2016

Well, I've made a habit of posting on this blog. Once a year. On January 1st. It's a strange time-capsule of sorts.

We've had a very eventful year and I recapped some of the highlights in a card/newsletter that I am going to let do the bulk of my lifting this time around. Check it out:

I don't do nearly as much blogging as I used to. Cineflect.com is still up and updated, as of tonight in fact! I just posted "The 10 Most Anticipated Films of 2015," check out the written post and the corresponding video. I've been putting more time into the Cineflect YouTube Channel. As far as documenting my life goes a few of my videos from this year provide some insight into our journeyings. Check out Slow East and Seattle Symphony No. 1 for example.

Did you know Nancy has a blog? She does a good job at covering some of the bigger moments of our year and fills it with big, beautiful hi-res photos that she graphed.

2016, I hardly know you, but I hope you stay a while.

2013

This blog sees the light of day less than a Scalopus aquaticus (pictured above, better known as the common mole). What a specimen this one is. Sometimes Pokemon ain't got nothin' on real life...

I know I'm more than capable of being a "consistent blogger." Last year I posted some 150 times on The Film Tome (and-then-some on other blogs). Why then do I not update this one very oft? I am much more excited to talk movies than I am to talk about my life I suppose, but at the end of my life what am I going to be able to leave my posterity to know about me? Sure, they'll know I was downright obsessed with film and I would be delighted if any of them shared that passion, but they may want to know about other aspects of my life (AKA The Film of Jared Scott Lewis.)

A year ago this day I wrote a post entitled "2012." It was valuable to look back at what was going through my mind and down through my fingers that night. Hindsight makes them invaluable.  That, more than anything, should be the fire that fuels my drive to improve my dedication to this personal blog. So many things have transpired since then. I was in China at the time meeting my girlfriend's family. Since then we both graduated from BYU, we tied the knot and we moved to California. Some of the biggest milestones one confronts in one's lives and I've knocked a few out in one fell swoop of a year!

2012 will be a year I'll never forget. 2013 may not have as big events (in fact, I kind of hope it doesn't), but there are aspects aplenty in my life that I am working on improving. As I type this post my dear Nancy is in the other one putting together her first post of the year for The Perfect Bubble, a blog that she started this last year that is a far better documentation of our lives together than you'll currently find here. She also blogs about some of her favorite things there. Anyways, said blog post is about some of our New Year's Resolutions (five each). One of mine was to improve in my record keeping. In addition to daily journal entries I wanted to post on this blog once a week. So far, so good.

Here's to a New Year. Cheers to you and yours!

P.S.

My first summer out of high school I worked in Alaska (this was 2006). It was a hellish job, housekeeping, but I honed wanted habits, labored, and was constantly inspired by the mystere of that region. My brother-in-law was a body builder at this time (a great fit for my so-athletic-it-makes-me-ill sister). He pressured me into going to the Gustavus High School gym on some of my mornings there. In the weight room there were motivational phrases black-marker-ed onto the wall. One day we brought our own utensil and left our mark. Here's what I wrote:

If I ever return to that small town in South East Alaska I will seek out the building, the specific wall therein and see if my "tag" is still there. That inspection will just be for kicks, because I haven't forgotten or stopped striving to do what I wrote that day. Not by a long shot.

NANCY

Yesterday I made the biggest decision of my life. I asked a twenty-two year old gal (who was born and raised on the other side of the world) to marry me... to be my wife.

Her name is Zhou Kehui, but a lot of us call her Nancy.

I often think of my life in terms of the ultimate film. In the grand screenplay that it's based on the scene when she first appeared went something like this...

INT. APARTMENT - NIGHT


A BEAUTIFUL ASIAN (20) walks through the apartment door. 


Time stops for the AVERAGE-LOOKING WHITE KID (21).

She literally entered through the door of my home at that time, passing a threshold into my shabby apartment and also walking into my life. The rest, as they say, is history.

Yesterday morning I drove Nancy past that very apartment building. "I used to live there," I reminded her. She commented on it being the place where we first met. The drive took us to 9th East in Provo, Utah where I headed North to Rock Canyon Park. We passed the MTC and the Provo Temple along the way. It was a brief, landmark journey. I had asked Nancy the night before to help with a service project. It was a test, a final test I suppose. Would she be willing to get up on a Saturday morning and do some good for the community? I had informed her that we were going to help pick up trash at the park. She wasn't happy about it (who would be?), but after some coaxing she tagged along.

We reached the park. I parked.  Nancy got out of the car with one of those big, pitch-black garbage bags. I took my time getting out (I had to stuff the ring box in the left pocket of my jeans - not easy). Nancy, bless her soul, was already starting to pick up trash. We walked around and couldn't find the others. She was confused. I wasn't. I suggested we just clean on our own.

Nancy was on one side of the picnic tables and benches, I was on the other. I wasted absolutely no time. I got the ring box out of my pocket and got on one knee. We hadn't been "picking" for more than a minute when I called for her. "Oh Nancy! Look at this!" I was beside a chain-link fence, pointing down in a ravine it protected me from. "Look down there. Do you see that?" She came over to where I was. Again, she was confused. I wasn't. She was wondering what I was so eager for her to see. When she was standing beside me I produced the open ring box and popped the question.

"Oh my gosh!" (She said this when she saw the ring, before I even asked.)
"What the heck!" (She said this after I asked.)
"Yes." (She said this a few seconds later once she had caught her breath. She had started to cry immediately.)

I have such an accurate record of those events because I had set my iPhone to record (audio only) in my shirt pocket.

Yesterday Nancy made the biggest decision of her life. She said, "Yes."

In truth, it was not a descision made yesterday. It had been a long time coming and we had already been planning a wedding this year. We were both anticipating a proposal, but I was lucky enough to have a bit of a surprise for her.

I wanted to do something film-related for the proposal (Nancy and I both have a passion for film and filmmaking) so I decided to do a loosely-based reenactment that we would post to YouTube and Facebook in order to announce our engagement. We did that yesterday afternoon. I had a vision of what I wanted it to be and it turned out even better (usually it is the other way around). My roommate helped us shoot the short film with Nancy's iPad using the 8MM app. After we were done shooting I edited the raw footage on the iPad with the Silent Film Director Pro app. Technology. See the result below:

I love Nancy.

iPHONE MEMORIES #1: NANCY'S GRACE

Photo & Film

Photos are remarkable. They freeze a particular moment in life, a point in time that you can never return to (whether you would like to or not). While film can portray so very much, a picture has captured and paused life. Likewise, it makes us pause and consider the still. Film, in all its moving glory, is simply a manner of pictures. Photo & film: The mediums are forever happily married, never capable of cheating or divorce. We want both and we need both and we have both... so why not use both? Well, we do.

iPhone Memories

Months ago I began an album on Facebook called "iPhone Memories." It was a place for me to post the pictures taken on my iPhone that I most prized. Today I have deleted that album and will henceforth post their likes here, on my life's blog. I do not want another place one might look to find them.

The iPhone in question is my current 3G (16 GB). When I returned home from my mission, my parents picked me up at the Las Vegas airport. It was there, waiting between baggage carousals, that my folks handed me a nicely wrapped parcel. A gift! As I held it in my hand the contents began to ring. The box (made of two incomplete boxes) slid open with ease. Within was this iPhone and Tara, my sister, was calling (I later learned that father or mother had texted her when the moment was right to give me a buzz). I had no idea how to answer the device, father had to demonstrate the sliding madness. Gone for just two years and the whole world has evolved, including my parents... they were texting!

We hear that "a picture is worth a thousand words." That is surely true, but I beseech that we do not stop there. I may not write a thousand words for each "iPhone Memory" entry, but if time allowed I would and could. Of course, it helps that I am posting and writing about pictures from my own phone and, more importantly, from my own life. Writing about a picture with no evident relation to you is still worth a thousand words, they just might not come as soon.

Why iPhone photos? Well, I do not always have a camera with me (I know, heresy!), but I usually keep my iPhone in my right pocket or otherwise close at hand. One never knows when a "Kodak moment" might arise. Besides it being the lone source of visual documentation at times, it is fast, cheap, and easy all around. The quality is nothing to write home about, but the subjects truly are. "iPhone Memories"... tis quaint.

The forewords are solely because this is the beginning of a new series. In future "iPhone Memories," I will get right to it. I shall resort to a simplistic format: write the photo's (un)official title, post the photo itself, supply the date and time and day the photo was taken (just underneath it), and then write. Come what may!

Nancy's Grace

August 22, 2010 at 7:28:13 PM (Sunday)

This is the gorgeous woman I have had the joy and blessing of calling my girlfriend for the past 13 months: Nancy Zhou. She plays the piano almost as beautifully as she is herself. Here she is playing on the piano that currently dwells in the Kearl residence (the surname of the man who took my sister unto himself - with my family's consent of course). (I like calling their home the Kearl Kastle.) 

This brute of a piano has been in and out of my life. He was in our home when I was young. He appears in my first short film, "Earthquake." My mother made me take piano lessons (as all mothers should). At home, I would practice on his teeth. I remember sticking pennies between the keys. Would they not fall within? I vaguely remember that sound. He could be a piano bank if you wanted him to. (So many objects can be used for other unintended purposes. Possibilities are untold.) I believe he has made a modest sum... one day we may break and collect.

He was well-worn. One day my father bought a baby grand piano for my mother. This old piano was spurned and left alone. When we moved down to St. George, he did not come with us. Like a foster child he went from one relative's home to another, only to end up with Tara when she longed for a place to play. And there he remains today.

Curious is what I learned today when talking to my mother on the phone. Turns out they had this piano in their home before they had any of us kids. Curiouser is that my father grew up with this piano in his house. Did he play on this piano as a boy like I did? Might there be some 1960s pennies within his chasms, put there when they were fresh by young hands of my father? Apparently, "Scott" is carved into that wooden soldier (where?). As a child, my father claimed it was not his doing (though it certainly was his name). What say you now father?

Back to Nancy. I believe she was playing Debussy's "Clair de Lune" at this instance. It is a pretty piece that we have all heard. It is well-regarded, known, and used in a different film every single year in recent memory (except 1994 for whatever phenomenal reason). I want a woman who can make music and she can. She does. Her slender fingers have practiced and she skillfully dances them off the ivory. I doubt she knew that grizzled piano's history. Heck, there's surely chapters of his existence that I am unaware of.  This much I know, when I was boy I would begrudgingly practice "Springtime Symphony" on that very instrument. I had no way of knowing then that years later the woman I love would press upon those same keys.