Up now on NYTimes.com, a story I helped my Chicago News Cooperative co-worker write. He's going to have an awesome TV piece tonight on WTTW about it!
By ASH-HAR QURAISHI and RACHEL CROMIDAS
The Field Museum of Natural History this week will open an exhibit that features a reincarnated Sue — the museum’s iconic Tyrannosaurus rex — as a lifelike animatronic creature that turns its head to track visitors’ movements and lets out a loud roar.
The exhibit, which opens Wednesday and runs through Sept. 6, celebrates the 10th anniversary of the museum’s debut of Sue, the largest and most complete T. rex fossil yet discovered. The imposing, and somewhat unsettling, replica was created by Kokoro, an animatronics company based in Tokyo, and KumoTek, a robotics company, based in Texas. (John Canning Jr., chairman of the board of the Chicago News Cooperative, is also the chairman of the board of the Field Museum.)
Hilary Sanders, the museum’s project manager for exhibitions, said that when she first saw the robotic dinosaur, called RoboSue, it “made my skin crawl.” Ms. Sanders said she was eager to see how children, only those 4 and older will be admitted, would react.
Matthew Fisher, the founder of KumoTek, said that when there is no one around, the robots are doing what appear to be random behaviors. “But once the target or the human comes into play,” he said, “then the robot immediately engages that person.”
Establishing how dinosaurs would move and react to humans was tricky, said Pete Makovicky, the curator for the Sue exhibit.
“It’s really hard to decipher behavior from the fossil record because behavior doesn’t usually leave a trace,” Mr. Makovicky said. “So when it comes to the individual actions of the dinosaurs in the exhibit, a lot more of that is based on the general study of how animals react — what is plausible given what we know about the anatomy and frame of a T. rex.”
Gabe Lyon, whose foundation teaches paleontology to students, said that the scientific accuracy of the animatronic model is doubtful. “They’re not going to tell us anything real about how dinosaurs behaved, any more than ‘Jurassic Park’ is going to tell us that dinosaurs hunted in packs,” he said.
Monica Post, the director of MPR Museum Consulting, said the “wow” factor of RoboSue may help draw more people into the learning experience that museums offer. “Today, we expect so much more. We are the X-Box generation,” Ms. Post said.
RoboSue is scaled to three-quarters the size of an adult T. Rex, which in Sue’s case is more than 40 feet long and 13 feet tall at the hip.
Sue, a 67-million year-old fossil discovered in 1990 near Faith, S.D., was purchased at a Sotheby’s auction in 1997 for $8.4 million.
Monday, May 24, 2010
Friday, May 7, 2010
Troll 2, Mr. Vampire bring students together Sunday nights
My latest article is up on the University of Chicago Arts Page:
Residents of Snell-Hitchcock take part in a decade-long tradition called Bad Movie Night.
Among the residents of Snell-Hitchcock Hall, third-year Mandy Stafford is the girl with the endless mental catalogue of some of the worst movies ever produced. She uses this knowledge to preside over a decade-old tradition known as Bad Movie Night.
Stafford screens a film every Sunday night in Snell-Hitchcock’s Rec Room; though they are no cinematic masterpieces, for her and the 10 to 20 students who gather for the event, they are far from a waste of time.
“The point is once a week everyone can just do something stupid,” says Stafford. “I don’t think that’s something people get to do enough at this school.”
First-year Jen Woolley agrees. “They’re so bad that they’re good to watch,” she says. “Some people bring schoolwork; I knit.”
Stafford’s choices range from the fantastical to the truly absurd. Upcoming screenings include Troll 2 and Mr. Vampire.
Second-year Levi Foster, who stopped by for the showing of High School Musical, 2, quips in here: “Wait a minute, Mr. Vampire is a legitimately good movie. It’s campy as hell, but a legitimately good movie.”
One subject of debate among the group of regular viewers is what makes a movie “bad.” Twilight and High School Musical, for example, were box-office hits; but neither escaped Stafford’s bad movie line-up. “They’re both bad enough to be funny, and that’s important for bad movie night. Some movies are literally unwatchably bad, and we don’t screen those. The favorites year after year are the ones that people find quirky and ridiculous.”
Clearer rules govern the movie selection-process, which Stafford inherited from Margot Spellman, AB ’08: The movies should be “earnestly bad,” she explains, unless “you can tell the film knows it’s bad, and yet still comes out even worse than [the directors] intended—like Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter.”
In contrast, “there’s Plan 9 from Outer Space. The director thinks it was the greatest thing ever committed to film, but it was just awful.”
There’s also Wild Zero, a film Stafford struggles to summarize concisely: “Aliens turn everyone in the world into zombies. The protagonist is the biggest fan of the band Guitar Wolf. Does that make sense?”
The answer doesn’t matter, as long as the film has achieved a necessary combination of unintentional humor and notoriety. But Stafford does have her limits:
“One movie I refused to play this [school] year was the Star Wars Holiday Special. People always come out to it en masse, but it is just an abomination. Truly the most horrifying thing ever committed to film.”
Stafford speculates that Bad Movie Night has remained a dorm tradition because it is low-commitment, and convenient. “You just come to a movie at 10 p.m. on Sunday in the Rec Room, and it’s been like that since the beginning. Week nights are hard nights to hold events because people are actually doing homework, and on Friday and Saturday people want to go out in the city.”
Residents of Snell-Hitchcock take part in a decade-long tradition called Bad Movie Night.
Among the residents of Snell-Hitchcock Hall, third-year Mandy Stafford is the girl with the endless mental catalogue of some of the worst movies ever produced. She uses this knowledge to preside over a decade-old tradition known as Bad Movie Night.
Stafford screens a film every Sunday night in Snell-Hitchcock’s Rec Room; though they are no cinematic masterpieces, for her and the 10 to 20 students who gather for the event, they are far from a waste of time.
“The point is once a week everyone can just do something stupid,” says Stafford. “I don’t think that’s something people get to do enough at this school.”
First-year Jen Woolley agrees. “They’re so bad that they’re good to watch,” she says. “Some people bring schoolwork; I knit.”
Stafford’s choices range from the fantastical to the truly absurd. Upcoming screenings include Troll 2 and Mr. Vampire.
Second-year Levi Foster, who stopped by for the showing of High School Musical, 2, quips in here: “Wait a minute, Mr. Vampire is a legitimately good movie. It’s campy as hell, but a legitimately good movie.”
One subject of debate among the group of regular viewers is what makes a movie “bad.” Twilight and High School Musical, for example, were box-office hits; but neither escaped Stafford’s bad movie line-up. “They’re both bad enough to be funny, and that’s important for bad movie night. Some movies are literally unwatchably bad, and we don’t screen those. The favorites year after year are the ones that people find quirky and ridiculous.”
Clearer rules govern the movie selection-process, which Stafford inherited from Margot Spellman, AB ’08: The movies should be “earnestly bad,” she explains, unless “you can tell the film knows it’s bad, and yet still comes out even worse than [the directors] intended—like Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter.”
In contrast, “there’s Plan 9 from Outer Space. The director thinks it was the greatest thing ever committed to film, but it was just awful.”
There’s also Wild Zero, a film Stafford struggles to summarize concisely: “Aliens turn everyone in the world into zombies. The protagonist is the biggest fan of the band Guitar Wolf. Does that make sense?”
The answer doesn’t matter, as long as the film has achieved a necessary combination of unintentional humor and notoriety. But Stafford does have her limits:
“One movie I refused to play this [school] year was the Star Wars Holiday Special. People always come out to it en masse, but it is just an abomination. Truly the most horrifying thing ever committed to film.”
Stafford speculates that Bad Movie Night has remained a dorm tradition because it is low-commitment, and convenient. “You just come to a movie at 10 p.m. on Sunday in the Rec Room, and it’s been like that since the beginning. Week nights are hard nights to hold events because people are actually doing homework, and on Friday and Saturday people want to go out in the city.”
Sunday, May 2, 2010
Pilsen Railroad Strike Will Be Re-Enacted
By RACHEL CROMIDAS
Published: May 2, 2010 in the New York Times
Paul Durica wears many guises as a historical tour guide to such places as Haymarket Square and the Kenwood haunts of the 1924 thrill killers Leopold and Loeb. On Sunday he and a group of historians-turned-artists will re-enact the 1877 scene of a Pilsen railroad strike and a clash between laborers and the Chicago police.
Related
A staging of the Battle of the Halsted Viaduct will take place at 3 p.m. on the corner of South Halsted and West 16th Streets. Attendees will be invited to participate as mobsters and policemen, said Mr. Durica, the founder of the irreverent Pocket Guide to Hell Tours and a graduate student at the University of Chicago.
Period dress is encouraged, and a horse-drawn carriage, live music and foam bricks - in case the audience gets rowdy - will be provided, Mr. Durica said. The free event concludes the Version Festival, a springtime convergence of local artists and musicians that is in its 10th year.
Published: May 2, 2010 in the New York Times
Paul Durica wears many guises as a historical tour guide to such places as Haymarket Square and the Kenwood haunts of the 1924 thrill killers Leopold and Loeb. On Sunday he and a group of historians-turned-artists will re-enact the 1877 scene of a Pilsen railroad strike and a clash between laborers and the Chicago police.
Related
A staging of the Battle of the Halsted Viaduct will take place at 3 p.m. on the corner of South Halsted and West 16th Streets. Attendees will be invited to participate as mobsters and policemen, said Mr. Durica, the founder of the irreverent Pocket Guide to Hell Tours and a graduate student at the University of Chicago.
Period dress is encouraged, and a horse-drawn carriage, live music and foam bricks - in case the audience gets rowdy - will be provided, Mr. Durica said. The free event concludes the Version Festival, a springtime convergence of local artists and musicians that is in its 10th year.
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