Being okay about things ending

So in the second week of January, my very favourite band Anberlin posted this video to their twitter feed:

http://youtu.be/Xa7RabbuOTA

Blogger is giving me grief with embedding the video, but at the very least, hopefully, the link is live. Go click it. You'll need to know what's in it for context.

Anyway.

I have very clear memories of the first viewing of the video, because it instilled a great feeling of sadness, and I wasn't able to indulge in that sadness for very long, because it was either the second or the third day of WAVE, which is my church's week-long kids club, and I had to get there and be geared up to work with kids from 7:45am. So the case of the sads went into the back of the head, and I went back to being a magician for four-year old kids.

But there was this feeling that was returned to later - processing in entirety that my very favourite band was finishing, and this was their last year. There was some consolation in knowing there was going to be one more album published, and one more world tour, so odds were high that I'd get to see them again, but still.

Anberlin was ENDING.

Now, this was all stuff that happened at the start of the year, my copy of Lowborn, the last album, arrived on Monday. It's still sitting on my couch, inside the packaging, because I want to listen to it properly - with enough time to sit and just listen through, once or twice, and then play it over and over again, and then go back to my moderate-rotation music. I don't have a lot of time this week, and suspect I'll be a useless pile of emotions afterwards anyway. Knowing that this is the last to hear from their recorded efforts.

"If I don't open it, maybe it won't end."

But then, I have since realised that this was a thing I'd been thinking through last year, and I'm grateful for the way Anberlin have chosen to finish - a lot of bands you see go through fights, or wander into the territory of the Infinite Hiatus, and it's sad to see something you loved so much tear itself to pieces.

I had been aware that they wouldn't be able to produce music forever, and I wouldn't want them to - it's all very well to spend all your time touring as young adults, but the guys have been producing music for twelve years. They started out as teenagers and twenty-somethings, and they're all married, with families of varying sizes now. Their wives and kids (if they have kids. I don't know.) deserve to have them around the house more often.

Their music has meant a lot to me not just because of the style, or the sound, or the lyrics, but because they were introduced to me when I was trying to figure out who I was, asking a lot of the same questions and working through a lot of the same problems presented in their songs. They covered love, loss, confusion, euphoria, blame, depression, and a bunch of other things. I spent as many evenings being useless on my bedroom floor as days spent lost in the heady emotions of joy listening to their music. And it wasn't just these perspectives that helped - knowing that the members of the band profess the same faith is pretty cool. It means when they say 'hope' that I know we're on the same page in terms of understanding.

The interest in their music didn't just leach into helping me understand the chiaroscuro of life either. I mean, it helped a lot, because I'd not been taught any other coping mechanisms, or even what to do on the bad days aside from mope. Anyway.

Their music has been hugely influential in the stuff I write and make - if you've been following my blog for a while, you might have seen a post detailing an entire body of work (in film photography) built around the album Cities, for example. It didn't stop there - I'm fairly certain that the music video for The Unwinding Cable Car got referenced as an inspiration source at least once a semester during my uni degree.

So, given that you can now see a couple of reasons why I like their music, you might be able to see why I was a bit sad about them ending. I guess, it's been understanding that there's a time and a season for everything, that helps. All things end, sooner or later. It's how they end that's important.

And I think Anberlin have done a good job of that.

They could have kept on even after most of the band left, having the name of the band eventually equate to one guy. They could have dropped into obscurity, vanishing without a word or a trace. They could have stretched things out until it was obviously more about the money than the love of music. But they didn't. They've chosen a time and a place, and you can tell that they're keen to see us all off in style and with love.
So while I'm sad, seeing that things are happening in this way is alright. It's garnered a huge amount of respect in my book (not that they need that, but hey), and I want to wish them the best in the future.

You hear that, guys?

Dear Steven, Joey, Chris, Deon, and Nate,
Thank you for having such a positive impact on my life, and the lives of others, with your music.
You're gonna be missed by a lot of people, myself included, but that's okay. You got things going on in your lives aside from Anberlin, and it's cool that you're choosing to pursue those things now. I hope that they're good, and fun, and that you get to be a blessing to the people around you because of your involvement.
Thank you for your kindness to us as your fans. Thank you for twelve years and seven albums of excellence. I wasn't there for the beginning, but I'll be there at the end.
See you in September.
Stay cool.
From Brooke.

Silver in the City

I guess that this blog post, rather than be dedicated to the many many things I've got sitting on the backburner and have been eyeball-deep-in-uni-so-could-not-post might be a bit of a letdown. After all, it's really just more uni work. But it's also the core concept behind one of my photography subjects; specifically, Silver.

Silver is a third-year photography elective. Which means that next semester when I go to pick subjects, I won't give myself three ones that are a year up from my current level. Stupidhead. Anyway. Third year elective specific to film photography. Films and negatives and darkrooms and stuff. It's quite a bit of fun, and I enjoy the process and concept behind this type of photography more than others. I guess that's because there's a much smaller margin for error when creating photos. They're harder to fix when you get to developing the negs, and in general, you have to know what you're doing.

So. Concepts and stuff.

The course, as always, gives us a theme to work to and start with and the theme for Silver was 'Investigating the Shadow'


This sounded quite dark and intimidating to begin with, and in the first couple of weeks, I continued with printing photos from negs I had taken last year, along with stuff I'd taken for 'getting my eye back in'.

The only other thing you probably need to know at this stage is how I operate in the darkroom. This is pretty similar to how I used to work in TAFE. Don't feel like chatting while working. Stick headphones in and go. And the waiting period that you have to have while waiting for test strips to develop and then fix allows you to think in between working on things. So while the music is going, I don't always pay full attention to it.

This particular afternoon, I was walking out of the darkroom with Switchfoot in my ears. It was this song.

"we are

crooked souls trying to stay up straight

dry eyes in the pouring rain,

well,

the Shadow proves the Sunshine

the Shadow proves the Sunshine"

And like a bolt from the blue, there was the core idea. Sort of. I was going to talk about depression and hope in the brief. Shadow and Sunshine.

This initially was thought out as a series of constructed studio photographs, a bit like what I had done in the previous year with photography, where myself and some friends got to sit down and play with masks and stuff.

And stuff.

And then I went to Sydney three times during March. Each time I had a camera, and each time I took photos of the city. 

There were a lot of skyline photos, but there were some odd ones that cropped up too - tiny observations that kept crawling into my lens. I couldn't stop taking photos of them. 

And then I talked to the tutor about it. Very quickly, the project evolved into something else.

Depression and Hope in the City.

I have to admit, I liked where this was going; a take on the city which, while certainly investigated before, could have something added to it. Ack. Too many pronouns.

The city.

There was probably still stuff left over in Brooke's head from last year, where this clip got used for the Mask unit. Can't remember why it was relevant specifically. I think it got included because it's a beautiful clip.

But this got to pull the project more and more into that view of the city and the black and white and the soul in something so large and grey and paradoxical.

Add to that the fact that Anberlin, who have been mentioned earlier on this blog, are popular with me, and the album that the above song is called 'Cities'

Look at that album artwork. That is some beast work. It even looks like a city.

This album, which I've probably mentioned before, is my favourite out of all the work they've produced so far. It...ah.

It explores so many large themes and manages to do it with some kind of deep understanding that I love. And there's the music and the lyrics and the yes. It just feels like the city; at times peaceful or sunny, but also rushing along at the breakneck speed that comes with life and construct and all-of-the-things-I've-been-trying-to-express-this-afternoon.

Look. Just go and buy a copy of the CD. I was a muffinhead and bought the CD/DVD copy, so it was pretty expensive, but the standard twelve-track wasn't too pricy.

I guess that the song I explored more than the others in the making of this project (which is slowly turning into another 'Brooke really loves Anberlin' post) was actually the seventh track on the album, 'Hello Alone'.

From a lesser known, I'm here. And there's hope. There's hope.

I'm going to decide later whether making this was work or procrastination.

Hope is such a powerful thing. It keeps us going in the darkest of times. It gives us something to look forward to - My phone dictionary, as sad as it is, says '(any reason or encouragement for) the state of feeling that what one wants will or might happen.'

It's a pretty soggy definition, but it'll have to do for now. The point that the above definition is missing (I think) is that in order for there to be hope, there has to be some pretty unfun business going on first. We never hope when we're in a good patch. It's like a little candle, and it serves its greatest purpose at night, when we have little else to guide our steps.

Considering the emotions I have encountered in myself and others since moving to the metropolis of Newcastle, and the feel of the city in the first place, this seemed like a good place to start. Buildings and pavements and arriving here with the smell of London still on my shoes, used to the beat of a thousand floors - cobbles, gravel, pavement, bitumen - always hard and unforgiving.

(Pretty sure tears came to my eyes when I went for a walk through Hyde Park on the grass.)

Right about then.

But that's what the city is; it's rough and big and scary and it doesn't give a rats arse about you. It's grey and smelly and there's people everywhere but none of them see you. Not the real you, anyway. It sounds kind of unfun.

Through the project, I just really wanted to be able to show that; the simple play of dark and light in the city across all of it's artificiality. That as unforgiving and dark the city appeared, that there could also be something worth hoping in as well. Something outside of the grey stones and grey skies.

Something with promise. Because there's hope.