Scott Bush

Lil­lian Gish as Romola. Your screen’s not broken–it’s sup­posed to be in black-and-white.

A cou­ple weeks ago a friend invited my wife and I to join him at a movie. “Great, a free movie!” I thought. “It’s a silent, black-and-white movie from 1924,” he added. “Oh great,” I thought, “just what I want, a movie with no color or sound.” But he sold it as a “cul­tural expe­ri­ence,” so we agreed to meet him at the Para­mount in down­town Seattle.

An organ very sim­i­lar to the one being played live at the Para­mount dur­ing the movie.

While I cer­tainly wouldn’t call it a block­buster, see­ing Romola in all its silent glory and accom­pa­nied by (what I’m told is) a beautifully-restored Wurl­itzer organ was worth­while expe­ri­ence. The story, in brief, is essen­tially polit­i­cal. It’s set in the Ital­ian city of Flo­rence when the Medici fam­ily ruled. A man mar­ries for polit­i­cal ambi­tion, becomes a bad guy, has a baby, shuns his step­fa­ther (who later kills him), and oh yeah–a priest is burned at the stake. Hmmm… sounds a bit all over the place. If you want a more fleshed-out syn­op­sis, one is avail­able at IMDB.

See­ing a silent film made so long ago high­lighted some inter­est­ing points.

Melo­drama

The exag­ger­ated over­act­ing shown in par­o­dies of old movies is true. There were times watch­ing Romola when I nearly laughed because of how fake the char­ac­ters’ actions seemed. Then I remem­bered… that was how it was done in those days. With the poorer-quality cam­eras, black-and-white film, and no sound, the actors relied on their histri­on­ics to con­vey emo­tion. Still, it’s hard to take it seri­ously today. Most over-acted scene? Romola dis­cov­ers her dad has died in his chair. She runs around the room, wav­ing her hands in the air and then clasp­ing them to her breast, eye­lids flut­ter­ing as though she’d swoon. Puh-lease!

Far fewer cuts

In watch­ing this film, I was struck by how long the scenes went with­out a cut. The cam­era was (in my rec­ol­lec­tion) always stationary—not too sur­pris­ing given that it was 1924 and cam­eras weren’t exactly tiny. And edit­ing was done man­u­ally; no Final Cut Pro or Pre­mière to do the work. Those facts help explain why time between cuts could be mea­sured in min­utes, not sec­onds or even frac­tional sections.

Later that evening we watched a TV show (I know, that’s a lot of watch­ing in one day) and I was amazed at the fre­netic pace of the cuts. It’s no secret that the rapid­ity of cuts has increased dra­mat­i­cally over the years, but wow. Try it your­self: begin count­ing as soon as you see a cut or tran­si­tion in the cam­era angle. Get to three? It’s rare; many cuts hap­pen in a sec­ond or some­time less.

And it’s not just TV, either. The web­site Cin­e­met­rics com­piles a data­base of the aver­age time between cuts of all sorts of films (a cool project in its own right). Some analy­sis on the dis­tri­b­u­tion of the “Aver­age Shot Length”:

Is there a trend to be found in the dis­tri­b­u­tion of longer and shorter ASL data across the data­base? Even a rough esti­mate shows there is. It is not by chance that the slow­est film of those posted on cin­e­met­rics so far was made in 1902 and that the fastest was made in 2000. No one knows bet­ter than our crew how com­plex the ques­tion of edit­ing is and how many fac­tors affect the cut­ting tempo of films, but if we are asked “do films become faster in the course of film his­tory, yes or no?” cin­e­met­rics says yes. True, we have not yet inspected every film ever made, but 294 film selected by 22 peo­ple for dif­fer­ent pur­poses is a decent unbi­ased sample.

So, does the cut fre­quency in out TV and movies shorten our atten­tion span, or help us adapt quicker? Call me an old fuddy-duddy, but I think the for­mer is more true. But is that such a hor­ri­ble thing? If the major­ity of the “inter­faces,” for lack of a bet­ter term, we inter­act with today (and increas­ingly in the future) are quick-paced, then it’s a use­ful skill. As long as the art of appre­ci­a­tion of the long, still shot (or just the abil­ity to sit still for 15 min­utes at stretch read­ing or think­ing) isn’t lost, I’m not sure it’s so bad.

“Inter­ti­tles” actu­ally work pretty well

Inter­ti­tle from silent movie “The Jazz Singer”

Finally, I learned that silent film’s back­story and dia­log com­po­nent, the text plac­ards that appear at inter­vals to share infor­ma­tion (they’re called inter­ti­tles), aren’t really so bad. I’m used to watch­ing sub­ti­tled movies so per­haps thats why I actu­ally sort of liked them.

It’s inter­est­ing how our expec­ta­tion is that a silent movie with inter­ti­tles wouldn’t be able to explain the story well enough: There’s no talk­ing, after all. But a sur­pris­ing amount of information—in con­text of the film’s action, of course—can be con­veyed by a few well-crafted lines. And not all of it is dia­log, either; Romola had a fair bit of expos­i­tory infor­ma­tion. Sure, it’s not like what we’re used to, but it works in its own way. Sort of like short sub­ti­tles that only appear when there’s noth­ing else on the screen.

Gmail noticed I for­got my attachment.

Gmail is the best e-mail client I’ve ever used, whether as web-based or desk­top soft­ware (sorry Pine). Recently I saw another rea­son why Gmail—and this is true of all Google’s products—is the best: atten­tion to the small­est aspects of user expe­ri­ence (UX) design.

Case in point: e-mail attach­ments. I wrote and almost sent the mes­sage shown here, but Gmail was kind enough to remind me that I’d neglected to attach the doc­u­ment. “Duh,” I said to myself, “I hate it when I do that.” But with this fea­ture of Gmail, no one needs to know I for­got the attach­ment (except that I chose to blog about it any­way). I also appre­ci­ate the def­er­en­tial word­ing of the reminder mes­sage: “It seems you might have for­got­ten…” How gen­er­ous when they could have writ­ten “Hey, clown-face, you didn’t attach the file you said you were gonna!”

Tech­ni­cally, I imag­ine this feat is achieved by pars­ing the body of your mes­sage as part of the pre-send check (the same one that looks for valid e-mail addresses, pres­ence of a sub­ject line, etc.). If “I’m attach­ing,” “is attached,” or other phrases occur in the mes­sage but no actual attach­ment is present, this warn­ing is dis­played. Gmail already knows the con­tent of the mes­sage; that’s how their AdWords plat­form knows which ads to dis­play. Adding this check is an excel­lent UX improve­ment that builds on that same platform.

If you’re a Gmail user and have for­got­ten attach­ments with­out land­ing in this safety net, let me clue you in: Gmail Labs. If you’re logged in, this link should take you to a repos­i­tory of Gmail good­ies that are not quite ready for prime time. Users can enable cer­tain tools to enhance their Gmail expe­ri­ence. Pre­sum­ably, the pop­u­lar ones will be pol­ished up and intro­duced into everyone’s Gmail. (For exam­ple, Gmail themes is a grad­u­ate of Gmail Labs.)

My other favorites:

• Pic­tures in chat — lit­tle avatars appear next to your con­ver­sa­tion mates.
• Inbox pre­view — shows you a sim­pli­fied ver­sion of your top mes­sages as Gmail is load­ing. That’s cool. No new mes­sages? You can abort and close the win­dow before all the Javascript good­ness has to load up; it’s great for slow connections.
• Title Tweeks — rearranges the browser’s title bar for Gmail so the inbox and num­ber of mes­sages appear first. Who cares, you ask? Well, with mul­ti­ple tabbed browsers hav­ing that info come first lets you know if you’ve got new mail with­out switch­ing to that tab.

There are dozens more UX enhance­ments, so if you’re a Gmail user (and you should be!) go to your set­tings page and look for the “labs” tab and choose your favorites. And say good­bye to “oops, I for­got to attach this…” follow-up messages.

Walk­ing across cam­pus the other day, a new poster out­side the Henry Art Gallery caught my eye:

While the design choices made in the piece are debat­able  (I don’t think the white text pops enough from the light-colored back­ground, but that’s just me), one thing is cer­tain: noth­ing can be both “new” and “improved!”

• New: “orig­i­nal and of a kind not seen before”
• Improved: “some­thing that has been made bet­ter; enhanced”

So if it’s improved, by def­i­n­i­tion it can­not be new. “Improved” requires some­thing to have existed in an ear­lier ver­sion. “New” means it has no predecessor.

This oxy­moron is king among all ver­bal para­doxes. “Jumbo shrimp?” Okay, sure; some shrimp are big­ger than oth­ers. “Mil­i­tary intel­li­gence?” as an oxy­moron is really more of a polit­i­cal view­point than a seman­tic truth. But “new and improved” is unar­guably wrong, yet it’s used all over the place. I hope one day the term dis­ap­pears from com­mon usage, dis­carded into the bin of inap­pro­pri­ate say­ings along­side “irre­gard­less” and “oriental.”

You’d think that an art gallery on a uni­ver­sity cam­pus would know better.

It’s been quite a while since I wrote about a play at the Seat­tle Shake­speare Com­pany. My wife and I have been sea­son ticket hold­ers of SSC since were mar­ried and really enjoy the company’s per­for­mances. This past Thurs­day we took in The Tem­pest, the last of SSC’s 2008-09 sea­son. It was quite good, as they usu­ally are, but I must say that of the four plays we saw this sea­son, The Mer­chant of Venice was the stand­out. The last scene when Shy­lock demands his pound of flesh… whoah, intense.

If you’re not famil­iar with The Tem­pest, you can read a sum­mary on Wikipedia or take a peek at SSC’s own one-page “Jump­start” PDF or lis­ten to their pod­cast. We enjoy the pre-show jump­start (only avail­able on the sec­ond the sec­ond Thurs­day of the pro­duc­tion). It’s an hour-long intro­duc­tion not only to the play but the pro­duc­tion itself. Sort of a Cliff’s Notes to get you in the mind­set for the per­for­mance. I learned that The Tem­pest was the last Shake­speare wrote on his own, and fol­lows Aristotle’s three uni­ties: unity of time, place, and action, unlike his other plays. The entire story takes place between 2 and 6 o’clock, on the same island, and has only one main plot. The other thing I learned about the play was that schol­ars believe that Pros­pero, the pro­tag­o­nist, prob­a­bly rep­re­sents Shake­speare him­self. When Pros­pero breaks his staff at the end of the play, it (might) sig­ni­fies Shakespeare’s retirement.

This pro­duc­tion was sim­ple, but had some stand­out per­for­mances. I really enjoyed Ariel, the good spirit serv­ing Prospero–played by and as a female, not as a male as the char­ac­ter was writ­ten. The music was good and was appar­ently writ­ten specif­i­cally for this pro­duc­tion by Jesse Sykes. The char­ac­ter Cal­iban was played by a very agile and well-made up actor. His per­for­mance reminded me of Gol­lum in how he crouched and jumped around the set, espe­cially with that long braided hair. The most strik­ing per­former was Pros­pero, how­ever. Extremely well acted by… so famil­iar… had I seen him in an SSC per­for­mance before? No… I couldn’t fig­ure it out until Act 4: It’s Tay­lor! Tay­lor from Gilmore Girls (yes, I’ve seen Gilmore Girls… I’m mar­ried, so it’s okay). It struck me and from then on I couldn’t stop think­ing of him as the uptight town coun­cil­man. But Michael Win­ters is clearly an excel­lent stage per­former, too.

Pocky, to the unini­ti­ated, is a deli­cious chocolate-coated bis­cuit in slen­der stick form. There are vari­a­tions, such as the interestingly-named “Men’s Pocky,” and a num­ber of fla­vors rang­ing from straw­berry to green tea. It does, after all, come from Japan like so many other won­der­ous food prod­ucts.

If you’ve not enjoyed some of its many tasty vari­eties, I sug­gest you get some and dig in.

I rec­om­mend, though, you don’t let them get to warm in their pack­age. Oth­er­wise, you might end up with the dreaded Unipocky, which I dis­cov­ered tonight. The good news? It’s like eat­ing a sin­gle giant, multi-layered Pocky. And when I say giant, I’m not talk­ing about the “offi­cial” giant Pocky. I’m talk­ing about this:

Mar­tial arts, as I have writ­ten about, isn’t about being a big tough guy with lots of mus­cle strength. At least, not the mar­tial arts I’m learn­ing at my dojo in Both­ell. It’s about body mechan­ics, tim­ing, relax­ation, tech­nique, focus, and speed. But there’s no deny­ing that mar­tial arts–by its very definition–involves some body part or another com­ing into con­tact with some­one else’s body part (often with con­sid­er­able speed and force). And where there’s body parts col­lid­ing, there can be bruising.

Some­times, lots of bruising.

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