Sean Malin's Film + Travel Blog

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Pieces of April, pt. 2: 11 – 24 Apr.

As Neil and Elaine left on a shipbound voyage across Oceana back to the States, Lonnie left for a trip to New Zealand for her spring break. Here is an interesting sort of event in our travel that’s worth mentioning, as it sometimes happens in traveling couples and hardly ever goes mentioned. Lonnie and I had different spring breaks at the universities that we were attending, meaning that we could not properly vacation together AND get the work we’d need done for our respective classes. She chose to take her spring break in New Zealand; I chose to share part of mine with her on a trip to Melbourne, completing it with a dedicated week of work.

While Lonnie was in New Zealand, my body went into a interesting form of collapse. I began to cycle through my upcoming essays and projects with incredible dexterity and quickness; I watched a movie or two every day, spent time outdoors, joined friends at hidden little pubs in the assorted suburbs, etc. But those distractions did not keep me from just exploding through my school work. Additionally, I made up for my lost position at the bar with a huge job search.

There are many different ways to get a job in Australia, but the most convenient is to use the Ad posting site Gumtree, a sort of Craigslist offset with much sketchier reliability/honesty/safety and an odd-looking domain. Other professional work sites are around, but for some reason, they all want very personal information, and revolve around this LinkedIn career-type networking. Between sketchy and overpropulsive, I chose the former, and wound up inundated with spambot responses to my applications. You’d think I was parented better than to use those sites, right?

As Lonnie was preparing to fly back to Australia, I met with the head of a media advertising agency in Sydney whose name I don’t feel comfortable using here. It is a recent start-up by two men: a Japanese businessman whose wife is an angel investor in their company, the two of them previous entrepreneurs on the first ever food trucks in Australia; and a younger, smarmy former real estate agent who looks like a taller and better-looking version of Charlie Sheen in WALL STREET. This gentleman is in workout-and-sales-manager mode all day long, but the partners together have an agency that wanted someone to soften the communication between them and clientele. The position they offered me is post-secretarial: I connect with clients immediately after meeting with someone who has sold them something or attempted to, and set meetings at their convenience. I get their feedback, develop a profile of theirs in the ad agency’s database, etc.

The interview went well and, just as Lonnie was flying home, I got the position. I began working, and as of this writing, am still with the agency. I find the work extremely easy and rewarding for my time. It pays well enough that I’ve been able to remain attentive to any cravings I have – for post-school travel, for dinners out, etc. I am happy. Ask me about it some time – the experience is bound to come up at some point.

After a week of my work and Lonnie catching up with school, we traveled to Melbourne, an interesting city. Everyone in Australia had implored me to visit it, especially since Sydney and that city have an acute rivalry over everything from coffee to art galleries to political differences. But the cities are nothing alike. Melbourne suffers from a schizoid personality, much in the way I described Amsterdam in an earlier blog plost. A younger city than Sydney, it has developed around more guerilla design styles (cafes and holes-in-the-walls in alleyways just off the main strip of skyscrapers) and a definite European ethic. The arts are treasured as a way of survival and personal design there. Museum and coffee culture, as indescribably attuned to my interests as they could be, are divided by Melbourne’s INCESSANT need to be “city”, thereby integrating hugely expensive meals, hipsters, and Asian tourists into the equation. There is, of course, nothing wrong with Asian lineage of any kind.

Melbourne was also quite rainy and unpredictable in terms of weather and comfort. Lonnie and I had chosen to stay with a single man in a high-rise apartment we found on the website Air BnB, and though his place was reasonably priced, it was also quite high up. That meant cold air at night; it meant we were the first to be afflicted by an early sunrise. When clouds came out, we froze, and when light came, we awoke too early, grumbling and sniffling for the lack of curtains in this man’s chic home. The city is famous for a certain cyclical-by-day quality, where all four seasons occur in the course of the daylight, until Winter sets in in the evenings. That is no longer a myth in my mind, but Melbournian fact.

I write you now after the break has ended, Lonnie has settled back into living with me and my habits, and I have taken far too many photographs to post here. My computer and hard drive alike are both in danger thanks to the excess of information that comes from my film reviews, my typing, my interviews, and my camera. I will need a new hard drive soon. I will accept donations and birthday gifts.

Oh one more thing. A few nights ago, we went to see TITANIC 3-D at the largest IMAX screen on the planet. The screen is sixteen stories high, 160 feet of pure, beautiful cinematic image spreading across the room. Although that film is so poorly written, melodramatically (partly unintentionally) performed, and abysmally unrealistic, it is a work of art in terms of visual style and image. Even in three dimensions, a format I generally hate deeply, TITANIC can’t help but be one of them most state-of-the-art, awe-inspiring pictures ever made. It was a gorgeous experience. Ah, and the glasses were hardcore glasses with real, strong frames and full head range. No peripheral problems at all!

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Pieces of April, pt.1 : March 18 – April 10

It’s true that it’s been a long time since I’ve blogged, but you’ll have to get over it. So much in such a small amount of time seems to have come about, and I simply can’t keep this blog at the head of my priorities to get the most out of where I am. You’ll forgive me for that, won’t you? I have a lot of photographs! Look! Photos and stuff!

As March wore on, much of my mind became overwhelmed with the impending spring break, for which I’d essentially planned nothing for myself over two spare weeks. I became pretty consistent in my re-search for a working job. Australian wages are comparatively massive from the American perspective, and given the amount of applications I sent out, quantity demanded that I simply hit something.

I got lucky enough to come upon a position with an Oxygen Bar, of which there are several in Los Angeles given the state of the oxygen in that city (i.e. unbreathable). The job required a few things of me, not least an incredible patience simply standing at a bar waiting to give people noses-full of oxygen flavored like Lime, Tequila Sunrise, and Jasmine Abandon. It paid so well to someone accustomed to the American minimum wage; in Australian terms, it was horrible paid, and violated a few casual-employment laws in terms of my treatment, which only included a half-hour break for food and “preferred” that I did not sit while their. I had two shifts; after the first week, and a cash-in-hand payment, I tried reaching my manager to get new shifts. I never heard from her again, even when I went back to get my money.

At the end of March, Lonnie’s father and stepmother, Neil and Elaine, visited us – their first time in Australia as well, a lucky coincidence given their love of travel and interest in far-off places. Neil, Elaine, and Lonnie have traveled much together, and love to explore, to walk, to see both urban and rural beauty, and to just enjoy the flow of vacation. They are special companions to be sure, and love to go special places; even better, though it breaks my heart immediately, they constantly offer to take me on excursions with them and their daughter, under their wing as if I weren’t the stranger I am.

Although I don’t have photographs ready for this post, we finally managed to see the Sydney Tower Eye, a Westfield Malls-owned tower that is the largest building in Sydney. I have posted pictures of it before, a large trash can shaped spire jutting into the horizon obscenely, and allowing tourists with just a few spare bucks to hop a ride up to the top. A strange thing happened on the tower: to prepare for the elevator, there is a “4-D Experience” show in the mall lobby, with pop music and fake water spraying on your face as you look at photographs of the ocean. It was so calming and excited in its presentation of Sydney that I began to cry from sheer joy, and then like an embarrassed jerk, flew upward with Lonnie and her family. The view, as you might expect, was everything it might have been.

Neil and Elaine went to Cairns for a few days to see the Great Barrier Reef, but when they arrived, Lonnie was truly happy to see them. There is a certain inescapable comfort from the presence of your family, no matter how homesick (as she feels) or otherwise (as I never feel homesickness, and haven’t since I was young man at Camp Alonim) one is feeling. We trekked with them into the Blue Mountains World Heritage site just outside the Sydney city limits, and of which I have attached a few notable photographs. We will return with my parents, who arrive in Sydney for the first time ever in the middle of May. More to come on that.

For now, enjoy some gorgeous photographs with some incredible people. Neil and Elaine, from the bottom of my heart, I thank you, and cannot wait to see you again.

(Source: seanmalinblog.maysecond.com)