California Gothic

I watched The Third Man on DVD the other night. Photographically, It was a really beautiful film, but I have to admit that I didn't care for the story. Everything was very tight and interesting for the first half or so, but then it sort of lost its momentum and the characters became uninteresting. Still, it had in spades that undeniable romance of postwar Europe and film noir. It makes me wonder where in the world that magic might be hiding today. Maybe in Uganda, or so I once believed.

A month before I graduated from college, I applied for a fellowship that would have sent me to work as a photojournalist for The New Vision, a state-controlled newspaper based in Kampala. I was asked to submit a small, relevant portfolio, which was tricky because most of recent stuff was edgy graphic design work that I had heavily Photoshopped . I eventually settled on some photographs I had taken at a skate park during the summer after my freshman year, when I was first becoming interested in photography.


The photos were for a class I was taking through UCSD Extension. My final project was a series on skaters, surfers, and other punk kids hanging out around the various concrete jungles that comprise San Diego. I called the series "Youth Culture", which pretty much just meant that I had wandered around town taking pictures of people who were roughly my age. Still, I remember selecting these images because they all shared a certain feeling of stillness and sadness- a California Gothic, if you will. In retrospect, this sentiment was likely a projection of my own longing to break out of the isolation I found myself in at the time. I had (and often still have) a desire to decode the enchanting bits of knowledge that skaters share and surfers share but the uninitiated can only dream about.

I knew the portfolio I had submitted for the photojournalist position wasn't very strong, so I was very surprised when I learned that I had got the job. In fact, I was happier than I had been in a very long time- photojournalist in Africa is one of those dream jobs that goes right up there with astronaut or rockstar or president. It was a chance to escape the banality of doing something awful and ordinary. It was an opportunity to travel and meet people and have my mind blown. It was exactly what I'd been needing and wanting for a very long time.

A few days later, my mother threatened to sue the people who had awarded me the fellowship, so I lost the job. I was furious at the time, and I still get a little crushed whenever I think about it. I remember being somewhat consoled when a wise and venerable professor told me that it must have happened because the fates had other things in store for me.

I'm still wondering what those other things might be.

Blocked

I haven't been able to write anything for over a year now. I'm more dedicated to my journal than I was even in high school, I find myself making an endless number of lists of things to do or buy or think about, and I've written several letters to my friend Laurel, but I haven't produced anything creative since I handed in my thesis last spring. It bothers me because even when I wasn't writing anything terribly substantial, I was at least able to scrawl down little poems or phrases or fragments of stories that managed to hook into a piece of my brain. But now there's nothing. Even this post feels uncertain and difficult. I had a blog once before- a little page on livejournal where I complained about my troubles and made lists of the new music or movies I had recently consumed. I think a lot of what I wrote was pretty insincere and shallow (I seem to remember once saying that Green Day's fashion aesthetic was so damn cool), but I'll never really know because I deleted it during my junior year at about the same time I purged my Myspace and Facebook accounts. I think I was trying to liberate myself from dependency on meaningless digital media, but I ended up effectively severing myself from the people around me. I regret it, largely because I also lost my high school journal when my mother's house burned down last October, and now that strange boy who lived in that wonderful, critical, wretched time seems so impossibly far away. It's strange to think that it's only been five years.

Lately I've been trying to write something of a fantasized, fictionalized memoir of those high school years. I've been stuck on the first page for about five months now. I'll be driving around San Diego or talking with old friends, and suddenly I'll feel inspired to start writing so I can sort out all of my feelings about my Southern California life, but when I finally force myself to sit down in front of the computer, I just revise the same two paragraphs over and over and over again. I think part of the problem is that my would-be story is too thinly autobiographical and self-involved to make for very appropriate fiction. Right now the characters are all just stand-ins for me and my parents and my high school friends, and I know that this needs to change or at least mutate in some interesting way before I'll be able to make any substantial progress.

Maybe I've just been in a non-fiction mode. The only piece of my writing that I have been happy with recently was a documentary treatment that I submitted with some of my graduate school applications. The idea was basically to make a surfing documentary without any surfing in it. I have a bunch of friends who are connected with the surf industry, so I wrote my treatment about how I would follow them around in their everyday lives, which I would then contrast with the romanticized pop culture image of the surfer that they are all helping to create and promote. I also talked about my own attraction to this image of the surfer, a figure which I have found to be alluring and seductive but also deceitful and impossibly out of reach. I actually got so excited while working on the treatment that I decided to start shooting the project , and I've now gone through 20 hours of tape. I hope something good comes of this, but I'm more than a little worried by the length of the thing, as I probably still have another 10 hours left to shoot, and then I have massive amounts of editing to worry about.

I eventually heard back from the two grad programs who saw my treatment. I was accepted at CalArts but turned down by UCLA. Strangely enough, I was pretty happy with both pieces of news.