The Michigan Daily - michigandaily.com BUA From page 5 the air hung with Chinese lan- terns; wool-capped graffiti writers slouching in the train yard, wielding canisters of spray paint. "Istarted paintingthingsthat people told me not to paint," Bua said. "I'm painting MCs and b- boys and break dancers and graffiti writers. People asked, 'What the hell you painting that. for? No one cares about that!' I said, 'I hear you, I respect that, but I'm a do what I wanna do."' He's recently started to paint pimps and hustlers, people from the neighborhood. "They're city-dwellers. They're the peo- ple who are forgotten by the mainstream," Buasaid. "They're the people who made New York what it was, and they're just as important, just as much a part of the New York City skyline as the Brooklyn Bridge or the Empire State Building." The tradition of urban art is not necessarily about hip hop and jagged, skyscraper-scarred landscapes. It's about the lower class, about the images of the people. PENN From page 5 ly the greater picture here is the size of his courage and his will, and how, those things tell me that if he was brave enough to justify it for him, then that's enough for me." "McCandless's journey," he explained, "while very dramatic and in some ways reckless was nonetheless so brave and so clear that there's inspiration to be gotten out of that." At 141 introspective minutes, the movie feels markedly per- sonal, but that may be more in the completed product than it was in the production. Though Penn has a long connection to this material - he was in touch with McCandless's family for nearly 10 years before they finally decided to let him make the movie - he said its inner- most thematic value rests pri- marily within a generation not his own. "For a 47-year-old at this point who read this book when tIwas a little closer to the magic years of life," he said, filming the movie mostly made him become frustrated with what he called the "lack of activism" amongyoung people who arrive at McCandless's suspicion of establishment and social expec- tation. Asked what he hoped a "I paint the underclass, like Rembrandt or Bruegel. They painted the poor people of their culture, and those are the kind of people I emulate, too," Bua said. "I like to paint the heroes of my day and the people I grew up around next to this welfare hotel." Bua's life in this environ- ment created the experiences he would draw upon as an art- ist. "It was just this cesspool of drug dealers and crazy people. But these are the people that I say, 'Hey, this is what gave New York City its flavor,' " he said. Bua moves urban art in new ways, connecting Rembrandt and graffiti in the same way art unites people. "I think that art is tremen- dously powerful, and it can move masses. When you say a picture speaks a thousand words, it really speaks more than that to me," he said. "Art and hip hop are about gratitude and hope and bringing together people from all walks of life." Bua's got the booming sub- woofers behind him, shaking it up, lending that bounce to the bass player, to the graffiti writer in the train docks and to that artist on the streets. younger generation would take away from the film, Penn, in his famous dead tone, said sim- ply "whatever they want." But as his eager camera lingers on the movie's stunning expans- es of desert, forest and other landscapes, most of which he said were chosen for the "360- degree freedom" they provided the production, Penn's belief in Audiences can take away 'whatever they want. Lucid. Chris's journey and its revela- tions is clear. "I think there's an enormous value to what he did, in that in his case, the triumph was not necessarily hope and survival," he said. "The big thing is that he rebuilt himself." The movie, whatever its stark destination, is ultimately about "the pursuit of freedom - freedom on what- ever terms each person who sees the movie will find on their own." So if the deeply personal experience a movie as existen- tial as "Into the Wild" evokes is not his, Penn said, he hopes it's his audience's. AMR% Aft o <r W 1 n Aj tic A - e S ho n edtPoint S U M MER SEAS ON AUDITIONS &Technical Interviews [lwf ~For information: 1lRIAIMIAT 419-627-288 Take Your Career In A NEW DIRECTION! Try a health care career in CHIROPRACTIC, MASSAGE THERAPY, ACUPUNCTURE or