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Have you ever looked at the sidewalk during an intense storm? An amazing thing happens to those sheets pf droplets as they plummet to the ground; they start to group together into vein-like formations from the disparity of concentration of those droplets. It’s almost as if the storm is helping to show us the natural blood-network of the Earth. This is how we are all connected, through the Earth and its ordinarily invisible network. This is the beauty of the Earth and nature and the everyday.

It breaks my heart to hear people make stark distinctions between science and art. There is no distinction, one blends into the other in a perfect gradient. No art exists without some orderly science behind it and there no science without some beautiful art to observe. Creativity and fact exist in all things. Look at the branches of trees, they grow in orderly fractals, but there is also beautiful randomness that dictates their growth. Nature is the existence of art and science in harmony. Humanity is the only force trying to separate the two.

I don’t understand why we try to categorize life like this. The brain thrives on both the chaos of creativity and the regularity of fact. Chaos allows us to relax and emote, regularity allows us to predict and react. Both are necessary and both complement one another. Humans can live with this notion of gradience, but we refuse to accept it. We love contrasts and categories because it often allows us to function more easily, but this should be the one thing that isn’t categorized. We should witness the beauty of the everyday and also see the stunning order. Life isn’t lived in categories and nature won’t exist that way either.

We should learn to appreciate Nature and its creations. The veins of rain and its connections show us this interaction of art and science. We could perhaps form some sort of explanation for this occurrence, but we could never truly predict its artistry. Let’s all take a moment to appreciate the wonders of the world. It is perfectly ordered with rules, but also incomprehensibly chaotic. Look at the ordinary and marvel at its extraordinary existence.

In Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu’s new movie “Birdman,” Michael Keaton plays Riggan Thomson, a washed up actor who had played the flying superhero ‘Birdman’ three times and refused another sequel, only to watch his career fade and disintegrate over the years. Although Iñárritu insists that the story is intended as a reflection on his own insecurities, the casting is seems far too referential to be coincidental –  Keaton, of course, played Batman twice and, largely disappeared from movies after turning down a third installment.

We find Thomson backstage, scrambling to prepare for the premiere of his first Broadway play, which he has written (adapted from Raymond Chandler’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,”) and is directing and starring in. For Thompson, this is a last ditch attempt at legitimacy and relevance, an effort to salvage his sadly diminished reputation (“I’m a trivial pursuit card,” he moans) by establishing himself on the stage.

The deep mess of Thompson’s personal life is quickly revealed through interactions with his cast and crew as they clamber to prepare for the three opening previews: his girlfriend Laura (Andrea Riseborough) reveals that she is pregnant, his ex-wife visits and makes tragicomic, regretful allusions to their chaotic shared history, his daughter Sam (Emma Stone) has recently emerged from rehab and works as his sulky assistant, her presence serving as a frustrated living rejoinder to her father’s self-centered career obsession.

Meanwhile, a falling light fixture immediately knocks out Thompson’s bumbling lead actor, and he must replace him with the conceited but talented Broadway star and method actor Mike Shiner (a brilliantly overbearing Edward Norton), whose histrionics threaten to derail both the show and his relationship with the lead actress (Naomi Watts).

While the camera weaves through the labyrinthine backstage (a set artificially crafted on a soundstage to make the halls appear narrower and more claustrophobic), catching glimpses of the increasingly entangled cast arguing, flirting, smoking and rehearsing, the frazzled Thomson retreats to his sparse dressing room, where he monologues to himself in the disembodied voice of Birdman, levitates, and moves objects with his mind (generally to smash them). “Birdman” never decides whether Thompson’s powers are ‘real,’ even as our hero eventually flies through the city streets and conjures up blockbuster style explosions with crazed despair/delight. The surreal conceit works largely because Keaton’s intense, personal performance anchors us to the fantastic: Keaton’s Thompson is by turns brokenly self-reflective and fiercely manic, both burned out and crazily sustained by the mission to perform.

Much like the occasional fantastic departures from reality in Louis C.K.’s Louis, whether or not we think the fantastical moments in Birdman are taking place in Thompson’s psyche or actually happening, we follow because we understand how the preoccupied mind can inadvertently project itself outwards, how weirdly personal the world can get when we accidentally experience it through the lenses of our own consuming inner messes. At one point, as Thompson stumbles drunkenly down the city street, the homeless man who has been ranting about God in the background turns to Thompson as he passes and makes the plea of an auditioning actor – did that sound good? Should I try it differently?

Though “Birdman” explores deeply personal themes (aging, relevance, legitimacy of different art forms, parenthood), it does so with a flashy stylistic melding of the theatrical and cinematic: in constant motion, the camera follows the cast through the theater hallways in a series of lengthy, carefully staged and choreographed takes, which Iñárritu has spliced together through a mix of clever editing and CGI to create the illusion of a single, long take. The style isn’t just an impressive gimmick –  the perpetual motion of camera and actors creates a rattled, exhilarating energy, while quietly evoking the foreboding feeling that Thompson has lost control of his personal life and his art. Antonio Sanchez’s excellent, sharp percussive score keeps the feverish energy up as the show’s previews go comically wrong, conflicts between characters come to a head only to get weirder, and the narrative practically spirals towards opening night.

By the time I exited the theater I was wound up and mildly exhausted, but also soothed by the lingering, poignant catharsis that  comes from watching a truly great comedy. It’s a serious feeling, mostly because it’s one of the basic bummers of being human that we’re going to be periodically, upsettingly disrupted from the necessary assumption that we are Important by the basic suspicion that life might just be completely ridiculous. “Birdman,” centers around this deep, tragic need to be important, acknowledging that we are ridiculous but endearingly so, invoking serious empathy with the flailing ex-superhero, making us laugh.

The sad truth is that people in my generation are growing increasingly apathetic to hard work. Obviously this is no news flash, but sometimes going through a lot of effort for one small thing can seem pointless. This has come through in my experience with cooking. Why would I want to spend an hour or more preparing something I’m just going to devour anyway only to be left with a stack of dishes the size of Mount Everest, a floor covered in crumbs, and ingredients strewn across the kitchen? With all of that to anticipate wouldn’t it just be easier to order a pizza? Well, not too long ago I met someone who made me rethink my apathy toward the cooking process. This friend argued that cooking is an amazing art, that he loves the hands on engagement of crushing garlic and chopping onions, and that nothing beats the feeling of a successful cooking experience. It took me a little while, to say the least, to get on board with this mentality. After burning my jambalaya, setting the stove on fire trying to make bacon, and even regressing in my ability to make pancakes, I was ready to go back to frozen dinners for life. It wasn’t until I really started to acknowledge that all art takes both hard work and a lot of practice that I was able to start enjoying cooking. It’s the same with music, painting, drawing, and even writing. Understanding this has refreshed me in my approach to all of my artistic interests – writing, photography, music, and now cooking. The more I push aside all of the reasons not to do something, the better I get at it. Now I’m making acorn squash and eggplant parm like nobody’s business. Once you can pull down the creative process from this idealized space, you can take the first (and hardest) steps and get practicing. Then, the dishes, the time, and the mess will all be worth it and you can finally throw away the stacks of takeout menus in your drawer.

I was rewatching the classic movie Pocahontas with my cousin this past weekend, and as the song “Colors of the Wind” played, it got me thinking;

The song isn’t really about the colors of the wind so much as it is a commentary on cultural diffusion, the colonist character’s opportunity to learn a deeper natural wisdom from a culture he considers otherwise inferior. But the patterns of imagery in both the lyrics and visual imagery of the song – fruits bright colors, the wolf an azure blue, mountains’ rich oversaturated earthy tones – led me to think about the language of color, so to speak.

I turned to one of my favorite painters, Wassily Kandinsky, as he has written much about color and experimentation. Kandinsky argues colors have two effects: a superficial physical reaction to color, which associates a color with the physical phenomenon of the world. For example, bright red might evoke memories of fire, and the physical sensation of heat. The second level of reaction to color is psychological – beyond the physical sensation a color may induce, we also experience visceral emotional responses to colors. Kandinsky argues as we grow accustomed to the mundanity of our daily surroundings, we filter out both the physical and psychological sensations of our everyday stimuli. As a painter, Kandinsky strove to abstract the shapes and colors of everyday life into a panoply of psychological stimulus, re-introducing the wonder of everyday life. This painting, Kandinsky’s version of a city, demonstrates his mission.

So Pocahontas’s “Colors of the Wind” functions as an allegory, not only for a particular moment of cultural interaction, but also for a more universal observation on the role of culture in the first place. Culture functions as a means of codifying human experience in order to understand and appreciate both the external world and internal psychological states. Perhaps the role of art within culture, then, is to induce a collision of sensibilities and revivify our sense of wonder.