Our Hopes and Expectations

I've been looking for a new scene. A new social circle to replace the one I walked away from. It is a long, slow process filled with trial and error. Even if I go out and don't meet anyone interesting on any particular night, it's still better than staying in The Tomb where there's a 0% chance of meeting anyone.

My latest source of inspiration/ideas is TIMEOUT. A friend gifted me a subscription so the damn thing is coming to me every week, may as well try to exploit it.

Saturday night, I gravitated toward an event that looked intriguing on paper:

Dreams, Nightmares and Hallucinations: A Celebration of The Dream Sequence

Dreams and nightmares have fascinated artists since the dawn of time. For years, filmmakers have been turning to the filmic “dream sequence” as a way to explore freer, more subjective forms of expression within the confines of the narrative structure demanded by conventional film-making. When these dream sequences are taken together as a group, we find a catalog of what could be understood as experimental “films within films.”

Tonight, join filmmaker Ronni Thomas for an exploration and celebration of the dream sequence. Thomas will contextualize the dream sequence within a discussion of its history...

It was held at The Observatory, an arts and events space in Brooklyn.

It was the coldest night I'd walked around in a while; the wind battering against me as I tried to get to the place on time. Disappointment occurred almost immediately upon my arrival at the venue. I expected it to take place in an auditorium, but it turned out to just be a smallish room with not enough folding chairs. There were too many people and it turned into an awkward standing-room-only affair.

A projector screen was set up to show clips from movies. I traveled all the way out there, I had to give it a chance.

It began promisingly enough with a surreal clip from a 1961 Canadian horror film called "The Mask".


Thomas offered a brief intro to the clip before he played it from his Mac book. Some really bizarre imagery in anaglyph 3D. (No glasses for the audience.) Real interesting stuff. When the clip ended, Thomas talked about how much he liked it. Then he introduced and played a clip from another movie.

This was the structure of the entire hour-long event.

With a name like "Dreams, Nightmares and Hallucinations: A Celebration of The Dream Sequence", I thought something more profound was being offered. It sounds like a really compelling lecture class. I expected the speaker would make connections between the disparate sequences, discuss the history of dream sequences in film. The nature of dreams themselves and the art of using them as a storytelling device.

There was nothing like this.

It turned out to be just a bunch of clips of dream sequences from movies and TV that this guy really liked. And isn't that cool?

No.

It wasn't cool.

It pissed me off.

More so because I know that I could've taken the same fucking clips and delivered an infinitely more compelling and cohesive lecture. This guy did not even try. And all these fucking people (myself included) came out to see it. Paid FIVE BUCKS to see it. Because it was featured in TIMEOUT NEW YORK. What a rip-off.

More annoying still: I think the majority of the audience liked it. They thought it was good. Because they got to watch some fun clips.

If the bar's that low for entertainment, I bet I could probably host my own event and have it featured in TIMEOUT. That's the only intriguing thought that I derived from attending that piece of fluff. If and when I've got something featured in TIMEOUT, I promise it'll be better than this. Underachievers, please try harder.

New rules. I don't want to hang out with anyone who I pity. I can't avoid this entirely right now, but I'd like to do my best. I want to hang out with people whose company I enjoy. People who've got something to contribute to the conversation. People who are cool. Not just superficially cool but profoundly cool. As relentlessly self-critical as I am, I know that I deserve a better scene.

This could take a while.