November 13'th

Not a very bright weekend. A bit homesick. I’ve been told by friends back home, that there will be these peaks every two month that you suddenly get awfully homesick, it sounded like a joke to me but seems to be true. It takes 2 days or so and then it’s over.

Anyway I tried hard to stick to work. I just did some readings for the MAA3 essay. It is going to be something about Animated Documentaries. I remember I had this question about this whole term when I first heard it. It seems to be like contradiction to what we usually conceive as documentary to be treated as animation.. I think I should take a look at Bill Nichols writings too. I Wish We Had More Time.

I was thinking about the Iranian mythology and old literature for the bibles. The one relating to fairy tales. They are full of wonderful characters. I woke up today by this vision about Zahhak: the king with two snakes on his shoulder. Visually he is really aspiring. But there are 3 versions of his story in different ancient texts. In some of them he is a cruel demon who wants to destroy the whole creations of god and in the other he is a king. The endings are also varied. One says he is still leaving in a cave in mountain Damavand and he will arise at the end of the world. He has been actually cursed to live this long.The other one says, they couldn’t kill him because he was full of filth and darkness and if he was to be killed his darkness would spread in the whole world so they just chained him in this cave. and since he is so frightened of Fraydun, they have made this scarecrow like thing of Fraydun beside the cave so that he won’t think of escaping.
The point is he sometimes appear quite cruel and evil and sometimes quite innocent and some how stupid. That’s what makes him a good character with both weak points and strong points.
At the same time it’s interesting to see how a certain story changes during periods of history. specially the one that gives Zahhak an Arabic root…

The taxonomy is still under spell. Not much progress. I feel I am doing nothing.

Life drawing sessions are good.

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