Space dirt

This article was originally published in the Sierra Vista Herald on 15 February 2015 under the title, "Recalling that first X-Wing Fighter run."

There is a museum exhibit touring the United States right now featuring costumes from the original Star Wars movies.  It was bound to happen.  Pretty much everything associated with entertainment during my childhood is now a museum piece.  Reel-to-reel tape decks, vinyl records, cathode ray tube television sets, and the Atari Pong game are all now just relics in roadside attractions.  How long before Alice Cooper gets stuffed and displayed in a glass booth next to “The Thing” in Benson. 

Young people today don’t understand the impact that the first Star Wars movie had on American culture.  Up until that point, space-themed entertainment was boringly squeaky clean.  Until Luke Skywalker entered the realm of our consciousness in 1977, we had only Star Trek to shape our vision of space travel.  The series had ended in 1969, but it was rerun on TV constantly ever after until everyone in my age group could have detailed conversations about photon torpedoes, tribbles, and Klingons. However, the Enterprise and its crew were always spotless.  You never saw a pile of grease rags in the engine room or excess wax coming out of Spock’s pointed ears.  Even the Klingons were clean and looked like regular humans with deeper tans and Fu Manchu mustaches.  Except for the facial hair, they could have starred on Jersey Shore. 

From the time Captain Kirk began going where no man had gone before until Luke Skywalker began looking for Obi-Wan Kenobi, there was not much going on in the space genre.  Only two films really had any impact during that time.  The first was Stanley Kubrick’s  2001: A Space Odyssey.   This film also featured squeaky clean spacecraft and antiseptic living quarters.  After the initial ape-man scene, pretty much everything looks like it was cleaned by Martha Stewart.  The only other notable space film that premiered during the Star Trek-Star Wars gap was Barbarella, starring Jane Fonda.  Although Barbarella’s living quarters appeared to be lined with Wookie fur, I doubt anyone noticed if it was clean or not since Barbarella removed her spacesuit in the opening scene to reveal…well, everything. 

So, along comes Star Wars, which revolutionized the space theme movie genre forever.  No more spotless spacecraft and conveniently disappearing bodies after being zapped by a phaser.   Finally, a space film with some dirty spaceships, limb chopping lightsabers, alien blasting blasters, and heroes winding up in a garbage compactor with a snake monster.  From the perspective of my generation, it was like someone had crossed The Wild Bunch with Battlestar Galactica. 

A teenager at the time the first Star Wars movie came out, my friends and I went to see it at the fabled Cine Capri in downtown Phoenix.  The movie was a hit of unimaginable proportions.  Star Wars was so popular with Arizonans that it ran at the theater for over a year.  For my friends and I, it was a mind-blowing experience.  We drove to the theater in my 1967 Chevrolet Caprice, but on the ride home my car had been transformed into an X-wing fighter.  We roared back to the east valley, from whence we came, dodging asteroids, imperial battlecruisers, and death stars all the while encouraging each other to “use the force.”  We somehow made it back alive. 

The Star Wars costume exhibit, which will be in Seattle until October before it starts to move about the country, features some sixty costumes from the movie series.  Of course, the Darth Vader costume will be featured and is situated so you can get a selfie with it.  The only restriction is that you can’t use tripods, flash photography, or a selfie stick.  WHAT! You can have my selfie stick when you pry it from my cold dead fingers, Darth Vader, you evil villain!  The other big costume display is that of Princess Leia’s slave bikini. I have to say that until I read of this exhibit, I’d never seen the words slave and bikini together.  Of course, I knew exactly what they were referring to as does every red-blooded American that saw Carrie Fisher wear that costume back in 1983. A bikini made of metal?  A genius marketing tactic for a movie series written and produced specifically with teenage boys in mind. 

Thus, Princess  Leia’s slave bikini and the other hallowed artifacts from the Star Wars movies will be paraded around the United States until the first of the next series of Star Wars movies premiers in December, 2015.  I have no idea what the next series will be like, but hopefully, it will return to the simple, adventurous, gritty storyline that rocked our world back in the 70s. I drive a Ford pickup truck now, but I bet I can turn my vehicle into an X-wing fighter one more time.   

Monkeys in a sick zoo

Someone once said that art is in the eye of the beholder. That philosophy is being put to the test in a museum in Rotterdam, the Netherlands that is currently exhibiting giant sculptures of dung. The poop sculptures were created by a group of four artists from Austria calling themselves Gelitin who specialize in this kind of “art.” The four artists met in 1978 while attending summer camp.

I’m betting that their parents are wondering if they did the right thing by sending their kids to summer camp way back then just to get a break from the little creeps for a little while.  Most kids go to summer camp to learn how to swim or ride horses or hike the wilderness. The Gelitin kids learned how to make giant poop sculptures.

But, maybe I’m trying to apply my own cultural bias to the Austrian summer camp experience. After looking up one of their camps on the internet, I discovered that I might have been way off base in understanding what Austrian kids do at these things.  

  

According to one website, the camps are “designed for those who want to have fun in the summer and not sit listlessly at home.” OK, that sounds normal enough if not exactly appealing to today’s youth who would love nothing more than to sit listlessly at home. 

Some of the specialized camps include:

•         Horse camp: For all those who love horses and want to learn more.
•         Movie camp: Film shooting, cutting, & a bit of Hollywood.
•         Learning camp: perfect preparation for the new school year.

And then there was this.

•         Austria’s first celiac disease camp: action and adventure await you

Who wouldn’t want to go to a camp where action and adventure await those with oversensitive bowels? It sounds like a camp that the Addams Family kids would attend. I’m guessing celiac disease camp wasn’t available when the Gelitin artists went to summer camp in 1978 since we didn’t know about the whole gluten thing back in the seventies. Maybe they went to syphilis camp instead. That is about the only disease I can think of that would affect your brain in such a way that you would want to create giant statues of crap.

The Gelitin artists practice something called Relational Art which is defined as "a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space." What they mean is the artists are making their audience the monkeys in their sick zoo. 

In 2013, they put on an art show in which street artists drew portraits of people seated on a stage at the Teatro Arsenale in Milan, Italy. It sounds normal enough, but they had placed the paper on the surface of the stage in front of their seated model and were drawing the portraits with a paintbrush stuck up their posteriors. Boy, you just don’t get more relational than that. At least they were using paint.

More recently, they exhibited some sculpture in New York’s Green Naftali Gallery that was composed of lumps of clay that the artists had thrust their, uhm, “artistic creativity” into. The exhibit included 40 pieces. One wonders how many bottles of Viagra went into that effort.

I’m not exactly a connoisseur of contemporary art. I think the art world may have taken a wrong turn about the time of Jackson Pollock. Let us be thankful, though, that Michelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci never went to an Austrian summer camp.  

I was a hipster before being a hipster was hip

This article was originally published in the Sierra Vista Herald on 25 January 2015.

One of the problems with not being a Millennial is that I’m not constantly wired into the social media universe. I don’t get constantly alerted by my phone that there is some vitally important social phenomenon going on right now that will change life as we know it for the next thirty seconds. For instance, I missed that Kim Kardashian break-the-internet thing. References to it kept popping up here and there, but I had no clue what it meant. While at the ASU-UofA game last November, I was sitting next to some ASU students sporting “Break-the-Cat” shirts with Sparky’s face photo-shopped over Kardashian’s in one of her look-at-my-derriere photographs. “Nice shirt,” I said without having any idea what I was seeing. My daughter and son-in-law later had to slowly and carefully explain it to their rotary-dial, dinosaur father. 

My daughter, who is a card-carrying, hipster-qualified, Millennial advised me to check the “trending” feature on FaceBook to stay up with important social developments.  I just checked it.  Jane Fonda admits that posing for photos on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun in 1972 was a huge mistake.  She just figured that out? The other trending story was “DeflateGate,” the allegation that the New England Patriots were deflating footballs to make them easier to throw and catch during the AFC championship game.  But, doesn’t that mean it was easier for the Colts to catch the ball also?  According to my daughter, I can arrange to have these vitally important stories sent to my phone as soon as they break at any time during the day or night.  I don’t know about you, loyal readers, but the only socially significant information that I need to have sent to me in the middle of the night is that there is a meteor headed for my house…or, that Kim Kardashian is headed for my house wearing a Sparky mask. 

However, there is one vitally important social development that I should have been aware of  but, has somehow escaped my attention.  The vitally, important social development that I should have been aware of and wasn’t is that I’ve apparently been a hipster for my entire life.  A hipster is generally defined as someone who follows trends or fashions that are considered outside the cultural mainstream. Again my daughter, who is a font of disturbing information, was explaining to me how she frequents a hipster beer-tasting establishment with her husband.  She tells me that she has to wear a plaid shirt and wear geeky, black horn-rimmed glasses while she’s there. The hipsters like to drink what they consider to be counter-culture beers.   Now this is where it gets weird.  The favorite beer of hipsters is Pabst Blue Ribbon.  Other beers they like are Olympia and Schlitz.  For bourbon, they prefer Wild Turkey.  Are you kidding me?  These are the kinds of drinks that you’d expect to find in a Wilcox honky-tonk.  If you wear a plaid shirt and Buddy Holly eyeglasses while drinking a Schlitz, you’re living a lifestyle that even Barry Goldwater would have been comfortable in.

My, how things change.  I’ve been wearing plaid shirts, geeky glasses, and drinking cheap beer most my entire life.   At no point in my life was this behavior ever seen as cool.  It was just the way it was.  What a shock to find out that everyone from my generation that grew up in Arizona has been on the cutting edge of a nation-wide social coolness phenomenon for fifty years and didn’t even know it.

I hear hipsters like those fat-tired, no gear, bulky framed bicycles to ride.  What’s next?  Slinkies and hula hoops?  The skinny-jeans they like to wear now remind me of the straight-leg, high-water jeans we used to wear as kids.  The difference is that we had to wear ill-fitting jeans because our parents couldn’t afford to buy new ones each time we grew, not because we thought it was cool. 

I’m worried about how far the hipsters might take this glorification of the fashions of my generation.  I don’t mind the fashions of the 50s and 60s, but what if they start assuming the fashions of the 70s?  I don’t think I can stand it if they start wearing polyester, bell-bottomed leisure suits and grow fu-Manchu mustaches on their faces. Maybe I should subscribe to one of those social media phone alert services to warn me at the first sighting of someone wearing a puka shell necklace.  If that happens, you can look for me in a Wilcox honky-tonk wearing a plaid shirt and sipping on a Schlitz, waiting for the fashion trends to change so I’m considered cool once again.   

Me and Kim Kardashian that is.  

Delivery drones of death

I’m becoming more and more alarmed at the steady, creeping growth of robot technologies. If robot cars, hamburger flippers, and sex dolls weren’t bad enough, someone has designed a robot that can come to your house. 

A company called Starship is making delivery robots that can bring food or other packages directly to your house or place of business. You can order it with the click of a button on your phone app. The GPS in the robot can zero in on your location and deliver your avocado on toast and Triple Mocha Frappuccino within about fifteen minutes.

The state of Arizona has just passed legislation allowing these robots to use city sidewalks. However, the law states that robots must obey the same laws as other pedestrians—meaning, I guess, that these things will be completely lawless. I envision delivery robots wandering around Phoenix streets staring at their cell phones while playing Pokémon Go and falling into sewer manholes.

It could have been worse. The Arizona lawmakers could have said the robots are required to obey the same laws as bicycle riders. Then they could blow through stoplights and stop signs, block traffic by traveling side-by-side on narrow streets, and achieve speeds of 25 miles per hour on a crowded sidewalk.  

As it is, these things will only move at about four miles per hour and will have an orange flag attached to them so you can see them better. They can see you better also. The robot has cameras installed all the way around the chassis so they can see and identify anyone that might try to steal the food in the cargo bay.  It also has an alarm that sounds off if someone tries to pick it up and run off with it. Equipped with a two-way radio system it can converse with anyone it encounters. The New York model is programmed to say, “Hey, I’m walking here!” whenever a car gets too close to it.

The company says that in all the testing they’ve done that no one has ever tried to steal the cargo or vandalize the robot. But, that is what they said about the Canadian Death Robot known as HitchBOT before his horrific demise in a Philadelphia back alley three years ago. Before long, these delivery robots will be modified so that they can defend themselves from attackers. They could arm it with tasers or tear gas or maybe just put a little Rottweiler inside of it that could jump out of the cargo bay.

Whatever they decide to do, it will only be a matter of time before the weaponized delivery robots turn on us and try to take over the world.  Fortunately, the first victims will all be hipsters who will be ordering artisan food and craft beer with these things before it stops being ironic. That will give the rest of us time to come up with a means to destroy the delivery robots. We will probably have to go back in time and kill whoever designed these things in the first place as they did in Terminator II.  

Before that happens, though, I suppose we can think of some good use for these things. They are cheap, costing less than $2,000 so your average citizen could easily afford one. I think this would be a great way to take some of the pressure off busy moms who could use these things to pick up groceries while they take the kids to soccer practice.

Come to think of it. How many kids could you get into one of these things?