following patrons help keep the lights on. You can support DDComics on Patreon.
- Banes
- JustNoPoint
- RMccool
- Abt_Nihil
- Gunwallace
- cresc
- PaulEberhardt
- Emma_Clare
- FunctionCreep
- SinJinsoku
- Smkinoshita
- jerrie
- Chickfighter
- Andreas_Helixfinger
- Tantz_Aerine
- Genejoke
- Davey Do
- Gullas
- Roma
- NanoCritters
- Teh Andeh
- Peipei
- Digital_Genesis
- Hushicho
- Palouka
- Cheeko
- Paneltastic
- L.C.Stein
- Zombienomicon
- Dpat57
- Bravo1102
- TheJagged
- LoliGen
- OrcGirl
- Fallopiancrusader
- Arborcides
- ChipperChartreuse
- Mogtrost
- InkyMoondrop
- jgib99
- Call me tom
- OrGiveMeDeath_Ind
- Mks_monsters
- GregJ
- HawkandFloAdventures
- Soushiyo