Fellini: on the realisation of mediocrity

I did a little Federico Fellini movie marathon this past week. Well, not so little actually, considering the length of his films (La Dolce Vita is almost 3 hours long). I saw four excellent movies:

8 1/2 (1963)

Giulietta degli Spiriti (1965)

La Dolce Vita (1960)

Il Bidone (1955)

Watching his movies with such an intensity might have affected my mood recently. First of all, after being immersed in his amazing surreal settings, my own life felt quite mediocre: no exciting parties with the aristocracy, no orgies with fantastic characters, no bohemian artists or gorgeous celebrities. And above all, no Marcello! Secondly, especially 8 1/2 and La Dolce Vita have a melancholic undertone that raises the question of the meaning of life and offers fertile ground for wondering about the quest of love and existence in general. Something has also happened to me in the past few years, as I now understood the lost character of Mastroianni in La Dolce Vita much better than when I last saw the film.

The films were great, all of them, and Italy in the 1960s seemed wonderful. With the exception of Il Bidone, the fusion of dream and reality (which is also very dream-like) was the typical character of the films. Together with the great music by Nino Rota, I could have continued watching the beautiful moving images for hours.

Watching Marcello Mastroianni, I felt desperate about the Finnish guys and started thinking seriously about moving abroad again (obviously not only because of the guys, but because I feel more and more like an outsider in this society, and this can be an especially strong feeling in one's own home country). I miss those passionate-vibrant guys of Southern Europe, they seem to be more alive and more vulnerable to the beauty/exceptionality of women. After 1,5 years in Finland, I'd now be happy if someone called me in the street: "Mademoiselle, mademoiselle, vous avez de beaux yeux..." Sad.

Then, just before starting to write this, I read in the New Yorker book review about a British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips: "Instead of feeling that we should have a better life, he says, we should just live, as gratifyingly as possible, the life we have. Otherwise we are setting ourselves up for bitterness." His point is to avoid mourning for the lives we are unable to live - a source of an endless trauma.

In his book "Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life" he writes about love: "There is a world of difference between erotic and romantic daydream and actually getting together with someone; getting together is a lot more work, and is never exactly what one was hoping for. So there are three consecutive frustrations: the frustration of need, the frustration of fantasized satisfaction not working, and the frustration of satisfaction in the real world being at odds with the wished-for, fantasized satisfaction."

His book sounds really interesting, and I don't think his main message is that we should  necessarily settle for the life we have. Indeed, the article continues that Phillip believes that we are not forced (by others) to settle for the life we are living, but we choose to do so. In other words, we should take responsibility for our own lives - and for changing it as well if we wish to do so.

It is actually not a wonder that I end up from Fellini to modern psychoanalysis. Fellini undertook Jungian psychoanalysis during his mid-life crisis and probably in his film 8 1/2 we see some traces of his own process (Boston Review offers an interesting analysis of the film and Fellini).

In the next post, I will write about all the wonderful things happening in my life and in Helsinki...

Becoming a fan

Oh, I'm so sad I missed this wonderful artist yesterday in Helsinki. Is he the new David Bowie? After all the female singer-song writers I love so much, it's good to get to know some exceptional male voices as well. I have crush (blush).

I love his voice but also his dandy style. This video below is really beautiful. 

Even though I'm becoming a Patrick fan, I'm waiting to hear Lana del Rey herself to sing this one (below) live in Helsinki in June - this time, I'm going. 

Brooklyn in Helsinki and one stop pub crawl

Just the previous day, I had complained that life is boring in Helsinki in the sense that you never encounter strangers the way that you would abroad or as a tourist in general. Obviously, one reason is that our everyday life is much more organised; we follow routines and we have put limits to our behaviour. For instance, I wouldn't join a group of 15 Americans for a pub crawl and then be locked out of my hostel (as I did in Barcelona, 2003), chat the night through with a cute bar tender with few other customers to serve (as in Catania, 2008), spend a fantastic day, including herbal sauna and a buddha statue park, with a middle-aged Kiwi (as in Vientiane, 2011), or accept an offer for a motorcycle trip from a handsome young guy sitting next to me in a café (in San Francisco, 2008). At home, we tend to be more reserved and this rarely gives room for adventures or improvised discussions. We try to avoid unnecessary talk with strangers and don't leave our comfort zone. It's a pity!

 Photos of Brooklyn Café from the Facebook page of Brooklyn Café.

Maybe it was the café, the very cute and cosy Brooklyn Café in Viiskulma, that made me act like in a real New York place. The owners of the café are sisters from Brooklyn and the cute waiters speak only a few words of Finnish, so it's not hard to imagine being in New York instead of Helsinki.

Having installed with my iPad in front of another iPad user (see, it really is like a hip place in Brooklyn), I soon engaged in a nice chat with this young man. He was writing his second novel, the first one, he showed me, was on sale in the café. He had written most of it in the corner table. Indeed, this café offers very nice atmosphere for hipster-like experiences in art and creative life. I would definitely write my novel there. But I don't need such an excuse to hang around there because it is probably my favourite café in my neighbourhood in any case and their great filter coffee is one of these wonderful little things making Saturday mornings a bit more glamorous.

                                                              Photo from the Facebook page of Brooklyn Café.

The conversation with the young author, and some tips for reading he gave me (and certainly I'll try to read his book "Nyt" as well), made me really happy and disproved my idea of the impossibility of an encounter in this city. It seems to be more about my own attitude, so in the future I'll try to be more open and act more like a tourist with a curious mind.

Actually, the touristy behaviour continued in the evening as we decided to do a Kallio pub crawl with my friends. After a hearty dinner at Ravintola Pelmenit, the great Kaurismäki-like Ukranian restaurant in Kallio, we headed to Pikku-Vallila. It is a super cute little bar with only a few tables in a pretty wooden house in a calm and residential wood house area of Helsinki, the so-called wood-Vallila. 

With one irritating guy at the next table (and then later, at our table) buying rounds of shots for the whole bar, our objective of a pub crawl somewhat shrank as we stayed in Pikku-Vallila until the wee hours. The cute and friendly bar tender made toasts for art and creativity and at the end, when he was pushing us out of the door, I said to him: "Thanks, it was a really nice evening", as if we had just had a house party in his living room. 

The photo is from this photo blog.

I should definitely go more often to Kallio-side of the city. Though I love my own beautiful neighbourhood, it is slightly bourgeois and boring in Eira and Punavuori. The funny bohemian atmosphere of Pikku-Vallila and the eccentric or purely weird people there are hard to find in my neighbourhood pub.

Planet Ocean - the Beauty and the Beast

Unfortunately, I managed to see only one documentary film at the recent DocPoint film festival in Helsinki. But this documentary film is definitely worth watching. It's the extraordinary Planet Ocean by Yann-Arthus Bertrand and Michel Pitiot. It examines its subject, the ocean, from several perspectives and in addition to powerful music and beautiful images, it has a very strong message about the importance of protecting our oceans, the source of all life.

The beginning of the film is quite dramatic (see below), the narrator, with her soft voice, declaring that the ocean contains the origins of our own story, us, the mankind. We are descendants of the ocean and yet, we are super predators exploiting the limited resources of our planet and unable to see the elements of catastrophe surrounding us. The planet is ours, but where are we going?

Like the wonderful BBC series Blue Planet, the film shows us the wonders of the ocean and the audience cannot fail to understand that the ocean contains things that are unimaginable on land. The creatures of the deep sea are more mystical than you could ever see on a science-fiction film. We are far behind the imagination of the mother nature. Sea creatures are just fascinatingly weird and we know so little about them.

At the same time, the film makes obvious the connection between the life on land and the sea. The ocean controls our climate and nourishes us, it serves as means to transport goods and has played a role in making globalisation possible. From the early years of our civilisation, the ocean has expanded the minds of human beings and offered us opportunities in work and pleasure.

Yet, we have polluted the sea, destroyed the coral reefs, depleted its resources and still continue to overfish despite all the warning signs clearly visible to us.

After all the amazing and beautiful images of the sea, I couldn't help wiping a few tears from my eyes thinking of seriously endangered sea animals, dead birds' bodies filled with plastic, deep-water oil rigs. Is the only ocean we will know in the future the ocean shown in the pictures below and colourful colar reefs something we remember from "Finding Nemo"?

These photos are from the website of Local Philosophy.