The Signal & Be Kind Rewind

It's kind of funny how the universe works sometimes. I've often said that if you pay attention, the world is trying to tell you something. Maybe it's some sort of cosmic thing, maybe it's just our very human capability to find patterns in chaos. I don't know and I don't really care. (Leave that to the philosophers.) What matters is that I get the point therein and do something with it.

Over the last two weeks, I saw The Signal and Be Kind Rewind. Both deal with the influence of media and human connectedness. In one, the media is an overwhelming presence that drives people to kill, and the other shows people making media for themselves and growing as a community.

The Signal is a triptych of short films about a mysterious signal emanating from every TV, radio, and phone that causes people to kill each other. Ironically, everyone thinks everyone else is crazy and the reasons they use to justify murder make a bizarre sort of sense to themselves. The eponymous signal is inescapable. TVs and radios just come on with the broadcast playing.

Be Kind Rewind is about two guys remaking older movies with a VHS camcorder after a magnetized Jack Black inadvertently erases the store's stock of VHS movies. The self-made remakes become a hit and the people in the neighborhood get in on the action. Of course, the studios come in to piss all over the parade.

The reason I bring this up is because I feel like I've been taken too much with the mass media. I've been watching too much TV. I've been reading Digg way too much. I would be totally vulnerable to some sort of killer transmission.

I haven't been working on my back-burner projects. I haven't been making my own media. I keep worrying about finding the next gig so I can pay my bills. I keep living in this weird, fear-based state instead of embracing the whole "do what you love and the money will follow" edict. This kind of progression will only continue to lead me away from the work I wanted to do when I got into this whole industry in the first place.

I'm shifting gears. I'm not sure of how I'm going to get to my destination just yet, but the journey should be pretty cool.

I don't walk, I stroll.

I had to do a lot of walking today and I kept noticing that everyone was speeding to wherever they had to get to without any thought about what was going on around them. Since I had nowhere urgent to get to, I strolled everywhere I went, observing everything going on.

We live in this wonderful, amazing city of Chicago, but we're too wrapped in our heads to pay attention to the beauty and wonder of what's out there. It's a shame.

I understand that some of this is the result of defending ourselves from unwelcome intrusions upon our daily existence, namely those that come in the form of crazy, scary people in rat-skin loincloths, but this is an inevitable occurrence that happens when you try to be present in the moment instead of somewhere else. The crazy thing is that these disturbances help you appreciate the sublime things you normally don't notice all the more.

There's no real point to this other than that sometimes it's worth the effort and risk to get the benefit of those instances of beauty.

A Foot in Both Worlds

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.
-Anaïs Nin

Life is the fuel of creativity. As artists, we take our life experiences and transform them into works to communicate to others. We live life, and then we relive it as we create.

I find that in my own experience, I swing from extremes of extroversion and introversion. That is, I go through phases where my soul yearns to be out and about, gathering experiences. Then I go through phases where I only want to go hermit and retreat to my cave to process everything.

I would be lying if I said that I didn't find this kind of bipolar social life frustrating. Sometimes my desires and instincts are at odds. I may really want to go out, but instead, I stay in to work and create. Other times, I may have a deadline looming and need to work, but my mind is out in the fields staring at clouds.

I've often wondered, in the past, if instead of living twice, we actually just live two half-lives. However, I think the reality is that we tend to live more aware and more fully than the majority of our species who sleepwalk through life, paying little attention to the details of our existence.

Recently, I started walking to the Red Line el train from my apartment to get to and from work. This wasn't because of any sort of need or desire to increase my fitness level or to save money on CTA transfers. (I live a mile from the Red Line, but I live 3 blocks from the Brown Line and the bus could just as easily take me to the Red Line.) The weather was nice, the sun was out, and I really just wanted to walk.

Have you ever just marveled at how awesome it is to walk? We usually just take this for granted, going so far as to save ourselves the "hassle" of walking by driving our cars for a mile trip. But walking, though, feels so present, so real. The cool air breezing past you, the sun warming your back. The smell of cut grass and burning charcoals from backyard grills. If I had taken my camera with me, I could've found dozens of things to photograph that were interesting to me.

How many people could say the same? I'm not knocking other people; I know that everyone has things going on in their heads that's taking their attention. Hell, I get preoccupied a lot thinking about projects, women, whatever.

But I think that as artists, we tend to live so fully in the moment, that we take in more of life than a lot of people do. We have to take that downtime just to catch our breaths and empty ourselves so we can do it again. So, we live life sometimes in the moment, extroverted and then we relive it through our work, introverted.

A foot in both worlds.