I finished watching the director’s cut version of Woodstock today, and it struck me powerfully in a variety of ways.
(1) People really made it happen, despite all the impediments. It was no idyll, and the incipient OSHA inspector in me kept having seizures as I saw scene after scene of risky infrastructure. (rain + electricity + gusting winds + towers of scaffolding = ??) Still, the will to make those three days come off prevailed.
(2) The time and the documentary were even more male-centered than I remembered. The movie very obviously emphasizes women’s nudity; though some men appear naked, a leering camera persistently lingers on women bathing or sunning or dancing. Great index moment: the announcement from the stage to the effect that “there’s a guy here whose old lady just gave birth. Let’s hear it for this guy. . . and his old lady!” Oh, yeah, a woman might in some way have been involved in this guy’s big moment. This is a world in which women were still sexual ancillaries of dominant males, and the documentary underlines that.
(3) Some of the acts just were not at their best. Granted that the material circumstances weren’t exactly favorable, at least they could hardly have asked for a more sympathetic audience.
(4) Where was Johnny Winter? I didn’t see him in the movie, but he’s in the credits.
(5) The design of the director’s-cut DVD box is lame.
(6) The director devotes a lot of the camera time to idiosyncratic angles, blank shots, “trippy”effects, that don’t enhance my viewing time at all.
(7) It’s fun to see how young so many of the musicians I remember looked back then. You’re tempted to pat them on the head and walk them to the school bus stop. Well, I am, anyway.
(8) It’s easy for me to see how the recent debacle-reenactment couldn’t recapitulate the [best moments of] the first Woodstock. It’s hard for me to see how anyone thought it could, especially if they had watched this recently. Woodstock 1 had a lot of positive contextual support going for it, a reservoir of unmatchable goodwill.
(9) Mud. So very much mud. Muddy, muddy, mud. Everywhere.
Posted by AKMA at August 28, 2003 09:30 PM | TrackBackThis variable is then used in various lines of code, holding values given it by variable assignments along the way. In the course of its life, a variable can hold any number of variables and be used in any number of different ways. This flexibility is built on the precept we just learned: a variable is really just a block of bits, and those bits can hold whatever data the program needs to remember. They can hold enough data to remember an integer from as low as -2,147,483,647 up to 2,147,483,647 (one less than plus or minus 2^31). They can remember one character of writing. They can keep a decimal number with a huge amount of precision and a giant range. They can hold a time accurate to the second in a range of centuries. A few bits is not to be scoffed at.
Posted by: Benedict at January 13, 2004 01:00 PMThese secret identities serve a variety of purposes, and they help us to understand how variables work. In this lesson, we'll be writing a little less code than we've done in previous articles, but we'll be taking a detailed look at how variables live and work.
Posted by: Noe at January 13, 2004 01:01 PMFor this program, it was a bit of overkill. It's a lot of overkill, actually. There's usually no need to store integers in the Heap, unless you're making a whole lot of them. But even in this simpler form, it gives us a little bit more flexibility than we had before, in that we can create and destroy variables as we need, without having to worry about the Stack. It also demonstrates a new variable type, the pointer, which you will use extensively throughout your programming. And it is a pattern that is ubiquitous in Cocoa, so it is a pattern you will need to understand, even though Cocoa makes it much more transparent than it is here.
Posted by: Noe at January 13, 2004 01:02 PM