The Circle Cinema: Say It Ain’t So…

(image courtesy of Flickr user thebulli)

National Amusements, acting a bit like every villain in an 80s dance-off movie, has announced that they will be shutting down the Circle Cinema in Cleveland Circle next week.

Cinema Treasures has some of the history of the building, which most agree was built in 1940, with renovations made in 1965 and again in 1976. It has seen many famous nights, including the exclusive Boston debut of most of Paramount’s pictures. Many on the above site mention seeing a star-studded debut of Chinatown at the Circle.

For my roommates and I, going to the Circle was initially done for ambiance reasons. Let’s not let nostalgia gloss over the facts: that place was run down. So, seeing movies like, say, Zodiac or Be Kind Rewind there made a lot of sense to us. Over time, however, it became our default venue for its low prices, home-y aesthetic, cheap eats on the block, and decent run of arcade games. By the time I left Boston going to the movies was a simple formula: if it was an Indie or a midnight, we’d go to Coolidge; if it was an art house flick, we’d go to Brattle; if it was a special-effects-driven feature, we’d go to AMC; otherwise, we’d go to the Circle.

I have yet to find a replacement for the Brattle or Coolidge here in DC. I found the nearest multiplex with little trouble. I wonder if I’ll ever find a place like the Circle outside of rural America again. And I have absolutely no idea where I’ll ever find the cheesy Japanese flight simulator game they had at the Circle.

You will be missed.

The New Blue Blood

This is cheesy, but I’m going to roll with it.

It’s nice to have a candidate I actually believe in.

Now, Barack: Don’t fuck us over.

Jmac’s Arcade

I owe Ethan Zuckerman a proverbial big one for mentioning this today in his fantastic blog “My Heart’s in Accra.” (Accra, I’m fairly certain, is in reference to the capital of Ghana where Zuckerman spent some time studying access and technology, and heartland of Highlife music, one of my favorite genres I learned about in Ethnomusicological enterprises).

While Zuckerman’s article focuses on a documentary on Pac-Man high scorer Billy Mitchell, whom anyone who has seen King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters knows is really a total jerk, he mentions an amazing podcast series which quickly joined my feeds:

Zuckerman:

It sounds like Jason McIntosh spent much of his childhood wondering about the mysteries of the arcade in much this way. He’s got a wonderful (though too short) set of videocasts where he talks about his childhood while playing the games he remembers from those days. [...] It’s an honest, moving and lovely piece of storytelling, and I’m glad I stumbled on his podcasts while searching for information on Nibbler, a game mentioned in the Bearman story and the subject of Jmac’s third “arcade” podcast.

Here is the Nibbler post Zuckerman speaks of, the first in his series:

I love this story. Somehow it’s a perfect blend of video game geekiness (a subject on which I’m familiar), Massachusetts childhood memories, and a touching observational story. Jmac talks about girls using video games the way Nick Hornby uses music in his novels: often in the foreground, but never obfuscated in bad analogies.

And those who know me personally are no doubt ribbing me for failing to mention another reason why I love this little video. It almost perfectly describes my experience growing up learning to skate and developing an early love for both the “Velma over Daphne” archetype (or perhaps the “bookish girl with cocoa and a sweater” if Perks of Being a Wallflower is where your pop-culture affiliations lie) and video games in general. As a kid I spent a lot (and I mean a lot) of time at the Wallace Civic Center in Fitchburg. I had a skating coach named Michelle, who took seven-year-old me in her fluffy mittened, Fitchburg-State-College-studying-to-be-a-kindergarten-teacher hands, and skated backwards while a I stumbled forwards in knee pads and a helmet.

The rest of my experience is a perfect parallel to Jmac’s story, so I’ll spare the details. My exposure to video games came about ten years later, so replace all references to “Scramble” with “old Tapper and Gauntlet II machines” and you’ve pretty much got my story. Be sure to also see Jmac’s “Missle Command / Why I don’t want to write a letter to the President” or “Nibbler / How I learned to code” or “Moon Patrol / Retro-kitsch and laundromats” or his fifth and final, I, Robot, which is less a Hornby novella and more a reflective look at video games through the eyes of one developer.

It’s a tricky art that Jmac is mastering here, and I wouldn’t be surprised if people don’t find this as entertaining as I do. It’s perhaps too geeky for some or too romantically nostalgic for others. It’s been about a year since Jmac has posted one of these, so this might be a dead collection. Still, I hope there are more, and kudos to Jmac for cherishing our arcade game days.

You and Me and the DNC

BagNewsNotes is a fantastic resource for anyone curious about photojournalism and its subtle (and often not-so-subtle) contexts. It is one of the most visually stunning and interesting political websites I’ve yet to uncover, and many thanks to Mr. Colin Ashe for passing it along. Today we were treated with one of the first glimpses into the Denver DNC:

BagNewsNotes:

This shot more than captures the rise, and resourcefulness, of the new netroots political media.  In the shot, Bill Scher of Campaign For America’s Future (well known for his ability to blog standing up) interviews public policy expert Steve Clemons of The Washington Note in the Google lounge of The Big Tent (in other words, blogger central).  Using his MacBook as a video camera, you can see Al Shaw, our producer capturing the interview with his iPhone uploading directly to the web via Qik, with yours truly on screen just off Steve’s left shoulder

What strikes me in this shot, much like BNN, is not so much the technology-porn we’ve just borne witness to. Everything we see here is commercially available at a relatively low cost. The technology used to capture this event varies little from the phones and laptops many of us have today. One gets the feeling netroots, as they say, will rule the day in this year’s DNC.

I’ve had the good fortune of seeing a number of events worth taping for posterity, and worked with a fair share of documentary and journalistic filmmakers. Over the past year or I’ve seen the shift so eloquently captured in this picture (were it not for the Google banner, this would effectively be a good Apple ad, too.) For the first time, people can produce and distribute videos of a high caliber throughout the known world, instantly. And anyone with the money to get their hands on these and a pass in the door now stands on close to equal footing with the print and TV news media. While the big “J” Journalists may have the expertise (both in-house and brought on the show) and the high production value, groups like these can capture and produce faster, more efficiently, and often times fundamentally better than those elsewhere. And I for one would not draw the distinction as one between “amateur” and “professional.” This is the line between “new media” and “old media,” between technology-hesitant versus technology-forward, and, fundamentally, between a closed-access event and an open-access event.

What does this emergence of a major open-access media event mean? It’s hard to say until this week is over. But I’ll be very curious to see how the DNC and RNC, relatively open forums for taping, contrast with the Olympics, a tremendously regulated forum, in terms of the quality and volume of content produced. I would not be surprised if many of us find more pleasure prowling the videos captured by the many over being fed the glossy videos of the few.

As a side, the person with the legal finesse and technical skill to tie all these democratically-produced (little “d” democratic, that is) segments into a clear media center for these events stands to be very successful.

A Copyright Announcement, With Guitars

The Kleptones – Question

Starting today, I am a full-time law student.

While I don’t think my experience will be as devastating as The Paper Chase or even Legally Blonde, the time requirements will mean that lots of extra-curricular will be replaced, including, most likely, frequent contribution to this blog. I have made a promise to myself to keep writing, but I’m holding to a once-a-week commitment, as opposed to my previous constant stream of rants. I hope you all understand, and I’m sure there are no shortage of other things to read.

That said, I have an open challenge left unanswered from last week, and I want to take the time to go over it.

MBTA Tries to Stop the Signal

(my old Charlie Card, in my new apartment)

Well, I’ve been a DC resident for almost 24 hours now, and still my curiosity is drifting back up to Boston once again.

Universal Hub reports today that the MBTA is suing to prevent three MIT students – Zack Anderson, Russell Ryan, and Alessandro Chiesa – from giving a lecture at DefCon, a hacker convention in LA, on how to crack the Charlie Card.

The lecture.

The complaint (PDF).

The Wired article.

The implications stretch beyond the MBTA – the Charlie Card is a MiFare Card, with a special proprietary encryption built on top. A Dutch group already showed the world how to “crack” the MiFare card earlier this year. These cards are used worldwide, in a variety of transportation and security settings.

As of today, the restraining order was filed and the talk for this weekend was canceled. But I would not say the MBTA won by any stretch. The students got the attention of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who have now begun advising the students, and one of the documents filed by the court friday includes a detailed vulnerability assessment (PDF) given to the MBTA by the students. By submitting it, it is now on public record, where you can learn such things as:

a) value for Charlie Cards is stored on the card, not in a centralized database
b) anyone that has a card can read it and write value on it
c) not cryptographic signature is used on the card
d) the MBTA do not use any central card verification database

I am reminded of a famous DMCA case from a few years ago: Edward Felten, bright professor of computer science at Princeton, responded to a challenge in 2000 issued by the Secure Digital Music Initiative, a group of IT and music specialists that had developed a watermarking system for marking digital music files. SDMI offered a cash prize for breaking the system they had developed, but insisted that findings be sent to them confidentially. Felten and a group of students broke the watermark (allegedly in a matter of hours) and opted to present their findings to a IT conference, declining the cash prize. Upset at this, SDMI and the RIAA threatened to sue Felten under a DMCA anti-circumvention claim, and Felten decided to wait on presenting the paper. Up until this point, this sounds an awful lot like the case between the MBTA and the MIT students.

But consider how the story ends: the Electronic Frontier Foundation sued these groups under a First Amendment claim, though the case was dismissed due to lack of standing. Felten did end up presenting his work at the USENIX conference in 2001, and the Justice Department issued a statement saying that the DMCA does not threaten the work of those that research digital security.

While there are some clear tactical blunders from the students (putting “want free subway rides for life?” in the lecture description did erode some of their academic claims), in the end I see their work as quite similar to Felten’s, and should be presented and protected. Naturally, while the SDMI watermark was a theoretical exercise, the MBTA Charlie Cards are qutie real, and what Anderson, Ryan, and Chiesa are doing would illustrate a clear theft of services. However, if not these three, someone else will no doubt discover what these students did. Perhaps their discovery won’t be brought up in a scholarly setting to be reviewed and critiqued, but rather simply implemented at great cost to the T. Where does the MBTA stand then?

As Mr. Universe says in Serenity, “You can’t stop the signal.” This information will be available, be it in a matter of days or of years. Rather than squelch those that seek to make the world aware of it, perhaps the MBTA could re-appropriate funds from the Legal office to research some of the clear suggestions the students made.

Waxing Nostalgic, or “Andy being Andy.”

(the mural at Bay State Foods, aka “The Russians.” A strange title, given the Peruvian ownership.)

My time in Boston has come to a close. I have vacated my humble Brookline apartment for the potential glamor of Washington DC. Moving always brings out a clutter of emotions, and while I have done the September shuffle my fair share of times in the Hub, leaving entirely is especially tough.

I’ve slept in the same dorm that birthed Napster on Hemenway Street. I shared a very, very small bedroom with Colin and Oscar (thankfully, one after the other) in a lovely brick-walled nook at St. Stephen and Mass Ave. I sweated it out in a very cramped apartment with the floodlights of Fenway creeping in the window on Peterborough, saved by close proximity of El Pelón. And for two years, when not on tour or otherwise traveling, I’ve called the peculiar haven of college students amidst the Brookline families, known to most as “The Empire,” my home.

We’ve seen some crazy things in the past five years. I could rattle off a list, but I’m sure I’d miss something important (the filming of The Departed, the gigantic snowstorm in January 2005, Kerry’s Copley Square presidential rally, and all of the Marathons are worth mentioning). While I’m not a large sports enthusiast compared to many Bostonians, as a lifelong Mass resident the Red Sox run deep in my blood, and the 2003, 2004, and 2007 Red Sox weaved a beautiful common thread in my Boston experience.

If the Sox are my thread, then Manny Ramirez serves as my framing. His arrival in the spring of 2001 was about when I started thinking seriously about where I was going to college, and Boston schools stayed at the top of the list through the next two years. I got my license shortly thereafter, and while I spent most of my time in Gardner or Fitchburg, I always looked forward to the occasional trips to Boston with a van full of kids. Once at Northeastern I was naturally at the heart of it, surrounded by Red Sox fandom. The Sox in ’03 was how I met most of my friends freshman year, as we piled into one suite to watch the whole series build up, screaming at the TV when Grady left Pedro in the game. 2004 had us pouring out into the streets, celebrating well into the morning (I remember watching Fox25 at 5AM and seeing my street from the helicopter camera). By 2007 I had left the college parts of town, but still walked from Coolidge to Kenmore and back, high-fiving passersby, when we swept the Rockies. Between these high-water marks were the low points: the departure of Theo Epstein (only to have him return shortly thereafter), the 5-game Boston Massacre at the hands of the Yankees in 2006, and of course, the departures of our once-lauded heroes: Nomah, Pedro, D-Lowe, Nixon, and now Manny.

I do not want to sound obsessed, and indeed many, many great moments happened without the Sox as a centerpiece (most of my friends actually don’t care that much about baseball), but living in Boston means they’re never too far away: on the radio or TV in the other room, on the baseball cap of your friend, or amidst curse words under your breath when you attempt to board a train passing Kenmore around 6:30 on a weeknight.

And now, a little more than a week after Manny’s departure, I’ve left my city. I do not doubt I will return many times, and would never rule out living here again, but for the next few years the majority of my time will be in law textbooks at George Washington University. I know that I’ll never fully leave, but for now I’ve traded Bostonist for DCist (I’m keeping Universal Hub, though). There will be good times in DC; I am certain. But I will most certainly Boston, and all those who snark their days through in it. I’ll miss Newbury Comics, The Coolidge Corner Theatre, JP Licks, Deep Ellum, Little Stevie’s, The Russians, Nuggets, and, yes, Fenway Park.

But don’t worry, Red Sox, I’ll only watch the Washington Nationals occasionally, merely for amusement. You’re still in a whole other league.

Our Scrabulous Affair

(image courtesy of Flickr user allyrose18)

By now we’ve all heard about the Hasbro/Facebook/Agarwalla brothers fiasco surrounding the popular Facebook application Scrabulous. If you haven’t, take the time to click the Wikipedia link and get familiar. People have been asking me to comment, so I’ll take this stormy Sunday as a chance to chime in. I’ve got a proper (amateur) analysis, and a very special treat from one of my favorite bands.