Back from the Beach

After a chock-full-o'-design spring and a refreshing beach vacation on Galveston Island...

Ah!  Hot shrimp gumbo, ice cold beer, and warm Gulf waters!

A view of Galveston beach at the turn of the last century by P.H. Rose, Wikimedia 

But now I'm back.  To Dallas.  To work.  To blogging.

While opening ten shows in five months this spring I did rather let the blogging thing slide, but I'll do better now.  At least until my (very faint) tan fades and the work schedule warms up.

Before getting back to Theatre... a beach book recommendation:  the brilliant graphic novel from the internet blog-comic by Sydney Padua:

The Thrilling Adventures of 

Lovelace and Babbage*

The (mostly) True Story of the First Computer

Review to follow, but why wait?  Buy it HERE, now.  

(That's The Author, by the way, struggling with her day job to find time to write.)

Catch-Up

Lotso touristy goodness going on with me lately:

1)  A beach vacation in Galveston, Texas, a city with a fascinating history that includes Spanish explorer shipwrecks (Cabeza de Vaca); French explorer shipwrecks (La Salle); cannibals; pirates; early Texas troublemakers; numerous hurricanes; bootleggers, rum-runners, and illegal gambling; oil riggers; doctors; artists; Spring Break college kid troublemakers; and, nowadays, Caribbean cruise-goers.  Also delicious oyster po'boys.  And don't forget the Gumbo Bar's gumbo!

The Perot Museum of Nature and Science - believed public domain image.

2)  The new Perot Museum of Nature and Science.

A very interesting building - a sort of geological-metaphor of a structure.

 Architecturally I thought it had a beautifully clear design parti and well executed pre-cast concrete panels that suggest rock strata...  not so convinced by the west-facing plaza which will, I believe, be a broiler pan for afternoon visitors in the summer.  (Plus facing nothing-much instead of the main street, making the street-facing school bus entry look like the main door.)  Also problematic, for me, are all the one-material-just-slides-past-another gaps that recur in the building's detailing.  A cleaning crew nightmare: already little kids are dropping candy wrappers down these slots.  As often happens with such complex geometries, a few intersections of materials and planes are unresolved.  But traveling up and through the vertical circulation path is a kick.  The main ticket hall is a great space.  And I love all the glimpses of the city outside.  It's a very urban building.  

Some terrific displays (visit the dinosaurs and gem hall!).   My favorite detail is probably the giant amethyst geode that the visitor can crank a mechanism to open and reveal its crystalline beauty... a perfect microcosm of the building itself.

Amethyst geode from Wikimedia

Film Fest Monsters

Last night I watched the 2010 film Monsters.  The storyline: a NASA probe crashed into northern Mexico, now a Contaminated Zone where alien monsters run amok.. . Our heroes, a male journalist and a female tourist, have to travel through this to return to the U.S.  There's a pretty obvious metaphor.

I liked the film.  It's done on a modest budget, but it's wonderfully gritty and authentic (with one quibble) and beautifully photographed.  Good performances, I thought.  The story is logical, the escalating problems caused by the journalist's idiocy (ya wanna smack him).  I especially liked the - for once! - intelligent attention paid to alien biology.  A credible life-cycle is presented with reasonable explanation of the aliens' violent outbursts.  Even the attraction to light, especially flickery light like a TV's, had a suggested reason.  I love intelligent science fiction.  Aliens are filmed with effective restraint, which works so much better than the look!-another-special-effect! style of some Big films.  Monsters is good.  Late in the film comes the first, last, and rather beautiful image of the monsters.

The quibble?  It was shot in Costa Rico, Mexico, and Galveston, Texas - after it was devastated by hurricane Ike.  After getting such a good grade in Xenobiology (at least surface-believable - give it an A), Monsters totally flunked North American Geography.  Sorry, no jungles or mesoamerican pyramids near the Mexico/U.S. border.  Even if there were, topography wouldn't so suddenly switch to coastal sand flat, just steps beyond the protecto-wall.  Nevertheless, it was a personal thrill to see Ike-damaged Galveston.  Good to see that mess useful to somebody: it made very convincing alien damage.

Somehow that seems to sum up this film for me - the clever use of difficult circumstances to create something rather special.

Monsters film still courtesy of The Brag