My latest Geek Girl Traveler post is up over at China Shop Magazine! In it, I tell you all about one of Seattle’s greatest geek destinations, the EMP Museum, home of Battlestar Galactica: The Exhibition (until March 4th), Avatar: The Exhibition, and the largest collection of Nirvana memorabilia ever assembled.
Excerpt:
There’s nothing quite like standing in front of Caprica Six’s iconic red dress, or Starbuck’s flight suit. Or, the TWO FULL-SIZED VIPERS and the FULL-SIZED CYLON RAIDER on display. You might be tempted to jump into these awesome vehicles, but as the signs all over the exhibit say, “Don’t touch the frakking artifacts!”
For the full article, CLICK HERE. And if you’ve got any comments, leave them over at the post! Don’t forget to vote (click on the little teacups at the bottom of the article), and stay tuned for more Geek Girl Traveling!
Traveling to Los Angeles? Worried about getting around without a car? Not looking forward to spending the cash to rent one? Fret not. Geek Girl Traveler offers weary wanderers words of hope (while providing a PSA to folks who live in Los Angeles)! Check out this video (notes and photos below):
Notes:
A downfall I forgot to mention in the video is that you have to pay every single time you ride a bus or train. There aren’t any free transfers (you might wanna take a cue from NYC on this one, L.A.). So, each ride is $1.00/$1.50, but you’ll have to pay that 2-3 times depending on where you’re going. Metro buses/trains are $1.50, DASH buses are 50 cents, The Big Blue Bus is $1.00, and the Culver City Bus is $1.00
To plan your trips, visit HopStop. You can also plan trips through Google Maps, obviously, but since HopStop’s specifically designed for public transportation, I find it works better and is easier to navigate/read. Just my humble Geek Girl Traveler opinion.
Entrance to the North Hollywood Red Line subway station.
Clearly, SOMEBODY Walks In L.A.
Woodman Bus Station, Van Nuys.
Metro Red Line.
Metro Red Line/Purple Line platform, Union Station.
Metro Red Line/Purple Line platform.
Union Station tunnel.
Metro Red Line, Union Station.
Union Station.
Union Station
People exiting the North Hollywood Red Line Station.
So, remember that time when I said I’d start exploring Los Angeles furiously this week? Yeah, well, this week also found me dealing with multiple deadlines that didn’t leave much time for exploring this fair city. Next week. Promise.
Starting with…THE GRIFFITH OBSERVATORY! Because why the hell not!
Hello there, everyone! Hope you had a fabulous and wonderful holiday season, and that your 2012 has been as breathtakingly awesome as mine has been so far! This year’s gonna be a great one – I can feel it!
Now that we’re embarking on a new year together, I’ve decided to really set on the task of exploring my new, adopted city. City of Angels, I’m coming for you!
Starting this TUESDAY, I’m going to seek out and visit a new geeky location a week. I’m gonna pick Los Angeles apart with a fine-toothed comb, until I’ve visited every geek site this place has to offer! Call it Mission: Los Angeles! New video and/or write-up each Wednesday. Because I can, and I wanna.
Got a tip? Email it to geekgirltraveler[at]gmail[dot]com! And keep up with my findings for this, and any other cities I visit on Twitter (@GeekGirlTravels) and on Facebook.
Rough and tumble guerrilla travel videos are where it’s at! Though if I really wanted to be guerrilla about it, I would’ve sneaked a camera into The Magic Castle and gotten some footage. But that would have been wrong.
Besides, I respect the places I visit. While I do, in part, travel for you, to inform you of some fabulous geeky places to visit (and help you steer clear of the not-so-fabulous ones), I – more importantly – travel for me, and I’m not about to get kicked out of somewhere fun just to get you some video footage. So there.
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Magic must to be a West Coast thing. I remember when I used to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer when it was on television back when I was living in New York, and one of the major locations for the Scoobies was, of course, Sunnydale’s The Magic Box, the magic shop eventually owned by Giles where the gang would meet up in Seasons 5 and 6. I remember watching and thinking, “Um, do magic shops actually exist anymore?” It seemed so old-timey. Then I became a fan of Neil Patrick Harris, and as I started reading interviews with him, he would talk about magic and magic shows and being a magician all the time. I was all, “Wha?” Magic certainly isn’t a New York thing at all. I mean, obviously big-name magicians play New York all the time. And, of course, there are children’s parties. Aaand, that’s it. It’s not a particularly popular hobby. Then I moved to California, and it seems like you can’t swing a cat without hitting a magic shop, or some kind of magic performance establishment. When I lived in Santa Monica for the first three weeks I was here, I would always pass by Magicopolis whenever I was walking around near the 3rd Street Promenade. I remember passing it and thinking, “Wait, so people actually do magic seriously here?”
Weird.
Well, last night, I had the opportunity to visit the Los Angeles mecca for the magical arts, The Magic Castle. It’s an exclusive, members-only club, and in order to get in you need to either be a member magician, or attend as the guest of a member magician. (In my case, I was the guest of a guest of a member magician) The dress code is strictly swank, and upon entering the Castle, it feels a bit like stepping back in time. Though it opened in 1963, The Magic Castle feels much older, seeming more like a Victorian-era social club than a modern magic school. Yet, that’s exactly what it is. In addition to being a world-renowned clubhouse for 5,000 member magicians, it’s also the home of the Academy of Magical Arts, a non-profit organization devoted to teaching and furthering the art of magic.
As I walked around the jovially jumbled Castle, photos and caricatures of magicians past and present graced the walls. Magical memorabilia (ventriloquist dummies, various magical props, a pool table used by W.C. Fields, etc) sat in glass cases, and dapper gentlemen at tables scattered throughout the establishment entertained those waiting for magic acts in one of the Castle’s four performance spaces with slights of hand. There’s a feeling of history there; a history I had never thought to explore before, but was fascinating once I was immersed in it.
Sadly, due to a fire at the Castle this past Halloween, most of the Castle was closed for renovations, so I only got to see a small portion of the place. While I didn’t get to see the large dining room, the library, the ballroom, or Irma, the Castle’s resident ghost who plays any song you request on piano, I did get to see a show in the intimate Parlour of Prestidigitation (where I also enjoyed a drink, thanks to waitress service!), enjoy a drink at the bar, and get scared by a skeleton in a phone booth. Yeah, that happened.
My group and I were there to see Dave Cox, who is not only an excellent magician, but a funny one! He’s so good, he can have random people do his magic for him with nothing but the help of an Evil Hypnotist (Stuffed) Monkey. Seriously, he threw his deck to a random person in the audience, chose another random person from the audience to come up on stage, and had the woman on stage guess the card that the guy in the audience randomly selected from the deck. No, they weren’t audience plants. I mean, obviously there’s a trick to it, but that wasn’t it. That would be too easy… His whole act was pretty damned incredible.
So it was a treat for my group and I to sit with him at one of the tables out in the lobby and have him do card tricks just for us. For one, he had one of my party holding her hand over what she thought was the 6 of hearts through another trick entirely, only to come back to her and reveal that someone else’s card had found its way under her hand and it was now the 7 of diamonds. That one kind of blew our minds a little. The other was when he and my friend, Alex, split the deck and shuffled, shuffled, shuffled them only to have the cards Dave dealt come up all Kings and the cards Alex dealt come up all Aces. WHAT?! But….HUH?!
I can’t really do the tricks justice in print, so you’ll just have to go to Dave’s website for some quality video of his work.
If you find yourself in Los Angeles, and have any sort of an in to The Magic Castle, I highly recommend you take it. It’s an excuse to get gussied up, and it’s a truly unique, fun night out. I plan on trying to go back in January once the Castle is fully renovated. If I see Irma, I’ll tell her you say hello!
2012 is going to see me casting my net further and further, doing my damnedest to bring you the best geeky hotspots from all over.
It’s my duty, after all!
And you can help me do it! I’ve entered the “NOLABound” program, which selects 25 people to go to New Orleans for a five-day, all expenses paid trip where they take you on an itinerary devoted to one of four industries (Arts-based Businesses, Digital Media, Biosciences, and Sustainable Industries) and you write about your experiences in the hopes of relaying the word that New Orleans is a great place to do business! I applied for Arts-based industries, natch. They’re looking for people who are expressive (um, Hi!) and who have large followings on social media and access to a large internet audience. With my articles at ChinaShop (and their large readership), as well as my active Twitter following and my Facebook friends, I think I could be a contender! But the folks at NOLABound need to see that.
So, if you want me to seek out the geekiest spots New Orleans has to offer while I’m there, please visit my NOLABound profile page and “Like” and Tweet it. Also, have a looksee at the above video on YouTube! Views, likes, comments, and sharing of that will totally help! Spread the word and help Geek Girl Traveler be NOLABound!
OK, so this isn’t a serious travel video or anything. I had just gotten my Flip Cam the day before, and had taken it with me when a friend took me to dinner at the Sky City Restaurant atop the Seattle Space Needle, so I decided to test it out. In this video, you’ll see a lovely view over Seattle just after sunset from the Space Needle’s observation deck, hear some fun fact tidbits from my friend, Lesli, who lives in the area, and learn why I am the BEST. TOUR GUIDE. EVER.
And by the way, the Sky City Restaurant, while pricey, is AMAZEBALLS if you ever get to go. The food is ridiculously good right down to the maple butter they give you for the bread on the table, and the fact that the restaurant spins and you get a 360-degree view of the city is wonderful. I would highly recommend going there for dinner, because watching the sunset from up there is pretty spectacular. Though trying to find my way back to my table when returning from the bathroom was pretty hilarious. I’d forgotten that the restaurant spins, and my table was now about 20 feet away from where it was when I left.
Photo by Moi. Sky City Restaurant is also a lovely place for a romantic dinner...that can be surreptitiously photographed by voyeuristic geek girls with blogs.
Marian Call and Me at Soul Food Books in Redmond, WA.
When I was in Seattle, I had the pleasure of being able to see geek songstress,Marian Call, perform at an awesome coffee house/independent bookstore in Redmond called Soul Food Books!
The venue was really great – friendly staff, amazing organic coffee, tasty baked goods, and a bookstore I sadly couldn’t browse, because of the event going on – and it was fun to be able to see someone whose music I enjoy so much in such an intimate space. Soul Food Books is a warm, inviting place that hosts lots of great events like this, and I strongly urge anyone living in Redmond or visiting the Seattle area to stop in!
Photo by Moi. Marian Call and her guitarist were also accompanied by an ASL interpreter! Soul Food Books - Redmond, WA
The concert itself was wonderful – and free! Call was in great voice, and she and her guitarist had an awesome rapport. I’m a new fan of hers, so I was glad to hear a great mix of both older and newer songs, so I got to become familiar with work of hers I hadn’t heard yet. Equally entertaining was the wonderful ASL interpreter that was signing the songs as they were performed. So expressive! I love watching signed performances for an entirely different take on what’s going on.
And of course, I took a video of Marian Call performing one of my favorite songs of hers, and one that should be near and dear to anyone reading this blog: I’ll Still be a Geek After Nobody Thinks It’s Chic (the Nerd Anthem). Yes, she’s playing a typewriter. Enjoy!
Photo by Moi. From the Battlestar Galactica Exhibition at the EMP Museum in Seattle.
Back in October, I spent two weeks in Seattle. I went for Geek Girl Con, and stayed for all the other geekery that city has to offer, and believe me – there’s a LOT of it. Geekery isn’t just a hobby in Seattle, it’s a lifestyle.
Photo by Moi. From the Butterfly House at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle.
It’s a land where everyone works for Microsoft (which is based just outside of Seattle in Redmond), and people are so nerdy it’s not even considered a “thing.” It just is. I mean, they have the EMP Museum – an entire museum devoted to sci-fi and nerdery – for crying out loud!
Photo by Moi. Golden Age Collectibles at the Pike Street Market in Seattle.
Photo by Moi. This is in the doorway of the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Store, New York City.
There is a wonderful, magical place in New York City (in Brooklyn, which seems to be emerging as the Geek Capital of NYC) where you can not only buy yourself a superhero cape and a secret identity, but you can also outfit your sidekick, and even de-villainize any villains you manage to trap. This place is called the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Store.
Even better, however, than being able to buy a whole mess of cool superhero gear is the fact that the proceeds go to 826NYC, an organization that provides free walk-in writing tutoring and workshops to school-age children! So you can dress like a hero by actually being one!
826 Centers, co-founded by author, Dave Eggers, also exist in San Francisco, CA and Ann Arbor, MI. All of these locations are mentioned in a ChinaShop article I wrote, and all of them have geeky storefronts to help raise money for the centers – 826 Valencia has a Pirate Supply Store, and 826 Michigan has a Robot Supply & Repair Shop!
What ISN’T mentioned is that there’s also one in my new city, Los Angeles! 826LA actually has TWO locations: one in Venice, and one in Echo Park. Echo Park also has a Time Travel Mart. You know, for all your time-traveling needs. And I love its slogan: Whenever You Are, We’re Already Then.
826 stores are springing up all OVER the place, currently existing in Boston, Chicago, Washington DC, and Seattle in addition to all the locations above! Chances are, there will be one soon in any city you’re visiting if there isn’t one already. For the complete list of 826 centers and the geeky products they sell, visit the 826 National website.
