A little something for everyone, from my browser tabs to yours.
- Check out this beautiful slideshow of the Fox Theatre in downtown Columbia, South Carolina. Let's hear it for stimulus money (and many other sources) funding its restoration as the future home of the very vital Nickelodeon Theatre.
- Swinging through the Southeast, "Do you have a good eye for film? Do you love movies? Would you like to be involved in determining which films screen at the 2011 Atlanta Film Festival?" You have one more day to apply to be a screener for the 2011 ATLFF.
- Ricocheting to the great white north, Montreal-based Maisonneuve's "The Eh-List" details "Canuxploitation cinema: our homegrown industry of B-movies that run the gamut from camp to crap to pretty great. For every Sweet Hereafter, Red Violin and Atanarjuat, there are a hundred flicks like Screwball Academy, Cannibal Rollerbabes and Rock ‘N’ Roll Nightmare."
- Looking back into the past, FOC Nancy posted the following anecdote after Eddie Fisher died:
Eddie Fisher once appeared on a television program during which entertainers sought romantic, spiritual, and other miscellaneous guidance from a group of panelists (among them the noted wit George S. Kaufman). Fisher's complaint concerned a certain chorus girl who refused to go out with him on account of his age. "Mr. Fisher," Kaufman advised, "on Mount Wilson there is a telescope that can magnify the most distant stars up to twenty-four times the magnification of any previous telescope. This remarkable instrument was unsurpassed in the world of astronomy until the development and construction of the Mount Palomar telescope - an even more remarkable instrument of magnification. Owing to advances and improvements in optical technology, it is capable of magnifying the stars to four times the magnification and resolution of the Mount Wilson telescope." Here Kaufman paused, surveying the puzzled faces around him. "Mr. Fisher," he continued, "if you could somehow put the Mount Wilson telescope inside the Mount Palomar telescope, you still wouldn't be able to detect my interest in your problem."
- From chorus girls to... computer programmers? I want to see this doc, Top Secret Rosies: The Female Computers of WWII. "Rosie made the weapons, but the female computers made them accurate. When the first electronic computer (ENIAC) was invented to aid the Army’s ballistic calculation efforts, six... women were tapped to become its first programmers."
- New York's Vulture talks rom-coms and watches You've Got Mail with the charming Mindy Kaling [who I still think of as that "Matt and Ben" actress because I am an Old who doesn't watch television]:
I was very intimidated by New York and I didn’t know it very well, and this movie really helped me, it made me fall in love with the city — it’s such a love letter to New York. I went to all the places in the film. And I decided that I love the Upper West Side. I remember watching it during Christmas and thinking, I wonder if I’ll ever have a really cute boyfriend like Tom Hanks, and sing carols around a piano? I love this line, where they say Parker Posey’s character makes coffee nervous. There are great jokes in here. Do you notice how they made everyone look so middle class and regular? And yet Ryan’s apartment is huge …
- That Henry Jenkins two-part interviews FOC Generoso Fierro, who, when he's not producing docs or spinning ska, has the very cool job of documenting the design process at MIT's GAMBIT games lab. One of this summer's prototypes, Elude, sounds especially fascinating, and I'm no gamer: "By tapping into the experiential aspects of the video game medium, Elude's metaphorical model for depression serves to bring awareness to the realities of depression by creating empathy with those who live with depression every day." Seriously, it's like demonlover and a plot point from an as-yet unwritten William Gibson novel had a baby!
-
Finally, there's the fourth HiLobrow merit badge, Feral Tendencies! How one earns this little number reads like a lesson plan from Werner Herzog's Rogue Film School, so it should come as no surprise that under Requirements (complete 1 or more), one finds "4. Explain the significance of the dancing chicken in Werner Herzog’s Stroszek," while one option for Thought Experiments (complete 2 or more) is "8. Briefly explain the identities of Kaspar Hauser, Bruno S, and Timothy Treadwell. Were any of them feral? Explain."
