GalacticMu

Everyone once and a great while I, like many, am bum-rushed by the villagers and the time comes to gather up the bindle and escape by the protection of night. Wait, I already mentioned I was moving to Los Angeles.

Anyway, things are reaching critical mass, so poor put-upon GalacticMu will be on silent autopilot for a short while. Hopefully our Engineer, who will be monitoring from a remote station, will have time to chat a little in my absence.

If I make speak of the mundane, but BALLS, moving is horrid. They say it’s worse than divorce/separation, but I don’t seem to recall divorce involving so much fucking physical labor. Or wait, are they including the having to move part? Because then it is worse. Otherwise, I pick divorce over moving, rain or shine. The emotional strain of realizing we are nothing but an accumulation of utterly disposable hauls of junk is SO HEARTENING. I swing wildly between saying “Fuck it all!” and throwing perfectly good crock pots into the trash and then scrabbling it back out muttering, “But that’s good, that’s a good thing for the apocalypse, if we had electricity, because it’s good for one-pot meals.”

Just. Give me some medication. Okay?

I wonder why people don’t do that. People get chemical intervention when they’ve had a loved one die or they’ve, I dunno, come back from war - I can imaging walking into a doctor’s office and saying, “I’m moving,” and have the doctor go, “Goodness me, here’s some Percoset.”

In the mean time, since folks are keen on asking, here’s a little FAQ:

Why are you moving to Los Angeles?

Process of elimination. It’s a boring story that involves work. But basically, we wanted to move back to the West Coast and Seattle was automatically out (it’s a beautiful city to visit, as they say), San Fransisco seems lovely but terrifyingly expensive, Portland was an option and the Los Angeles area was an option. Portland didn’t have any work nibbles. Los Angeles did. Done and done. And something I haven’t spoken too much of yet: I just feel something about Los Angeles. Oh, hello, Deanna Troi, when did you get here? It’s difficult to describe and I don’t like to flaunt it because it I fear being mistaken for one of busloads of folks who daily arrive and are certain that they’re mere days away from Fame and Fortune, but I have this hunch. I’ll leave it at that.

Where are you going to live?

No idea. That’s how I moved to Cincinnati, and if it’s good enough for Cincinnati it’s good enough for Los Angeles. Our plan is to stay for a little while (maybe 2 weeks) at a gracious friend’s house, after which we will have settled enough for finding a weekly hotel to stay at until we get an apartment. It’s going to be rough living - suitcases and take-out food, for the most part. But the alternative was to go to the Seattle area to stay with friends and family, then fly to Los Angeles to try and find an apartment, then fly back and get the car and drive down. Costly and ineffective. Normally a big draw for us, but not this time.

As an aside, the internet has been, as ever, an utterly unrivaled resource. Thanks to weeks of poking around I now have a good idea of what neighborhoods to concentrate our housing search in, as well as the never-ending driving advice. Right now I have reams of notes to aid our search and we have every confidence that we’ll find a big, free, wood-floored house in a crime-free part of the city where wild unicorns deliver baskets of ripe figs and avocados to residents every morning.

You don’t seem the type to want to live in LA.

Yes, well. You don’t know me very well, do you? I’ve talked about it for years, as a pipe dream. I’ve wanted to work on special effects (practical effects, not CG) since I was a kid. It is true that I am pale and my lips are naturally thin and pinched, but I suspect it’s an urban myth that everyone is made of plastic. That kind of thing only happens in Miami. And despite my nacho-eating, booze-swilling ways, I’m actually a closet health nut. I bitch constantly about high fructose corn syrup and bleached flour. I love salad and vegetables and bulgur wheat, when my Crohn’s Disease allows me to eat them. I’d slather an avocado on every thing I ate, if the baby jesus granted me the wish. I’d rather eat fish than any other meat. By all accounts, I’m already addicted to “California Cuisine,” but I’ve been calling it “Angry Hippie-Spawn Cuisine.” So we’ll see how me and LA get along.

How are you moving there?

I’m glad you asked! We’re taking I-40 across Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. Yes, we are aware it is summer, but it is a preferable route over driving through mountainous Colorado and then south through Las Vegas. On this end we are packing our goods into two ABF U-Pack cubes. We used them in 2006 and the system worked out great. You schedule the cubes to be delivered (you have to have street parking or a driveway available for them to be placed on), after which you have three days to pack them, after which you call and arrange them to pick up the cubes. From there they can either start to deliver them or they can send the cubes to their gigantic freight shipping yards for storage, for which they charge a perfectly reasonable monthly fee. What we are doing, since we don’t know when we’ll be needing them, is sending them straight to storage in Cincinnati (rather than store them at the other end in LA, for two reasons: one, there are three shipping yards in LA and you must pick the closest one to the destination, no exceptions, or they charge you additional moving fees and two, the contents will be cooler sitting in a shipping yard in Ohio). When we know where we need them we just make a phone call and within a week our stuff arrives. Pretty slick. Not terribly cheap, but we don’t have much of a choice.

So there you have it.

This is going to be a hard one.

I’ve known it was coming. But the gulf between preparing one’s self and actually facing the music is a big one.

I’m talking, of course, about Watchmen movie.

Of all the comic book stories in all the world, this is the one that I feel most protective of. This is my giant fanboy experience and if they fuck this up I am going to fall out of love with Hollywood forever. And so it is with the timid, fragile, quivering heart of a teenager that I watch the now-available trailer for Watchmen and think, “It’s not perfect, but … could it be? Good?”

Good?

• Casting looks promising - what was once slated to star both Keanu Reeves and Jude Law now is cast by semi-unknowns
• Effects are pretty
• Rorschach’s mask swirls!
• Yay Archie! It appears they didn’t update Archie into “awesome” Batmobile-level absurdity

Break my heart?

• My favorite character, Dr. Manhattan, looks… too real. Veiny?
• Might just be trailer-politics, but man does it look way overly action-packed
• The Silk Spectres had bad costumes before - and the new ones aren’t any better
• Some scenes appear overly stylistic (giant Dr. Manhattan, for example) and not in keeping with Gibbons’ style of comic realism

Lightly Flashy offical Watchmen website, with trailer.

I’m in a little bit of shock right now. I’ve been staring at this WordPress draft page trying to decide between some long-ass dedication and a short-n-sweet send off. Neither is particularly satisfactory when one of your heroes has died.

Stan Winston, easily the greatest special effects artists ever to live, has died at the young age of 62.

Stan - can I call you Stan, Stan?- won his first Oscar for creating one of the most complicated puppets ever constructed, the alien Queen of the seminal Aliens. Busting out pretty much every single great movie monster over the next 20+ years (right up until Iron Man’s scene-stealing suit, which you’ve surely seen by now).

When I was a kid, I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up. I guess I still don’t. On any given day I wanted to be a storm chaser, an astronaut, an epidemiologist, a horse trainer, a comic book artist, a pagan priestess, a writer, a movie star and a special effects artist. As my 30’s approach with gaining speed, I find that the one career I think most often about is the special effects artist - namely, practical effects. Monster masks, elf-ears and bloody intestines. Any DVD watched at my home means watching the special features hoping for behind-the-scenes peeks. The giant Alien box set I own (thanks dad!) gets play time as much for the voluminous documentaries as it does for the films - and in particular, my favorite part: Stan Winston and his crew, mocking up a giant, absurd, nearly-impossible puppet parts while seeing the possibilities behind the cruddy black-painted foam and the rubber tubing - the Queen. Who cares if someone is standing by with an industrial-size tube of KY Jelly to string from the Queen’s jaws? Me, that’s who! I want to be that someone!

Of course he had other achievements, undoubtedly ones he was more proud of. His stories of trying to keep the damn tyrannosaurus rex in Jurassic Park from shaking as though plagued with some kind of palsy would crack me up (the rain would soak into the latex and overload the motors, which would then violently shudder). You know, another frustrating day at work.

Anyway, thanks Stan. I’m getting choked up thinking about you fighting cancer for 7 years, and I wish I’d had a chance to meet you. Lightspeed.

Sometimes I nerd out so hard I embarrass the shit out of myself. Getting a tear over Orbital’s live Dr. Who blowout is one of those times. Then again: I’d not change myself for the world.

After promising months ago that I would cry myself Chinese at the Johnson Space Center (and then failing to deliver) I instead unexpectedly lost it at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. I just wasn’t expecting to see SpaceShipOne hanging there, sun-bleached, battle-worn and triumphant. I just wanted to touch it, to feel something that had done the fucking improbable. “It’s so small,” Halcyon whispered. “Yeah,” I smiled.

image credit to Sunday Williams - that’s me!