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| Self portrait in bathroom mirror before getting ready for bed. I look psycho on this, or as an artist I guess I should say, "tortured." Really though I look this way in most of my self portraits because I'm glancing up from my drawing pad at the mirror. The direct overhead lighting isn't helping things either. Still I think the drawing goes well with the video below. [Image: head and neck of a white woman with head tilted down looking directly up at viewer. Contour line drawing in blue and orange marker, somewhat unrealistic.] |
Video: black & white close-up film of a cat, an obvious spoof of French 1960s existentialist cinema. A man narrates the cat's "thoughts" in French while subtitles appear. Melancholy piano music plays.
[cat sits in window]
Well... I'm still here.
I have grown my fluffy coat for the winter... like a Tsar's robe it requires... [owner snips fur around the cat's butt] a delicate maintenance.
I'm free to go. [Looks out window] Yet I remain.
The fifteen hours a day I sleep have no effect... I wake to the same tedium.
Immortalized on the wall [looks at vintage poster of the Chat Noir]. Forgotten on the floor.
When my caretakers step here [sits on a bathroom scale] they feel irate... yet I feel nothing.
They leave tasty snacks just out of reach. [Eyes two birds and a mouse in a cage]. They taunt me mercilessly. I alone feel this torment.
[Another cat, white, wiggles.] The white idiot writhes on his chair, begging for cheeseburgers.
I'm surrounded by morons.
[looks at "beware of cat" sign.] "Pay attention to the cat." Not that they ever do.
Still I have learned the few things.
The whipped cream in the bathroom is not whipped cream. [Tastes and rejects a blob of shaving cream] We cannot escape ourselves. [Gazes at self in mirror] And sometimes the cat door... [runs for the cat door but bonks into it when it fails to open] is closed.
un film de Will Braden.
