Travel Plans

Posted on May 10, 2011 by Nick Keirle

So, I haven’t really written anything here for a good while. That’s not because I’ve had a boring semester; this semester has been absolutely fantastic. And it’s also not because I haven’t had any interesting events to talk about; among other things I’ve climbed stadiums, had magnificent and tumultuous gatherings of friends and friends-of-friends, and run along McKeldin Mall in my underwear (admittedly with several hundred others for a rather good cause). No, I haven’t written anything here because I’m lazy, and because I forgot. The Semester’s almost over, and I’ll be returning home to England reasonably soon. In just over a month’s time, in fact. I’m very sad to be leaving, and I’m sure I’ll be writing something about that pretty soon, but for now I’m going to settle for keying people in to my travel plans.

Semester finishes on the 18th of May, and I get to stay in the country until the 19th of June. I’ll actually be flying out of JFK on the 18th of June, but between the end of semester and that time I’ll be visiting friends around the country, and also just travelling on my own for a good old time. First thing’s first, myself and a few of my good friends are going to glamorous New Jersey. One of my friends has a beach house there, and we intend to relax there for just over a week. I’ve been told it’ll also be possible for us to make a trip to the as-seen-on-Jersey-Shore famous cultural centre and prospective World Heritage Site of Seaside Heights. Other than that I’d also be sad if I don’t get the opportunity to visit the Statue of Liberty at some point.

After this a friend and I are flying out to San Francisco, California to meet another of my friends who is going to be working in a national park up in northern California. We’ll be spending a few days in a hostel in San Francisco, though my friend is hardly thrilled with the idea of staying in a hostel, and then spending the weekend up in the national park, where I hope we aren’t accosted by bears.

After this I’ll be flying out of San Francisco on my own to Chicago. I’ll spend about four days there, walking around, seeing the sights, and hopefully meeting other travellers, before heading off via long train journey to New Orleans. Now, that’s really a very long train journey; over a day in fact. But it saves me around three hundred dollars, so I’m somewhat comfortable with the idea.

So finally I’ll spend five days in New Orleans before heading back up to New Jersey to collect my suitcases, say a final goodbye to a couple of my close friends, and then leave the country semi-permanently. But while I’m in New Orleans I’ll be sure to see the sights, taste the southern foods, delight in the southern drawls, and get too comfortable with a group of other travellers, before deciding to trust them, following them to a ‘fun party’ with ‘some of their friends’ in an unfamiliar part of town, and being robbed and brutally murdered. Sorry mum, that’s definitely not going to happen. But if something very bad does happen, well, then this blog post will take on an undesired but not entirely unforeseen level of morbidity.

Don’t worry, I’ll be fine. And I’m hoping I’ll have a great time. I’ll be very careful, and I’ll see everyone back home soon enough. Maybe I’ll write a little bit more about my semester between revision for finals this and next week. Otherwise my last post from America will be a kind of goodbye-letter to everyone from College Park, and elsewhere in the States, that I’ve had the pleasure of knowing.

Bye for now,

Nick

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Films of 2010 – Part 2

Posted on February 14, 2011 by Nick Keirle

Dogtooth

A wealthy Greek family live secluded in the countryside in their walled-off home. The three children (two daughters and one son) are brought up in complete isolation from the outside world. In fact, they’re taught that outside the walls of their grounds the world is a hostile place that spells great danger for all who venture out. The entire modern world is denied, and to these children their parents are the only people that exist. And ‘children’ is the right word here, even though the siblings are all of adult age: they’re mentally stunted and emotionally infantile because of the way they’ve been raised. Even their basic understanding of the world has been perverted by their parents: planes flying overhead are described as tiny birds, and cats are said to be deadly monsters (this leads to a pretty horrific scene where the son confronts a cat that’s wandered into the family’s garden). The parents never show any doubt about whether it’s right of them to isolate their children so, and presumably they think they’re protecting them from the harshness of the real world, though not much is ever explicitly stated. The film concerns itself with their warped daily life, and the destabilising effect the introduction of an outsider, brought in to satisfy the son’s growing sexual desires, brings to the family. It’s fascinating, even if you don’t care about its status as a critique of Greek society and family life. It’s also, to be perfectly honest, one of the most uncomfortable experiences I’ve ever had in a cinema: it’s uncompromisingly full-on in terms of physical harm, and it’s graphic displays of sex and incest are certainly hard-going. If you think any film that features sex is inherently pornographic or titillating then, well, probably take a look at this Dogtooth, because there’s nothing erotic about the sex portrayed throughout. It’s an extremely rewarding film though, and while it earns its 18-rated certificate with gusto, it’s something that deserves to be seen by many.

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A Single Man

This film is essentially a vehicle for Colin Firth to show the world how he’s turned out to be one of the finest actors of our times. Firth plays an expat Englishman living in California, working as a college professor. Almost a year ago George’s [Firth] partner Jim died in a car crash, and the film follows a single day in George’s life; what he intends to be his last day. We follow George through his day, and through flashbacks and dreams of his partner’s death (as well as his memory of  receiving the news of Jim’s death, which is a scene that is heat-rending partly because of its simplicity, and partly because of how it throws an entirely unrestrained outpouring of emotion in with the rest of George’s actions throughout the film, which are reserved, quiet, and painfully stoical). This is a wonderfully stylish, substantial effort from debut director Tom Ford. I think it’s kind of a tragedy that Firth didn’t get an Oscar for this, though I think that he’ll definitely get one for his work in The King’s Speech this year.

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Heartless

Jamie was born with a heart-shaped birthmark on his face, and as a result he has some serious issues with his self-image. It’s also hinted quite strongly that he has a history of serious psychological problems, and one’s stance on this is going to vastly alter how one interprets the more otherworldly-natured aspects of the film. He lives in East London, (which is gloriously shot throughout) and the whole area is on the brink of chaos due to the intensely violent activities of a local gang, who are reported to wear demon masks. When the gang brutally murder Jamie’s mother in front of his eyes he finds they are really demons in disguise as humans, and later he is offered a Faustian bargain by a mysterious man in an abandoned block of flats. This man agrees to remove Jamie’s birthmarks if he introduces an element of chaos, in the form of a brutal and unprovoked murder, into the world. The world around him, or Jamie himself if you prefer, falls further and further into  madness and violence, and we’re never really given a clear explanation of just what the hell is going on. Its ending is both horrifying and strangely, inexplicably delightful. It’s sad that it was shown in about five movie theatres around the country, but hopefully its director (multitalented Philip Ridley) can keep making movies with the kind of imagination and freedom he’s shown here.

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Black Swan

Another wilfully incomprehensible film here. Black Swan is either an insane, unhinged tour de force or an insane, unhinged piece of rubbish, depending on who you ask. What everyone seems to agree on is that Natalie Portman is phenomenal in her role as a perfectionist, unsociable dancer falling down under the intense pressure of the ballet world. There’s flinch-worthy physical harm, psychological fracturing (probably better described as utter psychological shattering), and an obligatory Lynchian lesbian scene. I felt it suffered a little in its first third, but once it came into its own it was utterly spellbinding. The cinematography was very impressive, both in many little effects (the strobing in the club scene comes to mind as particularly impressive), and in its ability to show us impressive feats of ballet without simply panning back and showing it to us: the camera swoops in and around the dancers, helping us to see the dancing as something manic and primal. I feel it’s less a film that you should attempt to put together as a coherent series of events, and more one that should be simply experienced. I’m not sure it’s meant to make sense, but few good films about mental decline really do. It’s hurried pace whips itself into a frenzy in the last twenty or so minutes, and it becomes something else entirely, and that’s probably the point where I fell for it completely.

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New York City

Posted on January 30, 2011 by Nick Keirle

I returned to America on the 16th of January, with considerably less trouble than when I flew home in the days before Christmas. After a day in College Park I caught a bus heading to New York City, where I’d meet my friend Nicole. Having never been to New York before I was extremely intrigued to see if it would live up to the expectations that result from over a decade of watching films and television shows set in NYC. Within ten minutes of getting off my bus at 33rd and 7th I saw ten or so police officers raiding a van in the middle of the road. So I decided to put a little tick next to one of the expectations in the list. Later I met Nicole and her friend Jesse (and one of his friends), and we set off to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The American grid system is a brilliant, if a little impersonal, way of setting out a city. However, the New York subway system feels like an afterthought; lines scribbled together and criss-crossing with reckless abandon over each other on the subway map. The lines are named, rather unhelpfully, 1, 2, 3,… and A, B, C,… rather than anything particularly memorable. Here you go.

The Met was very interesting, but unfortunately it closed quite early, so we weren’t able to see a great deal of what it had to offer. Later we had a good meal at a Eastern food restaurant, and Nicole and I caught the train from Penn Station to her hometown in New Jersey. In order to get there we had to transfer at Newark, which was not a nice place. It’s a notoriously dnagerous city, and the train station gets that information across very quickly.

The next day we went back into New York City again, and got to spend a lot more time exploring (well, it was exploring for me, at least). We went into the lobby of the Empire State Building, though we didn’t go up to the top because it was extremely expensive. After that we walked to Times Square, which was very impressive. However, like most of New York, it didn’t feel as big as I expected it to. This is probably because I’ve seen Times Square hundreds of times on television and in films, where it’s always portrayed as huge, neon, and overwhelming. Granted, we saw it during the day, and it’s probably something entirely different at night, but I still got the feeling that it wasn’t really anything that certain streets in London couldn’t reach, or at least approach, in terms of sheer size and impressiveness. I’m not complaining of course: I thought New York as a whole was a fantastic city to see, and I’d love one day to spend a long period of time living there. It certainly feels like there’s a lot to discover, especially if you make an effort to explore.

Later we went to the Museum of Modern Art. Modern art museums are always interesting to experience, even, or probably especially, if you’re a person who doesn’t appreciate modern art. I have to say that I, by and large, don’t appreciate vast swathes of it; conceptual art, specifically. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with what it’s trying to do in principle, and I’m not going to dismiss anything without experiencing it, but I just think that a lot of what it as a whole does, such as challenging our conceptions as to the nature of art, or attempting to be explicitly self-referential about art, isn’t really very interesting. Walking through the many levels of the MoMA occasionally let me see something that I find genuinely interesting, but it largely left me cold. There was one piece that was a looping video of a woman eating a hot pepper, and then rubbing it into her eye. We also got to see a performance artist play with a bit of string on a table. That is literally what she did for the entirety of the day.

Later we wandered around, trying to find somewhere to eat (after I was taken to the Museum of Sex, which was equal parts interesting and harrowing; leading to several memorable lines, such as ‘that’s a very wide vagina’ and ‘The tortoise’s penis really looks like a giant spike – ohgodwheredidthattentaclecomefrom’). We walked round for a very long time, but eventually found a place where I ate my bodyweight in chicken.

The next day we stayed in New Jersey and walked around Nicole’s hometown. Anyone who’s ever been in New Jersey can understand that I’m deadly serious when I say that walking anywhere in New Jersey strongly reminded me of Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road’. And the day after that I headed back into New York and waited for my bus back to D.C.. I had a lot of time to kill, so I decided to wander down broadway to find somewhere to eat. Somewhere in a street near Times Square I stumbled across the New York headquarters for the Church of Scientology, and I decided to eat at a pizza place just across the street. It was a nice way to end my short stay in NYC.

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As for music, well, I’ve been listening to a fair amount of new (in most cases just new to me) stuff. A couple days ago I decided to buy Joanna Newsom’s debut album ‘The Milk-Eyed Mender’. She’s a musician I’ve been unable to really get into in the past because of her slightly odd voice. Someone linked me to a track off her 2010 album, and it really got a hold of me. Her voice is very distinctive, and unlike anything I’ve really heard before, but where at first I couldn’t understand the appeal now I find it strangely calming in its childlike nature (apparently she doesn’t like when people call her voice childlike, but there isn’t really another way to put it, to be honest). She plays the harp, and she writes startlingly poetic lyrics. And she’s Awesome. (I’m sure she’s probably on Spotify, but that doesn’t work in the US).

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I also recently finished reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s ‘Everything is Illuminated’. It’s a magic realist novel about the Holocaust, the past, and remembering the two. It’s utterly fascinating, if not wholly satisfying (though I tend to think that’s part of the point). It’s also got the best name of any book I’ve ever read.

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