We are…the Three Amigos!
Day Three, we awoke in New Orleans before 7 a.m., excited and peppy and ready to go. Sadly, most of the French Quarter was still asleep, but we found a place to hang out while we waited for them to catch up with us. No matter where you go, Mondays are Mondays.
10:51 pm.. EDT — See that tiny, funny-colored dot at upper right? That’s no space station.
No, the above photo was not necessarily my best attempt at capturing the soul of tonight’s much-ballyhooed “super blood moon” very special astronomical event, but it’s the first one I took when I discovered my Canon PowerShot ELPH 340 HS has a setting called “Handheld NightScene”. The moon is visible in that shot, but wasn’t for long. Here in Indianapolis we’ve been under cloud cover all weekend long, and they refused to let up even for something as unusual as a lunar eclipse, let alone an oddly hued one. I’d describe this as “once in a blue moon”, but I’m not sure which moon color is rarer and I’d rather not spark any sky-science semantics squabbles over this.
I didn’t take the greatest SuperBloodMoon photos of all time, but at the very least, the pics leading up to the feature presentation were the best moon pics I’ve ever taken in my life. For a thoroughly amateur photographer, I’ll take that little victory.
Here’s the best takes on what we saw before the clouds solidified the gaps between each other and ruined an otherwise cool evening. All time stamps are Eastern Daylight Time, and for once I’ve resisted the urge to crop or resize any of them.
Right this way for the light of the silvery moon! Featuring cameos by the color red!
One of the G-rated stretches of notorious Bourbon Street on a Sunday evening. Even Party Central needs its downtime.
There she was at long last — New Orleans!
We reached our primary objective at the end of Day Two, thankfully before sundown. All the post-Katrina tourism resources we consulted in our vacation research (books, travel sites, AAA brochures, message boards with supporting posts from wary New Orleans residents) seemed unanimous on one important message: anyone caught outside in New Orleans at night will be swiftly, repeatedly murdered. Perhaps that’s not the reality, but we weren’t prepared to call Fodor’s bluff during our first hours in town. No matter how long we spent in Alabama or at stops along the way, we wanted to be in New Orleans and checked in at our hotel while the sun was still on our side.
We met our objective, and all it took was a long, nearly featureless drive through an unrelated state, braving the cramped hallways that pass for roads in the French Quarter, and cutting a major stop from our itinerary.
Spend five minutes peeking at Midlife Crisis Crossover and you’ll notice my wife and I do enjoy a bit of travel. We have our annual week-long road trips to other states and time zones, where we can discover new environments and attractions, such as the New Orleans establishment shown above. From time to time we head off to our sometimes annoying neighbor Illinois for geek conventions, and we’ve discussed expanding our scope in other directions. We like spending our respective birthdays visiting other parts of Indiana and seeing other Hoosiers like or unlike us. We may devote a lot of time to screens with entertainment on them, but we place a certain importance on getting out of the house and seeing the world beyond our front door.
However, our family, friends, and longtime MCC followers know our expeditions come with a limitation: we don’t fly. We’ve never bought a plane ticket, we’ve never soared in or above the clouds, we’ve never been across the oceans or even to California, even though we have friends living there we simply must meet before we all die of oldness. By our standards air travel is expensive; the boarding requirements are invasive; you miss all the interesting sights and stops between points A and B; and it doesn’t help that the news outlets love to tell us about all the crashes but they never celebrate the hundreds of successful non-crashing flights that I’m told are theoretically possible and maybe even real.
We’re well aware Superman loves to tell everyone who’ll listen that, statistically speaking, flying is the safest way to travel, but that’s easy to say when you’re so invulnerable that not even actual dying keeps you down for long. For all these reasons and more, we’ve never been in a position to give planes a chance.
Until now.
The southbound road from downtown Birmingham led us up a ridge called Red Mountain, so named for its red iron deposits and the suitably colored surfaces. Atop one particular crest there’s a park centered around what’s billed as the world’s largest cast-iron statue, molded in the likeness of Mount Olympus’ most underrated resident, the Roman god Vulcan.
Right this way for a closer look at the Hephaestus of Earth-2!
If you’re pressed for time, please feel free to pretend this photo of our dog Lucky wearing a bandanna is today’s entire MCC entry, toss him a happy “Like”, and read no further. He’s used to that kind of fleeting attention from strangers.
Welcome to Midlife Crisis Crossover’s 1100th entry! In the grand tradition of comic books and The Simpsons, every 100 entries we mark the occasion as a sort of accomplishment and sometimes celebrate it. Those 1100 moments have been an interesting way to spend the last 3½ years of my internet time, but odds are it’ll take another two or three hundred years of consistent blogging before I stand a chance at becoming a household name. By then I’ll be more renowned for my refusal to die than for any paragraph I’ve ever written.
Every blogger who somehow makes a living off it has their official list of blogging tips that you’re supposed to follow in order to achieve fame, success, impact, and/or income. I’m happy for them and I wish them well as they make lasting contributions to the world at large and change the course of mighty rivers. Meanwhile at the other end of the spectrum, stubborn folks like me keep plugging away at their sites without regard for conventional wisdom, official procedures, or dime-a-dozen “Blogging for Dummies” articles. My approach to the game can be summed up in two words: “low-key” and “counterintuitive”.
Wanna blog like me? Here’s ten tips for how it works in my world, through happy times or blah:
Going into this year’s vacation, we hoped the cuisine would be a highlight at our various stops — be it good ol’ Southern kitchen cookin’, Gulf-sourced fresh seafood, or, really, anything outside of international franchisees. We received our first recommendation from the friendly guide at the Alabama Welcome Center, who insisted that during our road trip we had to try genuine shrimp-‘n’-grits somewhere below the Mason-Dixon line at least once. For lunch on Day Two, I trusted her and gave it a shot.
Low-cost admission, free hors d’oeuvre, big-screen trailers, a chance to support the arts and to hang out with adults. Tonight had all the best qualities we needed in a diversion from the week’s events.
Since 1992 Indianapolis has held its own celebration of cinema with the Heartland Film Festival, a ten-day, multi-theater marathon every October of documentaries, shorts, narrative features, and a few animated works made across multiple continents from myriad points of the human experience. Several have aired previously at other festivals; three will be making their American theatrical debuts; two have elected Heartland as the site for their world premieres.
In the early years Heartland concentrated on works of pure uplift and positivity, while today their keyword is “transformative” as the breadth and technical proficiency of entries has grown by leaps and bounds. For the 24th annual event, dozens of volunteers screened 1,756 submissions from 96 countries and together culled them to a more manageable 175+ official selections, several of which will be vying for official festival prizes.
My wife and I been fans of the Heartland concept for years, but so far we’ve shamefully managed to attend just one, a 2011 screening of Emilio Estevez’ The Way at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Last May, Anne signed up for Heartland’s mailing list at their Indy Pop Con booth. This week she was notified of tonight’s special preview presentation at the Athenaeum Theatre downtown, at which the Heartland staff announced their official selections and competition finalists, and released the 99%-finalized schedule for 2015. We had the time, we sorely needed to get out of the house, we’d been hoping for a chance to jump into the Heartland experience, and we loved the idea of having more information at our fingertips about our future viewing options.
Among the numerous films coming to Indianapolis in October, the following is a partial list of what jumped out at one or both of us, either during the presentation or in the detailed festival guides they handed us as we exited. Trailers and links to official sites are provided where available. We’d like to see at least a few of these, time and location permitting. Naturally the results will be reported here on MCC.
Photo swiped from a relative on Facebook, date unknown. I have no pics of him on hand. Shots of the two of us together exist but are rarer than mint copies of Action #1.
After I arrived at work this morning, I learned their estimate was off by about forty hours and that he’d passed away shortly before midnight.
The last time I saw him alive was on the morning of our wedding day in 2004. He’d arrived hours before anyone else, including us, because he wanted to congratulate us in private. We spoke for less than five minutes before he took his leave.
We spoke on the phone once every couple years after that, mostly about medical updates. We share a first name, and it’s entirely possible I’ll be sharing some of his conditions in the years ahead.
My preferred method of working through unique events (better or worse, good guy or bad) is to ponder at length in this space, but for dozens of reasons this moment doesn’t feel like the right time for new essays. The first time I tried to string any clauses together this evening, an ostensibly simple, fourteen-word Facebook status took me twenty-five minutes to write, including an extended thesaurus consultation and an editorial review by Anne at my repeated insistence.
Between this and other little signs throughout the day, I strongly believe God’s been trying to tell me to be still and spend more time listening, reading, thinking, and praying for a good while.
The funeral is Friday, but I’ve no idea how the next two days will go, either offline or here on the site. More introspection? Extended radio silence? Deep diving into Scripture? Off-topic distraction? Wish I knew.
Apologies for the disjointed fragments. For now I’m putting my inadequate words away, shutting up, standing by, and waiting to see what comes next.
“Electra” has stood atop the Alabama Power Building downtown since 1926. Her origins lie closer to Greek mythology than to any similarly named Marvel characters.
Our two-hour walk around downtown Birmingham on a Sunday morning took us from Kelly Ingram Park to Linn Park to the Art Museum and to other parts here and there. We also stopped at their bus station because Anne had it good authority that they had one of those smashed-penny machines. I don’t mention those often in our travelogues, but those are a big, BIG thing for her. You’d be surprised how many of our stops over the years appeared on her smashed-penny machine master list months before they appeared on our finalized itineraries. This time, though, either her informant was misinformed or the bus station management hid it in some far-off back room. We weren’t prepared to go that deeply into the heart of bleakness.
We took zero photographs of the bus station, but other curiosities caught our eye as we traipsed around town. Electra up there, for example.
We had an idea in mind of how today would go. A small Indianapolis convention had brought in a handful of actors of varying levels of fame and importance. In my mind one of the biggest was Lance Henriksen — Bishop from Aliens and Alien³, one of several cops from The Terminator, star of the X-Files spinoff Millennium, costar of the southern-vampire cult classic Near Dark, and other stuff I’m forgetting. With a geek resumé like that, I anticipated waiting a few hours or more for the chance to say hi.
VIPs could enter the con at 10 a.m. When the general public was ushered in promptly at 11, we were third in his line. That seemed wrong. If we had known how quickly we’d finish the rest of my to-do list, maybe we would’ve taken a closer look at the photo, noticed his blinking, and asked humbly for a retake. Who knew.
Right this way for photos and a super-short convention round-up!
DC Comics house ad from The Flash #339, cover-dated November 1984. A lot of ’80s characters are no longer around, and it’s been decades since fans begged DC to bring back “legends” like these.
We live in an entertainment culture where we take it as given that all the best ideas were conceived before we were born, so trying to forge new universes seems like too much effort. Reboots used to be a desperation move, but anymore they’re the norm for luring in new fans — not just for work-for-hire companies with an intellectual property catalog to keep fertile and growing, but for artists, writers, and filmmakers all too happy to make a lifelong career out of perpetuating the lives and histories of worlds and heroes they didn’t invent themselves. It’s a living.
It’s easy to scoff at reboots when they’re happening to characters that don’t matter to you. If you’re a geek for long enough, though, sooner or later they’ll get to a universe you do care about.
I’ve been there. I remember the first time I had a universe yanked out from under me.
Right this way for memories and lessons about two universes with a lot in common…
“Steelworker” by Luis Jimenez, 1990.
Our Day Two morning walk through the desolate streets of downtown Birmingham took us across the street from the north end of Linn Park and toward the Birmingham Museum of Art. We’ve visited art museums in other cities on past vacations, but we regrettably missed out on BMA admittance because they don’t open till noon on Sundays. We had a busy schedule ahead of us and not much margin for immersing ourselves in the local culture beyond the first few hours.
Luckily for us, the contents of the BMA extend beyond its mere walls and enjoy grassy display space all around the block. We enjoyed what we could on the lap we took. ADVANCE DISCLAIMER: Please disregard our situational example and give money to arts. Thank you.
Jedi M&Ms: they melt on Mustafar, not in your hand.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: a flashback to our four-day weekend at 2005’s Star Wars Celebration III in downtown Indianapolis, Indiana. Part 1 was nearly three thousand words’ worth of anecdotes, bullet points, actors, friends, Star Wars creators, popes, and the worst line we’ve ever endured in our entire lives. Part 2 was a basic photo gallery of stuff ‘n’ things that were pretty exciting to us at the time. Now it’s all standard convention decor, but we were younger and easily impressed.
And now we reach the grand finale to this very special all-35mm MCC miniseries in a predictable fashion with predictable fashions. It’s vintage cosplay time! Here’s what the Star Wars fans of yesteryear were wearing before cosplayers divided sharply into two camps: those spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars on painstakingly self-tailored tributes; and dudes in store-bought Halloween costumes. Enjoy!
Life-size X-Wing Fighter! Working engine and hyperspace drive sold separately.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: a flashback to our four-day weekend at 2005’s Star Wars Celebration III in downtown Indianapolis, Indiana. Part 1 was nearly three thousand words’ worth of anecdotes, bullet points, actors, friends, Star Wars creators, popes, and the worst line we’ve ever endured in our entire lives. Part 3 is the inevitable cosplayer roundup.
Tonight’s episode: more scans of 35mm ten-year-old photos, now with more Star Wars stuff than ever in them — a combination of official Lucasfilm props on display behind lock and key, loving fan-made objects, and Star Wars playthings writ large. If Part 1 is a long nonfiction book, Part 2 is the glossy photo section in the middle of the book apart from the rest of the content. More things, fewer words. Enjoy!
Right this way for a short, easy-to-scroll-through photo gallery of Star Wars things!
He was burnout concert promoter Del Preston in Wayne’s World 2, a victim in Alien³, and the big-bad Dr. Fennhoff in Marvel’s Agent Carter, but to Star Wars fans with advanced memories, Ralph Brown is best known as panicky pilot Ric Olie from The Phantom Menace.
So far my Labor Day weekend on the internet has been all about (a) toy fans reveling in the Star Wars “Force Friday” merchandise onslaught, and (b) longtime cohorts kicking around Dragon*Con in Atlanta seeing lots of SW-related costumes, actors, and at least one novelist. I’m happy for everyone enjoying themselves for those various reasons, but skimming through all this STAR WARS STAR WARS STAR WARS STAR WARS STAR WARS has put me in a nostalgic frame of mind about a relevant occasion from our own past that I meant to dredge up four months ago for May the Fourth but delayed due to distractions.
Ten years ago last April, my wife Anne and I attended all four days of Star Wars Celebration III (“CIII” to our friends), the second and final major SW convention to grace the Indiana Convention Center in downtown Indianapolis. As with the 2002 shindig (previously relived on MCC here, here, and here), our weekend was filled with costumes, props, things containing Star Wars logos, performers, crowds, terrible line management, and out-of-town internet friends given a great excuse to visit.
Sadly, my own write-up of the experience was atomized shortly after its initial posting due to a freak accident involving dumb stupid idiotic software that made it too easy for a trusting message-board administrator to delete dozens of threads with a single misunderstanding keystroke. Anne’s own version of events survived the purge and remains online as a minute-by-minute account more thrilling to those of us who were there, probably less so to outsiders. This, then, is the recap of her recap.
Sunday morning in Birmingham didn’t stay cool for long. We walked away from Linn Park hoping to see art. Before long we were dying for water. North of the park, nestled between the Birmingham Museum of Art and the Boutwell Auditorium, we found a tidy spot that offered and hid the best of both.
Once upon a time, at the very first comic book shows I attended as a teen, rooting through back issue bins for missing comics was the only thing I wanted to do. Once a year or so, my mom would drive me to the Marriott out at 21st and Shadeland, where the Ash Comics Show brought a bunch of dealers and collectors into a single ballroom and let them sell the heck out of comics — shelves, spinner racks, and packed longboxes from wall to wall. A few published artists would come in as guests. A TV and some chairs set up near the entrance passed for an anime viewing area. There may have been related events in another room or two. But mostly I wanted to plug the holes in my comics collection. The thrill of the hunt, the joy of discovery, the satisfaction of completism — whatever you call it, that’s how comics were my anti-drug.
I tried to get into the spirit in time for Wizard World Chicago last month. I took the above pic while going through my organized accumulation as a reminder to myself of the joy I once had rifling through hundreds of comics at a time in hopes of striking reader gold. I spent a couple of nights shifting from box to box, reuniting with old series, reliving classic arcs, stumbling across #1s I forgot I had (Reign of the Zodiac? That was a thing?), and generally immersing myself in the old-timey smell of newsprint and the nostalgic sight of crinkled, battered covers from decades past.
I was thiiis close to wanting more back issues. It almost worked.
In the last three chapters we walked through Birmingham’s Kelly Ingram Park, which hosted some of the most unforgettable moments in civil rights history and today commemorates those struggles and victories in a forthright manner. It would prove to be a solemn experience for us.
A few blocks northeast is Linn Park, which has the unenviable job of trying to compete against that weighty reputation for attention from the local citizenry. Not that their adjacency has to be considered a competition, but one certainly had more visitors than the other. Calling it the Jan Brady of Birmingham parks would be mean, so let’s not do that. We can instead highlight its prominent aspects, its own graven personalities, its own works of art dotting the downtown landscape.
Exhibit A, pictured above: the Eternal Flame of Freedom, a 1969 American Legion memorial saluting all Jefferson County war veterans, equipped with a gas jet for burning brightly. The flame was out when we happened by, so I’m taking the “burning brightly” part on faith. To me “eternal” implies 24/7 fire, but it’s possible in this context “eternal” means “three shows daily” and we were too early for the first performance.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:
It’s that time of year again! Anne and I are at Wizard World Chicago in scenic Rosemont, IL, where we’re so far having a blast even though parts of it resemble hard work and our feet feel battle-damaged after two days of endless walking, standing, lining up, shuffling forward in cattle-call formation, and scurrying toward exciting people and things…
My wife and I took an okay number of photos over the course of our three-day stay and will once again be sharing the most usable over the next several entries.
Tonight’s episode: the miniseries finale! The panels we saw! The comics pros I met! The winners of the Annual “Convince Me to Spend Money in Artists Alley” contest! The troubles with conventioning while old! And more!
Right this way for one last batch of photos, anecdotes from the weekend, and one (1) costume pic!
Midlife Crisis Crossover! 