The Odyssey continues…
Tonight, I started the upload of 112 Steamer Lane surfing images to a staging area on Shutterfly™ before dinner at a local restaurant, and the upload is continuing as I write this entry at 10:30 PM Pacific Time. After the surfing images are uploaded, there are images of the California Coast and spring flowers. All in all, there are just shy of 200 images from those taken during the trip to Santa Cruz area State Beaches and Steamer Lane. I will make an announcement when the images are available.
I thought that I owed myself a little break after a pretty full day. In honor of Arthur C. Clarke’s passing, I watched the DVD of 2001: A Space Odyssey, in the 40th anniversary year of its release.
The movie has been described as one of laconic suspense. The use of a minimum of *words* (45 minutes of dialogue in over 2 1/2 hours) is only one of the memorable features of the film. Another is the use of silence, appropriate in space. Tonight I noticed how the sudden, rough “cuts” between different perspectives at the end of the film is foreshadowed at the very beginning, and elsewhere.Given all of the technological developments between 1968 and 2001, the film is amazingly visionary (and ambiguous). Stanley Kubrick was a still photographer for Look magazine, and a passionate chess player. The striking images (including “stills” at the beginning) reflect the photographer, and there is a chess game in the film between mission commander David Bowen and the HAL9000 computer. The special effects were engineered by the special effects pioneer, Douglas Trumbull (Silent Running, Blade Runner, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Trek: The Motion Picture) and several others. The 2001 film may be “slow” to generations raised on action films; I need to ask around for some “generational perspective.” The Wikipedia article on Kubrick cited above mentions a claim that 241 people, including the studio head, walked out of the exhibitor’s screening, and that Arthur C. Clarke commented on the screening saying that an MGM executive stated, “Well, that’s the end of Stanley Kubrick.”
Once again, we see the gulf between creative people with vision and administrative types without. The film was a huge success.
2001: A Space Odyssey is my favorite film, and tonight was like getting together with an old friend.
-Bill at Cheshire Cat Photo
