122. Disruptions
How we live out-of-routine to feed the work. A week away from home with words and drawings. Vepertine, continuing to take shape. In closing, Sphinx.
I played Brooklyn resident for a week.
While I stayed at a friend’s Harlem-like brownstone on a tree-lined street reminiscent of my own, it was clear that I was in a very different place.
There was a lot more restaurant/cafe bustle. Everyone seemed to have a toddler or a dog. Mosquitos were unexpectedly abundant—and aggressive—at all hours. Manhattan felt far away, like a different country; I was disinclined to cross back over during my stay out.
Exceptionally, I found myself also avoiding trains, even within Brooklyn itself. Despite the brutal heat, I took 15,000 to 20,000 steps a day, commuting to work earlier in the day, exploring neighborhoods after. I went to farmer’s markets. I discovered cool businesses and talked to the people who worked there. I went to see a screening of Signe Baumane’s Birth, which a filmmaker friend was moderating the Q&A for at the Greenpoint Film Festival. I had breakfasts and dinners with suddenly-proximate friends. I got caught in a thunderstorm. I ate a lot of shellfish.
It felt luxurious to hoof it to both the Center for Fiction (where I wrote) and my desk at the shared studio in Crown Heights (where I animated), almost daily. Either would normally mean an hour commute to/from Harlem.
As important as disruptions are for both self and labor, I don’t tend to seek them out.
I really enjoyed this one.
In the Studio
Shaking up routines has been great for both writing and drawing.
At my shared desk in Crown Heights, it was a treat to leave work mid-action at the end of the day, then pick right back up the next morning. (I generally only come in once a week so tidy up after each work session).
The five or so of us who rent the space have idiosyncratic schedules, coming and going irregularly. Sometimes it’s a full house! Balancing focus, chill, and jokes in a tiny shared space is a delicate dance but everyone’s a pro; it just works.
I got a lot done!
Drawing:
Keys:
Pencil test with lead-up:
Cleaning up volume, breaking down further:
More keys:
Timing pass:
Chicken scratch:
It was a good week.
Provisions
Shrimp cocktail. I suddenly seem to be obsessed. Nearly every restaurant or bar has it on the menu, with different takes on “cocktail sauce.” It makes a great dinner! I loved savoring the dish early and alone while reading, especially before the 7 o’clock rush.
Severence, a novel by Ling Ma. I’m halfway through and it’s very different (in a good way) from what I thought it was going to be like.
Vadouvan oil. I regularly dream about a warm watercress and carrot salad that I once ate at a Nolita cafe. It was dressed in vadouvan chili oil, and I was inspired to recreate it using the recipe in this article. Turned out fantastic.
How to Make Hand-Drawn Animation | Straight-ahead and Keyframing. In this delightfully tight demystification presented by MOMA, local artist Kohana Wilson explains animation with eloquence and clarity. I usually animate pose-to-pose so it was cool to watch them build movement straight-ahead. It was also cool to see another artist go through the many steps of keyframing, roughing things out, erasing, and redrawing.
New work by Aaron Chung. My friends inspire me so much. (Also, I would kill for a basement studio like his.)
In closing, Sphinx
During the week, my friend’s Persian feline kept me company.
I’m not sure what I expected but even with the general reputation for indolence that cats have, I was surprised at the amount of time she spent in various states of repose. Was this normal? Cat owners responded to a similar inquiry on Reddit:
My cats have a set schedule with a lot of naps included:
6 am morning zoomies
8 am breakfast
8-10 am play/fight time
10 -3 pm nap time
3 pm zoomies
4 - 8 nap time
8 pm dinner
9 - 11 pm fast and furious playtime
11 pm - 6 am bed time
and
Eat, Sleep, Chaos, Repeat
The internet says that “cats sleep 12 to 16 hours a day, clean their fur, and look out windows. They spend a lot of time grooming and watching.”
True to form, I would often find Babu staring unblinkingly into the middle-distance. One night I found her in the shadowy basement, centered as if onstage before the curtains went up. Babu, I called, leaning over the railing. She looked up unhurriedly, haunches on the floor, front paws gathered neatly before her. What are you doing? I faltered a little. The silver plates of her eyes had swung in my direction, mirroring my phone’s flashlight back at me. She seemed then even more sphinx-like, even less knowable, than ever. We stayed that way for a minute. The spell broke when she turned her attention back to a darkness that remained closed to me but which I imagined must, for her, be filled with stories.
A cat rover came twice a day. In my contacts list, I had her listed as “D Cat Whisperer.” What do they think about, I asked her. They’re intelligent, she said, but they don’t have the complexity of thought humans do.
Sometimes she stares at nothing, I said.
The Cat Whisperer paused. She’s probably looking at something that we can’t see.
I laughed. Don’t say that!
She laughed too. It could be anything—a dust mote, for example.
I watched her as she worked. Babu’s purring was a low motor. She loves being brushed, DCW said. Right on cue, Babu stood, having had her fill, and walked out of the room.
"True to form, I would often find Babu staring unblinkingly into the middle-distance. One night I found her in the shadowy basement, centered as if onstage before the curtains went up. Babu, I called, leaning over the railing. She looked up unhurriedly, haunches on the floor, front paws gathered neatly before her. What are you doing? I faltered a little. The silver plates of her eyes had swung in my direction, mirroring my phone’s flashlight back at me."
///the silver plates of her eyes/// what a fantastic string of 6 words.