Waves of Inspiration

I often find myself entrenched in themes.  For instance, finishing Susan Casey's The Wave rounds out the triumvirate of nautical books I've been wading through for the past couple of months.  While reading about freak hundred foot waves and the blonde beefcakes who risk life and limb to surf them is exciting, I've still been waiting for a surge of inspiration to carry me into the brunt of this project.  I expect that it will get easier once the research and volunteer work expand.  But in the meantime, another one my accidental media themes has come to my rescue.

Live streaming of obscure documentaries has allowed me stumble onto some pretty fascinating subjects.  I've now come across a number of really great documentaries questioning the legitimacy of visual art, among them, My Kid Could Paint That, and Who the Fuck is Jackson Pollack?.  Joining the queue this week was a documentary called Exit Through the Gift Shop, by the mysterious and prolific British street artist Banksy.  Once intended to trace the history of street art, the film transforms into a documentary about Thierry Guetta, the eccentric Frenchman who filmed thousands of hours of midnight graffiti excursions by the world's greatest street artists, and who eventually transforms himself into the questionable Mr. Brainwash.

What does any of this have to do with Alzheimer's, you ask?  Well, what I learned about this man is that his story begins with an obsession over capturing memories.  Having lost his mother at a young age, he lost a lifetime of memories with her and felt compelled, the moment he got his hands on a video camera, to record as many moments from his family's life as possible.  One obsession led to another and he was soon addicted to the rush of adrenaline in following street artists whose careers teeter on edge of legal.  It even brought him to an interrogation room in the bowels of Disneyland after he was caught filming Banksy place an inflatable Guantanamo prisoner into the landscape of Big Thunder Mountain Railroad.  The results of all this filming are a little disheartening: hundreds of boxes filled with thousands of unlabeled, unorganized, and unwatched miniDV camcorder tapes.  A lifetime of memories, and the entire history of an art movement marked by temporality, sitting in the dark of a Los Angeles garage.

As I've been starting to think about the concept of memory and actively trying to capture memories of my own, a lot of questions have arisen.  What do we remember and what do we forget?  And why?  Who do we remember things for, ourselves or our progeny?  Sometimes we share memories with others, and some  we keep to ourselves.  How much do we really learn from our memories of the past, and how do we embark on creating memories for the future?  Remembering and forgetting are completely subconscious acts and we have biological and psychological reasons to do both.  Is it possible to change these evolutionary behaviors in our mind?  Are there ways to improve your memory?  Although memory-loss is one of many changes in the brain while developing Alzheimer's Disease, it can be one of the most wrenching parts of the experience for the loved-ones of an Alzheimer's patient.  I'm curious to know what you may think the answers to these questions are, as I explore them myself.

Memories are integral to who we are.  They mark the chronology of our experience, the landscape of where we come from, and provide the palette with which we paint an image of how we see ourselves, the lives we've led, the lessons we've learned, and what we have have to say.  Our memories may be painted over, knocked down, constructed upon, scrubbed clean, or simply faded away.  But whether they sustain a cultural or familial permanence, or even if they lay packed away, untouched in storage, what is most important is that they were made.