Cotton is jumping and the fish are high

I RSS WTF posts into my Google Reader. Anyone else who does this probably feels as I do at this point, that if we were to look out our window and see O’C walking down the street, we’d sic the hounds on him. Jeesh! Lose the modules, Jon. Please. There must be someplace you can post them out of sight of the rest of us. Summer may be quiet, but it’s not that quiet.

Oh, well. Camp must be almost over. Summer’s certainly half over. I’m at the annual point where I think I should redo all my websites, plus I was listening to some folks talking about the E3 convention yesterday and began thinking I should buy a PS3, which definitely means that I need a reality check and a new season. I do seem to be in a minority on this life-goes-on thing with the Sailors, only a couple of whom seem to realize that if they don’t officially sign up for Yale, they won’t be going. Seasons begin in the summer, not in the fall. Greenhill is already almost up and open (although we don’t travel that far, as a general rule), UPenn seems to be in business (with O’C as their godfather ex situ for some reason), and I certainly have Pups hotel rooms (which, it seems, will have very few Sailors in them). Whatever. I’m committed to go no matter what, and it is much easier when there’s literally no chaperoning responsibilities. Still, I can’t really understand why they wouldn’t want to go, it being usually nice weather and good food and all those things that we as a team tend to value way above debate. As I said, oh, well.

On the bright side, there is time to do things that I never seem to get during the season. I feel as if I’ve seen every art exhibit, performance and film imaginable, except for the ones we’re still going to see over the next few weeks. I do especially like the summer for going to the movies, which at one point in my life was practically the only thing I did when I wasn’t working. The easy access of video has to some extent replaced movie-going for all of us, but in many ways this is regrettable. There is a big difference between seeing a film on a giant screen with dozens or even hundreds of strangers and seeing it at home no matter how elaborate your setup is. I saw Star Wars, for instance, on opening day (at a Loews, if I’m not mistaken), somewhere in the 40s off Broadway. This was back when the movie was, indeed, called Star Wars. They gave us all buttons that said, May the Force be With You (and damn, I wish I could find that button) and there were, oh, maybe a thousand of us that afternoon. I’m not quite sure why we were all there. There had been a little advertising for the film, but not that much hype, and this was all pre-internet, and George Lucas was far from any big deal, and SF films were, with a few exceptions, marketplace dogs. I don’t think we really knew what to expect, and then the text roll, and then the Imperial ship flying overhead, and, well, that was what movies were invented for. A thousand of us at once had our jaws drop to the floor. There was cheering when Han Solo turned up at the end (oops, was that a spoiler for the one person left, no doubt unborn, who hasn’t seen the movie yet?). The friend I went with, who was African-American, was pissed off that, as always, the bad guy had to be black. (Really black in this case, and there’s no way that little Ani schmuck kid in the 90s would ever grow up to talk like James Earl Jones. I wish I could talk like James Earl Jones. Who doesn’t?) I mention all of this because, as the Times pointed out yesterday, it seems that every movie out there this summer is a superhero film of one sort or another, all consisting of slam-bang action, some of it traditional SF or fantasy and all of it sprung from traditional SF or fantasy. I can’t imagine seeing The Dark Knight on a small screen, no matter how big that small screen is. There are a couple of moments in the film where there’s a small release-valve laugh as one is rather beaten into the seat by Heath Ledger’s amazing performance. Do you get that shared sense of communal connection at home? I don’t think so, no matter how many people you invite over to watch it with you. All of which takes us conceptually to a McLuhanesque approach to media, where we maintain that a medium by its nature controls our response to its content. McLuhan had that whole hot and cold thing to distinguish various media, but for us it’s enough to say that watching any movie on the big screen with many strangers is a completely different experience than watching that same film on your Nano. Who would argue otherwise? It’s only a small step to insist that, whatever the film, since it is a film, it is best watched as a film in a movie theater. That is what the film experience ought to be, regardless of the content or quality of the film. And I miss that during the year, when I don’t have much time to go to movies. Come Memorial Day and the first of the summer flicks, and I’m ready to dip my toe back in. By September I’ll go see almost anything (except Mamma Mia, which in my book will never have a !, since the day I put an Abba song on my iPod is the day I admit that it’s over).

As I was leaving the theater last night, at around 9:30, I looked over and saw that there were numerous film showings starting as late as 10:30. On a Thursday night. And people were still buying tickets as I was trying to get the soggy popcorn out from where it was stuck between my teeth (our theater has the absolute worst popcorn, and, it being a movie, you’re forced to buy and eat it, which is not true at home, where I never eat popcorn while watching a movie, which means there’s yet another part of the experience that isn’t the same). It’s an amazing world we live in, bub. Absolutely amazing.