The Girl with the Dragon tattoo is a story about a girl self segregated from mainstream society both outwardly with counter cultural hair, piercings, and tattoos and internally, avoiding substantial long term relationships as a victim of misogyny and rape. She's ultra intelligent, boasting a photographic memory, hacking mastery, and investigatory skills that not only rival the seeming protagonist but surpass him. On the surface, the films protagonist appears to be a neo-noir detective story about investigatie reporter Mikael blomkvist played by Daniel Craig that unfolds like a modern day game of "Clue" where the potential "who dunnit"'s are the members of a beyond dysfunctional wealthy Swedish family of industrialist Nazis. However, in the hands of David Fincher, it is a follow up to the social network and another tale of alienated genius driven by the desire to connect with the one person that provides a sense of normalcy. Played by Rooney Mara, Lisbeth Salander outwardly mutilates her skin with piercings and tattoos to cope and withdraw from her internal scars.
The film is a US studio remake of the 2 year old Swedish Indie adaptation of the novel by Stieg Larsson. Larsson himself witnessed a brutal rape at a young age, and most likely developed the intriguing character Lisbeth from an obsessive insight into how such brutallity could effect a woman. Despite critics who find the characterization of the books antagonists to be superficial and lacking depth, he is successful at inventing a unique ultra feminist revenge heroine and story rich with unpredictable plot twists and detail. Those are the successes that probably garnered Fincher's interest which he cultivated for his stripped down American version.
This is evidently an ideal playground for Fincher who's most significant contributions to Film have been heavy handed studies of the sociopathic such as Seven, Zodiac, Fight Club, and even the Social Network.
According to wikipedia: "Antisocial personality disorder is described by the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, fourth edition (DSM-IV-TR), as an Axis II personality disorder characterized by "...a pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others that begins in childhood or early adolescence and continues into adulthood.""
Psychopathology as in Seven, Zodiac, and Fight club would be a subset of sociopathology. (Anti-Social Personality Disorder)
In the Social network, Zuckerberg's character whether in real life or not is portrayed as at least antisocial, obsessive-compulsive, and passive aggressive. The Social Network and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo not only share similar non-psychopathic potentially borderline sociopathic misunderstood geniuses, but they also share most of the same talented ensemble crew.
Here I have listed the shared cast and Crew members along with selected previous works:
Screenplay- Steven Zaillian
Moneyball
American gangster
Gangs of new York
Hannibal
A Civil Action
Clear and present Danger
Schindler's List
Cinamatography- Jeff Cronenweth
Social Network
Fight Club
Music- Trent Reznor
Social network
And Atticus Ross also music
Social network
Book of eli
Editing- Kirk Baxter
Social Network
Curious Case of benjamin button
Zodiac
And Angus Wall also editing
Social network
Curious case of benjamin button
Zodiac
Panic room
Actress- Rooney Mara
That list alone should provide enough supportive assurance of the quality of this film. In each of those areas, this film is a master example. And even though i have yet to see the swedish version, i would wager that a Film class could devote a portion of its curriculum to comparing the swedish version to Fincher's as a comparitive study of narrative technique and mastery. For example Fincher and Cronenweth demonstrate a thorough mastery of cinamatorphic language in every frame from the shot to shot continuity of motion to the Choices of framing its characters. Whether they are coming or going, standing afar, obscured by objects, or the Camera is moving from low to high while rotating so that Mara's character becomes upside down and tinted red, they provide intense psychological narrative that tells us how to feel about the characters and how they might feel at each given moment. My initial favorite probably being the sequence introducing Mara's character.
Unlike most psychological mystery thrillers, this is not a game of cat and mouse, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is a stripping away of layers until the characters nude wounds are left bare like artful tattoos.
As an entertaining movie I would not recommend this film if your IQ is not at least in the 100 and up range or else you might not keep up with the dizzying amount of information Fincher forces you to follow quickly. If you have read the book or seen the swedish version then the twists and turns probably won't surprise you and if you haven't studied film than you probably won't appreciate the amount of technique that bubbles below the surface of the complicated plot. If you are squeamish about graphic violence, then you probably wont enjoy the punches Fincher doesn't hold back from throwing. If you don't fit any of those requirements then you might at least appreciate the compelling performaces of its cast.
Particularly Rooney Mara. The product of New York Giants football royalty, she demonstrates an impressive amount of acting talent and social intelligence. If you don't remember her from the Social Network, she plays Erica Albright the girlfriend of Mark Zuckerberg played by Jessie Eisenberg and I will briefly tangent about the opening scene.
Written by Aaron Sorkin who won an Oscar for it, the Opening Scene of The Social Network introduces us to Mark Zuckerberg. The scene itself concisely conveys so much about character but requires so much subtlety that I consider it one of the better written singular scenes for two actors to exercise acute skill.
Personally I often tire of actors that claim to know more about acting because of whatever training or experience they possess but fail to recognize how difficult to achieve the degree of success that scene possesses. During the Renaissance period, an Italian painter by the name of Giotto di Bondone was commisioned by Pope Benedict to demonstrate his worthiness by painting a single drawing. He drew a single perfect circle with a pen dipped in red ink by fixing his arm firmly against his side to make a compass and turning the sheet of paper. Despite the courier thinking he was made a fool of, Giotto was chosen as his skill was recognized to greatly surpass the other painters (Giotto's Circle). I personally regard the opening scene of the Social network as Rooney Mara's Giotto circle.
Simple and subtle her character arcs from Jovial banter, to on her heels apologetic defense, to being offended, disgusted, angry, and then she breaks up with him in a snap decision while remaining cordial, until she finally loses control and aggressively puts him in his place. From her feigned attention to the tic of a single left eye lid to the pursing of lips that surpress her steaming lid about to blow, the subtle execution displays more skill than any screaming argument one might obviously point to. In a film where Eisenberg's protagonist intellectually steamrolls every character while barely allocating a portion of his genius selective attention, Mara's Erica Albright is the only one who can keep up with him. While he jumps around from one complex statement or witty insult to the next, she quickly processes and fences back with an equally witty response, ultimately defeating him. It is the most crucial scene of the film because it defines the broken connection that drives the character to create a multi-billion dollar social networking site. We have to believe that this girl is the one person he wants to be friends with. Not his business partner. This girl. (The Social Network's Opening Scene 1st half Written)
And if that is Mara's Giotto's circle, Her portrayal of Lisbeth Salander is her roman chapel. She's just as quick witted, her responses are short and sharp. She speaks with a decent scandinavian accent that is believable enough if not purposefully strange. She hides depths of emotion, is capable of ruthlessness, physical and emotional strength, while being completely fragile when she opens her walls. She performs a wide range of unimaginable feats of human action while winning over an audience to care about her. The result is an iconic performance and an unforgettable protagonist that Strengthens Fincher's vision of a wounded genius. I predict great things for Rooney Mara.
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is an excellent film and will no doubt recieve several oscar nods. It's not necessarily the best film of 2011 but it was worth writing about. Also, I cant say that everyone will enjoy this film but hopefully some will appreciate it as much as I did.
A small window into Fincher's team through a behind the scenes about the post from The Social Network:
The Social Network Post part 1
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone
Thursday, December 22, 2011
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Music and the subconcsious: a scientific qualitative meditation
I've spent the last several months in a deep study of music. I'm not only filming a documentary project that aims to dive into the how's and why's of the cultural movement of electronic music but I've been learning to compose in Logic and Ableton Live. Despite being a music fanatic all my life, the process has made me feel re-freshed as though I am a foreigner and the ways and customs of the musical world are alien. It's lead me into deep personal meditations that ask why? Why do we listen to music. How does it effect us? What is the point of dancing? Is there a biological explanation? What is the nature of emotion and why is it so closely entwined with the consumption of music?
I'm at work. I was bored. I opened spotify. Typed in M83 and started zoning out. M83 is named after a spiral galaxy, Messier 83 spearheaded by french musician Anthony Gonzalez. Often compared to Shoegaze or goth pop, I prefer to categorize it with the likes of Empire of the sun as Indie dream pop. Its epic out of this world sound is full of spacious reverb, passionate vocals, piercing high synths, and urgent low basslines were complex and freshly interesting enough to transport my mind to a distant mental state. While the new album "Hurry Up We're Dreaming's" unrelenting desire to be "epic" could be considered wearying, I personally found the pace pleasantly escapist. Hopefully the play Coachella in 2012, because if they do they could quite possibly be next year's "Empire of the Sun" experience for me. Or atleast they could have been if I don't over expose myself by then.
I am however not writing this blog because I'm in love with M83. I'm writing it because they happened to be the catalyst to a meditational epiphany.
The power of music to liberate the spirit is as universally understood as the enjoyable experience of warm sunlight or a cool breeze. Yet, the familiarity seems to leave us content with barely landing on the surface how music effects us. I propose a hypothesis. Music taps into our emotional centers because it requires sub-concsious aspects of the brain to process it. It is primal.
Visual information as in written language and visual art is uniquely human. Think about pictures and silent movies. Their full of detail and they instantly correspond to memories and ideas about what we are looking at. Instant isomorphic correspondence is unavoidable and takes place in the neo-cortex, the more evolved uniquely human part of the brain. So does language. Abstract ideas, image processing and language, live in the conscious mind and our memories.
Audio processing on the other hand is older. Back when we were mammals trudging through the darkness on the alert for danger, back when our ears could swivel, and we couldn't speak, we depended on the ability to process sounds. Our survival depended on determining the difference between a snapping twig or the harmless chirping of mating crickets.
In the case of music, we get hit in both places. Lyrics, especially poetic ones require higher abstract processes and they tell us about memories and experience that our conscious neocortex later tells us how to feel about. The instrumental sounds of music excites a more primal and subconscious sense of how we feel. The scale volume and pitch of a sound tells us about it's size and weight as in whether it is large and ominous or light and playful. The rhythm of the sounds tell us about its urgency and give us a sense of change over time, like a steady comforting heartbeat in the womb, the banging at a door, or the speeding build up of a house track. The pitch variation in music requires highly mathematical processes. But unless you're a composer or a dancer, you're never consciously counting, dividing, and adding 1/8ths and quarter notes into timescale mathematics. It is our subconscious that recognizes the dance steps of an instruments notes. The image of A person wearing a costume isn't silly or scary unless we have a preconceived notion about what they are wearing whereas we develop an emotional reaction to a series of notes regardless. You don't have to have heard a melody before for it to make you feel happy or sad, the mathematical configuration of the notes gives us that information instantly. That's why they say playing classical music for babies makes them smarter. It's like building muscles in a aerobics class for audio pattern recognition software of the mind. Classical music has a greater level of complexity and learning to recognize the motion paths of the notes upon the musical scale teaches the mind to process like a kid reading War and Peace versus reading twilight. The subconsious mind is much more closely wired to the emotional parts, the parts that are behind the guy behind the guy in our decision making.
Think of it like this. The sound of a heartbeat needs no intellectual context. A heart beat is calm or slow, excited and quick, angry and intense, or it flutters with amorous infatuation. But in a greater sense, the human spirit is behind those rhythms. Whether we long for love or we run in fear, the human spirit and the human heart share the same sense of rhythmic variation. One being physical, the other being metaphysical. Music just more directly interfaces with the parts of the brain that process and communicate this information. Images and language must go upstairs to the management team in the neocortex, but music goes straight to the people without management decisions and mental bureaucracy. It tells us how to feel, whether to fear, aspire, or love, it makes us feel strong or vulnerable or amorous. Its rhythms speak directly to the places that make us feel
Play that Funky Music,
-MM
I just thought of a counter argument to prove this entire entry to be pseudo intellectual drivel. If music is so primal and originates in primitive subconcious parts of the brain,f then why aren't more animals musical? Why aren't other animals effected by our music? There must be a lot more going on that is human specific.
I'm at work. I was bored. I opened spotify. Typed in M83 and started zoning out. M83 is named after a spiral galaxy, Messier 83 spearheaded by french musician Anthony Gonzalez. Often compared to Shoegaze or goth pop, I prefer to categorize it with the likes of Empire of the sun as Indie dream pop. Its epic out of this world sound is full of spacious reverb, passionate vocals, piercing high synths, and urgent low basslines were complex and freshly interesting enough to transport my mind to a distant mental state. While the new album "Hurry Up We're Dreaming's" unrelenting desire to be "epic" could be considered wearying, I personally found the pace pleasantly escapist. Hopefully the play Coachella in 2012, because if they do they could quite possibly be next year's "Empire of the Sun" experience for me. Or atleast they could have been if I don't over expose myself by then.
I am however not writing this blog because I'm in love with M83. I'm writing it because they happened to be the catalyst to a meditational epiphany.
The power of music to liberate the spirit is as universally understood as the enjoyable experience of warm sunlight or a cool breeze. Yet, the familiarity seems to leave us content with barely landing on the surface how music effects us. I propose a hypothesis. Music taps into our emotional centers because it requires sub-concsious aspects of the brain to process it. It is primal.
Visual information as in written language and visual art is uniquely human. Think about pictures and silent movies. Their full of detail and they instantly correspond to memories and ideas about what we are looking at. Instant isomorphic correspondence is unavoidable and takes place in the neo-cortex, the more evolved uniquely human part of the brain. So does language. Abstract ideas, image processing and language, live in the conscious mind and our memories.
Audio processing on the other hand is older. Back when we were mammals trudging through the darkness on the alert for danger, back when our ears could swivel, and we couldn't speak, we depended on the ability to process sounds. Our survival depended on determining the difference between a snapping twig or the harmless chirping of mating crickets.
In the case of music, we get hit in both places. Lyrics, especially poetic ones require higher abstract processes and they tell us about memories and experience that our conscious neocortex later tells us how to feel about. The instrumental sounds of music excites a more primal and subconscious sense of how we feel. The scale volume and pitch of a sound tells us about it's size and weight as in whether it is large and ominous or light and playful. The rhythm of the sounds tell us about its urgency and give us a sense of change over time, like a steady comforting heartbeat in the womb, the banging at a door, or the speeding build up of a house track. The pitch variation in music requires highly mathematical processes. But unless you're a composer or a dancer, you're never consciously counting, dividing, and adding 1/8ths and quarter notes into timescale mathematics. It is our subconscious that recognizes the dance steps of an instruments notes. The image of A person wearing a costume isn't silly or scary unless we have a preconceived notion about what they are wearing whereas we develop an emotional reaction to a series of notes regardless. You don't have to have heard a melody before for it to make you feel happy or sad, the mathematical configuration of the notes gives us that information instantly. That's why they say playing classical music for babies makes them smarter. It's like building muscles in a aerobics class for audio pattern recognition software of the mind. Classical music has a greater level of complexity and learning to recognize the motion paths of the notes upon the musical scale teaches the mind to process like a kid reading War and Peace versus reading twilight. The subconsious mind is much more closely wired to the emotional parts, the parts that are behind the guy behind the guy in our decision making.
Think of it like this. The sound of a heartbeat needs no intellectual context. A heart beat is calm or slow, excited and quick, angry and intense, or it flutters with amorous infatuation. But in a greater sense, the human spirit is behind those rhythms. Whether we long for love or we run in fear, the human spirit and the human heart share the same sense of rhythmic variation. One being physical, the other being metaphysical. Music just more directly interfaces with the parts of the brain that process and communicate this information. Images and language must go upstairs to the management team in the neocortex, but music goes straight to the people without management decisions and mental bureaucracy. It tells us how to feel, whether to fear, aspire, or love, it makes us feel strong or vulnerable or amorous. Its rhythms speak directly to the places that make us feel
Play that Funky Music,
-MM
I just thought of a counter argument to prove this entire entry to be pseudo intellectual drivel. If music is so primal and originates in primitive subconcious parts of the brain,f then why aren't more animals musical? Why aren't other animals effected by our music? There must be a lot more going on that is human specific.
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
Steve Jobs and the Legacy of a Visionary
It is almost Midnight. It is the end of a rainy day in LA. The day that Steve Jobs passed away from a world he shaped with his ideas about technology, business, and how to live life moving forward. I've spent the last several hours since I got home from work reading up on a man who's ideas permeate every facet of my life. I learned that thinking of Jobs as an inventor who brought us the iPhone was wrong. He wasn't the inventor turned engineer. He wasn't "like Bill Gates but the Mac version". He was never the Engineer. That was Steve Wozniak. His co-founder of apple who actually designed the first Apple I computer. He wasn't the inventor who developed object oriented programming and the mouse-cursor interface. That was the engineers at Xerox PARC. He wasn't the Animator who revolutionized animation technology. That credit belongs to the John Lasseter and the creators of Pixar. He wasn't the one who invented PostScript. And from what I understand, he wasn't even running apple when they were selling macintosh computers to College students headed for their dorms, it was being run by John Sculley the man who had pushed him out. Steve Jobs was a visionary. He was the one who saw the potential in Steve Wozniak's little box of chips and circuits and convinced him to start a computer company. He was the one who while taking a tour of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center saw "a strange device called a mouse, that you could use to move a cursor around the screen. You could open files and folders, copy and paste content inside them. It was simply a breakthrough." Steve said "Within ten minutes, it was obvious to me that all computers would work like this someday." He was the one that saw the potential in Pixar that George Lucas didn't. It was he who encouraged the founders of Adobe, Warnock and Geschke to make PostScript into a standard computer language. And even though he wasn't the head of apple computers when it was selling the Macintosh computer to college students around the country, he was the one who spearheaded that division of apple and gave it direction. A friend rightfully called him a champion and facilitator of innovation. He developed a better computer because he saw that there was a need for one. He developed the iPod because he saw a use for one and unlike anyone else, he saw how it could change the way we consume music and how it could make his company flourish. He was the visionary.
In hind sight, its easy to call Jobs a visionary. Yesterday they announced the iPhone 4s and I blogged about it on my Macbook Pro while editing video in Final Cut Pro and listening to music I downloaded on iTunes. I can't go a single day without having my hands on an apple product. How can you not give him credit for being a visionary when we spend every day surrounded by tangible reminders of his impact on the world. Yet some of his greatest contributions are things that we don't touch. Steve Jobs changed the way companies develop market positioning because he saw that you could change the market and move everyone else's position around you. For instance, in 2003, Benioff and a few members of his executive team at salesforce.com went to talk to Jobs. Jobs told them they needed to build an ecosystem around their software. They did just that, by designing an ecosystem that it initially called the "app store," which basically let people buy apps and run them in Salesforce software. Steve later did it himself with iTunes and the App Store for the iPod and iPhone. Steve Jobs changed the way advertisers develop brand strategies. His iMac, iPod, iPhone, iLife, iEverything naming strategy proved that product iDentity is something that involves every aspect of how a consumer interacts with it, including the spelling. He changed the way we approach design and saw the aesthetics of design as the visual manifest of designs true function; re-inventing the way things work. His ideas were so far ahead of the curve that everyone to this day is still making sense of how revolutionary and important his ideas actually were. He taught the world how to envision realities that didn't exist and how to manifest them into being. When you think about it, foresight is the basis and function of intelligence; to more accurately predict and initiate future outcomes. In that way, you can definitely call him a genious. Looking at the length and breadth of Jobs' reach and the degree of impact he had on our world and its future, It becomes pretty evident that in the end his greatest legacy was showing us how to be a visionary. The world is all the more dim and blind without him in it to see and light the way.
RIP
-MM
"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. "
- Steve Jobs (Stanford Commencment Speech)
"Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts"
-Albert Einstein
This is the first apple computer. Where people saw a wooden box with chips and circuits inside, Steve Jobs saw a company. He talked Steve Wozniak into starting a company and sold his VW van to pay for building the first boards.
Steve had a good argument. We were in his car and he said — and I can remember him saying this like it was yesterday: “Well, even if we lose money, we’ll have a company. For once in our lives, we’ll have a company.” That convinced me. And I was excited to think about us like that. To be two best friends starting a company.
- Steve Wozniak (Co-Founder Apple Computers)
"...Things became much more clear that they were the results of human creation not these magical things that just appeared in one's environment that one had no knowledge of their interiors. It gave a tremendous level of self-confidence, that through exploration and learning one could understand seemingly very complex things in one's environment. My childhood was very fortunate in that way."
-Steven Paul Jobs
"We’re going to be a Fortune 500 company in two years. This is the start of an industry. It happens once a decade."
- Mike Markkula
"Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life or do you want to come with me and change the world?"
-Steven Paul Jobs (Recruiting PepsiCo executive John Sculley)
In hind sight, its easy to call Jobs a visionary. Yesterday they announced the iPhone 4s and I blogged about it on my Macbook Pro while editing video in Final Cut Pro and listening to music I downloaded on iTunes. I can't go a single day without having my hands on an apple product. How can you not give him credit for being a visionary when we spend every day surrounded by tangible reminders of his impact on the world. Yet some of his greatest contributions are things that we don't touch. Steve Jobs changed the way companies develop market positioning because he saw that you could change the market and move everyone else's position around you. For instance, in 2003, Benioff and a few members of his executive team at salesforce.com went to talk to Jobs. Jobs told them they needed to build an ecosystem around their software. They did just that, by designing an ecosystem that it initially called the "app store," which basically let people buy apps and run them in Salesforce software. Steve later did it himself with iTunes and the App Store for the iPod and iPhone. Steve Jobs changed the way advertisers develop brand strategies. His iMac, iPod, iPhone, iLife, iEverything naming strategy proved that product iDentity is something that involves every aspect of how a consumer interacts with it, including the spelling. He changed the way we approach design and saw the aesthetics of design as the visual manifest of designs true function; re-inventing the way things work. His ideas were so far ahead of the curve that everyone to this day is still making sense of how revolutionary and important his ideas actually were. He taught the world how to envision realities that didn't exist and how to manifest them into being. When you think about it, foresight is the basis and function of intelligence; to more accurately predict and initiate future outcomes. In that way, you can definitely call him a genious. Looking at the length and breadth of Jobs' reach and the degree of impact he had on our world and its future, It becomes pretty evident that in the end his greatest legacy was showing us how to be a visionary. The world is all the more dim and blind without him in it to see and light the way.
RIP
-MM
"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. "
- Steve Jobs (Stanford Commencment Speech)
"Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts"
-Albert Einstein
This is the first apple computer. Where people saw a wooden box with chips and circuits inside, Steve Jobs saw a company. He talked Steve Wozniak into starting a company and sold his VW van to pay for building the first boards.
Steve had a good argument. We were in his car and he said — and I can remember him saying this like it was yesterday: “Well, even if we lose money, we’ll have a company. For once in our lives, we’ll have a company.” That convinced me. And I was excited to think about us like that. To be two best friends starting a company.
- Steve Wozniak (Co-Founder Apple Computers)
"...Things became much more clear that they were the results of human creation not these magical things that just appeared in one's environment that one had no knowledge of their interiors. It gave a tremendous level of self-confidence, that through exploration and learning one could understand seemingly very complex things in one's environment. My childhood was very fortunate in that way."
-Steven Paul Jobs
"We’re going to be a Fortune 500 company in two years. This is the start of an industry. It happens once a decade."
- Mike Markkula
"Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life or do you want to come with me and change the world?"
-Steven Paul Jobs (Recruiting PepsiCo executive John Sculley)
Sunday, September 18, 2011
Drive A MovieReview: A Real Humanbeing A Real Hero
"You ever hear the story about the scorpion and the frog? Well, your friend didn't make it across the river." Those are the subtley brilliant and confident words of the Driver; the otherwise nameless character played by Ryan Gosling in the film Drive. The film is exactly that, subtley brilliant and confident. It is no wonder that director Nicolas Winding Refn was awarded Best-Director at Cannes for this independant arthouse Thriller. Masterfully crafted, Drive feels more like a 1970's classic than the action movie the trailers portray. Like so many films of the 70's, Drive is an unforgettable and lasting contribution to film canon with a distinct sense of panache and originality that sets it apart from its predecessors and will forever provide a benchmark of comparison for films to follow as Gosling's invincible and laconic portrayal of the story's protagonist is as iconic and memorable as javier bardem's chigurh in no country for old men, al pacino's scarface, or robert deniro's raging bull.
Drive really does stand alone and its difficult to categorize or compare it to something else. Its kind of a drama, romance, thriller, gangster movie, action flick. But even those elements that would make you want to place it into a genre are so unique that trying to call it a car chase action flick because there's car chases in it, would fall really short of describing it. This film isn't fast and the furious or the transporter, it would be most accurate to say it is nihilistic-neo-noir at its best; the story of a crime from the perspective of the criminals rather than that of the police in an urban setting with elements of corruption, double-crosses, and devious plot twists with a femme fatale and a distinctive hard-boiled protagonist who lives by his own rules with themes of alienation, nihilism, existentialism and fatalism. It's Neo Noir where the hero says, "I don't carry a gun, I drive."
Like the protagonist, Nicolas Winding Refn's directing is patient, minimal, cool and calculating with explosive moments boiling below the surface. In the hands of a lesser director, this film wouldnt work. The pace begins slow and audiences hoping to see a vin diesel nicholas cage stunt movie will find themselves uncomfortably watching gosling emote affection for Carrey Mulligan's character in silence. This serves to purposes. The first is a contrast to the violence. The second is because the mystery behind "the Driver" that unfolds tells us that this is a character who doesn't really have anything to say because he doesn't relate. For the film afficianado, the tension building is thrilling because when we get the payoff, its explosive and relentless. From opening to close, Nicolas Winding Refn's choices are masterful. The first film of his that i had seen was Bronson and some of the same brilliant DNA codes Drive's sequences.
The frames are beautifully composed with care and attention to narrative context. For example when the Driver meets Carey Mulligan's character and asks about her husband's photo, we see her, and the photo of the boy and father on a mirror that is reflecting Gossling's image. Placing her and her whole family with Gosling superimposed in the background. Utterly brilliant.
The soundtrack blasts retro 80's synthesizers with lyrics so dead on that they seem as though they could have been written perfectly for the scenes they are chosen. The film begins with Kavinsky's Nightcall as the Driver is driving through the city of los Angeles and we hear the lyrics
"I want to drive you through the night, down the hills
I'm gonna tell you something you don't want to hear
I'm gonna show you where it's dark, but have no fear"
Wow. When you see the film you will understand how haunting these retro 80's sounds are. In a self referrential line Albert Brooks character says, I used to produce movies in the 80's they were action films that some critic described as European". When choosing the soundtrack it is as though Nicolas Winding Refn had this in mind. Using A real hero by college will forever be burned into my brain.
And as the song says, the Driver is a real hero. This summer has been jam packed with hero movies from Thor and Captain America, to Xmen first class, Harry Potter, Pirates of the Carribean, Cowboys and Aliens and Transformers 3. And given the fact that I cant tell you how many times i saw the world saved this summer, it was incredibly refreshing to see a film with a Real Hero that felt like a real human being.
I recommend going for a Drive
-MM
Thursday, April 21, 2011
My First Coachella: Walking on A Dream
How does one even begin to explain an experience like their first Coachella? There are so many distinct aspects that separate the experience from everyday life. For me it was so eventful and rich with new perceptions that the 4 days I was there could easily fill a high school yearbook with my moment to moment thoughts about what was happening around me. It was like a year away in a distant far off reality. Work, romantic relationships, Friendship drama, taxes, TV schedules, Traffic, and all the other things that make up our day to day lives was a distant planet away from my Coachella routine. Yet despite the difficulty, I'm going to make my best effort.
First of all, I have to explain that I think everyone had a very different Coachella experience and I am only trying to explain mine. Sure, we all traveled to the desert and braved sweltering heat, to party in the presence of music and culture, sleeping in overly crammed quarters, spending personally relatively large amounts of money on the trip. Yet, there were very different sub-cultures within the "Coachella-goer". There were those that bought there tickets in advance and went for the music because they go every year, there were those that put themselves up in extravagant houses, chartering comfortable transportation and had their hearts set on having only the "BEST" Coachella, there were those that went because "everyone" was going and they just didn't want to be left out, so they last minute found a couch to crash on and scrounged up money or favors for a ticket to the Parties, and then there was the likes of me who went to Coachella for the first time without really knowing what to expect.
Early on, I felt the pressure to be cool. There was so much talk about how to dress, where to stay, and what kind of ticket to get. Being a LA/Hollywood resident there was a lot of talk about getting VIP versus Gen Admission. Once we got to the concert the attitude was really different. Nobody cared who you were or what you did or who you know or how good your accomodations were. They were just ecstatic to be there and only wanted to talk about who you saw so far and how it was and who you were going to see next. They were focused on experiencing the shows and wondering if they missed out on something you got to see while they were gambling on some other artist. By contrast, it became pretty evident that some people wanted to have conversations about where I was staying and how nice it was. What parties was I gonna go to and when I thought I would check out Oasis, or Trousdale, or Lacoste. I admit it was fun to talk about the place we got, VIP, and the parties, but by the end of my experience I didn't care about that stuff anymore.
We started out as a group of 5 guys. As we woke up in our condo and prepared for day 1 after partying our asses off during day 0, we laughed at our own preparation process. We cooked a hearty breakfast ranging from Yogurt to Omelettes and bagels. We took vitamins, drank energy drinks, and protein shakes. We asked for advice on our Coachella outfits and made fun of Brandon for putting in his Crest white strips and Ironing a shirt that was about to get sweaty and dusty. Obviously we still cared about all that frivolous stuff. We talked about the parties and when we should check them out and came to an agreement about our music schedule for the day. Getting to Coachella was a process and partly due to my personal mission to find a battery charger for my camera, it took close to 4 hours to even get in through the gate. The first thing we did was run! Gitty as children and compelled by uncontainable excitement we sprinted to catch Skrillex hollering like a pack of Indians going to war. It was our first show. We were late so we found a spot on the outside close to the stage but outside of the crowd. We enjoyed the beats but weren't really participants. We jumped up and down and pumped our fists sporadically.
For the most part, I imagine that this was the limit of most people's Coachella experience. And for those people they were probably miserable by day 2. It was Hot. It was dirty. It was over crowded. Half the bands you've never heard of and you can't even hear them very well from the outside. I don't blame those people for spending a lot of time in comfortable cool VIP or at the Hollywood parties. If I hadn't been with the friends that I went with, I probably might have only had that kind of Coachella.
You're in the middle of 200 thousand people so meeting up with friends was an elaborate process. You had to choose a landmark to stand by and you had to give detailed descriptions to direct them to where you were. We had met up with a group and were now a group of 12 but were trying to meet up with Brittany and Chelsea and their group. After standing in the beer garden for 30min, going to VIP and 2 different bathrooms, we were unable to find them (typical). Not only that but we lost our original group and were down to 3. Shit like that always happened. keeping a group together was near impossible.
So, Julian, Brandon and I set off for Afrojack in the Sahara tent to find the rest of our crew that we just lost, vowing to find the girls later. It was there that I first got my taste of the choice drug of Coachella. No, it wasn't any of the ones you druggies are thinking. They told us they were in the very middle 50ft from the stage. We fiercely fought our way through the dense cluster of bodies and couldn't find them. Earlier we had devised a way to hold your hand up and signal, but when the crowd is bouncing with their hands in the air, it didn't work. They could have been 6 people away and we would never have known because all you could see was the stage and the people around you. But there in "The Pit" as afrojack was at the peak of a long teasing build up, "TAKE OVER CONTROL" dropped like the New Years Eve ball on our ears and that's exactly what happened. I lost complete control. The crowd erupted into a human powered volcano spewing the spirit like magma turned audio-lava. I bounced and screamed at the top of my lungs with the crowd like one cohesive entity swinging my arm back and forth like a hatchet! That is the drug I am referring to. I was lost in the music, in the moment between the crowd and the artist, bouncing to the same frequency as the crowd, feeling it like some form of energy that was simultaneously inside and outside of my body all around me. My excitement was magnified by the artist, contibuting to the crowd, and the artists energy was magified by us the crowd and spit back at us and so on in an endless cycle of spiritual feedback. Trying to intellectualize it does it no justice. All I can say is it was addicting and once we had a taste of that feeling, we were hooked. I was high on live music.
Trying to explain what we were witnessing made us get creative with our descriptions. And if you weren't at Coachella and didn't witness what we were trying to describe, then we sound "high". For Example, Jarran had explained that after one of the songs, a lot of people left and it was like "All this pressure just released. Like it just kept building up and people got too hot and too squished and the tent just popped like a pimple and expelled like a thousand overheated people. Then all of a sudden you could move again." When trying to find our friends in the middle of The Black Keys, it was like "Dude we gotta hurry. It's like collapsing. It's about to get super dense and we won't be able to move. Once it reaches a certain density were gonna get stuck. So do you think we can make it to them before it collapses or should we just stay out here?" We weren't even drunk yet. The point is that Coachella is so different from the outside world that trying to describe normal Coachella activities sober makes you sound like you're high.
So hopefully you can understand what I mean when I say that each show had a completely different energy. Both literally as in the amount of electricity, lights, and sound pumping into the show and more metaphysically as in the kind of spiritual aura around the crowd's actions. I was amused by how crazy the Sahara tent was. Thousands of people were converting food calories into simultaneous kinetic motion. You were so close together in that tent that you had to move with the group to avoid getting crushed. So much more than the other stages you really were vibrating your body to the same frequency. But the people singing along with Kings of Leon were vibrating to the same frequency as well. It was just a frequency that wasn't loud enough to manifest as jumping bodies. You might get some hands reaching into the sky or some swaying here and there, but mostly I witnessed groups of people hugging each other. Couples and friends embracing. There was a lot less screaming and a lot more singing along to individual words. All the other shows were somewhere in the middle in between those ends of the spectrum but with their own completely unique sense of spiritual energy. So that's what we did for all 3 days. You picked a vibe, an energy, or a sound that you wanted to experience and you sought after friends who wanted to go experience it with you. "Okay, so if you're down to see Steve Angello then go with them... and if you want to watch Arcade Fire, go with them. Meet back here or at the big U-shaped building in front of the Pretzel stand afterwards." Coachella wasn't about being cool or exlusive at all. It was about experiencing a show and the way it made you feel with your friends.
After Kings of Leon and the first day of revelry was over, we went to after parties. Chasing them around, getting directions, and getting friends in started to not feel like Coachella. It started to feel more like Hollywood again and it seemed to only separate our group. We opted not to go and to save it for the next day. The Second day we planned on hitting all the parties during the day so we went to Oasis, Lacoste, and Trousdale. Our group split up and not all of us made it to everything, nor did we go at the same time, but overall our group thought they were cool. They were cool and fun, in the sense that they would have been cool or fun if we were in LA or would have been cool or fun if we hadn't been high the night before on Boyz Noise. In fact the consensus started to become, every second we were away from actual Coachella was a sobering reminder of the reality we had been trying to escape. The parties were dope as fuck and were full of hot people and celebrities and hot celebrities, but "Laidback Luke goes on in 30minutes and we're missing Two Door Cinema Club guys". We had a good time going and partying, driving around and losing part of our group only to re-unite, but overall we just wanted to get back to Coachella.
By day 2 our group was huge. Depending on the time of day we ranged anywhere from 20-30 or more people. For whatever reason, our social gravity just kept pulling new recruits into the group and wouldn't let them escape. One person would meet up with a friend, and introduce them to the group. Hey guys, this is my friend "Michelle". By the end of that show, the new recruits were like, "Where are you guys going after this" and our group just grew by 2 people permanently. At coachella, when navigating a sea of 200 thousand people, the larger your group is, the harder it is to stay together and the harder it is to do anything. After every show, somebody had to go to the bathroom or needed some water or had to go find a friend. We would be set forth with the task of full-filling the needs of the group while trying not to lose anyone. This was a stressful and taxing but necessary activity that seemed to only pull us closer together. I pointed out that it was interesting how many times per week you look to your friends for help, with dating advice, personal problem or a ride home, or whatever. By contrast at Coachella, needing help was more frequent. Every 5 minutes you were looking for a lost friend, looking for water, trying to solve a problem and asking someone to risk getting lost from the group to go with you. Quickly you knew who was really connected to you because they would go with you without hesitation. You would build bonds with people quickly because you depended on them to not get lost or they pulled through for you when you were in a shitty situation.
I first got seriously lost during Arcade Fire. The entire group voted on Steve Angello. And right before the group left, I asked Brittany and Bri to come with me to get my camera battery from the Charging station. Happily they agreed, but as we started to get farther and farther away, they got nervous. "How far is this place?" they would say, looking back at the group as though we were setting sail and the group sitting in the grass, was our mainland port that we were leaving behind. Their fear grew and grew until Brittany was like, "I'm sorry Markus, this is too far! Good luck!" They turned around and ran back to the group and I watched them go, fully aware of the fact that if I didn't get back before the herd moved, it might be a long time(in Coachella time) before I saw them again. I went to get my battery and spent a lot of time texting the group for directions and updates to their locations. In that time, because I was alone, I started paying a lot more attention to everyone else around me. What did groups look like. What were they doing? I started thinking about how Coachella was kind of a little microcosm for life in general. You set a goal, like going to the bathroom or going to a show that makes you feel a certain way and you need people to go with you because otherwise there's nobody to share it with and you can easily just get lost wandering around without direction. I started to think about a conversation we had had earlier at IHOP. Jarran had said, it's so crazy that the greatest punishment other than death that we can give to a person is making them sit in a cell by themself with nobody else around. We had also talked about some guy at the lacoste party who was wearing a beard and a borat one piece thong bathing suit. I had said, "Why would you want so much negative attention". The group answered, because negative attention is better than not existing. This paired with the sight of the people around me and the feeling of being alone made it clear how much it sucks to be alone and how much we need other people, in general, not just at Coachella. I got back to the groups location and they were indeed gone. I was still alone but Arcade Fire started to play.
Throughout the show I was texting friends. I was trying to find a friend that was watching Arcade Fire and I was trying to find out where the group went. Who cared that I was missing enough to respond to my texts in the middle of the other show? Who was trying to help me? Who cared enough to take the time to miss a few seconds of Steve Angello to stare at their phone and try to describe where to find them. The interesting thing was realizing that through my text messages, I was reaching out. I didn't want to witness this music alone. I didn't want to be singing alone. I wanted that feeling of being a part of the group that I had had for all the other shows. Then looking around at the groups of happy people singing along made me realize that that's life. Everyone just wants to feel connected. What don't we do to get people's attention? The way we dress, what we choose as an occupation, what music we like, how we spend our time, all in some way or another involve connecting to people, wanting to be connected to people. It happened right in the middle of "Wake Up" ironically or coincidentally or poignantly I felt compelled to write these thoughts down.
I haven't mentioned yet that I had been filming a documentary of the entire trip. At that moment, using my flip camera, I started recording myself writing a blog while holding the phone up so that you could see arcade fire performing in the background. Then Arcade Fire released hundreds of giant glowing globes into the crowd. I started thinking about how fitting it was. How much like glowing globes bouncing around space we are. Crashing into eachother as individuals. clustering into groups. Sharing the same energy. All these people were singing because they were connected to this song. It meant something to them and their life. They were all sharing that meaning together. I was alone but surrounded by thousands of people thinking about how we're all connected but feeling all alone. I started writing this blog that you're reading at that moment, filming myself as I typed it, listening to arcade fire, singing along. I will share the contents of what I wrote at that moment shortly.
After Arcade Fire I rejoined the herd. I was slightly awkward because of my solitary experience and didn't know what to say for a while. My conversations were short and felt forced. It took me a good 30minutes to decompress from the ocean depths that I had explored. We after partied and I got home when the sun was already up.
Day 3 was much of the same. Our group had a blast. We were energetic and light spirited. Chromeo and the Strokes being the most fun. By the third day, we were much better at staying together. Our systems of navigating and communicating were more refined. Much more time was spent in play then going to the bathroom or getting water. We skipped because it was fun. We took our shoes off because it felt good for our sore dancing feet. Nobody was really serious or stressed about anything anymore. That is until Brandon came forth with a mission. Turns out it was one of our guy's birthday at midnight. His name is Mike. I didn't even know Mike before the week started, but we had a lot of great talks. Brandon asked me how to get a cake and 20 glow sticks instead of candles. I told him he could easily find some sort of cake in the food court but 20 glow sticks would be really hard to come by. He and Omar went to the food court and discovered that the pizza place made cookies. He had them make a giant cookie. They only had plates so he bought one of their pans. He had them spell happy birthday Mike in chocolate. Then they ran around stealing glow sticks and picking them up off the ground until they had enough. I knew Mike was waiting to sing along to "All of the Lights" during Kanye West and we were waiting for midnight. Out of pure chance, just before when midnight struck, Kanye performed All of the Lights. We got in a circle around Mike holding up our glow-stick-candles. As soon as the song finished, right at the stroke of midnight, we sang him happy birthday.
Then the meaning of the weekend came together in one coherent idea. I started writing the end of my documentary into my phone as a continuation of the blog I had written earlier. Here is what I wrote that started during arcade fire and finished after we sang happy birthday:
"So here is what I learned at Coachella, so far. We all exist in metaphysical space. Surrounded by the swirling flow of energy. It is us that pull it together. The beings that turn energy into kinetic temporal motion. By doing so shaping the ripples of time. And in that pool of life we mix our ripples together. Into herds, packs, families. We over lap each other. We are all connected.
We experience the sharing of existence in time as a single unit. We reach out to each other trying not to feel singular at all. With a look. A smile. A touch. We share our precious time on earth, dividing up our attention. Hoping for affection. Because the truth of it all is that we need each other.
Coachella is but one thing that helps us pull together. To feel connected, loved, and not alone.
There is so much energy in this place. So much life. So much joy. I'm not sure I can properly answer why we love music so much, but I can say that sharing it is wonderful. It kinda helps us vibrate to similar frequencies.
Put more simply I hardly knew some of these people when the weekend started. We came from different places. We wanted to see different shows. Some how we ended up compromising to stay together. We helped each other find our way back to the group when we got lost. We shared our supplies. We danced like poets. We sang like superstar icons. And we left it on the field like champions. Then during the final performance under a full moon, at the stroke of midnight, we howled a happy birthday to one of our pack in celebration of life. We were right there, all together. We loved all these songs together. We loved these artists together. Sharing that love helped us discover what we had in common. We were connected. Even if just for a weekend. Whether we stay friends after that weekend or drift apart, we will always know that everything that happened at Coachella 2011 was real. And in that way we will be connected, forever."
My favorite song and moment of all of Coachella was actually during Empire of the sun. And my friends who witnessed it know that it was the moment that I lost my mind and danced like I was possessed. I didn't talk about it so far because the meaning of the song is more appropriate here.
Walking On a Dream by Empire of the Sun is what I learned at Coachella.
walking on a dream
how can i explain
talking to myself
will i see again?
we are always running for the thrill of it, thrill of it
always pushing up the hill, searching for the thrill of it
on and on and on we walk calling out, out again
never looking down im just in awe in whats infront of me
is it real now
when two people become one
i can feel it
when two people become one
thought i'd never see
the love you found in me
now it's changing all the time
living in a rythm where the minute's working over time
we are always running for the thrill of it, thrill of it
always pushing up the hill, searching for the thrill of it
on and on and on we walk calling out, out again
never looking down im just in awe in whats infront of me
is it real now
when two people become one
i can feel it
when two people become one
is it real now
when two people become one
i can feel it
when two people become one
catch me im falling down
catch me im falling down
don't stop just keep going on
im your shoulder, lean upon
So come on deliver from inside
All we got is tonight that is right till first light
is it real now
when two people become one
i can feel it
when two people become one
is it real now
when two people become one
i can feel it
when two people become one
Walking on a Dream,
-MM
How does one even begin to explain an experience like their first Coachella? There are so many distinct aspects that separate the experience from everyday life. For me it was so eventful and rich with new perceptions that the 4 days I was there could easily fill a high school yearbook with my moment to moment thoughts about what was happening around me. It was like a year away in a distant far off reality. Work, romantic relationships, Friendship drama, taxes, TV schedules, Traffic, and all the other things that make up our day to day lives was a distant planet away from my Coachella routine. Yet despite the difficulty, I'm going to make my best effort.
First of all, I have to explain that I think everyone had a very different Coachella experience and I am only trying to explain mine. Sure, we all traveled to the desert and braved sweltering heat, to party in the presence of music and culture, sleeping in overly crammed quarters, spending personally relatively large amounts of money on the trip. Yet, there were very different sub-cultures within the "Coachella-goer". There were those that bought there tickets in advance and went for the music because they go every year, there were those that put themselves up in extravagant houses, chartering comfortable transportation and had their hearts set on having only the "BEST" Coachella, there were those that went because "everyone" was going and they just didn't want to be left out, so they last minute found a couch to crash on and scrounged up money or favors for a ticket to the Parties, and then there was the likes of me who went to Coachella for the first time without really knowing what to expect.
Early on, I felt the pressure to be cool. There was so much talk about how to dress, where to stay, and what kind of ticket to get. Being a LA/Hollywood resident there was a lot of talk about getting VIP versus Gen Admission. Once we got to the concert the attitude was really different. Nobody cared who you were or what you did or who you know or how good your accomodations were. They were just ecstatic to be there and only wanted to talk about who you saw so far and how it was and who you were going to see next. They were focused on experiencing the shows and wondering if they missed out on something you got to see while they were gambling on some other artist. By contrast, it became pretty evident that some people wanted to have conversations about where I was staying and how nice it was. What parties was I gonna go to and when I thought I would check out Oasis, or Trousdale, or Lacoste. I admit it was fun to talk about the place we got, VIP, and the parties, but by the end of my experience I didn't care about that stuff anymore.
We started out as a group of 5 guys. As we woke up in our condo and prepared for day 1 after partying our asses off during day 0, we laughed at our own preparation process. We cooked a hearty breakfast ranging from Yogurt to Omelettes and bagels. We took vitamins, drank energy drinks, and protein shakes. We asked for advice on our Coachella outfits and made fun of Brandon for putting in his Crest white strips and Ironing a shirt that was about to get sweaty and dusty. Obviously we still cared about all that frivolous stuff. We talked about the parties and when we should check them out and came to an agreement about our music schedule for the day. Getting to Coachella was a process and partly due to my personal mission to find a battery charger for my camera, it took close to 4 hours to even get in through the gate. The first thing we did was run! Gitty as children and compelled by uncontainable excitement we sprinted to catch Skrillex hollering like a pack of Indians going to war. It was our first show. We were late so we found a spot on the outside close to the stage but outside of the crowd. We enjoyed the beats but weren't really participants. We jumped up and down and pumped our fists sporadically.
For the most part, I imagine that this was the limit of most people's Coachella experience. And for those people they were probably miserable by day 2. It was Hot. It was dirty. It was over crowded. Half the bands you've never heard of and you can't even hear them very well from the outside. I don't blame those people for spending a lot of time in comfortable cool VIP or at the Hollywood parties. If I hadn't been with the friends that I went with, I probably might have only had that kind of Coachella.
You're in the middle of 200 thousand people so meeting up with friends was an elaborate process. You had to choose a landmark to stand by and you had to give detailed descriptions to direct them to where you were. We had met up with a group and were now a group of 12 but were trying to meet up with Brittany and Chelsea and their group. After standing in the beer garden for 30min, going to VIP and 2 different bathrooms, we were unable to find them (typical). Not only that but we lost our original group and were down to 3. Shit like that always happened. keeping a group together was near impossible.
So, Julian, Brandon and I set off for Afrojack in the Sahara tent to find the rest of our crew that we just lost, vowing to find the girls later. It was there that I first got my taste of the choice drug of Coachella. No, it wasn't any of the ones you druggies are thinking. They told us they were in the very middle 50ft from the stage. We fiercely fought our way through the dense cluster of bodies and couldn't find them. Earlier we had devised a way to hold your hand up and signal, but when the crowd is bouncing with their hands in the air, it didn't work. They could have been 6 people away and we would never have known because all you could see was the stage and the people around you. But there in "The Pit" as afrojack was at the peak of a long teasing build up, "TAKE OVER CONTROL" dropped like the New Years Eve ball on our ears and that's exactly what happened. I lost complete control. The crowd erupted into a human powered volcano spewing the spirit like magma turned audio-lava. I bounced and screamed at the top of my lungs with the crowd like one cohesive entity swinging my arm back and forth like a hatchet! That is the drug I am referring to. I was lost in the music, in the moment between the crowd and the artist, bouncing to the same frequency as the crowd, feeling it like some form of energy that was simultaneously inside and outside of my body all around me. My excitement was magnified by the artist, contibuting to the crowd, and the artists energy was magified by us the crowd and spit back at us and so on in an endless cycle of spiritual feedback. Trying to intellectualize it does it no justice. All I can say is it was addicting and once we had a taste of that feeling, we were hooked. I was high on live music.
Trying to explain what we were witnessing made us get creative with our descriptions. And if you weren't at Coachella and didn't witness what we were trying to describe, then we sound "high". For Example, Jarran had explained that after one of the songs, a lot of people left and it was like "All this pressure just released. Like it just kept building up and people got too hot and too squished and the tent just popped like a pimple and expelled like a thousand overheated people. Then all of a sudden you could move again." When trying to find our friends in the middle of The Black Keys, it was like "Dude we gotta hurry. It's like collapsing. It's about to get super dense and we won't be able to move. Once it reaches a certain density were gonna get stuck. So do you think we can make it to them before it collapses or should we just stay out here?" We weren't even drunk yet. The point is that Coachella is so different from the outside world that trying to describe normal Coachella activities sober makes you sound like you're high.
So hopefully you can understand what I mean when I say that each show had a completely different energy. Both literally as in the amount of electricity, lights, and sound pumping into the show and more metaphysically as in the kind of spiritual aura around the crowd's actions. I was amused by how crazy the Sahara tent was. Thousands of people were converting food calories into simultaneous kinetic motion. You were so close together in that tent that you had to move with the group to avoid getting crushed. So much more than the other stages you really were vibrating your body to the same frequency. But the people singing along with Kings of Leon were vibrating to the same frequency as well. It was just a frequency that wasn't loud enough to manifest as jumping bodies. You might get some hands reaching into the sky or some swaying here and there, but mostly I witnessed groups of people hugging each other. Couples and friends embracing. There was a lot less screaming and a lot more singing along to individual words. All the other shows were somewhere in the middle in between those ends of the spectrum but with their own completely unique sense of spiritual energy. So that's what we did for all 3 days. You picked a vibe, an energy, or a sound that you wanted to experience and you sought after friends who wanted to go experience it with you. "Okay, so if you're down to see Steve Angello then go with them... and if you want to watch Arcade Fire, go with them. Meet back here or at the big U-shaped building in front of the Pretzel stand afterwards." Coachella wasn't about being cool or exlusive at all. It was about experiencing a show and the way it made you feel with your friends.
After Kings of Leon and the first day of revelry was over, we went to after parties. Chasing them around, getting directions, and getting friends in started to not feel like Coachella. It started to feel more like Hollywood again and it seemed to only separate our group. We opted not to go and to save it for the next day. The Second day we planned on hitting all the parties during the day so we went to Oasis, Lacoste, and Trousdale. Our group split up and not all of us made it to everything, nor did we go at the same time, but overall our group thought they were cool. They were cool and fun, in the sense that they would have been cool or fun if we were in LA or would have been cool or fun if we hadn't been high the night before on Boyz Noise. In fact the consensus started to become, every second we were away from actual Coachella was a sobering reminder of the reality we had been trying to escape. The parties were dope as fuck and were full of hot people and celebrities and hot celebrities, but "Laidback Luke goes on in 30minutes and we're missing Two Door Cinema Club guys". We had a good time going and partying, driving around and losing part of our group only to re-unite, but overall we just wanted to get back to Coachella.
By day 2 our group was huge. Depending on the time of day we ranged anywhere from 20-30 or more people. For whatever reason, our social gravity just kept pulling new recruits into the group and wouldn't let them escape. One person would meet up with a friend, and introduce them to the group. Hey guys, this is my friend "Michelle". By the end of that show, the new recruits were like, "Where are you guys going after this" and our group just grew by 2 people permanently. At coachella, when navigating a sea of 200 thousand people, the larger your group is, the harder it is to stay together and the harder it is to do anything. After every show, somebody had to go to the bathroom or needed some water or had to go find a friend. We would be set forth with the task of full-filling the needs of the group while trying not to lose anyone. This was a stressful and taxing but necessary activity that seemed to only pull us closer together. I pointed out that it was interesting how many times per week you look to your friends for help, with dating advice, personal problem or a ride home, or whatever. By contrast at Coachella, needing help was more frequent. Every 5 minutes you were looking for a lost friend, looking for water, trying to solve a problem and asking someone to risk getting lost from the group to go with you. Quickly you knew who was really connected to you because they would go with you without hesitation. You would build bonds with people quickly because you depended on them to not get lost or they pulled through for you when you were in a shitty situation.
I first got seriously lost during Arcade Fire. The entire group voted on Steve Angello. And right before the group left, I asked Brittany and Bri to come with me to get my camera battery from the Charging station. Happily they agreed, but as we started to get farther and farther away, they got nervous. "How far is this place?" they would say, looking back at the group as though we were setting sail and the group sitting in the grass, was our mainland port that we were leaving behind. Their fear grew and grew until Brittany was like, "I'm sorry Markus, this is too far! Good luck!" They turned around and ran back to the group and I watched them go, fully aware of the fact that if I didn't get back before the herd moved, it might be a long time(in Coachella time) before I saw them again. I went to get my battery and spent a lot of time texting the group for directions and updates to their locations. In that time, because I was alone, I started paying a lot more attention to everyone else around me. What did groups look like. What were they doing? I started thinking about how Coachella was kind of a little microcosm for life in general. You set a goal, like going to the bathroom or going to a show that makes you feel a certain way and you need people to go with you because otherwise there's nobody to share it with and you can easily just get lost wandering around without direction. I started to think about a conversation we had had earlier at IHOP. Jarran had said, it's so crazy that the greatest punishment other than death that we can give to a person is making them sit in a cell by themself with nobody else around. We had also talked about some guy at the lacoste party who was wearing a beard and a borat one piece thong bathing suit. I had said, "Why would you want so much negative attention". The group answered, because negative attention is better than not existing. This paired with the sight of the people around me and the feeling of being alone made it clear how much it sucks to be alone and how much we need other people, in general, not just at Coachella. I got back to the groups location and they were indeed gone. I was still alone but Arcade Fire started to play.
Throughout the show I was texting friends. I was trying to find a friend that was watching Arcade Fire and I was trying to find out where the group went. Who cared that I was missing enough to respond to my texts in the middle of the other show? Who was trying to help me? Who cared enough to take the time to miss a few seconds of Steve Angello to stare at their phone and try to describe where to find them. The interesting thing was realizing that through my text messages, I was reaching out. I didn't want to witness this music alone. I didn't want to be singing alone. I wanted that feeling of being a part of the group that I had had for all the other shows. Then looking around at the groups of happy people singing along made me realize that that's life. Everyone just wants to feel connected. What don't we do to get people's attention? The way we dress, what we choose as an occupation, what music we like, how we spend our time, all in some way or another involve connecting to people, wanting to be connected to people. It happened right in the middle of "Wake Up" ironically or coincidentally or poignantly I felt compelled to write these thoughts down.
I haven't mentioned yet that I had been filming a documentary of the entire trip. At that moment, using my flip camera, I started recording myself writing a blog while holding the phone up so that you could see arcade fire performing in the background. Then Arcade Fire released hundreds of giant glowing globes into the crowd. I started thinking about how fitting it was. How much like glowing globes bouncing around space we are. Crashing into eachother as individuals. clustering into groups. Sharing the same energy. All these people were singing because they were connected to this song. It meant something to them and their life. They were all sharing that meaning together. I was alone but surrounded by thousands of people thinking about how we're all connected but feeling all alone. I started writing this blog that you're reading at that moment, filming myself as I typed it, listening to arcade fire, singing along. I will share the contents of what I wrote at that moment shortly.
After Arcade Fire I rejoined the herd. I was slightly awkward because of my solitary experience and didn't know what to say for a while. My conversations were short and felt forced. It took me a good 30minutes to decompress from the ocean depths that I had explored. We after partied and I got home when the sun was already up.
Day 3 was much of the same. Our group had a blast. We were energetic and light spirited. Chromeo and the Strokes being the most fun. By the third day, we were much better at staying together. Our systems of navigating and communicating were more refined. Much more time was spent in play then going to the bathroom or getting water. We skipped because it was fun. We took our shoes off because it felt good for our sore dancing feet. Nobody was really serious or stressed about anything anymore. That is until Brandon came forth with a mission. Turns out it was one of our guy's birthday at midnight. His name is Mike. I didn't even know Mike before the week started, but we had a lot of great talks. Brandon asked me how to get a cake and 20 glow sticks instead of candles. I told him he could easily find some sort of cake in the food court but 20 glow sticks would be really hard to come by. He and Omar went to the food court and discovered that the pizza place made cookies. He had them make a giant cookie. They only had plates so he bought one of their pans. He had them spell happy birthday Mike in chocolate. Then they ran around stealing glow sticks and picking them up off the ground until they had enough. I knew Mike was waiting to sing along to "All of the Lights" during Kanye West and we were waiting for midnight. Out of pure chance, just before when midnight struck, Kanye performed All of the Lights. We got in a circle around Mike holding up our glow-stick-candles. As soon as the song finished, right at the stroke of midnight, we sang him happy birthday.
Then the meaning of the weekend came together in one coherent idea. I started writing the end of my documentary into my phone as a continuation of the blog I had written earlier. Here is what I wrote that started during arcade fire and finished after we sang happy birthday:
"So here is what I learned at Coachella, so far. We all exist in metaphysical space. Surrounded by the swirling flow of energy. It is us that pull it together. The beings that turn energy into kinetic temporal motion. By doing so shaping the ripples of time. And in that pool of life we mix our ripples together. Into herds, packs, families. We over lap each other. We are all connected.
We experience the sharing of existence in time as a single unit. We reach out to each other trying not to feel singular at all. With a look. A smile. A touch. We share our precious time on earth, dividing up our attention. Hoping for affection. Because the truth of it all is that we need each other.
Coachella is but one thing that helps us pull together. To feel connected, loved, and not alone.
There is so much energy in this place. So much life. So much joy. I'm not sure I can properly answer why we love music so much, but I can say that sharing it is wonderful. It kinda helps us vibrate to similar frequencies.
Put more simply I hardly knew some of these people when the weekend started. We came from different places. We wanted to see different shows. Some how we ended up compromising to stay together. We helped each other find our way back to the group when we got lost. We shared our supplies. We danced like poets. We sang like superstar icons. And we left it on the field like champions. Then during the final performance under a full moon, at the stroke of midnight, we howled a happy birthday to one of our pack in celebration of life. We were right there, all together. We loved all these songs together. We loved these artists together. Sharing that love helped us discover what we had in common. We were connected. Even if just for a weekend. Whether we stay friends after that weekend or drift apart, we will always know that everything that happened at Coachella 2011 was real. And in that way we will be connected, forever."
My favorite song and moment of all of Coachella was actually during Empire of the sun. And my friends who witnessed it know that it was the moment that I lost my mind and danced like I was possessed. I didn't talk about it so far because the meaning of the song is more appropriate here.
Walking On a Dream by Empire of the Sun is what I learned at Coachella.
walking on a dream
how can i explain
talking to myself
will i see again?
we are always running for the thrill of it, thrill of it
always pushing up the hill, searching for the thrill of it
on and on and on we walk calling out, out again
never looking down im just in awe in whats infront of me
is it real now
when two people become one
i can feel it
when two people become one
thought i'd never see
the love you found in me
now it's changing all the time
living in a rythm where the minute's working over time
we are always running for the thrill of it, thrill of it
always pushing up the hill, searching for the thrill of it
on and on and on we walk calling out, out again
never looking down im just in awe in whats infront of me
is it real now
when two people become one
i can feel it
when two people become one
is it real now
when two people become one
i can feel it
when two people become one
catch me im falling down
catch me im falling down
don't stop just keep going on
im your shoulder, lean upon
So come on deliver from inside
All we got is tonight that is right till first light
is it real now
when two people become one
i can feel it
when two people become one
is it real now
when two people become one
i can feel it
when two people become one
Walking on a Dream,
-MM
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