Coming to America (1988)
Director: John Landis
I hate how everything's called devices and apps now. Those are frail words with no weight and show no respect like machine and program do.
An important part of making art is just not doing anything. Just letting weird stuff percolate. Absorbing more or less useless information and then pinning it onto a cork board like a terrible alcoholic detective but with no thread, just things pinned to other things and most of the things are just two word phrases like ANCIENT CRAB and DIRT LABYRINTH and MEAT CASTLE that don’t mean anything. Just moving through the world, making nothing, eating bread, having prophetic dreams and letting insane thoughts build up and up and up until they can finally crystallize into something that exists outside of your body and you can enter a blissfully thought free phase of your life where you just get to glue small objects to other small objects for 18 hours straight
Unfortunately the other part of making art is actually making it
[image id: a four-page comic. it is titled “do not stand at my grave and weep” after the poem by mary elizabeth frye. the first page shows paleontologists digging up fossils at a dig. it reads, “do not stand at my grave and weep. i am not there. i do not sleep.” page two features several prehistoric creatures living in the wild. not featured but notable, each have modern descendants: horses, cetaceans, horsetail plants, and crocodilians. it reads, “i am a thousand winds that blow. i am the diamond glints on snow. i am the sunlight on ripened grain. i am the gentle autumn rain.” the third page shows archaeopteryx in the treetops and the skies, then a modern museum-goer reading the placard on a fossil display. it reads, “when you awaken in the morning’s hush, i am the swift uplifting rush, of quiet birds in circled flight. i am the soft stars that shine at night. do not stand at my grave and cry.” the fourth page shows a chicken in a field. it reads, “i am not there. i did not die” / end id]
a comic i made in about 15 hours for my school’s comic anthology. the theme was “evolution”
conscious-alignment