when i first saw this film back in 2001, i recall dismissing it entirely as an exercise in rotoscoping. in retrospect, my only defense is that i wasn't ready for it. i was too concerned with its superficial formal strategies, and so i could only scratch at its surface. thinking on it now, rotoscoping as strategy to get the viewer to distance themselves and allow the idea of the uncanny to begin to unfold, is really quite effective.

the notion that a small thing can be off- and that this alone can be a signifier for either waking or dreaming states, is really useful when considering the potential of lucid dreaming.

and at the risk of going off the new age deep end, i have begun to think about this film as an intersection of nearly all the ideas that preoccupy me as of late. and it's inherant to the nature of its subject matter that it has come back to me now, ten years after i first saw it, in a way that is wholy consumable. i think this gets to the idea of layers. and that perhaps life is in fact a series of holy moments that have to be received and understood as layers. eventually the layers may stack up to create a fully formed image. wake up already.

stills from waking life, 2001 directed by richard linklater

not THE diagon alley, and not the center of wizarding, but a diagon alley of sorts, and certainly the center of street food cravings in phuket, thailand. during the day, this alley would remain open but it had a sleepy quality- mostly functioning as a shady respite for anyone walking by and seeking a cold coconut. but at night, the alley came alive with lights, people, and scooters pushing through. the center area of each stall seemed to offer a secondary function as a tv lounge for the owners, which seemed quite useful. the flickering light from the tvs as one walked by, along with an olfactory tunnel of grilling foods, all add to the mysterious quality at night.

in the spirit of continuing to look closely at my own backyard [the backyard being wellington as a whole], i took these photos on the miramar mountain bike path one afternoon.  perhaps because of the limited resolution, lytro seems to have issues with shooting into a source of light. but i felt here, this particular technical flaw evokes a sense of intrigue and mystery. maybe this really is just a flawed photo, but i think the notion of an actual low-fi aesthetic is an interesting and useful one for telling certain kinds of stories. district 9 comes to mind as a really well-crafted example. and of course we have blair witch to thank for popularizing the whole concept.

in continuing to experiment with the lytro, i've been playing around with it's built-in filters.  the line art filter converts everything to a sort of rotoscoped look. i admit there is hip disposable instagram potential here.  loads of it.  but there is also a way in which the thing being photographed becomes distanced, and through a quality of constructedness, observed freshly as if for the first time. in this case perhaps a tree is a tree is not a tree...

i grew up watching x files. at a young impressionable age, i had already decided that clearly aliens were among us, the governments was covering it up because the general public couldn't handle the truth, and most importantly, there was a lot of classified shit going down in the california deserts. though i largely still believe most of that, age has tempered the mystery and wonder conspiracy theories used to hold for me. perhaps it's the glut of alien movies i have consumed in the intervening years. or the steady diet of trek. but it all feels pretty blase. aliens, cigarette man, fbi. next.

yet, when i do have occastion to drive through some of the real places that have inspired the fiction, i find they still hold a powerful sense of the unknown. windmills en route to palm springs are particularly iconic. they have a foreboding, sentient quality, as they remain perched en masse, just watching the towns and passers by below. they may be a blight on the landscape, but after all this time, to me, they have come to embody it and exemplify the isolation of the desert.

i want to believe.