If I spend this much on supplies, I must be an artist

(This was actually Wednesday’s entry, but I held off posting it to watch The West Wing, and by 10 PM LiveJournal’s servers were stone cold dead.)

Dropped much more money than I’d expected on art stuff. Went to Pearl, got three ebony and three waterproof pencils, no prob, those are cheap, also a brass wedge-shaped sharpener, which I really didn’t need, but also wasn’t too much. And a big, cheap, spiral-bound sketchpad for roughs and brainstorming. Then I went to the Excellent Dumpling House, had my usual — curry beef stew on rice, scallion pancakes, a Coke — and five hours later I’m still full. That’s my one meal for the day. Ooof!

On a whim I stopped off at Soho Art Supply on Grand Street, and spent lots. They had Faber-Castell Goldfaber oil pastel sets pretty cheap — from $5 for a box of twelve to $11 for a box of thirty-six! This may not be as great a price as I thought; I’ve been unable to find a list price, and one British online store lists the set as costing £11.10, which is almost US$18. I was expecting something more in the vicinity of $30. I also got some small canvases pretty cheap (good quality, too; the kind with the canvas stretched all the way around and stapled on the back instead of the sides) and pre-gessoed boards. I may try fiddling with the oil pastels and some turpentine (well, Turpenoid, which I’ve got a small bottle of for some unknown reason). Anyone know how long that sort of thing takes to dry? I’m a water-media guy, so these oil-based media are a bit of a mystery to me.

Then up to Union Square, where I got a large-sized Moleskine sketchbook at A.I. Friedman; they only had the small ones at Pearl. I had forty minutes to kill before NYRSF, so I stopped in at Java & Jazz on Broadway for some coffee (turns out macciato is pretty strong stuff, and served in those little cups like espresso) and sketching. I sketched the Japanese woman above, and then a guy at long range, and was in the middle of sketching another woman when she noticed me, and we got into a conversation about Dutch influence on New York, and her travels to Russia and points east, and freelancing, and other stuff.

On the train home I saw a poster for the USA Network’s upcoming movie Rudy, about NYC’s ex-mayor Giuliani, starring James Woods and filmed in Montreal. The poster is dominated by an image of the old NYC skyline, from the south — two years ago it would have been totally unworthy of notice, practically a piece of clip-art, but now it stands out as a symbol, not just of a place, but of a place and time. A metric buttload of semiotic payoff for very little effort.

Ah, that's why the downtime

Apparently LiveJournal has been (and is still being) the subject of a DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack. See the lj_maintenance entry for 20 Feb for details. Note that the earleir of those two entries was written not too long after midnight, so “tonight” probably refers to Wednesday night. 5:30 PM PST is 8:30 PM EST, and I tried to get on around 10 PM and couldn’t.

The SQL Slammer worm that caused so much trouble a few weeks ago also worked via a DDoS attack. I don’t know if it’s the same kind of DDoS.

(Yeah, I know, I oughta be asleep, but an insight popped into my head for the review of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom that I’m writing, and I wanted to get it down.)