Butterflies (Turkish), 5/5 stars.
A very beautiful film that falls in the category of laughing, crying, and left wanting more. It's about three siblings who have all not heard from their father in 30 years, but after receiving a call from him and each needing a break from their failing lives, they set out on a road trip back to the village they were once small kids in. They come home to find that their father just recently passed and they are left in his home with only each other to truly grieve with. The siblings grow close to each other as we see them weak and floundering for answers nearly as often as we see them stand up and face their issues head on. The film is about grief, family, and sibling love. Also it's about exploding chickens. I enjoyed it immensly.
Leave No Trace (American), 3/5 stars.
Leave No Trace tells the story of a father and a daughter who are found by authorities after living off the grid for several years. They camp out in a state park and practice drills of hiding from people and authorities. You're suspect at first that they do this because the father is wanted or something like that. There is even this scene where the father sells perscription drugs to some shady guys I a tent. But in reality, it is later implied that the dad is a former veteran and has difficulty living in society.
I say implied because they never specifically say it. Really they never specifically say anything. To say that this film had a script I think would be stretching it. Silence was highly utilized alongside the sounds of nature to convey feeling and there would often be minutes of the movie that would pass without a single word being spoken. This put a lot of pressure on the actors' facial expressions and although I thought that they did fairly well, it wasn't perfect and I found myself wishing there was more script to support them and give me a better sense of what that character was thinking or feeling at given times. After all, there is only so much you can convey with a look.
The plot if the movie was pretty repetitive. The narrative of "live one own, get roped back into society, daughter likes society and doesn't want to leave, dad makes her leave" is repeated twice in the film to the extent that it seems almost copy-pasted. I mean, I understand why they did it. In the end the daughter, Tom, decides to stay and her dad leaves on his own after a long, silent, goodbye. And they wanted to show the change in Tom since the beginning, where she would have gone anywhere with her dad. But the narrative was so long and so implied that it only took about 10 minutes for you to realize it was repeating and that not much would change. And you'd be right.
Adelaide was a lot of fun, even though I was only there for a day. I rented a bike for free and travelled around the city to THE MIGHTY BLACK STUMP, a couple of nice city parks, and the Adelaide city library. I also wiggled myself into an Adelaide library card so I can have access to their ebooks and audiobooks when I fly home. technically, you should be a resident of the county in order to get one, buuuuuut whatever.
Overall, it was a pretty relaxed day. I found myself spending a lot of time in the downtown area where there were tons of street musicians performing and some really cute stores, including a bookstore that was having a going-out-of-business sale and it was 3 for $15 on fiction books.
So, naturally, I bought three.
Which in retrospect was pretty silly of me since I only have my carry on and it's only allowed to weigh up to 7kg for when I fly and it already weighed 6.3kg. But hey! Its still under. Barely. It just now means that anything else I buy (souvenirs, gifts for the fam) have to be small and light. Challenge. Accepted.
But anyway, the last thing I did was watch this really cool street musician by the name of Trav Collins for about 10 minutes before heading back to my hostel. I gave him five bucks and downloaded his EP on Spotify (he's pretty established) because he was pretty legit and it's always been my policy that if a street musician makes you stop, you owe them at least a dollar. That was that though. I went to bed early that night because my flight to Melbourne was at 6:10am.
When I arrived in Melbourne, I wasn't allowed to check into my hostel until 2pm so I had approximately 6 hours to explore the city. Well, try and explore the city. I got a map from the hostel, heard there was free transit around the main city center, and set off!....in the completely wrong direction. I didn't know it at first and I wasn't sure where I had started so I kept thinking that I was on a different street than I actually was on. But after four intersections of being completely lost, I found myself on the map.
A quick aside: in my outdoor education class, one of the things we were required to submit before our last trip was a "lost procedure", outlining what we would do if we were ever lost. Since we were given no direction for this document, I designed mine rather humorously, quoting facts like "87% of mapping accidents occur when walking" and "Acceptance of being lost is the first step towards recovery." The first step in this guide was to stop moving. Dear reader of this blog, when I was in Melbourne, I did not head this advice.
I PRESSED ON! Walking aimlessly, taking tram route blah to destination blah and if I was to point at the map I could confidently tell you that I was either there, there, or there. But it was all in good fun. Even with all my mucking around, I still made it back to my hostel around 1:30 because I couldn't think of anything else I wanted to see that day. So I sat in my room for the rest of the night and read, finishing two of the books I was reading.
My hostel in Melbourne was a lovely place. And by lovely I mean rough. There was a limit to the WiFi you could use every day and I feel like I got off on the wrong foot with the staff. They just seemed real bitter towards me. But I really only slept there and occasionally read there so it wasn't a big deal. I went to the library to download my audiobooks though. I also spent the day seeing the Victoria gardens and the centre for contemporary art. I caught a comedy show at 6:30 that night at a local comics club that was a hoot and a half. The comedians we're all really good and the atmosphere was very casual because it was "new material" night where everyone was trying new bits. Some landed real well, some didn't. But we still got a good laugh out of those ones anyway!
My third day in Melbourne started late because I was tired but still included touring the Royal Botanical gardens and the National Gallery of Victoria. I also got a library card at a city library on the harbor docks (no shame). The place closed at 7 though and I got there at like 6 so I decided to return there the next morning.
So I did.
And proceeded to do NOTHING ELSE that day.
Okay. Let me tell you about this library.
It's not a huge library, only 3 floors of modern architecture with a bunch of glass and wooden floorboards. Very artsy and exactly my style. And despite having three separate eCheckout library Apps, there isn't much of a selection. BUT. They have, not just an activity room with ping pong and pool, not just a computer space with high-powered gaming computers and top notch design Macs with every creative program you can imagine (gimp, Adobe suite, protools, some 3D imaging programs that I only wish I knew how to use), not just one but FOUR 3D printers, not just a VR gaming space preloaded with a ton of games (including Subnautica, a game I just got hooked to), but also 5 different standalone Midi keyboards and boxes.
So, having arrived at 10 in the morning, I spent 9 hours on one of those drumboxes (a piece called the Novation circuit, retail: $349. I know because I checked) making tracks. I made 5. It was so addicting. But at the end of the day, I had to bid it farewell. I was going to try and record my tracks into protools in the last hour so I could save my work for my own record, but they ended up not having the audio cables (3.5mm to 5-pin) needed to hook the device up to the computer. I did, however, convince the lady at the desk to allow me into the recording space (a soundproof room!) and record the essence of the tracks with my phone and the device's speaker. I'll put those up on this blog later when I have access to a computer.
[Marc from the future here: below is a video with all the tracks.]
Anyway, now I'm in Sydney! I took a 4am bus (3am wakeup, woot woot!) to a 6am flight and I have time to get lost here before my 11am show at the Opera house! I'll be updating again after I head home from Sydney.
These last few weeks in Lismore have been full of lasts, as places often are. Everybody is finishing up the remainder of their school work and getting ready to head home (well...except Madison).
Since my last blog post I went on a trip to Sydney with some friends and we saw the opening weekend of the Vivid festival. I had finished up the last of my music and art project before we left and I'm happy to say that I got exemplary marks on the music and art project alike :) (the grades were posted yesterday).
During the trip we went and saw the lights at Darling harbor, then saw the Opera House the next day after a visit to the Australian museum and the Museum of contemporary art. The Australian museum had a really amazing mamoth exit with a preserved mamoth specimen on display, which was pretty neat! But the true gain from that trip was that Madison bought a little grabber thing with a shark head and named it Calvin. Of course, since I was the one who had the backpack, I carried him around some. Making me the bearer of not one or two, but THREE travel buddies.
I felt pretty special.
Anyway, my friends humored me by letting me wander the museum of contemporary art where there were some pretty cool exibits. There was one painting where the artist used a dice roll to randomly determine each characteristic of each for he dot placed on a painting. It was pretty rad. There was another piece where an artist took heaps of pages out of an astronomy textbook and blacked out every word that wasn't the word "star". From far enough away, it looked like a black sky with just a few white-dot stars, which was pretty cool. There were some other ones and I can go on because I love contemporary art, like the clock that had its seconds set slightly faster so that the day was only 18hours long instead of 24, or the performance art of a guy measuring the entire distance of a walk through a temple with a needle. But like my friends, this talk of weird art may not be all that interesting to you ;)
The next day, we didn't have anything planned except going to Bondai Beach which took all of 2 hours to really explore. So I bought a ticket to a theater production that was happening just down the road from our hostel and spent my night that way. The show was called the Walworth Farce and it was SOOO COOOL. I mean, it might just be that it's been a while since I've seen a theater production but MAN. It was one of the best shows I've ever seen I think. It was all about the stories we tell ourselves and how we bend reality to justify our actions and it conveyed that through this beautiful show within a show happening, two stories unfolding at the same time.
UGH. I loved it. And I wish I could see it again honestly.
But anyway, we headed home the next day and it was back to reality (ope. There goes gravity).
Over the next week we (kindof) wrapped up the DND campaign. We would've kept going a little longer had I not planned another trip that I've begun to call my Ausie City Tour, but more on that in a bit. I finished my last project in Sound Production which I ended up getting an A on! A relief really because the previous projects did not have very good marks. I also studied for the Sound Production exam and did....decently...on it. I mean, I didn't fail. But looking at my grade, I'm a little scared that nobody did well on that exam. Regardless, it looks as though I will at least pass the class and that was my goal since this class was really chalanging for me.
The last thing I had to do was finish up an Outdoor Ed paper that involved designing and justifying your own outdoor program. I spent two days writing it and ended up getting so enthralled by some of my sources (it really only took me so long because I'd end up reading a source because I found it interesting, not because it was really relevant to my paper) that I checked them out and are reading them now. They are about the ethical issues in experiential learning programs and are quite fascinating.
Right. Where am I now? I've been pittering out this nonsensical blog post on my phone because I'm travelling and didn't bring my laptop. I'm in Adelaide right now! And after that I will be spending some time in Melbourne and then Sydney again as a part of my Ausie City Tour. Then I'll be back to Lismore for two days and then back to the States! I was hoping to make it up to Cairnes as well but it just didn't end up working out.
I arrived last night and didn't feel like paying for a taxi to my hotel so I walked an hour from the airport to my hotel. It was in good fun, and I only missed my turn once...well, twice technically...of the three turns I needed to take....BUT I PROMISE I'M COMPETANT DONT BE WORRIED MOM I MOSTLY KNOW WHERE IM GOING.
Tomorrow I head out to Melbourne where I'll be spending 4 days visiting museums and art shows and improv shows and libraries, oh my! And even though I've already been to Sydney I'll be spending four days there as well where I'll be catching the end of Vivid and the Sydney Film Festival! I've currently got tickets to see 7 movies and a percussion ensemble concert which I am beyond stoked for!
The biggest downside of this trip though is that I mostly didn't get to say goodbye to a lot of the people I've met over the course of the session. I get back the 18th and most people will be two days gone when I return. So, you know, if any of y'all are reading this, I've enjoyed getting to know you and if we're lucky I'll see you again! I hope you have a good life and don't forget to be awesome!
