Remember I told you I’ve been taking LOTS of photos lately? Here’s one taken from the window of a classroom I teach in. Maybe I should have titled this blog post “A View of Viets Tower from Diercks Hall,” lol.
Here’s a long view, showing what I saw from my desk across the room from the window.
I had to work a little to isolate the elements that caught my eye and make a photo, though. I kind of like my classroom photo, too 🙂
It’s FRIDAY! Have a great evening and weekend, everyone! TGIF, to all who celebrate 🙂
I’m searching for movie clips to demonstrate some film/video editing concepts for my Digital Storytelling class tomorrow morning (J cuts, L cuts, match cuts, etc.), and in the course of wracking my brain to find an instance where one of these cuts was used for comedic effect, I tried viewing YouTube clips of films I remember thinking were really funny when I watched them the first time.
First, FYI and backing up a bit, a J cut is an editing transition where the soundof the next shot precedesthe visual. Usually this is used in scene transitions. Here’s a famous example, from The Wolf of Wall Street, where you hear the thumping sound first and are disoriented, like “what is that sound?” and then you get the visual switch, and you’re in the next scene. Start at around the 1:55 minute mark, and see what I mean.
Second, an L cut is the other way around. The visual changes first, and then the sound trails behind. Like the J cut, this one is also used in transitioning from one scene to another. Here’s a famous example of that type, from the end of No Country for Old Men, where Tommy Lee Jones (as Sheriff Ed Tom Bell) is telling his wife about the dream in which his father was building a fire somewhere out there in the dark and how his father would be there waiting for him when he got there. The horrific events of the villain’s killing spree have just overwhelmed him; the world out there is, indeed, no country for old men. As he finishes describing the dream to his sympathetic wife, he just sits there at his kitchen table, kind of dazed, kind of stunned, even baffled. Slowly, as their dialogue has ceased, we become aware of the ticking of a clock, presumably there in the house, like maybe a kitchen clock. Then the screen cuts abruptly to black, yet we still keep hearing those “ticks” of a clock. And, rather devastatingly (my personal emotion), we understand both Sheriff Bell’s mortality and his readiness for death (my interpretation). You can watch this whole clip, or you can start at around the two-minute mark for just the ticking clock at the very end.
So then, as I said, I was trying to find a movie where the J cut or L cut was used to humorous effect, and I’m just having no luck, even though I’m sure examples abound out there. I’ll just have to keep this in the back of my mind, and then at some point when I’m watching a movie for fun, all of a sudden that task will come off the back burner when I’ll notice and catalog exact such an editing transition for a future teaching moment.
But meanwhile, I decided to try skimming through Hot Fuzz clips, thinking surely there must be an example in there. No luck so far, but I’m laughing out loud at my desk while I’m searching, so I thought I’d take a quick break and share a clip.
If you’ve never seen Hot Fuzz, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND it! It has a fabulous cast and a ridiculous and equally fabulous story. Basically a highly skilled police officer in London is resented by all the slackers on the force, so our hero is transferred to a tiny police department in a quaint English village . . . where, he soon realizes, a high number of “accidental” deaths seem to occur. When our hero commences his investigation, hilarious mayhem ensues. There are people in this village who are not what they seem, as revealed in plot twists that cross Agatha Christie with Rosemary’s Baby and maybe a little bit of The Stepford Wives. It’s a classic English-village “cozy” mystery that includes at least one spectacularly gruesome death. Satisfyingly clever but still gruesome.
In this clip, see if you can spot all the allusions to other films and cinematic clichés. We open up with a spaghetti Western homage to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The gunslinger riding into town, the quick cuts from face to face to face reminiscent of the cemetery showdown. (okay, first, here’s a clip of that famous showdown first, as a reference 🙂 There is an incredibly long build-up to the main action, so skip ahead to about the 1:15 minute mark.)
There’s also an allusion to True Grit’s Rooster Cogburn in the bicycle-riding pistolero’s two-handed shooting (and I love that she is taken out when our hero’s small-town police partner “doors” her. So many gags in this film!)
First, I guess I’d better show you Rooster Cogburn’s great shooting (reins in teeth, guns blazing). And that’s Robert Duvall playing the villain Ned Pepper opposite John Wayne.
And FINALLY the Hot Fuzz clip I originally intended to be the only thing I shared during my “quick” break. (Now it’s time to pack up and go home already!)
Every morning I drive past the Milwaukee County Courthouse. A beautiful structure listed on the National Register of Historic Places, its rightful prominence in the cityscape has been shadowed for decades by poor planning (my opinion), by decisions made for convenience of unrelated matters (again, poor planning), and finally, by the sorry state of our world today (yet again poor planning?). Don’t get me started, but freeway construction, gun violence, a poorly positioned and inadequately engineered parking structure, just to mention a few things.
But anyway . . .
Several weeks ago I noticed how striking the “Milwaukee County Courthouse” lettering appears in early morning sunlight. Maybe it’s something about the angle of the sun hitting the carved edges of the text at that specific time of day at this specific time of year; I don’t know. I’ve driven past the courthouse for decades, but not until this fall, when I’ve approached it from the south every morning on my way to work in the morning (a new route for me), did that lettering capture my attention and imagination.
I’ve yearned to take a photo of this for weeks, but conditions have never been right. Either the sky is overcast, or the light is green and I can’t pause, or there’s a huge line of vehicles behind me wanting to turn right on red (which you can do in Wisconsin), meaning I also can’t pause for long without drawing the ire of people in a hurry to get to work.
But today, at last: Sunny morning! Red light at the intersection! Nobody waiting impatiently behind me! Victory!
This probably did not need to be a separate post, but as these colors aren’t GREEN, they would have messed up my green-themed post from two days ago😂
I mentioned in that post that the Marcus Performing Arts Center changes color. I probably didn’t specify that the colors change like every 10-15 minutes, it seems. The lights will be one color while I’m walking to my parking garage after work, and then by the time I’m in my car, leaving the garage, the lights are a different color entirely.
Anyway, here are two more lighting combinations. The changes in color are achieved with lighting that is thrown onto the building from attached fixtures.
I guess this one (above) is purple, but at the time I took the picture, I was thinking of it as blue. So maybe they have another one that’s lighter and more purpleish.
I took the picture below when  I was coming home last night (yes, sadly, I was working in my office on a Saturday; never believe those fairytales that professors don’t work hard). This time I noticed it was the yellow and red, which I hadn’t seen in a while, so I thought I’d take a picture and add that to my little collection, as well.
I took this photo Tuesday evening, around 8 PM. The streets were quiet and the buildings were washed in the same green light—two neighbors, one devoted to finance, the other to performance.
On the left (taller of the two) is the Associated Bank River Center; on the right is the Marcus Performing Arts Center, which I still call the PAC, as it was known prior to 1994, when the Marcus Corporation (local entertainment/hospitality juggernaught) made a sizable donation in honor of its founder, Ben Marcus—hence the name that’s stuck ever since.
The performing arts center shimmers with shifting hues at night—bathed in red and orange one minute, light and dark shades of blue the next—while the bank traces its rooflines in steady neon green. Most of the time, anyway. Check out the glimmering, flickering white lights from last night. Don’t know what that was about; never seen it before.
That shade of green in my Tuesday night photo can mean so many things—growth and renewal, envy and money, permission to go. I thought about titling this post “The Green Light,” something Gatsbyesque, but it didn’t really seem to fit. There’s something sad and pathetic about Gatsby’s longing gazes across the bay toward that green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. I mean it works in the novel, but still, it’s sad and pathetic. (EDITORIAL COMMENTARY: Don’t waste your life on a dream that was never worthy of you anyway!)
Mostly, I just liked the colors in the photo. As I mentioned, the PAC lighting is constantly shifting palettes, and only some of its shades really hit for me. There’s a purple-lavender combination I love, and I often like the blues you see in the video. But as you can also see in the video with the flashing white lights, the PAC’s changing tones really need the complementary green lines of the bank building to achieve their full impact.
That’s why, when I saw those “Emerald City” greens earlier this week, especially set against the darkness like gems nestled in a jewelry box lined with black velvet, I felt compelled to capture the image. The colors seemed almost too alive in their intensity, calling to mind cinema’s associations with the supernatural—as if the city were dreaming in the language of ghosts, its memories flickering green against the dark.
[UPDATE — That last sentence is so super dramatic that I almost expect it to be followed by: “And so we beat on, boats against the current,” etc. 😂]
I am SUPER BUSY at work right now, working crazy long hours and racing from one project deadline to the next. That’s what’s so funny about the current state of my phone’s camera roll: It is brimming with new photos taken this week and last.
I can hardly think straight, but everywhere I go, I see potential photographs—things I need to whip out my phone and take a picture of PRONTO! It’s like one part of my brain is exhausted, so another part of my brain is stepping up?
Anyway, it looks like my blog posts are going to be a bit photo heavy into the foreseeable future 🙂
The image below is from today. It’s a view through the elevator shaft in the glass atrium of the Grohmann Museum, the building I work in. I was coming back to my office from getting water for my coffee maker (super busy = lots of coffee) when I happened to glance over across the gallery and noticed all the cool lines of varying angles and thickness.
Reminds me a little of Mondrian’s work and also the work of Edward Lewandowski, a Milwaukee precisionist artist I’ve only lately discovered, whose paintings of the Edmund Fitzgerald are featured in the Grohmann Museum’s special exhibition marking fifty years since that ship’s sinking.
Took this photo in the early evening on Monday of this week. Church of the Gesu (is on the campus of Marquette University, on Wisconsin Avenue at 12 Street, in downtown Milwaukee. (By the way, Gesu is pronounced JAY ZOO, in case you were wondering😀)
A beautiful and rather large, imposing church, but with an oddly reassuring presence as it looms over the intersection above students walking to and from their classes.
I drive by this church pretty often, but it was the moon that caught my eye Monday evening and turned the moment into a photograph 🙂
These slender, feathery grasses are part of the landscaping at Milwaukee School of Engineering, where I teach. I walk past these plants several times a week, but I don’t think I’ve ever noticed them quite as much as I did earlier today. Maybe the lighting? It was an overcast day, and maybe that subdued light (as opposed to bright sun) allowed the plumed, silvery tips to shine.
In any case, they caught my eye today on my way back from teaching my 11:00 class, and I thought you might enjoy them, too. Not quite my usual style (curved lines instead of straight, geometric lines), but then again, the somewhat abstract pattern of repeating curves feels a bit Art Deco, so maybe it’s not so very different after all!😀
In honor of the occasion, I want to share a quick memory. I don’t know why—because, really, who cares what “National Taco Day” makes me remember? But that’s the great thing about having a blog, you know? Having the ability to inflict my musings on the world at large anytime I feel like it, lol.
But FYI, and for whatever it’s worth: I happen to know that the first Taco Bell restaurant ever to open up east of the Mississippi River was located at 2100 E. Main Street in Springfield, Ohio, and began operating in 1968. How do I know this (and now you do, too!)?
My grandmother, who spent much of her childhood in New Mexico, lived in Springfield for much of her adult life and ate at that Taco Bell every day for lunch. Sometimes if she had us kids with her, for whatever reason, she would treat us to lunch at Taco Bell, too.
I loved going there. Grandma was friends with the owner, Jim Lopez, and he seemed to be working in the restaurant himself every time we went. That’s kind of amazing when you think about it from today’s perspective: The owner worked in his restaurant, side by side with his employees—making the food, greeting the customers, and keeping the place clean (tables, seats, floors wiped down).
And the food was AMAZING! I don’t think that’s just the fondness of nostalgia speaking.
My favorite item on the menu was the “enchirito,” which as the name implies was a cross between an enchilada and a burrito. My second favorite (and my grandmother’s favorite) was the “spicy burrito,” which was wrapped in a flour tortilla and contained beans, cheese, possibly onions, and a green sauce. It was fabulous, and apparently it may be available right now (at least at one Chicago-area Taco Bell) as some kind of retro/throwback (see the Taco Bell website HERE).
In the process of just now discovering that Taco Bell has reintroduced the green burrito as part of its “Decades” promotion, at least for a limited time, I also found that the enchirito was similarly reintroduced briefly a couple years ago, but is no longer available (tragic, and the story of my life: finding things out TOO LATE!).
So back to that first Taco Bell in Springfield, Ohio. I’m sure it didn’t take long for other Taco Bells to open up east of the Mississippi after the success of that first restaurant. But for a while, it was the only Mexican restaurant around. Most people had never even heard of tacos. My junior high social studies teacher, during our study of Mexico, called frijoles “FRIJ-i-joles.” Not sure I conveyed his pronunciation well enough. He said the word “fridge,” followed by the short “i” sound, followed by “joles” (rhymes with moles). So almost zero familiarity with Mexican food at that time in the Midwest.
Yet, thanks to Grandma and that first-east-of-the-Mississippi Taco Bell, we knew all about burritos and frijoles and tostadas.
So what?
Well, life experiences are funny that way. Do you remember the movie Slumdog Millionaire? The plot centers around a young man who is advancing to increasingly higher levels on the quiz show and is accused of cheating because he knows the answers to questions that someone of his background would not be expected to know. Most of the film comprises scenes from his background that not only explain how he acquired his knowledge of each item but also tell the story of his life through each of these hard-acquired “lessons.”
I’ve come by a lot of my knowledge of the world in odd ways from strange sources, as well. Part of the fun in noting trivial things like “National Taco Day,” for me, is the associations they trigger. Part of who I am was formed at that Taco Bell.
It made an impression on me that when Grandma walked into that restaurant, the owner greeted her by name. It made a similar impression that I knew the correct pronunciation of words that my social studies teacher mangled in front of the class.
I wrote about a scene in the movie Working Girl several weeks ago in a post about connection-making and a new engineering/science fabrication technique (“Bloom Patterns“) inspired by a student’s love for origami. The particular scene I described was the one in which Tess thwarts her boss’s attempt to steal credit for her business idea by explaining how she conceived of it in the first place by putting together elements from wildly different sources. With her night school college education and her job as a secretary, Tess has been condescended to by bosses and managers throughout the film.
But Tess is smart. When she suggests serving dim sum dumplings at a work function and mentions that she’s been reading about them in W (a fashion magazine), a snooty colleague of her boss sneers, “You read W?”—the implication being that Tess, a Staten Island girl with the accent to prove it and a wardrobe to match, couldn’t possibly be reading an “in”-crowd publication like W.
Tess keeps her cool, though. Her response (and the setup for her later moment of triumph at the film’s climax) is blunt and simple:
I read a lot of things. I mean, you never know where the big ideas could come from. You know?
This is the way things work in my life—and probably yours, too. You never know where the big ideas could come from. Nothing is truly trivial. Every little factoid is a piece of the bigger puzzle. As Steve Jobs said in his famous Stanford University commencement address in 2005:
[Y]ou can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
So, happy National Taco Day to you! Today happens to be Taco Tuesday, as well. Let’s all go out there and engage with the important things in life. No one knows what they are yet, so just be open to everything 🙂
Katherine Wikoff 
