Planetarium Mobilis
Living Arts of Tulsa
August 15, 2026
Solaris
Circle Cinema
August 18, 2026
What with the Glenpool refinery explosion, the heat-stricken trees prematurely shedding leaves, Scott Taylor prowling northwest Arkansas, and the thought of the Cry Baby Cry sculpture baking in some warehouse at a taxpayer-funded $2500 a month, it seems like a good time to leave the planet for a sec. In spirit, anyway.
You might not think The Pickup has the budget for this, but I went to outer space twice this week. The first trip happened at Living Arts, where Austin-based duo Highway Lights presented their new ambient-music-and-film pop-up Planetarium Mobilis on Saturday night. The second came via Tulsa Global Alliance, which brought Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Solaris (1972) to Circle Cinema on Tuesday, in honor of Tulsa’s sister city Zelenograd.
Total time: four hours and change. Total cost: around $30. Getting a taste of interstellar travel while also experiencing air conditioning felt like a win.
Sure, things got a little hairy on planet Solaris, with its seething sentient ocean, ambient paranoia, and themes like what my cinephile seatmate jauntily called “the prison of my own nostalgia.” But the crowd gathered in the Circle’s big theater (some veteran Solarists, some first-timers, and at least three Pickup contributors) seemed cozy enough, as we tried not to munch our popcorn too loudly during the gorgeous silences that make space feel so intimate in Tarkovsky’s film.