GRIZZLY PEAR

written snapshots

Category: Notes

  • Ultra Flex Steel Nib, Fountain Pen Revolution

    After reading a post by Ashlyn, I purchased a pen from Fountain Pen Revolution.

    Here are a couple before-after images.
    The “K” was drawn with a Pelikan 14k Medium nib
    The “L” was drawn with the FPR Steel Ultra Flex.

    This “L” doesn’t take advantage of the power of the flexy-flex, but the The nib pops when I’m doodling hard, as I did below.
    (The top two alphabets are the flex nib, the third one is the Pelikan Medium nib.)

    Understandably, the steel isn’t silky smooth like the gold nib, but it’s a great value at $30 (half for the body and half for the nib). Plus I’m willing to push a $15 nib to the limit, while I doubt I would have the courage to do that with one that costs 10x).

    Time to start practicing if I want to wield its power and breath life into my lines.

  • Little Mermaid, Clements & Musker, 1989

    An hour of horrific life choices followed by twenty-five minutes of consequences with a miraculous rescue in the last five minutes. Happy it worked out for the couple, but I remember why I’ve never liked this movie.

    The fact this movie is so popular makes me wonder if dominant American culture is just more optimistic than those with Asian cultural backgrounds. It felt hollow without consequences (aside from Ursula’s fate)

    Maybe that’s why I’ve always been too timid to contemplate life as an entrepreneur? I don’t think folks would accuse me of having an abundance of moxie.

    But dammit, Disney knows how to make song and dance numbers like nobody else! You go Sebastian!

  • Cinderella, Geronimi, Jackson, & Luske, 1950

    • Shocked (not shocked) that Disney+ used a single scene with cigars as an excuse to move this movie to the parent’s (ad-supported) page.
    • The king is an abusive boss.
    • Love that they named the cat Lucifer. Different time then!
    • Strange propaganda film for Chinese foot binding.
    • Biddidy bobbidy boo!
    • Amazing animation. I didn’t realize that the technique was cemented by this time. The craft of Cinderella and Bambi hold up to anything made today.
    • The backgrounds at the dance are mid-mod sumptuous.

  • Tangled, Greno & Howard, 2010

    Disney has a formula that works. It can get old, but they know what they’re doing.

    Years ago, I had low expectations when I first watched this film. It easily cleared that bar.

    Last week I came in with fond memories of first watch. It still easily cleared expectations, though I must admit to being biased for any film that extols the virtues of a cast iron frying pan.

    Unlike many Disney films, Tangled doesn’t have a truly surreal standout musical moment, though the showtune at the Snuggly Duckling is awesome.

    Also not to be missed is Rapunzel’s wildly fluctuating internal turmoil when she first touches grass.

  • Moana, Clements, Musker, & Hall, 2016

    Yet another classic Disney princess movie. No prince this time, but it’s got lush tropics, a demigod with animated tattoos, and a psychotic crab.

    I wonder what a Pacific Islander thinks about the laundering of their culture for popular consumption. On my end, I’ve become more forgiving of appropriation of Chinese culture as mass media has become more diverse.

    Maybe I’ve wearied of all the watching-over-your-shoulder critical theory overthinking of the past decade.

    I just want to enjoy my time out.

    In any case, Disney slammed their formula, with the nice twist of having a brown skinned world at the center of this movie.

    When it isn’t featuring a psychotic crab in black light!

  • Redline, Takeshi Koike, 2009

    I came across this cult classic anime through a YouTube review. A few minutes in, I stopped the review to watch the two-hour film over three sessions.

    If you want wild animation covering fast cars, a dude with a massive pompadour, cute girls, all manners of aliens, mechs, and crazy bionic monsters, you got it.

    If you want a coherent story, you got it too! Just not very deep. A dude races a fast TransAm while hitting on a competitor as his mechanic deals with the mob.

    As an almost entirely hand drawn film, it’s a love letter to a bygone era. It feels more comfortable in the late nineties than in the late-aughts. But with a production value that’s out the roof!

    The surreal moments of slow-mo speed as the cars stretch in anticipation of the nitro hitting the engine are pure art. And I love the bold black shadow work throughout the film — it feels like Frank Miller’s comic finally made it to the big screen (I’ve never had the stomach to watch his Sin City movie).

    The beauty of a cult classic as a commercial failure in the theater is that it’s now available on several free streaming platforms.

    For the price of sitting through a few ads, you can’t go wrong (as long as you’re not expecting anything contemplative).

  • Soul, Docter & Powers, 2020

    Another supremely crafted Pixar special.

    I’m not sold on the company in Emeryville dealing with internal matters. (I wasn’t hot on Inside Out either.)

    But it was cool to have Jazz at the center of the movie.

    And those quantum line Jerry’s in the other world were a helluva lot of fun. As I watch more animated films, I crave these I love these moments of visual absurdity. It’s not the best ROI, but a few moments of Jerry can redeem the rest of the time spent in a formulaic feature length film.

    ~

    I’m going to start a concerted push on here with my “Notes on My Consumption”. I don’t consume nearly as many books and movies as it might seem. I just decided to stop being so precious about these notes and flush out my three year back log!

  • Don’t be a prince, be noble.

    不事王侯，高尚其事。
    I Ching 18, line 6

    The footnote to my “Penny Delights” are an extremely idiosyncratic rendition of the I Ching. This is how I normally write them up.

    • Perform a quick reading (Russell Cottrell has a great yarrow stalk program)
    • Pick out the predominant line (using the method described by SJ Marshall)
    • Copy the original Chinese from Project Gutenberg.
    • Paste it into Google Translate (often unintelligible),
    • Reference a couple translations (on Russell Cottrell’s download)
    • Freelance wildly to create a little doggerel that may — or may not — have anything to do with the original.


    Today’s reading was a first. Google translate both made sense and actually aligned with the proper translations. So I passed it along untouched.

    Great life advice to boot!

  • Island Book (1), Evan Dahm, 2019

    The art is lovely, the story is evocative, but it brings up a problem I’ve noticed in some graphic novels — density.

    It’s short story in a book format. Nothing wrong about that, but it left me feeling a little empty. One might argue that Dahm preserved liminal spaces for the reader to insert themselves, but I’m not yet ready to give it the benefit of the doubt.

    Part of the problem may be that it’s a serialized piece of fiction. Maybe the openness was to make room for the author to infill in future volumes.

    Still, this book is a fun read, worth checking out at the library. Maybe my opinion will shift after I’ve read volumes 2 and 3. I’ve put them on hold at the library, it’s certainly earned that.

  • Sharpening Blades

    The knives in our house were ridiculously dull, so I finally took took to the internet. YouTube did not fail*.

    As with any varied collection of DIY videos, I was confronted with a conflicting advice that could have frozen me to inaction**. I could have been intimidated by my lack of good equipment. Fortunately, the knives were so dull I was forced to do something.

    I grabbed our cheap stone*** and sharpened.

    I started with 5 pounds of pressure**** on each side. Try putting that much pressure on a kitchen scale. No joke. Once a blade was back to mediocre, I ran descending passes (ten to one) on both sides of knife on both sides of the whetstone — 220 in total for this second phase.

    Repeat that process for a house full of knives. My forearms were sore***** the next day.

    But I had a meat cleaver that could cut paper******.

    So over the top, but so satisfying******.

    ~

    *A basic search led to a beginner’s tutorial by Joshua Weissman, then warnings against beginner mistakes by Ethan Chlebowski, and finally in Burrfection’s extensive library.

    **On the other hand, the algorithm fed me videos sharpening the silliest things, like a cardboard box. At least my knives were made of metal.

    ***Two years later and I’m still using our cheap whetstone. I should spend a $40 Japanese whetstone to see what I’m missing. But that would force me to buy at least one knife that cost as much as the stone…and that’s how the damn hedonic treadmill gets started.

    ****Burrfection recommends against putting so much weight on a knife while grinding. Pick your poison.

    *****I now use my legs in an extremely shallow “bow and arrow stance” to shift my whole body back and forth, minimizing the effort in my arms. That’s about the extent of my martial arts now.

    ******After writing the initial draft, I chopped up a batch of bad apples for composting. Wow, the new knives were scary sharp. I didn’t notice the seeds as I sliced through the cores.

    *******I sharpen the kitchen knives about every other month whenever my wife makes a big meat purchase from Costco. I don’t know how we lived years with such dull blades.