Am I Becoming A Tourist?

I will not be just a tourist in the world of images, just watching images passing by which I cannot live in, make love to, possess as permanent sources of joy and ecstasy. -Anais Nin

All the things I love and get geeky seem to be about are the stories that people tell and the journey those stories take to be told. For example a few months ago I listened to the musical Spring Awakening for the first time and to say it affected me would be an understatement, it got put on immediate repeat.

This it turns out it just the beginning, I am now a huge fan of the people who created the show and acted in it and it feels like tumbling down a rabbit hole trying to keep up and find out all the other things that they have been involved with. It continues to be a fantastic way of finding new music and stories and lives being lived but as much as I have connected to it and to other people through the Internet and am so glad it exist it has caused me to question something. How much this enthusiasm for something such as this is actually a stunting force in my life if I find it has become something that is not shared by those directly in my life? And is the observance and admiration of people and their work only beneficial if I take that energy and enthusiasm and fuel it to do something myself in that field? Can you get so lost in the joy of something created by others that you lose the opportunity to do something yourself?

Do you find that enthusiasm for something brings you together or sets you apart? If you find your ecstasy in the deeds in others is it merely an opiate for what if clear headed you could achieve yourself? I chase the creeping shadows of my depression away with the stories of others but does it leave me with no story of my own?

1 Oddbill

Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky

I have a habit of becoming fans of specific actors/actresses and finding all of their work I can, this method has lead to some almighty duds believe me; however not tonight. Bryan Dick is an English actor whose most well know projects have been Master and Commander and Blood and Chocolate, but as a British TV watcher I saw him in Earthfasts as a child, then Blackpool, an episode of Torchwood, the lovely All The Small Things and most recently an episode of Being Human.
Tonight the marvelous Cinema Paradiso enabled me to curl up and watch Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky and it was wonderful. The colour drained pallet of London in the 30's draws you into the world of Bob, Jenny and Ella; whose three overlapping but separately told stories make palpable the slow breaking of their hopes, love and ambition. There is a fantastic synopsis and review here so I won't even attempt but it got me thinking about things.
About how many small but passionate lives go on, how each person is screaming with their own story no matter how cliched or boring it may seem from the outside and that we may presume to get to know people or a situation but that it is probable we may never know anyone truly. How the small moments of happiness linger and how what is settling for one person may be heel-clicking, heart stopping love for the person on the other side of the relationship. How we are all living our own stories overlapping with others.
It also got me thinking about now, about all the blogs I read and why starting this was important to me; the lives portrayed in the programme were all quiet, a waiter, a prostitute, a barmaid living in a time we now paint with nostalgia. It came from a book by Patrick Hamilton and was heavily autobiographical, and yet it feels timeless, not necessarily the situation but the emotion behind it, commit to another human and run the risk of being hurt, trust someone again and again because you love them and want that to be enough, watch someone you want to want you want someone else. It made me wonder about the life I am living, what I want it to be and the people around me. Stuck in this body of perception, I want to know how and why others choose how to live, and how we try to break the barriers to tell our stories and what we choose to keep quiet.
Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky is a quiet period drama but it made my method worth the madness. My favourite plot was Ella's but I can't find a good picture of just her.


1 http://wondersinthedark.wordpress.com/2008/11/25/twenty-thousand-streets-under-the-sky-%C2%BD/
2 Ibid
3 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/dec/08/classic-novel-new-york-review