More St. Petersburg Pier

In gathering materials for my blog post on the St. Petersburg Pier, I came across an undated postcard depicting early-era cars at night. The image is so cool and evocative that I couldn't resist a brief follow-up post.

Reviewing Andrew J. Morris's Postcard Dating Guide Styles and Types page - just looking at the cars, too! - I'm sure this card is unlikely to be any newer than 1930. Indeed, I'd guess that the image is from a pre-1926 pier.

Darker City

One of my favorite movies, Dark City, has been given the director's cut treatment - with mixed results. Hereafter, expect plenty of spoilers.

Visually, the film is more stunning than ever. Even the muted palate pops off the screen, and the climactic showdown (with some cool new effects, this time) is much more clearly articulated over the original. We even glimpse more spiral imagery this time -- thumb prints and the swirling of coffee creme -- to illustrate the maze-like reality of the city.

Narratively (at first), the film benefits from a generous application of a "less is more" philosophy. Director Alex Proyas's decision to remove the "Help! The audience is too dumb to understand this movie" intro monologue means that you no longer must mute the audio until the doctor opens his stopwatch when showing Dark City to first-time viewers.

Unfortunately, Proyas chose to add some heavy-handed dialogue between Mr. Hand and Emma that, true, makes the Stranger's "There used to be a ferry" exchange even more crafty and cruel. But the extended scene also weighs the movie down with too much exposition of what we already know.

And then there's the soundtrack, which is not improved this time around. The original version is far more prodding and orchestral, perhaps a sop to audiences at risk of drifting off. I loved it all the same. The new one is too restrained. I suppose that choice is a sign of the director's confidence in his material, but I miss the constant sense of dread produced by the gorgeous music in the original.

And don't get me started on Proyas's inexplicable choice to use Jennifer Connelly's original vocals in the film's two nightclub interludes (one, extended in this version). The first cut made use of Anita Kelsey's lovely voice. This version: not so much. Jennifer Connelly may possess many talents (acting, itself, a debatable issue in this film), but she can't sing.

One final note: The addition of a scene in which John Murdoch uses his psionic powers to torture Dr. Schreber seems to be both unnecessary and yet useful to understanding the "darker" truth of this film. Its protagonist, a character with which we initially relate and sympathize, risks losing the same humanity that the Strangers never had when he becomes the God of this "world."

Now, even the happy ending of Dark City is a little bleaker.

Learn More: This year I published a book chapter entitled "'Small World': Alex Proyas' Dark City and Omnitopia" in an edited collection called Sith, Slayers, Stargates and Cyborgs: Modern Mythology in the New Millennium. If you wish, you can read an excerpt of the chapter and contact me (wooda AT email.sjsu.edu) to get the entire piece.

Rethinking our suburbs

Haya El Nasser writes in today's USA Today how rising gas prices are inspiring suburbs like Maricopa, AZ; Rancho Cucamonga, CA; and Huntersville, NC to consider redesigning themselves into self-sustaining communities. The article even mentions a website, http://www.walkscore.com that evaluates the "walkability" of some 2,500 neighborhoods, proposing that our nation's tolerance for driving vast distances between bedroom, work, and market is rapidly declining. Here's a snip:

"We're sort of stuck with retrofitting the suburbs," says Scott Bernstein, head of the Center for Neighborhood Technology, which for years has urged that transportation costs be a criterion for mortgage qualification. "That's not all that bad. … There's nothing like a crisis to get people to try something."

Incidentally, my neighborhood (Scotts Valley, CA) has a Walk Score of 63/100 ("Somewhat walkable"). I hope that number will increase with the addition of our long awaited Skypark Town Center. It's a literally perfect illustration of this article: the transformation of an empty lot and two ill-placed propane businesses into a real downtown.

Read the entire piece: Gas prices drive push to reinvent America's suburbs

Planning for Halloween 2008

Anyone who knows me well can probably guess my favorite holiday: Halloween. OK, sure, Christmas is more meaningful and Thanksgiving is more sentimental. But hour-for-hour, I enjoy the times when Jenny and I design, build, and execute our annual Wood Family Halloween Theme Porch more than any other ritual of the year. Thus far we've done a pirate dungeon, a corpse wedding, an alien autopsy, and a psycho circus (check out the video from 2007).

This year I think it's time for "Dr. Frightmarestein's Haunted Laboratory of Horrors" (and, yes, I got the character-name from The Simpsons). Off and on, I might return to this post with thoughts on props, scripts, and other inchoate notions. Right away, I envision the construction of a demented mad scientist's lab with eerily lit jars filled with body parts, some sort of creepy electrical device that creates cool effects, and a gory medical experiment gone horribly wrong. As usual, Jenny and I will dress the part and develop some funny patter to add life to the scene.

We always post signs up the stairs announcing the PG-13 rating for our porch, not wanting to traumatize kids too young for our brand of Halloween fun. But each year some parents still choose to trundle their wide-eyed moppets into our lair, inspiring Jenny and I to downshift our act to a more toddler-friendly vibe. But our "target audience," pre-teens from 8 to 12, loves the show. Some years we've had to shoo a few off after they'd seen the entire show and couldn't pull themselves away, producing a traffic jam of kids waiting to climb the stairs. As usual, I hope that this year will be the best Wood Family Porch yet.

Any suggestions for ways I can flesh out the Mad Scientist theme? I hope you'll post a comment.

Mad Men Returning - Video Blog Post

Check out my video blog post on Mad Men

NOTE: YouTube somehow lost the "normal quality" version of this video, but it still works on "high quality." So click this link and ignore the note, "We're sorry, this video is no longer available." Go ahead and select "Watch in High Quality." It should work.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hy1ghI7NEQ

Don't forget: Sunday night at 10 p.m. on AMC [check your local listings to be sure].

Oh, and here's the intro:



Learn More: New York Times [Registration required] review: Back to the Office, Vices in Tow

Here's a snip:

"'Mad Men,' which returns to AMC on Sunday, distills the moment in the American century when the buoyant certainty that came with winning a war and running the world was beginning to crack."

"On the surface the dollar is strong and the Kennedy administration is in sparkling swing. There is a mournful, autumnal pulse to even the gayest office parties and supper club sorties, but it mainly goes unheeded. Most of the privileged white-shoe account executives and copywriters who ogle their secretaries; cheat on idle, discontented wives; and keep their offices as segregated as their country clubs have no real sense that their world is coming to a fast end. They are like vacationers on the beach just before a tsunami hits. All they see is that the ocean has receded and suddenly there is a lot more sand."

2005 Wood Family Trip to Australia

In three weeks and countless thousands of kilometers, we sampled the cosmopolitan pleasures of Sydney, watched Aussie parliamentary action in Canberra, enjoyed the coffee culture of Melbourne, played with kangaroos, wallabies, and koalas on Kangaroo Island, saw a Green Day concert in Adelaide, journeyed by train into the Red Center, communed with Uluru near Alice Springs, snorkeled along the Great Barrier Reef, befriended the fruit bats of Brisbane, and visited friends upon our return to Sydney.

Here's a link to the website (text written by Jenny) from our trip: http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/wooda/oz/index1.html

Space Solar Power

With all the discussion these days about the increasing costs of energy, it's cool to hear about a new idea that is both good for the environment and our economy: space-based solar power. Here's a snip from today's New York Times:

"A space solar power system would involve building large solar energy collectors in orbit around the Earth. These panels would collect far more energy than land-based units, which are hampered by weather, low angles of the sun in northern climes and, of course, the darkness of night.

Once collected, the solar energy would be safely beamed to Earth via wireless radio transmission, where it would be received by antennas near cities and other places where large amounts of power are used. The received energy would then be converted to electric power for distribution over the existing grid."

Read the entire piece: O. Glenn Smith (New York Times, July 23, 2008, registration required): Harvest the Sun -- From Space