#housefall

[zinjanthropusboisei]

I actually managed to get back to this project in July and not only rescript and expand the missing final third but also start painting the pages I already had drawn (sitting on my desk since last November!) and I'm just. Really excited about it 😭

[zinjanthropusboisei]

Sketching a scene from my haunted house story that I return to every time spooky season comes around and I'm posting this stage because 1. I'm super pleased with it and 2. the next step is to totally obscure it with plants 🤦‍♀️

[zinjanthropusboisei]

An Account of Human Costs

For upstaters, the reservoirs providing water to New York City represent at best an imposition and at worst an imperial pillage of the lands

"In the summer of 1907, the New York Times found the doings rustically comical: a farmer told their reporter he wanted the city to pay for rabbits and woodcocks driven away by the commotion; someone else’s cow ate a stick of dynamite and died, for which he was given $100 by the contractors. But, of course, each condemnation revealed a small, specific narrative. The local jumble of small villages and smallholdings were home to other recurring types — small shopkeepers, boardinghouse keepers, millers and blacksmiths and quarrymen, ministers and schoolteachers. Their connection to the world beyond their own fence lines was, at best, the daily newspaper; few had telephones. The trip to Kingston, no more than ten miles away, was undertaken by most maybe a couple times a year. They spent very little money, consuming mostly things they cultivated themselves or bartered with a neighbor. But they weren’t isolated; dense family ties spread across the region, and neighbors had been the same for decades. They were bonded and pledged and sealed to the land."

First article in a series from Places Journal about NYC's water system and its reliance on reservoirs in upstate NY - featuring eminent domain, environmental injustice, the age-old upstate/downstate divide, and a bonus appearance by Aaron Burr.

[zinjanthropusboisei]

“Spillian,” 1880s, Catskills

[zinjanthropusboisei]

ahhhh mad that someone put so beautifully into words something I've been trying to write an entire short story about

[Image: Screenshot of two tweets from Aadita Chaudhury @ThylacineReport reading: I realize I've been drawn to those places we call "ruins", not because I see them as places of decay - but that those places, in their dance between concrete or stone architecture and vegetal life create new worlds under our noses. We mistake living assemblages as ghosts."]

[zinjanthropusboisei]

English Tudor “summer cottage,” 1911

Looking at AirBNB listings for mansions in the Catskills for “story inspiration” during a pandemic is my modern equivalent of Dorothy L. Sayers giving Peter Wimsey more first editions and fancy wines when she was hard up: 

“ Lord Peter's large income... I deliberately gave him... After all it cost me nothing and at the time I was particularly hard up and it gave me pleasure to spend his fortune for him. When I was dissatisfied with my single unfurnished room I took a luxurious flat for him in Piccadilly. When my cheap rug got a hole in it, I ordered him an Aubusson carpet. When I had no money to pay my bus fare I presented him with a Daimler double-six, upholstered in a style of sober magnificence, and when I felt dull I let him drive it. I can heartily recommend this inexpensive way of furnishing to all who are discontented with their incomes. It relieves the mind and does no harm to anybody.”

[zinjanthropusboisei]

What's housefall?

It's the title of a haunted house story I've been working on for awhile (first as a short story now as a comic thanks to a wonderful horror comic workshop last fall by @melgillman). It's based on the idea of a haunted house as a kind of whalefall - a rotting corpse transforming and decaying into fuel for a new weird habitat. I shared a couple pages a bit ago...I still have 3-4 pages to go but I'm thinking about starting to post the ones I have finished throughout October as motivation to finish by Halloween.

I also use the "housefall" tag as a grab bag for reference photos, inspiration, stuff that's thematically related.

[superandrop]

Ilustración 76 "Patio Cascada". #dibujoisometrico #isometrico #isometric #vector #vectordesign #gradients #housefall #artstagram #illustration #art #artistic #illustrationdigital #digitalart #creative #mipatio #lp #adobeillustrator #artedigital #falls #isometricdrawing (en Rosario, Santa Fe)