Rainbows

I used to chase rainbows in the faint glow of a sky streaked by rain. The sky, both muted and vibrant, gathering orange and gold into itself, waving the colors together as it were a loom, not sky. Every child, or so it seems to me, has this same story, looking up from a sidewalk spattered in rain, dropping a red bouncing ball, a small metallic police car, a doll, and shouting about the colors in the sky. No doubt, I think to myself, you like me, put down the car, raced across the house, tried to trace the arc of light to its source. What were we looking for? Was I hoping to find a deep well of light from which the rainbow was created, spinning across the sky?

Once or twice, I was close enough to the source to try and find it. I was in a large field, patches of grass cut through with hard clay gone temporarily muddy after the passing rain. I'd been playing soccer with my friend, Blake when the storm had arrived. We'd sheltered beneath the eaves of the low slung buildings at McManus elementary school, waiting for the rain to pass. Most days, we went home and played the video game Contra, for hours. But today, we waited for the rain to pass, so rare in the upper reaches of the Central Valley where I grew up.

And when it passed, we saw it, a covenant from God that he'd find some other way of killing us all next time, a rainbow. We saw that its terminus must be somehow close to us, just beyond the chain link fence, falling behind a row of small ranch style homes beyond. We ran quickly through the gates and into the neighborhood beyond, past the star thistle and into the yard, but the rainbow seemed to have moved further still, and we chased it to the next block. There stood a blue house with an American flag hanging from the garage, snapping in the wind. But we couldn't see an end to the light there either.

We chased the light all afternoon, down wide streets dotted by rain, past houses with rock gardens, with small square windows, past houses where dogs barked lazily from the side yard, and down the avenues already starting to grow warm.

Sometimes I feel that though I have not seen Blake in decades that he and I must still be chasing that same light through all the corridors and back alleys of our lives, hoping to discover the source of so much glory. Tell me, dear reader, do you think we'll ever find it? 

Movie Review: Columbus

It's rare these days that I see something so quiet. In fact, I'm writing about Columbus, a slow movie set in the modernist haven of Columbus, Indiana because I fell a bit in love with it. In the past year, everything in my life seems to demand an argument, action, an opinion, and while I believe that 97 percent of the time. Sometimes I want to step away from the argument, from the right way to think and just to be in the quiet space of being a human being wandering about this confusing and wondrous world.
If I were to summarize Columbus, I'd say long tracking shots of beautiful architecture, reminiscent in some ways of Richard Linklater, but slower because sometimes the characters aren't talking, the spaces aren't necessarily given meaning by the character's presence or absence. Rather, the movie seems to ask if the modernist structures have a meaning in and of themselves, apart from humans, in the way that a mountain is still beautiful whether we are beholding it or not. For me, this question of aesthetics and modernism is the real heart of the film. The movie is full of long silences, light on water, on the underside of leaves, but it never quite dips into the full reverie of Terence Malik either. It just seems to delight in the details of life. I too, would like to delight in the details.

Of course, most television shows and movies are about shipping. And so the movie also centers on the relationship between a young woman, who works part-time in a library. She's a year beyond high school, far too intelligent to just be shelving books but she's also not sure if she can leave behind her mother for an offer to a study with a famous architect in New Haven.  The young woman develops a deep and soothing relationship with an architects son, in town to witness the decline of his famous father after a sudden heart attack. The son of the architect, like the young woman, has a tendentiosu relationship with his father. Thus, both of the characters are temporarily bound to Columbus because of their parents, and it's in this temporary in between space that their relationship flourishes, traveling between architectural marvels and talking about their parents, their lives, or just the way that a sunken living room was designed. In short, it's slow. But it's not agonizing. Rather, it's slow in the way that it's slow to watch the subtle v that the water makes as it passes the body of a swan.

It's rare to find a movie so in touch with stillness, with the way that a piece of sky, set between two long beams can be achingly beautiful. The filmmaker, Koganda, is a video essayist, and his essay about modernist architecture and the internal struggle we have with our parents, with growth and change, is a mesmerizing one.