Book Review - Wild by Cheryl Strayed

wild

Book Review

…a true story about a brave young woman who forged her identity and sought meaning out of her tragedies and tribulations, ditching what society and close family members and friends deemed irrational.

Around 7:30 pm, on Christmas, the second day of my winter break, I’d finished the final pages from Wild. Sometimes, as ludicrous as it may sound, I felt as if I was hiking beside her, feeling emotionally and physically exhausted and ready to quit – yet Cheryl, the author, was there, so were the the unworn, unread pages in my hand, that made more than half of the book, assuring me that this journey would be completed and that “we” would be through it together. Of course, both experiences were worlds apart - her hiking and me reading.

Summarizing her hiking experience is beyond my ability and desire. The joy lies within the journey, not the destination, even if the journey in this case is to read through her adventure. However, I did come to some conclusions that have perhaps altered my perception of the world. For, there is nothing as joyful as living through a second life by reading the biographies/life adventures of others.

Here are my thoughts:

Be irrational. Though you should feel a sense of reason and inward empathy toward your decision, or what some might call, a gut feeling, you need to understand that it will come off as bizarre and sound preposterous to those outside your mind. Even close ones. When Cheryl decided to hike the PCT, even Paul, her closest friend and ex-husband, advised her otherwise, suggesting a shorter hike. She knew better, even though there she’d admitted feeling a bit anxious about the hike and came to understand later that she wasn’t the most well-equipped, well-educated hiker on the PCT, but it had to be done.

Beginnings suck. Everything seems at fault when setting off to do something non-routine-like or deviant from normal thought – normal being a fictitious yet reliably comparable standard set by your circle of influences, your family and friends. Their words echo at every stumbling step you’ll inevitably encounter. Everything will seem hopeless, like an object full of pores, incomplete. Yet, as you’ll come to realize when you’ve gone through and trusted your instinct, that those exact pores, those exact imperfections, are what made your experience whole. The more your decisions in life are deviant, the more you’ll come to appreciate those imperfections, even at the early stages of your decision. You’ll come to realize that, in the end, it’s all worth it.

Trust and let go. Whatever you want to trust in, but trust. Trust people, trust karma, trust God, trust your instincts, but you have to trust in something to move forward. Yet, when I mention the words “have to,” I’m not implying nor encouraging a sense of burden, by all means, allow it to come naturally. But, seek it.

Work hard. Feel consumed by the work you love, delve in it, devour and savor every moment. Skill gives value; developing skill in a practice you love will make you feel useful and helpful. Yes, it should not define your value, because one’s life is worth much more than a mere skill or sets of skills, yet it adds to your value nonetheless. Working hard is your path to sweet independence figuratively and literally speaking.

Editing Analysis - Inside Out

Inside Out is an animation film produced by Pixar Animation Studios. The film revolves around the emotions we deal with in our everyday lives - fear, joy, anger, disgust, etc. - except that they are actual "beings" that exist in our head. Riley, played by Kaitlyn Dias, is starting school in a new city. Her father just got a new job in San Francisco and along with her mother, the family moves into a new house. 

How will the family adjust?

How will Riley as a young girl, navigate her way in a new school?

In this two-minute sneak peak of the film, the viewer gets a sense of the intense dynamic between our internal dialogues and our outward actions. This dynamic is achieved by pulling in and out of each character’s inner dialogue (emotions speaking) while they’re eating over the dinner table. At the beginning of the clip, there’s a slight confusion about where the voice posing the question: “Do you ever look at someone and wonder, what is going inside their head?” is coming from. Is it diegetic, coming from Riley, or non-diegetic that happens to be a voice-over walking us through the scene? Though we don’t get to hear that voice again, the following sounds and voices are easy to follow and understand.

A great editing technique that adds to the charm of this film is the constant match cut on action between the dialogue, taking place in the actor’s head, and their consecutive action. For example, when the “emotions” decide to signal the husband on the dinner table, the scene cuts immediately to the mom making a slight cough and looking at her husband. Also, when the “anger” emotion asks the crew to "prepare the foot,” the scene cuts to “fear” and “joy” inserting the keys in a launching position, shouting back, “ready to launch on your command, sir.”

A continuous shot/reverse shot takes place as the discussion heats up and the father experiences “high levels of sass” from Riley, who is also getting annoyed by her parents’ persistent intervention about her first day in school. Finally, a clear continuity system is established through out this scene, beginning with an established 180 degree line across the dinner table. The camera never goes behind Riley, but instead maintains multiple positions on the side facing Riley.    

Humans of Hunter

Humans of Hunter, audio/video project, was originally inspired by the widely popular Facebook page Humans of New York. On Saturday, November 29, Naiche and I set our camera, tripod, and zoom recorder at the intersectional bridge connecting the North and West buildings of Hunter College. 

It was intimidating in the beginning to approach students who did not know what we were doing. Slowly but surely the courage was built and we had a set of questions handy, something we had prepared before hand for the interview in case we ran out of questions in our head. It was a pleasant surprise to see that students were willing to share their experiences and funny moments as well as open up about what they liked and disliked about Hunter College. 

Nam June Paik: Becoming Robot - Reaction Post

On Saturday, December 6, I had the opportunity to attend Nam June Paik's Becoming Robot exhibition, and it was nothing short of mind blowing.

The selected artwork for Paik's exhibition covers the second and third floor of the Asia Society. The visitor is greeted by Paik's portrait where he poses in a sitting position surrounded by TV screens and micro controllers. This sets the appropriate sense of an artist who was captivated by all that the technological revolution would bring forth.

The pieces in the exhibition were equally engaging – they all seemed to capture the sense of a true visionary who was not afraid or intimidated by breaking down, playing with, and poking around with new technologies concurrently as they were introduced into society. Paik adopted these technologies and set a goal as an artist to humanize, or add sympathy to otherwise uncommunicative and emotionless devices. Paik might have as well been an early innovator in the artificial intelligence field of computer science, in his own sense.

The quote, “Artists are notorious for dreaming about the future, and in rare cases, they venture out and make dreams a reality themselves” (source) fully embodies the work of Nam June Paik. It was humbling to read his career timeline and become aware that he had thought of an earlier version of Facebook in the 60’s and would later create a prototype of what we would call today, Google Glass, only in the 70’s!
 

Response to The River of Life

On Saturday, November 8, I had the opportunity of attending Panel B: Beijing Independent Film Festival: 
The River of Life, a film documenting the life of a lower middle class family in a small suburb in China. Since the film was documented by one of the family members, Yang Pingdao, the viewer can get a true sense of the family’s everyday life – their struggles, hopes, fears, and the interstitial dynamics between family members. The three most prevalent themes that encompassed this autobiographical documentary were, life, death, and marriage.

While Yang Pingdao, a struggling writer, is trying to make ends meet, especially since he and his girlfriend are expecting a newborn, his grandmother is extremely ill and lies on her death bead. In addition, he is on a quest to find his father’s grave, which he had never visited since his father’s death, so he can revive a religious ritual of asking for blessings and to be a respectful son.

What I like most about this film is that it is nonfictional, in its purest form. It portrays the everyday life of a middle-aged Chinese male, who happens to be a son, a grandson, a boyfriend, a father, and later, a husband. He tries to preserve family tradition, keep his ties with his grandmother who has a hard time identifying who he is, and be a faithful husband, despite his wife’s continuous suspicions of a hidden love affair with a former classmate. Although the culture exposed in this film, Chinese, is different from my background, the similarities far outweigh the differences, making the film very relatable as far as family dynamics is concerned.

Project #2 - Audio Interview

For our second project, Audio Interview, I had so much fun interviewing Naiche, who blogs frequently on The Book Girl and aspires to be a young-adult literature author.
Full interview can be found here.  

An Evening Stroll - What I Hear...

An Evening Stroll - What I Hear...

I live in Woodside, Queens, a quiet neighborhood surrounded by two cemeteries. The day I chose to do my recording was Halloween - though that barely made a difference. I chose this neighborhood specifically because of the aforementioned reason; it lacks a lot of night life, granting me an opportunity to listen to the environment more intimately. The sport of contemplating my surroundings, wherever I go, is far from foreign to me. However, with this exercise, it was interesting to view the outcome as I zeroed-in only on the sound.

The stream of audio I recorded does not do the experience any justice. Though you choose to focus on the sound and attempt to “slow down psychologically,” you inevitably feel the wind on your face, blowing away your Hijab occasionally, and thoughts of how magical the night is occurs to you, stopping abruptly when a car swooshes by and you remind yourself that you need to listen.

That said, the sound of my neighborhood was multi-layered. The background, or keynote, was mainly composed of the sound of rustling leaves, flapping slightly forceful, on the occasion of an evening breeze. On top of that, there was the swooshing sound of cars passing by, which created a sound effect that I seldom paid attention to – their sound wave resembled a hill, with a very low pitch as you view them afar, increasing as the car approaches, and gradually fading away as the car drifts by. In addition, I caught a couple of drizzling drops on my way back, which created a harmonic sound effect as they dripped steadily on concrete.   

This exercise was rewarding in that I was outdoors listening solely to my surroundings, meaning no appointments to rush to, or class to catch, just a stroll to purely listen to what happens around me on an everyday basis. If I were to do this exercise again, I would record in a more populated area where I can perhaps record a story or scenario that would have otherwise gone unnoticed. 

Project #1 - Define A Space

Artist Statement

Artist Statement

As an immigrant of a Middle Eastern descent, traveling between Egypt and New York, the artist continues to experience the vast similarities between both eastern and western cultures and hopes to capture those similarities in her artwork. Inspired by the power of storytelling, the artist attempts to visualize the complicated emotions and experiences she undergoes after her exposure to a story. Her tools include ink, pen and a sketchbook, the content comes from external stimuli: a film, a song, a book, an encounter, or simply a quote, which invariably captures the human experience.

Toward that end, she finds herself mostly influenced by children's literature - those that capture the element of storytelling in an educational and entertaining manner. Storytelling through images, she feels, offers an empowering platform where the viewer can communicate with the story in a universal language. Barriers are thus nonexistent and vanish amidst visual communication.