Category: General

I’m a big fan of the Oak Street cinema. Its a movie house near the U campus that shows old and art films.

Lately they’ve been having problems and it looks as if the theater is very close to closing down if something isn’t done. A site to save the Oak Street Cinema has been started. If you read the website, I think you can tell pretty quickly why the theater is doomed.

1) Its run by committee. Nothing run by committee ever does well.

2) The solution to solve the problems of the theater is to contact politicians and try to get funding. This is basically an admission of failure. If not enough people show up to support the theater and you need gubment funding, then you’ve already lost the battle.

3) The theater is really horrible. The seats are uncomfortable. The screen is small. It has a very run down look to it. But for the type of films they show, there is no reason to ever go and see a film there. There is a nostalgia aspect to keeping it open, but quite honestly, old theaters are just inferior to newer mall theaters. I can go to the mall near my house and watch a film on a giant screen, stadium seating, with very comfortable seats. (see my last post on The New World) I’d be better off watching most old movies in my basement.

I think the answer to their problems are obvious. They need to let the audience select the movies that are shown, not a committee. Do it over the internet. You may get a lot of Star Wars and Godfather, but so what. Use those to fund the art films in between. Get a new theater or renovate the Oak Street. The screen is just too small for the size of the auditorium (its also why I dislike the Uptown). Ideally, you should also get more than one screen. The biggest audience you’ll have for many obscure movies is tens of people, so there is no point in hogging an entire auditorium for a film with that sort of draw.

There are lots of other little management things they could do as well to reduce costs, like online ticket sales, kiosks, and self serve consessions which would reduce your overhead.

…and go digital. Use DVD instead of film. The quality of some of the prints they get there is so bad, DVD iwould be an upgrade for most films they show. Digital would also provide much more flexibility on how long a show could run and what they could show.

There is a market for what the Oak Street is trying to do, but the current way its being done will never be successful.

I saw The New World last night. I highly recommend it.

It is not your normal film. On face, its the story of Pocahontas, but this is not a Disney cartoon. The film is beautiful. If it doesn’t get an Oscar nomination for cinematography, there is no justice. I’d give it a nod for Best Picture. Q’Orianka Kilcher should get a nomination for Best Actress.

The film is shot in a very dream like way. Who is the focus of the film changes as does the idea of what the New World is.

Go see it.

Is the wristwatch going out of style?

I haven’t worn a wrist watch in years. I never really did to be honest. Like the article says, if I want the time, I usually have my cell phone handy.

The only reason why I am bothering to write this is that I recently purchased a wristwatch. (MSRP is nowhere near what you pay retail for it btw. Its much less.)

To be honest, I really like it. Its a very heavy watch. Its a very technical watch, but technical in subtle ways that a digital watch is not. For starters, its a solar powered watch. You’d never guess by looking at it becuase there are no obvious solar cells. The cells are below the face of the watch , which lets light pass through it. It also show time in UTC on the face, which I think is great. I don’t know why, but I always like knowing what UTC is. (UTC is not exactly the same as GMT btw.)

It also has a slide rule type tool on the rim you can use to do simple navigation calculations. I have no need to ever use it, but its pretty cool. It also has a power saving feature where if it is out of the light it will stop movement of the hands and speed them back to current time when its in the light again. If my watch is in my sleeve for too long, when I take it out I can see the second and minute hands zoom to the present.

I can’t really pin down the reason I wanted a watch, espeically a (mostly) analog watch. Fashion may very well have been the determining factor. Men don’t have a lot of options for accessorizing. I have no desire to put in another earring (yes, I had one once). I can’t see myself wearing a ring. A necklace isn’t me. I don’t like to think that I’m a slave to fashion, but maybe the fact that men don’t wear watches as much anymore appeals to my contrarian nature.

I really don’t care. I like my watch.

There is nothing deep or insightful about the title of this post.

It is literally a quote from Ludwig Wittgenstein. This post is nothing more than a mini verion of Connectionsof how I came across it.

I’m a big fan of Philip Glass. I’ve written several posts in the past about this and I keep two links here to his website and the Yahoo Philip Glass Forum. Philip Glasss, if you don’t know, is one of the fathers of minimalist music (a term he doesn’t like and really doesn’t even apply anymore). The other big name in Minimalism is Steve Reich. I have some stuff by Steve Reich, but not nearly as much as Philip Glass. I like his work, but I lack the fantaical devotion I have for Philip Glass.

While looking for movies to see a while back, I stumbled accross the offical website for the movie The Dying Gaul. If you click on the link, you’ll immediately start hearing music. I was taken with the music immediately, but really paid no attention to what the voices were actually saying. I’m initial guess was that it was Steve Reich (which was correct) but had no idea what the piece was that was being played. At this point I hadn’t really paid any attention to the idea that there even were lyrics, let alone what they were. (upon review, the lyrics are actually very clear when heard on the website. They are much less clear on the actual track because they only do fragments of the sentence at a given time)

Some searching on Google and I eventually figured out what the music was. It actually took a while, becuase you don’t really see Soundtracks for small independent films. It was indeed a Steve Reich piece and it was called “Proverb”. I could find no CD by that name and really couldn’t find anything about it anywhere. Turns out the reason for that is becuase the CD it was on was recently released, and “Proverb” was not the title of the CD. Sure enough, it was on iTunes just sitting there the whole time.

So I download the song (had to buy the whole album actually) and listen to it several times. In all those times however, I never once paid attention to what was being said, just the sound of the voices. (The vocals are very similar to Gorecki’s Third Symphony) Until last week.

I was listening to it in my car when I caught that the voices were actually saying something! I could recgonize the words “how small…”.

More searching on Google. It turns out that the entire lyrics of the song are nothing more than the sentence in the title of this post repeated over and over. Reich was a philosophy major in college and studied Wittgenstein. The end.

As an added note to my inability to listen to the lyrics of songs, I just recently discovered that I have botched the lyrics to “A Little More Love” by Olivia Newton John, my entire life. I thought the line in the song went, “would a little more love make you cry?”. Its really “would a little more love make it right?”

I like my version better actually.

Here is what my spring semester should be. Much easier than previous semesters:

GEO 3880 X-Ray Diffraction Workshop; 1 Credit
GEO 3890 Pacific Geology Workshop; 1 Credit
GEO 4602 Sedimentology and Stratigraphy; 3 Credits
GEO 3401 Geochronology and Earth History; 3 Credits
GEO 4094 Senior Thesis; 2 Credits
GEO 8243 Principles of Rock Magnetism; 2 Credits

Total: 12 Credits (13 to be a full time student). I need to come up with 1 more credit. I’m debating taking an interesting class like Graph Theory pass/fail, or a blow-off class in CLA.

I also have to make up stuff from the previous semester.

I’m doing work on the VSM right now. I waaaay underestimated how long this was going to take.

Once I’m done with this semester, I’ll have no obligations whatesoever to anyone, anywhere.