Sunday, October 10, 2010

Detours


I uploaded this picture because it's one of my favorites. I took it with my roommate's Diana Mini on Kodak 400 last spring. During an afternoon drive through the country roads leading to campus, I decided to waste film on whatever happened to be on the other side of my moving car. The result was 24 double images with a few exposures receiving light leaks from the next shot on the roll. That burning pin of light in the middle of the image is just that. I really like it. It makes me miss school, which gives me mixed feelings about a lot things -- especially regarding living in Los Angeles.

Remember when I posted romantic musings about how magical my 5 months in the City of Angels were bound to be? I do. It was this past spring -- around the time I took the above picture.

Right now, the 45 students at the Los Angeles Film Studies Center are getting a "crash course in Hollywood" -- as the program website calls it. And those 45 students are quickly learning whether or not the film business is something they want to wake up to each morning. A lot of us come from the Midwest, from backgrounds SoCal natives would stamp as conservative or even rural; from backgrounds where a love of watching and re-watching a handful of favorite DVDs and owning a MacBook packaged with a student copy of Final Cut Pro promptly knighted you as "Hollywood bound" -- ready and able to achieve whatever creative outlets the entertainment business might demand. One of my roommates here in LA told me -- in a tone that was teetering on defeat -- that Hollywood was nothing like he imagined. It's harder. More exclusive. Even seclusive. It's a unique business where barriers have been strategically put up to keep those who shouldn't be here (or even can't be here) out. There are plenty of Jamba Juices and Whole Foods for the defeated to find refuge within.

Enough ranting about the biz. Enough people do it. It's called Variety.

Tonight I went to the roof of 5455 Wilshire. It's 24 floors high -- high enough to get a perfect 360 degree view of Los Angles County. Hollywood and the Valley to the north. Venice Beach to the south. Orange County to the east.
Santa Monica to the west. Smack-dab stuck in the middle. But it's only at night and at two dozen stories above Wilshire that I find myself whispering how much I love the city life.

Someone I respect once told me his personal motto is to daily "adapt and overcome." Those two actions are surprisingly harder to scratch into my baseboard than I wish. Highs and lows are expected, but I find myself moreover wishing to regain what I've apparently lost. I've noticed I rarely appreciate something to it's full potential until after its absent from my life. Childhood Christmases and the magic a handmade ornament could give to the room. Sitting for hours in front of a television and losing myself with a plastic controller in my hands. Visiting Mitchell, Indiana during the last weekend of September. Things I grow immensely nostalgic over. Things that, even if I participate in them now, will never resonate the same as they did yesteryear. It's these memories that strike a tuning fork within me and fill me with....something. Something I feel every time I think upon how much I truly love my family.

And that's the point I was trying to make. I counted a few detours in there.

-B

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