Movies

Having just finished my film studies paper yesterday, I can finally look forward to watching some movies again. Movies have always been important to me, but they've kind of disappeared from my radar over the last semester of bustle (along with live music, television, and reading). I went to the Art Theater probably 20 times last year, whereas this semester I've only been two or three. My figures for Netflix don't look much better. This decline in my traditional movie-watching has had some very strange side effects.

For one thing, it's simply harder to talk to people. At the beginning of the year there was an unspoken pact for all the seniors to never mention college in polite conversation -- if it was going to happen, it would be in hushed tones behind closed doors. This pact, for me at least, lasted less than a month into the Common App process. I've always thought of myself as the kind of person who would never be boring or pretentious enough to talk about schools, even at Uni, but I was quickly proven wrong. While no one really likes college talk, our outside lives often feel so withered that a casual conversation can end up circling the drain until someone tosses in the "so, top 3?" life raft. By now we've even learned to enjoy it. Like an Amish person talking about sex, it feels both uncomfortable, immoral, and unsatisfying -- all of which makes it just a little bit titillating. I don't usually blush and giggle after talking about college, but I might as well.

Still, the lack of conversation material isn't a problem confined to movies. I used to spend a lot of time talking about movies, but even people who didn't step inside a theater or turn on Netflix last year have been feeling the effects (I don't know any of these people, but just take my word for it). However, there have been some weirder effects that I blame specifically on the lack of film in my life. For one thing, my dreams have been much less vivid. I've always dreamed in a very "filmed" way, with lots of pans and zooms and scene changes, but lately that's been happening less and less. Most of my dreams now, when I dream, involve some kind of embarrassing or confusing school sequence, with very little cinematography. The reason I can blame this on movies is because when I have found the time to watch movies -- especially very visually stimulating ones -- I've had intense dreams based very clearly on those movies. For example, when I re-watched Spirited Away a few months ago, I had several dreams in a row of flying and working for demons. When I watched Aguirre, The Wrath of God, I lived in the jungle and got yelled at. I don't know why exactly movies have this kind of effect on my sleep, but they clearly do. And what's worse, I always sleep better when I dream, so my loss of dreaming has felt like a pretty big blow to my productivity.

Dreams aside, I've noticed some differences in my waking life as well. I've always been a fairly visual person, but that's been slipping away lately. Especially last year I would often be able to just look at something for several minutes and appreciate what a good shot (or, when I was drawing more, sketch) it would be. That's almost completely gone now. I've lost a lot of patience for visual beauty, which could be either because I don't have much of a framework to compare it to, or simply because having lost the practice sitting still for two and a half hours at a time has messed with my attention span.

If dropping movies from my diet has had such a bad effect on me, why haven't I just pushed some time aside in my schedule and work through my Netflix list? If you asked me this question out of the blue I would probably answer that there's just no time to push aside for it, but that isn't totally honest. Although I am pretty busy, I still usually have 2+ hours of free time on the weekends that could easily be spent on the couch. However, that free time almost all gets compressed into the pre-homework ritual, in which I open up a blog post or college essay and then spend several hours pretending to do it while clicking aimlessly and eating food. As pointless as this period is, I've tricked my brain into doing it by arguing that it almost constitutes work, and that I can't work without it (which is not true). Every individual task is very short, and I tell myself it will be the last before I get cracking. By contrast, committing 2 hours to a single task right from the start feels incredibly irresponsible, even if it might actually be relaxing enough to get me to work again when I finished. Unfortunately I can't see this changing this semester, which brings us back to the start: I can't wait for break, when I'll be able to redevelop my movie-watching habit for the less strenuous spring. With any luck, I'll be dreaming normally again by March.

Stud Prod

This year is my second doing StudProd. After really enjoying acting in Kai's show "Bad Influences" last year, I decided to take the next step and actually direct a show. My original plan was actually to write something of my own, but I ended up running out of time before the deadline, so instead I'm working with a script written by Coleman. Even though I didn't write it it's been a lot of fun to tweak the script and move it in my own directions, and to experiment with what works with the actors I have.

The play is called "Powers," and it involves a man who decides to be a superhero for all the wrong reasons (or at least some of them). The superhero genre is kind of overplayed right now, and in fact so is the loser-becoming-fake-superhero genre, and that's a big part of what I think makes this play work. It only really makes sense in a world where other people have done this before, because it's about an ordinary person who decides to live out a common fantasy. I wouldn't say it's a deconstruction of the genre, or even that it makes much of a specific point. Instead it's just a tenuously realistic story about one person doing something mildly unusual, which I think can be just as valuable, and probably more fun to watch. And the other plays look good too, especially the other student-written one, "Meet The Doctor and Her Friendly Staff" (I think that's it).

Even though I didn't manage to put something together this year, I still think that the opportunity to write something that will be performed is a very valuable one, especially for high schoolers. Right now there's talk about abolishing the student-written plays and making the process more about directing, and although I understand that argument (as well as the argument that overall quality would probably be higher if Stud Prod only used published pieces) I also think removing the student plays would take away some of Stud Prod's charm. I remember coming in as a subbie and watching plays that, while not necessarily good, had the definite mark of Uni humor and sensibilities. Later on, as I got to know some of the people who wrote plays, I started to be able to see individual writers' styles and match them with their personalities. Directing other people's writing does allow for some amount of personality to shine through, but it still doesn't have the same cobbled-together feeling of something that's student-made from top-to-bottom.

Still, I don't mean to be down on the idea of directing. There's something about managing a bunch of people so our community can see the best show possible that just feels worthwhile. I feel like it's my little way of making Uni a better place to work and go to school, even if all I'm giving is two 30-minute blocks of entertainment. Right now I think that might be the most helpful thing of all. The grind of everyday schoolwork, homework, activities, and college applications can get a bit numbing by November, especially given our recent excruciating slide into winter, so we need to have things like this to break up the monotony. And even if the show is a flop and it ruins everyone's pre-Thanksgiving weekend, it'll still have helped mix up my routine. You'd think that adding two hours of work every day would increase my stress levels, but in the long run it makes me feel much more like I'm doing something with my senior year, which keeps me willing to slog through pages of essays.

Experiments

The other day as I was driving home, I heard the song "Run Run Run" by the Velvet Underground come on the radio. For those not in the know, it starts out as a slow jaunt with the words "run run run" repeated in monotone -- not one of their best works. At a little over the minute, right when the repetition really starts to grate, a single screeching, dissonant guitar note breaks through the main melody, setting up a short solo. I've never really noticed this moment before, since it's pretty standard for the band, but for whatever reason it made me pause this time. Here was a moment that I really enjoyed, in a way that felt very familiar -- like I said, it's a standard Velvet Underground technique, and something that's been copied since -- which at the time it was written, was meant to be a shocking experiment. In the 1960's, there were people who would have been legitimately upset at hearing it interrupt their song. The idea that what sounds pleasant and inoffensive to me would have been taken as an ugly mistake not too long ago is a very strange one, which I'd never really thought much about before.

What this effect shows is that music is more cultural than we realize. People tend to think of certain kinds of music as having certain innate meanings, such as major chords being happy or diminished 7ths (the kind they play when the dead villain's eyes open up in movies) being scary, when it's actually more complicated than that. Although a lot of how music affects us is ingrained and instinctual, enough exposure to a certain musical idea can change the way we react to it, meaning that what sounds enjoyable to some people is unpleasant to others. In fact, the exposure effect is so strong that certain kinds of music that were once considered objectively wrong are now almost standard. One of the most extreme examples is Igor Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring," now a nice, harmless piece of background music for many people, which caused actual riots on its first performance in 1913. Another example is the avant-garde jazz of the 1950's and 60's. According to some of my more musical friends, artists like John Coltrane played chord progressions that should by all rights sound terrible, or at least confusing -- they just did it so much and were so influential that by now most of their music just sounds nice, even on the first listen.

Something we tend to take for granted about the current electric, mass-media age of music is that we are almost all exposed to traditionally "wrong" ways to play music, without ever thinking much of it. People who've never heard Stravinsky or Coltrane still live in a world where the experiments of those kinds of musicians have percolated into the wider musical culture, with all the artists they influenced incorporating formerly avant-garde elements until they become common. In addition, between satellite radio, movie and TV soundtracks, and the Internet, the average person probably just hears a lot more (and more varied) music today than at any time in history. You can go through a whole day now without ever experiencing silence. Naturally, this means that people's minds are much more open to different kinds of music, to the extent that this album was made by one of our most popular living artists.

In all seriousness, the fact that you can hear Yeezus on the radio does pose an important question: is there anything people won't listen to these days? After all, the music that was shocking ten or twenty years ago seems tame, or even cliched, today. In 2013 a band called Swans came out with The Seer, one of the most traditionally "unpleasant" pieces of music ever recorded, and as far as I know no one even complained. In fact, a lot of them bought it: The Seer, a 2-hour dronefest that features random bursts of dissonant noise, endless animal screeching, and a very scary album cover, charted in the Billboard top 100. Death Grips has 200,000 fans on Facebook. Imagine dropping either of those bands into 1913; people would start World War I a year early. Today they're something you can put on while you're writing college applications. Based on that and the fact that I can't remember any music within my lifetime that really upset people for more than its lyrical content, I think we might have reached a point of maximum experimentation -- we've just burnt out our own ability to be upset. In some ways, that's a shame. Maybe it would be fun if we could reset the clock and experience music that's really surprising. As long as we survived the riots.

Reading

Reading has always been very important to me. I learned to read early as part of learning English, so it's a skill I've had for almost as long as I can remember. When I was younger and lived in a small town in South Dakota, I read constantly, probably because I didn't have many friends. The rate slowed down as I got older and busier, but I've managed to keep up an average of a little less than a book a week during my time at Uni.
So far this year I've managed to read all of one and a half books outside of class. Needless to say this has been a very confusing change.

The reasons for my precipitous drop in reading are pretty obvious; I've just been so busy between school (taking no free periods was a mistake), college applications (applying to 10 colleges is a mistake), and all of my various social obligations that I don't have enough time to chew through a whole novel every week. However, I'm also reading less when I do have free time, for reasons that aren't quite as clear to me. Whereas my standard day used to involve at least a little bit of reading as procrastination, the amount of work I now have to do on my computer means that it's much easier to procrastinate online than in the real world. Particularly damaging to my reading habit is the proliferation of college review sites, where in the darkest depths of the days before a major assignment is due I spend inordinate amounts of time telling myself that technically, reading what Samantha K. thinks of her daughter's time at School X is more useful than reading fiction, because it's at least somewhat related to the big clawing mass that's bearing down on me. Even though these kinds of things are really pointless, I spend hours every week flipping through them because it's easier than actually writing but still "feels" like work.

I do this even though I know for a fact that just reading for pleasure would make me happier and more productive. Stress is one of the biggest reasons I agonize so much over my writing and wait so long to get started, so the reasonable solution would be to do things that reduce stress. Well, reading is the single biggest way I've reduced stress my entire life. But of course to read I'd have to get out of my chair and grab a book, which feels like giving up on the work I need to do RIGHT NOW URGENTLY. So instead I sit down, spend a few hours flickering back and forth between blank pages and tenuously academic articles and videos, getting nothing done and relaxing not even a little bit. By the end of it it's 10 pm, I have four pages due tomorrow, and I can't remember I single thing I've read the entire evening. This is not a healthy cycle, but every time I try to break it I get sucked right back in.

Honestly, I can survive without reading for the duration of this semester, if that's what it takes to survive the college application process. What I'm more afraid of is that my lifelong habit of reading, which has been one of the biggest sources of comfort I've had, is going to be broken by this brief interruption. What if six months from now I pick up a book and get bored within five minutes, then grab another book and get bored again, and then grab a third, and finally start flipping rapid-fire between them and growing increasingly agitated at myself for not understanding any of what's going on? Based on my recent behavior it's a real possibility, and the concept of having to relearn something that's always been natural to me is very frightening. Of course it still hasn't been enough to motivate me to set time aside for reading -- or rather, to actually get around to it when I do set time aside. At this point all I can say is that I hope I manage to figure out to balance work and relaxation in the brief calm afforded by the start of second quarter, and if not that I at least emerge from this period with my love of reading intact.

What Uni Does To Us

Coming in to my fifth year at Uni High, I feel as though I'm finally qualified to talk about what the place is actually like. I don't think many people really dislike Uni as a whole, but then very few people have an entirely positive view of it either. Those people tend to get made fun of, unfortunately. Like so many others, I have to admit that I've often wondered what it would have been like to go to Central or UHS instead. Maybe I would have known more people, gone to more parties, had more fun. On the other hand it's not a given that anyone who has good friends here would have found any at another school; maybe I would have spent a lot more time by myself. As time has gone I've mostly accepted that for me, any other high school experience is unknowable, and that I need to try to make peace with the one I'm having.

While Uni may not be known for great parties, there's still something to be said for the tight-knit quality of the social scene here. It's a true cliche that people know each others' names here, and while we tend to devolve into cliques by freshman year most people can at least hold a conversation. You do really feel like you have some sort of connection to almost everyone, even if it's just some small thing you did together as sophomores. And of course the teachers are fantastic, and the small size lets you feel like you have much more personal connections with them than might be possible at a larger high school.

That said, I think there are still a few things worth complaining about. The small size in particular is a double-edged sword; while it can be comforting it can also be isolating, and many Uni students feel very cut off from the rest of the world. There's definitely a bubble around us, with the opportunities to interact with people who aren't middle-upper class white/asian kids being pretty limited. It feels sometimes like there are a few background types everyone shared, and people who don't quite fit in with those are often isolated. Even within our tiny bubble, it feels like there are some pretty intense splits running roughly along such ridiculous divides as future choice of major or past middle school. In particular the STEM and humanities kids tend to keep with their own kinds, with all the future doctors, lawyers, and other upper-class miscellany shifting around amorphously. It's a very strange split but it's one that gets voiced pretty often, and one which I have to admit I'm not immune to. My friends tend to be the ones who plan on teaching English or sociology, not doing research in biochemistry. If there's a good side to this split it's that it is probably based more on personality type than actual prejudice -- the kinds of people who really value science (and money) tend to act differently than those who really value the arts (and meaningful conversation). Needless to say, in the real world the split between being a professor of chemistry and a professor of history isn't as big as it seems in the minds of most Uni students.

When all is said and done it's hard to weigh conclusively whether going to Uni is a good idea or a bad idea. Certainly a lot of people get a lot out of it; but then there are others who spend five years mostly alone and learn to hate everything it stands for. It's up to individual students to decide whether the relationships they've built here make up for what they've missed out on elsewhere. I'll never know if Uni was really the best place for me, since I can't measure the way I've grown here with how I would have grown at Central, but as the specter of college looms and I'm starting to realize all the people, places, and little quirks that I'll miss about the place, my answer is starting to look like a yes.

Local Music

As Ms. Majerus pointed out, my last post on what makes C-U worth living in more or less skimmed over music. Since we do have an uncommonly good music scene here, I figured I would make amends by doing a whole post on it. Of course I've never been allowed inside a lot of the venues (bars, the Canopy Club, etc), so this is going to be somewhat incomplete, but I'll try my best to give a decent overview of what people our age can see.

Personally I've been going to shows since I was about 13, which sounds impressive until you realize that that was four years ago. Needless to say I've missed out on a lot, but even in the time I've been here there've been some exciting changes. Probably the biggest is the opening of Error Records, an all-ages venue that's so far managed to get a lot of good shows. The genres are mixed but tend to run in the indie/hardcore region. In particular they seem to have the best record with out-of-city bands, which otherwise tend to be pretty poor, at least at shows where minors are allowed (unless you're really into high school Evanston sludgecore). Some of my favorite indie bands I first discovered playing in front of an old move at Error Records. It also doubles as one of my main sources of clothing; several of my t-shirts were bought in my excitement after seeing a particularly good band. This paragraph's recommended band: Muscle Worship, a Kansas hardcore/psychedelic outfit with no less than 3 bass guitars. I first saw them play at Error Records in front of a projection of Star Wars IV, which fit them surprisingly well. 

Error Records might be my favorite venue in town, but there are some other great options as well. Recently I went to a combination art/music show at the Art Party studio, which had some great local and out-of-town bands. I've never heard of the place before and I'm not sure they do these kinds of things routinely, but it was still nice to see. Some businesses like the Red Herring and Error Records (undoubtedly the best record shop in town) also have occasional shows if you check their schedules. Then there are the frequent house shows, which take place over two or three hours inside someone's private home, which is temporarily opened to the public. Unless you know the people involved the best way to find out about them is usually on either Facebook groups or Smile Politely's weekly "Overture" section. None of these venues is necessarily consistent, but put together they mean that if you want to go to a show on any given weekend, you can, and that's a very important thing to have if you want a really strong local music scene in a town like this. Recommended band: Acker, a local instrumental band that makes very good use of a cello in a rock setting. I've seen them a few times, always at small venues, and they're always a lot of fun. Their recorded stuff doesn't quite have the same energy, unfortunately. The members themselves are also great guys. 

Even with all of these available venues, if you look up shows around town it might seem like there's not too much going on. That's because the music scene is currently in the dry spell preceding the year's biggest musical event: Pygmalion. Some of you have probably been to Pygmalion before; it's one of the absolute best parts of the year for people who live in Champaign, and if you have any interest in indie music you've probably at least heard of it. Every year it brings in some of the best bands in the country, from of Montreal. to Warpaint to Grizzly Bear to Dinosaur Jr. Local favorites Elsinore are also a perennial presence. This year's lineup is especially deep, allowing there to be two separate days of headliners. Chvrches, Deafheaven, Panda Bear, and, most excitingly, the local band American Football, which is reforming just for this show after breaking up around 15 years ago. Their eponymous album is one of the most famous pieces of music to come out of Champaign, to the point where I've heard it even though I was 3 when it came out. The people who were actually around to see them live seem even more excited. I've seen individual members of the band play in various groups around town, and they all seem to be as good as ever. If only the organizers of Pygmalion had managed to pick up Slint, they would have had a perfect year.

Believe it or not, though, there was a time before Pygmalion. The venerable rock festival only started up ten years ago, missing out on the careers of some really incredible local bands. Like I said before, I wasn't around for most of this, and not a lot of books have been written on the history of the Champaign-Urbana music scene, but I do know bits and pieces of history. From what I understand the city had a kind of golden age of publicity in the 90's, as the success of bands like Nirvana and REM convinced record executives to search through college towns for the next big thing. We had a few near-stars, and a few fairly tragic stories, but we never quite ended up becoming the "next Seattle." What we got instead was much better: the 90's and early 2000's produced a ton of really great bands and musicians, which we get to enjoy even if most of the nation ultimately didn't (which might not have been a bad thing; look what happened to Kurt Cobain). Some particular standouts include American Football, Braid, Hum, the Poster Children, and Tortoise (technically Chicago-based but the members are from Champaign). These are all very talented and influential bands, and I would recommend any one of them. However, my final recommendation goes to Absinthe Blind, which I think is one of the best examples of the kind of shoegazy dream pop that's extremely indicative of the Champaign-Urbana scene. I first found this band at a local showcase at Error Records on the Saturday of Pygmalion two years ago. It ended up broken on the ground by the end of the day, but I managed to track down an online copy of their album Rings, and I have to say I agree with the person who sold it to me in saying that if you want to hear our local scene, you need to listen to Absinthe Blind.

(I'm going to tack this on here since I don't plan on writing another post about how great Champaign County is, but if anyone still doubts our artistic chops I just want to point out that Roger Ebert, David Foster Wallace, and Dave Eggers, three of the most influential voices of the late twentieth/early twenty-first century, have all lived in Urbana. Let's see Bloomington do that.)

Where We Live

Champaign-Urbana is the kind of place where residents really enjoy talking about where they live. Usually these conversations take the form of mutual complaints and promises to move to Chicago or Seattle. (Having never lived in any of the places people talk about moving to I can't say whether or not people complain about those too, but if there is a place no one wants to leave then East-Central Illinois is not it.) Sometimes I understand that all too well; I have to admit I'm one of the people who daydreams more about going to some exciting liberal arts college on a coast than spending another four years of my life in the midwest. At some point spending too much time here is bound to swallow up the little bits of bohemian street creed I get for having lived briefly in Europe. My repertoire contains a lot of the old overdone complaints (the bipolar weather, the lack of water, the distance from other cities, the midwestern over-politeness) in addition to some more abstract personal ones: the way the sky here dwarfs the tiny trees and buildings on the ground, and the way the empty flatness of the place hits me sometimes with the realization that we're all alone on a massive spinning orb (especially when it's dark and the wind is particularly harsh). But then you can say that for a lot of places, and as my time here is (probably) coming to an end, I'm starting to appreciate that this one in particular might not be as boring as people make it out to be.

When people are feeling generous towards our cities, the University is usually the first thing that gets brought up. While the contrarian part of me wants to skip that entirely since everyone's heard it all before, I think it's still worth pointing out how lucky we are to have the Quad, and the Bell Tower, and the libraries, and Boneyard Creek, and the entire sprawling nexus of enjoyable culture that springs indirectly from a massive population of young people and professors: the state streets, the Food Co-Op, the Art Theater, all the music, all the art, all the restaurants. If it weren't for the university we wouldn't have any of that, and the whole town would look like Decatur. You might not all want to go to the U of I, but everyone who lives here has to at least respect that it's responsible for much of what makes this community different so much else.

That's not to say that the university is responsible for everything there is to like about our area. If you're really sick of this town, and you're willing to drive a bit, I highly recommend visiting some of the smaller towns in and around Champaign county. Almost all of them have something to offer, from Homer Soda Company, to the Sidney Dairy barn, to Allerton in Monticello, to the inexplicable naval museum in the extremely landlocked Sadorus. I guarantee you that anywhere you go there will be something of interest to see or do, even if you have to use your imagination a bit. Even Rantoul has the reindeer ranch, which is worth at least one quick trip. I guess I should be encouraging you to bike to these places, since driving just to see the botanical garden in Mahomet seems a bit wasteful, but if I said that no one would even think about going anywhere further than the Savoy 16 -- which, by the way, is the one good thing about living in Savoy (we don't even have library access because the city council hates both taxes and learning, although they did lose their crusade against the MTD, so we now have bus service again).

Of course there are still a lot of things that I haven't brought up that make this place far from hellish, and not quite as dull as people make it out to be, but if you aren't exploring the U of I and/or the surrounding cities, you aren't making much of an effort to enjoy this place at all. Especially to the people who plan on leaving in a year or two and never coming back (and again, I'm probably one of them), just remember that this is still where you live, and possibly where you're from. A big part of all of us has been formed in Champaign County, and no matter how close to an ocean you move, that's not going to change -- so you might as well get to know what made you.