Last night we attended “BarBarella-Q”, a screening of Barbarella, Queen of the Galaxy which was part of the “Summer Camp” movie series at the Hirshhorn Museum. While the movie was terrifically camp from the zero-g spacesuit strip with music by Burt Bacharach to the floor, wall and ceiling shag carpet of her space ship to Dr. Durand Durand’s Excessive Machine (yes, Duran Duran took their name from the movie), what I found much more interesting was that hundreds of very interesting people would stand in line to see a forty year old film that was a box office flop. And never since I moved to the DC metro area have I seen such an un-diverse group of people. It was almost uncomfortable. Out of the 200 or so people that they fit in the theater, I counted two black men and an Asian guy. Is there something uniquely white about camp humor or about science fiction? Also interesting to note is that nearly all of the men in the audience were either older straight men or young gay men.
“What’s that screaming? A good many dramatic situations begin with screaming.” -Jane Fonda as Barbarella
“Our password is… ‘LlanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwIIllantysiliogogogoch.” -Dildano
Last weekend David and I went to the Silverdocs festival, which is a documentary festival put on every year by the American Film Institute and Discovery Communications, since AFI has a major office and theater here in Silver Spring, and Discovery’s world headquarters is here as well. There were many great films shown that covered topics of social injustice and politics. You know, the things that really matter. However, the one documentary that piqued my interest was Helvetica. No, no. You understood me correctly. It’s a feature length documentary about a font. Hey, where are you going? Come back and finish reading this! Like I was saying… a font.
I had never realized until seeing this film, just how ubiquitous Helvetica is. It was designed to be easy to read and neutral, to not take on any meaning of its own. Which is why it is seen in signs worldwide. When you read a sign written in Helvetica, you don’t think “oh, that’s a pretty font” or “that font is edgy” or “wait, is that a lowercase ‘I’ or a capital ‘L’?” No, you think “that sign says ‘move the fuck out of the way or you’re going to get killed!” The message is not lost.
The name Helvetica is Latin for Switzerland, its country of origin. A much nicer sounding name than its original name from 1958: Neue Haas Grotesk.
I highly recommend this film to all fellow nerds.
In other modernist news, Philip Johnson’s Glass House has been opened to the public. However, seeing as how the tickets are sold out through the end of 2007 and that entry costs $500, I think I’ll hold off on visiting for the time being.
[google -7125414172845389314 nolink]
I never have made a claim to be the fashion police, but there are two things I have seen in the past 24 hours that I beg of each and every one of you to never, ever try.
- If you are classy enough to buy 7 For All Mankind jeans, please make sure you didn’t spend all your class, leaving you with a class deficit causing you to convert your 7s into cut-offs. Really, I did see this. And it was less glamorous than it sounds.
- The right kind of scar on the right kind of person has the potential to be sexy. However, if you have a horrible disfiguring scar that has protrusions and obvious skin grafting, please have the decency to not wear a half-unbuttoned shirt.
Recent Comments