Marilyn Monroe and rainy days

So, I watched "My Week With Marilyn" with Michelle Williams.  It is centered around the filming of "The Prince and the Showgirl" in England, and the connection she had with a young Brit (Eddie Redmayne) working on the film. Redmayne gives a sweet performance through the inevitable heartbreak as Icarus flying too close to the sun. The interesting thing about Marilyn is that she herself was a caricature. Her actual persona was larger than life, and anyone playing her has to walk the line of honest portrayal and over-the-top drag impersonation. Michelle Williams did a lovely job, though she focused on the fragile, self-conscious, psychoses riddled side of her.  Marilyn Monroe is one of those enigmatic creatures that has an effect on everyone, you want to know her, help her, be her friend, sleep with her, protect her. The film was well done, and it's unfortunate that Kenneth Branagh's Olivier was overshadowed, he always is excellent.  More so than anything it made me curious about Marilyn. I wanted to know how screwed up she was, was she screwed up, what she thought about her fame, what she was feeling. I guess that is the sign of a good biopic. It is strange to me that, even fifty years after her death, we are still so enamored with her.  She is both the epitome of sex and so innocent at the same time. I wonder if she didn't know exactly what she was doing. This film shows a self-conscious and doubting side of her that is often left out, and leaves me with a more human picture of an icon.

the policy of truth

it is officially spring break! my job and my classes line up and i have an actual week off! i am excited to get some work done. i started a painting last week and have not had any time to work on it what with report cards, parent/teacher conferences, and midterms...i am leaving for vegas on tues and have the goal to finish before we leave. i have been
drawing a lot of inspiration from pop-culture as of late. i saw some paintings a while back that were snapshots of iconic scenes from movies. such as ferris bueller. i thought this was great! now, i have never been one to coop ideas, but i have since not been able to find this artist, not any info. now, this got me thinking and i have been watching a lot of movies recently so... my new work is not so much replicas of a scene from the movie, but a moment that happened off camera. i like this idea of the characters having a life outside of the movie. so i have a painting based on the fisher king. the red knight, you know? i think the exploration of these characters and their identity is fascinating. what about ferris and cameron taking a road trip? what about inigo as the dread pirate roberts? did the dude win the bowling tournament? these are the questions people want answered. when acting, you become the character, any actor will tell you that they have some strange background story to create a history, or they came up with a conclusion that happened after the credits. there are a lot of these type of art pieces around, it has become this surreal "other" reality with characters in various different activities... Brandon Bird does this effectively, but i feel that his work is largely absurd. in this pic, ian mckellan, as magneto, is covered with gerbils. not to say it isn't a great painting, but i think there could be something else. so, now i have the red knight and the cosmos and it is good. so back to honesty, and the policy of truth. as it turns out jon and i have been the unwitting participants in stolen goods transfer... we bought a macbook from e-bay recently, after about a week it died. jon took it to the apple store to get it checked out, it was under warranty so they said they could fix it, however the hard drive was 60 gigs and all they had was 160 gigs. i thought this was our lucky day because they gave it to us for free! well, on his way home he got a call from apple corporate, this guy tells him that the computer was stolen from a shipment in california, and wanted to know where we got it. jon gave him all of the info h had, e-mails, paypal info, shipping and tracking numbers, etc. this guy was so impressed by jon's honesty that he told the apple store to hook us up and fix the laptop! this situation is totally interesting because they could have just kept the stolen merchandise. so now we have a sweet up-graded computer and might have helped catch a criminal. so, believe in the policy of truth! that is all.