Outfit: The Golden Age

It seems fitting that I'm twirling around in a gold-dipped skirt with a purse that looks like an old film camera while still hung up on the film I saw last night--La La Land. Approach that film with caution, it might turn the cynical into dreamers. Heck, after watching it I wanted to pack everything up and move to LA and start a career in films and being an actress was never an ambition of mine! It has all the earnestness of Singing in the Rain with a touch of the melancholy of Casablanca (no surprise since it heavily references both films as well as half a dozen other classics from the Golden Age of Hollywood, although it manages to feel simultaneously modern and beautifully singular). Mostly it will be inspiring for artistics, creatives, anyone with a dream--and if outsider artists like Leonard Knight and Vivian Maier are any testament--under the most seemingly mundane person hides an artist with a secret passion. It had my mind on my passions and dreams when I was young and things like income and bills weren't concrete enough to limit my vision. The film is a welcome reminder to get back to creating--and that the act of creation, the passion is what is important, not the product or what people think of it. For further inspiration, dip your toes into Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert. As she points out, people were creating art thousands of years ago--hand prints on walls, stocky clay figures--before we had agriculture. Which demonstrates that art is not new, not a result of leisure or privilege, but is rather an essential element in mankind's design. The impulse was there from the beginning and yet we are still so quick to dismiss those who follow the impulse as unrealistic, impractical dreamers...