Don’t tell me you have seen every single episode of The Twilight Zone at least a million times. The show’s like crack; after a few seconds upon landing on whatever channel the show happens to be airing, it becomes impossible to turn off. There must be scientific studies lurking about that analyze the particular section of the brain that demands one watch TZ without interruption. Or, diabolically, Rod Serling placed subliminal messages within the episodes. Viewers trance out, drool a bit, say to themselves, “So that’s where William Shatner got his start!” (Hint: John Lithgow reprised one of the roles, but WS actually starred in two episodes)
I attribute my own particular attraction to this show when my age came in single digits. At that point, most shows were in color but still watching the black and white ones wasn’t unusual or weird. TZ didn’t make sense and that was fine by me. Later, in college, my friends and I stayed up well past midnight to catch episodes and quasi-pretend to be surprised (impossible, since the show was fodder for our misspent youths) or comment on the double meaning of the episode (“To Serve Man”). Even now, during marathon showings, I manage to sneak in a little quality TZ time and hope to catch one of my favorite episodes.
After my Mom passed, inevitably we had to sort through her drawers. That’s never easy. Personal belongings are an assessment of one’s life; items chosen by Mom had purpose and meaning. A favorite scarf, her mother’s wedding ring, photos of people I’ll never meet whose names are lost to time – all jammed without mercy in her vanity top drawer. Major natural disasters wouldn’t have budged the contents. Mom kept all her accumulated possessions bound together like old friends who see no reason to part company.
One afternoon, I chose the unwieldy task of sifting through her clown car dresser. I say this because I marveled at the amount of stuff she shoved into it. The more I grabbed at old clothes, hats, papers, candles, etc., the more intrigued I became. So tightly packed had everything become, items towards the back refused to relinquish the turf they so jealously guarded over time.
Nearly emptying the bottom shelf, I came across a cardboard box, slightly smashed and held together with an ancient rubber band. Since I had no clue what was inside, I opened it. Within the box rested a collection of miniature masterpieces, lithos of relatively unknown artists combined with a few superstars. I shuffled through them, saw the obligatory Van Gogh “Sunflowers” plus a few other Greatest Hits.
And there it was: Pig Girl.
Glancing at me, her brown eyes hinted at nonchalance. Pig Girl appeared as a young woman, possibly a teenager, with a round face and pug nose, sassy upturned brown hair, charming white hat, her collar tied with a bow tie that seemed to float in a sea of crisp whiteness. She wore a brown outfit suggesting a school uniform.
It hit me then: this one’s from that Twilight Zone episode, “The Eye of the Beholder.” In it, pig people valiantly try to plastic surgery-ize a gorgeous woman, regarded by the Piggians as hideously ugly. Perhaps the young, confident Pig Girl lifted herself straight from that episode. Charmed her way into the studio of the artist (Frango? Franga? Franca?) and insinuated herself into the Masterpiece collection. She had a partner, too, a clown boy. No siree, Pigitty wasn’t going through life on this planet alone. She had this fella for fun times:
Hobo-clown, sporting a look of resignation on his face, seems determined to find a purpose despite his genetic mutation. Both he and Piggity survived the DNA splicing of human and pig, they planned to make the best of it and damned be the world.
Can you imagine what might come next if these two produce an offspring? What horrors might come of that?
I closed the box and its unsettling contents rested once more in their dark shelter. I must admit, their presence haunts me still. Strangely, I can’t find Piggity. She seems to have vanished. Kind of scary, don’t you think?
So here’s a word of warning: when a parent dies, use extreme caution going through their former possessions. It can be a real trip through…The Twilight Zone.
Ever lay on your back on a summer night, looking up at the sky and think to yourself, “Where does it all end?”
Or begin.
Or go.
Or…
Ask a person to explain the universe is and guaranteed you’ll receive an answer just as expansive. Frustrating to conceive of an area that defies convention. For that’s what it is: an enigma.
Sure, scientists the world over have struggled to define just exactly what it is that the Earth inhabits and how it came about to be. Mathematical calculations summarize what is perceived to be forces governing its structure, but as soon as one explanation arises, another takes its place.
Take, for instance, the recent talk about finding traces of waves of the original big bang isn’t all it seemed to be. Could be interstellar dust, although optimism remains that perhaps evidence of the Big Bang is still present in the astronomer’s findings. And not to discount their discovery, because if they truly do find remnants of all that is, ever was and will be, my God, that’s like touching the face of eternity.
Though I’m not a scientist, I do wonder how an event so enormous, so unfathomable to most mortals, could have left a trail of crumbs in its wake. It has been determined that the universe began 13.798 ± 0.037 billion years ago, more or less. That’s all calculation, the only tool available to determine its age. It’s also calculated that the observable universe is 48 billion light years in size. Nothing to sneeze at, of course. These numbers are only the result of of the logic of numbers and not the result of a person who stood at the rim and said, “Well, then, here we are…at the end.” Unless, of course, you’re a person named Doug who’s actually hitchhiked your way from one end to the other. In my opinion, he’s in a place to know at present, but he’s not giving up his secrets anytime soon.
My mind shuts down when I contemplate the enormity of all there is. It gets worse when I attempt to ponder what caused its creation. That Big Bang came out of…what? What was before it? Could it be that there was a universe that lived, breathed and died before it? Or perhaps time bent backwards and regenerated its youth to live in another incarnation?
Will we ever know the answer?
Only the eternal reaches of the universe and time can tell.
Mercurial, fickle, entirely dramatic in all ways, these nomads of the heavenly sky form bonds with our souls. From expectation to delivery, these babies take years to put in appearances in our nighttime skies, and, like any baby, one never quite knows what to expect until its head pops out.
Example?
Sure, who doesn’t remember Hale-Bopp? Back in my Manhattanite days, I lived a stone’s throw from the Empire State Building. Out my bedroom window, there was the perfect view of H-B in the fading daylight, competing with the city’s electric glow, pulsing with energy and brilliance. I knew just where to look, and trained my eye in that sweet spot until its head poked from behind the dark curtains and the hazy feathers of its tail teased its way into the night. From its heavenly stage, it delivered a show guaranteed to enthrall the most jaded of Broadway critics. And when it departed after its celebrated run, Hale-Bopp imparted the warmest of memories, leaving an unforgettable performance in its wake.
Queen of the Night: Hale-Bopp in 1997
But as fans of ISON know, it ain’t all grand, despite the promises of glory.
My first experience with disappointment, comet-wise, occurred during the sixth grade. For months I climbed up my brother’s ham radio tower to access the relatively lower dining room roof and perched up there, looking for something, anything, in the dusk along the horizon. Nothing. Then bit by bit, tiny wisps of something resembling a pinhead with a tiny thread appeared. Is…that…IT? I remembered thinking, even dragging my mother up there (well, she peeked out of an upper floor window) hoping it grow larger and start wiggling that ginormous tail. But it never did, and eventually it faded, returning to the cosmos from whence it came.
Comet Kohoutek, as promised but not delivered
Let’s jump to 1986. My grandfather, then well into his 80s, used to tell us when he, as a kid, remembered beautiful Halley’s Comet dominating the evening skies, literally stopping people in their tracks to observe its majestic tail. “Oh, it shimmered like you can’t imagine,” he’d say, and in the relative darkness of the area of Pennsylvania mining country where he lived, there were few people who didn’t take in a lengthy stare in wonderment of nature.
So when he read in the paper that he’d still be present for its return, he lit up like the comet he remembered. “You’ll see nothing like Halley!” he promised. “Never thought I’d be around long enough to see it again, but I am, and I can’t wait!”
He shuffled out in the backyard of our New Jersey home, looking up towards the heavens only to see this tiny smudge, barely visible to the naked eye. “Really?” he said, as I pointed it out to him. “C’mon. That’s not it; that’s a plane.” As I assured him that blurry patch was not a plane but indeed the major disappointment of the decade, he sighed and said, “Well, at least I saw the real thing. Shame you won’t,” and went back inside. He’s right, you know, because as much as I’d like to hope I’d be around in 2061, the get-real part of me says I won’t.
What Grandpa saw and I didn’t: 1910 Halley’s Comet
So what other comets lie in wait for us out there? Well, literally dozens of comets are discovered every heart. Most one can’t see without a telescope or a good set of binoculars, but there’s generally a decent selection from which to choose. On October 19, 2014, Mars has a good chance of being brushed by the tail of Comet A1 Siding Spring’s tail – a great event and excuse to beg, borrow or steal a telescope.
And who knows? You might be in for a memorable treat! Cross your fingers and wish upon a star…
So there I was, a little kid, really, laying on my stomach on the living room floor. That’s how the small set viewed television, at least back then, when TV sets weren’t flat screens but part of the furniture. This show, Star Trek, was on and Mom was glued to it. Only a few years later, she’d do the same with Tom Baker’s version of Dr. Who.
Every Saturday afternoon, she’d turn on Channel 17 in the kitchen and watch whatever horror movies they happened to play. I’d turn on the set in the living room and watch from the couch. Mom peeked up from the ironing board, giant pot of dinner or pile of something she happened to be tending to at the time, and me, well, I’d be there, glued in stupefied fascination over the ridiculous plots. I mean, come on. A giant moth taking over a city? I never could get used to lips not moving in sync to the voices that never quite seemed to match up to the person speaking them.
Still, countless Saturday afternoons with Mom went by, watching an enormous man tangle with electric wires as his former girlfriend implored him to stop, or yet another man shrunk down shorter than the grass he hid in contemplating the stars. Why were the victims generally men? Sure, occasionally you had the disfigured, angry woman out to kill whomever did this to her, but on the whole, it was some luckless fellow falling down a hole, getting sprayed with a mysterious liquid, blasted by X/gamma/nuclear/unknown rays and having his soul wrenched from him as his body contorted/transformed/vaporized into an unrecognizable mass that wreaked havoc in the nearest city…and always a city.
Mom’s fascination with this stuff naturally influenced mine, except I developed a liking to those story lines that involved spaceships, aliens, misguided off-world adventures, and the like. I still think one of the best vintage sci-fi films is The Day The Earth Stood Still (the one that stars Patricia Neal and Michael Rennie), and so did Mom. Klaatu had it going on, and I thought he should have taken Patricia Neal with him, maybe the kid, too. That would have been a good story. Neither Mom nor I didn’t think much of the remake with Neo, but it did have its merits.
What Mom didn’t find to satisfy her thirst for science fiction adventure, she found up in the evening skies, when she was so inclined to peek at them. By the time I was in the sixth grade, I spent many an hour glancing up at them and I always told her what I saw, even showing Comet Kohoutek to her (a MAJOR disappointment). Occasionally a planet might wander by or an eclipse might occur. Come to think of it, my first total eclipse of the sun was shared with Mom, back in the 1970s. How amazing that in the afternoon all the lights went on in the street, the birds stopped singing and a few bright stars appeared as the sun played coy with the moon. We stood outside, afraid to look at it but in the end taking a quick peek during totality, gasping at that miracle of nature.
As years went by, my mother never lost her love for stuff not readily explainable, either via television or the movies. Once, she and my father even saw what they believed to be several UFOs flying over the coast, where they lived. That confirmed their belief by hundreds of reports the next day, covered both in the paper and on the morning news. We watched as the real Enterprise went piggyback on a plane, then as all the space shuttles, SkyLabs, ISS and anything else that left this planet went up and aided the Earth’s population, scientific and otherwise, to explore whatever lie out there and beyond.
On May 24, 2014, my mother went up there in the heavens to become one with the stars. I’d like to think she currently resides there, since she took so much interest in them. She had a very peaceful journey, laying down to take a nap from which she never awoke. There was nothing truly wrong with her, said the doctor, apart from it was her time. Mom had 85 action-packed years and I’d like to think they were all incredibly interesting ones. She leaves behind her family, terribly sorry to see her go and missing her every day.
I couldn’t write a single word of this blog until now. Nothing came to mind. Then, just like magic, the memories of how I’d laugh and joke with Mom over those vintage Saturday afternoon sci-fi groaners we used to watch together popped into my mind.
For the heck of it, I took a random episode of Space: 1999 and watched it again; I’ve included the link above. That’s what I love about YouTube; it’s such a marvelous way to visit the past’s recollections about the future. All sorts of great offerings are posted there and I’ve spent many an hour lingering over its pages.
As it turns out, the Dorcons are digging around in Maya’s brain. She has what they don’t. Or, rather, she has the last of what those pesky Dorcons need. See? Here we are with the brain again. As I had mentioned in a previous post, those mind matters sure come up often, because people desperately need to control what they can’t have. I’m figuring they couldn’t come up with their own supply of artificial intelligence, provided from their own biological source that they grew in some distant lab, harvesting other’s brains to reconstruct and contort for their own wicked purposes. If a society has to rely on one person to keep them ticking, when that person dies (which was inevitable), what next?
So here I sit, in 2014, looking back at the future in 1999. Odd. I find myself wondering if this is what I have to look forward to? I ask that question every time I check out the future. Not mine, of course, that’s kind of nebulous at the moment (whose isn’t?). There’s just so many options.
Take, for instance, a simple object like computers. I love the computer in Cloud Atlas. How about District 9? Even Iron Man. Notice how fluid and oddly shaped the displays are, how one can pluck from the air directives and commands, or plain information?
I’m kind of a fan of the computer in Max Headroom (the TV show) when floppy disks were those 3.25″ and that was considered the cat’s pajamas. Well, that was kind of a deconstructionist future, so I think it’s kind of valid today as back in the 1980s when it first broadcast. Brilliant show.
If you happen to watch the above episode of Space: 1999, you’ll see a more practical, button-pushing kind of keyboard/monitor setup. Similar TV shows also relied on the same technology, and if you dare to watch early episodes of Star Trek, you’ll see the most crude of crude. Still, those systems got them where they wanted to go, so they couldn’t have been all that bad.
Once in a while, there is some crossover. If one compares the hand mechanics to operate the computer/typing in Michael Palin’s office from the Terry Gilliam masterpiece Brazil to the hand mechanics in the scene in Children of Men where Clive Owen sees his nephew play a computer came as he asks his brother for a favor, they’re pretty similar.
Anyway, it’s fun to see what’s going on out there in the future. Gives us something all to remember.
Each summer at the museum where I work, I teach kids how to make a movie. Part of the museum’s mission is early films, since D.W. Griffith shot 17 films in the area, so I take advantage of that and work in modern-day approaches to that medium.
With the use of an iPad or iPhone and the simple iMovie app, I’ve taught kids how to build a world of their own creation. Starting with simple concepts, I lead future DWGs through the process of creating a plot, characters, script, storyboard and then the final product.
My first shot at this was a few summers ago. I only had three kids sign up for it, but man, I couldn’t have asked for three better kids. Two boys, one girl, all aged 11. All shy at first, later on they became best buddies and at the end, total hams.
“So, what’s a good idea for a story?” I ask.
All three exchange looks but no plot lines.
“C’mon. Someone’s got to have something floating around,” I say. “Toss out anything that comes to mind.”
“Cops…and doughnuts, ” said one.
“Oh, yeah, and murder,” said another.
“Good, good…how can we bring that together?” I ask.
After a thoughtful pause, the third camper blurts, “I know! There’s this cop, see, and he’s dead, holding a doughnut and these two other cops find him floating in a river. When they use their cell phone to call for help, they turn into aliens. They need doughnuts to stay alive!”
BINGO! The plot falls into place easily. Pretty soon, I can’t stop any of them from reckless creation. The pages of the scrip fly out of the printer, the scenes are all crafted on the storyboards and before you can say “Oscar!” the shooting begins.
Now, we don’t have a back lot at the museum but we do have a lot of room. The kids used all of it to hash out one of the most surrealistic films I’ve ever seen. I prefer to consider it in the Deconstructionist genre…or Deconstructionist Sci-Fi, to be specific.
Some of the sound fades in and out (the kids were laughing too much holding the iPad and covered the mike or just didn’t pay attention to sound levels), I think there’s a finger over the lens at one point and there’s some real broad humor in it, but for a first effort, it was a blast. The kids and I never had so much fun doing anything. I couldn’t wait to get to work every day, and when camp was finished, I was totally sad.
Regrettably, I’ve not seen them since, but I can visit them anytime on YouTube.
Want to see what we did?
Here’s a trailer they made too, but it has little to do with the film
I gotta warn ya, this is pretty scary stuff…well, kind of…maybe…
I can’t wait for this August and the next summer camp I teach. I wonder what those kids are going to dream up this time…
Do yourselves all a favor: click on the link below to read the utterly gripping tale of Californian adventures of long ago, complete with colorful characters and thrills to spare. Honest.
Okay, maybe this isn’t a true scorcher, but it’s a pretty big one, folks! This nickel thriller dates from August 1893 and, I got to tell ya, it kept me on the edge of my seat. Out of curiosity? Out of wonder? Out of ideas?
Nah, nothing like that.
Well, I can’t take complete credit for this find. I was trolling around io9 one afternoon reading some of the blogs posted there and I came across this. Some thoughtful contributor added it to an already existing post in the comments section – forgive me if I can’t remember who – and posted just the picture. Unable to rest upon sight of this wondrous creature, I Google-imaged matched it and came up with the story behind the picture.
I mean, who wouldn’t want to read a story about a gentleman named “Electric Bob”? That moniker brings to mind the sort of guy who came with all the drugs to the party in the 1960s and got people all charged up. Their acid hallucinations resulted in a giant shooting ostrich.
If nothing else, this certainly is creative. What must have passed through the author Robert T. Toombs to come up with such an idea? Perhaps it was the allure of electricity, still a fairly new phenomena in the home and elsewhere, yet exotic enough to warrant the attention of readers. “Electric Bob” sounds as if he’s harnessed the shocking truth behind the power, and he’s enlisted the help of a turn of the 19th Century Trojan horse to off the bad guys. Obviously there’s murder and mayhem. The story’s only about 14 pages long, though it’s tiny print. Still, I promise you’ll get a kick out of it. I did.
A great deal of what occurs in the world of science fiction involves the mind and/or brain. Strange forces, and not necessarily alien, want to control others thoughts, expressions, decision making capabilities, functions and more.
Why is that?
Well, for starters, the brain/mind is who we are. What we see. What we do. It governs our perception of the world and how those react towards us. It goes without saying that a brain controlled is a person conquered.
Mind control is like getting the keys to the kingdom. Figure out how to rob one’s senses and you have the entire population cornered.
Take, for instance, Invasion of the Body Snatchers or its modern update, The Invasion. A pod of sorts lodged itself to a human form and, long story short, assumed that person’s entire being except for its soul. Seemingly, the soul was destroyed in the process and everyone was pretty much like the women in The Stepford Wives. In that film, the women were duplicated via robot/android. Then it’s assumed everyone was bumped off and buried anonymously in a hidden grave deep in the Connecticut woods.
In A Clockwork Orange, our hero Malcolm McDowell has a rather questionable attitude when it comes to women, violence and society in general. It’s a pretty simple fix when he’s subjected to the Ludivico Technique. After that, the urge to vomit pretty much takes over when he’s starting to explore those negative tendencies. If that were me, the idea of having my eyelids pinned open would be enough to gross me out and get me to never do anything evil again.
Oh, let’s not forget the classic Jedi Mind Trick, either. It’s one way Luke Skywalker invites himself in for a visit our revolting friend Jabba the Hut. Come to think of it, just by simple virtue of being a Jedi all that is familiar to your being is a mind trick.
The mind is a mystery. We all have one, but who knows what’s in it? How many times have you said, “What are you thinking?” Haven’t you ever taken your fist and rapped it on your brain, or that idiot friend of yours and said, “Dude, are you nuts? What happened to your brain?” Yet, we still wonder what occurs during the thought process, what makes us arrive at the decisions we so nimbly or slowly do. Our influences, our impressions, our decision to eat yet another piece of food that will stuff us silly all comes from that thick grey matter residing in our skull. Is it a machine? Is it will? Is it hope and dreams?
I’ve come to notice that one thing many aliens have in common: they’re angry.
Why?
Now, I’m not talking all sci-fi films or TV series. In fact, some are really quite friendly and helpful. Paul, Alf and E.T. made good friends and lifelong connections with their earthling counterparts. And a quick look at Star Trek/Wars/Gate will tell you that there’s a bounty of otherworldly types just itching to make nice with us inferiors.
But then again, how many baddies have you come to enjoy over the years?
Let’s take, for example, the Borg. They’re a pretty economical lot. If you ask me, they become part of a collective, kind of like communism in its most evil form twinned with just plain communes. They readily adapt to any situation, yet they clearly enjoy being together. One could argue it’s the system making them relate to each other so well, but they’re so anxious to turn complete strangers into buddies that they readily adapt the most innocent of bystanders, hook them up to machine-like apparatus and get them angry enough to kill anyone the collective doesn’t like.
Now, here’s what I’m talking about: Mars Attacks!
These guys made no pretensions, minced no Ack! Ack! to their sworn enemies on Earth. All they knew is that they looked humble and willing for about twenty seconds, let us earthlings make fools of ourselves and then wreaked utter destruction. Heck, they even brought down Jack Nicholson! Yet it was a simple yodel that brought them to their knees and made their gooey green brains blow up like bubble gum in a microwave. Don’t tell me you didn’t get the parallel between that and germs in War of the Worlds.
Yet, for all the seeming variety out there, we keep coming back to this stereotype:
Now, this guy’s pretty cool and the star of his own film, Paul. But really, he is indicative of the stereotype. If anyone says they’ve seen someone that didn’t look like they belonged here on Earth, went finger-pointing up a section of the anatomy not commonly known for engaging positive thoughts, and generally dug around in someone’s insides uninvited, it would be similar to the person/thing above.
I’m asking: where did this image come from? Where did it originate? Is this the one imprinted in our brains that makes us react when we think we’ve seen something that doesn’t quite belong to our planet? Is this vision of an alien comforting to us, as in if we see something just like this, we’ll know to run (if we can)?
Will it angry with us?
Will be have the courage to ask why?
Will it accept a box of chocolates and a bouquet of flowers to kiss and make up?
But first, I’d like to know what it is that we did in the first place…
So. You knew it had to happen. Disney steps into the picture et voila! Yet another film squeezed from the franchise. It’s all over the internet, all over the place in the media and if people still gathered around water coolers, the talk would be rife with what’s going on in that faraway galaxy a long time ago.
“Star Wars” is more than just a movie. It’s a way of life.
Its lingo has insinuated itself into our vocabulary. Its characters are our buddies. And come on, who hasn’t wanted to be Darth Vader? Who hasn’t sounded like him during cold season? There are people who get into fistfights over what made more of an impact in our culture: “Star Wars” or “Star Trek” (My answer? Both have).
I’m a purist when it comes to my “Star Wars.” I prefer the unadulterated version, the one I went nuts over in high school. Twenty-something years later when I sat down in the movies to watch the “updated” version, my friends and I, all dedicated “SW” fans, were at first fascinated, then puzzled at the unnecessary add-ons meant to enhance the film. They didn’t.
Especially outrageous was adding to the very end the new and improved Anakin Skywalker, the non-actor Hayden Christensen. Not that the other guy really brought a lot to the role (we just see his cauliflower head at the end), but he pretty much matched the person you saw. HC bears absolutely no resemblance to Darth as he aged. I mean, they didn’t change how Yoda looked, did they?
It is indeed interesting that the original trio of superstars are going to have an actual role. How could they not be included? While no one expects Carrie Fisher to roam around in a skimpy Jabba-Jawdropper skirt and bra, I sure hope they give her a position of importance. That goes for Han Solo, too. Does anyone think they got married? Had kids? Pay a mortgage or deal with unruly teenagers with a drug habit? Or maybe neither of their kids turned out to be a Jedi, inheriting Solo’s traits. Sure, he redeemed himself in the end, but he started off as a ne’er do well in compromising circumstances.
However, I’m hoping everyone cheers for the real hero in this drama, Mark Hamill. He paid a big price to be Luke. He’s every bit of a good actor as the rest of the crew, yet drew the short stick. Forever stereotyped, he developed the Richard Thomas syndrome, forever being attached to a role that everyone loved and no one forgot (RT was John Boy Walton, remember?). Carrie Fisher had a bunch of good roles and went on to become a very respected script doctor. Harrison Ford played yet another franchise character and despite that, still took on many roles, some sci-fi based, others not. Why did Mark get left out in the cold? Did he suffer from Darth’s curse?
Still, I know I’ll be one of those ticket holders standing patiently in line, waiting my turn to see just exactly what “Star Wars VII” has to offer. No, I won’t camp out and swap war stories with the rest of the geeks in line. I will, however, cheer my head off watching the iconic logo flash on the screen to the familiar theme, and scan the storyline roll, while in the back of my head I’ll wonder: what ever happened to Billy Dee Williams?
Moon, Stars and Beyond 