Stendhal Syndrome

Saint Sebastian is the patron saint of many things, including the plague, beauty and snow. ^__^ I drew this pic a while ago, but it fit today…

Stendhal syndrome is a psychosomatic illness that causes rapid heartbeat, dizziness, fainting, confusion and even hallucinations when an individual is exposed to art [...]. The term can also be used to describe a similar reaction to a surfeit of choice in other circumstances, e.g. when confronted with immense beauty in the natural world. [From Wikipedia, bold added by yt.]

Sounds a little bullshitty, huh? But it’s real. 0_0

You know that classic image of a snowflake that you never see in real life? This one:

Well, today, it snowed in Munich (what the crap, right? End of October and snow, hello??)  but anyway, it was snowing with fair intensity and J and I were out for Family Sunday Lunch with the Nazgul (during the snow, he levels up to a Snow Nazgul) and as we were going up the stairs to get out of the subway, J says to me, oh wow, there’s this perfect snow-crystal in your hair.

Me thinking, oh okay, that’s nice, whatever.

We keep walking, but a minute or so outside, I looked down randomly at the Nazgul’s head and lo, just like J had said, there, wonderfully contrasted against a dark back-ground of nut brown Nazgul hair was nestled a pristine snow flake and it was so lacy and beautiful with the clean five spokes and the little blades of ice furry on each spoke, crystal-crisp. Honestly, any snowflake I’d ever seen before had been a homely misshapen blob making me wonder where that iconic snow-flake had even come from but no, here one was, so unbelievable, so clean, so innocent, so fresh, so complex, so simple, so peerless, symmetrical and blameless–

And then it died.

And then I looked over and on J’s hair were more… Every second, more were falling, two of them, three of them, not all of them had the perfect snowflake shape, but the ones that did, sweet Mary in Heaven, with exquisitely formed five branches, six branches, tiny blades curving off the branches, oh my fucking god, I shouted, they’re  all over… look at that! I started laughing hysterically, waving my arms.

J: Dude, you’re kind of freaking out.

Me: But look at that, fuuuuuck, like how can it be so perfect, like I thought that whole snowflake thing was some kind of meteorological mythos, or something you could only see with a microscope…. there’s more! Oh jesus!! Look at that one…. ahahahaha, oh it’s so beautiful… oh my god, I can’t take it anymore, ahahahahahaha, no no no, you have to stop falling, I can’t take it anymore, ahhhgalksjdfoiawe ijsodfj sdjfklsjfasdfjkl.509303958′

The tears were welling up, okay, not in my eyes, but somewhere and I felt like laughing and crying really–I wish you could have seen it, moofs, they really were so spectacular.

Looks like it’s the start of winter. ~_~

People, you NEEEEED to check out this video. Skip the first 30 seconds or so for maximum Stendhal Syndrome, you won’t regret it.

This Is How To Be a Heartbreaker

[AKA cute brunette interrupts hot gay gang bang in the shower. Watch the video here. No, this is not dirty... it's a music video. ~_~]

Ahem.

Teen Idle – I want to be a virgin pure, a 24 cent cherry whore*, I want back my virginity so I can feel infinity….. (N.L. <3)

Dear Marina Diamandis,

I realize you will never read this so I can say whatever the hell I want and what I want to say is that I think your music is ultra. Super. Amazing! I am a tremendous fan. It’s like innocently popping a panty colored gum ball and finding a spike inside. (Okay, so that actually sounds massively unpleasant, but you know… metaphorically). Oh well, words seem to have failed me, so I have drawn (!) in pictures (!!) some of my favorite songs from you dear Marina, securing membership in the rank and file of your no doubt hoards of creepy fans. But in all earnestness, I can sketch for hours to your songs and I hope for you every success and happiness and for us more videos with underwear models, please!

As for you, dear readers, I have made many embarrassing posts over the almost two years that I’ve been the lord and master of this blog but this posting of fan-art for one of my pop-idols might just be up there in the top five most what the fuck am I really publishing this? But I am.

State of Dreaming – I live my life inside a dream, only waking when I sleep, my life is a play…. (A.D.)

Buy the Stars - ‘All my life I’ve been so lonely, all in the name of being holy, still you like to think you know me… you keep buying stars.’ (B.E.)

All right. Nothing more to see here, moofs. Big kisses to you and to you, Marina!

Get a copy of the excellent album Electra Heart here.

*24 cent cherry whore. Do you ever have it where the lyrics you thought were the right ones end up being in your humble opinion cooler than the actual lyrics? I was sad when I found out she really sings ’21st century whore’ there, having thought before, wow, not a 23, not a 25, but a 24 cent cherry whore, now that is some kind of vague sounding nasty right there…

NSFW- Kyoto Honeymoon

Not safe for work as in tentacle picture ahead. Dear readers who are faint of heart, I recommend you skip this post.

To the rest of you intrepid folk, hey moofs!

I made it back from Japan alive. O_O

Fancy that.
I have a lot to say and no brain power to say it, so here’s some moleskine pics I drew over our trip instead. They are in my sketchbook called ‘Kyoto Honeymoon’.

Kyoto Honeymoon
I dedicate this picture to w ^__^

Wedding Night I.

Wedding Night II -censored for your sanity  (So, I’m 80% sure my mother-in-law saw the uncensored version of this pic by peeking into my sketchbook ~_~. Let that be a lesson to all you presumptuous sketchbook peekers…)

Anyway, those are the three pics, a little bit my feelings while I was there.

Take care moofs and have a great week!

::dances::

Oh! And a dear reader really made my day, my week, my month, by telling me in a comment on an earlier post that they had gotten something I’d drawn tattooed on their body. How fucking amazing is that?!?

To this reader, I am so curious as to what of mine you found compelling enough to immortalize on you and I want to see the tattoo soo badly that I cannot even express it to you in normal human language (spins on the ground and foams at the mouth as proof). Here is my personal email, I post it on the internets and ask that you please show me, it would be so amazing. <3

moof06@gmail.com

[Nobody send me hate now, okay? ~__~]

Oh My Fucking God II.

I’m in Japan.
I’d post a picture to prove it, but I can’t right now. So you’ll just have to take my word for it, but I’m in Japan.
I don’t know… ever since I’ve arrived, I’ve just wanted to cry and I can’t. I haven’t cried in a long time it feels like, I want to, there is this horrible pressure inside and maybe if I did it would go away or at least be somewhat relieved, but for now, we are going here and there, it has been so long since I’ve been here before, and back then it felt like I could maybe belong to this place if I tried really hard, but now it doesn’t feel like that any more.

Sometimes, I am very afraid, like I can’t see the future of my life. I suppose nobody’s life really has a future, or alternatively, all of us know what the ultimate future is, but sometimes, I feel so sick and so scared, I don’t know what to do. I was telling J about it, it’s like a hand on the throat and while the hand is there, I can’t think of anything else, just taking sips of water, and counting to one thousand and breathe in and breathe out and telling myself little stories to not be scared of senseless shit anymore. ‘Once upon a time, in a faraway land there was a king and there was a queen and they loved each other very much, but one day, the queen became very ill and the king was so scared for her life, he called for the best doctors in the land…’

I’ve paced up and down sick on the streets of four continents. Junkie sweat pouring out, shivers, sweats, diarrhea, murmuring, moaning, pacing, pacing, and being scared of nothing and it seems to be getting worse as I get older. Like, the older I get too, I can’t take people anymore… For every hour I spend with someone, I need an hour alone, and there is no time to be alone. Now I’m at my mother in law’s house in Japan, sweet jesus, don’t get me started, You can’t have a friggin’ cup of coffee without it being a Broadway production and as soon as she sees you, it’s how you’ve been, who’ve you seen, where you’ve been, what choo know, oh and since you’re here! Can you bring x, peel y, chop z, take a to b point, no, no, no, I can’t do anything, I’m completely helpless, I feel like fleeing into my room like some paparazzi prey. Haha, too bad my wall separating me from her is literally paper. Behind her eyes, I can always see the question, why is this person so fucking rude, and the answer is, I need you to take a good meter back. Please, stand back. I need you to leave me alone. I have a feminine exterior, well I didn’t choose that and even if I had a more masculine exterior it doesn’t mean I want to help you fix your roof or your car because I’m not your servant and I’m not your friend and I’m only over here because my guy wants to visit you and it would be nice if just once you could prepare a meal for four people without needing six people to help you out. Is it really that hard?

Why aren’t you eating, are you okay, are you feeling all right, oh my, you’re always so tired, why are you always so tired? And in the background is Japan, all warm and dripping and making me sad and behind that is being sick and the shit in my head I wish I could wipe out.

Identical

I have a dream. I want to learn how to draw the most beautiful hair and lips and noses and spit in the world.    Identical Triplets (moleskine)

Drawing is like philosophy is like life–always the same questions coming up. Always can’t answer them. What is the good life? What is the good art? How do we weed out the good from the poop and how do we know when we ourselves have started producing poop?

Does more precise drawing have to be more boring than free, expressionist drawing? When we work for precision, is it at the expense of freedom and creativity? I mean, Durer had precision. He painted portraits–he painted recognizable things. Yet nobody would call him an illustrator. Yes, but that was a long time ago! Back then, it was okay to paint only portraits! It’s not anymore, we are so fucking over portraits and landscapes.

I’d like to argue this idea. Don’t we as human beings possess only a limited amount of topics to express and be fascinated by? Our toys have changed, but these handful of themes have not.  War, beauty, death, birth, religion, love, loss, nature. Change.

Why do you draw? Out there person, reading this? Why?

Me? I don’t know.

Though I thought about it today. I had talked to W and afterwards, I had to think about why. Why do I draw at all and the conclusion I arrived at is that when I see something beautiful, when it is really very beautiful, seeing it gives me an intense joy, but also ache, because I know somewhere that this beauty will wilt, fade, get picked, get used, get trampled on. Yes, there are always new beautiful humans, plants and animals getting born every hour every minute, but this that I am looking at in the moment, this very one, will not be. He, she, it will suffer.

Tolstoy said it was a human folly to equate beauty with virtue, and I will atribute no virtue to the motivations of an animal, a plant, or the mind working behind a beautiful human face. But that beauty, in and of itself, has a virtue to me. Then for a moment without any religion in my life I can be assured that there is something good and pure in the universe and I feel an insane, irrational urge to protect it.

It’s as if maybe, if I try very very hard, I can put this on a paper and there it will be kept safe.

Today, we were talking about this with W and he wryly commented that I talked about improving my drawing skills like building a table. You want to make a nice table, he said. Ah, I thought later though, but is there anything wrong with a well-built table? It can hold something. You can crawl under it when the roof is caving in. Must good art be a badly built table?

Oh, I don’t know. And then I start to see that human lips and wounds have the same exact identical shades of pink and red and white and wet.

A Bomb in the Tuna

-I’m sorry, but the Moof cannot come to work today. There is a bomb in the tuna.
-…who is this?! Who’s calling??

Back when I was a bitch for hire, I sometimes didn’t want to go to work. Okay, every day I didn’t want to go to work, but often, this urge to not go was so especially strong. I wondered, what would I do in exchange to not have to go? Would I put on a cow costume and suck on a cow’s teat? Would I eat a caterpillar? In my desperation, I fantasized about some kind of office you could call that would exchange unpleasant actions for missing shifts.

“You say you want to miss this dinner shift on Tuesday? Let me just enter that for you… All right. That will cost you the consumption of two deci liters of urine.”

The horror of working in a restaurant is that you have to drag your ass to work TWICE a day. Once in the morning for the lunch shift (still feasible with the lure of coffee) but once more in the afternoon for the dinner shift. Oh how low my spirits would sink.

Because he is such a good mate, sometimes J, seeing my hangdog expression would offer to call my sushi restaurant anonymously and report a bomb in the tuna.

Fast forward several years later, when we were supposed to meet at 7:45 for dinner yesterday. J arrived fashionably late, a little bit sweaty and disoriented. “Don’t get mad,” he said right away. “I tried to come on time, but I couldn’t. There was a bomb in the tuna so they closed down some of the subway lines.”

Me: … … … wut?

Yep, it seems that a leftover WWII bomb was discovered at a construction site just off the middle of town yesterday–how insane is that?! The place where it was discovered is a mere three kilometers or so from my house. Apparently, after trying to defuse it, they decided that the safest way to get rid of the bomb was to detonate it in a controlled blast. There was an evacuation of residents, shattered windows, a raging tumescent fireball and everything… Now if only this bomb had been discovered in the basement of my sushi restaurant four years ago on a day when I realllllly did not want to go to work!

More images and the article from Spiegel here.

It Is Easier for a Camel to Pass Through the Eye of a Needle…

…than it is for a woman who draws a sphincter on Jesus’s face to enter the Kingdom of God.

Mark said that, right?

A citizen’s (a)restoration. [I've now looked at this picture at least ten times, and it still makes me laugh out loud. Each. And every. Time.]

Okay, so I don’t want to make fun of this lady too much because it’s in bad taste and I’ll probably do something 40 times as stupid when I’m old, but seriously. Just when you think you have seen every screwed up thing under the sun, God’s like, nope. N00b. Cast your eyes on this, my son.

Ever look at an age-old fresco at your local religious watering hole and think, what a pity that the higher ups do not take better care of their treasures and maybe I should just save them some time and money and repaint that bad-boy myself?

Nope. Me neither.

But apparently an elderly lady in Borja, Spain had exactly that idea when she decided to ‘restore’ a fresco in her town’s church. I guess after a while she stepped back and had the ‘holy shit, something has gone horribly horribly wrong with this drawing’ moment. (Happens to everyone, god knows I have those anti-ephiphanies all the time.) Having evaluated that Jesus now had Pikachu eyes and a butthole for a mouth, she promptly turned herself in to local authorities.

Hey, at least she had a sense of artistic responsibility about the issue…