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Almost skipped out on school today, but luckily I finished the essay before I had to go. Too bad the essay was due last Friday. >: ANYHOO, it's done and it's kind of crappy, but whatever, ugh.
So glad I caught the documentary they were screening today though; it's called How Art Made the World, hosted by Dr. Nigel Spivey. The first part was about how people always have a tendency to exaggerate the figure, to give it an aesthetic impact. There was this short segment where they got a bunch of athletes/bodybuilders to strut around in the street, just in their underwear. The entire class laughed, but according to the film, men in ancient Greece really did show off their body any chance they got. To be a walking Body Beautiful was to be close to the gods. I laughed too, but it was pretty cool.
It's also nice to know that modern people are not the first to worship super models. The ancient Greeks got very close to making perfect statues of people, replicating life. Then they got bored of making life-like figures and went on to create supermodel men. The two most beautiful men of antiquity in sculpture have really unrealistic proportions; I guess that was the ancient Greeks' version of Photoshop.
They screened a second part to the documentary after that, about how people came to create images.
It's fascinating to know that someone who has never seen a 2D representation of something cannot recognize it. The documtary makers showed a Turkish man who had never seen an image before in his life, a painted image of a horse. He was absolutely confounded. He had no idea what it was until someone said it was a horse. The best part was, it was a life-like painting, and he said it wasn't a horse because he couldn't walk around it and feel it. Personally I find it really hard to believe, but I guess that's how much we're exposed to images.
All those cave paintings are really trippy too, considering the trances that the original artists went in. They're suspecting that most of the paintings were done in hard-to-access caves because they were painted while in total sensory deprivation, in a trance-like state of spirituality. Is that trippy or is that trippy?
Also. I don't actually have much money left, but I passed by Kino today and-- Well. I've been reading One Thousand and One Nights for a couple of years now, and since there were only two books left to the ending, I had to know what happened.
It's one of the best love stories I've read in a while. No major spoilers, but from their separation to their reunion, it was tragic as much as it was beautiful. It wasn't campy or cheesy.
The translation for volumes 9 and 10 regarding the Three Kingdoms sub-story was horribly disappointing, but Jeon Jin-Seok as a writer is wonderfully sensitive. One day I'm gonna write like him and Ikuhara, the guy who did Utena. Yoshinaga Fumi too, because I'm a newly converted fan of hers.
Funny though, that two of the most emotionally gripping stories I can recall now are written by men when the modern consensus is that women are more sensitive. Just proves my point that it's the individual and not the gender.