Falling Sky

Sky1K

Guess what?  It's the 1000th post on this here website.  Hurrah!  Rather than celebrate with monotonous burbling, nonsensical rambling or other syllable-rich words, I'll just let the night sky do the talking.  Here's to the next ton.

Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration

Resembling festive lights on a holiday wreath, this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image of the nearby spiral galaxy M74 is an iconic reminder of the impending season. Bright knots of glowing gas light up the spiral arms, indicating a rich environment of star formation.

Messier 74, also called NGC 628, is a stunning example of a "grand-design" spiral galaxy that is viewed by Earth observers nearly face-on. Its perfectly symmetrical spiral arms emanate from the central nucleus and are dotted with clusters of young blue stars and glowing pink regions of ionized hydrogen (hydrogen atoms that have lost their electrons). These regions of star formation show an excess of light at ultraviolet wavelengths. Tracing along the spiral arms are winding dust lanes that also begin very near the galaxy's nucleus and follow along the length of the spiral arms.

M74 is located roughly 32 million light-years away in the direction of the constellation Pisces, the Fish. It is the dominant member of a small group of about half a dozen galaxies, the M74 galaxy group. In its entirety, it is estimated that M74 is home to about 100 billion stars, making it slightly smaller than our Milky Way.

What's Wrong With Television Journalism In Four Minutes

A brief yet suitably stinging blast by Adam Curtis, he of documentaries The Century Of The Self, The Power Of Nightmares and The Trap, produced for an excellent news-focused episode of Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe last month.

While we're at it, also check out Charlie Brooker's piece that followed, a more focused study of UK rolling news and how it's responded to the disappearance of Madeline McCann. No matter how low you think the media may have gone, it's still shocking, depressing and essential viewing.

MP3s of the Week: FOUR FOR THE PRICE OF NONE!

Or, fruits from the devious pit of temptation that is Amazon's recommendations.  It is a dangerous pit, offering bands that you've never heard before but, with the briefest of Googlings, suddenly become necessary to the continued happiness of your ears.  Be warned, my friends!  Last night's dip into the murky waters of Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought brought up these bands who I'd never heard of before.  And now I must own them.  Curses!  Ignorance may not be bliss, but it is cheaper.

The Mandelbrot Set - Constellation of Rings (MP3, 12.2 MB)
A good big long 'un - over 13 minutes! - with a refrain that builds up little by little from the gentlest of strums to a roaring crescendo, like Explosions In The Sky or a less intense Mono.  Nice.

Lymbyc Systym - Truth Skull (MP3, 3.9MB)
Nicely reminiscent of Errors or Mogwai's quieter numbers on Happy Music For Happy People, somewhere between electronica and sparse guitars.

Blueneck - Oig (MP3, 5.6MB)
Reminds me of The Great Depression and M83, initially timid before ramping things up halfway through to a lovely climax.

Russian Circles - Death Rides A Horse (MP3, 5MB)
Oh, the metal!  This has a good old-school sound to it, much like Mastodon, and this instrumental track hits the ground running, leather-jacketed and chugging furiously.

One Terrifying Step Closer To Robomog

Or, IN UR BLUE CROSS GETTING MAH UPGRADEZ.

Bionic cat bounces back after death drop fall

Baby, a six-year-old female cat, has been dubbed a 'bionic cat' by Blue Cross veterinary staff after remarkably surviving two falls from a second-storey window.

The most recent incident happened in September 2007, when Baby accidentally fell from a window in her home in South London. Her owner rushed her to The Blue Cross for emergency treatment at the animal hospital in Victoria, London.

X-rays showed that Baby was lucky to be alive, having sustained severe injuries including multiple fractures in both back legs. To the surprise of vets, the x-rays also revealed two existing metal implants in both of her front legs, which had been inserted after a similar plunge when she was a young kitten.

[...] Jess Gower, Blue Cross chief veterinary surgeon at Victoria says: "Baby is an extremely lucky cat. A cat falling from this height will commonly sustain severe injuries, so we were stunned to find it was the second time she had done it! Now she has metal implants in all four legs, so the staff decided to call her the 'bionic cat'. She's had two lucky escapes but needs to be very careful to keep her remaining lives intact."

This Could Be You!

Less ranting, more painting - so here's one. A few months ago I was commissioned via the Emporium to produce an oil painting for a client. Similar to the portrait commission from last year, this had the added complications of being in colour and a full body nude rather than portrait, working from a number of source photographs. It's taken a fair few months to produce, mainly because the dark red background was painted using linseed oil mixed with paint, giving a smoother and shiny appearance that took literally months to dry. The body, by contrast, was painted using paint and a thickening medium, giving it an altogether more textured look. I finally completed the painting a couple of weeks back and the client seems very happy indeed with the finished piece, though it'll take another month or so before the paint is definitely dry enough to be despatched safely. It looks grand, and the colours are fresher and more effective than the photo's below suggest. So, if you've ever desired a painting of yourself in the buff, you now know who to turn to. Me!

1. Painting of a Male Nude (1), 2. Painting of a Male Nude (2), 3. Painting of a Male Nude (3), 4. Painting of a Male Nude (4), 5. Painting of a Male Nude (5), 6. Painting of a Male Nude (6), 7. Painting of a Male Nude (7), 8. Painting of a Male Nude (8), 9. Painting of a Male Nude (9), 10. Painting of a Male Nude (Complete)

Don't Watch That, Watch These

Tiptoeing back into blogland after being off with the lurgee, here's three fine pieces of moving pictureness to tickle your eyes and cuddle your cranium.

First up, remember this post (and the hurried follow-up)? Months after that tease of a teaser, there's now a full trailer for what has been finally titled Cloverfield. By all appearances it is indeed a big mad monster movie, played for genuine frights a la the good bits of Spielberg's War of the Worlds. There's still sod-all sight of the monster in question in this trailer, but an awful lot of noise and destruction, plus watch out for the tantalising hint of parasitic nastiness splattering forth from within people, hopefully reminiscent of what happens to hosts in the excellent Resident Evil 4. Considering the apparent format of the film - discovered footage after the event - this could either end up an embarrassing wasted opportunity or a genuinely terrifying success. Fingers and tentacles crossed for the latter. NICE BIG 20MB TRAILER - or for HD click here and select your preferred size.

Meanwhile, in small-screen YouTube land, tip of the hat to Gorilla vs Bear for spotlighting this fan-made video for Radiohead's All I Need, a particularly lovely track from the excellent In Rainbows album. It's been made by editing together footage from Microcosmos, a feature-length nature documentary made by the same team behind Winged Migration and March of the Penguins (let's just pretend that was a silent film, shall we?). It's a cracking piece of work, marrying the music and insect footage together surprisingly well. Go on, have a watch.

Wasn't that nice? I'll tell you what else is nice - three little kittens having an adventure in the back garden, narrated in Japanese (and thankfully subtitled), soundtracked with Joe Hisashi's music from My Neighbour Totoro. See how they scamper, eyes boggling at the scary size of the outside world! Spotted, inevitably, on Cute Overload.

And, to balance that sweetness out, here's the finest opening to any film this year. Though it never got a proper showing on this side of the Atlantic, I quite enjoyed the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie, being just as wilfully senseless, surreal and unapologetically obscure as any episode in the series. The best part of the whole film comes right at the beginning and has absolutely chuff-all to do with the movie itself, being a parody of those pre-feature animated segments selling horrendously overpriced and dubiously cooked refreshments from the cinema lobby. Here, though, the music is performed by rock daemons Mastodon and the lyrics are pure perfection (though sadly censored - boo!). "DON'T TALK, WATCH!" Too right. When I'm King, this'll play at the start of every film in the cinema.

Noise and Bleurgh

moar funny pictures

Dammit! It's the night before the Lass's 30th and what are we doing? Lying around at home feeling like shite thanks to the common cold or some similar nasty bollocks of a bug that's knocked the energy out of both of us. I'm drinking a ludicrous amount of water due to a raging thirst, hopefully flushing the nastiness out eventually, and consumed a whole punnet of grapes, carton of over-priced smoothie and a big bowl of homemade carrot soup, so there'd better be some healthy results when I wake up tomorrow morning (and there's another bugger about this - waking up at 2am and not being able to get back to sleep? Do not fucking want!) Now, don't get too concerned, this isn't the dreaded, über-horrendous, planet-crushing horror of manflu - oh dear god, let me be spared! - but it's an exhausting pain nonetheless and has put a downer on what would otherwise be a celebratory occasion of welcoming the Lass into the glorious giddy realm of 30 tomorrow. Fucking open-plan offices! It's all their fault!

Anyways, we're going to try and ignore all this ickiness for the rest of the night, first by watching Heima for the first time, then with the new series of The Mighty Boosh. And I just heard a few hours ago that My Bloody Valentine are going to play the Barrowlands next July. A reminder of why that's such a humungous deal is posted below. Ear defenders may be mandatory.

I'm Not Entirely Sure Why This Is On The News...

...but the fact that it is pleases me immensely.  The video footage is strangely comforting, as though any world where this could happen can't be all bad.  And what a fine name!

Cat's daily routine baffles owner

A cat is baffling his owner by wandering off at night before expecting to be collected by car every morning at exactly the same time and place.

Sgt Podge, a Norwegian Forest Cat, disappears from his owner's home in Talbot Woods, Bournemouth, every night.

The next morning, the 12-year-old cat can always be found in exactly the same place, on a pavement about one and a half miles (2.4km) away.

[...] Back at home, Sgt Podge has breakfast before going to sleep by a warm radiator.

Technorati Tags: cat

Word to the Wise

The annual Emporium price-rise is about to take place, what with inflation, currency fluctuations and high cost of paint to consider (and, oh, it's high!).  All prices will rise tomorrow, so if you've had your eye on any of the artwork I've currently got for sale, or are looking for a nice piece of original art to give to your nearest & dearest next month, the next 24 hours would be the savviest time to buy.  To brighten this otherwise dull post, here's a cat:

moar funny pictures

No Nudes = Good News?

Textured Study in Chinagraph, November 2007, $60

Hmmm.  Hmmmmm.  Hmmmmm.  There's an awful lot of pondering going on inside the Nagl cranium right now following Saturday's life drawing session.  It wasn't a particularly successful one, with two so-so's and one alright (see above), a much lower hit rate than I expect to be achieving these days.  For much of the session I didn't feel relaxed there, seemingly exacerbated by overhearing a wide range of pretentious chatter from the others at the class during the breaks.  Imagine, pretentiousness in an art college!  Aye, not particularly surprising, but for some reason it seems to be grating more and more - maybe I'm just becoming increasingly intolerant with every day.  Pretentious bullshit's never sat well with me - something which I still believe directly led to me not being accepted on the NFTS Animation MA six years back (what, me, bitter?  Still?  Sir, the very idea!).  Thankfully the classical animation courses I took in Bournemouth and Dublin were mercifully low in any conceptual guff (and reassuringly high in fucking hard work), but had I ended up taking a Fine Art degree instead... it just doesn't bear thinking about.  As a result I find myself feeling more frustrated and disconnected than I ever did at the Glasgow sessions, that feeling inevitably getting in the way when I'm trying to make a decent drawing.

But it's not just les autres.  The biggest distraction is muggins here.  I'm becoming more and more aware of viewing every drawing as a potential sale - judging each picture by how much I could realistically charge for it, if anything - and thinking this while I'm in the actual process of drawing.  I can't stress how unsettling this is.  I'm used to having quality control kick into action the moment the first marks get made on a sheet/canvas, every artist does, but this is an altogether more mercenary way of thinking and I don't like it.  It's telling that the clouds only lifted for me on Saturday after I'd done an ink drawing I thought could be sold (though, in retrospect, it's not good enough after all).  This seems wrong, really wrong.  I should be drawing and painting because it makes me happy, not because it could pay for a new Wii game or the week's grocery shopping, yet that's the mindset that seems to be creeping around my noggin during these drawing sessions.

Ironically, of sorts, this is happening at a point when I haven't sold any pieces for over six weeks after a few months of regular sales.  There's 60 pieces currently up on my Etsy site and 38 of those are nudes from life drawing.  By comparison, there's only 2 animal pieces, 2 still-lifes and 5 landscapes.  So here's what I'm thinking - maybe I need another break from the life sessions (this after saying in September that "I missed it far too much and won't go skipping any more terms").  Whether it's the venue, the other artists or the sales (and lack of) that's making my Saturday afternoon's a downer, it's daft to be shelling out a hundred quid a term for four hours of frowny frustration.  There's still four more pre-paid sessions to go this year, all of which I'll go to and see how it feels.  Unless my daft noggin can sort itself out, I reckon it'll be time for more solitary, unstructured drawing, whether it be still-lifes (which I really should be doing on a monthly basis at least, yet haven't done one all year), using all those Skye/Orkney sketches as a basis for some detailed landscape painting or getting a season ticket for Edinburgh Zoo and spending a couple of hours every Saturday sketching the beasties there.  I wonder if I've pretty much plateaued in terms of life drawing, and need to improve with other subjects before returning back to the human bod in the future.  And, from a cold business view, I'm more likely to sell a good landscape or animal sketch than a life drawing.  There's plenty of nudity already in the Emporium, surely it makes more sense to add some variety to what's on sale?

Three self-reflective paragraphs later, I'm still not sure.  I wonder if this is just an over-reaction to a bad session, and if next week will see me skipping home giddily having had a great session with a fine piece of work to show for it, or if I've let myself get lazy, falling into a life drawing rut with one eye on the artwork and another on the piggy bank.  On the one hand I can remember how frustrated I felt during the middle of this year when I wasn't doing any sessions (though, to be fair, those months living above a noisy mid-life-crisising fuckwit would've frustrated Buddha).  On the other I feel that the weekends are the only time I get to focus on artwork (especially during these months when the sun only hangs around for a few hours and decent daylight becomes hard to find) and if I'm not going to be a one-trick artist I should use that time to produce pictures free of dangly bits.

So, like I says, hmmmmm.