The missing, the madness, the music

There’s a line in Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” (see: inescapable radio hit of March 2012) where she sings, “Before you came into my life/I missed you so bad”, which I find a strangely profound thought in such an otherwise boppy, playful song (one that Justin Bieber absolutely loves, in case you hadn’t heard). The line captures something about that weird feeling of rightness upon finding something or someone that simply works for you. Balance restored, and all that. Robyn sings about a similar feeling in 2011’s “Call Your Girlfriend”, saying “Don’t you tell her that I give you something/That you never even knew you missed...” She’s even more reluctant than Carly to name exactly what it is that was missing, though we all have our guesses.

Philosophical conundrum aside (as in, how can you miss what you can’t perceive, UGH), these two ladies fleetingly mention something genuinely interesting. Is this a particularly 2012 thing, this longing for what we don’t quite have, this sense of dissatisfaction that comes with having incredible access to the world through your screen but not being able to physically touch it? Or am I overthinking it and it's actually just human nature and you're saying to yourself, "Man, what is this, a Grade 11 Media & Culture Studies class in 2005?"

It’s hard to say. But as Carly and Robyn know, you can certainly recognize a real thing (minor or major) when you stumble onto it, as vague as that sounds.

A minor example for you from my life: I found THIS today.

Not only did I immediately “get” Matthew & the Atlas, they get me. And even if I wasn’t specifically thinking, “Please, universe, give me a mash-up between The Decemberists, Civil Wars and Mumford & Sons, STAT”, the universe obliged and made me click on it and now I feel like I have a new friend x 5.

See? Minor example. But real nonetheless.

And also don’t get me started on books as friends. That’s a whole other discussion.

-         

For those days

when you feel a bit off, let's propose a new term: they're check-in days. As per my wise roommate, who introduced this term to me, it's when you've had a bit of time to think and to self-evaluate and you abruptly question your sense of purpose with a 'Whoops, what am I actually doing?'. She doesn't mean like when you stop in the middle of a task, like erasing an old hard drive, because you forgot how to perform it. In a grander sense, it's about at which point you find yourself in your life. And if you're wondering why I'm leading off a post with this: oh yes, today was one of those days for me. It's ok, though, don't fret, because this thing (ennui, maybe? Help me out, French existentialists) passes pretty quickly. Sometimes all you need to do is to pick up copies of Evelyn Waugh books or walk past a park full of exuberant kids skating on Family Day and know that despite the odd stab of melancholy on an otherwise radiantly sunny day, things are perfectly fine.

For everyone's benefit, however, I will now helpfully provide a list of Things That Don't Assuage Melancholic Stabs of Sadness:

• vacantly wandering the ADD wilderness of Tumblr and staring at GIFs of the Real Housewives until they stop making sense and you question the validity of your own existence
• re-watching The Notebook for the first time since 2004 (Things that improve with time: Ryan Gosling. Things that don't: my threshold for old-people sadness)
• anything to do with Lana Del Rey
• anything to do with Whitney Houston (RIP)
• (surprisingly) Bon Iver, or at least his latest album. I thought homeboy understood me, and maybe he does, but darn it if "Calgary" makes me want to weep and then give up on making creative things because he's a genius.

BONUS: Things That Do Help Assuage Melancholic Stabs of Sadness:

• Evelyn Waugh's entire oeuvre
• the comedy stylings of Jon Richardson
• talking to my wee niece on the phone (who can't talk yet, but you can hear her breathing)
• the prospect that tomorrow will be better
• writing a blog post alllllll about it

BONUS BONUS: Jon knows that sometimes all you need is a good moan. Peaks and valleys!

Talk to y'all soon!

"A fragile show..."

I've been researching 2D animation over the past week or so for an upcoming project, trying to get a sense of what's out there and who's acting as its gatekeepers. Result: it's alive, vibrant and still massively innovative. There's much, much more than just Disney out there.

I think many of us remain fascinated by traditional animation and its sense of built-in magic. Its intuitive hand-drawn-ness counteracts the hyperreality of on-screen CGI worlds that often exist just to be destroyed (preach it to me, Transformers), and rescues the emotional from being too well-recreated. Even the best-received CGI films of the past few years, like Up (2009), Toy Story 3 (2010) or Tangled (2010), have been lauded for their warmth and artistry rather than just for their outstanding graphics. Tangled is especially noted for its reverence for traditional art, as its creators made it their goal to render the film as a "three-dimensional painting": they cite the Romantic artist Fragonard as their main inspiration, lush Snow White-like backgrounds abound, and Rapunzel, the main character, expresses herself by painting large-scale artwork on the ceiling of her tower.

Examples of 2D animation are everywhere, but there were a few that blew me away. Check out the extraordinary work of Ari Gibson and Jason Pamment (Australia, 2011):

How beautiful is that? A whole world in three minutes.

This dreamy emotional intensity has made its way into the gaming world as well, where projects like Limbo (Denmark, 2010) exist in a disturbingly dark and foggy space:

And to keep with the theme of silent film-like ethereality (is that a word? If not, consider it coined), here's a handmade light-and-shadows show by Davy and Kristin McGuire (Germany, 2011) that I found along my YouTube travels. It can take a lot to find something so simple yet so astonishing these days, but these artists capture your imagination with the most basic tools in an animator's handbook: scissors, a camera, and light.

These projects may not seem too warm or fuzzy, but they're just three examples of the innovative work being done in the field. Now that major studios have seemingly switched to CGI more or less full time, it's fascinating to see the tradition flourishing in the online era.

And OK, one more... Tomm Moore's Oscar-nominated feature film The Secret of Kells (2009), mesmerizing to watch and completely in tune with the history of art and storytelling:

Don't you wish you'd paid better attention in art class? I sure do.

Adios!

Post the First

When I named my first blog (a little over four years ago--yikes) I rather solemnly subtitled it "A little learning is a dangerous thing", probably thinking romantically about how emancipatory knowledge and education could be for those who just needed a little bit of learning to break free. At the time, I believed my year spent abroad would be similar, even though I was the literally the opposite of oppressed at home (note: my parents have always and continue to be incredibly supportive of everything my brothers and I want to do. That one fact led me straight to the UK, actually). Including that line, however, was a tongue-in-cheek way of acknowledging that the grand backpacking tour I was about to embark on would give me some sort of alternative way of seeing the world.

Except, fast forward a few years to a few months ago, when I check out my now-archived travel blog after months of forgetting about it, and glance at the subtitle. It was like reading it for the first time. When I saw it again, I suddenly realized (much like those thunderbolt moments when something you've never considered suddenly makes a ton of sense, like, for example, suddenly noticing that in  'I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus', the kid's dad is Santa. Unbelievable) that what I'd typed four years ago was intended as exactly the opposite of what I meant it to be.

When Alexander Pope wrote that line in his poem An Essay On Criticism (1711), he was criticizing those who had a little knowledge of something and then acted like experts on the subject. With the hindsight of four years of travelling and further education, not only did I see the actual meaning of the phrase, but with a sinking feeling, recognized the signs of it in myself. There are some things that I do believe I have a deep knowledge of, thanks to formal and extended education (like film, for example, or the entire Harry Potter series...yes, years of deep research, mmhmm), but there is so much more that I have only a glancing and inconsistent framework for. Yet, like a lot of people, I still feel free to opine on and act like a guru about subjects I hardly know. It's easy to blame the Internet age and its in-many-ways wonderful tools, like Wikipedia or online newspapers, for an inconsistent and thumbnail-sized understanding of the world's issues. But I really do think it's important to acknowledge when your experience doesn't match your purported mastery of something. And when I noticed Pope's original meaning, I knew I wanted to change its alarming correctness in describing well, me.

And so, with that in mind, it's time to choose a path, much like I did when I moved to England for what turned out to be two years in total. Luckily, the phrase did come true for me the way I expected during my time there. 'A little learning' turned into 'a ton' fairly quickly. But now that I'm back, I know what I want is to truly know and deeply understand the craft of writing, rather than just know bits of a wildly varied array of arbitrary things (though there's definitely a place for that, too. I'm a massive trivia fan for that very reason).

This blog will be my record of how exactly I go about it and what I'm thinking and discovering along the way. If you want to join the discussion (and please do!) feel free to comment here or follow me on Twitter and tweet me there @gennellesmith!