Or, if you’re me, any day!

Up at Fantasy Magazine this week, I posted Ten Cheesetastic Fantasy Flicks for Summer. For once, there’s no competition for which one is best, because they’re all the best!

Except maybe Xanadu is the best.

(Look at those hostage eyes. Yipes.)

The thing is, some of the movies on that list are cheesy but legitimately good. The Mummy, for example, is pretty unapologetic summer-blockbuster pulp, but I’ve seen it quite a few times and it always holds up, because Pulpy and Bad are not synonymous, even though a lot of things that aim for Pulpy end up at Bad. (That’s another essay. I’m just noting it here.) Lost Boys is awesome, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure is amazing. I’ll even make a case for Earth Girls are Easy being a pretty solid flick! (Somewhere, Joseph Campbell is cringing.)

But there are some movies (…XANADU) that defy explanation.

I mean, you CAN explain it. You can say Xanadu is about Kira, one of the Muses who routinely get sent to inspire various artists to great heights, and her job is to inspire an album-repo artist to quit his job and open a Xanadu-themed rollerskate nightclub with Gene Kelly.

But look at that sentence. Nothing in it makes any sense! The whole movie is like this.

Explaining it more doesn’t help. Kira and Sonny (Malone, his name is Sonny Malone, people tell you that constantly in this movie) accidentally fall in love, which the guy is supposed to do because stalking people gets the creative impulse going, but she’s not supposed to because her dad Zeus will get mad at her (literally, her dad is Zeus and he scolds her through a reverb pedal), so their love is Forbidden, just like her love with Gene Kelly was Forbidden back in the ’40s when she came down to inspire Gene Kelly to…do something artistically amazing that will make him rich and famous. (It doesn’t seem to have panned out. No one mentions it. Maybe it’s awkward.)

How will Sonny ever find the heart to take Gene Kelly away from his beach rock and make Gene Kelly shop for suits in a store filled with dancers and find the strength to keep the club going when all he can think about is that girl he keeps seeing who never, ever takes her rollerskates off, except during the animated love sequence, in which she turns into a bird with legwarmers?

(I’ve seen this movie like, six times. It never gets any less confusing.)

It was hard to choose a representative clip. The scene where the sisters wake up from the mural they’re painted on (really happens) is pretty good. It gives the right tone for the film, both because the song makes you want to slap your ears off, and because it looks like the people actually in the scene were just as confused as anyone else, and the choreography was called out in a series of impromptu orders. (“Look at your hands! You have some hands! Have more hands! HAVE MORE HANDS.”)

But I think this clip has to win.

Notes: this clip has been severely chopped, so you are missing out on the Gene Kelly-led rollerskating step routine and the part where Kira and her sisters sing this in half a dozen different styles, including Country Western, in which Michael Beck (SWAN, WHY) has to shake his shoulders like he’s trying to wrench an arm out of the socket so he can be excused to the medic and just keep running and never look back.

Also, many of those sisters aren’t the same sisters from the beginning of the movie. I’m just saying, that’s the kind of show you’re in for.

An awesome one.

It’s not just a sub-par Moby lyric, IT’S ACTUALLY TRUE.

(That is an actual thought I had at Launchpad, while we were learning about the most common substances in the universe. It’s easy to dismiss Moby for everything after Play – not only easy, but probably a good idea – but the dude got some factual information about science at some point, that much is clear.)

Meanwhile, the Hubble, which is determined to show us how much we’ll regret letting it just fall apart in space, is taking pretty pictures just to spite us.

Dear Earth,

You know what? I am just taking pictures out here because it’s pretty and I feel like it. Don’t think this is about you, Earth, you hear me? Because I am over you. I don’t want you to worry about me, or feel guilty about just giving up on me forever, or anything like that, because I could not care less. You have fun with your James Webb Space Telescope, okay? Because I don’t even know what I ever saw in you, and I’ve got better things than you coming up.

No love,
HST

P.S. SEE ATTACHED, SUCKERS.

(Not pictured: filename “neenerneener.jpg”)

Also, yes, I have probably turned into one of Those Kids Who Won’t Shut Up About How Fun Camp Was*, and you’ll be regularly hearing about astronomy alongside movies and costuming. (Uh, fair warning for those who hate the night sky, I guess?)

As a kid I loved staring at whatever stars I could see (mmm, suburban light pollution), and I knew the mythology of the various constellations without having a sense of their real scope (or, let’s face it, knowing where many of them were). Launchpad really filled in some of the handwavey places in my brain and rekindled that little-kid love affair with the sky. It’s like I’m a kid again, only now I’m a really tall kid who knows terms like “visual binary” and pays taxes and has realized planes are not actually fun to be on like your parents always said they were!

* To be fair, I have not, nor will I ever, like an actual camp. I was out on Vedauwoo for less than three hours and I managed to wound myself and have an allergic reaction. The best thing about astronomy is that you can do it anywhere where you can look up, like penthouses with skylights. This will involve making new friends who have skylights in their penthouses, but it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.

Okay, I have not even begun to settle back in from Launchpad, where I spent a week learning about space with some unspeakably awesome people, but I have a lot of updates and not enough time to write thoughtful intros for them (or for anything, ever). So, we’ll do this list-style and then I promise to bore you sometime later this week with the awesome details about making s’mores with people using only starlight for heat and marshmallows we harvested ourselves.

(This did not happen. Wyoming has no marshmallow trees, as they only thrive in the Pacific Northwest.)

1. First, fiction news! My short story “The Zeppelin Conductors’ Society Annual Gentlemen’s Ball” is up at Lightspeed Magazine!

2. I saw Inception opening weekend. I had to wait until I was in New York to do it – I dropped my suitcase at my apartment and went straight from there to the theatre – but I saw it. I will be writing more (a lot more) about this movie later, but for now, my SPOILERY review is up at Tor.com. SPOILERS. It says so in the cut-tag, but I’m direct-linking, so SPOILERS. SO MANY SPOILERS. THE TITANIC SINKS. DARTH IS LUKE’S DAD. SO MANY SPOILERS.

3. Launchpad was great. I wrote up an intro post here, with some handy links, and followed it up with Four Fun Things About the Universe, for values of “fun” that include the knowledge that if you get close to a black hole you’ll be torn to shreds by gravity. Whee!

Tomorrow I should be caught up and ready to blog again. I hope. (I might just go home and sleep 12 hours. It’s reverse altitude sickness!)

They’re not just narratives; they’re snapshots in time, moments of pure joy.

Just like this scene from The Lost Boys, which came out in July of 1987. This means that they probably filmed in 1986, that moment when the 80s were just realizing what they could really become. It was a time of innocence and wonder; a time when a man needed only purple tights, leather underwear, and some chains to be fully dressed; a time when Jami Gertz had a promising career. (Remember Quicksilver? Anyone?…anyone?)

Full disclosure: this actually takes me back to a time when I was in high school and taking Photography. This was back when you had to know how to wind the film on the spokes in the dark and then pour in the developer and shake the canister, and if you did one thing wrong you ended up with a bunch of underdeveloped splotches and chemical burns on your hands, and then you had to develop each of the prints by hand using a series of complicated machines that they use for background props in movies like Splice now.

With the hours and hours of after-school work necessary to take that photo of your parents’ backyard and make it into something you could pass off as your “Garden” assignment (because your photos of the Botanical Gardens looked like a thin black plate with some cottage cheese on it), you had to have something to listen to as you stumbled around in the darkroom accidentally bleaching the crap out of your clothes. And for whatever reason, the soundtrack to The Lost Boys did the trick, and I must have spent about 800 man-hours that year with it on repeat on my Discman (FOR CDs – WOW, this was long ago).

That is to say: this clip is cheesy and dorky and hilarious, and I am fully implicated in it, because I have heard this song about a bajillion times in my youth, and I probably loved it every time.

This weekend, I found myself on the Wonder Wheel at Coney Island, despite having been pretty apprehensive the last time. (I have no answers; I just suddenly appeared on the Wonder Wheel again, like it was a dream and I was escaping a chemistry test by flapping my arms really fast and that’s just what happened.)

At night, Coney Island is packed and filthy and loud. (I would say it changed how I feel about Coney Island, but anyone who reads “And the Next, and the Next” in the Living Dead 2 is going to get an idea of how I feel about Coney Island.)

However, from the Wonder Wheel, there’s something very melancholy about it:

The blackness isn’t just my questionable camera; it really is a blaze of lights and then the huge, sapping darkness.

I walked across the empty beach and into the water, which was so dark that when the waves came in over my knees, it looked like tar. (I guess it still might, soon.)

The next day was the Natural History Museum, which has one of my favorite things in the world, the Wall of Completely Overwhelming BioDiversity:

And speaking of overwhelming, the IMAX Hubble movie talked casually about the 90-trillion-mile-wide Orion nebula, which is a birthplace for stars and galaxies:

It confirmed two things: the universe is an amazing place, and I am completely unprepared for Launchpad next week. (I did, however, pick up a lot of fun facts about marine life, so we’ll see if that comes in handy at any point.)

There’s no outward connection between the two days, but somehow I feel as if there was; as if I was reminded how lonely the world is, before I was reminded how teeming it is, before I was reminded how insignificant it is.

(And, oddly, how much the universe looks like Coney Island at night.)