I gotta be honest, I don’t get really “get” Thanksgiving. I like the four-day weekend, of course, and the pies — honestly, I could take or leave most of the traditional Thanksgiving-day foods, except for the pie — but the day itself has always seemed like kind of a second-tier holiday to me, really just a placeholder between the far more significant Halloween and Christmas, and nowadays of course nothing more than a prelude to the insanity of Black Friday shopping. And my personal history with it has not always been… good. And then there’s the ritual that seems to have sprung up of people publicly announcing online all the things for which they’re thankful, manifested most recently on Facebook as daily postings, one item a day, throughout the month of November. Um, yeah. That’s not really me either.
Even so, I would like to wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving, and I hope when you sit down at your respective dinner tables, you do find some meaning in it all…
(Extra credit if you get the meaning of that image!)
A couple years ago, I ran across a neat little site called the Sci-Fi Airshow, which is predicated on the notion that the spaceships and other miscellaneous vehicles we remember from the movies and TV series we grew up on were in fact real. Supposedly, the shows themselves were fictional, but rather than faking everything with special effects, the producers either built or acquired actual spacecraft and filmed them in action. And now, this conceit goes, these old machines are in the hands of private collectors and traveling the world on the airshow circuit so the public can see them up close, take ground tours of them, and maybe even go for rides, just like the 1940s warbirds I so love.
In reality, of course, the Sci-Fi Airshow site is just an excuse for a guy named Bill George to demonstrate his formidable art skills and love of 1960s and ’70s sci-fi through lots of gorgeous, photo-realistic renderings of imaginary spacecraft sitting in real-world settings. (I love the irony of “proving” the existence of nonexistent things by using CGI, which is arguably less “real” than the physical F/X miniatures that embodied these ships to begin with!) But the pretense is maintained throughout the site, and Bill has obviously had a lot of fun cooking up “true-life” back stories for everything. For example, it seems that the Battlestar Galactica shuttlecraft sat neglected for years on the Universal Studios backlot tour, where it eventually became a home for drug-using squatters…
Anyhow, I saw this morning that Bill has really outdone himself with the site’s latest addition, a short film all about the Jupiter 2, the iconic ship from the campy TV classic Lost in Space. The tone of the video is a dead-on imitation of similar materials from real-world airshows, from the generic music and slightly-too-cheerful host to the cheesily dramatic title graphics to the inarticulate gushing comments made by spectators. One technical thing that caught my interest: when the video references the Jupiter 2‘s cinematic ancestors — the flying saucers seen in movies of the 1950s — what we see is not footage from those early films, but digital re-creations that manage to look simultaneously identical to and better than the original effects shots. The obvious explanation is that Bill didn’t want or could not pay to license authentic film footage, but I wonder if perhaps we aren’t meant to think these vessels were “real” as well, and we’re what we’re seeing is “behind-the-scenes” footage? Or maybe I’m just overthinking it, as I’m prone to do…
In any event, I have nothing but the highest admiration for Bill George’s talent and dedication to his fannish obsessions; this is truly cool stuff. Give the site a look, and watch the video below. Oh, and keep your eyes open during the vid for glimpses of other fan-favorite machines from vintage sci-fi, including that creepy robot spider-thing from Jonny Quest, the ANSA Icarus spacecraft from Planet of the Apes (seen here in its upright launch configuration!), and Star Trek‘s Galileo…
It’s a grey and gloomy day here in the SLC — by mid-afternoon, it felt in my office like it was past dinnertime already, because the light was so dim outside — but it’s not too terribly cold, a combination that always puts me in a strange, difficult-to-describe frame of mind.
As it happens, my trusty iPod often seems as if it’s capable of reading my mood and somehow proceeds to find exactly the right song for the moment. Here’s what it served up while I was out taking my daily constitutional today along South Temple, Salt Lake’s grand boulevard of Victorian mansions and towering oak trees:
I don’t have much to say about this one. I have no particular memories associated with it, aside from being introduced to the song in the back bedroom of my grandma’s house by my cousin Stacey. Despite being a year younger than me, Stacey always seemed to be slightly farther along the arc of musical sophistication, and I recall her introducing me to quite a few songs and artists at that crucial moment when you’re beginning to take an interest in adult things, but still haven’t quite reached puberty… that moment in which, in my experience, so much of our tastes are truly formed. As far as I can recall, I’ve always liked this song. And I really like looking at Stevie Nicks circa 1981, but I suppose that goes without saying.
Anyway, for whatever reason, this turned out to be the perfect tune for a comfortably chilly afternoon with an iron-gray sky overhead and wet, faded-gold leaves whipping around my ankles as I walked and remembered things that once made me sad but recently seem to have lost some of their power over me…
Confession time: I’ve never especially liked Guns N’ Roses.
This may strike some Loyal Readers as strange, given my well-known affection for the hard-rock bands of the mid to late ’80s, the so-called “hair metal” guys. (I prefer the term “pop metal,” incidentally.) But G N’ R didn’t really fall into that category, did they? Their sound was louder and more anarchic than their contemporaries, closer in spirit to late ’70s punk than anybody like Def Leppard or Bon Jovi — which is, of course, what their fans and the critics thought was so great about G N’ R. But then I’ve never liked punk either. I enjoy a little melody with my crunchy guitars, please. Then there was the band’s image… oh, boy. Even at 19, I couldn’t help but roll my eyes at lead guitarist Slash hiding behind that mop of hair and that dippy top hat, and lead singer Axl Rose is precisely the sort of scrawny little smart-ass who somehow manages to enrage me simply by breathing. He puts off the same vibe (to me) as Adam Sandler, another smirky, beady-eyed little twerp I’d love to sock right in the nose. You just know these guys used to be the kid back in school who’d fart in his hand and then hold it over your face — the dread buttercup technique, the name of which, I suspect, is one of the reasons why I’ve never warmed much to The Princess Bride and its unfortunately named heroine — and then somehow you would be the one to get in trouble for disrupting the class.
I do like a number of individual G N’ R songs, though, or at least I like them at first. That is, they start off great. But inevitably, somewhere just after the second verse, the drummer starts ramping up the pace and Slash takes off down some self-indulgent back alley, and the whole thing runs off the rails in a nerve-scraping crescendo that I rarely manage to tolerate all the way to the end. “Sweet Child o’ Mine,” possibly the band’s best-known hit, is a perfect example. The first two-thirds are a near-perfect rock tune. Then it just gets obnoxious. And this is enough of a pattern with the band’s output that it keeps me from ever really saying that I like them.
But Guns N’ Roses did record one song that I like without reservation, and it’s a song that’s been on my mind a lot this week, what with my anxiety leading into the election, followed by the apocalyptic post-election laments of the heartbroken Republicans and all the tiresome back-and-forth about what exactly happened that night and what it all means. I’ve also been thinking of the troubles a couple of my friends are going through at the moment, and of course there’s my own eternally fragile state of mind and my weariness with all the worn-out bullshit of life. And throughout this past week, when all this stuff has reached a critical mass and I’ve felt like I’m at my lowest, most exhausted point, this song has flickered through my mind… and weirdly enough, the thought of it has kind of helped. And maybe it can help some of the people reading this, too, the ones with the problems and the ones who are afraid and unhappy, and the ones who, like me, are just plain tired. It is truly a song — and a sentiment — for our moment.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you “Patience,” from the 1989 album G N’ R Lies:
And on the note, I bid you all a pleasant weekend…
…I tracked down and scanned a photo of my favorite-ever Halloween costume I mentioned in the previous entry:
This was taken at my old elementary school during the student costume parade (do they even do that anymore?) in October 1979. I was in fifth grade, 10 years old, and this would be the last year I went trick-or-treating… the last full-blown costume I wore until I became an adult and started going to costume parties and rediscovered the joy of dressing up and role-playing. It was the best costume ever.
I also posted up some more fun vintage stuff tonight at my Flickr photostream. If you’re curious…
After that big, painful, confessional bowel-movement of a preceding entry, I think we ought to have a little fun, don’t you? Here’s a meme that Jaquandor and SamuraiFrog both did earlier this month, which I’ve been trying to get to for a while. And for the record, I also swiped that animated GIF from SamuraiFrog, just because I thought it was moody and cool…
Just to bring you all up to date, I turned 43 a little over a month ago.
Friends and long-time readers know that I don’t especially enjoy my birthdays. Not anymore. I used to. My old photo albums are full of pics of me holding up the latest cake designs for the camera and looking happy. I used to anticipate the landmark rite-of-passage-type birthdays as eagerly as any kid ever followed an advent-calendar countdown to Christmas: becoming a teenager at 13, getting my driver’s license at 16, adulthood at 18, finally able to buy booze — legally, that is — at 21. For some reason, I recall 25 was kind of a big deal too… my silver anniversary, I guess. I had a quarter-century behind me and the main engines were still burning, all systems nominal.
Then something changed. I started having a problem with birthdays when I reached my thirties. And they got to be really difficult for me when I hit 40. Other people tell me they see birthdays a chance to celebrate life, or at least a good excuse to have a party. But for me they have become depressing reminders of time lost… no, time wasted… and dreams unfulfilled.
As I wrote on the occasion of last year’s birthday, “there’s just too much baggage now, too many disappointments and regrets. Too much understanding that a single lifetime isn’t enough for all the things you want to do, and if you avoid making tough choices when you’re young — as I did — you might not get the chance to do some of them.” Since turning 40, I’ve also realized, as I further elaborated at the beginning of this year, “that while there may always be possibilities — as Mr. Spock so frequently counseled us back in the days when Star Trek was relevant — the probabilities of a great many things are shrinking for me.” Pretty hard to party hearty with that sobering truth lingering in the back of your head, isn’t it?
It probably doesn’t help that my birthday falls around back-to-school time, with all the bittersweet memories and melancholic feelings that stirs up, and the waning sensations of summer to amplify the sensation of time slipping away.
And yet, strangely enough given all the discontent and self-loathing that usually accompanies this annual observance of my failure to live up to my potential, this year’s birthday… wasn’t bad. Certainly it arrived with considerably less sense of utter defeat than in years past. Maybe I’m just becoming resigned to middle age, irrelevance, and mediocrity. But it’s also entirely possible that my forty-third trip around the sun was so traumatic that the formal demarcation of its end might have come as more of a relief than a reckoning. Seriously, the past 12 months have been… well, they’ve been something, that’s for sure.
***TEXT MISSING***
UPDATE: I found an intact copy of this complete entry and have reposted it elsewhere. See: “Forty-Three” Restored!
Here’s something that’s been going around the InterWebs the last couple days, so you may have already seen it — I’m somewhat ashamed that our esteemed colleague Jaquandor beat me to the punch on this one — but I have to make a note of it anyhow because it’s just so damn cool. It’s the latest masterpiece by artist Dusty Abell, whose tribute to the live-action Saturday-morning kid shows of the ’70s caught my eye a few years ago. But this new painting handily surpasses that earlier one, both in terms of information density — there’s a lot to look at here — and also in the size of the smile it brought to my face. Yes, I can identify each and every character, ship, and object in this painting, and tell you the name of the episode it came from… and you know what? I’m not at all shy about admitting it…
Be sure to click on the image and go through to the highest magnification so you can really savor the detail. If you’re of a certain age and even a mild fan of the original — the true — Star Trek, I guarantee you’ll be impressed. This image is simply magnificent. I wish Dusty was offering a print of it, to be honest…
(Also worth your consideration: Dusty’s “Television Sci-Fi and Superheroes of the ’70s.” They’re all there, man, all my imaginary childhood friends. This Dusty Abell is my kind of nerd.)
I long ago lost track of how many times I’ve seen Star Wars — or Episode IV: A New Hope as the Damn Kids(tm) insist on calling it — so it kind of shocks me that I’m just now thinking about this, but then my recent viewing of that Despecialized bootleg the InterWebs have been buzzing about really was almost like seeing the movie for the first time again…
Anyhow, you know those four Imperial guys Han Solo (presumably) kills aboard the Millennium Falcon while it’s held captive on the Death Star? Remember, the Falcon has been captured, and the initial Imperial boarding party fails to find our heroes because they’re hiding in the smuggling compartments under the floor. So Vader insists on sending a couple of guys in with heavy scanning equipment… we hear that equipment fall to the floor, and then Han’s voice calls down to two stormtroopers at the foot of the ramp, asking for help. They go inside… and we hear blasterfire. So, four (most likely) dead Imperials… whom we never hear about again. What do you suppose happened to their bodies?
I think it’s a pretty fair guess that Han dumps them in the secret compartments for safekeeping until after the Falcon escapes from the Death Star… but I find myself wondering if, in all the excitement, maybe he forgot they were down there. Did Han haul them all the way to the rebel base? And did he remember them there, or was he too eager to get the heck out of Dodge before the DS showed up and turned the fourth moon of Yavin into a new ring around the gas giant? It’s sort of amusing to think that maybe he didn’t get around to dealing with them until well after the movie’s final battle and the award ceremony were over, when all of a sudden a lightbulb went on in his head — no, in Chewie’s head! — and… well, let’s hope the rebels had a hose somewhere in that big hanger.
Yeah, I’m thinking maybe I need to turn in now. It’s been one weird-ass weekend.
I didn’t know flashmobs were even still a thing. And my reaction is probably amplified by my recognizing the location… I’ve been there! It’s the market street in Koln — or, as we Americans would say, Cologne — Germany.
(Extra credit if you get the meaning of that image!)
