Beauty in Low Places

Truth can sometimes be found in the most unlikely of places, in a children’s film, a comic book, a video game. The Dark Crystal is the 1982 Jim Henson film that introduces us to the world of Thra, its inhabitants, the native Gelfling, and its usurpers, the Skeksis. It is achingly beautiful and chillingly familiar. Not really a children’s film or maybe what children’s films used to be, unsanitized stories that had messages and told the truth about about life, even the darker parts. The story goes that the idea for the Dark Crystal came to Jim Henson when looking at an illustration made by Leonard Lubin for Lewis Carroll’s “The Pig-Tale”, depicting two “fancy crocodiles”, one bathing and one toweling off in a Victorian bathroom. Crocodiles. A few years later, Henson met Brian Froud and the two decided to partner to bring the world of the Dark Crystal to life, with Wendy Midener (Froud) joining as creature design supervisor for the Gelfling. The Frouds, Brian and Wendy, of course are fame...

When I was in my early to mid-twenties there was a period of time during which, unable to sleep, I would get up and drive to work in the very early hours of the morning. At the time I called it insomnia, but I also distinctly remember feeling excitement throughout the night, almost as a child on Christmas Eve might. Whatever the cause, the effect was that some days I would arrive at work as early as six in the morning. Alone, in solitude, the lights of the lab thermocyclers my companions. Maybe this is what I liked. Many days I would get there even earlier than Dmitry, the endearingly gruff and taciturn PhD who when once asked what kind of shampoo he used said "a bar of soap". Even Dmitry one morning asked me why I got there so early, and, surprised that he had spoken and unable to articulate why in fact I was there so early, I gave a short nonsensical response. The drive to work those mornings, in my then-new gray 2010 Mazda3, in the dark, was accomplished to the sounds of w...