Thursday, June 28, 2007

Time Travels


Greetings to all! I hope everyone is having a peaceful and productive summer. I am in the first month of a year long sabbatical so thought I would keep in contact with the CS blog by reporting in now and then from my assorted excursions. I am traveling a bit and last week was fortunate to connect with my friend in Los Angles, Marilyn Slater, who is author of the amazing website on the silent film star, Mabel Normand, http://www.freewebs.com/looking-for-mabel/. For our evening adventure, we visited the still vibrant LA institution, Silent Movie Theatre (http://www.silentmovietheatre.com/movies/), which has new owners committed to showing silent film once a week with live accompaniment. It was a great evening with three beautiful prints (including the King Vidor feature, The Crowd), some wonderful music, and even the family of King Vidor in attendance, who shared some info on the film and director. A big shout out to those doing their part to keeping this important part of our media culture alive. It reminded me how much cinema has always been a transmedia or intermedia enterprise and how the idea of live performance was once very much a part of the cinema experience (and is using this element again today in various experimental venues -- as seen in Toni Dove's colloquia talk on interactive cinema in May). These intersections of the live and recorded enhance the cinema's inherent properties of presence and absence -- a doubling of its uncanny spell!

I will be checking back with further reports in time travels -- in the meantime, please check out our links to assorted folks/places of interest. Erik Loyer, one of last year's colloquia speakers, has a brand new website with lots of cool stuff...check it out!
Until next time, my wishes for big sky mind adventures for all of you! I am off to update my music selections! Lots of Coltrane (John and Alice) these days!

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