"To a dark place this line of thought will carry us."

“Knowledge itself is power.” Sir Francis Bacon

“Power tends to corrupt…” Lord Acton

Sir Francis Bacon

My head was filling with information. Art school was saturating my brain with words and concepts I had never known existed. They covered everything. Every medium was sampled, art history from around the world, an entire class devoted to the theory of color and another dedicated to the complexities of perspective. It was a lot of information and it… was… great! I could apply most of it to film, too. My major, I had finally decided, would be digital art. I had a small understanding of computers at the time and too much impatience when it came to sitting back while waiting for paint to dry. What had also caught my attention was the mention that the digital design department was going to add a video class… I’m in!

The problem with all this was that I was becoming arrogant. I had been absorbing all these new theories and ideas and somewhere along the way… I got lost. I started feeling a sense of superiority towards the non-artistically inclined. I felt as if they were beneath me and I was a member of an exclusive club. It was intoxicating… going to all the art shows and standing around with my glass of wine and a napkin full of cheese. Meeting new people and discussing all manner of topics while engaging in a barrage of trivial banter in order to prove just how smart I really was. Spewing out names and dates and long words ending in “ism” while juggling gargantuan terms like “juxtaposition”, “nexus” and “oxymoronic” … anything with the letter “X” in it. I was in… deep.

I had a professor who once said that we had an arduous journey ahead of us because, ”We artists are like gods. Like God, we have the ability to create worlds.” Now… I am not a particularly religious fellow but I can recognize bulls**t when I hear it and this guy was simmering in it. Something was off. I would hear many of my teachers talking about how we represented the soul of the people but these people were too elitist to even give the average man a second thought. How would they know the feelings of the everyman when they spent the bulk of their time amongst each other… praising one another while stabbing each other in the back?

Don’t get me wrong… there were a few decent people among my professors but I had learned the magician’s tricks and somehow… the magic was gone and the magician, as it turned out, was an a**hole.

I knew it had taken hold when I started keeping things to myself. I would only speak of things that made me seem… intellectual. I only spoke of Indiana Jones and Star Wars in the context of their social applications… not to mention how E.T. was a childish film that had no real relevance as an adult. Who the hell was this guy? What happened to that kid who used to just love a good story? Why was there sudden need to deconstruct everything and analyze it to its very core? Social application!? What does that even mean?

My mother had moved to Connecticut soon after I had graduated from high school. I had visited her on several occasions but half way through college… I really needed a vacation. I was on top of the world and it felt like crap. To add to the frustration, things were going downhill with Katherine and the end was imminent. Yeah… I needed to get away from Puerto Rico for a few weeks.

As usual… I decided to go to the movies. I can’t even remember the movie I watched. That’s saying something. What I do remember was the trailer. The lights were dim and the room went silent. A little television popped up in middle of the screen and a man began to speak. “For an entire generation people have experienced Star Wars the only way it’s been possible… on the T.V. screen.” What? What was this? My eyes widened and my jaw dropped the moment he said, “But if you’ve only seen it this way… you haven’t seen it at all!” and the theater exploded! The Star Wars theme blew out of the speakers and echoed inside my head. With every passing image my eyes started to well up. When the narrator invited me to “welcome back” all those characters I knew and loved as a boy… I damn near lost it in that place. Star Wars Special Edition? It was old and it was new. It was all coming back to me. When I was a kid I wasn't analyzing anything. I was just watching, feeling and enjoying. How could I go back without sacrificing all I had learned? Was there a way to acquire knowledge but still maintain a sense of wonder? In other words… could I learn all the magicians tricks but still enjoy the show? Yes.

It all comes down to a very simple thing. Honesty. At the risk of sounding like Disney's version of a Paulo Coelho book… be honest with yourself. If you like a certain type of movie or music or work of art… don’t hide it. Don’t deny it. If you hate the Hollywood blockbusters or if the rare and independent isn’t your cup of tea… fantastic! Just be sure it’s for the right reasons. Don’t toss the big budgets aside in an effort to appear intellectually superior and don’t dismiss the foreign and obscure simply because you don’t understand them. Vocabulary is important if only so that when some holier-than-thou nitwit tries to crush you with their god-like knowledge of the universe, you can tell them to go screw themselves in the most elegant way possible. Don’t forget to throw in a few “X” words too. Then you can stick out your middle finger and tell them to “juxtapose this!”

Just enjoy the experience. There will be time for analyzing once the film is over. When it comes to the movies… I say: Feel first… think later.

"If you look closely, all of nature has it's beauty."

Katherine. Katherine had a dog. His name was Milo. Yes… he was named after Jim Carrey’s acrobatic pet in The Mask. I know. I KNOW! He was still funny at the time!

Katherine’s parents had decided to take the whole family to Disneyworld one summer. They would be gone for a while and little Milo would be left all alone. She asked me if I could house sit for them and make sure Milo was taken care of. I said “Hell no.” I offered to take the tiny black fur ball to my apartment and watch over him there. Although she thought it was a bad idea, she agreed. She gave me a spare key to her house… just in case. Women know stuff.

The first day in my apartment with Milo was the last. When I got home from wherever I was, there was diarrhea all over the floor. After spending a few hours gagging and wiping, I decided that house sitting for Katherine’s family wasn’t such a bad idea… anything to solidify the little guy’s bowel movements and keep me from having to pick it up.

Feeling bored and altogether uncomfortable in my girlfriend’s parent’s house, I decided to call my friend Julio to see if he wanted to come over and watch a movie. I didn’t know if I had permission to bring people over but since it was Katherine who introduced us in the first place and they were very good friends to begin with, I figured it was alright. It was (In case you thought this was a foreshadowing of some worst-case scenario type story like something out of Risky Business or The Hangover.)

David Lynch

Julio was part of, if not the ringleader of, the motley crew of misfits I had met at the University of Puerto Rico. He had already graduated college and was a graphic designer by trade, working at the university itself. He too was a secret movie buff. His choices, however, ran with the more obscure and independent films along with the foreign and bizarre. David Lynch was God and Hollywood was Sodom and Gomorrah. Our friendship grew as I explained the benefits and social relevance of the big budget blockbusters while he, in turn, explained the intricacies of film as an art form. After countless conversations and a few bewildering movie recommendations that actually made me nauseous, he chose a video that would serve as my subtle transition into contemporary foreign films. The movie was Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams.

The premise was simple… Kurosawa would reveal some of his most vivid dreams and nightmares in the form of several short films. He told the tale of his earliest dreams as a little boy and both the beauty and loss of childhood innocence. He tackled his passions as a young man by traveling through the paintings of Van Gogh. He faced his fears of war, death and atomic fallout. He concluded his cinematic journey by exploring the idea of death as a celebration of life. What the hell did I just watch?

When the movie was over and Julio had gone home, I thought about what I had seen. It wasn’t the strange narrative structure that held me... I actually thought it was too slow. It wasn’t the Japanese aesthetic that appealed to me either… It was beautiful but a little over the top for my taste. It was how personal the story was. These were the man’s most intimate thoughts… his deepest dreams and fears put on display. Could movies do that? Was there more to it than good old-fashioned story telling? There was a whole other language being spoken here and it wasn’t Japanese. With the help of subtitles, I could get past the spoken language of most foreign films just fine but they usually bored me. They bored me because I couldn’t understand the cinematic language of the pieces I watched. I was used to simple, straightforward narrative structures with your basic three acts and characters that, while often complex, were easy enough to follow. Why was this one different though? It wouldn’t let me go. I couldn’t understand the “language” but I felt it. How? What about this movie was speaking to me? It obviously had nothing to do with the stories themselves! I mean… what could I possibly have in common with a middle-aged Japanese man telling tales about WWII and Japanese traditions? What?  WHAT? Dammit!

Akira Kurosawa

Time to go to work. Like learning any new language I would have to start from the ground up. They say it’s easier to learn a new language if you have a solid understanding of your first language. I would have to understand the vocabulary of film and how it applied to what I already knew (mainly Hollywood blockbusters) before I could begin understanding the concepts brought on by the rest of the world. I would have to immerse myself in all things foreign as well. Head on. Several million books later and a mind numbing study of film theory and I was a fan. It didn’t make me a better person or a smarter person at that. It just helped me become more in tune to the thing I cherished most. It quadrupled the amount of movies I wanted to watch (not to mention damaging my wallet with all the new videos I wanted to buy) and it gave me a better understanding of the world around me. Let’s face it… If you want to know what people are doing across the world, read the paper or watch the news. If you want to know what people are feeling across the world, study their art.

I gained a deeper understanding and a greater appreciation for the movies I watched no matter where they came from. Dreams had driven me to the actual study of film… a study that went beyond just simply viewing the movie. Like a great sensei, as he was often called by his peers, Kurosawa awoke in me the desire to learn rather than just see. At the end of the day, though, and after countless years of research and a long overdue re-viewing of Dreams, it didn’t take a long to realize what it was I had felt in common with Kurosawa all those years ago...

Like him… I dream and, like his, they are sometimes comforting and other times terrifying but always… always beautiful.

"Wait, young man. You cannot escape destiny..."

What was the best thing about college?

The academic experience infused in me a sense of social responsibility and purpose where I… just kidding. It was about making new friends. In high school you kind of dealt with what you were given. You chose the people closest to you in thought and prayed you were cool enough not to be the group of kids that got it’s ass kicked. I had seen enough John Hughes movies to know and understand the perils of the high school fiasco. Thankfully, I was not in that group. In college, however, you seemed to have more of a choice in the friend selecting process and unbeknownst to us all it began by simply selecting a major. You were studying a particular subject surrounded by others who shared the same interest in the topic. I had chosen art so I was surrounded by more creative minds than I had ever known before. Introductions were made, hands were shaken and bonds were formed that still stand to this very day. (Oh… and the girls in college were hot too.)

My girlfriend in college (we shall call her… Katherine) studied drama at the University of Puerto Rico. I was over at La Escuela de Artes Plásticas (School of Fine Arts) trying to figure out exactly what major appealed to me the most. Sometimes between classes (and sometimes during) I would drive over to the UPR to visit Kate on the off chance that we could make out under a tree or something.

She had introduced me to a lot of people at her university and among them was a motley little crew of people that included graphic designers, actors, writers, musicians and most importantly… movie fans. Suddenly I was able to engage in conversations about film that ran deeper than things like “Wow…that was cool.” and “You could totally see her boob. Best movie ever!” Truth be told, at the time, my knowledge was limited to mostly Hollwood blockbusters. Among the crew of intellectual degenerates was a bizarre individual whose diminutive stature and bright blue hair made him stand out from the crowd. We were about the same age but I immediately got the sense he was better informed about things than I was. He spoke mostly of music but when engaged in the topic of cinema, he seemed to show an equal amount of enthusiasm. We quickly became good friends mainly out of our mutual fascination with Beavis and Butthead and all things MTV. His name was Danny.

One day, while hanging around the UPR halls waiting for Katherine to finish her classes, Danny showed up with a small dark box in his hand. It was a VHS tape. He was passing it around to the group. They handled it with a sense of reverence and Danny seemed very proud and protective of the little cassette. I finally got a glimpse of the plastic anomaly. The title read: Nosferatu. I had heard of this before. I knew it was a silent movie about Dracula or something. A silent movie… I had to see it.

He agreed to hang out and watch the movie with me (certain things you just don’t lend.) and while it was only a VHS version and not the original celluloid masterpiece you couldn’t help but feel that you were in the presence of something that had to be treated with the utmost care.  At first I feared I would fall asleep but as the film progressed I was mesmerized… truly mesmerized by this beautiful and haunting tale of love and obsession with no color and no sound. Questions arose… questions about technique and visual narrative... questions about the subject I hated most in high school… history! How must it have felt to see this for the first time back in 1922? It must have scared the crap out of people. The Count had to have been the most terrifying creature people had ever seen! What was going on in Germany in the early 1920’s that could spawn such a transcendent film style that I would later come to know as German expressionism? The lighting, the set design, the composition along with the dust and scratches of a century old film had sent me to a time and place I had never given a second thought to before.

I went on a hunt for all the silent movies I could find. I devoured my way through the obvious classics like Metropolis and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari not to mention the D.W. Griffith epics. It wasn’t enough! I wanted to go further back. Back to beginning. Where did it start? How did it start and who started it? I was overwhelmed by all the names and countries… Lumière, Méliès, Muybridge, Eisenstein, Guy-Blaché, Feuillade, Murnau, Edison, Gance and Lang to name just a pitiful fraction of the pioneers involved. There was more to this thing than just the big special effects and loud explosions I was used to seeing. This was beyond the Hollywood flicks I had grown up with. This was the origin… the birth of a medium that would haunt me for the rest of my life. I wanted to know more. I wanted to know… everything!

Art school, cute girlfriend, band of misfits, guy with blue hair and a VHS copy of a buck-toothed vampire. I love origin stories.