May 2009

We awoke on day two ready to get out and start exploring.  I hadn’t really planned any sort of itinerary – I’d just compiled a list of “things to see in no particular order” and decided to figure it out as we went along.  For our first full day in Portland, we decided to mainly stick to Downtown and the Pearl District, with a brief jaunt to the South Waterfront.

Our room at the Ace featured a great old claw-foot bathtub.

Clearly, the first order of business was breakfast.  Thanks to a wonderful web site, VegPortland, we had heard of a place called “Blossoming Lotus” that sounded interesting, and it was listed as being only a few blocks from the hotel, to the north of us in the Pearl District.  On the way out, I grabbed a shot of the Ace’s lobby mezzanine, which was set up as a sort of study for guests.

So, out we headed.   Read the rest of this entry »

May, 2009

This is not a slight against Southwest Airlines, but this excursion cemented my desire to not fly again – too uncomfortable, too stressful. It’s weird, because as a kid I loved to fly. I loved to sit by the window and watch the wing and ailerons and flaps and such, and see the world gliding by underneath. Sometimes, after a family vacation, my grandparents would ask me what my favorite part of the trip was, and as a deeply nerdy child I’d say “the plane ride.” Now, it’s just constant worries about turbulence. I get that it’s safe and efficient, but some animal part of my brain doesn’t. And what’s the deal with airline food?

And a note to Albuquerque: I’m sure you’re a lovely city, and you made wonderful Weird Al song fodder, but your airport’s positioning relative to the surrounding mountains makes for some unpleasant air currents for Southwest flights making stops on the way to the Pacific Northwest. It would be nice of you to either move the airport or the mountains.

Anyway, it was evening when our 737 touched down at Portland International Airport. Prior to landing, as we descended through the puffy white clouds, our first impression of the area was that it was very green. Sure, we have grass and trees in Texas – at least, most of the year. We don’t have anything quite so intensely, lusciously green as the Pacific Northwest, though. Doubly because we left the Texas of summertime, when the grass turns brown except where people essentially spray paint it green (and that’s only slightly an exaggeration – this is the land of TruGreen ChemLawn, after all). Peering down out of the plane, it was like looking into a box containing nothing but Forest Green crayons.

Upon landing, we stepped into the clean and well-lit terminal and made our way to baggage claim. It was our intention to spend the entirety of the trip without renting a car, so we headed downstairs to our first real encounter with the Portland we’d come to see: the MAX light rail train.

There are several MAX lines, and the Red Line runs right into the terminal at PDX. It makes it extremely easy to get to and from the airport, so riding it was a no-brainer. We settled in and headed off towards downtown Portland. Along the way, we noted that the Red Line stops at an Ikea – an Ikea with light rail access? This was a dream for us, being Ikea fans from the land where getting to the big blue Swedish megastore requires a long, terribly stressful drive across county lines.

As the Red Line rounded a curve, I got this shot of it.

A short time later, we pulled in to downtown Portland. Read the rest of this entry »

Tim Burton’s been on a hit-or-miss streak for a while now, but when he was on, he was on – in one unbroken run, he gave us Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands, and Batman Returns. That’s enough awesomeness for the entire careers of many directors – Burton accomplished that with his first five real films.

Capping off that winning streak, though, is Burton’s genuine masterpiece, an outstanding piece of cinema that is now often forgotten about when talking about Tim Burton, Director.  That film is Ed Wood, the lovingly crafted, brilliantly successful biopic of one of Hollywood’s most infamous personalities:  Edward D. Wood, Jr., the “Worst Director of All-Time.”

Now, fellow fans of “Mystery Science Theater 3000″ know that Ed Wood’s pictures are far from being the worst movies ever made – as bad as a Plan 9 From Outer Space or Bride of the Monster can be, they are nowhere near as poorly made or soul-crushingly torturous as films like Manos:  Hands of Fate, Monster-a-Go-Go, or Red Zone Cuba. Fortunately, Ed Wood doesn’t really play into the “worst of all time” mantra that much, instead depicting Wood as a relentlessly optimistic, wide-eyed dreamer with aspirations of being the next Orson Welles, using his talents to their absolute fullest – never realizing that his talents are pretty puny.  The film takes Wood’s side and crafts him as a likable, charming go-getter that one can’t help but sympathize with, which makes the inevitable ups and downs of being a Z-grade Hollywood director all the more affecting.

The film follows Wood from his early days transforming a sex-change exploitation flick into a personal, emotional (but still unsuccessful) look into cross-dressing (1953’s Glen or Glenda), to his meeting washed-up drug-addicted horror icon Bela Lugosi, to getting 1955’s Bride of the Monster made amidst funding troubles, ending on the iconic note of Wood’s career:  the filming and release of the legendary Plan 9 from Outer Space in 1959.   Read the rest of this entry »

The First Lady of superheroes finally gets to shine on her own.

I’m a Wonder Woman fan. I don’t read a lot of comics, and to be honest I haven’t even read any measurable amount of current Wonder Woman material, but as a character I’m definitely a fan of the Amazon princess. I own the original William Moulton Marston Golden Age Wonder Woman run in hardcover and Darwyn Cooke’s “DC: The New Frontier” has a place of honor on my coffee table. (I have a problem with the way Diana is drawn most of the time these days, but Darwyn Cooke’s version of her is my absolute favorite.)

I’ve always considered her to be one of comicdom’s most interesting characters – a woman raised in a feminine utopia by a mother who freed her people from enslavement at the hand of man, who now must serve as an emissary and champion of both her people and that very same world of man. A woman trying to empower the women in Man’s World to stand up for themselves and realize that they are special and amazing in their own ways (some say Diana’s not really relatable because she comes from an all-woman utopia – I disagree. She might not have ever been passed over for a promotion because of her gender, but when you come from a people who were enslaved by gods because of their gender I figure you’ve at least got a pretty solid foundation on which to base your arguments). A woman who is massively powerful, rivaling and perhaps surpassing Superman himself in many ways, and perhaps even more intimidating than Supes because of her femininity (one of my favorite moments in “The New Frontier” is the brief scene between Diana and Superman in Asia, as he confronts her for aiding a group of women held captive and forced into sexual servitude by guerilla fighters. Diana disarmed the guerillas, freed the women, and let them take the guerillas’ guns and slaughter them. Diana, drawn by Cooke as basically a seven-foot-tall, endlessly curvaceous ’40s pinup model, stares Supes down and gets in his face, standing a good several inches taller than the Man of Steel. She berates him for slamming her actions while the government conducts secret operations in the region before snarling “There’s the door, spaceman” and sending Supes on his way. It really gets the point across that even Superman is somewhat uneasy about being on Diana’s bad side). A woman who is equally capable of bringing about peace through massive strength or pure love. A woman whose sense of rightness might not quite mesh with the “American Way” every time.

Like Superman, she will always be an outsider who doesn’t quite fit in with normal people – but in some ways, she’s even more of an outsider than Supes. Sure, he’s massively powerful, intimidating, and on some levels godlike, but he’s an alien. At some point, people expect that aliens are going to be different. Diana’s much more subtle – she’s also massively powerful, intimidating, and on some levels godlike, but she doesn’t have the whole alien thing to explain it. When you get right down to it, she’s just an incredibly exceptional woman from a race of exceptional women. To a lot of people, that’s going to be weirder and more intimidating than an alien. She’s not powered by a yellow sun or born of a species of space beings – she is a product of Earth, a force of nature.   Read the rest of this entry »

I began to sense that I was coming out of the dream state at last, a dizzy feeling playing around my head as though enjoying a frolic in the meadow in springtime. I was cold, and sore in the legs, arms, and all up and down my back. As I started to regain feeling, I began to sense the dank, leaden air around me, heavy with moisture and feeling as if nothing living had breathed it in a great many years. I could tell I was laying on a floor, and it felt like stone. Yes; cold, wet stone. Under my right hand I sensed the presence of a small bit of moss.   Read the rest of this entry »

Having recently seen 2007’s fantasy flick “Stardust,” I feel compelled to write my thoughts on the movie.

“Stardust” is what you’d get if you took Rob Reiner’s 1987 cult movie “The Princess Bride,” loaded it up on CGI excess, paired the light and frothy humor with some out-of-left-field graphic violence, sprinkled it with a few dozen helicopter shots lifted from Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings,” and then tweaked it in places with a “Terry Gilliam” Photoshop filter. The result is something of a mess, very occasionally approaching something good before veering off into derivative territory.   Read the rest of this entry »