Checkpoint 1

There isn't a better time to write a post unless it's 4:17AM and I'm absolutely exhausted.

I just want to stop for a moment and put down a flag, a checkpoint, where I contemplate my present state, and try to answer the question of the ages, "Who am I? Who am I becoming?"

This is what really stands out. It's been about 3 years since I left Russia after graduating. This would actually be the longest I've lived and stayed in one place for since 7th grade! There is an incredible amount of stability and identity in this sun shiny city of Los Angeles for me. Well, Of course, it took me three years to get to this point of comfortability.

I'm starting to be O.K. with the idea that I may call Los Angeles my home. I know for most people the 'home' concept doesn't mean what it means for me. For me its been the big question of life and the identity crisis since I was 7. How can I be a U.S. Citizen, ethnically Korean, grow up in New Jersey/New York, grow up in Russia, study in Germany, and then move to Los Angeles- how can I be all these things and at the same time and have a place I call home?

Now, I'm starting to allow myself to really leave my past and move on to clinging on to my present and future, what I was in the past makes me who I am, but so does the present.

However, there is a fear. In one year, I'll graduate and almost all the people I consider a part of my 'home' will disperse. My 'home' is congruent with college life, so how will that change my stability when I graduate? I fear this.

What I'm missing in my life is a home outside of the college life. Most people have parents and a house or local friends to go back to, that is what they find stability in and 'home'. So when I'm out of college, who knows what will happen?

I won't die, but I'm curious how that will effect me. Maybe that will be another "Checkpoint".

The Artist

In the late 18th century of the Romantic Period there was a subtle decline in the creativity based on the achievements of the past. It rather shifted toward the importance of the 'standard of personal vision'. "Art could owe nothing to tradition or the past because that debt qualified the power and originality of the individual creator." The artist expressed what he or she experienced, saw, and felt. This had to be original, because its basis did not rely on a genre or convention for popular familiarity. Pure inspiration and passion was all that was needed. The true artist would not sway to create something that was already tested by culture and time.

"The true artist was noncommercial, struggling on the fringes of human existence, with neither society nor companions( and hardly any publishers), alone with his indomitable self."

Don't be fooled. There is no such thing as absolute creativity. All art still has some relation to the past and its text. So, if we go back far enough, God is the Artist.

- LJ Kim

Sources: Film Theories and Criticism (Braudy), Screenwriting from the Soul (Krevolin)

"...in the story of one person, is the story of all people..."