Sunday, December 27, 2015

John Renbourn

Top Five John Renbourn records:

1. The Lady and the Unicorn
2. Sir John Alot
3. A Maid in Bedlam
4. The Black Balloon
5. The Hermit

Great music to draw to, by the way.

Saturday, December 26, 2015

Some books I've read 23

Pas facile de voler des chevaux by Per Petterson
This book is called Out Stealing Horses in English. It's Petterson's international breakthrough.

A Death in the Family by Karl Ove Knausgaard
Yes, it's not bad. There are some very good sequences. But I'm not sure I will be rushing out to buy the next five volumes.

Killing and Dying by Adrian Tomine
A mature and masterful book from Tomine. His earlier, more realistic drawing style could be a little stiff. His current, still realistic but also more cartoony style is more relaxed. Storywise, he has also moved on, from mostly portraying whiny twentysomethings to a wider spectrum of people.

Macanudo Numero 5 by Liniers
The guy is a genius, okay?

Hemingway in Love: His Own Story by A. E. Hotchner
Doesn't really give any new information, but we're getting the story from Hem's point of view of what happened when he met Pauline Pfeiffer and left his wife Hadley.

The Letters of Ernest Hemingway vol. 3 1926-1929
These are letters from that period. Hemingway divorces Hadley, marries Pauline, gets another son, Patrick, goes back to America and writes A Farewell to Arms. Also, does a lot of hunting and fishing.

Sunday, December 20, 2015

Star Wars

Went to see the new Star Wars film. I liked the first half hour and the last scene. It got kind of boring in the middle, on the green planet. It was just hard to see what the stakes were. There were less CGI than in the prequels, but still too much. The air fights had little weight, it's just pixels moving around on the screen. The über bad guy, Snoke, being CGI didn't help. And the story was annoyingly close to the one in episode 4, especially a certain part of the climax of the film. I thought it would have been better and more exciting if the old characters, Han and Leia, had moved on and not been doing the same stuff they did in the original triology, just being older. Finally: Is BB 8 the new Jar Jar Binks?

Sunday, November 22, 2015

A swell city

"This is a swell city--Santiago de Compostela--clean and nice like Pamplona and cockeyed beautiful with a wonderful cathedral swell old buildings and grand hill country around."

Ernest Hemingway in letter 21 August 1927.
From The Letters of Ernest Hemingway vol. 3

Tuesday, November 17, 2015

Aaand... camino sketches 17

 Finisterre. End of the world, end of the journey.

This sketch is from my notebook, NOT my sketchbook. There's a big difference. It was a very quick sketch, trying to capture the sight of Santiago in the morning fog, seen walking out of the city. They're working on one of the towers, so it was covered in scaffolds.