The Lobby Room

Isn't film the Lobby in our lines that we can sit in the dark sometimes with friends, acquaintances, or alone and become whoever we want whether we are sharing it with anyone or if it is simply in our heads? If we could put aside the word, "film" and see it as a lobby a waiting place where our fantasies become a reality for 90 minutes, we could realize it's a place the brain can explore as it does possibly in the dreams state. Maybe this is way to abstract, but think about it. What do you do during a movie? Do you see yourself through a character maybe nor the main lead but someone in the film? I know I do.

Film producers hit gold when they created the whole Hollywood light. Average people idolize actors (when they are merely doing their job), the theater is a small vacation, people will pay a fair amount to view a movie, and people get to forget who they are for the time being. So the producers gets something and the actors get something and so does the audience. But what do they they get? Different things (answers may vary): Producers may get money, actors may get the thrill of being in the limelight, and the audience may get feeling whoever the fuck they want to be.

The audiences probably the most important to talk about right now simply because that is probably the majority of most folk. Isn't the point of the movies (the great thing about the movies) is to get away from ones own life? When someone like yourself leaves the theater you forget that the actors are just average people because in your head they have become the characters they just acted as. When you leave the theater you boy is shocked that the world is still spinning round that the people surrounding you did not experience what you have just experienced in the past hour or two. When you leave the theater behind, your fantasy may continue as the day goes on.

Now let's go over some themes that happened in Grand Hotel and then compare it to a newer film, the Social Network (not really a spoiler). In the Grand Hotel you get the lobby analogy full blown; you experience it on the screen as you are also experiencing it subconsciously as you sit in the movie theater with your expensive butter popcorn and large cherry coke. You realize that life is a repetition. Each character experiences something a bit different, but really life is all connected to each other. At the end of the film it smacks you in the face with a bit of hard pressed reality. A new married couple walks through the doors. As life in the lobby continues a bit of new light files in. This new couple is almost a metaphor for the next generation. They bring happiness and new ideas, simply because they haven't experienced as much as the people that have gone before them. And so it goes...

Now we brought up in class how we can't compare old films to new ones. but really film hasn't changed not the concrete important stuff. Acting style circulates, producers die and reappear, film style recycles, the only real change is editing and how our brains process the information. So now let's relate to the Social Network.

Last night I ad the opportunity to see an early showing of this new and exciting film. I realized that we strive to live off of someone else life because somewhere in our mind we think maybe (maybe it is) better than our own. The thing is we rush to the movies to watch a character who did something really truly amazing, but even he wasn't really content with his life. You get two different view of the character, Zach. The first scene he truly makes an ass of himself and you get this idea spun around at multiple times. You also see that he just isn't scene. By the end you pity him almost. You feeling sorry for him puts him on an invisible pedestal that he may or may not deserve. So what am I getting at? If you were friends with Zach or somehow connected to him in real life would you still idolize him? Or would you see through him? Has film given us almost the super human power of seeing the best or worst out of someone because you are seeing them from an unbiased view point? The end result for me is that film gives me the ultimate escape because I get to think in a way that I don't normally get to experience unless I'm watching a movie mostly because when you have an opinion on a film no one can honestly criticizes you. Because you can say you're right or wrong (they can but who can say they're right)

So why don't we just go sit in a lobby and start experiencing life as a film enjoying what we have created for ourselves instead of what a made up character on a screen creates for us. we can do it all on our own.

Language as an Idea

What if language wasn't called language? Or a better way to put it, what if language was known as something entirely different? What I'm trying to say is that, if language was seen as a less condensed definition. Language is so narrow minded if you really think about it. Look what we have done to it. When you think of the word language, what pops up in your head? I'm sure its not that everything that we do is a type of language. No instead we have this backwards thought that is just means the way someone else talks or communicates. But look at it. Language is so much more then just a way of communicating. It has created our universe and the society that each individual lives in, without it there wouldn't be blogs to read, or newspapers to write, or art to see, or people to talk too. It makes the world go round in a sense because we have made it the most important thing to us besides eating, breathing, and living. But we didn't really think about what language really is. We just wrote it off as something that we use, it's a tool like everything else, we don't really give it any credit, or really think about it unless we are learning a new language. Even then do we really see at as something grand or do we just memorize new phrases and new words to continue our own search for the things we want out of our lives? I feel as though I'm in a world that is based of wanting instead seeing how amazing the world really is. I know that in retrospect I'm a tiny dot that is meaningless, but my tiny dot is happy. My tiny dot is trying to do everything she can to appreciate what is around her and that the communication she has with her friends and family and strangers, gives her a chance to live an even better life. Language is much more than syllables and sounds escaping from the hole in the lower center of our face. Language is something that we should show a little respect for. It gives us that one extra thing that "brings us above the rest". Without it we would live very boring lives.

MY FAVORITE YEAR

So there are auditions for My Favorite Year tonight and tomorrow at 6-10 pm at Boucke, so if you love dancing, singing, acting, or some combination show your face in rooms 303-305!!!

It's going to be a good year!

Is a Tree really a Tree?

So one day some guy decided, look at that thing that looks like wood with little pieces of things stuck on other things that goes up. Let's name it. Hmm but what? What sounds good on the tip of my tongue when I look at this fine image in my head? Tree. That's a good one. And so another word was created and another word was added to the book of words that was then later translated across the world in all different languages and that word was then put on every bookshelf in every Barnes & Nobles in America in the Webster's Dictionary.

Is that how it happened? Did we just one day decide well there we go, here's another word to describe that bird or that "wooden" coffee table or the shower head? It seems as though we just created words simply because sounds made sense, they rolled off our tongues and formed sentences. But what is a sentence you may ask? Well does anyone really know. If you look at this rule by the fond philosopher, Saussure, then we really aren't saying anything at all. There is indeed no meaning to our madness. We create things and we buy things and we talk to people and we love things/people, but what does it really all mean in the end. It seems to me like we just die, something happens to our bodies. Well that's what I think. It had to be for something at least a recycling of the earth at least. I hope that the sounds we make are actually something, that we created something more then just a convenience of speech. It would scare the majority of the population if they really sat down and realized that the sounds each race, each ethnicity, each culture forms out of their mouths was nothingness. Why would it scare the majority of people. Well think about it. Wouldn't you be scared if you sat down and realized that you weren't here for any reason at all. That if you died, everything would just continue going. Well it does, you dying would affect the people and things that surround you, but if you 100% listened to this philosopher, you would drive yourself mad and the people around you would grow less and less, until if you did die, it really wouldn't matter. Who wants to live like that?

So instead we talk, we write, we communicate. Simply to stay sane. So that tree outside my window, it's a tree to me, well most days it's a tree.

Mammal Vs Mammal: CTE200

So the regular four folk that read my blog haha, I am adding an extra weekly blog about my awesome Critical Theory English 200 class. I love my prof and the topics in class so it should be an interesting read! Just thought I would put that out there...

So all of these philosophers tell us that humans are meaningless and there really isn't any point of us being here. If you look at the amount of time we have lived to the amount of time the Earth has been orbiting the sun, we make no dent in its history. This may seem depressing and if you take each word of the essays we have been reading literally, you may indeed want to slit your wrists and feel as though life is pointless, but if you go deeper than the surface most of the writers seem to be saying that we should just accept that our life is simply to live and enjoy what we make happen. It's not going to change how the world turns or really how the world ends up, not saying that there aren't things like the environment that must be protected, but in general if you become a writer or an engineer, its really not going to make a difference once the next generation of people show up. Or at least in the grand scheme of things it shouldn't.

All of this talk of human existence not being as meaningful as everyone lets on helped me out. Made me realize that I might as well do the things I truly enjoy and take a leap of faith in my own life; giving myself one major goal, to be happy. If there is happiness with or without lots of income or "material" wealth, my life wasn't spent being angry or depressed or alone. Which in my mind makes more sense then just living for some new gadget. But besides my whole take on it, I'd like to bring up a new point that the philosophers didn't really get to. Why is it that we put ourselves above everything living? We are always the alpha dog, but seriously, we have created our own languages, how do we know that other living being on this earth haven't also created their own way of speaking. Other animals obviously have their ways of communicating, but why do we put ourselves above everything else. Just because we don't understand their terminology doesn't mean they don't have their own language or common speech. These philosophers tell us that we are nothing to this earth, that in a couple hundred or thousand years our existence won't matter, so why do we make ourselves so important. Why is it that the other animals may not just be as smart and "intelligent" as the humans? They haven't brought it up and I don't understand how it couldn't be a possibility. Would it just be to scary to admit, does fear stop us from believing that maybe we aren't the only ones "existing for no reason at all"?

Incredible Lov

I love love. There are many different kinds of love and many different ways of showing love. But as a constant observer of this wonderful beautiful thing, I have found that the deepest is between that love that brings you total happiness. The thing about this type of love, this one love that everyone yearns for is terribly frightening to get too. No one knows if they have found it or if they have something like it or maybe they haven't found it at all and our simply faking the fact they "found it". The thing about this ONE love is that it is the most miraculous, who can say you haven't got it? Who can say they have? Instead of finding it, it just happens. When you aren't asking for it or wanting more out of love. It just happens. It comes up from behind you and embraces you and unless you let it go, it will stay forever. Because once it happens and the two people that are involved at that moment become one person. They don't change who they are individually they simply become something new that is even grander then they can realize. I call it that one love simply because it is above the rest. It makes everything else seem minimal. Once you find it, you can look at your life in the mirror and laugh at all the things that you once were so concerned about. I am not saying that someone should give up living. I'm just saying that you will give up thinking that everything is so important because in totally honesty, the things we are so concerned about before the one love comes along is just to make us not so concerned about not having the one love. I'm giving the L word a big ego and probably giving it to much credit, but I have seen love and felt it. It's warm and unbearably wrenching. It can turn a life around. It has the most power over our emotions and something that can literally control the ticking of our heart deserves a lot of credit and an even bigger ego. The great thing about love is that if that one love goes or stays love is still left inside you. Love never goes away, it doesn't turn on you. No people turn on you, but people also say and never let the love created go. The one love is created, combining individual love, while the love that lives inside us is our best friend.

I was told by someone that I loved that I was unlovable, I was helpless. Maybe for now that is true, but you can become lovable again. You just have to find where it went, where your personal love went. Once you find that, love can be created love can be given and received. Another friend would call me mushy for bringing any of this up, but deep down I know they think the same things, they are just protecting themselves. For me, the love I have in my hands is then I can handle and so I give it out to my dearest friends. I may not show it enough to the person I need to when the time comes, but I have seen what its like to lose track of the love inside. So I bring it deeper inside as to not lose it. The thing we all need to learn. They thing we all need to see and feel and taste and touch and comprehend, is the fact that usually when you find out that you love someone. That you know 100% you love the other person and doing nothing at all, but having them two feet away, or snuggled up in your arms, or across the room cooking, that you honestly love them, that they aren't going anywhere either. They made the choice too. What's going through your head is going through theirs. They are afraid you will leave, that that love is going to be lost. That they are going to have to start again and find themselves. But at that point, you need to stand your ground, see what's more important, which is more important. The love or yourself. That will define it, that will show you the time that needs to be spent with this love you have created. It is the hardest question that will probably ever be asked by everyone throughout the ages. But it is one that you answer on your own. You then have to believe that the choice you make is the right one and when it comes time that you know it is or isn't meant to last, it will come to an end or never end. It's confusing and it's hard, but we all know or at least have some inkling of what I'm saying, the key is you have to want to realize that what I'm saying we all have to do.

A friend like myself, the one that has always been there for the talks, the chatter before in the middle and in the end, that friend that me in your life, will always be there, but they can't I can't make the choice for you. If only the friend that me could, but sadly we can't. We are merely people, bystanders watching the love that is created and yearned for and held...