What makes a good story? What captures our interest and then keeps us there until "the end"? Walter Benjamin claimed the best stories embodied an inevitable contradiction: to tell a good story, you have to wander far from home. But to tell a good story, you have to come back. Late Saturday night, wanderers Greta Snider and Bill Brown came back to tell us stories around the projected light of the virtual fire.

Greta tore a few pages from her travel notebook, animating her margin drawings and setting them free to play in the spaces between autobiography, documentary, fact and fiction. In Portland, she and her friends decided to go to Portland (Oregon, not Maine) to escape San Francisco for awhile, avec camera, and it's one of those trips where everything goes wrong. Of course those make the best stories. But on most of those tellings, the essence is strangely absent. No matter how many details, or how much your friends (want to?) revisit the events through telling you; the fact remains that they were there, and you weren't; they're in, and you're out. In this respect, Portland does something surprising: through a mix of multiple perspectives, ambient location details and a low-key discursive style, you actually start feeling like you were there. The fractured narrative, the half-remembered streetscapes, the self-referential moments (reading from a script, talking about how the camera was locked in the squatters' house for days) all contribute to a perceived sense of real memory, the tone of which rings truer than straight documentary.

In Urine Man, she focused her lens (and microphone) on a neighbor who lived in a bus, and let the film roll as he unwound his entire worldview, opening a portal on a kaleidoscopic universe where strange paranoid states prevail: clothing is an agribusiness conspiracy, because if we leave our clothes off we'll photosynthesize nutrients from the sun; drink your own urine because 'you-rine is good for you', and since it's self-produced it's not poisonous; make sure to partake of at least 2 of the 4 food groups, speed and pot; etc. (I think there was something about aliens too but I can't remember.) And rather than playing the part of 'unaware subject for sensitive yet bizarre art-piece,' Urine Man complains loudly about editing his presentation, and midway through the film usurps the director's role with no uncertain intent.

Through the documentaries and the stories, the question of what is real and what is not comes up. But then, that question might well be applied to each one of us. Every time you tell a story about what happened to you, or how you came to be in a certain place, or some fact about your psychology, how much of that is real, and how much is not? Simply by leaving out some things and emphasizing others, aren't you really constructing a partial identity which has some relation other than the identity function to the truth? And thus some distance from it? One might say this is trivially true, for how could you include everything in every story, and aren't some things more relevant than others? Yes. But that just underscores the fact that we are in part storied beings, we are in part made up, and made up differently at any given time, and in relation to different questions. Greta's work treats the elasticity of identity truthfully, just exactly by mixing up the real with the reel.

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Bill Brown is a fellow hobbyist. But his hobby (which I also share) is a bit unusual, and doesn't usually make you a big hit at cocktail parties, where even the train geeks can at least turn on the tracks and make the toy cruise around the room. Our hobby is philosophy. Not as an academic discipline, not as tenets for a cult, but as a hobby. There aren't many of us, and usually we don't even have nifty scrapbooks in which to save all the theoretical odds and ends. But now Bill has made some stunning movie scrapbooks, and all of us out there simply must collect all three. In his road stories, Roswell, Hub City, and Confederation Park, Bill took a Saussurian approach to meaning, allowing identity conditions to exclude the thing in itself, and only include everything else, playing with the paradox of contradiction to the delight of fellow hobbyists in attendance. Well, me.

In Roswell, a meditation on both human and alien travelogues, Bill took on the persistent question of the meaning of life. You might assume that the meaning of your life would perhaps have something to do with you. But here we are, slogging away on the surface of the planet, living and dying with no apparent purpose, with only accidental forays by some of us into the embalming fluid of history (which of course perhaps means nothing in the non-human scheme of things anyway). But then imagine one day you came into contact with a UFO. Just by virtue of that interaction, you would be special. You would be catapulted out of the ordinary and into history, remarkable and remarked forever, or at least until history's end. And yet, what exactly is it that would make you special in this case? Nothing about you, per se. Just the accident of your occupying a certain place at a certain time. Could have been anyone. In other words, the meaning of your life has nothing to do with you, and has been determined by a completely external event, i.e., the meeting with the UFO, the ultimate 'other'.

In Hub City, an examination of both the real and the imagined Lubbock, Texas, Bill returns again to the question of the road. But this time, he subverts the nature of the journey itself. Between Buddy Holly, windswept prairie, and truck-stop diner road signs, the voiceover narration claims that each traveler has within him- or herself the dream of the ultimate goal, the ultimate destination; in other words, the end of the road. Now this goal could vary, of course between travelers but also for one traveler at different times. But if true, what it means is that there is no real traveling. One is never 'in the now' if one is dreaming of the future, one is never 'on the path' if one is dreaming of the goal, one is never really experiencing Oz if one is always dreaming of home. The very nature of travel, this film suggests, contains its own negation. And if that's the case, exactly where do we think we're going, and where are we when we get there?

Finally, in the last presentation of the evening, Confederation Park, Bill took on the nature of political and geographical boundaries, the demarcation of different social spaces, the antagonistic pulls of fluidity and territoriality when we try to differentiate here from there, or journey from one to the other. Criss-crossing Canada, he hangs out with his friends and investigates the simmering sub-civil war between the French- and English-speaking populations. Unearthing a history of radical actions and the ebb and flow of antagonism, he takes a geological perspective to wonder why we give these things meaning. After all, political and social boundaries can only exist on a map, and a map isn't the real thing. Sailing in a ferry away from a city, he observes that boundaries can only be seen from outside, never from within. So how real is a boundary, really? It is yet another thing that can only be defined from what it is not, casting doubt on its very existence.

History, ourselves, and space and time - each of these has been examined and found wanting. Although the harder you squeeze water in your hands the less of it you hold. Perhaps we should set these terms free in their rightful territory, that of the imagination, and use our time here to go about the business of reinventing our way of life, not our 'why'.