Dat Scriptorium Lyf

It just now occurred to me that I have always been a Scribe! Like my parents and grandparents and probably theirs too before them! My father and mother both loved and practiced pretty penmanship their whole lives. My maternal grandmother was Religious about it and bought me my first calligraphy set. Then paid me an outrageous sum (1$ per item) to gorgeously address her mail for her starting around age 12. My maternal grandfather was a judge, his writing not so pretty as ours (nor nearly so fast) and he too paid me to copy affadavits and other items into those giant beautiful law ledgers he had to keep. My maternal grandmother was completely blind, and still prided herself on being able to beautifully write her signature, and even on a mostly straight line. Our paternal grandfather was a Penmanship Nazi (though he always did that odd thing of writing his N's backward! Seems he was dyslexic with N-words in more ways than one. :/ ) and he paid me to paint and draw lettering for his peanut business and occasionally both papaws would farm me out to design friends' small business or team logos too. PROFESSIONAL Scribe, for over 40 years now. Wow. Ink runs in my blood. <3 

The Water of Life

Inspired to draw and write, even popping up first thing in the morning with ideas. I always have them. But I don't always have time for them, and here it feels like time is opening up for that. My house, my rules - ART RULES!
For some reason, when I just feel like doodling, I often sketch Bene Gesserit. This one is a Fremen. :) And the song in the background is two of the 16 - so far - verses of The Mighty Hawkwood Roll Call. 

Swedish Murder Machine

pencil and brush marker on posterboard.

Awww, skwish.

Digital crayon chibi Swamp Thing. Might as well go through all my faves first. :)

spandex soap sketches

I have been hankering to draw things outside my comfort zone for a while, and seeing all the cool hero movies coming out has made me remember how fun it was to draw that stuff. I decided to try characters I love, not just ones that are pop, to use various styles and media and not just stick to the standards for that genre, and to TRY to draw the characters and their accountrements from memory before checking reference (whee!). I decided to go with my favorite classic SSO character, Logan aka Weapon X, aka Wolvie, and I did this one using dgital fingerpainting in an online paint program with one brush, very quickly with as few strokes as poss and no erasing, a'la sumi-e (totes inspired by Andy Lee.) 

Wolvie, for me and TT. <3 

Even though I am heavy as the weight of the Earth,

I walk like a whisper in the silvery grey night
following ghosts that don't see me,
haunting them,
haunting.

Bright blinding sun comes to melt off the frost,
and I wake from my wandering
in the grass,
in the cold, sharp grass.

When overcast shadows pale the afternoon sky
and rain clouds threaten
like tight, battered fists,
I find myself sleeping and dreaming of you,
I am always dreaming of you.

I will curl up in a circle
like a bird in a nest,
cover me with my own velvet wing
and rock myself,
like the child that I never was,
and I'll sing myself to sleep,
I will sing.

And I will pray that you will hear me,
wherever you are,
and your heart will feel weight
and a twin twist of pain,
and you will be haunted by memories of me,
and of eyes the color of winter rain,
of eyes the color of rain.

Bad Girls Guide to Good Film, the essays - I Love You Man

I Love You, Man: The Coming Out of the Bromance

“You challenging me, princess?”- Chazz, Blades of Glory

    The genre of film I’m calling the Bromance has been bringing in the bucks since the burgeoning dawn of cinema. Dudes like films about Dudes doing things with other Dudes. Everybody does. That shit is funny.

We have watched the brawniest of all the brawn (and every shade in between, down through Eddie Izzard, all the way to Sandra Berhnardt and Tom Cruise) commit and fight and comment on heinous crime for centuries for now, and it never gets old. The Buddy Film is perhaps the greatest, most encompassing genre. If you think of Seven Samurai, Star Wars, TGTB&TU, Thelma & Louise, Pulp Fiction, Apocalypse Now and Donnie Darko, for example, as buddy movies, then perhaps you understand my point.

    Dude culture, at least in my neck of the woods, has been fairly consistent and clearly defined for essentially it’s entire history. I am trying not to offend anyone by saying “Racism and homophobia are STILL a pretty serious issue here, in places*  but...” there it is. But the world changes, and so do mens’ (and all peoples) images, whether they like it or not. Obviously in some places, changes comes slower than others, and sometimes only with great revolution. However, oh great revolution in little shades, cinema is one of the ways that entire cultures’ minds are changed, and sometimes, that’s actually a good thing.

    I confess, I was a fairly ambivalent toward Will Ferrell at first. Ok, I admit it, I didn’t get it, and I hated him. But then I saw Talladega Nights (2006), and it all started to make sense. I fell in love with him and this old-as-the-hills yet still somehow shiny new genre on the spot.

Hot Fuzz (2007)

- Frost and Pegg in general
Tropic Thunder  (2008)

SuperBad (2007),

Fanboys (2008)

Pineapple Express (2008)
- footnote Seth Rogan in Anchorman (2004) AND Donnie Darko (2001), btw... oowee-eeoo - these are the Bromantic Deities!
- Danny McBride

No secret that I love the things and people that shake the dirt and rust off of old ideas. These boys are shitkickers for sure, and yet adorable and stupid (sometimes, but mostly pretttty clever) and normal looking and sneaky-as-fuck in their wonderfully subjective politics. Plus it brings them in bigs bucks, lets them do what they love ,and gives us things to laugh and think about in the process. Not to mention opening closed minds like a giant can opener. Hoo-rah!

- BG/sll

*like my Dear Old Next Door Neighbors, I just found out. “I don’t mind them, as long as they stay in their place.” I shouldn’t have been surprised, but there it is.

Bad Girls Gude to Good Film, archive - the Action Estrogen Wave

I Know What Mommy Saw.

I’ve been a fan of action, horror, thriller, gangster, sci-fi, western, war, martial arts, etc. - “dude” tv and film - for as long as I can remember. My earliest memories are of watching Cowboy Bob Kelly in the ring on some snowy South Mississippi Channel 7 affiliate and trying to bash the tv with a glass coke bottle because the bad guy was winning. I was four. I could act out The Good, the Bad and the Ugly by the time I was 6. My dad was an open-minded unbiased media fan and collector and I had no restrictions on my choices other than my own good judgment, so I gave myself a thorough, and I think excellent education.

“Luckily”, I grew up in a culture that spawned and revered tough girls, so I was not only not ridiculed but respected for my taste in films. I didn’t get asked to chum around with the other girls much, but on the whole, it definitely seemed like a fair trade to me.

I did have one femme cousin who shared my unorthodox interest in these genres of film, tv, comics and fiction, and we went to great efforts and Olympian wheedling to get to see every new and classic film we could get to. We were glued to Turner Broadcasting and the early days of HBO when we weren’t reading second-hand Stephen King, Louis L’amour, Heavy Metal, Epic, Robert E. Howard or the Doc Savage pulps. We never had money, of course, but we found money when it was time the latest fantasy flick or Eastwood joint to come out on the big screen, and would start begging for a lift to the theater days, even weeks before, or just hike it if we had to. Deep down we always secretly knew that we had the best of all worlds. Not only were these movies some of the best ever made, but the gruff, clever, lightning fast, and generally badass heroes of them all (and many of the bad guys too) were often also ripped, hot, unstoppable - and to our great pleasure - artistically and relentlessly beating the hell out of each other. Often with explosions, if we were lucky.

(Most of) the boys didn’t know what they were missing (until ‘300’).

Over the years my love grew. My cousin had always leaned more toward Westerns and War, and I to Horror, Sci-Fi, Martial Arts/Action, though we never forget our oldest loves and both still re-watch our old favorites often and try to see all the good new films that come out. She eventually had kids and is occasionally caught paying to see a chick flick. It happens to the best of us, I suppose. As our lives changed and we grew up, I found myself alone in a social vacuum, with no one to watch and talk about my favorite films with. I did eventually discover nerd boys of course, most of whom still like martial art/action films less than I do, but loved me anyway, because I had boobs, but it was almost exclusively a girl-free zone for many years. With the exception of the occasional geek-girl crossover film and hanging with the few girls who liked Roadhouse because it has Patrick Swayze AND Sam Elliott in, my first 25 years of film buffdom (pun intended) were pretty lonely.

And then something changed. Looking back, I see that bohunks like - for brevities sake, the entire cast of the Expendables franchise - had a lot to to with the change in the tide. I remember smuggling Mickey Rourke flicks into the head RA’s office in my Bapstist Student dorm, and making sure they saw the GOOD Patrick Swayze films too. They didn’t really like them, but they would sure as hell sit through them. Well, wiggle. But when Dwayne Johnson hit the airwaves as more than a pretty defensive tackle, it seemed like media realized that both kinds of oily boobies would sell Mtn. Dew and KFC. Then Hercules and Xena hit the small screen, and it was on. Brad Pitt and his ilk just rode in on that wave, and it’s been a rippling, sweaty, meat-hammer-dubbed abfest ever since. Thanks to the standard formats of Action Films of old (James Bond is the first thing that comes to mind), everyone was willing to accept a smooth, hot, clever, well-equipped hero without much fuss. The films are usually fun if not outright awesome, and face it, a dude like that is always surrounded by cool weapons/toys and dozens of incredibly gorgeous and under-dressed badass women, so the dudes didn’t complain - much.*

Hollywood caught on quick and began to reel out the girl-bait with films like Desperado,The Crow, Mission Impossible, the Mummy, Fast and the Furious - all good action films, but heroes so pretty they just couldn’t be all for the boys. Suddenly these were the movies of ladies’ nights, and we didn’t have to sneak anymore! The old-school, laid back, handsome-but-pudgy guy hero had been replaced by these chiseled, relentless, growling psycho beasts with good - if often temporary - fashion sense and interesting morals. Life was good. I wholeheartedly believe this era in film paved the way for the inevitable coming out of the Bromance.

The day I really knew we, the ThunderBunnies of the world, had carved out our own niche in the genre was when I begged a few girlfriends to go with me to see xXx**. We went on a weekend, maybe a Sunday, for a matinee in a deadish mall. Some were moms and housewives stealing hours, probably all of us on a budget, and we were sure we’d have the place to ourselves. We were wrong. The theater was easily ⅓ full - at a Sunday matinee of an action film in a hippie town, and the audience was 99% women. I was truly stunned. Like the Grinch, my heart grew 3 sizes that day.   

Yes, it took a more urbane, prettier, sometimes gender-bending, racially varied and decidedly more fashion-forward new breed of badass to - haha - swing us around, and I still rarely find girls who share my obsession with the real toughies like The Kurgan, Marv, Bronson or Danny the Dog. But I still feel that warm glow when I realize how many there are who now openly share my love for Riddick, Jayne, Jet, Jason and any role Viggo Mortensen ever chooses to play. And I love that my favorite

real boys respect and admire these actors and heroes too. It really is a brave, new world.

This change in film production and its fandom was a sign of a bigger change, that of the breakdown of old-fashioned gender rules and boundaries in every aspect of life. Now all films traditionally known as Guy Stuff are no more. Since these films are being made with an even bigger, broader audience in mind, their popularity has increased along with their production budgets and they just get better all the time. Hallelujah! Praise the Lord and pass the Beefcake!

Now, if we can just do the same thing for chick flicks... *Sigh*.

-S.

*Getting through the transition in action films from early 80’s to 2000s was like a slow-motion version of sitting next to that VERY uncomfortable redneck guy in a packed theater during 300. Poor guy. I guess me clenching my fists and moaning softly every time someone died probably didn’t help either.

**2002 was also the year of Scorpion King. And Blade II (Bonus, Donnie Yen!), The Transporter, Knockaround Guys, Equilibrium, Salton Sea, Shiri, Two Towers, Minority Report, Die Another Day, Bourne Identity, Road to Perdition, MIB II, Reign of Fire ... that was a good year in film for action and Orc Girls.

Bad Girls Guide to Good Film, the essays - Everything I Needed to Know, I Learned from 'Soldier'

    When I was “doing the research”* for my first article I noticed that I am not the only hard-core action fan or film freak who loves the movie “Soldier”. Yes, the Kurt Russell film, with Gary Busey and schlock aplenty. Since we are all now a month or so into the Holiday Season, with another month to go and trying hard not to go 'Here's Johnny' on the fam, neighbors, etc., I thought it would be a good time to post this relevant list of life lessons for all the Bad Boys and Girls out there, trying not to lose their jollies.

    Merry Yule, Krampus, Festivas, Xmas, &. - whatever you do this time of year, even if it's just try to patiently get through it without hurting anyone or doing jail time.

-BG

    Everything in Life I Needed to Know I learned from 'Soldier' :

• There is a basic, instinctual set of protocols for trying to turn good creatures into bad ones.
• You don't have to be bad just because you were made that way.
• Maybe it is better to be smart instead of fast.
• Guys named Todd CAN be cool.
• You can say a lot with just a few words.
• Sometimes, it's just nice to be called or call people sir, sir.
• Handmade scarves are a great gift.
• It is better to teach someone how to defend themselves than turn them into someone who must depend on others.
• Bad people can learn to become good.
• Sometimes even the worst damage can be healed in some way by learning to love and being loved and feeling like you belong.
• It's ok for something to be unoriginal, as long as it is a loving and honest homage.
• Roy Batty was bad-@$$ enough to have fought alongside (or possible even against) Todd's unit and still survive.
• Recycling is necessary, wise AND really cool-looking.
• It takes a lot to override human nature.
• Human nature can be really good AND really bad.
• Having something you care about and have to protect is a good motivation for change, and yourself is a good place to start.
• Sometimes it's good to be the best predator, and until things change, society will always need them in some capacity.
• Sometimes it's a hard and bloody path to overcome your programming.
• Even some really tough mofos can be made to cry by the stupid-@$$ holidays!
• Really getting to know a child or children changes people in a profound way.
• Just as you can turn good things into bad ones, so can you do the opposite
• Unfortunately, sometimes just hitting things is the only way to get it out.
• Fortunately, there are lots of safe and socially acceptable ways to be able to hit things.
• Often, the the authorities, you are just junk. And sometimes, if you don't fight that, no one else will.
• Even if you can't trust anyone completely, you can trust a few people a little until things get better.
• When you want to hammer a nail into a piece of wood, don't do anything fancy. Just get a hammer and pound the son of a bitch.
• If it sounds like a growl, it's probably a growl.
• The mind controls the body, after all. 
• Learn to build and/or successfully hijack a good house and/or boat.

• Kurt Russell is THE MUTHA!@#$IN' MAN (Well, I knew that long before 'Soldier'.)

      - sll 12/11

brightwing

                    sketchbook play. <3 

Milady Poovey

Now that it's not a surprise, I can finally post my Tribal Rennie Girl homage to Pam Poovey (from Archer. I love her. I say she is my Spirit Animal. :) <3 I got Amber Nash who voice acts Pam to sign the original (I gave her copies of the just inked and colored one too) and sent it to a dear friend who is also a big Archer & specifically Pam fan! *it's fun to be a nerd!*
And for Kinnon's friends who were wishing for one of their own, here's the uncolored original, so you guys can print it out and color your own Tribal Renaissance Faire Girl Pam!