Turukhtan

Monday, June 27, 2005

A character I hope I'll be drawing a comic about some day ...

Albita (or whatever I'll eventually end up calling her) was born in a brothel somewhere in the Caribbean, where everyone except her mother was convinced that she was the devil itself. She was nine years old when her mother was killed by a customer, and some people in the house wanted to finally kill Albita, too, while the owner wanted her to take her mother's place. She ran away, and ended up in a circus, first appearing as a 'freak', then as an assistant to various artists, and finally as a sword swallower in her very own show.

Unfortunately, most people with albinism don't have red eyes, so I can't make her have that. It's already bad enough that her hair and complexion are so white, because most black people with albinism have a rather 'golden' complexion, and their hair is more yellow or light brown than white. Oh well. But maybe her father was white?

Cool people with albinism:

http://www.rickguidotti.com/main.htm

Posted at 2:07 am by turukhtan
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Sunday, June 26, 2005

My dreams are so nice sometimes.

Yesterday morning I had an interesting dream, where I was a young police woman working in the Russian countryside. We got a call from a woman who said her husband had gone missing, and she was suspecting that a neighbour they had been quarrelling with had shot him in the forest. We went out to investigate, and found that the woman lived in a small house in the middle of nowhere with thick woods around her house (which kind of looked like the house where my grandma used to live, only a bit bigger).

It was a quite long and complex dream that made surprisingly much sense. Unfortunately, I’ve forgotten a lot of the stuff in the middle, but it all came down to that we started to suspect that the woman was not telling the whole truth, because there were little things that didn’t quite make sense when you thought about it more closely.

For instance, we noticed she had been making repairs in the house that she couldn’t give any sensible explanation to. One of them was that she had laid out a new floor in one part of a room.

We broke up the new floor in that room, and it turned out that there was some kind of sealed compartment underneath it. As we broke up more of the floor, the first thing that appeared was a human leg, that looked as if it had been gnawed on quite a lot.

Soon, something else appeared. A teenage boy, looking slightly mad and squinting in the light, with blood smeared around his mouth. As he scrambled up on his elbows, he giggled: “If I hadn’t eaten him, I’d have been dead by now!”

As it turned out, the leg belonged to the woman’s late husband. The teenager was a lifter she had picked up once and offered to come have dinner at her place and spend the night. She had then knocked him unconscious and dragged him into the space under the floor, thinking he was dead.

I woke up before we got to know more about the woman’s motives, and why she had called the police when she herself was guilty. But I’m suspecting that she might have split personalities, of which one was murdering people, while the other didn’t know anything about it, and had somehow projected the subconscious sense of the murder on the neighbours ...

Posted at 9:42 pm by turukhtan
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On popular demand ...

A picture of the dress I sewed from the same fabric as Mitsu's collar. I think it's a bit too 'girly' for me, but it's okay for swimming trips like this one.

In the picture (taken by Mihai, as usual) I'm trying to figure out how to get to some hills with small lakes that used to be mines, which are supposed to be somewhere on the Skåne steppe, to the East of Lund. Behind me is Iryna from Ukraine.

Posted at 9:11 pm by turukhtan
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Saturday, June 25, 2005

Taprats!

I ran into this wonderful site, where someone has created a Java applet that generates 'islamic patterns' for you. You can choose from a number of basic patterns and modify them after your fashion.
http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/~csk/washington/taprats/

Posted at 1:42 pm by turukhtan
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Monday, June 20, 2005

Home

Speaking of architectoral gems threatened by demolition, the house we are currently residing in is one of the quite few remaining old houses on our street.

It's a truly amazing building, with many interesting little details, such as these iron ornaments over the entrance to the inner yard.

We live on the top floor, in the nicest part of the house.

Unfortunately, we can't access the attic, to which the small round window belongs, except by removing the roof of our shower cabin and climbing up to the attic from there (it's actually open - in the shower cabin's place, there probably used to be a ladder).

If the owner would have the money and the interest, this house could be made into one of the coolest and flashiest apartment buildings in Lund. Luckily he/she doesn't, so we can live here now, and enjoy the view to some of the town's greatest landmarks.

(All pictures were made by the great photographer Mihai Tomescu.)

Posted at 9:38 pm by turukhtan
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Link of the day: Decaying Detroit

Thanks to "In My Skin", the comic book biography of Eminem, (which completely made me reassess my conception of its subject), a slight fascination I've been nurturing at times for the city Detroit has reawakened in me.

It only got worse since I came across the website "Detroit Pix" by Greg Kacir.

While 'Stalinist' skyscrapers in Moscow are being kept in pretty good shape, and new buildings in much the same style are being erected, many of the buildings that once inspired them are rotting away and being demolished in Detroit.

Among them are the abandoned buildings of Hotel Eddystone and Michigan Central Station:

Also fascinating is the Motown building, where the record company used to reside until they moved to Los Angeles in 1972.

But the most interesting part of the website so far might be the pages dedicated to the "E-Zone" (And if you're wondering what the hell this "E-Zone" is, try the official website).

Even more Decaying Detroit can be found at David Kohrman's website "Forgotten Detroit".

*Edit August 1st:*
Yet more Decaying Detroit is depicted in the film 8 Mile, featuring Eminem as a young working-class aspiring hiphopper (partly based on his own life, I guess). One of the most bizarre places is the Michigan Theater, which has been remade into a parking house (!).

The main reason for Detroit's decay might be that its population, not counting the suburbs north of 8 Mile road, has diminished from about 2 million in the 60's to less than 1 million today (85% of which, according to DetroitYES, are Afroamerican).

Posted at 8:11 pm by turukhtan
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Monday, June 13, 2005

Link of the day: Suvorov Island

Ever since I spotted them on the map, I've always been wondering about the islands Suvorov and Vostok in the Pacific Ocean - the former belonging to the Cook Islands, the latter one of the Line Islands and claimed by Kiribati. Apparently they were both 'discovered' by Russians in the 19th century, who named them after their respective ships.

While Vostok doesn't seem to be very hospitable, being a single island covered with extremely dense forest, Suvorov is actually a small atoll enclosing a lagoon, and was by Robert Louis Stevenson's wife described as "the most romantic island in the world".

Apparently she was not the only person to maintain this view. A man by the name of Tom Neale lived in solitude on Suvarov Island between October 1952 and June 1954. He later returned in April 1960 and stayed until December 1963.

Extracts from the book where he recorded his experiences can be read on Jane Resture's Oceania website. It's a quite pleasant book, save for the negative feelings he nurtures against the island's wild pigs, who apparently are his main rivals in the fight for survival ...

Posted at 6:27 pm by turukhtan
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Saturday, June 11, 2005

Finally, breaking the tradition!