When I made it home for Thanksgiving, one of the first orders of business, of course, was to go to the movies. Foregoing the madness of the mall multiplexes on a busy night, instead I went to a showing of The Descendants at The County Theater, a great little repertory/art- house spot in Doylestown, Pennsylvania.

Living in New York City, it is so rare that I get to see a 35mm print of a new film anymore. The major chains and even most smaller houses have flipped to digital. So I was dismayed when the trailers at The County started running on a digital projector. Then, this came on:

{% vimeo 30800771 %}

In the video, the theater’s director, John Toner, explains that The County must make the move to digital in order to keep up with the industry. As a non- profit, they need donations to be able to convert their auditoriums and are asking audiences for help.

The video is low quality, probably originally standard definition. Projected on a movie screen it looks absolutely terrible. I mean no disrespect to Toner or the person who shot this, but seeing this video swirled me down into the same digital depression I’ve been feeling for the last few years. I want to move forward and believe that the perks of digital distribution (better access to films, cleaner viewing experience, better longevity for popular “prints,” etc.) outweigh the charm of projected film. It’s been so long since I’ve seen a brand new 35mm film, I thought I had gotten over my “woe is me, projection luddite” phase. To think, this is what they want to convert The County to? This looks awful!

Of course, the actual projector they need funds to purchase will look much better. It looks bad because, well, it is. Digital is the future, get over yourself, Jon.

Then, the projector switched and a film print of Alexander Payne’s film unfurled. I was crushed. The print looked stunning. The crisp edges of Hawaiian life nearly cut right through the screen. The colors popped out at me as no digital projector has been able to. The film itself spoke to me on a level I’ve become unaccustomed to lately. This is the splendor of 35mm projections and its days are numbered.

I wish only the best for The County and I hope they are able to fulfill their campaign. A theater must keep up with emerging technologies, and the best argument I’ve heard for digital projection is that it removes the friction of bringing the great movies of the world to towns that otherwise wouldn’t bother getting them. That is just as important as my unhealthy relationship with celluloid.

Before this relic of movie-watching is lost forever, do yourself a favor and go seek out a theater that has 35mm on the menu. If you’re near Bucks County, PA, The County Theater is a wonderful place to catch a movie. The U.S. is peppered with great little theaters whose hand will be forced to move into the future. Don’t miss out on the past while it’s still around.

Photo by [Dawn Derbyshire](http://www.dawnderbyshire.com/post/3021362647/one- of-my-favorite-places-in-my-hometown-county)

Earlier this year, I helped my dad to get new laptops for himself and my mother. I tried talking them into getting Macs or iPads, but they balked with the usual refrains. “If I worked on creative things…They’re so much money…I know you just like them, but I don’t want to learn another thing…” Bargain basement prices for the devil you know is tough to argue against. So we got in the car and went to buy laptops.

Best Buy may as well be a Salvation Army thrift store when it comes to buying computers. You can’t hope for too much in terms of style or sustainability. And service? Forget about it. My dad walked in the door knowing the model of machine he wanted, and we still spent hours there while the staff tried, in vain, to figure out how to take our money. There was scanning this and formatting that and searching for the free printer he was promised.¹

“Does it come with Office?” my dad asked. The blank-faced customer service rep looked at the box, as we had. “Oh yeah, definitely, says it right there.” Sure enough, there was a nice bright Microsoft Office logo on the box. My father wanted the machine to get some work done at home, and Office is a must. Like most people, my parents still believe that if you want to use Office at all you need a Windows Machine. If this plastic Toshiba laptop says it has Office on the box then it surely does, right? Wrong.

As it turns out, in 2011, Microsoft still ships a stripped down version of Office on new Windows machines. This version is ad-supported and barely works. In other words, it isn’t Office at all. It’s shit. Good sport that he is, my dad opened his wallet again and dropped $119 on Microsoft Office Home Edition. As it said on his Amazon order, “3PC/1 User.” Great, he’s only got two PCs, so it should install on both. But it doesn’t. Instead, he’s expected to buy two seats for his household.

Microsoft: go to hell.

There may well be a proper workaround that my father fumbled on. Perhaps he bought the wrong UPC, or maybe he clicked a wrong button when installing. Guess what? I don’t care. You still managed to fuck up the simplest bit of your core business, selling software. If you can’t sell software to my dad, you don’t deserve to sell it to anyone.

This is why I left Windows behind ten years ago². This is why I left Word behind ages ago and haven’t even noticed. I’m not a Mac user because I want to look cool in coffee shops. I’m a Mac user because I believe in straightforward computing. I want something that does what it says on the tin. Microsoft still relies on false marketing and blatant trickery to make a buck. So it can go to hell.

A few years ago, when it became clear that I would be writing for more than one outlet, I bought Scrivener and it became my go-to app for organizing the disparate strands of my writing. It is one of the best purchases I have ever made. That people spend $140 for Word in a world where Scrivener exists is absolutely insane; it’s 20x the app and a third of the price.

One of the side effects of using Scrivener was learning how to write in MultiMarkdown.¹ At first, the plain text syntax confounded me, so I bugged the Scrivener developers on their (incredibly useful) forums until I started to get the hang of it. Shortly thereafter, the iPad came out and plain text documents became “a thing” again, with Markdown the preferred language for composing richly formatted documents on the go. The only problem? Scrivener doesn’t work directly with text documents.

Over the past year I have moved away from Scrivener. Instead I’ve tried to create a workflow based solely around text documents I organize in folders. It has been, to say the least, a struggle. The trouble with Scrivener (actually one of its strengths, unless you’re fiddly) is that it organizes all of the documents you are working on as RTFs within the current .scriv project. Not only are those documents RTF, they are inaccessible to other editors.²

I’ve been buying text editors for Mac OS X and iOS in hopes of finding “the one” that fits my workflow. On the iPad, I’m pretty happy with Daedalus. Lately on the iPhone WriteRoom has been my main writing app. On the Mac? I flip-flop. A lot. Sometimes I’m in the mood for Byword, which features excellent writer-centric Markdown syntax highlighting and keyboard shortcuts. Other times I’m into the enormous (like, 36px enormous) beauty of iA Writer’s typography. When it’s time to get serious about editing a document, TextMate does an excellent job of filling the screen with all of my nonsense. Plus I love changing all the themes in the fullscreen wonder that is WriteRoom. But guess what? I miss Scrivener.

I should probably talk about the elephant in the “I wish I had a text only version of Scrivener” room: Ulysses. This app, made by the same folks behind Daedalus, gets very close to providing me with the kind of structured madness I need. It predates Scrivener and paved the way for this kind of editor.³ Not only does Ulysses work with text documents but it also features a kind of syntax highlighting that is extremely customizable. Big plusses! The trouble is that there is no easy way to incorporate the basics of Markdown into Ulysses. You can get very close, but it takes some investment to set it up and then falls short on some nifty conventions that are available in other apps.⁴ Beyond that, the text documents you edit in Ulysses are kept within a .ulys document, just like Scrivener’s .scriv, so again you’re stuck editing within one app. Worse, currently there is no real document sync. It’s easy enough to export your current work for editing on an iPad, but getting it back into Ulysses is tricky.

If you’ve made it this far, you either completely agree with my frustrations or think I sound like the kind of person who writes messages in poop on his basement walls.⁵ The truth is that I find myself comfortable using many tools given my changing moods and needs. This is why plain text documents are so brilliant. There are an endless number of apps and devices you can use to edit text. Better, it’s simple to share with others and can be turned into just about any other kind of document you like. Getting fiddly is part of my process. Given the market for text editors out there, I gather I’m not alone.

So what does my perfect text editing app look like? Well, it actually looks like a version of Scrivener that edits text documents located within my Mac’s filesystem. I love that I can keep my documents organized in Scrivener and scribble notes into a sidebar. I love being able to do things like change the color of documents in the “binder” or view my documents in an outline or “corkboard” view. I can get pretty close to all of that by using projects in TextMate or Espresso or Sublime Text or BBEdit, but not close enough.

I know, I have a problem with text. But I’m working on it.

Apps Mentioned in this Article

If you are considering purchasing any of the apps mentioned above, using one of the Mac or iOS App Store links below to purchase will help support the candler blog. Many thanks and happy writing.

• Scrivener
• Daedalus
• ByWord
• iA Writer
• WriteRoom Mac / WriteRoom iOS
• Ulysses
• BBEdit

A lot of you who read this site may not know the ins and outs of Jewish publishing. Frankly, neither do I, but, as a writer and editor at Heeb, I’m close enough to the metal that I can set the stage for you.

Tablet Magazine is a wonderful online project with a talented staff and a formidable stable of guest writers. It’s The New Yorker of the Jewish publishing world. Jewcy is a youth-centric blog that was acquired by JDub Records, the label that gave the world Matisyahu, in 2009. JDub also partnered with Tablet in late 2009 but folded earlier this year. Yesterday it was announced that the seemingly homeless Jewcy will now be published by Tablet.

Mazel tov!

All would be well and good if not for a slight by Tablet’s intrepid blogger, Marc Tracy¹. Here he is welcoming Jewcy into his family:

Five years ago today, Jewcy was born. Since then, the online-only Jewish magazine that many of you probably already read has gone through several evolutions and changes of management, with, to my reading, one constant: a dedication to engaging young Jews who may not think of themselves as the likeliest readers of a Jewish magazine, and doing so by winking at the conventions of what a Jewish magazine should be without undermining those conventions to the point of standing for nothing at all. (Cough.)

In his original post, the word cough was linked to Heeb’s main page. Unprovoked, he took the opportunity to winkingly call Heeb out for, if I’m following this correctly, undermining the conventions of a Jewish magazine “to the point of standing for nothing at all.” The joke, by my read, goes past the point of rib-poking. It’s a mean jab that seems out of place in an otherwise meaningful post. I can take it, but I can volley back, nu?

The first thing worth noting is that Heeb predates all the other publications involved here. Perhaps it’s ancient history, but when I hear the words “conventions of a Jewish magazine” my mind immediately goes to Heeb. Before I was a writer I was a reader, and no Jewish publication, not a one, went as far into the mainstream as Heeb did. It was revolutionary. Ultimately, Jewcy and Tablet are taking the road that Heeb paved a decade ago.

But yes, that is ancient history. Things have changed in our little world. Jewcy rose to prominence a few years back (though they’ve been dropping consistently for a year) and Tablet is now one of the dominant forces online. That’s okay, there’s room for a lot of voices, but to suggest that Heeb stands for “nothing at all” is patently false. Our goals are simply different.

We have no interest in seeing a return on our investment by way of Jewish marriages, Jewish babies, Jewish love for Israel or any of the other “goals” that a Jewish magazine could stand for. We don’t prescribe what Jewish life should be. All we aim to do is provide thought provoking writing about the Jewish experience in relation to whatever else is happening in the world. It can be funny, it can be offensive, it can be whatever we want. Former publisher Josh Neuman put it best when we suspended print last summer:

Heeb Magazine has never been about making Jewish “cool.” What we are big believers in, however, is making Jewish fun. We believe that in a world in which Jewish periodicals outdo themselves in attempting to highlight just how endangered Jews are, there should be one Jewish media outlet that actually makes its readers smile.²

We don’t have an agenda, a fact that has hurt us over the years. Damn near killed us, actually. Heeb is viewed as a double-edged sword in the Jewish publishing world. We have the young, unaffiliated audience that none of the other sites can seem to pin down, but we don’t conform to the standards of a hip synagogue newsletter. We take chances and, every so often, we go too far. Sometimes, that makes Jews look bad. But hey, so does tossing an editorial swipe into what amounts to a press release.

Marc, we can talk until we’re blue in the face about what role Heeb should play, what it stands for, what Jewcy stands for, etc. We can argue which site has better content and which reaches what audience. There’s no point though. You’re one of the hardest working writers online and one of my favorite to read to boot. I can’t wrap my head around how many words you get right every single day and I applaud you for it. But this one word, this “cough,” was wrong and you know it. Dick move.

So let’s see how things go for Jewcy under Tablet. Can’t wait.

I’m really enjoying using Hog Bay Software’s WriteRoom 3.0 which launched one week ago. One of the new features is the ability to configure multiple themes and share them with other users. I certainly love fiddling with my many (multitudinous, countless, umpteen, etc.) text editors, so of course the first thing I did was go and look for available themes online. Alas, none were to be found, so I made some of my own and I’d like to share them with you.

Here are the zips:

And here is me waxing poetic:

WordPerfect

The first word processor I ever used. I’d stare at the blue screen hoping something Doogie Howserian would come to me.

DOS

The colors may not be the most accurate, but that depends on what color (singular) your monitor was.

Solarized

Based on Ethan Schoonover’s wonderful theme. What’s a themeable app without it?

Screenplay

I’ve been using this one with Screenbundle files and Screenplay Markdown tests¹.

I’m not sure what the party was for, but I distinctly remember finding myself at the house of a screenwriter who lived in my area growing up. It was one of those fancy parties that kids probably shouldn’t be brought along to but are anyway. The owner split his time between coasts, wheeling and dealing in Hollywood while finding a place to lay his hat in his suburban Philadelphia manse.

There was never a time in my life that I didn’t want to work in movies. My parents always encouraged and broadcast my aspirations. Perhaps this was why I was brought along; to forge a relationship with someone in the industry. In fact, the screenwriter did his best to needle me in the right direction, though, being just a kid, I didn’t always follow along.

The first thing this kindly writer showed off to me was a small cupboard near the front door of his house. Inside was a stack of home entertainment gear. Amplifiers, receivers, radios; wondrous gear with all manner of digital displays and knobs and switches. This was the control room for an entertainment system that was piped through the whole house. The dining room had recessed speakers hidden below molding. There were speakers in nearly every room, even some outside. Was this a sound system with a house built around it, or the other way around?

“That’s nothing,” he told me.

As I recall it, we then all gathered into the living room, adults and children alike. The screenwriter flipped on his big-screen television (rear-projection, of course). He wanted to share something special with us, a justification of his aural investment. Naturally, he put on the Tyrannosaurus Rex scene from Jurassic Park, that most famous sequence that starts with a rumble and ends with a car mirror. I melted listening to the incredible, layered soundtrack of the 1993 film.

I had forgotten about this party and this experience, but it all came rushing back to me while reading Bryan Curtis’s article about the cult of the dino franchise over at Grantland. Earlier in the week I [excerpted](http://www.candlerblog.com/2011/10/28/the-best-jurassic-park- article-youll-read-this-week/) his piece on this site, but it’s worth reiterating:

Jurassic Park, along with The Abyss (1989) and Terminator 2 (1991), were the stars of an amazing in-between period of summer-movie history. An interesting couple of years between the Analogue Era and the Computer Era. We were charging headfirst into the movie future, but we hadn’t quite left the past.

Part of what keeps me coming back to this particular film is nostalgia. I long for the days when I was a boy whose socks could still get knocked off from even the cheapest of tricks. But there is something more at play here.

Jurassic Park and its antecedents were created for the big screen, but there was a certain magic to these films that allowed for them to be enjoyed brilliantly in the home. The technological advances of the 1990s were not limited to the theatrical experience. Where the “home theater” was once the playground of the über-rich, it has become an attainable reality for many. While prices haven’t hit rock bottom, the quality on the dollar you can get in your living room these days is far more reasonable than at any other point.
When I hear film people talk about home viewing it is usually in the context of the death of the theatrical experience. Usually, I’m inclined to agree; I love nothing more than sitting in a darkened room with a bunch of strangers, ogling whatever bogeymen or beauties slink across the screen. Still, I have had many (many, many) great experiences on the couch, in bed, sprawled on a floor or otherwise irregularly comfortable in my own or another’s home. Is that so bad?

The memory described here is important because it was special. Sure, I only watched a single scene and the purpose of the showing was more a braggadocious muscle-flex than a celebration of cinema, but that didn’t stop me from entering the world of the film. Spielberg’s film is enduring for a number of reasons, all covered in Curtis’s excellent aforelinked article. One that he skips, however, is its ability to suck you in even at home. The throw pillows and microwaved popcorn disappear right from the film’s opening lines (“Gatekeeper, step forward!”), allowing us to re-enter the deadly Isla Nublar time and time again.

Ashley Maynor at Self-Reliant Film:

Both as a film festival programmer and as a university instructor, I have seen how, all too often, art direction (much like sound design!) is neglected in first films and student films. It’s easy to spot an amateur effort when gangsters are wearing Converse One-Stars (yep, I’ve actually seen this) or an [MRI machine is made out of cardboard](http://trueslant.com/childers/2010/04/21/after-last-season-the- avant-garde-of-incompetence/) (After Last Season, anyone?).

As always, smart, useful information from one of my favorite filmmaking blogs. Great kicker at the end too:

It can make the story world credible or incredible, real or surreal. What’s more essential than that?

Bryan Curtis for Grantland:

Jurassic Park, along with The Abyss (1989) and Terminator 2 (1991), were the stars of an amazing in-between period of summer-movie history. An interesting couple of years between the Analogue Era and the Computer Era. We were charging headfirst into the movie future, but we hadn’t quite left the past.

If you don’t read this, then don’t read anything.

More from Netflix’s shareholders letter from Monday:

There are various ways to evaluate the content of a video‐streaming service. One way is to focus purely on quantity, but that leads to the licensing of thousands of rarely watched titles. At the other extreme is concentrating solely on quality, as measured by the number of Oscar‐nominated or Emmy‐nominated titles we have. Instead, we think about the value of our content as a function of how much a given movie or TV series gets watched relative to other titles, for how long and by how many members. From that perspective, an Oscar‐nominated film may be of less value to Netflix subscribers than “Pawn Stars,” because subs are watching the reality show more than the Oscar‐nominated movie.

They’re definition of quality seems tacitly incorrect¹, but I’m willing to let it slide for now. What concerns me is the last part of of this paragraph regarding the value of Netflix’s content. There’s some circular reasoning going on at the company that is going to be a big problem for movie lovers as the company begins its “comeback.”

Netflix’s thought process in one sentence: People aren’t watching the movies we don’t have, therefore they don’t want to watch them.

This ideology stems from the fact that Netflix wants to be a television network that you get through the Internet instead of through a cable company. This is what led to their acquisition of David Fincher’s “House of Cards.” They explicitly state this intention elsewhere in the shareholders letter:

In episodic television, exclusives are also the norm. Netflix doesn’t license “Deadwood” from HBO because they see strategic value in keeping it exclusive. Netflix licenses “Mad Men” and “House of Cards” exclusively for much the same reason.²

They want to be in the original programming business; they want to follow the traditional network model. The only way they can figure out what to stream is to figure out what people are watching. Think of them as a channel, just like HBO, and you’ll start to see that the idea of Netflix as a gateway to every film available isn’t their business model anymore. The Netflix we once knew, that massive video rental store in the cloud, is gone. Or at least their executives wish it were.

The reason why it hurts to move into acceptance of this fact is that we all jumped aboard Netflix at the expense of our local video stores. Those little red envelopes destroyed the rental industry and there is blood on our hands. The war is over but the game has changed. Is this what we signed up for?

Netflix’s streaming library will, likely, never be analogous to its disc library. They’re getting out of the rental business they killed. What are the rest of us to do? I’m not sure yet.

After I put together a small animated GIF for my piece on the Lytro camera a few days ago, I got the gif bug, if there is such a thing. Perhaps I’ll post more of these as they come to me. Leave ideas for other moments in cinema turn into a gif.

Here we have a great moment from François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, the psychological examination of Antoine Doinel. The question that precedes his smile? “Have you ever slept with a girl?”

If you buy the film on [DVD](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000E5LEV0/ref= as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=thecandlerblo-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399 373&creativeASIN=B000E5LEV0) or [Blu-ray](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001O549FC/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=thecandlerblo -20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399373&creativeASIN=B001O549FC) with these links you will be supporting the candler blog and adding a great film to your collection. I own Criterion’s Antoine Doinel Box Set; these films are worth revisiting every so often.