23 May 2012

All or Nothing

The road to adulthood is dotted with false starts, not least of which may be a quiet night in a friend's dorm half an hour away from home.
Moments before hopping into Esmira's car, I sat in a Taco Bell watching Jay play 五子其 against my dad, waves of melancholy and fear churning relentlessly in my gut. I've flown across the Pacific Ocean and lived for a month without my family and taken an overnight train to San Francisco with little notice to my parents, but in the hours leading up to these escapades I turn into a little girl on the first day of school who wants nothing more than her blankie and for her mom to reemerge from the door.

I tried to peer a few months into the future, to the as yet imaginary night when I would force myself through the motions of sleep, my room collected into a couple of fraying trunks at the foot of my bed, as I waited for the alarm to go off that would set the frenzy of relocation in motion. I sent my terror into the future, trying it on.

This weekend wasn't an escape. My worries nagged me as I painted my face in a department store, danced in the waning sunlight beneath a ferris wheel, took the recommendations of a stranger while unaware of his attempts at charm, eyed pregnant prom queens having dinner in a food court with their friends in pink mullet dresses, watched four pixelated men stumble about with tinny voices, slathered colors onto my nails, and made pancakes for the first time in a kitchen overflowing with pots. 

Here I am wishing for a safety net or a peek down the two paths before me. But when has this been anything but go big or go home, all or nothing?

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17 May 2012

Essentials of Cinema

Tomorrow I'll take my final exam and skip off into summer and you'll never catch me for as long as I live. In anticipation of my freedom I've borrowed a few older films I've been meaning to see. Some call them classics, others vintage (although I find this word overused and often wrongly so), and some of my old classmates would call them, "What do you mean you haven't watched that? And you call yourself a filmmaker."
Well here I am, with four movies clutched in my hand. My local library has a t-rex skeleton, a ceiling that changes to imitate the real sky (à la Hogwarts), and an aquarium with sharks (also could be used to describe the movie "Fish Tank" with Michael Fassbender). Surely it has a great collection of films as well. Why, yes it does.
Next week, I'll settle down with cookies, tea (we have sugar in the house agaaiiaiiiaian), and my filmmaking goggles to begin my required viewings. Before that I'm running away with my friends to a shopping center. It has a ferris wheel, you guys. Fearless adventurers, we are. Yoda, I now am.

Photos of Hitchcock, Godard, Scorsese, and Chaplin, credit unknown. If you know, please let me know and I'll update this post. :)

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13 May 2012

Doodle Doodle Doodle

Midnight scribblings in my notebook from last month. Sometimes, words are too much and I escape instead to the land of images. Messy and uninspired images, but wonderfully unfiltered. And each time that I flip through my notebook to get to the freshest page, my fingers always catch on this one. And it makes me smile. 

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12 May 2012

Fueled by Hunger and a Dash of Insomnia

Sometimes when I crawl out of bed and scribble furiously in my notebook instead, I'm playing out some sort of fantasy identity that has fossilized for over a decade in my mind. That of the artist consumed by his art, overwhelmed by his sheer need to create, by god! 

Tonight, I sat up because despite what I tell myself, I'm worried about the coming year. I'm worried about what comes after that. About the direction I'm taking myself. 

So I jotted down what I wanted to achieve in the course of my lifetime. What I wanted to see when I flipped those LIFE tokens over to tally up my points. And then I added below them the foreseeable steps I could take. 

This past year in college has changed me, I have to admit. Subtly, it has opened my eyes to certain realities and given me the acknowledgement I needed to move forward with quite a bit more fuel in my tank. Just now, with my stomach grumbling because it's nearly dawn, I realized I had been sidetracked for the longest time by things that were aesthetically pleasing and easy to stomach. It's time to weed them out, beautiful as they may be. Time to go back to the challenges I love, because when you love something, even the challenges are appealing. Also time to stop playing by someone else's rules.

Tonight, I needed to trap my thoughts on paper so that they could be properly tamed.

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07 May 2012

Scandal

Hell week of sorts begins. Naturally, I kick myself repeatedly for letting papers build up to this point, but last night's three paper marathon wasn't too bad. I watched all the episodes of Scandal, which managed to be simultaneously highly addicting and obnoxious.

Scandal is about a team in Washington D.C. that fixes the scandals of high-profile figures. From affairs to homicide cases, Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington) leads a group of lawyers in covering up for their clients. Oh, and Olivia is also caught up romantically with the President. But that itself would be, you know.
Olivia Pope - in terms of her place in the cultural fabric of our times? Wonderful. She's one of the few female characters who are - you thought I was going to say strong - fully developed and nuanced. Yes, she's independent and assertive (we'll just ignore that awkward scene in the Oval Office in episode one, during which I kept screaming in my head, "Push him away! Push him awayyyyyy!!!!), but she's also flawed in ways both major and miniscule. I can imagine what a meaty role this would be for an actress. We need more of these. And what's more, I love that she's a woman of color. There's nothing in her background so far that explicitly indicates her ethnicity, which makes it all the better that such a casting choice was made.

As a character in the fabric of a story, I don't like her as much. Her team builds her up to be this nearly invincible force of nature. "Gladiators in suits," "She doesn't believe in crying," and all that legend-building business. It makes for an initial thrill that quickly wears thin, in part because she makes crucial mistakes almost immediately. The audience must take declarations of other characters when they are repeatedly shown otherwise. I believe that is called conspicuous exposition. Her famous gut barely gets a chance to show off before it is compromised, by nothing other than amour.

Why, girls, why? Why can we be strong in everything but love? What is it about the fairy tale that makes our artistic representations weak? I'm not a cynic. I indulge in daydreams too. But to do a complete 180 personality-wise in the presence of your lover seems ludicrous to me. Maybe I'm too young and naive, but for now, this seems implausible (or at the very least frustrating) to me.

In general, it's great the way the writers have woven in diversity without making a big deal about it. Cyrus, the Chief of Staff, is gay. He just is, no big deal. Oh, the Vice President is a woman? Okay. Once again, however, the show champions progress while lacking as a show. Cyrus is obnoxious because I don't understand his goals and thus cannot empathize with him. I admire the approach in creating him, but I like him as a concept and not a character. After episode after episode of twists and secret dealings, I have to admit I want to skip ahead to the end when everything is tied up with a little red bow.
And one final thing. The first time Olivia intimidated someone, it was cool. The way she spoke without seemingly taking a breath, breaking sentences where they shouldn't be broken, and not letting anyone else get a word in edge-wise. But then she did it seven times in one episode, every time someone needed to be persuaded or intimidated. Armed with that alone, she's become the fearsome figure we see onscreen. Difficult to believe in its powers, especially when Gideon the reporter tears it down in five seconds with some tough talk of his own. In MUN we call that hard-balling (very amusing to a male delegate who thought I was speaking in euphemisms). More than once I wanted to do what my teacher taught us when we get hard-balled (wrong phrasing WRONG PHRASING), stick my hand in her face and say, STOP!

What's more, all the characters started speaking in the same way. There was one moment in particular when Abby and Olivia were screaming at each other, the only difference in their delivery the subtle characterization work of the actors. When one character does it, it's kind of awesome. When all the characters do it, I have to wonder if Woody Allen was in the writer's room.

My qualms pile up on paper, but for the most part, I enjoyed the show and I have to applaud Shonda Rhimes for her work as a writer and producer. We won't get our perfect female or minority characters immediately, but I'm glad we have characters like Olivia Pope along the way. I'll be watching in hopes that the writers of Scandal tweak and polish as the show moves along.

Photos courtesy of ABC.

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06 May 2012

How Do You Dew

It all started with one perfect leaf...
...and the morning dew.
At some point all buildings look similar and car exhaust irritates. And nature, who has been waiting patiently in our yards, sweeps us away with her miniature forests and deserts. 

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01 May 2012

Elixir of Love

A beautiful poem found in my linguistics book. 

Ask the stream why, groaning,
from the slope where it was born, 
it runs into the sea that lures it
and in the sea goes to die. 

L'elisir d'amore
Felice Romani

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