Favourite Things

This is a list dedicated to my favourite stuff, for movies, tv shows, and books.

  •  I have seen Goodfellas at least 10 times, and it never ceases to impress me with it’s incredible depiction of the biggest heist in American history. I never read the book Wiseguys, which is what the movie is based on, and hope to read it soon. The crime genre in movies has always been the most fascinating for me, with movies such as The Dark Knight, Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, The Godfather, and Raging Bull to name a few, it’s hard to not enjoy the genre. But Goodfellas towers above them all with its brutal yet honest violence and a story that spans decades. Martin Scorsese, the director, delivers his magnum opus with beautiful shots, a captivating story, and engaging characters that are unpredictable and unparalleled by most films. If you have not seen this film yet, I implore you to watch it.
  •  Breaking Bad is without a doubt one of the most glorified television shows in modern times, and is also the number one t.v. show I have ever seen. Walter White, a high school chemistry teacher with cancer, spends a year of his life producing methamphetamine to raise enough money for his family to survive without him. This show probably has one of if not the best performance ever delivered in television, with Brian Cranston shewing up scenery as he transforms from a regular joe to one of the biggest drug kingpins in New Mexico. Do yourself a favour and watch this masterpiece of a show.
  •  J.D. Salinger’s Catcher In The Rye is a book I did not enjoy in my first read. Or rather, I did not think it was anything special after my first read. But I must say, the more I thought about the book, the more I enjoyed it. A teen leaves his boarding to spend an unsure and lonely night in New York. It is one of the most honest books I’ve ever read. At no moment did I feel like Salinger was trying to beat around the bush of an idea, he is completely up front with his readers, and I find that to be so absolutely brilliant. I also thought then ending was touching while some may find it underwhelming. Tons of themes are present throughout the book and education systems should require everyone be required to read this novel, whether or not it has some inappropriate parts.

The Mnemonic

“Please, I want to see her again.”

That was enough for Norma to get carried away. A gentleman of his age should not be using the Mnemonic, but she couldn’t help it. How could she deny this man the chance to see his wife once more? He led her through the house to his bedroom where she laid the Mnemonic on a nightstand. Charles lay down on the bed next to the nightstand while Norma carefully applied some conducting fluid on the two cables that stuck out of the machine. She then attached the icy cables to his frontal lobe, and as if stabbed by the cold he flinched back and gave a silent gasp. Once done she clipped the control to his pinkie finger, and explained, “The Mnemonic can be controlled just by the brain itself, but if you find that too difficult you can move your hand to go through your memories. Your memories will be displayed on that wall like a projector. I’ll turn it on now.” The Mnemonic sprang to life and showed a blank screen.

“Thank you,” said Charles with a patient smile while Norma left the room.

The house had rejected her. She had felt it when she had first entered, but now she had felt it again. The house despised her presence, and wanted nothing more than to have her gone. Never the less Norma made her way to the kitchen where they had previously discussed all the repercussions of using the machine. She then collected all the signed documents and the cash from that oak table and inserted it all into her purse. She waited calmly until half an hour passed and Norma started to worry. She regretted letting him use it, after all, he could get dementia and she could lose her job. Every moment that passed seemed like an eternity to her, she just had to wait half an hour more, then she could go take the Mnemonic and leave. Just half an hour more in that house and she was gone, never to return.

Finally, the time had come for her to leave, and so she left the kitchen to go to Charles’ room. The door had been closed, but from the inside she could hear gasping, almost crying, and she quickly opened the door to find everything in it’s regular place, yet that noise, it seemed to be coming out of the Mnemonic. She looked at what it displayed horrified. He had his arms around her neck, her beautiful golden hair had specks of blood on it, and her face was a plum purple. Her hazel eyes became hazy, and she stopped fighting back, kicking back, hitting back, and lastly, trying to breathe. Everything went dead silent and Norma stared at Charles, petrified at his crooked smile.

She couldn’t move, she couldn’t save her, she couldn’t do anything. That’s when Charles said, “Don’t you know it’s impolite not to knock.”

Projector

Life As Told By Black Shoes

Life begins in a factory.

Where a surgical procedure,

Stitches you into life,

Where leather and sole,

Are melded together,

And delicately labeled,

By the brand you must keep.

 

Schooling begins in boxes,

Kept in the backs of stores,

Known only to a few,

Until you get placed on a rack,

Displayed for everyone to see,

Gazed at by loving admirers,

Until finally with the swift swipe of a card,

You belong to someone’s feet.

 

Work begins in a closet.

Where you shall remain,

Until ready to leave,

Exploring the world in a car,

Exploring the world in an office,

Exploring the world in a park,

Exploring the world,

In a trash bag.

 

Death begins at a landfill.

Left there to think for an eternity,

If only this hollowed out leather,

Had feet to walk with,

Then maybe life,

And death,

Would have began,

And ended,

With joy.

Alan Moore

Alan Moore is a comic book writer, and while most readers who enjoy high level literature might be turning their noses up at me, people seriously need to give this art form, and this writer in particular, the credit it deserves. Writer of V for Vendetta, Watchmen, Batman, The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and From Hell to name a few, he truly deserves much more praise from readers and writers alike, and while it makes me extremely happy to see some of his books receive garnish from magazines and organizations such as Time magazine, that put his book Watchmen in the top 10 novels of all time, he is not a writer that is well known in the public. He often explores deep ideas such as depression, terrorism, heroism, and sexuality with incredible precision and interesting perspectives in an unique way, unlike most novels that I have personally read. Watchmen is a prime example of this, a book known as one of, if not the best comic books ever written, which could honestly rival the likes of some of the greatest American fiction, and yet most people still haven’t even given these incredible masterpieces a chance. Comics are often seen as childish material, yet Alan Moore and other such artists continue to defy these stereotypes to deliver some of the best written stories and characters in this niche medium. Honestly if there was one thing I’d want to teach people about comic books, it would be that they are not childish material. In fact, that it is far from it, and that it is a respectable medium through which to tell stories. While some people might continue to snicker at the thought of a comic book as being a masterpiece, I truly do hope comics get the respect and admiration they rightfully deserve, and that in some way or form they are introduced into the school curriculum.

Alan Moore

Para Mi Familia, Poem

Para Mi Familia,
Was a song my grandmother used to sing,
And it told the story of three little pigs,
All dreaming in their beds,
One dreamt himself a king,
Who wanted only but pastries to keep himself fed,
One was the captain of a boat,
The day the sea seemed to want him dead,
And the youngest of three,
Dreamt of, “Supporting mi familia” he had said.
.
She would also tell me,
About the early years of my country,
When we had oil.
When we had a voice.
But when all was said and done,
When the land had finally been raped,
And we had no more left to give,
The world forgot we existed.
.
See mi familia comes from a third world country,
As if to say we have third class people,
And live in a galaxy far far away,
Because its easy to pretend like we don’t exist,
It makes us comfortable,
But mi familia has jumped over boarders,
To get to guarded cities,
Where there were reporters with recorders,
Endlessly recording nothing,
Where there were soldiers without shoulders,
For the pain of the world had grown too heavy,
Where the kids had guns for gums,
With every word which guzzled out as an uninformed tragedy.
.
But my country still stands.
And so the people of Venezuela became mi familia,
Because we had no one else to look to,
But ourselves,
Because while mi familia struggles to find toilet paper,
While mi familia dies for freedom,
While we’ve had to stare at the barrel of that gun,
You chose to look away,
The world, chose to look away,
Even when we pleaded for help,
.
Please,
.
Para mi familia.
 Marcha_hacia_el_Palacio_de_Justicia_de_Maracaibo_-_Venezuela_06
~
The purpose of this poem was for me to more or less explore the complications of being South American. As a result the poem uses the line Para Mi Familia often, which means for my family in Spanish. This also helps to represent the unity my country has discovered within ourselves. While political ideals may vary wildly from person to person, we’re still all in the same boat, stranded in an unforgiving ocean. I also wanted to use stereotypes in this poem as I believe they heavily affect the perspectives we have on cultures, and see if I could come at them from a different perspective.

Thinking Of Nothing

I don’t know what to say. So, this is me not knowing what to say, but saying it anyways. It’s kind of like those double negatives where someone says something like beautifully ugly or happily sad. I don’t really have a story to tell at the moment, and if I did it wouldn’t begin with once upon a time. It might begin with “This guy” or “She said” or “Have you heard”. The closest I might come to the stereotype is “This one time”.

So here it goes: this one time I was mad, and calm, and happy, and sad and all those colours the words remind you of. Just think about it for a second. Red would most likely be mad and white would be calm. Thats probably why people say you should go to the light when you die, because they’re seeking to be at peace and calmness. Happiness might be blue, or would that be sad? Why couldn’t they both be blue? Misery is such a short walk away from happiness or laughter. Maybe you don’t laugh at the moment, or in the next couple of hours or years, but eventually you will. People take themselves so seriously, constantly moving from place to place, the present isn’t present, it’s all about the future. People are terrified of their own mortality. They’re scared, and most importantly angry at it. Sure they might blame the traffic for their frustrations, or maybe the slow elevator, but in the end they’re angry at the clock, the time all that takes away from their lives.

If you haven’t realized by now, this is me wasting time, which I must say is pretty ironic. I’m part of those people that know how precious time and life is, yet choose to partly to ignore it. There’s other people in the world like that too, and others who just choose to ignore the subject of life and death completely, who focus on the next pay check and the next months or years of their lives. I am not fully aware of what I’m trying to say in this piece. But isn’t that sort of beautiful in its own right? Writing and creative medias in general no longer seem interested in telling the truth or having a voice. The movie Jurassic World made more money in it’s opening weekend then Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind, Goodfellas, The Shining, and Raging Bull combined. I know its not all about movies, but even in books Fifty Shades of Grey sold one million copies in just four days. I’m not trying to make the point that art is dying, because the same point can be argued that Jurassic World and Fifty Shades of Grey both pertain some sort of artistic vision or point of view, and there are plenty of books and movies coming out now that provide the inner critic in all of us with great satisfaction, yet, when was the last time a Buzzfeed article left people with some sort of inner catharsis of the society we live in today. This is just me, being as honest as I can, and I guess my purpose was to find some sort of inner meaning in what I’m thinking now. I’m sorry if this was hard to follow, I’m just not a simple person to follow.

New York Frenzy

My favourite place in the world is filled with insane people and drunks. It is busy and dynamic, with a constant drum beat to accompany the madness, and ever-changing streets according to modern times and ideas; the city that never sleeps. My parents have told me my obsessions with this city began with Spider-Man. As a young child the Spider-Man movies hit me hard, and I don’t know how many times I watched them, but I would always want to get my hair cut like Peter Parker and run around in my apartment wearing a white buttoned up shirt just to take it off and reveal a spider symbol that had been meticulously sharpie’d on my chest. My obsession with Spider-Man has since faded, but my love for New York city has never changed. I am romantically in love with a city that may very well reject me, but those streets and avenues simply seize to fill my mind with thoughts. As a result, when I got to go for a week in 2012, I was more than excited.

I spent most of that week angry. Now I know that sounds bad, but I was an angry kid. I was just frustrated with the fact that I couldn’t do all the things I wanted to do. This was eight years of dreaming packed into a weeks time, and as an 11 year old there was going to be no way I was going to fulfill all I wanted to do. We went on the golden gate bridge, the Statue Of Liberty, Time Square, and many other places for the first 6 days, but that was simply not enough to fill my hunger to know every inch of the city I had so passionately admired for so long. I remember the last day specifically, my parents had gotten sick since they weren’t prepared for the weather to be so cold, and had only brought light jackets. We spent almost the rest of that day just going to different places and trying to get soup on the go. I was mad that I wasn’t able to continue on my journey, but in retrospect that was probably one of the most interesting parts of the trip. Just walking around New York, looking for a restaurant that would serve some soup on the go. It was like we were real New Yorkers, if only for one day.

New York

Jim Carrey, (Funny Anecdote)

I lost a tooth while balling. I had decided that the best way to land a fall was to use my front right tooth for the landing. I don’t remember feeling it, I think I realized something was wrong some seconds later when I could insert my tongue into where my tooth used to be. In the course of a day I had gotten my tooth glued back in. Then about a week later at 12 in the night I was watching Doctor Dolittle, as you do, and I broke my tooth while eating pita bread and hummus. I got it glued back in the next day, and about five days later me and some friends decided to go to a haunted park. Halfway through one of the haunted house tours, I decided to grab on to my friends shoulders and try to scare him, and he sent his shoulders flailing back, hitting me in the tooth. I don’t remember the rest of the tour, all I can remember is feeling like I just got punched in a Looney Toons cartoon. So I guess I learned my lesson, when going in a haunted house with friends, don’t try to scare them.

Story For Scavenger Hunt

 A Walk Among London

London is sort of like the New York of Europe. There’s endless noise and endless conversations, all endlessly filling in the storm drains. But the further you get from the heart of it, the more you get to the calmer streets, the residences that aren’t owned by millionaires or royalty. Its all a lot like going from Times Square to Brooklyn. But at its heart the streets are filled with people that would be most accurately described as busy, and other people walking around just to make noise. A segregation of people, all on the same street, and I guess I belonged to the second type.

In Venezuela the sun is endless, and unstoppable. An old clock that will eventually run out of battery, that would, within the course of a single second, destroy all human life. Yet in London the storm drains just keep filling with voices, and the sun has decided that for the most part it doesn’t like the company of the British, as it hides anxiously behind clouds. I walk through the streets a conscientious tourist, hungry for the most part, and adventurous for the other. I walk past Saint Paul’s Cathedral, a marvellous work of architecture that was larger then I was expecting. Giant red buses pass by me, a stereotypical reminder to tell me where I was. I see a couple sitting in the patio of a restaurant filled with women in suits with big dreams, and men with cigarettes in their pockets wondering about the money they made. The couple sits awkwardly in the centre of it all, as the man makes weird hand gestures, most likely trying to tell a failing story.

I imagine my sister going on a date like that when she’s older. Putting on a dress and heading out to try and meet a nice guy. It’s hard for me to imagine this, so I just keep moving. An Italian restaurant passes by me, and I decide to enter, unaware that I had just entered the best restaurant I have ever experienced. It tasted like the kind of stuff Martin Scorsese or Henry Hill might have eaten. Life had sent me here, not a review on Yelp or Google telling me that this restaurant was close by.

Time passed and I eventually left and went back the way I had came.

It was beginning to become rush hour, and the streets seemed to suddenly be filled with business men in suits. I was now the minority in the streets, and I absolutely loved it. It reminded me of why I loved big cities, their dynamic nature. I took in the noise around me, the buzzing and humming of human engines and car lungs, all springing in to life. Even a gun shot might have not been heard in all the sound pollution of the moment. It was as if out of every building a pack of two dozen men and women all walked out in a joyous single file line.

Could I do this, I began to think. Have a nice family, get a job in an office, and work nine hours a day only to head back home, just another speck in the world? Then on the weekend invite friends over and discuss opinions we have on the world, and pay with my credit card with money that I can’t even see, that’s just a couple of lines on a computer screen.

Could my sister do it?

It sounds so simple, but I guess I was just not old enough to know. I remember my walks home from school through that narrow rocky road, and the joy I felt then, getting to go home. I continue on my way back to try and get to a tube station. I see the couple again, sitting at the restaurant. They didn’t look as awkward as they had before. They had settled into their places with each other. It was sort of nice.

London

– Used one sound, a walk, description of someone, a store or restaurant, an overheard conversation, and a film

Stranger Than Non-Fiction, River Writting

Expository:

There’s a place named The Rocks in beautiful cursive writing, that was imprinted on a large rock. It was not named that by Google, or by some corporation or the government. It was named that by people. Who? I do not know. Nor do I know it’s purpose, and maybe it doesn’t have one. They weren’t part of my existence or my reality before I saw them, but now they are. Now they existed in that moment, and only in that moment, whether they’re still standing there today I do not know. A collection of flat rocks, around 20 of them, all with varying expressions and different stereotypical face structures. The place was meant to be humorous, and was something I enjoyed more than I should have. I still remember on the title of The Rocks, there was a small heart in between the words, and I usually do not care for such types of embraces. But this one, this one I don’t mind.

Non-Fiction Story:

I love the wind.

Much like the rain, wind can become frustrating, make you cold and shivery. Or even create terrible and dangerous situations, such as tornadoes and storms. Yet it has graciously provided the Earth and its inhabitants with spectacles and comfort since the existence of mankind. The gentle whistle of the air as it swiftly moves from one place to the next, like a hurried business man running to catch a bus. I used to think I could capture air. As a child there was always some light peeking through my grandmother’s kitchen window, and I would watch the air around me carry minuscule pieces of dust up and down the room. I would use my grandmother’s glass can to try to capture what I could of the air and the dust, but would always find that there was just more air then I could capture. I would get frustrated and give up, and let the air carry on its natural business. On the first day of our river walk there was a miniature storm that hit. Well, storm is maybe not the best word for it. Lets say the wind was fast that day. I was not wearing a coat or anything for the weather we were experiencing, but even in that bitter moment of cold for me, I still felt comforted by the wind. It’s hasty nature was just that, nature. Maybe I just never thought about the wind enough before this.

Descriptive:

Water is unpredictable, much like a good romantic, and especially when it comes to rivers and seas. It has the ability to produce towering tides, or small waves that crash mildly into one another. At the river by my school the waves are usually the latter. They produce a color of rich, dark blue at the base, while at the peek they have a blurry silhouette of the world around. It is in constant motion, and so long as time is running, and water is still around to pass through the same rout it will never stop moving. The large trees will continue to stare towards the lake, from the orange and yellow fog that is autumn to the sunny and green times that are summer, and the river will continue on its way, swaying back and forth in a haze of blue.

Persuasive:

I wasn’t expecting to enjoy the lake. It was mainly my cynical nature getting the better of me. I guess I wasn’t expecting the casual nature of the place. Anytime we go outside for school we get bombarded by worksheets and fill in the blanks that it is more forced learning then a natural and enjoyable progression of understanding. This was different, I was still given work, but it was more of an adventure then a be all end all worksheet we were forced to do. It was whatever inspired you, and whatever you discovered. I guess the point I’m trying to make is that the river was honestly great, and schools should be forced to do more activities like this. Expand people’s minds through their own exploration.

Hello