crafty mcgee

Chamomilla, Flora and Herb

Since I am filling in as administrator for the Month of Softies group over on Flickr while Amy is on a maternity break, and I called the theme, I thought I should participate. The theme is "Plant Life" and here are three of my little plant pals. In the individual portraits below (which you can see larger versions of by clicking), Chamomilla relaxes with a cuppa tea, Flora spends some time in the sun with her cousins, and Herb is hanging out with his buddies from the Italian cooking class.

      

I had originally planned for four, but they took longer than I expected and I wanted to spend more time on my "Midsummer Night's Dream" stuff. You may have noticed a theme of little armed and legged non-animal or person things lately. I think it all started with this impulse purchase from superbuzzy:

Which I bought with absolutely no idea of what I'll ever do with it because it reminded me of one of my all-time favorite videos, Blur's Coffee and TV. What do you think the dude with the square blue head is? My current theory is an ice cube to help with the fire. I've been getting inspired by so many odd things lately that I'm beginning to feel a bit overloaded. I can't work that fast! 

Miike

Next up in my Asian directors series is Miike (pronounced 'Me YEK ee'), named for the Japanese director Takeshi Miike . Known primarily for gore fests and prodigious output (he once directed five feature films in one year!) I've never actually seen any of his ultra-violent films. In the horror trilogy film Three...Extremes his contribution "Box" was the only one I could get through, and wasn't the least bit gory...Anyway, it's a couple of his quirkier films that put him on my tribute list. The Happiness of the Kataruris  is a zombie musical - the stand out song being "Don't Be Discouraged 'Cause You're Dead" (sung to the zombies, of course). It's got lots of humor, and even claymation! Another of my faves is a lovely little film called The Bird People in China, a fantasy about a group of Chinese descendants of Scottish ancestors high in the mountains. I would recommended these two highly to anyone who likes unusual movies. He's even made a good J-Horror (what I refer to as "ghost girl" movies) called One Missed Call. The other films of his I've seen like Gozu, Audition, and Andromeda can best be described as "David Lynch meets Quentin Tarantino".  I don't think Miike is a great filmmaker. Not surprisingly, most of his films seem unfinished. But he's prolific, and always interesting. I tried to make the little monster reflect all of that.