In Boston

I'm in Boston attending the User Interface 8 conference in Cambridge, next to MIT. I've had the good fortune to bump into two small gems:

"To Be and To Have" is an unassuming and disarming documentary about a teacher and his young students in a small schoolhouse in the French countryside (Auvergne) during, I believe, a one year period. It earns our emotional connection without any traditional dramatic manipulations and it avoids the trap of relying on precocious children to spark our amazement. It was one of the few unabashed and pure emotional experiences I've had with a film.


Have not read "The Art of Taking a Walk" yet, but I bumped into it while exploring the MIT Coop's class textbook area -- I believe it was part of a film studies course. In the preface, the author promises, among other things, to discuss the cinematic nature of being a flaneur on the city streets and to discuss what she considers to be a phenomenon that is rarely discussed: female flaneurs and the particular ways the cityscape is read/interpreted by them. Add to this a discussion of Weimar Germany and....well.

Perhaps, if you are oh-so-lucky, I'll write more about the book once I read it.