Moving back into Folwell Hall!

Eighteen months ago we packed up our department offices and moved into temporary space while Folwell Hall was being gutted and reconfigured. My department has moved from the grotty, filthy, vermin-infested basement to a clean, quiet second floor. My new office faces south and for the first time in 22 years,  I will have an office with  natural light, decent climate control, no noise from crowds students sitting on the floor in the halls waiting for class, no noise from chairs being rearranged overhead, no grit and dirt tracked in all winter, a bathroom that is not used by hundreds of other people during that day. It's sinking in that I'll have an office I actually will be able to enjoy working in! What a concept. It feels as if I have received a promotion or a raise.  The foundation and exterior had already been redone some years ago. Check out this cool slideshow to see the exterior of the building with some fun architectural details that were preserved or restored.




The quality of my work life has been incredibly improved. The moving process itself, the packing and unpacking, is time-consuming, but stimulating. Once again I am confronted by the sheer volume of STUFF I am dragging around and that is cluttering up my space, and my brain.This time, the purge must be complete and merciless!


One unexpected consequence has hit me this week. I feel, for the first time in ages, excited about writing again. I feel as if I can contemplate making a commitment to writing without dread and panic. Writing on this blog is one step. Writing in my work life, which I have avoided in unhealthy ways for too long, is the next.

There's nothing like moving 22 years worth of papers and books twice in 18 months to make one confront the gap between intentions and action. As I shelved my books, I got excited about the projects some of them represent. More to the point, there is no room in my new, lovely office for more than four drawers of paper files, and no files are allowed to live at home. My goal in the next few weeks is to sort through the contents of all these boxes (15! 15!!!) and recycle what I will never use again or SCAN those I want to keep.

Which pile will include papers I wrote in graduate school? those articles I painstakingly tracked down using the enormous card catalogue, running up and down nine flights of stairs in the UC Berkeley library, paying to photocopy them and carefully placing each page so nothing was cut off? the sheer amount of labor devoted to collecting this material over the years is an obstacle to blithely tossing it in the recycle bin. And I HAVE used a lot of this material, for writing or classes. So now, in this brief interlude before classes begin, it's a good time to open each box, sort things into piles, and work up a righteous buzz of recycling anything that I have not touched in ten years, and will not read or use for a writing project. That will force me to decide which of the many abandoned writing projects are still viable, and which ones need to be released into the wild.

Traveling with "The Fall" (Tarsem Singh)

Last night, we watched the movie The Fall, (available for instant view on Netflix) by director Tarsem Singh. Tarsem (as he calls himself) has created many ads and music videos ("Losing My Religion" by R.E.M. is his) as well as two spectacular films, The Cell and The Fall.

Adam Howarth, who has also worked on many commercials and films, played a major role in realizing Tarsem's vision by making things blow up, creating building models, and making many of the spectacular costumes, working with reknowned costume designer Eiko Ishioka, including this amazing horned headdress.

Howarth's photos on Flickr are all wonderful, and the set from the shoot is breathtakingly beautiful, giving us a glimpse behind the scenes of a movie that was made entirely on location in some of the most spectacular landscapes and structures in the world. Here is his Flickr Set, published under the name of his company Siam Eye. In these photos, you can see some of the amazing details of costumes, building models, and many of the stunt doubles, actors, local people and sights during the filming.


I wanted to know where all the scenes were filmed, and found this wonderful site where someone who shared my desire has compiled a detailed list with still photos. Thanks, to blogger ally for helping us travel vicariously!


For another vision by Tarsem that incorporates many of the elements he expanded in the film, here is a video he did for the French duo Deep Forest (Michel Sanchez and Eric Mouquet), who mixed a vocal from the Solomon Islands with their own production. The original video, shown on MTV in 1994, can be viewed on his website's reel, but this remake adds much more to the "around the world" dream. In both this video and the film, a young girl's dream vision guides us through the imagining and creation of a voyage around the world.

All movie stills used in this post are available for download at the movie website.