Detail from Grant Elementary:
30 days
(13) Logos
I spent my Saturday watching four movies at the True/False Festival. Not too shabby.
An audience member asks former Walt Disney Co. president Peter Schneider a question after the screening of “Waking Sleeping Beauty.” Schneider was the film’s producer as well as one of its subjects.
Messing with camera settings before the showing of “Kick in Iran.”
All 1,200 seats in the Missouri Theater were filled for a 5:30 presentation of “Colony.” Bramble, a group based out of Salt Lake City, provided the pre-movie entertainment.
The director of the Secret Screening Orange movie speaks during his Q&A session (I don’t think I can be more detailed about it—it IS secret, after all).
(12) Outside In
The True/False Film Festival is here!
Last year when the festival came to town, I only got to see one movie—granted, it was a very good one (Food, Inc.), but I wish I had had taken better advantage of the movie offerings. This year I’m trying to make up for the lapse.
Tonight I saw “Antoine”, which I absolutely loved. It’s a French film, shot in Montreal, and is an exploration of the imagination of a kindergartner/first grader. The main subject, however, is blind (he’s also AWESOME and has the best and happiest laugh I’ve ever heard). How can a sighted person even begin to understand the imagination of a boy who’s been blind since he was three weeks old? It’s a pretty daunting challenge for a director to take on.
At any rate, I was impressed, and would highly recommend the film to any and all. (In semi-related news, I came out of the theater thinking in my rudimentary French. I didn’t realize Quebecois was easier to understand than the Parisian dialect.)
“Antoine” was shown at the Stephens College chapel—all of the other movies I have tickets for will be at the big venues, so it was nice to be in the little teeny theater for one screening:
I converted these to black and white because, as I’ve mentioned in the past, my camera doesn’t do so well shooting in low light situations. Noise, noise, noise.
(11) Routine Occurences
(Because I missed a day of photos, I am adding a day to the countdown, and will post Day 10 when I get my disposable camera images developed and processed.)
Lunch
Laundry. I shot this at 1/8 and now wish I’d made the shutter speed just a little faster, so the clothes were more defined. Ah well.
(9a) 1,000 Miles
I stupidly left my camera card reader AND memory card in St. Louis when I left yesterday…so I have no pictures for Tuesday, February 23.
Today, while on my way to Nashville, I stopped at a gas station outside of Memphis and bought a disposable camera (heck yes), because I didn’t feel like driving anymore without some sort of way to take photos. This means that I DO have photos for today, the 24th- I just have to get the film developed and the negatives scanned. We will see if any of them actually came out.
I wasn’t supposed to be going to Nashville at all, actually. I drove to Memphis because I was tired of waiting for InterLibrary Loan to send me the microfilm I needed for data collection, and I figured it would be much easier to just go right to the source. And the library at UMemphis had e-mailed me to say that they also had microfilm for the Atlanta Journal-Constituion, which is my other newspaper source. A trip to Tennessee, then, would be killing two birds with one stone.
However, upon getting to Memphis, I discovered that the library did not in fact have the AJC microfilm I needed. I had a minor freakout, then started checking library catalogs for every university within 8 hours of my current location. I was seriously considering trekking all the way up to Urbana, Illinois (which would have been awful) before I checked Vanderbilt’s library collection. This, amazingly, happened to have every volume of the AJC going back to 1899, well before the Journal and the Constitution had even merged. Hooray! I checked out of my hotel a day early, drove east for a few hours, and holed up in the Vandy library for four hours getting the rest of my newspaper images. Then I drove back to St. Louis.
So (for some reason the map loads a little too zoomed in):
[googlemaps http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&source=s_d&saddr=Columbia,+MO&daddr=Saint+Louis,+MO+to:Memphis,+TN+to:Nashville,+TN+to:Saint+Louis,+MO+to:Columbia,+MO&hl=en&geocode=FRlbUgIdCBh_-inJgoG786vchzEgb726LWkRoA%3BFc-0TQIduUaf-in5ju36qbTYhzFb4Lsiyuo5vg%3BFd5WGAIdLPah-ilFl0PqHn7VhzH-thpgFfOT0Q%3BFQLZJwIdRcbT-ik9kOsTMuxkiDGg2umh0Lk_fQ%3BFc-0TQIduUaf-in5ju36qbTYhzFb4Lsiyuo5vg%3B&mra=ls&sll=37.059145,-89.55399&sspn=4.050315,9.876709&ie=UTF8&ll=37.05948,-89.55399&spn=3.82012,5.56034&output=embed&w=425&h=350]
By the time I get back to Columbia at 10:30ish tomorrow, I will have driven about 1,000 miles total (according to all-knowing Google, today’s Memphis-Nashville and Nashville-St Louis drives accounted for 523 of those miles), through five different states, in a 3-day span. AND I have all of my data now! Time well spent, I think, since it takes about a week to get anything processed through ILL.
It’s true that I should have had my act together a long time ago, and requested the microfilm early in January, but as blog readers know, a couple of things happened in January that set me back much more than I ever expected. And, for a carless person like me, the chance to spend three days driving on the open road…is not one to pass up. Carpe diem, mes amis!
(9) Squaring Off, St. Louis Edition
I am currently en route to Memphis to do thesis research (very, very long story), and stopped in St. Louis for the night to stay with my friend Sanya, who’s in med school here.
I got to the city well before Sanya’s classes got out, so I spent most of the afternoon actually being productive. Then I went back to my New York Times crossword puzzle (this week’s; I gave up on the one I had been fighting with before), and productivity went out the window again.
Left: I filled all but three of the blank spaces, which has never happened before! And the answer to one of the clues was “ASHE,” which was, frankly, quite awesome.
Right: Sanya is a much more diligent studier than I am. This is probably why she’s in med school and I am not.
(8) Overflow
Most days I walk to school on the MKT underpass, which conveniently cuts right beneath my least favorite intersection in all of Columbia.
On second thought…
(7) Geburtstag
I looked up how to say ‘Happy birthday’ in German, but it was too long to fit as the headline, so I think just ‘birthday’ will suffice . Anyway.
As you have probably gathered if you’re following along with this blog…I don’t get out much. This is mostly because I have no classes this semester, so I don’t get to see people every day like I normally would, and because when I do get out, it’s usually to go hole up in the J-Library and look at microfilm or attempt to write some pages. So exciting!
BUT every now and then I escape this routine, and tonight was one of those nights. Mr. Jakob Berr turned a year older, and in honor of this momentous occasion, at least thirty j-schoolers packed themselves into Ragtag to celebrate. I lost track of how many people I saw tonight who I haven’t seen in a couple of weeks, or, in some cases, a couple of months (way too long in either case). Any time that happens, I consider the evening a success.
These are quite grainy, since I was shooting at ISO800 with sub-1/30 shutter speeds (my baby camera doesn’t do well shooting in the low light of Ragag). I’m hoping to upgrade in the next month to a 7D—crossing the fingers!
Erin! (and half of Scott’s head)
Birthday boy!
JohnChelseaMito! (She knew I was taking the picture, by the way. I’ll leave you to figure out which ‘she’ I’m referring to.)
(6) Where Mud Becomes Slush
Today I learned that photographers are loonier people than runners. I wanted to go for a walk on the MKT trail, and was hoping that there would be bikers and joggers along the trail…as there have been every other time I’ve walked it. But today the MKT was empty- not a person to be seen. This is probably because it was overcast and kind of rainy, but that didn’t stop me from going to take pictures! I’m thinking the running population of Columbia needs to step it up a little. (:
The focus on this picture is all weird, which is unfortunate (I am still working on perfecting the art of taking low-angled pictures while wearing a knee brace.
(5) Somebody's Watching Me
I am endlessly fascinated by the blinking red lights on the tall smokestacks of the power plant on campus. They look so ominous, especially when the smokestacks are, well, smoking.
On the other hand, the lights on the lower smokestacks aren’t intimidating at all, and come across very Wall-E-like:
