Let it be known: dulce de leche + nilla wafers. Unstoppable.
In fact, I need some more right now. Anyboody gots some cool iPhone app ideas? We have, like, a week.
A Gmaps dulce de leche finder app won’t cut it.
League of Arabia
(Reposting a Leaguemail to ensure dissemination)
Fellow fezzes:
Spencer (note Cha-Cha League headshot), myself, and the lately-befezzed (on the Lake Union jaunt) Agent Cooper are planning to take in one of the 70mm Sunday matinees of Lawrence of Arabia at the Cinerama. Danelope has noted his availability as well.
March 16 or March 23 are the Sunday showings, at noon. My preference is March 16. Please advise!
As the fez carries a peculiarly negative significance in realtion to this film in its’ association with a character portrayed by the father of Miguel Ferrer, I declare this outing fez optional and come one, come all.
Spencer, Coop, and myself have all seen this film at the Cinerama before in 70mm, and it is really among the most amazing moviegoing experiences one might have. Spencer and I also caught a super-clean 70mm 2001 there a few years back, and while I caught many compelling details I had missed in lower rez incarnations, I would personally say that Lawrence in 70mm dominates 2001 in 70mm.
You may recall my thoughts in 2004 or in 2002.
Apparently, Tom will recall them with especial clarity; Manuel may take some selling.
Holy shit, how long have we known each other?
Cities in dust
On my way to NWFF tonight, I walked around my old neighborhood gawking at the massive changes that two years have brought. I was gawking at the new buildings, but evidently crime is up as well. Lots of shiny new restaurants targeting an upscale demographic, lots of closed mom-and-pop storefronts and empty old standbys.
The old standby I selected ws Bill’s Pizza and Pasta, mostly empty (as were the majority I walked by).
The first song to roar off the jukebox as I settled in was Siouxsie and the Banshees’ Your City Lies in Dust.
Yub yub
Spencer screened the oddball 1929 silent/sound hybrid The Mysterious Island at NWFF tonight, and according to his presentation notes, the film was budgeted at over $4m – the equivalent, according to this, of from $40m to $400m today.
You could, as they say, see the money on the screen, in huge and elaborate sets and miniatures and in a peculiar grand finale involving what must have been a thousand midgets in rubber suits.
All in all, a film I found worth seeing, but one which must be characterized as muddled in construction. Other folks have written about it at length.
Noir
Tonight I foisted 1948’s Act of Violence on Viv over dinner, which largely drove her to bed. I was quite taken with the location shots in Glendale and one presumes Pasadena, the wartime fallout plot, and the lady leads, a very young but no less striking Janet Leigh and a ripe – even naturalistic – Mary Astor.
According to that link up there, director Zinnemann followed this noir up eventually with From Here To Eternity. There’s no beach in this flick, the architecture is superior, the women are better looking, and the moralizing is less obstreperous. Oh, and this film’s in black and white.
Oh, the pain
After a week of struggle, correctly identifying crufted permissions applied in layers dating back to around 2000, when I first installed OS X on the home server, I concluded that a drive wipe and clean reinstall was the only way to sort things out.
This has proved partly true, in that permissions have been the cause of my pain and suffering, and partly untrue, in that the frustrations I have been experiencing with them can now be definitively attributed to the Mac OS X default user structure.
I am quite close to a resolution, however. I have been able to connect to my crufty MySQL databases via PHP. Perl is still complaining, but does appear to be trying to talk to the databases.
With luck, tomorrow, I can extract the data needed and start shifting miscellaneous stuff over to the hosted environment.