It seems that whenever I tell the world not to expect any blog entries from me, that is when I blog the most. Whatever. I need a break.
The following links and videos are all courtesy of the Endicott Studio website—so good, so good!
First up, this Levis / Mermaid commercial. Wonderful, and even just a bit creepy. Again, can I say that as much as I love the ocean, I have some phobia of it? My big imagination. So much beneath those deep, vast, waters that no one ever sees. Videos like this only feed the sensation, even if it’s just fantasy.
A Japanese shampoo commercial, which is utterly gorgeous. I don’t know if the product is any good, but the marketing team deserves an award.
Next up, five hundred years of Female Portraits in Western Art—eerie, almost hypnotic, and fascinating because in five hundred years, women really haven’t changed all that much. Physically, anyway. Which, I’m sure, seems like an obvious statement, but think about it: When most people consider the past, the past which is always far removed (unless you are locked in some emotional stasis within a particular moment), it can be difficult to connect to those who have come before. The distance – physically, emotionally, intellectually—is too great. Those people do not live in our hearts and heads, because they do not seem like us. Immediacy does not exist.
But when I watch this video, it does. At least, for me. You see those faces—those moments, renditions of women caught in time—morphing into one another, and that odd fluidity, the similarities, are startling. Five hundred years of women. Too bad it isn’t one thousand years. Or two thousand, or three. But you can imagine. You can imagine how much we are still the same. Fundamentally, definitively, similar. Of course, you can get the same feeling from reading The Epic of Gilgamesh or the works of Plato, or Lao Tze. All of which, of course, are far older than the portraits below—and still easily interpreted in the modern context. Still an education. Which also says something about us. Again, that we are unchanged. The human heart has not evolved, not enough to count. And neither have the fundamental circumstances of our existence. Just the window dressing. Cars instead of horses. Guns instead of swords.
I actually think this is a good thing. It allows us to define humanity as a whole, across time. Past, present, future—all of us are together.
Here, too, are some fun links:
The animation of Adam Phillips at Bitey Castle. Start with Little Foot, and work your way down.
Through The Cobweb Forest – which Endicott calls “a wondrous journey through a Victorian-inspired tale, complete with haunted houses, ghosts, and forests of surreal beauty…”
ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive – a project of the International Animated Film Society
I’ll be watching Stargate: Atlantis tonight for my Ronon/Sheppard/McKay fix. Last night it was the Winchester boys. Night before, Ned the Necromancer. And, before that, Booth and Bones. Mondays I reserve for Peter Petrelli and a certain psychic cop and his rather elegant genius doctor friend from India. I love me some good television!
Okay, back to work.