I returned from a two week trip to New Zealand about a week ago. My heart and mind are still there. Being so visually oriented, I was floored. The sky I can never forget.
This is the first time I've tried postng to my blog from my iphone. I do wish here was a mobile version of blogger, but I'm happy enough that this actually works. I'm going to New Zealand for two weeks starting next Friday. I won't be taking my computer. Now I know my only challenge will be finding wifi access. Let me apologize to my 2.5 readers ahead of time for not paying $2/min premiums for mobile access overseas. Sponsors welcome.
When I worked in the cafe at Malaprop's years and years ago, one of our regulars - I believe his name was Derek - described to me a philosophy about the impact of events over time. Events, he said, are like rocks dropped in a pond, the ripples from which radiate in all directions. The waves don't just move into the future. They also move into the past (and presumably into parallel realities, but let's leave that alone for now). His point was that according to this theory, events in our future have an impact on us in the present. We're driven forward as a result of our past and future actions.
Personally, I don't find it practical to conceptualize time as anything other than linear and mono-directional, as scientifically prove-able as it may be at some point in our future (ironically). I prefer a slightly different take on the metaphor. I think about the effect of events in my life on my perception of the past and interpretation of my memories. It makes more sense to me. Memory isn't linear. It's more like the pond. The most active and relevant parts of my memory are the parts where most of the waves converge.
It doesn't matter how long ago the events occurred, necessarily. They're all in there, bumping against each other. As I move through time, new events change the context of the old events, giving some events more weight and meaning than they previously had, perhaps giving the illusion that certain things were "meant to happen". It's only an illusion, of course. We revise our memories to create the stories that we need to make sense out of our realities.
Yes, there is a little something that gets mixed up in our memories - imagination. Imagination is the thing that lets us reinvent our histories to fit our stories about ourselves. It also lets us envision our futures. Do the events in our imagination have the same impact as the events of our realities? I think they can. How we build ourselves up or tear ourselves down (be it in the past, present, or future) is one of the limiting factors of our future development. The events that occur outside of our control either support or contradict our visions of ourselves - either perpetuating our self-fulfilling prophecies or shattering what we think we know about reality...
I only wonder how one person's imagination might affect the realities of others.
I love the 2003 album Killing Joke. I never really cared about finding out more about their earlier music. Then Chris showed me this, the thing he considers quintessential Killing Joke. Now I love them even more.
I'm not a big fan of being overtly manipulated by movies. I hate myself if I cry during a Steven Spielberg picture. I much prefer to be affected by subtlety, surprises, sudden and unexpected tragedies, and uncomfortable personal relationships. I'm not a fan of being told to feel a certain way by a montage. I also despise the overused convention of focusing on an individual's face as they confront some awesome thing. Jurassic Park comes to mind as an extreme example. I'd much rather look at the dinosaurs than all those slack-jawed yokels being amazed by dinosaurs. If you've done your character development with any kind of skill, can't I look at the thing myself and imagine how the characters feel? These kinds of contrivances stick out like red flashing lights to me and result in instant point reductions in my ratings, no matter how good the rest of the film might be.
So I'm a little upset about how Into the Wild made me feel - which is bad, by the way - very sad and lonely. The contrived bits and pieces stuck with me. The super-charged relationships Alex Supertramp made during his journey filled me up like one too many servings of homemade macaroni and cheese, and I'm still feeling a little bloated. I could have used a few more vegetables with that, maybe in the form of stillness and reflection.
Then again, maybe that's the point. I don't subscribe to the idea that this guy had some perfect vision of a utopian life alone in nature. The story clearly indicates that there was some childhood trauma impacting his ability to cope with society. Maybe he wasn't crazy, per se, but it felt like he was living with some naive, euphoric vision of what life without complication could be. He rarely stopped moving, rarely observed in silence. He was always moving, always doing. His focus on Alaska kept him from really having to deal with anything. It kept him from recognizing the impact he had on other people's lives. He was headed for 'the answer'. Maybe some might read his behavior as 'living in the moment', but I don't buy it. The idea of Alaska took over everything. Maybe all the drama happening around him needed to be overly pronounced to drive home the point that he lived in a completely different mental universe than the people who were becoming attached to him.
So what happened when Alex finally arrives in Alaska? (What do you think happened?) The Alaska story unfolded in parallel with his adventures of the year or so preceding. These parts of the movie were my favorite. There was self-reflection, stillness, and intense despair, all depicted with more subtlety. Once confronted with a harsh reality with no one's kindness to rely upon, Alex's luck changed for the worse. In the beginning, he believed he could do anything. As he froze and starved, he learned, very simply, he could not. I don't think his moments of clarity were happy ones at this phase. I think these parts of the film could have stood on their own, but I think Sean Penn offset these scenes with those of happier times with his temporary friends from the road to intensify the loneliness of the stay in the wild.
The result for me? I walked out of the theater wanting to believe Alex achieved enlightenment somehow and accepted his place in nature with some kind of peace. Mr. Penn didn't let me do that, and it made me feel awful. Maybe I'm just fighting the fact that this story is incredibly moving and maybe more complicated than I might've thought at first glance, but some part of me just feels like I've been played. Yeah, maybe I should read the book and get over it.
As Moe Szyzlak's father used to say, "Sooner or later, everybody gets shot." Yep. It's inevitable. Death. It's a-comin'. Thanks for the reminder, guys. No Country for Old Men was a real holiday treat. I take comfort in the fact that the odds of me encountering any of the brutal ends depicted here are slim. What's unnerving is that when confronted with the choice, I might rather take a quick demise over any one of the impending, soul-crushing deaths of the characters who survive the duration of the film.
So what's to be thankful for? That No Country for Old Men has graced us with its presence in the world with its devastating landscapes, perfectly executed monologs (THANK YOU Tommy Lee Jones), uncomfortable comedy, horrific gore, understated social commentary, and literary regard. I've not read this Cormac McCarthy novel, but back in film school, I read All the Pretty Horses as part of a Westerns class. When I heard that this film was based on a McCarthy novel, I knew the stakes would be high in the despair department. No question, they were.
Despite my emotional reactions to the gut-wrenching and intimate nature of the drama, I feel compelled to include a more clinical film school analysis. My disclaimer here is that the professor for my aforementioned westerns class was pretty hung up on Ronald Reagan's presidency. Oh, and I'm also currently reading Al Gore's The Assault on Reason. Sorry, everybody.
Given the time this story is set (the dawning of the Reagan era in which the romanticized ideology of the American West was the backdrop for covert military actions, imperialism and laissez-faire economic policy) and the time this story was written and produced (the pinnacle (I hope) of American world domination fueled by fear and corruption), I have to believe the Coen brothers chose to tell this story to reflect a growing sense of helplessness and dread in this country and to remind us a little about the nature of man in the face of hopelessness. Lawlessness does not create heroes.
There. That's the abstract for a thesis that'll never be written.
While it's clear to me that every aspect of this story is precisely contrived to elicit a sense of the past while showing us our present, sometimes I prefer to believe the process happens the other way around. I like to think creators involuntarily reflect their influences filtered through the most emotional parts of their brains. The commentary on reality is communicated intuitively while the creator remains completely focused on the subject matter at hand. When done well, the result reveals some intelligence about the world in which we live that could not have otherwise been expressed...the immortal wisdom of Moe Szyzlak's dad notwithstanding.
I must have been in a mood on Wednesday when I decided to break in my latest pair (of two) of blue patent leather shoes, but I mean, come on...
Usually, a reasonable amount of comfort is required in my shoe purchases, no matter how high the heel. I'm not quite sure where my pain tolerance lies on the scale with most women. I've endured pointe shoes and ski boots for hours at a time. I'm no stranger to (broken) blisters on my heels and toes, bruises on my shins and ankles, muscle cramps in my arches and calves, and that aching throbbing feeling of my feet warming and swelling inside a constricted space. My feet are deformed from the experiences. (Not as bad as Uma's in Kill Bill. Her feet are evidence, I'd say, that perhaps my tolerance is not up to par with the professionals. Then again, I've not had the opportunity to cram my feet into such a wide assortment of unbelievably expensive shoes.)
Why blue patent leather, you may ask? When I bought the first pair, I was on a quest for a blue pair of shoes to wear with a particular shirt and a particular skirt I wanted to wear to a housewarming party in Oakland. The pieces, themselves, aren't of such particular note...well, except for the skirt. A knee length gray lycra skirt that I've had for eight years and only occasionally have the nerve to wear when I'm feeling particularly self-confident. It doesn't happen much. I'm not sure Chris really approves of me wearing it out, but I think he's conflicted. I think he'd rather see me wearing it than not, so...Dare I say that I got some thoughtful compliments from some young gentlemen on the street in Oakland.
The skirt has its challenges, however, and I haven't found too many shirts that I like to wear with it. One day I was in the Vans store at the San Francisco Shopping Center and found not only the perfect hoody (which is what I was shopping for), but also, by sheer luck, the perfect blue and gray striped tshirt (on sale!) to wear with the skirt. But a dilemma arose. Gray and blue. What shoes to wear? Gray shoes have never appealed to me. (I may come around on that yet.) The best I had in my arsenal (which isn't very big, really) was a pair of sparkly silver shoes from the late nineties that I like to wear with my silver sparkly skirt (coincidetally, styled much like my lycra skirt). The heels on the silver shoes are dated enough that I can really only get away with wearing them with the sparkly skirt. Time for new shoes.
The Shoe Pavillion at Potrero Center (in the old Old Navy space where there was always a cop car sitting out front) had only one acceptable offering. They happened to be blue patent leather. The heels were only 2" and a little too spiky for my taste, but they gave the whole outfit a little 80s flavor that I deemed to be perfectly serviceable. (Had I known I'd be standing on a lawn for a portion of my afternoon at the party, I might've thought twice. I didn't fall down, though.) They didn't fit terribly well, and I even tried to purchase one shoe in one size and one shoe in another on the basis that the right shoe of the only pair of size 8s had a broken buckle. As it turns out, I was wrong. The shoes had already been mixed up in the boxes, and we were able to locate the correct size 8 shoe with buckle intact. My trick almost worked.
Several months later, I walked into DSW on Powell after buying a replacement bra and a clutch of panties (as my husband likes to call them) at Victoria's Secret. Lo and behold, there they were, the shoes I really wanted in the first place. I swear I tried them on at the store and they weren't too bad. Although, I do recall that when I checked out, the woman at the register asked me if they were comfortable, and my response was 'not especially'. But, I mean, come on...
I couldn't not get these shoes.
After a couple weeks in the closet, I pulled them out to wear to work, of all places, a scenario in which I knew they'd have to stay on for at least ten hours. I tried three times to put the shoes on, wondering if I'd perhaps picked up the wrong box before I checked out. After finally shoving my toes into the front of the shoes - all crooked and stuck in awkward positions that I thought might drive me insane thoughout the day - I realized that even if I did have the opportunity to take my shoes off in my office, I dared not in fear of not being able to get them back on after all the swelling.
What's the good news? Well, I didn't have to stand up to much during the day, and after the strange achings and swellings and chafings subsided, they didn't feel too bad. Also, I didn't fall down.
