Want a sneak peek at an in-progress yard sign in my studio right now? Feast your eyes on this (first-coat) primed sheet of plywood!

In animation, they say good character design is a figure you can recognize by its silhouette. So I probably don't have to tell you who that will eventually be a painting of.

Speaking of design, I was often asked in art school why I would bother doing so much prep work before I painted, as if suggesting there was no point in painting something if I already knew how the finished product would look. (I was also told my work was often "clever in a bad way," whatever that means.) Maybe the finished work of abstract expressionists reveals deep truths about, er, something to its creators, but even if that's true, maybe I just don't like surprises or, as the inimitable Bob Ross would call them, "happy accidents."

I have a good friend from college who still believes that my work is craftsmanship, not art. To be fair, he doesn't mean that as an insult. We both have nothing but respect for great craftsmen. I once knew a very impressive young draftsman at J.C. Booth Junior High School who could recreate freehand anything he could see at any size. He was a craftsman, and I still think his work was pretty darn good.

I'd define craftsmanship as the ability to execute a plan skillfully. But someone has to create the plan in the first place, and the ability to visualize that plan is what makes someone an artist. The greatest artists lie in the Venn Diagram intersection of craftsmen and artists. Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello, Bob Ross... they could all think up a great idea and execute it. That kid in junior high lamented he couldn't draw anything from imagination. I hope he kept trying. I happen to believe that while not everyone has the natural tools to be a craftsman, anyone with an idea can be an artist.

I don't mean to suggest that I'm the equal of Bob Ross, and maybe I do tend to overthink (and underexecute) my pieces, but I will insist I'm an artist.

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A quick search reveals that I've never explicitly mentioned here on the blog that I have long owned the same two cars. I have the 1995 Jeep, which is the last year the YJ model was available. You've met it; I love and brag my Jeep about frequently. But I also own a 2002 Oldsmobile Intrigue. Two-thousand two also happens to be the final year of Intrigue production. (I'm a niche collector!) As my previous silence about it should indicate, I do not love the Olds.

True story: it was my father's Oldsmobile. Briefly. It was actually purchased by my father's father, who bragged that he got a great deal on it. As I mentioned above, 2002 was the final year this car was made, and the reason it was a great deal is because the electrical systems of Intrigues are famously... sorry, I was trying to think of a diplomatic way of saying "crappy," but no, it doesn't deserve diplomacy; it's just crappy.

When my grandfather was no longer able to drive (I forget when, exactly, but 2009/10-ish), my father took the car. The one condition that my grandfather tried to impose was that under no circumstances was Dad to give the car to me. So now maybe you can understand my template for how to treat a father.

Anyway, it may have taken 22 years, but at long last, my very temperamental Oldsmobile has successfully reached 100,000 miles!

And it's only cost me $1,360.93 in repairs in the past 4 months! And it needs a new set of tires, so cut me a little slack about that "low washer fluid" idiot light. Car ownership is expensive.

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57/2368. American Graffiti (1973)
I avoided this movie for years in part because I expected it to be the worst kind of nostalgia trip. It is indeed what I thought it was, but it also has a truly great cast, and the soundtrack is even better than advertised. I've got to give it to George Lucas, he really knows how to give audiences what they want when he wants to. (Which makes those later Star Wars movies even more baffling.)

Coke note: For a movie built on pure, distilled 1950s Americana, Coca-Cola is conspicuously hard to find. It only appears in a mini-golf snack shop intentionally obscured from the camera because it was obviously part of the actual snack shop and not paid product placement. (The "Frozen Coca-Cola" logo dates to 1969, an anachronism in a movie that takes place in 1962. Obviously.) What, did Coke want a cut of the box office?

58/2369. Thor: Love and Thunder (2022)
Clearly the wrong lessons were learned from Ragnarok. The key theme of both the the A and B plots in this film are squarely focused on death, or more specifically, how to come to terms with surviving the death of loved ones. I think this is what makes the incessant, juvenile antics of Thor and company land so badly. There's just too much happening that's too heavy for the audience to enjoy casually tossed-off punchlines (mostly about destruction) and a badly underrealized visit to God City (which should be a movie in itself).

59/2370. The Hateful Eight (2015)
When I reviewed Django Unchained, I mentioned that it felt plodding. This movie moves half as fast, but since it is set up like a horror film (wearing the skin a Western), the slow pace is actually its strongest asset. (Perhaps because of Kurt Russell's presence, it becomes clear pretty quickly that John Carpenter's The Thing is the style template here.) The overriding theme in Tarantino's best work is the fluid state between trust and betrayal (the guy must have issues), and all roads lead here. Very good, I'd say; among Tarantino's best.

60/2371. MoviePass, MovieCrash (2024)
This is a documentary about how a company germinated by a good idea was killed by greed. It is a very American story, but it's clear even the filmmakers don't think anyone will learn any lessons from it.

61/2372. Scott Joplin (1977)
Billy Dee Williams plays the King of Ragtime in a period piece biography heavy on the syphilis. The movie is not great -- the director is unable to rise above its made-for-television feel -- but Billy Dee is.

More to come.

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My father called this evening to tell me that he received an unsolicited group text in which recipients were invited to visit a URL where they can fill out documentation to apply to be paid $600 a month for having a Purel hand sanitizer advertising decal attached to their cars. He thought it might be an opportunity worth pursuing. Hey, free money!

Hopefully, dear reader, I don't have to tell you this is a scam. The FTC has been warning about it for years. If you don't trust the government, you can get the same warnings from both the BBB and AARP. Yet, obviously, the scam still works or the scammers wouldn't still be running it.

Now, my father is, in theory, an intelligent man. (In fact, he gets really angry if anyone dares to question that intelligence. I hate to admit it, but I am certainly a chip off that block.) So how is it he could fail to recognize all the red flags? It's not like he needs the money. (Seriously. I do his taxes.) I think he just wants something for nothing.

I mention all this not to denigrate my father. (That's just a bonus.) I mention it because I think it's the key to understanding why so many people, like my father, support that orange-faced fellow who accepted his party's nomination for president today. They don't care about the red flags like, say, his previous, well-documented attempt to subvert a federal election for his own personal benefit; they just want to believe him when he tells them he's going to give them something they want for free, like lower taxes and fewer colored people. While I wish those people could see the fallacy in where they've chosen to put their trust, I have to concede there's nothing you can say to someone to make them stop wanting the things they want.

I want free money, too. I guess I'm just jealous no one is offering to pay to put decals on my Jeep.

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Google has kindly informed me that Wriphe.com has been having a problem with certain pages "without user-selected canonical" resolution. That's a fancy way of saying that you can get to the same content multiple ways, and Google's bots can't figure which one is the "correct" one.

I thought I had this problem fixed before, but my server did migrate my host not too long ago, and it's not unheard of for files to fail to transfer correctly. (I swear you get even one 1 swapped with one 0 and everything goes haywire!)

After a bit of re-coding, I think I have it fixed again, so hopefully everything is now resolving "canonically." What a good thing there was nothing else happening in the world to distract me during this difficult time!

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56/2367. Denial (2016)
This is a courtroom drama about the libel lawsuit brought in the mid-90s against a Emory University professor by a British Nazi-sympathizing Holocaust denier. That's interesting, sure, but the reason I watched it was because I was a student at both Emory University and DeKalb College (renamed Georgia Perimeter College while I was there but is now a satellite campus of Georgia State University) in the mid-90s when the principle action takes place.

The 2016 film begins with an attempt at verisimilitude with establishing shots on Emory's quad in Decatur, GA (purporting to be 1994 and not doing too bad a job at pulling it off)...

...then follows our antagonist as he travels west away from Emory towards downtown Atlanta on Freedom Parkway (a road originally planned as the very controversial Presidential Parkway which was still under construction in the mid-90s)...

...then south along the Downtown Connector ("connecting" US Interstates 75 and 85) through the Grady Curve, so-called because Grady Memorial Hospital is just off camera to the right. (There's a giant neon Coca-Cola sign just off camera to the left.)

Side note: Turner Field, seen on the sign above, is also an anachronism. It didn't exist in 1994. It was originally opened to the public as Centennial Olympic Stadium for the 1996 Atlanta Olympic games. After the Atlanta Braves abandoned it and moved north to Cobb County in 2016, it was sold to Georgia State University to become their football stadium and renamed again to Center Parc Stadium.

Side note 2: That billboard in the bottom right of the frame is advertising then-new (in 2015) news team of Sharon Reed and Ben Swann for WGCL CBS46 News. In 1994, WGCL was calling itself WGNX and after many years as an independent UHF station had just become the local CBS affiliate (after Atlanta's original CBS affiliate, WAGA, became a Fox station). Since 2022, WGCL has become WANF (for "Atlanta News First") but both Reed and Swann are long gone (in 2018 and 2019 respectively).

The antagonist must have been headed south down the Connector to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (called just the William B. Hartsfield Atlanta International Airport in 1994 as former mayor Maynard Jackson wouldn't die and get his name added until 2003) because we next see him pull up to -- I had to Google Image Search this -- the Elmsbridge Civic Centre in Esher, England.

Google Maps tells me that Esher is a suburb of London, where most of the movie is set and filmed, so it's easy to see why the filmmakers would use it here. For the record, according to Wikipedia, the Civic Centre was constructed in 1991, so it is at least period appropriate!

However, in the very next scene, by means of movie magic, we're transported back to the States inside an unidentified lecture hall disguised as DeKalb College (by means of a banner on a podium)!

I have no idea where this last bit was filmed, though I suspect it is also in London. It doesn't match any hall I sat in off Emory's quad in 1993-95, and if there were any lecture halls like this on Perimeter's Clarkston ("Central") or Decatur ("South") campuses in 1997-99, I was never inside them. They never used wood paneling when concrete blocks would do.

That's just the first 5 minutes. The rest of the movie takes place in Europe. I never went to any schools in London or Poland, so for all I know, all those locations are perfect.

More to come.

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It is not so long ago that a member of the Diplomatic Body in London, who had spent some years of his service in China, told me that there was a Chinese curse which took the form of saying, "May you live in interesting times." There is no doubt that the curse has fallen on us.

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