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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

The Woods (working title), Part I

The following is the beginning of a story I decided to write this past week. It's come to my attention that I've spent probably over 10 years trying to figure out what it means to grow up -- and this story is me still trying to come to terms with everything that involves. Feedback would be good (Josh?), so feel free to "tear it up" and go nuts.

___________

Once upon a time, there was a place caught between seasons. It was a place where autumn still lingered when winter was long overdue. It was a place where boys played outside and wore knitted caps, fingerless gloves and handy-down bomber jackets to protect themselves from an always-approaching chill. It was a place where trees changed their colors with unyielding frequency, and where each falling leaf resonated in the wind like a tuning fork – which could strike a chord in even the bitterest and most sensible of hearts. Among this boundless spread of trees, the boys found a place where adventure was equally immeasurable.

Darmy and Middy were waiting for Kaffy to return with new orders. As ritual demanded, they carried out their current game until further instruction arrived. It was a rather sluggish game of marbles. Darmy had drawn the circle in the dirt with a finger and took his time educating Middy on the rules despite Middy’s anxious fidgeting. His apprehension had cost him seven games in a row.

“Again?” cried Middy. “You win every time! Darmy, how’d you get so good at marbles?”

“I’ve played a lot, Middy” stated Darmy. “You have to play a lot to be good.”

Middy was small and the youngest, not a day older than nine. He wore an oversized cap with flaps that went down well past his narrow shoulders. Darmy was maybe fifteen and was the only boy who had an air-powered BB gun. When not hanging at his side, the plastic weapon leaned against a tree stump – the same old tree stump that Darmy had secretly hollowed a notch to hide various knickknacks. The tree stump also acted as the boys’ meeting spot. When one of them was sent out to get instructions, he would return to the stump to find the other boys waiting for him, continuing whatever game they were directed to play, and this was precisely what Darmy and Middy were doing this particular day.

“I don’t want to play anymore,” said Middy. “I want to play a new game.”

“Me too,” said Darmy, “but we got to wait for Kaffy to come back.”

“I know,” muttered Middy as Darmy began to divide the marbles again. “Them’s the rules.”

“One more game?” he asked.

Middy didn’t answer. He pushed back his cap. Out of the corner of his eye and through several layers of gray tree trunks he saw Kaffy, wearing a blue coat with a green hat, emerging from the woods. The sound of his worn-out tennis shoes pounding the leaves as he ran wasn’t as loud as his panting – as he had been running all the way from the hideout on the other side of the woods. Instead of calling out to the other boys, Kaffy took a deep breath and crowed like a rooster – a ritual that Darmy and Middy knew to mimic in response. The three boys’ howls echoed through the tree branches, and for a brief, nearly nonexistent moment Darmy felt the woods come alive with a feeling he knew he had grown numb to – a feeling that, if he had known the word, he would have called ecstasy. Adventure, he thought. It’s about time. He grabbed his gun from the stump and ignored the marbles that he had let scatter among the leaves.

_______

-B

Jeremy and Rachel

When Jeremy Lambert kissed Rachel Nelson in the kitchen doorway of his two-bedroom apartment, he knew at that precise moment that the woman he wanted to spend the rest of his life with was not Rachel Nelson.

Jeremy and Rachel had spent most of their evening in and around the shopping center, and in that lively environment lit by icicle lights and teeming with the sounds of the holidays, Rachel made a very astute observation when a skipping girl, no older than ten, flew past them in a bright orange coat.

“Look at her,” she said. “I honestly can’t imagine being so happy that I would actually skip.”

Jeremy didn’t reply and Rachel forced a weak laugh as the girl pranced over to a group of children, presumably her friends and joined them in frantically scooping snow into their gloves. As the children prepared for their friendly battle, Rachel tried a new approach.

“Is that bad?” she asked, linking her arm with Jeremy’s.

“What are you asking?” he replied.

Jeremy’s trite response caught her by surprise. Rachel Nelson was then reminded of something: she was very unhappy that evening. She was unhappy about having lived a quarter of a century with very little to show for it besides a framed piece of paper she now kept in a cardboard moving box. She was unhappy that Jeremy constantly had a cocktail of medication coursing through him. And she was unhappy that her father continued to put several hundred dollars a month onto her debit card. But she was most unhappy that she remained dependent on someone else – someone who wasn’t Rachel Nelson. That someone right now was Jeremy Lambert.

“I’m not even sure,” she replied quickly.

She forced another laugh as Jeremy looked away. He was hiding a violent cringe that had just made its way across his face. He had always found masking his emotions difficult, but thankfully Rachel was someone who didn’t easily pick up on tell-tale subtleties.

It was getting late, indicated by Jeremy referencing his watch. He let out a sigh.

“Should we be going?” she asked. “What time is it?”

“Almost eight,” he replied.

“Time flies,” she said.

Jeremy couldn’t agree more. Had he missed it? All night he was looking for an opening – a brief pause in her barrage of hollow conversation that would allow him to finally speak his mind. So far nothing. Either Rachel had not given him the chance or he wasn’t brave enough to interject. He had found her comment on skipping disturbing, but chose in that moment to not use the statement as a platform for his much-delayed complaints. He feared her response. He feared her making a scene in a public place. He feared losing her. And most of all, he feared knowing that he needed someone like her to feel complete. But he wanted to complain – truly he wanted to interject and proclaim that he too was unhappy just like her. But he wouldn’t tonight.

He would instead return with her to his apartment as the ritual mandated and spend the next two hours lounging alongside her on his couch watching television. It was mid-December, so reruns of classic holiday shows would be playing. She would eventually claim to be too tired to stay awake. He would ask her to spend the night, but she would refuse. He would offer her a ride back. She would politely decline, insisting the walk wasn’t far and that she needed to clear her mind. They would make their way to the apartment door, kiss their goodbyes, and probably start over again tomorrow.

June 3

I've been home for almost two weeks now and my bedroom has a lot in common with the state of my dorm room during my last post.

Meanwhile, I've been doing my internship. Here's a picture I took downtown. This is technically the geographical center of the city, and the office where I work is right off this street a few blocks down.



This is all I got.

-B

May 21st and rainy

It's my second to last night in Upland, Indiana. On Saturday I leave for home. And at the end of June I move out west - to Burbank, California. I'm there until the end of August. From September to December, I'll be attending a film school program in Los Angeles. And by January 2011, I'll be back in Upland - returning back to the only people I consider to be my friends.

My name is Brent and I'm 22 years and 3 weeks old - and I'm growing up. And this is my existential-quarter-life-crisis.

I feel so blessed to have so many awesome opportunities ahead of me, but the greatest mystery right now is where I'll be in 6 months. I want to make sure I eventually look back to this moment - to this rainy night in May, 2010 with half my room dismantled around me - three bankers boxes full of odds and ends stacked up against my desk chair. Hopefully if and when I look back to this moment I don't scrutinize this moody writing style.

I've just spent a semester in a fiction writing class where I wrote stories about adapting to change - all involving the same character archetype: the iconic, post-gender, 20-something-year-old male character searching for . . . something. Call him Zach Braff from Garden State. Call him Michael Cera from any movie with Michael Cera. Call him Jason Schwartzman from Darjeeling (that would be my choice, personally, but he's 30).

In half a year I want to think about now. At Sundance this winter I saw a movie called Obselidia. I heard it's been bought - so maybe it'll see a theater release sometime this year. I hope so. Anyways, the movie talked about a made up word called "nowstalgia" - an mindset of anti-nostalgia where you cherish the present knowing it'll be gone tomorrow when you wake up. Who knows? Maybe the whole world will be gone tomorrow? How then would you live today? That, there, is more or less that tagline of the film, so don't quote me on that. I actually feel like a bit of a plagiarist already - one of my fiction stories talked about Obselidia's "nowstalgia" concept very blatantly. This story also included blatant lyrics from a song by Atlas Sound - so I in no way feel original or ethical in retrospect. It's not like fiction pieces need credits or a works cited page at the end - do they?

Anyways, this concept of loving the "now right now" is something I hope I look back on when I return to Upland. Did I take advantage of all the opportunities that presented themselves? Did I learn any valuable life lessons (like: how to cook on your dollar? How to navigate LA traffic? How to [fill in the blank]?)? Did I "find myself?" And do I have quality film pieces for my senior portfolio (oh, I better).

"But Brent - you're gonna be in LA (spoken "el-EH")," says a friend. "Marijuana is legal there, dude. You can get some sweet 'tat' on your arm and not tell your parents about it until you get back."

Yeah, I know this. I understand these things. In many ways, California seems very anti-Brent on several major facets (I'm that guy talking about himself in the third person - nice), but seriously, how am I going to react to life out West? I'm from Indiana; a Hoosier is what some call me, even though I hated that movie. I thankfully grew up in Indy away from the dense cornfields and near-Amish lifestyle of these northern areas, but yeah, this will all seem very rural compared to the suburbian jungle-city that's Los Angeles. I want to preserve who I am, but at the same time I want to change and learn from whatever is out there - and hopefully shoot a short film on a Canon 7D (please, oh, please).

This brings me full-circle. Welcome back to now. Welcome to Room 209 - still a half-dismantled wreck amid the other wrecks in this building. Move-out weekend is the worst, but there's always something waiting for you beyond campus: your family, a dog back home, a girl/guy, a part-time job at Chili's - anything and everything.

-B

April Updates

Hi blog.

I feel like we've grown a bit distant. It's not your fault - it's mine. Really. I know people will always say that, but right now it's totally true. Trust me.

If this blog accurately documented my life, I would have made several posts regarding my trip to Poland last month. Gosh - last month? That long ago? Things just seem to be moving too fast for my comfort level these days.

Especially this past week.

Way back during the winter I talked about "looking ahead" to the summer of "twenty-ten." Summer is practically here, everyone. T-minus four weeks and counting. That resume I made in January seems to be pulling some weight, too. I had a Skype interview with someone really important on Monday and this coming week I should find out what in the world I'll be doing these next few months before my semester in LA - the City of Angels and Hollywood.

It definitely feels like life is pushing the accelerator down.

I'm excited / anxious / intimidated / nostalgic / having an identity crisis. There's simply no substitute for time in life. You can ask for more time, and maybe someone will grant you it, but it never changes the fact that you will never have enough time / resources to do everything.

It's late, blog. Glad I had time to stop by and say hello. Better head towards bed.

Dang, I didn't do laundry today.

-B