This website captures exactly how I feel sometimes — it’s uncanny.
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Welcome to the personal space of Bart Kowalski.
I'm a Visual & Graphic Designer and Art Director from Melbourne, Australia, currently based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I spend my time in photography, blogging, and in other creative projects. Wordizzle.
FYNCT
March 27th, 2012
Yellow Submarine
March 25th, 2012
Last Friday night, Kelly and I attended the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra‘s tribute to The Beatles.
I thought it was a good performance, but without singing (the orchestra played the vocal lines) the conductor elicited crowd participation on the form of clapping (ok), whistling (borderline), and singing (I didn’t pay to hear people who think they can sing sing). The definite standout for me was Elenor Rigby, simply because it’s one of my favourite Beatles songs, but also because the song itself is all orchestral so it translated perfectly.
The event information called for attendees to dress up for the Beatles era. Living in KL with the group of friends we have, we’re no strangers to dressing up. For this occasion Kelly wore a newly-acquired flower-power-esque dress and boots. I don’t own anything vaguely resembling the 60s/70s, so I wore all black (surprise) but accented my attire with four of my Beatles Yellow Submarine figurines. Yes, I brought them with us to Malaysia! In truth, I’d forgotten I had them until about a year ago when Kelly made the discovery while looking for something else in our unpacked boxes.
I’m a big fan of the Yellow Submarine animated film, more so than The Beatles themselves. My cousins and I watched this in video countless times when we were young. It’s equally colourful, imaginative, and bizarre, and completely wonderful. (I’m sure the directors/animators were munching a steady diet of hallucinogens at the time of production). I don’t doubt this film had some part in steering me towards a graphic design career. If you haven’t seen the film it can be viewed in full on YouTube.
When I grew older, and started earning some money, I found that McFarlane toys had released two series’ of Yellow Submarine figures. Naturally I had to have them. The full set wasn’t hard to put together from eBay, and luckily it didn’t cost an arm or a leg. While I had the figures unpacked and out in the open, I decided to shoot them for your viewing pleasure. Enjoy!
My set of figures came with a bonus wife. Did you spot her?
Update
In an uncanny coincidence, six days ago the official Beatles website announced a DVD/Blu-Ray version of The Yellow Submarine, in May 2012!
Currently out of print, the film has been restored in 4K digital resolution for the first time by Paul Rutan Jr. and his team of specialists at Triage Motion Picture Services and Eque Inc. Due to the delicate nature of the hand-drawn original artwork, no automated software was used in the digital clean-up of the film’s restored photochemical elements. This was all done by hand, frame by frame.
I don’t have a Blu-Ray player at all, so I will purchase the DVD and download the Blu-Ray rip for playback at home :)
That’s no moon
March 23rd, 2012
From as far back as I can remember, I’d occasionally stare at the moon. (I’d stare at the sun really occasionally, and see how long I could before I had to turn away. but I could stare long enough that the sun turned bluey-green, the rest of ther sky turned dark blue, and a white crescent shape spanning approximately one-third of the circumference of the sun would spin along the outside of the sun, wildly and randomly). But back to the moon…
I often still look at the moon, but once in a while I stare at it. And what I see is not “the moon”, but a giant spherical rock floating in the sky, not too far from earth. This might seem normal to you because we all know the moon to be a giant spherical rock floating in the sky not too far from earth (well, maybe not McGauz…), but once in a while I see it for exactly what it is.
And it’s pretty amazing.
I think you should try it. When you’re next in the moon’s presence, look at it and picture it being a heavy floating rock — a physical object — rather than “the moon”. Imagine this physical object being “just over yonder”, almost within an airplane flight’s distance away, say, 8hrs, just to give your perception some sort semi-realistic base.
When I do this, it opens my mind to the realities of the universe because at that time, I see the moon for what it is, and I see “our world” for what it is, a planet. A physical object. Floating in space.
We are at the same time insignificant, and extremely lucky to exist.
Epilogue I
There have been two recent films that are somewhat related to the above; Another Earth, and Melancholia. Both great films.
Epilogue II
If you tried to see what I see as described above but couldn’t “get it”, this video might help you understand what I mean. What typical landscape photographs might look like if the earth had the ring system of Saturn.
Ping pong
March 22nd, 2012
Yesterday marked Kelly and my first visit to the recently opened Hampshire Residence games room. The Games room looks more like a carpeted heroin shooting gallery than a games room; it’s rather large, oddly shaped with many mini areas or voids, has one ping pong table, two card tables, two unhung dart boards, no darts, and some left over ice-cream wrappers, but hey, we’ll take what we can get. It’s free!
Kelly and I played some ping pong1 over Christmas in Australia at my brother-in-law’s house. It was the first time I’d played in my adult life (that I can remember) and I had an absolute blast!
The reason we made our way down to the games room was to test out the new paddles I’d purchased for us:
Along with the professional paddles2 which set us back a whopping $15 each (!!!), I thought we could do with some covers to protect our new investments. I was with Mrs J at the time and she thought these covers looked particularly “porno”. I agreed, so bought Kelly a red one, and myself a black. Chur.
The reason we purchased some ping pong paddles was because we had challenged T-Jizzlé and Mrs J to a doubles duel of pong. In fact, it was to be the inaugural Hampshire Residences Tower A (A-Team) vs Tower B (B-Team) Mixed Doubles Open.
We knew B-team had played pong before, but not enough to warant the following score:
0–5
That’s 0 to 5 sets of first-to-21-points, not 0 to 5 points.
A-Team needs some practice.
Tennis lines-people are not to blame
March 15th, 2012
While watching the BNP Paribas Open in the US on TV (the third pro tournament I’ve watched either in person or on telly), I’m struck by the coverage of the lines-people — the men and women who watch the lines eagerly and call it out when it is.
In recent years, the larger tournaments use the electronic Hawk-Eye system, where a player can challenge a call from a lines-person if they believe a wrong call was made. I’m generally in favour of Hawk-Eye because the ball moves so quickly nowadays that wrong calls are going to happen. A blink at the wrong moment is enough to skew one’s view of the ball’s bounce.
What I’m not in favour of is the camera operator’s focusing on the lines-man or -woman during the few seconds tense seconds of animation which shows whether the ball was actually in or out. I feel this selective camera focusing is unfair to the lines-person. There’s no need to embarrass them by placing them on the big screen, especially when the ball clips the outside of the line by a millimetre or less. In important points, I feel even worse for them. I haven’t heard boos from the crowd yet, but I can sense them around the corner.
(Image by James Mellor)
The lines-people are providing an essential service of the modern tennis tournament. They work together with the rest of the volunteers, ball bays/girls, umpires etc. They should be anonymous. The lines-people aren’t to blame, the system is. They do a hell of a job to keep focused for so long on the fleeting-est of moments, on a line a couple inches wide. I try to watch the ball when I play; sometimes I’m a mere few feet away from where the ball bounces and I still can’t call it, and my opponents and I are hardly at a level resembling professional.
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As an aside, the BNP Paribas Open is the only tournament I’ve watched where they have audio advertising — and presumably video ads via the big screens — in between end changes. The Malaysian Open just had music, and I think the Aussie Open did as well (although I’m not 100% sure about the Aussie Open).
The BNP Paribas Open is in the US. Is this a coincidence? It’s a smaller tournament than the Aussie Open, so they might need the advertising revenue, but it’s one of the larger smaller tournaments. The Malaysian Open certainly ain’t big…
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