Red Wombat Studio

November 2003

This made me laugh like a loon. And roll my eyes a bit. And laugh again. And cringe. And feel uneasy. And then laugh for five solid minutes and pound on the arm of the chair.

(Sort’ve not safe for work–found over at the vintage erotic community)
http://dirtymags.com/oldmags/action/index.html

Basically they’re covers from pulp soft-core porn mags during the 60’s, catering to that whole He-Man, Hemingway-esque mentality–a sort’ve Pulp-meets-Maxim–lots of languid damsels chained up in temples being threatened by the Other (hippies, Nazis, foreigners, wild animals, whatever) followed by quizzes that make sure you’re rugged and manly enough. And I know, as a feminist of some stripe, that this should be terribly apalling and I should be up in arms about the linking of sex and violence and the helplessness of women and all that crap. And I suppose to a certain extent I can see that–I’d have to get up pretty early in the morning to objectify a woman any more objectly, and it’d take me a couple of pots of coffee and some serious brain power.

But c’mon, I dare anyone to look at a hysterically fonted “I WAS THE SLAVE OF THE TEENAGE NAZI COBRA GODDESS IN THE TEMPLE OF LUST!–a true story!” and not laugh. I howled. The cover where they’re attacked by killer sea monkeys made me shoot coffee out of my nose. It’s all SO bad it’s like a carictature of itself–you literally couldn’t make it any more pulpy and idiotic and tasteless unless you could show nudity on the cover or got out the hentai. It’s like a horror movie that’s so over the top gory it just becomes funny.

It also makes me want to paint a pulp cover just for the hell of it. “I WAS THE SLAVE OF A LOVE WOMBAT!”

Okay, definitely not. Some things are just wrong…

Working on the next sculpture…it turned into a sort of sheep-man. He may wind up in a nun costume. I can’t help it, he looks good in black with pale trim, and I realized about a minute too late that it looked really nunnish. I don’t know what that means. We’ll see. I am not above giving him a little rosary and making a cross-dressing Catholic nun-sheep. (Address all complaints to my Muse. I got no control over that thing.)

As usual, my tendency to make heavy-schnozzed faces has left it massively offbalance, although it’s much more upright than the last one, so we’re fooling around with steel rods and sinkers again to get it functional. Seems to work. We’ll see.

Best line uttered during a Kurosawa movie:

James: “Wow, look at those Japanese women rock out…HEY! That’s the cantina scene! Only with Japanese women!”

It also occurred to me, infinitely belatedly, while watching James pick up a drunken Sith chick in Knights of the Old Republic that hey! There are no evil women in Star Wars! I mean, there’s only…um…four women? total, and they’re all good guys. What’s up with that? Equal opportunity evil, damnit!

Today I feel fat and lazy. And that is how you’re supposed to feel following Thanksgiving, so it’s all good.

The turducken was good. The rest of the food was good. The pie was good. It was all good. Upon arriving at my father and stepmom’s house, James vanished into the garage with my father to do arcane things with a wiring harness and Dad’s vintage Jaguar (a car which only a handful of people have ever seen function–I’m one of those select few, and can say that even the small child with absolutely no interest in automobiles that I was will realize that is one COOL car.) I assume that went well–the few times I went out there, it sounded like people disarming a bomb. “Okay–there should be two red wires, and a green wire…” I, meanwhile, got reacquainted with my stepsisters after about ten years, which was nifty–at least, as reacquainted as one can get over a Sisyphean game of Uno and while racing around frantically doing the cooking thing.

Now, I cannot cook. I am in awe of cooking as an art. I am, in fact, a sort of Anti-Cook–bending my attention upon food can cause it to miraculously become more raw, more burnt, and more unfit for human consumption. Molecular bonds in Jello will break and collapse if I lean against the fridge for an extended period of time. I can turn heating a pan of water into Defcon One, through no real fault of my own. James does all the cooking because the alternative is a series of explosions, followed by swearing and then Taco Bell.

So, needless to say, my assistance at dinner preperation was limited to peeling potatoes and running to the store. But the other people in the kitchen, fortunately, knew what they were doing, and the end result was really quite good.

Then we hung out and chatted for awhile, and finally drug on home, deep in the throes of turkey lethargy, to shoot the cat with insulin and lay around going “Shmooooggggllle….” (and other overstuffed noises.)

Given that the last ten Thanksgivings have been spent snarfing takeout Chinese (they’re the only ones open) barring one lovely gourmet turkeyfest at our buddy Chris’s last year, it was really cool to get together with the family (particularly a family that I hadn’t seen in forever.)

And now, I’m gonna spend today lounging around and fiddling with clay, damnit.

I dreamed I was a cleric. (Yes, alright, a halfling cleric, are you happy? I’m a geek! I admit it! The fundamental mythology of my existence is the D&D core rules. Joseph Campbell would have a fit.) I was, in fact, a cleric of Apollo, although His Shininess had rather come down in the world, since he mostly demanded things made of gopherwood, and then wrote me checks that bounced. (At one point I was wandering around looking at all these checks signed by Apollo and thinking “Man, none of these are gonna clear…”) And gopherwood! Always with the gopherwood! Do you know how expensive gopherwood is? (I don’t either, but in the dream I did.) “Noah had it easy,” I grumbled to my only other fellow cleric, who was a well-meaning but deliberately helpless Valley girl type. “He just had to get everything on loan and wait for his creditors to drown.”

Disgusted by my station in life as deity-babysitter, I attempted to get work as a nurse on a caravan leaving town, only to be told that I wasn’t qualified because my one-room-apartment-that-for-some-reason-was-a-ceramics-studio wasn’t neat enough. I was moping around when one of the gods of death showed up and handed me a goblet. Hmm. What do I do with a goblet? Well, if I put it on one of the tables, the death gods will come and party, and nobody in the room, however mortally wounded, will die because the death gods are getting hammered. Useful if one is in the nursing profession, I suppose, although a table surrounded by drunken semi-translucent death gods that resemble something from the Haunted House ride at Disneyland is a little difficult to have in the house.

I woke up muttering something about the price of a cubit of gopherwood. I don’t know either, excepct that now I’m a little curious about what the heck gopherwood actually IS.

And tonight, my stepmom is fixing a turducken. I almost don’t care how it tastes, I just wanna see one of these things.

Finally!

So I called my mother up t’other day and asked if she ever got the urge to do 3-D.

“Yes,” she said, “but I squelch it immediately.”
“Goodness–why?” I asked.
“I’m afraid I’d enjoy it too much,” she said.

Wise woman. I enjoyed this waaaaay too much. Which leads me, at long last, to the point–I finished the sculpture. Woo!

http://www.metalandmagic.com/Images/LJimages/browndude1.jpg
http://www.metalandmagic.com/Images/LJimages/browndude2.jpg
http://www.metalandmagic.com/Images/LJimages/browndude3.jpg

I dunno–he’s nothing amazing, but for a first attempt at sculpture, he coulda been a lot worse. Has a kind’ve Christensen-meets-Dark-Crystal thing going on. I really enjoyed doing it–whole new set of challenges. (Which isn’t to say that painting isn’t difficult, but it’s the same bits that are difficult, usually.) So for something made for fun, I was pleased. In fact, in the one bit of symbolism intentional to the piece, the coin on top of his staff is an arcade token I picked up at a garage sale and says “For Amusement Only” on it, which I thought was terribly appropriate.

He’s about thirteen inches long, made of polymer clay, wire armature, styrafoam, lead weights, a steel rod, a whole bunch of wire, glue, some little plastic leaves, a lot of fabric, no sewing whatsoever (I have limits!) and a stick. He’s actually pretty hard–the cloth is stiffened in place with this fabric stiffener (rather regrettably named “Stiffy”) that holds it in those particular drapes. It’s cool stuff. His staff is sort’ve stable–it’ll fall over if you poke it too hard, but it stands up to basic vibrations, anyhow.

I had fun. I gotta do some more…

Recognizing that some people can’t see the things up on my server, he’s also at Deviantart, at http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/3989305/

Got the other half of the first root canal done. It was unpleasant. They have to essentially drain-snake the roots with a little wire whisk deal the first time, and then they do it again this time to make sure all the nerve’s out. Only there’s no Novocaine, because in theory there shouldn’t be any nerve. Predictably, they hit a spot that went somewhere bad, and I made that horrified “YuuuNNnnnnnnnnnGHH!” noise that you make when Pain Has Occurred But You Can’t Flinch. The dentist said, “Sorry, sweetie,” but fortunately did not hit the nerve again. (He kept calling me sweetie. In a mechanic, this would piss me off to no end, but I got the impression that he didn’t even hear himself saying it, and since he is otherwise a terribly good and friendly and not at all patronizing dentist who explains everything and waves in the waiting room and tells amusing anecdotes about weird things in dentistry while working, I ain’t gonna complain.) At one point, he heated something up with a miniature blowtortch and used a very hot thingy to seal the cement or whatever. It was very strange. It’s a little sore now, mostly from the gum being mauled and the jaw hinge being strained, but not bad, nothing like the first time.

On the way back, James swerved to avoid hitting what he thought was a paper bag, but which turned out to be a fairly large dog lying in traffic. I made him pull over, jumped out, and walked back to the dog, who was sitting up and looking around, but just laying in the middle of the street. Great. Looked like a pit-bull cross. Greeeeat. (On the bright side, they’re generally built like brick shithouses, so that’s something.) Another car stopped in front of him and put on the hazards so that he wouldn’t get hit again. I coaxed him out’ve traffic (mostly saying “C’mon, sweetie,” which probably says something right there) and he could walk just fine–jumped up, came closer, then veered off, look suspicious. Parts of his face were skinned, but he didn’t have a limp–presumably a graze that knocked him silly more than anything else. I tried to coax him in closer, thinking that maybe I could get him into the car and take him over the vet, but he leapt up suddenly and took off at a dead run into the bushes. There was no way I was gonna catch him–he was going rather faster than an out-of-shape woman is gonna manage, even before he got into the bushes, and I value my skin much too much to risk getting a pit bull mad at me–so all I could do was look at the driver of the second car, shrug, and say “Well, hope he gets back home!”

I hope he got back home.

Today, in an effort to keep Loki out of my studio, (where he is evidentally so well recovered from neuroapathy that he’s jumping on the workbench and into the window, wreaking havoc on my highly scientific “Stack that somewhere” organization system) James attempted to use psychology on the cat.

At least, I think that’s why I caught him telling Loki “Stay away from the brick. The brick doesn’t love you. It wants a restraining order. It wants to see other bricks…”

Once I finished laughing hysterically, I made him apologize and tell Loki that the brick really did love him. Then there was a brief pause, and James threw his hands in the air and said “What am I SAYING?! It’s a brick!”

He’s nuts, but I love ‘im.

Romancing the Brick

As further proof that nothing is ever really wasted, my useless 49 cent art brick thunked to the floor of my studio, where it promptly became the love of Loki’s life. He’s been cuddling with it for the last eight hours. I had to poke him at one point to see if he was still alive. (He is, but he was grumpy about being distracted from snuggling his brick.) I have had cats that can sleep on the serrated edge of a Saranwrap box, but Loki is the first one who’s life seems to have culminated in using a brick for a pillow.

That cat ain’t right.

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  • I write & illustrate books, garden, take photos, and blather about myriad things. I have very strong feelings about potatoes.

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