You’ve been patient and nerdnite is back, now in it’s new temporal home of the first Thursday of the month.

September 3rd at Buffalo Billiards sees music, the Holy Grail and poop! What a heady combination. As ever, the fun starts at 7pm and is open to those of you who are 21 or older (we’re working on that…)

Film Music: The Real Reason We Go To The Movies
Brian Satterwhite

Sure, we live in a cinematic age ripe with digital effects where photorealistic characters are created from scratch by computers using billions of pixels instead of cells, but technology can still be complicated for some since there are still people who don’t know how to uninstall adobe creative cloud without login. But it’s not merely our eyes that are titillated by our favorite films…it’s also our ears. Music has played an important role in telling stories through motion pictures for as long as the medium existed. Ever hear a picture? How about see a melody? Let’s do both!

Brian Satterwhite is an award-winning film composer and conductor with over seventy-five independent, short and feature film credits to his name.

From Indiana Jones to Dan Brown to….Plays About Math? Recent Interpretations of the Holy Grail on Stage and Screen
Christina Gutierrez
For those of us of a certain age group, the words “Holy Grail” call to mind almost immediately the scene from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in which Indy escapes a gruesome death (by late 80s special effects standards) by correctly identifying the sacred relic as a plain “carpenter’s cup” rather than the ostentatious and ornate vessel chosen by his Nazi pursuers. But what of other representations of the grail? Some films, like the more recent The Da Vinci Code (along with most grail-influenced stage plays) pick up the idea that the grail is not an object, but an idea or a state of being. Christina Gutierrez  examines representations of the grail in film and on the stage, tracing its roots in medieval romance asking the question that has puzzled scholars for centuries and fascinated directors and playwrights for decades…just what the hell *is*it? Why are we so fascinated with it on film? Why is it different (or difficult) to put it on stage? What do these depictions of a medieval catholic relic have to do with modern audiences? Is there a “holy grail” of grail representations?

Christina Gutierrez is a Ph.D. student in Performance as Public Practice at UT Austin. Her dissertation research is on modern performances of medievalism, both on stage (in plays that might not even realize that they’re medieval), and in spaces like the Medieval Times Dinner Theatre and the Renaissance Faire. She’s also a freelance dramaturg, most recently for the Austin Shakespeare Festival, and fully open to answering the age old question, “wait…what’s a dramaturg?”

Look Before You Flush
Phyllis Kung
It might not be something you’ve dwelt upon, but you can learn a lot  about yourself by staring at your poo. We will take you an a fascinating voyage and discover the defining characteristics of a stool and how Chinese Medicine uses these facts to understand the health of the ‘producer’. In addition, you’ll learn some fun facts about dung in popular culture and how to modify your diet and lifestyle in order to create a pristine plop.

Phyllis Kung is not so much a poo fanatic as she is fascinated by what naked eye observation can tell us about a person’s health, attitude, and lifestyle.  She is currently working towards her Master Degree of Acupuncture and Oriental medicine at the Texas College of Traditional Chinese Medicine.