Quartz City

Supermoon Eclipse NYC

Mostly overcast, but caught a few good looks in between some clouds.

On our way to the High Line we ran across a lone bagpiper on 14th St. Had a moment.

The 21st Century, Week 821

A Billy Ocean gig may have sparked alien invasion fears in Twickenham.
What’s this new camera installed on a U-2 spyplane spotted at Palmdale?
Cameron: Cinderella of the Wastelands is on display in NYC for a few more weeks. Good quality hi-res scans at that site.

The 21st Century, Week 820

RIP Martin Milner. Famous for Adam 12, but once played an assassin on an episode of Route 66 that was supposed to air on November 22, 1963 but was pre-empted by the JFK assassination.
Russian bears treat graveyards as ‘giant refrigerators’. Choice quote: “In Karelia one bear learned how to do it [open a coffin]. He then taught the others”
HAARP resumes operations
“there’s never been a worse time for someone who doesn’t care about computers to use a computer to automate a task.”
Observational Signatures of Self-Destructive Civilisations
Cubesat feared lost in Antares explosion last year washes up on a beach. Still works!
Famous CIA spy ship Hughes Glomar Explorer heads for the scrapyard.
The Real Reason Netflix Won’t Offer Offline Downloads. Choice quote: “One of the things I’ve learned is that every time you offer a choice, you paralyse some people who can’t decide if that’s what they want to do or not. Now, that sounds really stupid and self-serving, but it is in fact true”
Southern California grocery store invader Haggen goes bankrupt so fast it might as well be corporate performance art.
Mystery ice chunk plows through roof of Modesto home amid triple-digit heat.
Amazon Web Services in plain English.
Q & A with experimental geographer and artist Trevor Paglen. (his new exhibition is terrific!)

Laguna South Coast Cinema 1923-2015

The only movie theater in town closed for good on Sunday. The OC Register has the details but you can fill all that in with the usual reasons: business decline, digital projection conversion costs, demographic changes, gentrification, etc.

I’m not a big nostalgia person, but this hits hard. I’ve seen at least 100 movies there. No exaggeration. The math just works out that way when you’re a restless kid without transportation and are tall enough to avoid getting hassled for anything that wasn’t rated G. Our oddball next-door neighbor was the projectionist. Local speculation was that he was the way he was because of seeing the same movies over and over again.

Everything played there: Oscar nominees, foreign, indie, Cheech & Chong, animation festivals, Schick Sunn Classics, if a movie had some sort of distribution it inevitably played there. My dad and I saw Airplane! there on opening night and I’ve never since seen an audience lose their minds so complete like that.

The last showing was Guy Ritchie’s remake of The Man From UNCLE. It’s nice to see anything that’s on film and not digital.