Wednesday, August 25, 2010

The New 'Hood

It's high time for a post about our new apartment. On or around July 1, SM and I moved into a new apartment in Chicago's North Center neighborhood. It's pretty awesome. The surrounding area is quiet, but has a bunch of cool restaurants and bars and cultural activities. We're pretty much just as far west as we were before, but we are 12 big blocks north. Also, we're now a 5 minute walk from the Brown Line at Irving Park, which is a huge improvement from the 20 minute walk we had before. I don't mind walking of course--the nice walks around the neighborhood was one of the things that attracted us to this spot--but when it comes to getting to work in a timely fashion, a 5 minute walk can make all the difference.

I've explained it this way: at our old place, if I was ready to leave the house 8am, my choices were to wait for the bus and get to the train station (to wait however long for a train) in 5 minutes or walk to the train station in 20 minutes. If I use CTA Bus Tracker to discover that there's a bus in 10 minutes, it saves me 5 minutes, but I'm still starting my commute at 8:10 instead of 8am. These days, I can leave whenever I want, and 5 minutes later, I'm at the train station on my own two feet, and there's usually a train (and a seat!) about every 5 minutes during rush hour. I'm getting to work consistently in an hour or a little less, instead of an hour one day, an hour and 10, 20 minutes the next.

If I'm going some place other than work, the CTA options are still plentiful. There's the Brown Line to the loop (or the Brown Line to the Red Line to 95th), the Ashland bus south but staying west, the Lincoln bus to the west of us going southeast, the Clark bus to the east of us going southeast, the Damen bus to the west of us running north and south, and the Irving Park bus down the block going east and west. Each of these options is within a 10 minute walk from our door. It's transit heaven!

Inside the apartment, it's absolutely beautiful. The building was built in 1931, and it's all brick on the outside, old wood on the inside (dark wood door with glass panes in the dining room, old style windows). It's large, with a sizable living room and bedroom, 2 closets, a hall way, a bathroom, a linen closet, and a kitchen with a separate dining room area. There are lots of built in cabinets and, as I've implied, tons of storage place, which was something we were adamant about on our search. There is also a dishwasher and a microwave above the stove. There is free radiator heat, which is pretty cool, because that's how I grew up. It's very much a practical and awesome place.

Another thing I like about our apartment is just the new perks of living alone. Alright, so I'm living with S, but he's no roommate or anything. We even have similar cleanliness and organizational habits and design desires, so most roommate differences don't even count. Anyway, there's so much you can do when you live alone. All the space is yours. All the food is yours. You don't have to move anything you don't want to. The TV is always yours. The living room is always yours. You can go into another room whenever you want. If so inclined, you can do any business you want in the bathroom with the door open.

But my #1, most favorite perk of living alone is that you can wear as little as you want at all times. (Gross Out Alert) You can walk around completely naked. It is in my top 3 most liberated feelings. One of the first things I do when I get home from work is take off my pants. It's awesome. And some days, you just need to strip down. It's your right; it's your place. If you don't already, I highly suggest getting your own place for that reason alone.

As my good friend OBM once said, "nudity and happiness go hand in hand in living in one's own place." If you don't like where you live or you're feeling down in a rut, I recommend shedding some of that clothing and taking a tour in your birthday suit. Go ahead. DO it. Take a deep breath and feel renewed. There's really nothing like it.

Monday, August 23, 2010

Inward Observations: part 1 of ∞

1. I think I need a career that can offer lots of independence. I like setting goals for myself that are tied to larger, more life-affirming, and practical aspects of life (i.e. education, conflict resolution, health, etc.), as opposed to being obliged to adhere to goals set for me that are tied to smaller, subjective, shorter-term initiatives.

2. The things I like best about my current job are the editing and the shooting, when I can fully immerse myself in the creation of a solid product. I don't particularly like troubling myself with the distribution or the client desires, but when I do, I am often disappointed with the relatively small sphere of influence, short term goals, and/or enthusiasm over what I see as proportionately small events/meaning.

3. I like working with something hands-on, and I learn better by doing.

4. I'm really bad at being fake, and I hate having to be fake. Fake smiles, fake interest, and fake enthusiasm tire me out. Relatedly, impressing anyone besides those I care about is never high on my list.

5. My hopes for something are almost always trumped by possible realities. I'll get really excited about something if the logistics are there to support its potential.

6. More than approval or praise, I want feedback.

7. I like when questions have a purpose, for example to come closer to a conclusion, when someone truly cares, or when the information will be used for something.

8. Inefficient systems and unnecessary elements irk me.

9. The test to pass is whether or not the issues one talks about in a meeting have any implications outside of that particular closed community. Immigration? Yes. The history of film? Yes. An upcoming community event? Doesn't excite me.

Given all of this, what is the best career for me?

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

A Better Dreamer [Spoiler Alert]

**NOTE: I've been writing this for 3 weeks, so it's a bit choppy and disjointed. Let me know if you need any clarification of my points, and I'll do my best to shed light on something or other.**

Exploring the three levels “on which our minds live: the past, the present, and the conditional - the realm of fantasy” ~ Federico Fellini

Of course a lot of talk has been going around about Christopher Nolan's Inception. I for one thought it was great, until I thought about it and decided that it was flawed, but still great. Christopher Nolan has great concepts in his head, and he really has a vision for his work, it's quite obvious. But my main answer to anyone who asks is that I don't think he thinks things through in layers, rather he thinks a movie through via it's plot.

Remember that whole story vs. plot thing? The plot is confined to the film or piece of fiction, whereas the story can bleed beyond the pages of the book or screenplay. The key difference is that the plot of a work of art (told in order) can portray a story out of order. Take Nolan's Memento for example: the story portrays Leonard tattooing himself to combat his short-term memory loss as he searches for his wife's killer; the plot presents these events backwards for dramatic and artistic effect. My claim is that Nolan is really good at thinking of a captivating plot, but he is not as good at fleshing out the layers of a good story.

In the case of Inception (and I won't go too in depth because that is not my main point here), the concepts such as totems, architects, and the concept of inception itself, seem intriguing on the surface, but as soon as they're done furthering the plot, they are dropped. We never find out anything more about Ariadne's totem (or much more about dream architecture once its existence as a concept is done explaining her presence); we never find out how long all of this dream stuff has been around (Mal supposedly invented the use of the totem, but if this thing has a long and storied history, you would think someone else would have needed to keep a grasp on reality); and we never find out anything about the other characters beyond their functions on Cobb's team. To those of you who use these facts to support your stupid "it's all a dream" theory, I say BOO. Even if it was a dream (which, I maintain, would be a cop out), I believe that it is important for a movie to have depth beyond what happens on screen -- more story, less plot.

The dream bit actually brings me around to my real point here. Interestingly enough, I had the pleasure of seeing 8 1/2 again last night. Great film. For once Ebert and I agree when he said that it's the best film about filmmaking. Hands down. Anyway, my main thesis here is that I think Fellini did the dreaming Christopher Nolan was aiming for, both achieving more of a dreamlike quality (one popular critique of Inception), and more successfully incorporating all those rules Nolan beats into you during all of that futile exposition. (Again, I think it's flawed, but still great.)

8 1/2 focuses on Guido, a middle-aged film director who is struggling to make the movie he's always wanted. It is a metafilm adventure, as we discover that the project described therein that is supposedly doomed to fail by all of his colleagues in the picture is eerily similar to the very film we are watching. Guido wrestles with his subconscious to figure out what he believes about love, what his life really means, and what those around him mean to him. It is personal in every sense of the word, first and foremost because we automatically assume in the first minutes of the film that the director portrayed must bear some resemblance to the real and famous Italian director, Fellini himself, and secondarily due to the behind-the-scenes look we get at Guido's varied relationships, his director's-block, and how each of them affect his work. But perhaps most personal is the fact that we dream with Guido and not only witness how the film's events affect his work, but also how they affect his subconscious. More accurately, we witness how his subconscious affects his work--even more plainly, his subconscious is the work. Thus, dreaming is a very important element to the film, and the common ground between this and Nolan's latest piece.

Returning to Inception for a bit, Nolan sets out several rules in the beginning his film that are supposed to alert the viewer and the dream invaders that they are in a dream world, and that the subconscious is alive, well, and ready to turn on the intruders. Rules range from keeping tabs on others around you (the more everyone looks at you, the more their subconscious is aware of your presence, a sign that you have tampered with too much), to staying abreast of how you arrived at your current position (a sign that you are probably in a dream), to being aware of the either the "kick" or death as some of the only ways you can forcibly get out of the dream state. Nolan lays out these rules and tips as Cobb introduces Ariadne to the world of extraction.

I would claim that, while one film predates the other by 50 years, Fellini adheres to similar rules of the unconscious/subconscious. Better yet, he teaches these rules of the dream world to the viewer by throwing them into the fray instead of giving googobs of exposition. We follow Guido seamlessly in and out of the dream world, unsure of how we arrived or where we are. Guido's dreams, like the film itself, are ripe subconscious material, ripped straight from the events of his life, past, present, and future, and holding important clues for interpretation, much like the dreams the extractors probe in their work. The eye contact of those who populate Guido's world is also an interesting characteristic of his subconscious. They stare at him (and us) with an unnaturally steady gaze, prying into his motives and desires, and, like Nolan's extractors, trying to discover what his deepest secrets are.

Throughout the movie, Guido tries to interpret his own dreams to answer his questions about making his film while battling his personal life on the side. The two intermingle until he has a realization that. Cobb, too, struggles to find a balance between his work and his personal life, and he also comes to an intermingling conclusion. While the protagonists have many similarities, it's the directors in my mind who differ in their storytelling styles. There is a subtlety that Nolan could learn from Fellini that I think is highlighted in their dreamscapes. The ease with which Fellini glides through 8 1/2 underscores the harmony between story and plot; perhaps this was because the story was so personal to the director. Nolan really told a great plot in Inception, but, for me, the transitions were rocky and drew attention to the incongruity between the story and plot. Inception is an undoubtedly an entertaining film that gets people talking and thinking, but when it comes to the better dreamer, I maintain that Fellini's got him beat.