Aiyaiyaiee. This one's been something of a rough week. Back to class, as if we had an actual break. And just as you all get to taste the late evenings of summer, we have had a week of early darkness, winter-style. It's no better in April than it is in November, by the way.
But, the big problem has been getting good sleep in this house. Some housemates of ours are having troubles, which has resulted in one of them partying to all hours in our living room (two feet from our bedroom, by the way) three nights in a row, music and voices raised. When that finally stopped (because the weekend was over) we then had to listen to the two of them scream and yell at each other, stomping around in the room upstairs. Not fun. And not conducive to good mental health, which is particularly precious to those of us who are homesick and frustrated in the first place.
So, we'll see how things play out over the next few weeks, and in the meantime, try to do the best we can. Lack of sleep notwithstanding, it has actually been a semi-productive week. D finished revising and submitted her article1 that Gay McAuley had requested for the next issue of the dept journal, so that was a big step. Chad's computer is finally working fairly consistently, and he even managed to get a temporary license for the software he needed, so he got a couple of snags worked out in his code.2 Looking ahead at all we have left to do-- both research and otherwise-- is overwhelming, but we have to take things one step at a time...
... and not forget to take time to experience where we are. To that end, we spent Saturday downtown, attending an excellent matinee production at the Opera House3 and then "queueing"4 for over half an hour to get tickets to a once-a-year event in Sydney, 'Discovery After Dark.'
'Discovery After Dark' is a cooperative venture by the bus system, a handful of corporate sponsors, and a number of museums and cultural venues around the city wherein 31 museums and cultural venues stay open (for ticketholders) from 6pm - midnight on a Saturday evening, while the busses run special routes between the venues. In six hours, we made it to eight places, starting with the Justice & Police Museum down on Circular Quay (we were there anyway to go to the Opera House) and wrapping up our evening at the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) studios just two blocks from our house. In between, we saw the Hyde Park Barracks Museum, St. Mary's Cathedral, the State Library of NSW, the Sydney Eye Hospital, the restored ship "James Craig" of the Australian Heritage Fleet, and the Destroyer "Vampire," also anchored in Darling Harbour at the National Maritime Museum.
It was a full night, unseasonably warm, so the crowds were large,5 but an extraordinary opportunity to see a bunch of stuff "right on our doorstep," so to speak.
For D, one of the highlights was the Hyde Park Barracks Museum. Though the exhibits were sometimes sparse, they were incredibly sophisticated in the way artifacts, text, narrative, and interpretive information were blended together. As an example, the central foyer housed a stairwell bearing signs that explained that each of the three floors was arranged to present a different way of understanding the history of the building: ground floor as traditional historical exhibit, next floor as an exhibit of the methods used to research and create the historical exhibits, and top floor as an "experience" for visitors to engage physically and theatrically with the history. One of the rooms displayed objects excavated from the foundation of the building (there were hundreds, at least) but it placed them in a grid of tied-off twine like archeologists use in the field. Alongside the descriptions and explanations of the objects were explanations and descriptions of how archeologists conduct field research.
For Chad, though, the undisputed highlight of the evening was the tour of the ABC building,6 which was built for the subsized television station only two years ago. We got to see two of the four studios and the state-of-the-art equipment with which they are fitted. Lighting grids with instruments that lower individually on hydraulics, green screens (or "chromakey," if you want to be all technical about it) explained by the professional camerapeople who use them,7 and a brief description of short-range plans to outfit "the small studio" to broadcast in high-def, as soon as they get approval to broadcast in high-def.
We will confess, though, that the ABC tour might have been just slightly more exciting if we had any idea about the television shows they tape there and whose sets we were traipsing over at midnight on a Saturday night. Without broadcast television at our house here, we were lost as everyone around us casually referenced "Enough Rope," "Memphis Trousers," and the 29-year-running "Playschool." Sigh. We were invited to come and be live audiences during the taping, though-- maybe we'll get to see some real Aussie television... in person.
Time to sleep now. I was hoping to get some of the fabulous guesses posted from the "Explain This Saying" contest, but that will have to wait, since the judging is still in progress. Tomorrow, maybe, or the next day.8
;)
- D
PS: Totally random news snippet- someone stole a plastic dead body from the Bodyworlds exhibit! Go check it out here!
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NOTES
1Entitled "Rehearsal as Cartography: Some Challenges for Metaphor and Practice." This issue of the journal is the first ever to be "peer-reviewed," and those of you who are familiar with that term will understand the significance for D's career.
2D, in her naivete, was hopeful that the reverse-image that the imaging software produced was simply a negative sign in the wrong place, but, sadly, it was a little more complicated than that.
3War of the Roses, a wonderful production by Bell Shakespeare Company (dir. John Bell) that was a two-part adaptation of Shakespeare's Henry VI trilogy.
4"standing in line"
5After standing in the queue for nearly forty minutes, when we were the next to buy tickets the booth attendant announced that there were no more tickets to be had unless the event organizers made more available. At that point in time it was still ten minutes before the event was supposed to start and the line behind us stretched longer than a city block.
6His excitement was partly, though not wholly, due to the fact that his father is an Emmy-award-winning television professional.
7Green screens can also be blue (in which case they are blue screens). These are the screens placed behind, say, a weatherperson on the evening news, so that all the blue can be edited out of the image and replaced with, say, an animated map of the country or a satellite image of the storm coming to get you, and it looks like the weatherperson is walking right in front of it. Cool fact of the day: blue was the original color used for chromakey because it is the color least present in human skin tone. But then, some anchorwoman in Sydney had blue eyes and wanted to wear blue suits, so they had to change. I can only assume that her preferences were not the driving force behind the world-wide use of green screens.
8Ok, contest results are up now.
Back to the GAA page!