A Shattered Childhood Illusion

Yesterday I went to Tombstone.

No doubt to the surprise of most of my friends and relations it is not thanks to Val Kilmer's performance in the 1993 film Tombstone. I am a true geek. I owe my fascination to an original Star Trek episode called Spectre of the Gun. An episode famous because they didn't have enough money for a real set so Kirk and Spock wander around a town made of western building facades. The plot revolves around Kirk and his gang being forced to play the parts of the bad guys against the Earps on that fateful day.

From those beginnings was born a fascination with the legendary characters and events that made up that famous fight in Tombstone. Really, all of the American west is fascinating for the alternate morality and colorful people that made it up. The prostitutes. The gunfighters. The lawman who weren't always so lawful. The feuds. The friendship. One of the most fascinating things to me about the legend of the OK Coral was the loyalty that existed between the suicidal gunfighter Doc Holliday and the borderline lawful Earps. The romantic in me loved it.

There is not much romantic to be found in the town of Tombstone anymore.

Yesterday Some Girl, her fiance, Tech Support and I piled into their car and drove the hour it took to get from Tucson to Tombstone. It was to be the fulfillment of a childhood dream. I'd heard that it was a tourist trap, but I had to go anyway.

The old courthouse of Tombstone which is now a museum was the first place we went. It proved to ultimately be the most interesting. It is filled with artifacts and historical information on the city, from the discovery of the first silver strike to when the mines finally closed down. Though at times it felt a little hodge-podge and quaint, it was still very interesting.

We left the courthouse and began to stroll around the town. I first began to suspect the true nature of the town when Tech Support laughingly informed me that it would be $3 to see the world's largest rose bush. Shortly thereafter it cost $4 to see three men shoot each other with blanks and stand up repeatedly while making off-color jokes in a "gunfight" show.

We paid $4 again later for a package deal at the OK Corral which lead to the ultimate destruction of Tombstone in my mind. The first part of the deal was a little history piece on Tombstone, narrated by Vincent Price. As the lights came down in the small theater we sat in with a few polite looking older couples one of the ladies that worked there said, "Please don't take pictures of the diorama during the show. If you want to we can open it up again for you afterwards."

We sat in stunned silence for a moment as the door shut ominously behind us and Tech Support said softly, "A diorama? This could be fantastic."

It was.

Tears poured out of my eyes and I desperately tried not to disturb the other patrons by laughing out loud as the curtain pulled away and the giant diorama was revealed. Vincent Price's dramatic voice describing the earliest years of Tombstone as lights highlighted various parts of the huge model was lost on me as the absurdity of the situation sent me into hysterics. I was finally able to calm down a bit when a small screen came down and started playing some shaky vintage 60's footage complete with reenactments. The giggles started again. The little screen rose and I discovered that the diorama actually rotated, displaying different scenes each time the screen went up and down. This did not help matters.

Further highlights included a fire in Tombstone that involved the model buildings windows all turning red, and the deaths of Morgan Earp and Frank Stilwell, in which small diorama people clunked dramatically to floor in their death throws. Not much information was gained as even Vincent Price lost interest in his overly dramatic monologue and started slurring words together.

We left the diorama and went out into the courtyard of the OK Corral itself. In one corner of the yard large metal manikins moved arms and necks jerkily in a bizarre reproduction of the gunfight where no one falls over. Once again the austerity of history was not present and I tended towards giggling rather than awe.

It was here also that one of my main problems with Tombstone is highlighted. It's hard to tell what is truly historic. The fight of course didn't actually happen in the Corral itself (although two other murders had occurred there) it happened in an empty lot next door. However, the location we were in was called the "OK Corral". Now, it is stated that the person who owns it now also purchased the empty lots, but I'm still confused. Were the creepy sun-bleached reproductions standing where Wyatt and the gang actually stood? I'm left uncertain. As I was also left uncertain about many of the historical buildings that lined the street. Which ones are actually historical and which ones are rebuilt? Do they look like they used to? Most of them seemed concerned more with bringing in money than with history, which was a bit off-putting.

A quick run to wikipedia reveals that I am not the only one who had these problems.

There were gems amongst the tourism intense locations. Fascinating information about prostitutes cribs, lynchings, and all the things that make the American West so fascinating, but most of it is buried beneath the artificial attempts to turn Tombstone into an amusement park.

After Wyatt and Doc fled town for Colorado one step ahead of a large posse most of the locations they had made so famous burnt down. Not too long afterwards flooding in the mines crippled and then destroyed the town's source of income. One can't help but wonder if it was meant to stay dead.

Tombstone, the self proclaimed "Town Too Tough to Die", is about as tough as a kitten.

Still, despite my doom and gloom I think Tombstone could get better. I know that people need to earn a living in a town where the main industry is tourism, but I want to believe that if they focused more on history and less on fleecing tourists, the money would come. I want to see clearly what buildings are reproductions (which are most I suspect) and to see pictures of what the originals looked like. I want to stand where Wyatt and Doc stood and feel the history, not giggle at the absurdity.

And please, get rid of that diorama.

On Strange Foreign Lands

Last week, without ever leaving the state of my birth, I traveled to a strange and foreign land. The customs, the culture, even the conversation was alien to me and it took me a few days to get used to it. It was a strange land of white walls, mirrors, christmas decorations and giant fake ferns. I'll admit I may have stumbled a bit with the native population at first.

For example, I dare anyone to come up with, on the spot, the correct way to respond to a reference to the cat-eating Husky in residence as "my angel baby from heaven". I certainly didn't and settled for a stunned silence instead.

Yes, I was at my boyfriend's mother's house.

Over the past two decades I have become accustomed to a certain set of faults and idiosyncrasies belonging to my own family. Thus it is always a bit off putting when meeting other people's family who invariably have a different set of faults and idiosyncrasies that I am unused to. Suddenly, I am at a loss. And being at a loss around the mother of the man you love is not a great vantage point. I personally prefer having the upper hand.

Tech Support's mother is a fascinating woman to me. Here I am, neurotically worried about the environment, driving a fuel efficient car as little as I can, buying local, trying not to waste money, trying urban composting and gardening, and recycling as much as I can. In comparison Tech Support's mother drives a massive SUV so she can feel safe, spends obscene amounts of money on buying all sorts of materialistic items, and probably doesn't know much about sustainable living. On the other hand, she is working on getting leaky old pipes that pollute the water in her area replaced, destroying old businesses and turning them back into marshland, and personally helping several disabled people in her area live better lives.

Despite our different approaches to environmentalism we got along just fine and passed a pleasant several days together.

Though now I am glad to be home with my little angel babies from heaven.

Wrestling the Ten Ton Gorilla

I've managed to insert enough BS into my current story that it now clocks in at well over 50,000 words (that's a million-zillion pages for those of you not in the know).

I've never written remotely near this number of pages, my previous attempts at long-story writing maybe hit the 20,000 word mark. My Gorilla is twice the size it's ever been before, pardon the topical reference, but it's a bit of a King Kong.

No longer do I flip back a few pages, or even ten, to see if what I wrote before makes sense now. No, I'm sitting at page 70 and wondering if what I wrote made sense on page 9, and does it all lead up to that climactic point on page 88?

I feel like I just can't keep that many pages straight in my head. By the time I'm at page 88 I don't even remember what page 9 said, let alone if it flows well.

What about the subtlety? The delicate phrasing? The gradual unwinding of emotions so that the end point, where all subterfuge is gone and the characters have grown as people and they can finally freely and joyously declare their love for one another, is as satisfying as a spicy scallop roll on a hot day?

I was so worried about being too obvious and heavy handed (my mother refers to it as being like Oliver Stone) that by the end of my first draft one got the sense that the characters might possibly have some sort of affection for one another. I don't think either had even thought about love the whole story. And when you are writing a romance that's bad, like writing a murder mystery without a dead body - very unsatisfying.

That's one of many things that I am fixing as I grapple with this monster.

Will it ever get any easier? Will I be able to write a story with a climax so powerful that makes silly things like me tear up and then check to make sure no one is watching? That the gradual building of feelings keeps the reader on edge, knowing it'll all turn out well but loving the torture that the daft characters keep putting themselves through? Will I know if and when I hit that point? Or will it still feel so weird and unmanageable?

I don't have the answer, just an excessive number of rhetorical questions.

But at least I must be enjoying this insane wrestling match on some level, or why would I be doing it?

CGBBC

I have a friend who is very sensitive (perhaps with good reason) about when people complain about recognizable special effects in Film/TV. I must admit that I rather tormented him with my ignorance in the early stages of our acquaintance. Years have passed however and I now have a more, ahem, intimate acquaintance with SFX and understand just how many of them the average audience does not notice.

Of course there are still plenty of times when the space ship looks just a little to smooth, the background doesn't quite move in sync with the characters, and the debris from the explosion are oddly chunky. I now realize how often however, low budgets and time crunches can be an excuse for such imagery.

But tonight I saw bad Special Effects for which there is no excuse and it has raised my ire.

I saw bad CG in a period BBC show.

Foyle's War is a show that I have quite fallen in love with in the past several months. Tech Support's mother loved it so much that she sent us the first two seasons on DVD just so we could enjoy it ourselves. It's a mystery series set during WWII. While most of Britain are either off dying in the war or being killed in bombings, Mr. Foyle gets to deal with the few Brits who are still killing each other. Michael Kitchen, as Foyle, has a marvelously dry, tired way of dealing with the lies that people tell in their attempt to hide their crimes. The supporting cast is nuanced and wonderful as well.

So you can imagine why garish, flat military planes moving through a monochrome sky and exploding rather abruptly might be an affront to my senses. That after the melody of the British accent a flat, story-book looking city radiating light in an odd way meant to imitate a bombing, might be less than satisfactory. I won't even bring up the airplane oscilliscope-type-thing the nazi's were pointing at that was very obviously generated in a computer invented long after the plane fictionally went down.

Of course I am not so cruel as to pretend as though these sort of scenes are easily done in any practical sense, still, I have a few suggestions:

Smoke is your friend. Cloud your plane in it as it 'flies' through the sky.

You don't need a sharp focus. Especially when your buildings look so flat.

Perhaps the suggestion of bombs and plane crashes are better than the distracting affect of poorly done fake ones?

If nothing else, get Terry Gilliam to do some animation instead, it looks more realistic.

Luckily all of this occured in the first 5 minutes of the episode and I was able to once more submurge myself in the drama of WWII England and dead bodies.

Still, with all due respect, while I don't mind and even expect bad CG when it comes to the Sci-Fi channel, no more bad CG in my BBC shows, please?