iG.STUDiO: Ilya I. Gerasimenko

...generally, when the amount of money in my savings exceeds a certain number (and that's not a large number), mainly, because I expect various unpleasant events to take place. Usually, the car breaks down. Sometimes I hit something, but sometimes it breaks by itself just as well. This Tuesday I came to work, parked my Jeep, spent 9 hours at the office, went back to my Jeep and turned the ignition key. Nothing. The lights are on, though, radio works, too - I have power. So it's a fuse, or starter. I checked the fuses (found two which claimed responsibility for the starter operation), one was all right, the other one I couldn't pull out without pliers, so I decided, that it's all right, too. It looked nice from the outside. So I called AAA and asked for the tow to the dealership. The truck came in about half an hour and the driver checked my battery, confirmed that it's not it, and offered me to start my Jeep with a help of two seemingly undocumented individuals, who...

Excuse me... err... how do I vote Sanjaya out ? No, really... What's the number?

The first page of hits Google returns if you run a search on "casino royale film review" are all basically the same. Everybody agrees that it's the best Bond movie ever made and Daniel Craig is the best Bond ever. I beg to differ. I may not be a true 007 fan, I must admit, although I have seen all of them, and some more than once (I do not consider myself a true fan just because I don't remember what many of them were called, and who played Bond in which particular one). I do, however, have a very clear idea, why I like those movies. Because they provide the very best brainless entertainment the movie of this genre can provide. Well, they used to. They had an enchantingly evil villain, many bad guys of different calibers, tons of cool gadgets, beautiful girls, world-scale crisis and, of course, indestructible, classy and cool main character. There would be a half an hour of the "character introduction" proving time and again, that 007 is the coolest, classie...

The things I do, darn. I thought that getting a keyboard will ease the creative process, but, no. It just makes it more complicated. My new bossa, which doesn't even have a name yet, now contains a sequence of descending chords, which is going to make it a bitch to solo over. Why do I do this to myself? I don't know. Probably, for fun. This is my idea of fun, apparently. But it sounds good this way...

Here is the thing: when a conductor raises that skinny chopstick of his (or hers), you don't see him or her actually play an instrument. You are, however, assuming that the person, who is responsible for the operations of the whole orchestra, is capable of playing at least one instrument. And I bet you are right. More than that, actually, many of them are indeed multi-instrumentalists and often quite capable solo performers. Another thing - play of film directors. I bet they can act, most of them. And many of them are former or still performing actors, too. Not when it comes to directing art, oh, no. I suggest a simple test: take a book, any book, and put it on a table. Put an orange, apple, or an office toy basketball on top of it. Now give your art director a pencil and a sheet of paper and make him draw the book and the object on top of it in perspective. Forget the shading, just the wireframe (that's even better test). And even better one would be to draw from imagination, ...