footpad, posts by tag: beauty - LiveJournal (original) (raw)

Three things	[Aug. 13th, 2013\|12:57 am]Footpad
[Tags\|beauty, delays, serendipity, train, wolves] [Current Mood	thoughtful]On the ride down from Germany, the sunset poured horizontally in impossibly rich deep-honey light across the plain. In the distance the Black Forest was cloud-shadowed in the folds of its brooding hills, and ahead of us a rainbow lit up against tobacco-coloured clouds. A sweet old Russian woman was sitting opposite me with her nose in a book. "Have you seen that?" I asked, pointing out of the window, and she cried, "oh!" and her face went creased and rosy with delight.Much as I may roll my eyes at akeela's habit of buying footwear on eBay, especially when he gets it in the wrong size for himself, I count myself thoroughly delighted with the Jika-tabi he acquired for five euros, and subsequently passed on to me. I find them marvellously comfortable and somehow wholesome to wear.Thirty years after it came out, I finally gritted my teeth and watched Never Cry Wolf, and found it an unanticipated delight. The novel was fiction branded as non-fiction (and instituted many myths whose tenacity still makes wolf researchers gnash their teeth), and the film version was by Disney, so I expected a bucket of nauseating schmalz. Instead I found a rather lovely meditation on wildness and wolves, sententious in parts and inaccurate almost everywhere, but still sweet to watch, not least because wolves.÷And now the train bears me towards Zurich, delayed by well over an hour due to idiots. "Someone on the tracks," they said, but, to my faint and sanguinary regret, I got the impression that it was the kind of track-wandering idiot who gets chased away rather than rinsed away. Oh well. Better luck in the next turn of the Darwin lottery.
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[Aug. 13th, 2013|12:57 am]Footpad

[Tags**|beauty, delays, serendipity, train, wolves] [Current Mood**

thoughtful]On the ride down from Germany, the sunset poured horizontally in impossibly rich deep-honey light across the plain. In the distance the Black Forest was cloud-shadowed in the folds of its brooding hills, and ahead of us a rainbow lit up against tobacco-coloured clouds. A sweet old Russian woman was sitting opposite me with her nose in a book. "Have you seen that?" I asked, pointing out of the window, and she cried, "oh!" and her face went creased and rosy with delight.Much as I may roll my eyes at

akeela's habit of buying footwear on eBay, especially when he gets it in the wrong size for himself, I count myself thoroughly delighted with the Jika-tabi he acquired for five euros, and subsequently passed on to me. I find them marvellously comfortable and somehow wholesome to wear.Thirty years after it came out, I finally gritted my teeth and watched Never Cry Wolf, and found it an unanticipated delight. The novel was fiction branded as non-fiction (and instituted many myths whose tenacity still makes wolf researchers gnash their teeth), and the film version was by Disney, so I expected a bucket of nauseating schmalz. Instead I found a rather lovely meditation on wildness and wolves, sententious in parts and inaccurate almost everywhere, but still sweet to watch, not least because wolves.÷And now the train bears me towards Zurich, delayed by well over an hour due to idiots. "Someone on the tracks," they said, but, to my faint and sanguinary regret, I got the impression that it was the kind of track-wandering idiot who gets chased away rather than rinsed away. Oh well. Better luck in the next turn of the Darwin lottery.

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Dear Mischa.	[Jun. 28th, 2013\|12:23 am]Footpad
[Tags\|beauty, dear mischa, love, mischa] [Current Mood	wistful]Dear Mischa,You know that I love you.Usually when I write that, it's followed by an ghostly evanescent but, after which I go on to describe some strange facet of your behaviour and then digress into a philosophical rumination on your malamute-nature and its ambiguous, tenuous relationship with consensus reality.Tonight I dispense with that. All I have to say to you tonight is that I love you.On Sunday I looked at you as you were snoozing on the cool stones of the terrace. You were lying on your side with your eyes closed and your tail laid down behind you. Your tail's bushy but rather short, you know; did I even mention that before? It's the shedding season: you were in need of a grooming and your coat was looking a bit tufty and unkempt. Since you were lying down, the tuck-up of your belly wasn't particularly in evidence and you had a cylindrical look to you, like the body profile of a slightly overweight Labrador.I tend to think of you, and favour the pictures that portray you, as a lean and lithe and elegant beast, full of majesty and grace, a creature above and removed from the grubby yapping masses of the common Unterhundsch. But in that moment I looked at you and thought, "Dozy, rotund, scruffy... Why, you look just like an ordinary dog. And... I still find you beautiful, and I still love you."I love you for a hundred reasons. Among them, I love you because you're beautiful. But if you weren't beautiful, I'd still love you exactly as much as I do, and that's because I'll always find you beautiful anyway.Love,me.
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Dear Mischa.

[Jun. 28th, 2013|12:23 am]Footpad

[Tags**|beauty, dear mischa, love, mischa] [Current Mood**

wistful]Dear Mischa,You know that I love you.Usually when I write that, it's followed by an ghostly evanescent but, after which I go on to describe some strange facet of your behaviour and then digress into a philosophical rumination on your malamute-nature and its ambiguous, tenuous relationship with consensus reality.Tonight I dispense with that. All I have to say to you tonight is that I love you.On Sunday I looked at you as you were snoozing on the cool stones of the terrace. You were lying on your side with your eyes closed and your tail laid down behind you. Your tail's bushy but rather short, you know; did I even mention that before? It's the shedding season: you were in need of a grooming and your coat was looking a bit tufty and unkempt. Since you were lying down, the tuck-up of your belly wasn't particularly in evidence and you had a cylindrical look to you, like the body profile of a slightly overweight Labrador.I tend to think of you, and favour the pictures that portray you, as a lean and lithe and elegant beast, full of majesty and grace, a creature above and removed from the grubby yapping masses of the common Unterhundsch. But in that moment I looked at you and thought, "Dozy, rotund, scruffy... Why, you look just like an ordinary dog. And... I still find you beautiful, and I still love you."I love you for a hundred reasons. Among them, I love you because you're beautiful. But if you weren't beautiful, I'd still love you exactly as much as I do, and that's because I'll always find you beautiful anyway.Love,me.

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Awaiting the Storm	[Jun. 24th, 2009\|07:01 am]Footpad
[Tags\|ailah, art, beauty, mischa, wolves]There was a time when I resisted having 'Footpad' drawn—partly because I liked my wolf side to be a creature of qualities rather than specifics, and partly just out of stubbornness. But one day I saw that that talented sweetheart Vantid was offering badge commissions, and in a sudden irrational urge I thought, want!. The beautiful results remain the definitive picture of Footpad—such a satisfying evocation of the wolf, that I feel no need to seek any other piece.Similarly, I've been resistant to the idea of asking people to draw Mischa. It's like... well, how is any picture going to compare to his hairy, affectionate, obstinate self? But then one day I just happened to notice that a rare and precious resource was up for offer: Ailah was offering a single solitary commission slot. And a sudden irrational part of me cried out, _"Want!"_I was lucky: I squeaked in by a nose ahead of the competition, and I got the slot. I described what I wanted; Tess came up with something completely different and much better; and then she showed me an early in-progress sketch that I swear almost any other artist would have been proud of as a finished work. And then she really got to work. Admire the finished work and see for yourself.
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Awaiting the Storm

[Jun. 24th, 2009|07:01 am]Footpad

[**Tags**|ailah, art, beauty, mischa, wolves]There was a time when I resisted having 'Footpad' drawn—partly because I liked my wolf side to be a creature of qualities rather than specifics, and partly just out of stubbornness. But one day I saw that that talented sweetheart Vantid was offering badge commissions, and in a sudden irrational urge I thought, want!. The beautiful results remain the definitive picture of Footpad—such a satisfying evocation of the wolf, that I feel no need to seek any other piece.Similarly, I've been resistant to the idea of asking people to draw

Mischa. It's like... well, how is any picture going to compare to his hairy, affectionate, obstinate self? But then one day I just happened to notice that a rare and precious resource was up for offer: Ailah was offering a single solitary commission slot. And a sudden irrational part of me cried out, _"Want!"_I was lucky: I squeaked in by a nose ahead of the competition, and I got the slot. I described what I wanted; Tess came up with something completely different and much better; and then she showed me an early in-progress sketch that I swear almost any other artist would have been proud of as a finished work. And then she really got to work. Admire the finished work and see for yourself.

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Intimations of muttality	[Aug. 6th, 2008\|07:57 pm]Footpad
[Tags\|beauty, death, joy, life, sadness] [Current Mood	exquisitely bittersweet]Taking a break from the work of the day, listening to fin de décennie rock, Far away, away,Fading distant lightsLeaving us all behind,Lost in a changing worldAnd you know,That these are the days of our lives;Remember. lying on my floor, stroking Mischa. He rolls onto his back, stretching out luxuriously and pressing his hind paw up against my chest while I run my fingers over and through his thick soft fur, shoulder to flank, shoulder to flank, shoulder to flank. He's so sweet and I do love him. Prompted by the music, I realise that he'll die one day, probably (hopefully) before I do, and for a while there will be nothing for me but sadness.Sorrow will be my all, but on the scope of things my sorrow will be even less significant than the days of my life. We are all pathetically finite. Like mayflies in pine-resin as it hardens to amber, we are constrained to our lifespans on the face of this minute planet, each of us one creature among billions, on one planet among trillions, while the cosmos extends as though to eternity across the unfathomable deeps of space and time. This is the human condition: the ephemeral creature, forever yearning towards the Infinite. Don't you just wish, once in a while, that you could live forever, if only to see the great march of the galaxies, to watch the stars themselves grow old?Oh well! Not gonna happen. You can dream of the infinite but, like Mischa himself, sometimes you just have to live in the moment. Right here, right now, I love my dog.
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Intimations of muttality

[Aug. 6th, 2008|07:57 pm]Footpad

[Tags**|beauty, death, joy, life, sadness] [Current Mood**

exquisitely bittersweet]Taking a break from the work of the day, listening to fin de décennie rock, Far away, away,Fading distant lightsLeaving us all behind,Lost in a changing worldAnd you know,That these are the days of our lives;Remember. lying on my floor, stroking Mischa. He rolls onto his back, stretching out luxuriously and pressing his hind paw up against my chest while I run my fingers over and through his thick soft fur, shoulder to flank, shoulder to flank, shoulder to flank. He's so sweet and I do love him. Prompted by the music, I realise that he'll die one day, probably (hopefully) before I do, and for a while there will be nothing for me but sadness.Sorrow will be my all, but on the scope of things my sorrow will be even less significant than the days of my life. We are all pathetically finite. Like mayflies in pine-resin as it hardens to amber, we are constrained to our lifespans on the face of this minute planet, each of us one creature among billions, on one planet among trillions, while the cosmos extends as though to eternity across the unfathomable deeps of space and time. This is the human condition: the ephemeral creature, forever yearning towards the Infinite. Don't you just wish, once in a while, that you could live forever, if only to see the great march of the galaxies, to watch the stars themselves grow old?Oh well! Not gonna happen. You can dream of the infinite but, like Mischa himself, sometimes you just have to live in the moment. Right here, right now, I love my dog.

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