Idling of gypsum operation puts Empire-Gerlach in jeopardy
The company-owned town of Empire, which is 100 miles north of Reno, will go quiet after 87 years when USG Corp. halts its gypsum mine and wallboard manufacturing operations in January.
Officials say the move, putting 92 people out of work, is considered an “indefinite idling.” It’s possible the plant will reopen if and when the ailing construction industry recovers.
But the ripple effect of the closure could extend beyond the 300 people — employees of USG and their families — who live in company-owned apartments and single-family homes in Empire.
The area, including nearby Gerlach, is a launching point from State Route 447 for the tens of thousands of participants in the annual Burning Man festival in the Black Rock Desert.
“For them, it’s catastrophe,” Elliott Parker, economist at the University of Nevada, Reno, said of the longest-running gypsum mine in the U.S. coming to a halt. “If the idling isn’t temporary and (USG) doesn’t come back in a year or two, I’d have a hard
time imagining Burning Man could continue there.”
Undoubtedly one of 2010’s most anticipated films, Disney’s TRON: Legacy finally hit cinemas earlier today. This video was created by Andrew Dorn from scenes captured at the premiere and is accompanied by music from Galapagoose. The event saw Will Hine, Harley Powell, Alexi Dowley and Jay Huggins skate up and down a small half pipe that was fitted with interactive lighting software, keeping in theme with the technologically advanced motion picture. Enjoy!
The prodigious director talks about taking immersive cinema to the next level with one of the most mind-bending visual experiences in movie history
* Text by John-Paul Pryor
When we saw TRON: Legacy for the first time last week, it’s safe to say that our jaw was firmly in contact with the floor from the moment its protagonist Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund) enters it’s brilliantly conceived neon-soaked universe. It was quite simply the most mind-bending, hyper-visual immersive 3D head-trip we have ever seen, and as its first-time feature director Joseph Kosinski notes in this interview, it should probably come with the tag “Drugs Not Required”. To say that the much-envied CGI prodigy has taken cinema to a new dimension with this film is something of an understatement. This hyper-speed celluloid extravaganza is more than a film, it’s a taste of what’s to come; of what lies far beyond the accepted boundaries of cinema.
Thankfully, it’s one with a well-considered narrative based upon the classic estranged father and son motif, which also takes into its sway a rather dark allegory for totalitarian regimes, and more specifically The Holocaust (Olivia Wilde plays ‘Quoraa’, the last of the ISOs – a miraculous digital species who have all-but-one been exterminated in ‘The Purge’). If the neon-soaked light cycle-heavy landscape is not enough to entice you into this wildly disorientating nostalgia trip, perhaps watching Jeff Bridges grapple with a younger version of himself is. The legendary actor plays both the 60-something creator of the Tron universe Kevin Flynn, and his ageless clone ‘Clue’, and witnessing him seemingly battle with his younger self on screen is a truly bizarre cinematic experience, one with some slightly unnerving connotations. We entered ‘The Grid’ with Kosinski to talk about the evolution of cinema and find out why he thinks we are already living in the future.
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