Pre-Exam Euphoria

It is 5.48 and I am still awake after struggling for several hours with the fact that I am not particularly tired… and now I have whimsically decided to recommence with this blog. It has been a good year since I wrote anything into the vacuum of the internet hoping someone will care to listen. So here are my dawn ramblings…

I finish my course on Monday and therefore should be no doubt stressed by the fact that a sleepless night will not place me in optimum mode for my exam. However, I am beyond caring. I am euphoric that this 3 1/2 years of jumping through hoops will be over and I will be able to run directionless from tangent to tangent along lines of flight that actually interest me. I feel writing undergraduate essays have held me back from exploring the ideas and concepts I am actually concerned with. Before attending university I was a voracious reader of literature and philosophy, consumer of art, connoisseur of cinema, now I am a voracious drinker and part-time dreamer. No doubt my own laziness has played a significant factor, and you could say that university has instilled me with important life skills such as lying, cheating and how to get by on as little effort possible (it definitely has done very little to improve my grammar), but it has been a distraction from the important things in life.

I am being too cynical, perhaps. Leeds has definitely provided me with an environment I couldn’t have got back home. It has given me life, entertainment and intelligence. No longer do I point to the sky and say “the sky isn’t necessarily blue, you know? what if you were colour-blind? what is this ‘blue’ anyway?” for the rest of the 14 year olds to knock me to the ground and laugh. No longer do I have to prance about school with Baudelaire under my arm sneering at the proles fucking and frolicking like they were having fun (and without poetry!). Here I am a prole! ‘Up the lower-middle-middle class!’

Here you are allowed to be whoever you want… as long as you wear your hair in the hipster fashion and are not a Tory or a ‘grid’. It’s paradise and I will genuinely be sad, despite my (slightly) ironic tone, to leave. Having said that, I will be even more distraught if I have to stay in Derby for another year.

Oh Danny Boy the pipes, the pipes are calling…

A few words on Paris, Texas

I start every book and film with a highly sceptical attitude; I’m a pessimist by trade, and whilst this may create problems in everyday life, it is (perhaps ironically) a positive attribute when granting a discerning eye. It means the work must persuade me each time, it must distinguish itself in order for me to embrace it.

Yesterday I sat down to watch my second Wim Wender’s film, Paris, Texas,having been previously impressed by his depiction of angelic longing in Wings of Desire. This time I was stunned from the first shot : billboards have never looked so beautiful, the sky never looked so blue, and the highways of America never looked as vast as they do in this film; a film that concerns itself with the link between physical and emotional distance. The subtle dialogue crescendos with the journey of the protagonist, Travis (played by Harry Dean Stanton), who at the beginning is walking alone in a desert, unable or unwilling to speak a word, and at the end is precisely recounting his story, through a pane of glass at a sex emporium in Austin.

I will say it now, I think this is one of the best films I have ever or ever will see; it is a slowly but perfectly crafted masterpiece.