Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 41

I read this when it was new, and thought it had some interesting ideas and was a fun trip down memory lane. But over time I kept seeing people point out problems, and I’d think back, and realize, yeah, there’s not a whole lot of substance there, and it’s got some serious issues.

Didn’t bother with the movie.

Back then, the nostalgia and scavenger hunt were enough for me. Now, not so much.

Solo isn’t high art, and it’s got some rough edges, but it’s a fun ride. Star Wars movies from The Phantom Menace onward have been trying to be serious with a side of adventure and comic relief, not trying to be adventures that also have something to say.

That said, I liked The Last Jedi more than The Force Awakens, so YMMV.

Xmarks (originally Foxmarks) was a cross-browser bookmark sync service that I used for a long time to keep Chrome, Firefox, IE, and Safari on multiple computers using the same set of bookmarks. It almost shut down in 2010, but LastPass bought it and moved to a freemium model, which they kept running until May 1, 2018. By then it had been flaky for a while:

• Anytime I came back to a system without using it for a while, it would have trouble syncing and have to re-download everything.
• Sometimes it would get confused by the different folder layouts.
• After Firefox dropped their old extension API, the new extension never worked well with my scheme that drops all cookies when I close the browser except those on sites I want to stay logged into.

These days I use Floccus to sync bookmarks across browsers, which has the added bonus that I get to choose my own storage.

The cold-war musical Chess works surprisingly well set in the present day.

UCI Drama’s production is a concert staging of the show, with the orchestra and choir onstage, and the actors carrying handheld microphones with minimal props. It works well, especially for the more 80s-pop numbers like “Nobody’s Side” and the big ensemble songs like “Merano” and the chess games, though it gets a little awkward when the characters are singing to each other with microphones. (The show features two competing styles of music, achingly 80s and classical musical theater.)

The show’s structure is fluid, with vast differences between the original London and Broadway versions and later productions, and just about every version tweaking the story and moving songs around. This version largely follows the London stage version, with a few key changes:

1. It’s set in the present day. This updates the USSR to Russia and drops the CIA vs KGB elements of the background game played between Walter and Molokov. Florence is the daughter of Hungarian refugees, rather than a former child refugee herself (Budapest 1956 is the only fixed date in the story.) The political stakes may be a bit lower, but the personal stakes work just as well.
2. Several roles have been recast as women, including Molokova and the arbiter, which makes the show even more “alto-licious” (as Katie puts it).
3. The second act drops a lot of the connections between songs (it is done as a concert, after all), which means you don’t see the breakdown of Anatoly’s and Florence’s relationship, or Anatoly cracking under the pressure, until he finds his “one true obligation.” You get the before and after but not the process.

The performances were all solid, with Molokova in particular as a standout.

I’m still not sure how well “Someone Else’s Story” works for Svetlana, but that ship has sailed. And “One Night In Bangkok,” despite being instantly recognizable to anyone who lived through the 80s, is cringe-worthy now. For this production they downplay the stereotyping by playing up the fact that it’s seen through the perspective of a total lout (Freddie). It’s still cringe-worthy, but at least it’s a character statement rather than a narrative one.

2024 Update: The hotel has been remodeled and is now the Palihotel San Diego. It’s still in the same location, though, so at least some of my experience is still relevant!

As late as 2018, the historic Hotel St. James still had its original elevators (super-fast by 1913 standards) – complete with hand-pulled sliding gates instead of automatic doors. The kiddo was quite taken with them. The rooms are small, but our double turned out to be a tiny suite, which was nice. Breakfast at the hotel restaurant was quite good, and there’s a casual rooftop lounge area open to hotel guests that offers a great view of the city.

One downside to being an old building: No room for central air conditioning, so they’d put in window units instead… and being in the Gaslamp, weekend nights get loud. Not just traffic and sirens, but there are a lot of bars and nightclubs, and we heard people talking, shouting, and cheering late into the night.

Transit

We took the train down to avoid traffic and parking. (Parking’s bad enough downtown that I usually end up leaving the car in the hotel lot the whole weekend anyway.) Amtrak’s Surfliner runs all the way to Downtown San Diego, and we took the trolley from the train station to within two blocks of our hotel. From there, we walked everywhere downtown, and took a bus out to the zoo and Balboa Park.

Follow-up

I’ve never stayed here during Comic-Con, but I have stayed here twice with the family. The first time, when I wrote this review, was the weekend the weekend after the con, when the crowds (and hotel prices) go back down to normal summer levels. A few of the trolleys were still wrapped, and one gift shop had 50%-off superhero shirts, but otherwise there was no sign left of the Gaslamp’s annual week-long transformation into a pop-culture extravaganza. The second time we got a slightly bigger pair of rooms. Even the first set of rooms were bigger than anything at the Mark Twain or the Mosser (both in San Francisco), though, and I have no idea whether Pali remodeled the existing rooms or knocked out the walls to build new ones.