SKETCHBOOK, OSCARS, THE MOON
Well heckfire, no one showed up for my comics class this morning. I wish I could have seen myself hanging around the (locked) classroom door for half-an-hour before I left; I would have stayed asleep instead of waking up and finishing my class notes through a fugue of hangover. Well I'm awake now. Time to get productive Dharbin! Or at least continue waking up, because boy oh boy, that is a work in progress today.
I have been thinking this week about the Oscars: I just don't get them. Is there a reason for them? I understand the awards part, but isn't it just a reason for movie studios to promote their movies, get more people to go see The Hurt Locker or whatever?
And even that isn't bad, that's how our government is run too right? People spend millions AND MILLIONS of dollars to get into office, then spend their time their struggling to raise more money so they can stay in that office. Somewhere in there they make a lot of speeches cynically aimed at the stupidest and most impressionable parts of their perceived constituencies, and at least once or twice they vote for or against something. Afterwards I think there's a party, with a lot of backslapping and cigar smoking.
But the thing that KILLS me about the Oscars is all the money that's spent on the actual event. Not just the production costs, swag bags, all that--it's the clothes baby, what's the deal with all those clothes?? In a time when the entire nation of Haiti is more or less a pile of treeless rubble, sprinkled with tarp lean-to's, and the rainy season about to begin... the best thing we as a society can do is throw a party for the movie industry.
And just to remind us of how important this party is, everyone should show up in $20,000 designer dresses or Versace tuxedoes, casually displaying their fancy shoes or handbags or dogs or whatever, as they pause to endure 2 minutes of flashbulbs on the (tented) red carpet before entering and practicing not looking directly into any of the hundred or so moving cameras.
Afterwards, they will complain bitterly about how celebrities have no privacy, how fame ruins everything, how "regular" people just don't understand the incredible pressure.
That sounds pretty negative, I guess. But it's gross, honestly. The idea of spending tens of millions of dollars on a big party when there are starving people literally everywhere is just nuts. Or sending a rocket to the moon for... for what? I love space, I love astronauts, NASA is like a codeword for "awesome." But worrying about sending a manned mission to Mars when we have two very foggy wars going on, 10% unemployment, an increasingly monetized political system, and natural disasters all over the place.
Well, pardon me for saying that it sucks. But it does. SUXXXXX2000
Oh! I nearly forgot to mention that I put these three spreads up in my Flickr set, which will eventually comprise this entire 108-page or so sketchbook. You can click on any of the pictures to see them in Flickr, or here for the whole set. Hope you like it yo!
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