Crafty Seasonal Decorations

We got into the spirit of the Halloween season with some crafty window decorations. How quaint. Apparently we're letting our suburban side show...

Corrie did the cutting and gave the kids the choices on what design would pass muster. Then Cass and Camille (but mostly Cass) told me where to put them from the outside. I made the web using the string we had leftover from our Decemberween-tree purchases each year:

The cat, tree, and graveyard are very masterful, and I believe Cass cut the bats:

I really liked the cutout of the witch on the moon...

At one point Corrie said, "Maybe we should move the tree up to---" to which I had to cut her off.

"Eh, I don't think any of these are moving from these spots. Not sure they'll survive..."

It was a very traditional afternoon, something we don't really engage in normally. We have enough 'bike-rides to the beach' and 'scooter trips to the playground' that normal suburban-type 'sit and craft some window decals' is novel.

Maybe that's novel for everyone, and my consideration of it being 'traditional-suburban' says more about me. 

Anyway, Happy Season! Cass decided on our Halloween costume and I'll show pictures as we get closer. (Or zoom past it.)

Discovery Cube in OC

We had a playdate this past Sunday at the Discovery Cube in Orange County, Santa Ana to be more precise, in the shadows of the CA-22 and I-5 freeways:

It's a pretty neat exploratorium-type place, only not as spectacular as the SF location. Older kids may not have been too impressed, and Camille was too young really, but Cass and his buddies loved it. 

There was a Halloween themed event happening as well, with "corn mazes" and other things:

The longest wait was for the bumper "cars," which were devises with steering controls similar to Ron's ride-on mower at the Farm. We waited in line for nearly an hour, since it took only four riders at a time and each group got three minutes:

They had a bed-of-nails attraction, where you laid on a table that was smooth, and once activated, the nails would emerge en masse hoisting you up, holding for a few beats, then returning to the table. Cass saw me doing it, and wanted to try himself, which is when I took the following picture:

Outside they had a giant dinosaur you could walk through, with pieces of flesh and meat stripped away scientifically, and a makeshift GI tract inside the belly zone.

One thing that was kind of an issue was that the whole outdoor space looked like a playground, but it wasn't really anything like that. That didn't stop Camille, of course, from doing Camille things:

Inside the giant cube itself was a replica of a space exploration module from a generation or two ago, with fake steam and smoke that made the kids flee quickly after arriving at it:

Cass and some of his buddies all go to different schools now, and it was cool they got to hang out:

They even did a laser-room sneak-attack thing---see them on the monitor below, trying to avoid the beams:

All in all it was a nice trip to see some things. I think the Halloween aspect was, eh, not as spectacular as they billed it, but the kids had a good time, which is what we're really trying to do.

Oktoberfest with Family

My cousin Lizzie and her husband Thomas came to visit us in Long Beach this past weekend and we ventured to an Oktoberfest event that was both kid friendly and dog friendly, so we could bring all of our babies, both the fur- variety and the human- variety.

We posed for one of these nifty pics:

Camille doesn't quite get it, and we adults may have had some beers by this point, but such is life.

It was up our street, Elm Ave, at the Scottish Rite Temple (a Freemason building and home to the rad Ernest Borgnine Theater) grounds, had big tents set up, and had a (relatively) rockin' polka band.

I joked when we got their that the band, and polka in general, is what white people would come up with musically when left to their own devices and not influenced by the creative passions of a formally-enslaved and currently-oppressed people.

It was super cool, especially to hang out with family, which I'm trying to improve on---my imposing on family so our kids feel like they are part of a family.

It's always fun, though.

They gave us return tickets for this weekend, because of the purchase of these tickets, and we'll head back for a beer on Saturday afternoon. We'll keep it far more mellow this weekend.

British Invasion (Of Comics!)(In the '80s!)(Comes to the Moving Image!)

Having just finished Netflix's first (and currently only) season of The Sandman, I wanted to reflect a minute on comics from the 1980s and the shows/movie . Well, not that exactly...

The comics industry got some influx of new perspectives in the 1980s that helped move the medium into a more mature direction. American Frank Miller (The Dark Knight Returns, 1986) and a trio of Brits Alan Moore (Watchmen, 1986), Grant Morrison (Doom Patrol, 1989), and Neil Gaiman (The Sandman, 1989) were the main auteurs, if you could use such a term. The success of the two Englishmen and the Scot had the small circle of critics at the time claiming a British Invasion. This led to the likes of Garth Ennis and Peter Milligan (comic nerd alert!).

In any case, each one of those properties has been adapted for the screen, small or large, in the past, er, decade (plus?). Skipping Frank Miller's work, since it's been adapted a few times in various ways, and he's an American, I wanted to briefly mention the other three works.

The top row above is each writer's first issues with their respective titles.  Grant Morrison took over with issue 19, but the other two were first issues. Watchmen was a self contained story and universe, a twelve issue maxi-series), and was a dark satire of superhero comics and superhero universes in general. That's why it's generally beloved by comic fans. The movie took itself a little too seriously, was very slick, and basically became the very thing the comic was trying to satirize and parody. 

Grant Morrison's run on Doom Patrol was another novel approach to super hero comics, and is beloved by a far smaller subset of comic fans than Watchmen or the Sandman. It's weird for weirdness's sake, and if that's a facile description, it's because I don't think the fans of the comic read this dreck. I really enjoy it.

Sandman I never really read, but I remember the comics, and along with Doom Patrol, I remember them before they switched over to the Vertigo imprint. In fact, it was those titles (Sandman and Doom Patrol) along with Alan Moore's Swamp Thing and Grant Morrison's Animal Man, that helped bring the Vertigo imprint into existence.

Sandman is Neil Gaiman's total recreation of a character and introduction of new mythos into DC Comics, as well as introducing  dazzling visual vocabulary since the main character is the anthropomorphized Dream, the king of The Dreaming, his realm, the collective unconsciousness of humanity. It's wild, heady stuff.

All I really wanted to do is say that I liked Doom Patrol better than Sandman, and what I'm talking about is the shows. I haven't read the Sandman comics yet, and while I did enjoy the show quite a bit, I like Doom Patrol more. Doom Patrol seems like it splits the difference between superhero comics and existential fuckery. 

Maybe it's the combo of the out-of-this-world acting by Diane Guerrero as Crazy Jane and an ensemble cast of tortured misfits trying to not screw up The World that makes the show for me. They're just trying to get by, like so many of us. 

Some of the episodes of Sandman are good, and I like Tom Sturredge as Morpheus, and the ladies playing his older sister, Death, and the Vortex, Rose Walker, are awesome. The approach of gender fluidity and non-binary characters and actors to portray them fits with the ethos of a comic WAY ahead of its time. 

I'll certainly keep watching new episodes of Sandman, should they come. With Doom Patrol, I mark the calendar and circle it twice.

I would like to check out the Watchmen show on HBO, I hear it hits pretty close to the heart of the original comic.

Heatwave Finally Breaks

Just like everywhere, it seemed, we in the Southland were being smacked by a heat and humidity wave, a moist blast furnace that defied description. If you live in Saudi Arabia, maybe, or Manilla, or Ho Chi Minh City, sure, you may be able to withstand the 100+ degree and 99% humidity. Or Phoenix...or Biloxi...

But in LA? In Long Beach? Just look at the display on our Google spy:

That's nearly twenty past noon on a Sunday and it was 106 degrees outside. Opening the door was like being hit with a blast of steam-room air: hot, muggy, and immediately you started sweating and your hair kinked up. That quickly became a "No-go outside" day, as many of them turned into.

I'd like to say that it was an aberration, just a weather fluke, but I'm afraid it's what the new moral looks like, a sadly predictable result of what things are and will be as we move forward in time.

It got so crazy that when I'm outside and NOT feeling oppressed by the furnace of The Normal, I'm confused.

Cool Airplane Pictures

Corrie took a few pictures from her flight to Texas that I doctored a bit for this post. Check it out:

Visible at the bottom is the marina and even the start of the beach proper, our Alamitos Beach section. There's also the convention center and the performing arts complex. 

The red and yellow arrow is our apartment and the blue and yellow arrow is Cass's new school, just a few blocks away. It was built, I'd wager, in the years immediately following the earthquake in 1934 that destroyed so many schools. The newspapers all pointed out that everyone was lucky the quake hit on the weekend. 

Anyway, this kind of thing I find fascinating: pictures from above and being to find recognizable things.

Corrie's New Office

We moved Corrie out of her old office space, which notified their renters with about four weeks notice that the space was closing to retool. What followed during the month of August was a scramble to find a new space, and there were various configurations of how Corrie and some of the other folks in the old space were set to do that.

Eventually they all opted to find their own situation, and Corrie settled into another nearby office space. The mural on the back, the alley-facing facade, is pretty damn cool:

The view from the second story conference room is also pretty nice:

The space is bigger snd the price reasonable, and it's even a bit closer than the last office.

But, that back mural is rather striking, and I took the following picture when I was driving by the other day:

My Long Beach-related question would be: when are they going to make this parking lot into another apartment building?