The finale of this series of video posts, my long-awaited directorial followup to The Tree. In this documentary film, we capture incredible footage of a university-roaming cryptid.
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Category: School
Video: “The Tree.”
My live-action directorial debut. I forget what the assignment was, but you know, basic stuff. Establishing shot. Medium shot. Close-up. That kind of thing.
You WILL believe Martijn is in that tree.
On long Mondays
I haven’t really done traditional journalling-style blogging here, so let’s find out if that’s a thing I do. Some things, maybe, aren’t best served by a weird joke on short text-based social media.
For the past… probably eight months1This started between semesters last year. my schedule at school has included a… very rough 9:30 to 21:30 Monday. Last year that last class was Art History, with just the six of us.2I’m in the short version of the art teacher course, because as a fully licensed cartoonist I’ve obviously already got a diploma for the art part and I just need to do the teacher part. This 2-year version typically picks up between six and a dozen people a year. Last year most of our classes were just the six of us — this year most of our classes are with the third years of the 4-year version. Come next semester we’ll legally be fourth years. That specific configuration, with a fairly relaxed teacher who had the whole year to convey information to us, worked pretty well. Acceptable execution of a shitty situation nobody was happy about.
But this year, that last class has been Education3Or “Onderzoekswerkplaats,” technically, if you’d like a great word for Hangman or Scrabble, but that’s really just the other half of the class we call “Education.”, which means, a lot of fairly heavy information in the philosophy and pedagogy zones, which means, class from a teacher who is great but also a sentient bouncy ball even at literal night.4Esther! Calm down! All of this, surrounded by 25 energetic third-years whose primary passion appears to be to generate with their mouths a bed of static noise that makes it impossible to think. If you’d ever wanted to experience cognitive overload, room 4.18 at my school was the place to be on Mondays from 18:45 to 21:30.
I’m not kidding when I say cognitive overload — it’s like it was scheduled specifically to totally fry my brain. The volume of the information we were supposed to take in ratcheted up through the morning and afternoon, then came essentially to a total stop for Media5For me, anyway, because, like, video editing and HTML, please, in my sleep, I’ve got an exemption, I could teach this class, but even if you’re new to all of that it’s honestly a fairly chill couple of hours. and a lengthy dinner break, only to then launch right back into the HARD KNOWLEDGE of yer BILDUNGS and yer GERT BIESTA and yer THE BANALITY OF EVIL. This didn’t do justice to the great, well-prepared, informative classes, and it didn’t do justice to us as students who would be eager to learn and work with all of this information under better circumstances. I’m sorry, but after a full day like that you were just never gonna pull anything meaningful about the banality of evil out of me at 21:00.6In the morning I’m a writer, in the afternoon I’m a poet, in the evening I’m a comedian — but at night I’m a haunted shell of a person, apparently.
But that’s all in the past tense, because as of next week7No regular classes this week. Media8And the third-years’ Music class, too, I… have to imagine. is moving to Tuesdays, which makes space for that late, late class to move to the much more reasonable 15:30 – 18:00 slot. And thank fuck for that. It’s a little like, and this is definitely a metaphor that’s way too heavy for this specific scenario, I’ve been told the war is over and I’m now just waiting to learn when we’re being shipped back home. This war, if you’ll continue to allow me the metaphor, has taken its victims — by what we now know to be the last battle9Last late class. half of my little Six of Us gang wasn’t showing up any more. One of us was approaching a burnout, one chose to prioritise their family. I was being a real trooper, but I’ll definitely need a real refresher on this info before the end of the semester, and, like, by that last class I was giving a presentation lying down on a table because that was the only way it was gonna happen. What would another few months of this have done to me?
Video: “Sequence One”
This was a video collage assignment in class. I’ve got an exemption for this class, but I usually just do the work anyway, just so I’ve got what everyone else is doing front of mind when someone inevitably requests my assistance.
Footage from 2007’s The Tracey Fragments used under a CC BY-NC-SA license.
As a film The Tracey Fragments is notable for three things — for starring a young Elliot Page before he was famous, for its extreme use of splitscreen, and for releasing all of its footage online under a Creative Commons license. It’s not a particularly good film, honestly, but it’s a good source of professionally shot footage starring real actors that you can both play with and legally release.
Video: A bunch of stop-motion examples
I never ended up actually showing these in the class I made them for, but here’s a bunch of examples of relatively simple stop-motion examples I made last year to show what you can just do for fun at your desk with basically nothing. I think they’re sort of charming.
the way the river flows
The meaning of life
Written for school, translated and slightly adapted for here.
Between the weather, the time at the end of a very long day, the… tremendous amount of energy coming from the other class, and also the difference in… maturity between us, I found it hard, in the context of class, to give an answer to the question of what we perceived to be “the meaning of life.” I also found some of the answers given frustrating, and the thought of engaging in dialogue with them filled me with even more despair than the weather already did — I’m sorry, but once you answer that question with “reproduction” you’ve lost me — but here’s a few words of an answer, anyway.
I do not have the bones for religion. I was born without them, I was never taught how to do it, and for that to change today would be a voluntary act of self-delusion. Religion, in my experience, has always been something intrusive, something that tries to intrude upon my life through cracks and gaps.1Blog-exclusive footnote: My view on religion is more nuanced than this, and if we’ve known each other for a long time you know this about me. But it’s a 400-word — 396, but I found four more. — answer to a philosophy question aimed at 19-to-21-year olds. Please understand this context for any writing from class I might post this year. Does that mean I never think about this stuff? Frankly, I find it hard to imagine there’s anyone who hasn’t at least rotated it in their head a little. Especially if you’re an artist, an educator, or both. But I do think a good answer has to come from inside you. Well, from inside me, in this case.
So here’s my good answer. First a motto, and then something more like a mission statement. The first is, “The river flows the way the river flows.” I say this a lot. It’s a mindset I try to keep central to my life. On a roaring river, there’s no way to paddle back. Can’t be done. No regrets. But no regrets doesn’t mean you can’t make corrections, improvements to your course, or plot one out. That can be done. And here’s your mission statement, “Enjoy yourself, have a good time. Improve yourself, be better tomorrow than you were today. Connect those two things in every way you can.”
And isn’t that enough?
Review: “EXIT Macbeth,” Noord Nederlands Toneel, at the Staddschouwburg in Groningen
Had to see a stage play for my theatre class. We’d been warned ahead of time it was essentially the best option of a season of shows that weren’t quite the best thing to take a class to.
Adapted from Mastodon nine and a half months after the fact.
As the title implies, EXIT Macbeth is, ostensibly, the story of Macbeth (the play) if Macbeth (the guy) were no longer the protagonist of Macbeth (play again.) Except it’s… not, because when Macbeth (the guy) fails to show up to be in Macbeth (the play) at the start of EXIT Macbeth, we get a quick recap of Macbeth (the play) and then the whole thing just implodes up its own asshole.
If there’s any cohesion here at all, it’s somewhere in, one, the framing device presenting the play as a sort of interactive choose-your-own-story museum, almost like if Macbeth (the play) were The Stanley Parable, (the video game,) whose exhibits are mostly obvious themes yelled out loud at you, and two, the character of the Porter, who in Macbeth (the play) has one short scene somewhere in Act 2, but here becomes the narrator, presenting the play (EXIT Macbeth) as an ode to the minor character, the porters, the walking forests, the women, of these plays. Sounds great. (The Porter character here is just tremendous, by the way, a hoot every time she shows up. For everything else I might say, terrific character, great performance.)
But that’s the problem — everything it says it is sounds great, but everything it actually does is, well, not the thing it’s saying it is. It’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and that sheep’s name is Macbeth. (This is the play.)
Anyway.
The thing it actually is is more of a soundscape, a large, audio-visual nightmare presentation of sort of the… dream of Macbeth (the play) collapsing in on itself. And I’m not particularly well equipped to talk about dance, but the dance performances, the soundscape, the minimalist staging, the puppets, it’s all great, every performer is very good at their job and a blast to watch. Like, the thing it actually is, everyone both on stage and behind it really seems to believe in it and stand by it, and you can tell from every seat in the house.
But what it is isn’t what it said it was or what I wanted. In the end it’s a mess that just about manages to border on the incomprehensible because it says all its themes out loud too hard to properly land on either side. But it’s a very pretty mess.
And I haven’t even mentioned the naked witch going through Mother Nature’s dating profiles.
Trailer content warning: Flashing images, taxidermy.
A Lake You Can’t See
A necropost. I remember this one feeling very raw, but it’s been a few years, and who knows how these things age, right? I haven’t reread it.
Monday, September 3, 2018
The green tent I’ve bought so as to not have to sleep in the big, shared tent had been advertised as fitting two people. Which two people exactly had been left to the reader and/or buyer’s imagination, but the people selling the thing certainly can’t have been thinking about me, being just a single, tall, fat person. When I put my bag inside, which is where it has to be, the space that’s left is exactly enough for me to be uncomfortable in pretty much any and every position I might choose. In addition, the mat I’ve bought is too thin and too small, so is the sleeping bag, and the way the tent gets incredibly wet on the inside at night is the straw that breaks the bag full of straw that had already made a victim of the camel some time ago. I will not sleep until Wednesday night.
I try, of course. I toss and turn. I wonder about the state the book I brought with me will be in when this is over. I toss and turn. I see my phone’s battery is nearly empty, and plug it into the portable charger, one with a huge battery that’ll last me all three days, making it the only good purchase I made specifically for the trip. I toss and turn. I never even get close to nodding off. I keep tossing and turning. It’s starting to make me feel like a salad. So I get up, and out of the tent (not that there’s any way to get up inside the tent) and try to figure out what to do, at night, alone, in a forest. I shower for longer than would’ve been reasonable if anyone else had been awake.
I make my way back to the dining area. There are people there, mostly around fires, a lot of them talking, smoking, drinking. I can’t see anyone’s face. I don’t learn anyone’s names, or even talk to them. It would’ve felt rude to try. I walk away, and look at the maps app on my phone to see if I can find the lake I heard people talk about earlier. It’s maybe a 10-minute walk. 15, at night, in the dark. I get to the lake, and I see a pirate ship, crewed by ghosts. This seems impractical, because I’m pretty sure the lake is landlocked. Except, of course, I don’t see a pirate ship, or ghosts. A trick of the moonlight, filled in by imagination. I briefly wonder if landlocked pirate ghosts are a metaphor for something. I walk back, because there’s not that much to do at a lake you can’t see.
On the way back I stroll around the area we’re in for a couple of laps. I overhear teachers talking. People have mostly disappeared from the dining area. I go sit down near my tent, listening to podcasts on my headphones. I shower again, and then go back to the dining area, to wait, in general for other people to show up, and specifically for the people who make the coffee to do so. It takes them ages.
Tuesday, September 4, 2018
This is the day when a rich man at the campsite gives a speech in which he feels the need to tell us that shithead alt-right hero Jordan Peterson has some good ideas, actually. I stop paying attention, because the reminder of the world outside the forest sets the back of my head on fire. When I see an opportunity to leave, I run — well, walk fast — to the lake from the night before. I realise as my bare feet slip into the water that this is a panic attack, and that it’s happening because I have PTSD, and that that’s why I sometimes feel the need — not desire — to run into a lake. Or, at home, the forest, but I was already in the forest, and it seemed impractical to find a separate forest to run into. Internet hate mobs make you want to run into nature, I guess. I wonder if the victims people have actually heard of ever run into a lake because somebody brings up a discount psychologist.
For the rest of the afternoon, I separate myself from the activities at the site, the ones I can get away from. I tell people it’s because I haven’t slept. Second and third-years have been recruited to push the people sitting by themselves into the activities. I wonder if anyone else sitting solo has PTSD. At the end of the day, I join in on the bingo. We don’t win anything. We’re mostly relieved we didn’t win the inflatable woman, because what the hell are you going to do with one of those? Amidst jeering boys, agreeing with the friends I’ve made on the trip that we really don’t want to win the inflatable woman is the first time since the panic attack I feel okay again.
I never try to sleep. I do take another long shower, cleansing to exit the daylight. There’s a lot of lights in this night. Dancers, jugglers, all sorts of installations. These are here for the rich man’s corporate retreat I’ve learned we’re here in the oncoming shadow of. A silent disco — I recognise a lot of them as fellow students — jumps and thumps around in a field. It’s surreal enough that it’s a little like walking into magic. I never get tired. I’ve crossed the rubicon on tired. Tired is in my past.
After the silent disco ends and everyone wanders off again, I do what I did on Monday. I sit near my tent for a while. I take another long shower, which at this point has, in my head, become a ritualistic cleansing to be allowed back into the daylight. I wait for coffee. It takes ages.
Wednesday, September 5, 2018
Everyone knows I haven’t slept. It’s either the first, second, or third thing I say to everyone I talk to. “You know,” I wave slightly dismissively, as if it doesn’t matter, “I haven’t slept.” The rubicon has slipped back under my feet. I’m sore, and tired, and done. I destroy my nemesis, the green tent. While people pack up their stuff and break down the big, shared tents, I sit under a tree and I read more of my book than I have all trip. (Books are famously hard to read in the dark.) I go home, and decide against going to bed right away. Wouldn’t want to mess up my sleep schedule.