Every semester I teach at Rutgers I try to get a “smart classroom” which means a classroom with a built-in beamer so that I can hook up my laptop and lecture with my slides. Rooms have already been assigned for Spring08, and it turns out that both of the courses I’ll be teaching are in rooms described as having “overhead projectors” in them. Great, I thought (non-sarcastically), I don’t have to plead to have the rooms switched! You see I had been thinking of the beamers the way they are set up at the GC, which is to say, suspended from the ceiling (this often makes for fun times when students have to stand on tables to press buttons when professors can’t figure out the remotes, but that’s another story). Sadly, however, this is not what is meant by an overhead projector. An overhead projector is that old-school box with a lamp and a fan and some mirrors and lenses that shines your transparencies (or your scroll of acetate, if you’re that kind of overhead projector user) first up and then out onto a screen. Why “overhead”? Nothing about the whole procedure is overhead — the box, the lenses, the mirrors, the projected image, nothing really ends up over your head, if you’re standing up. And as far as I know this is not a case of a description becoming a name and subsequently failing to describe when the object it denotes changes (see Dart, river, mouth of). So I went to the wikipedia article on overhead projectors, which, although failing to illuminate me on the origin of the name, did point me to both the overhead-projector-based art project The Art of the Overhead (check out their sweet interface!) and this video, which shows you how to make your own beamer out of an overhead projector and an lcd monitor. Make it so!
Read MoreFor a while I was a big fan of dvd commentary, and considered it a useful tool for appreciating cinema. Check out 400 Blows, or any Kurosawa, or really any Criterion Collection release. But recently my thoughts have changed.
Lately we’ve taken to watching films over dinner, which ends up spreading the viewing across a few evenings, and sometimes results in completing a film when we’ve still got wine left in the bottle, or food on our plates, prompting me to fire up the dvd extras. So last night we finished watching “Stranger than Fiction” which I generally liked (I could probably sit through anything that had both Emma Thompson and Dustin Hoffman), and I made the big mistake of starting to watch the included behind-the-scenes featurette. I ended up being so irritated by some of the behind-the-scenes people that it ended up contaminating my whole experience, and now I think I don’t like the film as much. Walt was spot on when he compared it to really enjoying some dip, say, and then making the mistake of reading the label and realizing that you’ve just ingested guar gum and hydrolized corn proteins.
Apparently, really irritating superficial people can make films that I enjoy; I just don’t want to know about it.
Read MoreI just watched Klute last night. Great cinematography. It brought back memories of NYC from when I was small, and you had to wear your purse across your body for fear of “snatchers” and Times Square was seedy and dangerous and there was still great art on the subways. Anyway, two things: Jane Fonda had the “one mullet to rule them all” and Donald Sutherland used to look a lot like Tobey Maguire.
