So what's it like being in art school?

Recently, there's a lot of the novel back-to-school yelling hi! and hey! from one end of the school to the other when a long-lost friend is spotted. There's the mingling at the student cafe where I fiddled with a photography major's $10,000 Hasselblad on loan from the school, feeling downright pissed that I wasn't able to loan it too! Because a graphic design major should totally be entitled to utilizing precious and elite equipment from another department right, ha!

Its missing lunch and eating pistachios instead, because I can't be bothered to waste my already short break trekking up the hill to a very crowded canteen.

Its also eating pistachios in the middle of class, because we're kind of chill that way. Then again, its also running down to the workshop to look for scrap mounting board for a last minute presentation. And then! Finding perfectly good files in the workshop and then bringing the whole lot up to share with friends haha! When we sponge from the school, we do it collectively - that should be our motto I guess.

Its a classmate jokingly telling you that they have an announcement/advice to make to my friend and I: that this semester, they request that we take a break and stop working so damn hard and making them look bad. Which is ridiculous, as I told him so, stop pretending okay, you guys are equally as crazy lor.

But its also facing the relative silence from your teacher when its your turn for your work to be critiqued, which is terrible of course because it means she thinks its boring. Then you struggle with thinking maybe its a) just a conflict in design direction or, b)deciding that my resistance and self-justification against her critique (or non-critique lol) might be gasp, arrogance.

Its also finally being more awake and caffeinated in the second half of your Western Film History lecture and suddenly while watching documentaries on the beginnings of the Hollywood studios, you really do feel the excitement and magic of film-making. My appreciation for film is still somewhat voyeuristic and definitely tinged by a permanent(?) stranger from the outside world perspective, but film is such a fascinating world on its own!

From this class, I watched a bloody 3 hour long silent movie that is said to be the first blockbuster ever (D.W Griffith's Intolerance), and surprised myself by actually liking it and being eventually quite emotionally connected to it. Then I learned that the same director did Birth of a Nation, which, while being a cinematic milestone, was an explicitly racist movie that revolved around the Ku Klux Klan saving the world! How is it that a director who can make a lovely film about LOVE also be the bigoted freak?

Its a strange world. Because this same fella, was also one of the founders of a minor* Hollywood production studio, United Artists. And the aim of United Artists was pretty noble: to return film-making from the clutches of evil commercial-minded producers, to the artists! Which is a cool notion, although I'm not too sure to what extent they managed to implement this.

*minor: Minor not in the sense that they were financially small, just that unlike the major production studios (e.g Paramount), they did not own any cinemas (yet) and were therefore, unable to control the exhibition of the films they produced. The major studios were totally vertically intergrated and controlled all three aspects of film production: production, distribution and exhibition.

The major studios also had this sly practice of forcing cinemas to purchase films in packages that maybe included one fantastic movie along with four clunkers. I honestly thought they still did this, which WOULD explain the crap that fills the cinemas sometimes, but uh apparently not! The practice was outlawed in the 1940s.

Wow see I learned a lot today.