History's Dumpster = GLORIOUS trash! Kitsch, music, fashion, food, history, ephemera, and other memorable and forgotten, famous and infamous pop culture junk and oddities of yesterday and today. Saved from the landfill of time...
"Milk",
starring Sean Penn and Josh Brolin is about San Fransisco City
Supervisor Harvey Milk, an openly gay businessman who had gotten sick of
not only watching other gay people being harassed and bullied by a
stiff city establishment but other minorities such as African Americans,
the poor, elderly and people with disabilities being used as scapegoats
and the first to suffer in any major city decision of that time. He not
only stood up for the underdog, but he championed them. He put PEOPLE
first - something a lot of politicians only pay lip service to. Milk
actually did something about.
Milk transcends
being a mere gay bio-film. While Milk's sexuality is never too far off,
the real gist of the movie is how he gave the system a major wake up
call and how he paid the ultimate price for standing up for what he
believed in. From his beginnings as a flamboyant camera store owner in the Castro
district of San Fransisco to the political battles he fought against the
city and self-righteous anti-gay crusaders such as Anita Bryant to
finally being elected city supervisor of San Fransisco and the turmoil
that followed, especially from his biggest opponent, Dan White who assassinated Milk and San Fransisco Mayor George Moscone.
The
story of Harvey Milk is a fascinating one for me, having read The Mayor
Of Castro Street by Randy Shilts several years ago.
HIGHLY recommended reading!
I always loved his
appeal to the social outcasts and how he worked to level the playing
field for all people. We sure as hell could use a guy like him today.
One
could only wonder what could have been had he not been assassinated. He
most likely would have ended up mayor of San Fransisco and would
probably have made it to Washington DC by now. I'd take Harvey Milk anyday over Diane Feinstein.
Harvey Milk never
got the recognition he truly deserves for not only breaking down a LOT
of doors and glass ceilings for gays and lesbians, but for inspiring all
of us that the underdog can lose many battles, but still win the war in
The Good Fight. The people know a true hero when they see one.
If you never knew colour film existed this long ago, there's a reason.
The earliest movie film stock was made of cellulose nitrate. There were not many other materials that were feasible for film making. However cellulose nitrate had a couple horrifying drawbacks.
First, it was extremely volatile. If not stored under carefully controlled conditions, the film would deteriorate rapidly
Fact: 90% of all film before the late '40s is lost forever due to deterioration of their nitrate film .
If the film lamp was too hot, the entire reel would instantly burst into flames or even explode. And the fire/heat would ignite other film reels in the projection booth. This caused several theater fires.
So the early theater industry came up with a horrifying solution. Should the film catch fire (as sometimes did), some theaters had an automatic shut down mechanisms that would not only close the projector portholes, but also in some cases actually locked the projection booth door, incinerating the projectionist alive or suffocating him (it was usually men who were projectionists. Female projectionists were very rare) using them as a sacrifice to save the theater. Until safety film became standard in the 1950s, it was truly a dangerous job and only for the highly skilled.
I volunteered as a projectionist at an old theater (and luckily, this was modern safety film I worked with) and I remember seeing the old portholes and the shut down doors above them. It truly is creepy. And those booths were HOT!
A week ago on a lark, I ordered a pair of Chinese made video sunglasses. They only cost $16.49 - including shipping on eBay.
So I ordered and it did arrive. Quickly...A couple days ago. I got a package from Shanghai. (These photos were taken on my Android tablet. Bear with me.)
Comes with carrying case, USB cord and lens cleaning cloth.
"I make these look good..."
The instruction booklet
This also uses a 2 to 32GB Micro SD card (not included.) I pulled a 2 GB card out of one of my old cell phones and reformatted it for use on this.
I was more or less expecting the worst. But they were surprisingly good for the price.
The video quality isn't 1080pi HD (but what were you expecting for $16.49?) But a hell of lot better than what you'd expect for that price. I've seen worse video from $200 cell phones.
The downside:
The video files they record are HUGE in pure AVI format (a little over 1 GB for a 15 minute video shoot) The video here took about 180 MB. So to upload onto the web, you'll need video compression software. I used FFConvert for Linux and converted it to a 27 MB MP4 file. But there are a number of these available depending on your operating system.
The lens is just above the bridge of your nose on these glasses. So you will need to keep your head slightly tilted down (don't shoegaze.) I deliberately aimed my head lower to keep as many faces as possible out of this video (which was shot at a library. I picked it to demonstrate average indoor lighting conditions.)
The built in mic is extremely sensitive in video recording mode (it encodes in uncompressed PCM.) And if you're talking in a normal volume, you'll overmodulate (cause distortion.) So keep your voice very low when recording.
For straight audio MP3 recording (no video), they're very bad. They encode at 8kHz at 128kbps and sound extremely muffled.
I don't know the overall battery life because first, the instructions say the red LED light will stop flashing when fully charged. But after 24 hours of initial charging, it never stopped flashing. Plus as it takes 1 GB for 15 minutes of video and my micro SD card was only 2 GB, I'll have to buy a full 32 GB card to really find out.
The photos are also pretty bad. And the problem is you have to make a time.txt file in the root file of this for the automatic time stamp on the photos (the time reads in 24 hour UTC and not in standard AM/PM. I tried this in every configuration, but I could never get it to read correctly.) It always read as the default 2008/12/31 00:00:00 (give or take a few seconds)
While the photo and audio capabilities are downers, that's not the BEST feature of these glasses, which is the video recording capability. These glasses have quite a few uses. I wouldn't recommend them for recording concerts, namely because of the sensitive mic audio issues as well as the mysterious battery life. But for quick on the spot video recording of public events incognito, they're PERFECT.
How many of you remember THIS when you were a kid?
This was Fisher-Price's nifty little comeback to GAF's ViewMaster. Each cartridge held a short cartoon (it was silent.) Plus it was hand-wound. No batteries!
Until I was dragged kicking and screaming into the digital age, The Polaroid One Step was MY kind of camera.
It was fast and easy and you didn't have to wait 24 hours for the film to develop to see results. They were my family's kind of camera (my mom, grandma, uncles and aunts all used them at family holidays.)
The only problem was the film. The film packs were SUPER expensive. And if you had lighting problems or your subject wasn't cooperating, you were SOL
And while Polaroid discontinued the film a few years ago, a new company called The Impossible Project now manufactures classic Polaroid film. But the price is still outrageous (even more so, around $25), ensuring whatever film I'm using will only be for a specific purpose.....
Before the era of digital and even one hour photo development, Fotomat kiosks were once ubiquitous in shopping centers across America. Yours Truly worked at one one summer in the mid-'80s.
It was just me, still in high school and a girl named Julie, a college student who worked there. Julie was a drop dead BABE and sweet and bubbly as soda pop - but already taken (Man! I was jealous of her boyfriend! I mean, he was a really cool guy to me and all. And I had to be really cool to him, but....Still...)
Julie had the morning/early afternoon shift and I had the afternoon/evening shift and closing.
Fotomat offered one DAY photo processing. A JOKE today, but at that time, it was still very much standard (although the first one hour processing places in drug stores were appearing. But not so much to give us any SERIOUS competition. Not just yet.) Our biggest selling point was still pure and simple All American drive-thru convenience. And for a lot of people, we were good enough for them.
We also sold Kodak and Konica film, batteries and even flashcubes/bulbs for your old trusty '50s/'60s/'70s cameras. Even Polaroid film was available (yes, we even showed them some love!) Disposable cameras were still a few years away.
The customer would drive up to the kiosk and drop off his/her film rolls, which the customer would pay for and we would take down their names/addresses/phone numbers on an envelope (or they would take an envelope and do it themselves, making things a LOT faster), put the film inside and pay for their purchase and we would wait for the pick up/delivery person to come and get them/drop off finished photos. They came twice a day - usually at noon and again around 6pm to take the film to Seattle and return them the next day. So between pick-up/deliveries and taking orders/returning finished orders, it was mostly a pretty laid back job. A lot of tedium. But for minimum wage, it was worth it. And for me, not so much an outgoing "socially active" person in public, it was PERFECT.
And contrary to popular belief, Fotomat kiosks were air conditioned in summer and well heated in the winter. "Lavatory use" was provided by a nearby AM/PM gas station/mini-mart who's franchise owners, a sweet older Indian lady and her husband were one of our friendly regulars (they often brought us sackfuls of cheeseburgers, hot dogs, burritos, BBQ Pork "rib" sandwiches - anything pulled and sodas along with their film.) And we didn't care if they were just pulled from the heat lamps and a little dry (well, maybe Julie did more than I - which is probably why she never ate much of it if it came on her watch and left most of it for me.) But to a hungry young man like I was - and still am (though not quite so young), chow is chow.
And if you've ever seen Tommy Chong's character in That '70s Show, you know just how "laid back" a photo kiosk was. But even though on the surface, it looks like the perfect place to "smoke 'em if you got 'em", the reality was you never knew who could show up at any given time (regional managers would make surprise visits.) Cops also developed their personal/family film there too. So it wasn't always as easy to get away with that as it would appear.
In the '80s, we had no internet or any kind of social media to play with to pass the time (would have been PERFECT.) So a lot of the time between customers and pickup/deliveries of film - gaps of between 10 - 30 minutes weren't unusual, was spent listening to the radio and reading magazines, library books and newspapers. Actual LINES of cars were rare, but the busiest day I had that summer was the day after the 4th of July. That was my biggest line at one time, five cars, all done in less than 6 minutes. Julie said she dealt with an eight car line that morning.
But there were problems. The worst was having film or photos lost or misplaced at the processing center. We made sure everything was organized and accounted for on our part. But accidents still happened on the other end. Dealing with angry people was a real problem sometimes. We had a hotline number we gave them. But sometimes that wasn't good enough and understandably so - people's memories were on that film. Fortunately for me, that only happened once.
And the occasional robbery. We never kept more than $50 at any time in the till. But I never had a robbery in the whole time I worked at Fotomat (Julie wasn't so lucky.)
It was sad seeing the Fotomats disappear soon after I left as one hour photo processing became standard. But it was one of the best jobs I ever had. No pressure to overachieve, low stress. And one I actually MISS in spite of the low pay and occasional boredom.
