(no subject)

Youth and middle age are squabbling over me lately. I liken them to the two visual layers of Bugs Bunny cartoons, the painted background and moving objects. You'd always know which things were going to be picked up or otherwise involved in the action because they had a black outline and solid color; they lived in the same world as the characters, bright and simple shapes though infinitely malleable. You could feel how their cellophane sheets must have shone from neighboring angles. The backgrounds, in comparison, were quite detailed, with colors fading into one another to indicate dimensionality. They were lavish and complex but utterly static and slightly washed-out, an ancient world where everything was clear and still and hopeless.

Much more offensive than the Mary Poppins-level gnosticizings of "What Dreams May Come" was its attempt at animating paintings. It was heartbreaking, really: there was just enough success, here and there among the scrambled-eggs-with-mango-jelly visuals, to wake your yearning. And then maim it by showing computer cartoons may take us little further. To know the world in its complexity without freezing it or being frozen oneself, the old dream of art, is still a discipline only certain books teach, and those imperfectly, uncertainly.

Also I have the flu.