My flight to Spain leaves early tomorrow morning. I'm more nervous than excited right now, but I'm confident that as soon as I land in Madrid things will come together quickly. Mostly I'm excited to reclaim the sense of adventure and of entering the unknown that I remember from the early days of college. It should be a big adventure!
I'll be in Madrid until June 30th, then spend a few weeks travelling somewhere in Europe (very much still up in the air). It's been a great summer in Bellingham, and I feel like I'm already starting to miss the beauty of the Pacific Northwest - then again, Spain has its own unique beauty that I know I'll be missing when I fly back stateside in ten months.
To family and good friends: thanks for the companionship and fun times. I feel blessed. ¡Hola a Madrid y aventuras nuevas! Check back here for updates and photos.
31 August 2010
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Saturday, August 28, 2010
Bellingham Fun
Had a great day with Emily, Jon and Tori - brunch at Harris Cafe in Fairhaven, a walk to the Boardwalk & Boulevard Park, cupcakes, Village Books, Village Green lounging, and finally a stroll through downtown. Altogether lovely, and a good way to start wrapping up summer. Thanks guys!
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Sailboat Adventures!
Just had a great weekend trip to Anacortes. Susan Johnson graciously hosted us in her family's cabin, us being myself, Emily, Sam, Marc, Jen, Kaitlin and Jan. Great group of people & beautiful location!
The adrenaline highlight of the trip was surely Sam's and my sailboat adventure - the two of us were sailing a bit off the coast in one of those ultralight racing boats. The wind picked up and we hit some serious waves, so we decided to turn around - only to fail to let out the mainsail enough as it swung across the boat mid-jibe, so that it took the full brunt of the wind while parallel to the boat rather than perpendicular. Simultaneously a large swell came in (parallel as well) and the boat "went turtle," mast-down.
The water is frigid in Puget Sound, especially in the deeper straits, and it was a shock going in. I could feel myself starting to hyperventilate and move towards shock after only a few minutes: we were in the water no longer than that, thank God. Sam and I kept our composure and quickly started to pull on the centerboard and side of the boat - so successfully that as we rolled it upright it kept going and flipped again, basically right on top of us. Dodged that, tried again, got the boat back upright. We climbed back in shivering (and thankfully already pointing towards shore!) and went "full gas" back to the waiting hottub!
Needless to say, we were both very grateful to be OK afterwards. You feel totally calm while things like that are going on, and only afterwards when the adrenaline wears off do you start to get scared. We were just laughing for the entire trip back in to shore, feeling vigorous, triumphant and very "alive" (comes across as a cliche).
The rest of the weekend was great too. Prime fire lounging, midnight skinny dipping and repeated hottubbing with Jan and Marc, followed by coffee, muffins and a beach walk with Emily the next morning.
Thanks for the fun weekend all - and especially thanks Sam for your part in getting us to shore!
-Dave
The adrenaline highlight of the trip was surely Sam's and my sailboat adventure - the two of us were sailing a bit off the coast in one of those ultralight racing boats. The wind picked up and we hit some serious waves, so we decided to turn around - only to fail to let out the mainsail enough as it swung across the boat mid-jibe, so that it took the full brunt of the wind while parallel to the boat rather than perpendicular. Simultaneously a large swell came in (parallel as well) and the boat "went turtle," mast-down.
The water is frigid in Puget Sound, especially in the deeper straits, and it was a shock going in. I could feel myself starting to hyperventilate and move towards shock after only a few minutes: we were in the water no longer than that, thank God. Sam and I kept our composure and quickly started to pull on the centerboard and side of the boat - so successfully that as we rolled it upright it kept going and flipped again, basically right on top of us. Dodged that, tried again, got the boat back upright. We climbed back in shivering (and thankfully already pointing towards shore!) and went "full gas" back to the waiting hottub!
Needless to say, we were both very grateful to be OK afterwards. You feel totally calm while things like that are going on, and only afterwards when the adrenaline wears off do you start to get scared. We were just laughing for the entire trip back in to shore, feeling vigorous, triumphant and very "alive" (comes across as a cliche).
The rest of the weekend was great too. Prime fire lounging, midnight skinny dipping and repeated hottubbing with Jan and Marc, followed by coffee, muffins and a beach walk with Emily the next morning.
Thanks for the fun weekend all - and especially thanks Sam for your part in getting us to shore!
-Dave
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Olympic Peninsula camping trip
Just came back from a glorious camping trip on the Olympic Peninsula with our good family friends the Stutzmans. Highlights included hiking around near Hurricane Ridge, exploring low tide at the Salt Creek beach, and a family softball game. What a great trip!
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
A few days away
I'll be out of town for a few days on a camping trip with some family friends. Accordingly there will be no new blog posts until early next week - check back then.
Just got back from a few days in Seattle. It was wonderful to see good friends from Willamette! Emily, Katie, Coby, Micah, Tristan, Jamesie, Russ: thanks so much for all the good times.
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Seattle
Had a grand adventure last night with partners in crime Coby and Scott - after missing our bus to downtown Seattle due to poor timing, we just walked the whole thing, running into the brand new Tesla Roadster on the way (!!). We visited a few bars and "got our reunion on" prior to Coby's DC move, my Spain move, and Scott's own upcoming adventure: a noble night in the Willamette Cycling tradition.
Thanks Scott and Coby!
Thanks Scott and Coby!
Monday, August 9, 2010
Reviewed: Inception
Hi all,
I finally got around to seeing Inception with my good friend Tori two nights ago, and I was duly impressed. Detailed, good-looking, convincing. Mainstream reviews have tended to label the film "ingenious but emotionless" - cerebral at the expense of emotional - and I would dispute that verdict for two reasons.
[In a nod to its subject matter, this post will be not only psuedointellectual but long.]
First, the film may be ingeniously conceived, but it is not in fact so complicated that deciphering it requires the viewer's full attention. From the very first sequence the idea of "dreams within dreams"is steadily thematized; the viewer really doesn't have much trouble figuring out what's going on once the film delves into those nested dreams. It's hard to follow all the little details as you pick up on Inception's conceit, but not hard to figure out the conceit itself. Inception is a somewhat cerebral movie, but it's no intellectual heavyweight: Dan Brown rather than David Foster Wallace. (That sounds like slander, I know, but I'm not criticizing Inception itself, just the idea that figuring it out is an all-consuming process that comes at the expense of emotion.)
Yes, secondly, I found the emotional impact very real. The idea of an idea as a "virus," near impossible to eradicate, rings true in my experience - for that reason I have no problem believing that Mel would be unable to shake off the "hermeneutic of suspicion" that Cobb first incepted into her. My problem is with that first, plot-shaping inception: how are we as viewers to swallow the idea that Mel wouldn't doubt the "reality" of her world after descending to dream-limbo through a labyrinth of other dreams? Even if limbo is convincing and near-eternal, Cobb still gets what's up - I have a hard time believing that Mel would be stupid enough to require the idea to be incepted in the first place. At any rate, her suicide is the logical continuation of the emergence from limbo, and Cobb's guilt and sadness came across to me as very real. Likewise his joy at seeing his kids at the film's end.
In fact, the last shot of the film was (for the most part) received by the audience at the showing we attended as a big "F*** you!", a sort of cinematic middle finger on Nolan's part. I disagree with that as well: although it's initially frustrating not to see whether the spinning top falls over, Nolan (I argue) is formally recreating for us what Cobb did a minute earlier: turning away from the "hermeneutic of suspicion" - spinning the top and watching it, questioning reality - and embracing the present reality of emotion. That's our final impression of the film: a rejection of the doubt that consumed Mel for, instead, the doubt-free pleasure of human contact. Nolan (perhaps) wanted to make a claim that the "reality" of the now doesn't matter: it just is. Therefore Cobb's inattention to the spinning top mirror is meant to mirror the audience's acceptance of the happy ending over our own hermeneutic of suspicion, a doubt which we as viewers are forced to share with Inception's protagonists from the very beginning. ("Are we dreaming?" = "are we watching a dream?") The idea of the ending as a conscious claim rather than a big joke supports my personal impression that the emotional impact of the film more than stood up to its ostensible "cerebral-ity."
Oh, and by the way, Nolan did one thing very, very well. I've been marveling for years at our own fallible memory: none of us remember where we came from. We're told a story of our birth, shown pictures of a baby that shares our name but that at its youngest we cannot recognize at all, and at some point the story we're told corresponds (or at least overlaps) with those first hazy memories of our infancy. But fundamentally not one of us can recall "how we got here," i.e. how we came into being. Not even close. It's weird. Nolan's ingenious move was making that condition a symptom of being in a dream, no doubt leading to a lot of "A-ha!" moments in post-film discussions. "Oh sh** man, maybe life really is a dream," etc. Good one, Nolan, extending the audience's own suspicion (and film's rhetorical power) until well after Inception ends. Here I am writing about it, two days after the fact.
Lastly, two influences on (or intertexts within" Inception stand out for me. First, was anyone else reminded of the Kurtz scenes in Apocalypse Now when Cobb met the elderly Saito at the beginning of the movie? The soaked yellow lighting, the surreal mood, the trembling voice of the old, tormented figure asking the weakened stranger if (in Inception) "you've come to kill me" or if (in AN) "you're an assassin?" (@4:30 for comparison, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9oBiD7-kAM). Even the bowl or rice Cobb's eating echoes a similar shot of Willard's recuperation. The whole thing felt like an homage to Apocalypse Now. (Rightfully so: the entire Kurtz sequence does an infinitely better job of recreating the creeping uncanny ambience of a dream than Inception's visually slick but non-dream-like CG effects.) The second intertext deserves real credit, I think: Borges' short story "The Circular Ruins," about a man who sets out to dream another man into existence. I'd be shocked if Nolan didn't read it while conceiving his film. "The Circular Ruins" is part of Borges' Ficciones, which is an exquisite collection. (Material for a later post!)
I finally got around to seeing Inception with my good friend Tori two nights ago, and I was duly impressed. Detailed, good-looking, convincing. Mainstream reviews have tended to label the film "ingenious but emotionless" - cerebral at the expense of emotional - and I would dispute that verdict for two reasons.
[In a nod to its subject matter, this post will be not only psuedointellectual but long.]
First, the film may be ingeniously conceived, but it is not in fact so complicated that deciphering it requires the viewer's full attention. From the very first sequence the idea of "dreams within dreams"is steadily thematized; the viewer really doesn't have much trouble figuring out what's going on once the film delves into those nested dreams. It's hard to follow all the little details as you pick up on Inception's conceit, but not hard to figure out the conceit itself. Inception is a somewhat cerebral movie, but it's no intellectual heavyweight: Dan Brown rather than David Foster Wallace. (That sounds like slander, I know, but I'm not criticizing Inception itself, just the idea that figuring it out is an all-consuming process that comes at the expense of emotion.)
Yes, secondly, I found the emotional impact very real. The idea of an idea as a "virus," near impossible to eradicate, rings true in my experience - for that reason I have no problem believing that Mel would be unable to shake off the "hermeneutic of suspicion" that Cobb first incepted into her. My problem is with that first, plot-shaping inception: how are we as viewers to swallow the idea that Mel wouldn't doubt the "reality" of her world after descending to dream-limbo through a labyrinth of other dreams? Even if limbo is convincing and near-eternal, Cobb still gets what's up - I have a hard time believing that Mel would be stupid enough to require the idea to be incepted in the first place. At any rate, her suicide is the logical continuation of the emergence from limbo, and Cobb's guilt and sadness came across to me as very real. Likewise his joy at seeing his kids at the film's end.
In fact, the last shot of the film was (for the most part) received by the audience at the showing we attended as a big "F*** you!", a sort of cinematic middle finger on Nolan's part. I disagree with that as well: although it's initially frustrating not to see whether the spinning top falls over, Nolan (I argue) is formally recreating for us what Cobb did a minute earlier: turning away from the "hermeneutic of suspicion" - spinning the top and watching it, questioning reality - and embracing the present reality of emotion. That's our final impression of the film: a rejection of the doubt that consumed Mel for, instead, the doubt-free pleasure of human contact. Nolan (perhaps) wanted to make a claim that the "reality" of the now doesn't matter: it just is. Therefore Cobb's inattention to the spinning top mirror is meant to mirror the audience's acceptance of the happy ending over our own hermeneutic of suspicion, a doubt which we as viewers are forced to share with Inception's protagonists from the very beginning. ("Are we dreaming?" = "are we watching a dream?") The idea of the ending as a conscious claim rather than a big joke supports my personal impression that the emotional impact of the film more than stood up to its ostensible "cerebral-ity."
Oh, and by the way, Nolan did one thing very, very well. I've been marveling for years at our own fallible memory: none of us remember where we came from. We're told a story of our birth, shown pictures of a baby that shares our name but that at its youngest we cannot recognize at all, and at some point the story we're told corresponds (or at least overlaps) with those first hazy memories of our infancy. But fundamentally not one of us can recall "how we got here," i.e. how we came into being. Not even close. It's weird. Nolan's ingenious move was making that condition a symptom of being in a dream, no doubt leading to a lot of "A-ha!" moments in post-film discussions. "Oh sh** man, maybe life really is a dream," etc. Good one, Nolan, extending the audience's own suspicion (and film's rhetorical power) until well after Inception ends. Here I am writing about it, two days after the fact.
Lastly, two influences on (or intertexts within" Inception stand out for me. First, was anyone else reminded of the Kurtz scenes in Apocalypse Now when Cobb met the elderly Saito at the beginning of the movie? The soaked yellow lighting, the surreal mood, the trembling voice of the old, tormented figure asking the weakened stranger if (in Inception) "you've come to kill me" or if (in AN) "you're an assassin?" (@4:30 for comparison, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9oBiD7-kAM). Even the bowl or rice Cobb's eating echoes a similar shot of Willard's recuperation. The whole thing felt like an homage to Apocalypse Now. (Rightfully so: the entire Kurtz sequence does an infinitely better job of recreating the creeping uncanny ambience of a dream than Inception's visually slick but non-dream-like CG effects.) The second intertext deserves real credit, I think: Borges' short story "The Circular Ruins," about a man who sets out to dream another man into existence. I'd be shocked if Nolan didn't read it while conceiving his film. "The Circular Ruins" is part of Borges' Ficciones, which is an exquisite collection. (Material for a later post!)
Alright, that's all that's on my mind having to do with Inception. Hope you enjoyed it. Take care all,
-Dave
By the way...
David Davidson is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com.
Monday, August 2, 2010
Inaugural Post
Hi all,
My name is David Davidson. I'm a Willamette University graduate in English and Spanish, about to begin a 10-month Masters in Teaching at the University of Alcalá in Madrid. I'll use this blog to document my travels and life, hoping to strike a balance between personal utility to me, value as a communication device between me and you and simple entertainment value for the lot of us. Thanks for reading!
Take care,
-Dave
My name is David Davidson. I'm a Willamette University graduate in English and Spanish, about to begin a 10-month Masters in Teaching at the University of Alcalá in Madrid. I'll use this blog to document my travels and life, hoping to strike a balance between personal utility to me, value as a communication device between me and you and simple entertainment value for the lot of us. Thanks for reading!
Take care,
-Dave
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