Illustrating my pain
For those of you who don’t know, from December to March Loyola’s (Lakeshore) campus is basically a series of blustery wind tunnels that transform the entire area into an outdoor blast chiller.
Wasn’t Loyola voted the coldest campus in the continental United States?
One of the many reasons I ditched Loyola last minute. I’m still VERY happy with my decision. Shit looks nice on the surface, but after orientation, it was the last place I wanted to be.
I’ve been having trippy dreams lately. I think it’s because of all the Nyquil I’ve been taking.
Last night, from what I remember first, I was watching a movie on how things in nature follow a fractal pattern, but then I guess I forgot I was watching a movie and it became my “reality.” So, as I was standing in my grade school’s playground, I looked up at the clouds and they were forming and spinning and dissipating very rapidly in fractal spirals, something similar to Electric Sheep. Then I started spinning as well to enhance the effect.
Then somehow my dream was about researching evolution and how we found out that a specific species of baboon-chimp was closely related to bulls. To test, this theory, naturally, I decided to ride one, and if it was anything like bull-riding, then our hypothesis would be confirmed. So, one happened to be wandering around the grade school’s parking lot and I jumped on it’s back. Amazingly enough, it was like bull-riding. The entire time, the baboon-chimp was trying to buck me off it’s back. It also somehow grew an extended neck and tried to bite my hands.
I also had a weird dream yesterday. I was in a dark basement with a bunch of people from my high school, trying to collect these large white spiders to use as bait for fishing. We got a few but then they started to escape from our plastic bag. I pulled on the rope that they were climbing up and then a shit-ton of them fell from the ceiling, which sounds scary, but it actually didn’t feel like a nightmare. A few landed on me but I brushed them off.
Then, once we collected all the white spiders, a bigger, black one came down and pulled out about 50 spider-sized guns and shot Kyle Lundy to death, which took a while because the bullets were so small. Then, we squashed it and it transformed into this giant invincible bee thing with a scorpion tail. I trapped it under a metal bowl, and then squashed it, but it came back to life and kept trying to squeeze out from under the bowl like an octopus. Someone decapitated it a few times but it kept regrowing its head.
I ran to go get something that was supposed to be able to kill it and went past this freaky TV with an arm coming out of the screen and choking this bald, pale boy with metallic circular ports all over his body like the ones from The Matrix. Again, it still didn’t have a nightmare feeling to it, though. Apparently I wasn’t concerned with the boy being choked because I found the thing I was searching for right next to him and ran back.
Somehow, I became aware that it was all a dream, but decided to go along with it anyway. So I went back and put the bowl with the bee in it on the table in the laboratory that the basement had now become. A scientist came in with the boy with ports on his body (who had apparently thwarted the TV arm) and he put a glowing green cylinder into one of the ports. Then a white, floating, translucent woman with a rainbow forcefield over her head came in the room. The boy lifted up the bowl to release the bee and it went straight for the floaty-woman. She quickly put the rainbow forcefield in front of her. The bee rain into it and exploded into a cloud of blue butterflies, which flew around the room and then disintegrated. Then I decided to wake up.
IF YOU DON’T SMILE I AM GOING TO KILL YOU.
ZOMG. Coincidences. I just watched Gummo last weekend. Weird ass-movie. I’ll probably blog more about Harmony Korine later.
Purchased.
Justified simply because ever since I watched it, it was painful not having it in my library.
Waking Life is one of the best cinematic pieces I’ve seen in a long time. Highly experimental, this film offers a cornucopia of unconventional, mind-expanding ideologies and theories, framed by a loose narrative. If you’re ever in the mood for serious deep-thinking or feel that your current perspective of the world is somehow inadequate, this is the perfect thought-fodder for you.
Firstly, something must be said of the visual style. Similar to A Scanner Darkly, another of Richard Linklater’s fantastic films (and dare I say, house to the only role made for Keanu Reeves, for matters of his sheer psychosis), Waking Life is made with real footage, modified by overlaying animation. The result is spectacular. A perfect representation of the dream world in all its trippy splendor.
Though, unlike most modern films, all style and no substance, Waking Life definitely delivers on the philosophy front. The movie is composed of a host of vignettes, each expressing a unique yet solidly grounded worldview, with a different visual style, yet all communicating a concept with eye-opening, possibly life-changing implications. It is impossible to watch this movie without dedicating the entirety of your attention to it. It can be difficult to keep up with, and if you miss part of it, you’re lost. That is, until the next vignette begins.
Interestingly enough, this film actually de-emphasizes the narrative component of film. The story (although a great one) isn’t nearly as important as all of the ideologies that the film broaches and it’s not really developed until the last stretches of the movie.
The acting (if there even is acting) is phenomenal, as evidenced by the fact that I’m not even sure if this movie contains any actual acting. I’m liable to believe that there is acting, at least to some degree, just based on the fluidity and structure of the dialogue. However, I do believe that the speaker in each vignette is and expert in that respective field and the author if his/her own speech, simply because of the passion and devotion behind their voiced philosophy (or, possibly, stellar acting). At the very least, it was (obviously and most-definitely) premeditated. Unfortunately, the movie is so little-known that I can’t really find any critical material to substantiate this.
But you’re not going to learn much just by reading this. I realized about half-way through that I can barely even touch on trying to explain this film. Go out and watch it for yourself!
