The Tactile Past Ep. 2 “Predictions"

 Poor Predictions and Shaky Science

Well humans are motivated in a limited number of ways but the easiest, probably, is fear. So we brush aside all the fanfare and listen intently to what scientists all over the world are saying and we believe them, yet in time, those predictions simply fail to materialize.

 

Oil

None of the predictions made in the 70’s or 80’s came to pass. The first cataclysm we could expect, we were told, was for the world to run out of oil. We’re using far too much gas for it to last very long, they said. Countries which didn't have oil panicked and started stockpiling and striking deals with shady governments to proactively head off any sudden world-running-out-of-oil scenarios and all the chaos and ruin that would bring.

Population

The next major catastrophe, we were told, was the population explosion. If things carry on like this, in the merrily exponential manner which typifies life, the world will be overrun with people and we won’t be able to feed all of them. We should expect Africa and Asia to encounter massive famines on account of all the tens of millions of people being born every day and not as many farms being made to compensate. It's strictly a numbers thing.

Mobility Tech

One good thing, they said, was that we could expect flying cars running on solar and personal jet packs and also personal bots to live our lives for us. We can spend weekends shopping for a robo-dog to go with the new robo-dog-walker that came with the flying car and on the way home, the robo-dog will solve complicated equations in loud, robotic monotones.

Sea level

The next big threat to mankind's existence, say the scientists, will be the rising sea levels owing to all the ice melting in the arctic. At this rate the polar caps will be gone in decades and every coastal city will be consumed by the ocean. Plus, the cities could sink because they're heavy.

Entertainment Tech

On the bright side.. LCD looks promising but the future is, without doubt, holograms. We’re going to have lasers everywhere showing us 3D shows in the air, or direct to our brains, and *finally* they make some half-decent sci fi using biofeedback and brain pattern recognition. Still.. 3D eh? 3D! Science fiction baby!

Nukes

Nukes. If you have nukes but never use them, that's the same as not having nukes. Why get us all excited then? Ayy.

The Tactile Past I: The Tickey

 

A "Tickey" was a 2 ½ cent coin from Rhodesia.

 I recall the pervasive parking meter. In the city, every street-level parking bay had a mechanical timer; you would feed the coins into the device, crank the handle (like a gumball machine) and it would show how much parking time you had left. When the time ran out a little red flag would swing into view, saying “EXPIRED” and attracting the meter maid, looking to fine anyone parked in an expired bay. The system today, unbelievably, is even more awkward.

What was unusual, I think, was that we had a coin specifically for this one purpose. The coin was a ‘tickey’, 2 ½ cents (formerly threepence) and it was tiny ~ so small, in fact, that they were easy to find by touch alone. Outside of parking meters, the tickey seemed to have no purpose.

 

The coins I experienced were decimal but these here show the conversion – threepence (3d) to 2 ½ cents, sixpence (6d) to 5 cents, a shilling (1/-) to 10 cents, a florin (2/-) to 20 cents and a half crown (2/6) to 25 cents. 

The largest bill in print, lol, was ten dollars, the equivalent of 20 pounds sterling.

Haight Ashbury - The Epicentre of Hippie Counterculture

 

One Wall to Rule Them All

On the wall at the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic is a mural, a sort of collage, cut ‘n pasted there by the hippies who hung out there between 1967 and 1969. It is old now, faded, marred with graffiti and other grime manifest over the last 60 years but it is still there  (and, coincidentally, at my place albeit ‘like new’)   and it has an interesting story to tell, one you won’t find anywhere else.

It was my task to recreate this mural for a TV show about serial killers – in this instance, Charles Manson. Working with very little reference, I set about making the enormous artwork in precisely the same manner as the hippies did back in 1967 – by using the free posters Bill Graham would deposit there.

Bill Graham & LSD

Bill Graham was the name on every poster which he used partly for promotion but principally to market direct to users of LSD. Bill’s formula was to host benefit events, which skirt a good deal of the bylaws, and so offered to hold benefit gigs for the clinic, where LSD and his market intersected.  The Summer of Love emerged amongst all this and the rest is history, but know that here, in this room, under this artwork, was the epicentre of Haight Ashbury and the principal role it played in the emergence of the hippie counterculture.

Bill Graham’s story you’ll find on Wikipedia, but that’s the ‘official’ story. The wealthy black man who owned the Fillmore auditorium had conservative values; Graham’s first few gigs, being benefits, made the cut but it was unlikely he would be fine with back-to-back shows from Friday noon to Monday noon, a for-profit venture which hinged on the supply of LSD and the engineering of the first large-scale counterculture in US history. Graham took the lease and then, mysteriously, the wealthy black guy was murdered! How unbelievably fortunate for Graham, and lucky too that he had the support of the LSD supply chain, which would naturally remove any hinderances to moving product in volume.

Graham gave out free posters at the gigs and naturally dropped off a stack of the things at the clinic, a marketing move. It served to attract an audience and also inform the supply chain of the sorts of numbers involved. A popular show would need a good 30,000 tabs of fresh blotter, or some 250 sheets be made available, and the clinic was the only place of central exchange.

The Clinic

The Clinic naturally didn’t describe itself as a LSD hub but as a social welfare place, something of a do-good rehab, a medical support service.  However, people like Manson, who was permanently high, hung out there pretty much because you got free acid and would meet a number of runaways, drawn to the legend of the district. He could conscript girls and have them do pretty much whatever he said; the acid was free, the concerts were free and there was no chance of getting in trouble with the law.

So the Clinic was the hub, no big whoop. Our posters on the wall tell us that Jan 1967 to Dec 1968 – those two years – were the height of the fad and the concerts outgrew the hall. Haight Ashbury became a magnet for every part-time criminal, chancer, vagrant and addict to descend in great numbers. The Clinic had to start to distance itself from the drug trade as the district started turning into slum, with all the unwanted attention this brings, so in 1969 the LSD transactions took place off premises. This marked the end of the poster series and the start of the whole thing winding down. The hippies trekked off to Woodstock and Haight Ashbury started cleaning up.

The Posters

These aren’t just any posters, they are works of art and core to the psychedelic movement in how it came to be defined. They epitomize, and illustrate, legendary artists in a unique age and gave young people a voice.

 

Lost in Space 2018

 Lost in Space (TV Show) 2018

Not sure if this is funny or sad.

 Six minutes into the series, the family crash on Earth, in a snowy area. Mom's leg is broken, so she sits down and takes off her helmet. It is, after all, Earth.
. "NOOO!" shouts dad, thinking this is an alien planet and concerned that the atmosphere is not breathable.
. She points to a tear on dad's pants. "If the atmosphere was deadly, you'd be dead by now." she states, the evidence of his lack of death being the reason why she suddenly removed her helmet and caused panic.
. If he saw her suit torn, he would rush to her aid and frantically repair the fissure. She sees his suit torn and waits to see if he dies, because if he does, she should keep her helmet on.

. Just to repeat, this is minute six... 1,194 minutes of passive aggression to go. We can look forward to mom openly hating dad each of the 200 times he fails to die. There are 20 more family panic meltdowns still to get through, with the abject stupidity it needs to repeatedly turn nothing into disaster and back to nothing again.

. Also in the first 6 minutes: the family crash on Earth but fail to realize it is Earth despite there being quite a lot of irrefutable evidence that they could not possibly be anywhere else. For a collection of doctors and professors and everyone's a genius, it seems unlikely they wouldn't notice that.

 

 

. Here's another memorable moment: when he expresses concern that the black hole is getting closer. "Oh yes," she says, "It's almost here. I went into orbit earlier and I saw it."
Hold on... even if you could see a black hole... if you can blast into orbit then surely you're no longer stranded on the planet. You have to do a sanity check every time someone says something.

Meanwhile, we nervously wait for the girls to strike up an affair, for when that happens, it becomes underage lesbian interracial incest in space, which is a very specific genre. 

 

 

I have to work from memory here, but as I recall, the formula for the first season was entirely rote. We'd start with a good round of emancipation, with women declaring dominion over the weak and foolish men, and minorities declaring dominion over each other. For a family, they sure are hyper-diverse.

Then, suddenly, a completely unforseen event would happen even - and I'm serious here - if it could have been reasonably foreseen. Mom springs to the aid of the children but does she make it in time? Of course she does, before cocking up the works again with the screaming and the crying and the devastating attack of emotion. This may be due in part to everyone sleeping with everyone else, making the girls pregnant and hormonal and very, very confused.

   Let's be blunt about this. At no point is anyone lost, or in space. The whole lot are rooted firmly on Earth, but bizarrely, are in a panic to leave it. It's the perfect place but they hate it, despite food and refreshments appearing as if by magic. The most likely reason is poor signal, and you can't watch Youtube with poor signal.

The appearance of some horses felt a little out of sorts. Did the horses also wind up stranded on an alien planet, like the humans? You bet they did! Because horses, like people, are shit at interstellar navigation.

Like mommy and daddy when they're not fighting, the kids are horny as hell. When the robot is discovered, the poor thing is sexually abused to the point where it malfunctions. Thereafter, the kids turn on each other (and one unfortunate chicken, whose story we can not tell here) and in the general melee, somehow create one example of every ethnicity known to man. The chickens multiplied randomly or kept changing colour, much like the cast.

 

 
But best of all, is the predictable cliffhanger. "Let's go for a drive" "Okay" "Hmmm, those clouds over there look a bit menacing" [short while later] Kids (screaming): "DAD! DAD! DAD! DAD! MOM! MOM! MOM!" Parents (screaming): "KIDS! KIDS!" Kids (crying): "MOM! DAD! MOM! DAD!" .. and this, folks, is as good as it gets.

Lost in Space 1998

 

 

 Lost in Space (Movie) 1998

I'm not sure what motivated me to revisit the 1998 sci-fi adventure “Lost in Space”. I do recall having enjoyed the movie, and the cast (William Hurt, Mimi Rogers, Heather Graham, Gary Oldman, Matt LeBlanc and Lacey Chabert) was a stellar selection of highly skilled actors. Together with Jim Henson's creature shop, ILM and no fewer than ten leading CG production companies in the UK and US, it was bound to be entertaining, I figured.

Ten minutes into the 122-minute treatment, the entire premise had unraveled in a pointless and unthinking cacophony of random dialogue that could only be possible if assembled from scores of preschoolers by selecting, painstakingly, the worst of the lot.

   
Mankind was to be 'saved' (from themselves, apparently) by establishing a ‘hypergate’, a portal through which a ship could jump. At the destination, a return gate would be constructed and the colonization of a distant planet could commence.

Enter the baddies. The ‘Sedition Fighters’ elect to attack the construction of the gate, a curious decision such a skilled and clearly intelligent faction would adopt, given that they are members of the species the gate was designed to save. Equally curious is that they would attack an experiment supported by theory that was weak at best, so the most obvious way to see it fail would be to wait. They decide to build their own version of exactly the same thing.

It would have made much more sense to simply start the movie with the family already lost in space. However, the desire to explain how they got there clearly was more powerful than the ability to do so. Getting themselves unlost by propulsion to random co-ordinates in time and space seems more like a way of getting lost, but no matter.

New Line Cinema had a lot riding on this movie. They were to relaunch the entire enterprise, franchising TV shows, movies, toys, games, the works. And then this disaster of a steaming pile of crap happened, and the cast quickly swept it under the table and New Line Cinema kissed their aspirations goodbye, as did Netflix, 20 years later.

 

 

 The kid "genius" admits his intellectual defeat at the hands of the bad guy like this:

“Surprise!” he says, perceiving a problem in noting his father's scream, terrified face and blaster pointing at the robot's head.

“Dad, chill, it’s okay, I hacked into his CPU and then…”
(pointing to the droid’s head)
“… bypassed his operating systems and…”
(points to the droid’s side panel)
“… accessed his subroutines.”
(shows a RC unit)
“He’s basically running by remote control.”

The kid might was well be saying "Ga-doh ga-doh" while beating himself on the head with a baseball bat. Maybe that's why he's a genius, he's worked out you don't need the bat. I think they should have left the bat in for entertainment value. Speaking of bats, Lacey's voice is so high only bats can hear it, mercifully saving us from the headache of nonsensical pointless dialogue.
   
'Okay' says the professor, 'As you know Alpha Prime is the only habitable planet so far detected by deep space recon. We're going out to Alpha Prime, take us ten years in suspended animation. There we will supervise the building of a gate, the companion gate will meanwhile be built here on earth. This will means vessels can pass instantaneously between points and establish a colony on Alpha Prime.'

So... the question from the press isn't 'why do we need a gate if we have suspended animation?' or possibly 'isn't there already a colony on Alpha Prime?" or "Doesn't that place Alpha Prime within our solar system?" or "why the fuck would anyone want to do that?" or perhaps even "if you've tested this thing, you know you can also teleport yourself there, right? "

Nope, the burning issue is "How does this relate to getting lost in space?" Phrased as: "Can't you use the Jupiter's engines to hyperspace out there?" The short answer to that question is yes, for we see (spoiler alert) at the end of the movie, it's how they get back. "No" says the professor to the attentive cadre of global news representatives. He goes on about how hyperspace is random and therefore a completely stupid idea, and therefore installed on the ship, you know, obviously.

Oh how they will freak the fuck out, he would muse, having spent hours meticulously planning the moment he yells 'Surprise, motherfuckers!" and then plunges down the red button, FOOM, random point in the universe. Haha! THEN they'd be FUCKED and oh what a caper!

Suddenly! the moment arrives! 'See you in hell, bitches!' he screams, bashing down the red button and FOOM, they go from random point in the Universe to their living room on Earth and the hunky pilot is missing and all the girls are pregnant.

In the end, the Robinsons were so happy to be alive that they didn't notice they failed on their mission completely, but was told it happens anyway by future baddie and future Will, so they just up and forgot about it. They also didn't notice the hyperdrive worked by failing to do what it was supposed to do. That seems like the underlying theme of the entire movie, the hypergate never happened either, nor did the sedition destroy it or make their own gate. Even the invention of time travel was somehow uninvented.

In the end, pretty much everyone was back at square one, except the baddie turned goodie maybe, who was now a spider. Told you all they needed to do was wait.