Last night I watched two thirds of the PBS documentary The Elegant Universe on DVD. It’s based on the best-selling book by Brian Greene, a specialist in quantum field theory, and deals with ‘Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory’. I’ve been meaning to read the book for some time (before or after The Tao of Physics, Hyperspace, and The Dancing Wu Li Masters, I don’t know) and was looking forward to seeing computer graphic visualizations of the various concepts. Now, I can actually comprehend how there might be dimensions other than the four we perceive, and what a ’string’ actually is. I was a bit disappointed, though, by the tongue-in-cheek, Nickelodeon-meets-Cosmos feel of the production. To me, it seemed way too popularized and just plain inelegant. After reading reviews on Amazon, I found it does match Greene’s down-to-Earth approach to the material, but I’m also not the only one that found it a bit goofy at times. That said, what’s with leaving-in all the commercials and intros at the beginning of each episode? I understand that’s necessary when airing them on television, but why on a DVD collection? Still, the content was very informative, the visuals were interesting, and hearing from the original discoverers and theorists helped my understanding a lot.

One of the biggest obstacles in my creative life is my tendency to need a plan. As in: ‘Master Plan for Boundless Success and World Domination’. The trouble is, I’m often slow to begin a new project or lethargic to complete a current one if it doesn’t fit into some such Master Plan. I think it’s time to abandon that. From here on out: no Plans, just projects…

As part of my personal summer reading program to get more acquainted with literature from the 1920s and 1930s, I’m delving into work by writers associated with The Harlem Renaissance period. Currently, I’m pages away from finishing Passing by Nella Larsen, a short novella about two young, African American women living in the late 1920s. The main character Irene is conflicted with her childhood friend Claire’s practice of ‘passing’ for white and her seemingly boundless drive to ‘have’ whatever she puts her mind to — including, it seems, Irene’s husband. The writing is both vivid and enjoyable and goes by too quickly.

I’m also a third finished with Teach Yourself Film Studies by Warren Buckland. This insightful read delves into film aesthetics, structure, authorship, genres, documentary types, and approaches in reviewing. It’s worth it alone for the author’s analysis of David Lynch’s enigmatic Mulholland Drive. So far, I’ve been especially interested in types of narrative structure and narration.

Some days, my mind goes numb from staring all day at the computer monitor in my office at work. I need to read more books and be outside.

I love the BBC Comedy series The Office, and have both seasons on DVD. A couple of months ago, I downloaded (from file-sharing-space) parts one and two of The Office Christmas Special (as yet unavailable on these shores). Lately, I’ve been having a heck of a time converting the files (one’s an MPEG file, the other a DiVX AVI file, both are PAL format) to be able to watch them on my DVD player at home. I wanted to convert them to NTSC DV format (720×480, 29.97fps, and so on) and burn them to a DVD-R at work, but that doesn’t seem to be working in Final Cut Pro (FCP Express wouldn’t scale them up from their smaller resolutions). The files end up way too big and the audio gets all jacked-up. There are a lot of Unix shell utilities (with names like MMT, mpeg2enc, mp2enc, mplex, vcdxgen, vcdxbuild and so on) and a bunch of freeware apps to give them a pretty face, but the numerous options seem cryptic; some just fail to work. Ah well, plodding along…