bellascribe

Sometimes I don’t write here because of having to come up with the post or entry title. If I go with what first comes to mind, like today, I’m okay. But If I get hung up on “Well, that doesn’t really say what this post is about…” and all “search engine-tag-reader-blah-blah-blah” then I don’t even want to bother. I already have a job (actually, make that plural: jobs); this is supposed to be fun. And what a lot of work that is, reminding myself to have fun. Which is, in part, why I dig my offline journals.

Also, it seems that when my titles are too long, as in How to move during a hurricane (yeah, I’m still peeved about that), the entry can disappear. And I have so far not wanted to invest the time in figuring out why and how to correct it. Fun, it’s supposed to be fun, that’s why.

Last night, we saw Michel Gondry’s The Science of Sleep at the Vinegar Hill Theatre. The Theatre provides this review for the movie.

Not a perfect film, but I liked it quite a lot. Visually appealing. See the forest in a boat here, for example. Stephan (protagonist) falls in love with Stephanie for how she makes things with her hands. Yes. Yes.

In one scene (minor) Stephanie says to her boss that she and her friend/coworker are not fighting but are “exchanging ideas.” This phrase has been resounding in my head since. In the sixth grade, in a confluence of our teacher’s exposure to (for the time) progressive teaching methods and being deemed of appropriate social and intellectual development to partake, we students were divided into groups of four or five, told to move our desks together, and, assigned lesson-related topics in hand, ordered to exchange ideas.

How do we really exchange ideas? “I gave Bob my idea on a new sandwich of macaroni on pumpernickel and took his on using magnets to hang jeans. Elsie got in on things…”

Ideas sleep furiously… Yeah, you do recognize it. “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” is Chomsky’s (1957) example of a grammatically correct sentence with nonsensical meaning. (More on that at wikipedia.)

Which inspired a literary competition.

And which inspired John Hollander’s poem, Coiled Alizarine:

Curiously deep, the slumber of crimson thoughts:
While breathless, in stodgy viridian
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

Last night there was a little hitch in the “changing over” of the film –

(from the Vinegar Hill Theatre website) Films are shown the old-fashioned way, with the projectionist smoothly “changing over” from one reel to another with the aid of visual cue marks on the film. It is the only theater in Charlottesville using this system, which results in less wear and dirt on the film print. It is also the only commercial theater in Charlottesville to have one projectionist for one auditorium, resulting in the fewest projection problems in town. –

at which the projectionist? or the man in charge of things (who’d also been manning the box office earlier) came into the theater and announced very nervously that the lamp on the second projector wasn’t operating properly, but that they were working on it, etc. Using my time wisely, I snapped a shot. (Note the color of the wall and overall palette — more to come on that in a future posting.)

Edited 10-12-06: “palette” for “pallette”