Gothic

I got a new job. I'll be one of a few winter caretakers up in Gothic, Colorado this year. It's the site of the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory.

This place is beautiful. If I'm wise I'll stop bitching and moaning, and writing bad editorial, and write the movie myself; the one I wanted to see in the first place.

Update, February 21, 2009: I think I need an agent.

Sunrise, Mars

I'm not sure why I made this... I guess I was inspired by this Spirit photo of a Martian sunset. And I always liked those early twentieth century 'cigar' shaped rocket ship designs so often used on pulp space novel covers and in Bugs Bunny cartoons.

They were clean, iconic, beautiful and totally impractical.

Sputni[x]

Wish I'd thoughta this.

I worked with one of these hoaxologists at my last restaurant. He was unflinching in his stance that the moon landings never happened. I tried explaining, reasoning, cajoling... nothing worked. Then I asked... 'If it's so easy to fake a landing on the moon, why didn't the Russians do it?'

Blank stare, followed by... 'Because they were in on it!'

Of course, the 'X-Files' defense (does 'X' stand for hoa[x]?). History is fake. The truth may be out there, but we poor chumps will never know it. Government officials are simultaneously complete incompetents and brilliant conspirators. Don't trust what looks to be your hand in front of your face... and so on.

Conspiracy theorists have their own internally self-reinforcing logic which basically amounts to 'don't confuse me with facts.' But the icing in the cake is their ability to imagine ever larger sphere's of complicity to account for ever smaller inconsistencies.

To be fair there's a difference between misinformed and paranoid. For the truly paranoid, the less evidence that a conspiracy exists, the more it must exist. I'm not sure where my buddy sits on a line between the two. But he definitely needs to ask better questions.

The Muck Knows

God fearers...

When the mind becomes preoccupied with deeply held convictions, anything that supports that conviction gets filtered in... and everything else gets filtered out.

The mind has its own mechanisms for judging the validity of exterior input, i.e. reality. But sometimes these mechanisms competitively trip over themselves, becoming mired in metaphor. This type of reasoning happens everywhere, even in science (just ask Percival Lowell), but it is comparatively strong in religion.

The faithful are especially prone to placing the solution not at the end of the equation where it belongs, but at the beginning. For them, answers always precede questions. They first and foremost declare god exists, and second look for evidence of the same... if at all. For them variables are a matter of opinion. Only the foregone conclusion matters.

But the universe does not care what we want of it. It just is. We must guard against projecting our desires and wishes upon it, because by doing so we run the risk of getting it all wrong. The universe is so vast and so old that to personify it with ones pre-technical, metaphorical, origin myth is to dishonor the physicality of it. There is far more power in the real than in our dearest illusions. Those feelings of happiness for a beautiful day come from within, not from without. Good and bad things happen, but only as affect, not as judgment.

Knowledge flows up from the muck, not down from on high. We know what we know because we earned it. Not because it was whispered in our ears by angels. We earned what we know individually and collectively. Before us came our human ancestors, then our primate ancestors, then shrews, lizards, amphibians, fish, plants, muck, chemicals, atoms... and finally the raw pure energy of the big bang.

The complexity of our lives was payed for first by the interaction of material forces in nature, then by the sweat and pain of living things, and finally by experiment and the scientific method. Everything given to us individually was payed for by someone or something that came before us. Each generation was built upon the accumulated wisdom and information content of that which preceded it.

Science has reduced religion to a kind of 'insert god here' proposition whenever the remaining faithful are confronted with a scientific mystery. And since science has effectively pushed that insertion point back to the beginning of the universe, the only remaining place a believer can put god is behind the big bang itself.

But even now scientists are generating models that reach beyond the singularity at the beginning of the universe. They're asking rational questions about what happened 'before,' and are finding good, honest answers. And they are doing it with tools that have a billion times the exploratory resolution than do some ancient nomadic parables.

There is a megaverse out there to explore, one that works by rules, not miracles.

The universe is a neutral substrate, a platform upon which our emotions can exist; a foundation only. Evolutionary theory ultimately means the god origin hypothesis must be abandoned. How we react to pleasure or pain says much more about ourselves than it does about the world, because the world is a superset of our minds. A reasonable person must therefore concede two categories of knowledge; things we know, and things we do not yet know.

Own the good you do. And own the bad also. Stop giving them away to a fairy tale.

May as a Gay in Day

We have got to stop these damn dirty dyslexics from marrying each other!

* * *

Last Saturday night I caught the ass end of a local TV interview program; 'Colorado 2031' on Fox31, moderated by Ron Zappolo. It featured a sweet lesbian couple and two jesus-sucking bunco artists from 'Fuck Your Family If It Doesn't Look Exactly Like Mine,' a Colorado Springs based vomitorium. They drove up (broomsticks were in the shop I guess) especially for the occasion, bless their hearts. They were so full of peace and love and charity I could hardly contain my urge to do an Elvis on my pretty new flat TV.

The first uber-bitch was just your run of the mill aggressive, tight ass, busybody cunt in desperate need of an extra large, everlasting gob-stopper. But the other was apparently one of those (excuse me while I cough up a hairball) 'ex'-gays. These self-loathing assholes, I swear... Judas', all of them.

(This particular one reminded me very much of that other sanctimonious, 'conservative' shill... Mary Cheney; daughter of the famous dictator. Although her duplicity is more political than religious in nature.)

But seriously folks...

Did these people actually read the bible? If they had they may have noticed, amid the mountains of mutually contradictory statements, wife swapping, slave trading, smiting and child rape, that Jesus' favorite swear word was 'hypocrite.' I refer you to the source: Matthew 6:2, 6:5, 6:16, 7:5, 15:7, 22:18, 23:13, 23:15, 23:23, 23:25, 23:27, 23:28, 23:29, 24:51, Mark 7:6, 12:15 and Luke 6:42, 12:1, 12:56, 13:15.

These people are on the wrong side of history. They must at all times maintain the status quo. For them change equals death. They are the last stand against modernity. They are an evolutionary dead end that just won't die.

Fifty years from now (barring singularity) there will be thousands of openly gay, legally married preachers of every flavor on pulpits all over this country. And because some true believers are world class revisionist historians they will have reassigned opposition to gay marriage to atheists, communists, Darwinists and maybe fascists too (aren't they all the same?). Of course by then they'll be complaining about someone else's plea for freedom; equal rights for A.I.s perhaps.

Their vitriol maintains that gay marriage will be the latest end of civilization as we know it. But history shows that every time the definition of 'us' is expanded, giving equal liberty to a new beleaguered group, society is strengthened. Every time.

I attended the straight marriage of my boss and her fiancée in Omaha a few weeks ago (I was the photographer). I don't think god was mentioned once during the ceremony. No one prayed upon bended knee or ate the body of Christ (there was lots of drinking though). The point I'm making is that marriage as these people understand it does not exist, and probably never did. By a strictly legal definition marriage is a secular consolidation of assets. The wedding ceremony itself is a completely non-binding formality to which ones religious beliefs may or may not be attached. Your choice. To arbitrarily distinguish between gay or straight is just a minor tinkering. It will not destroy the earth.

I've got an idea... don't legalize gay marriage. Instead let's deregulate straight marriage and make this whole thing a non issue.

And so, Jesus... After hypocrites and stone throwers, I think Christ saved a special strata in hell for liars. All this polite, compassionate talk about two-parent, bi-gendered households and crumbling civilizations is just a smokescreen. These fuckers hate queers... period. To say otherwise is disingenuous. Gay people simply do not fit into their narrow world view...

...except as fund raising fodder.

$

Wormholes

The wormhole journey as portrayed in Contact is a cheap thrill ride unworthy of the material.

OK... So the pod drops through the center of the popcorn machine and into a wormhole aperture. Great, with you so far (sort of)... But the red flashy-crap, followed by a star-field, followed by being sucked into some kind of funnel/vortex/tunnel thingy doesn't work.

Through a wormhole one can travel to distant parts of the universe instantly, avoiding all the fuss of relativity. More importantly wormhole nozzles do not look like funnels. Watch Cosmos again (The Edge of Forever, Episode X). A funnel in 4D space is a sphere in 3D space.

Here's how it should have gone... The machine should have been more like the one in the book where a stationary pod is surrounded by a device that generates a pucker in spacetime to which an awaiting wormhole nozzle can attach. The wormhole itself is an invasive sphere which envelopes a local area of spacetime; the space enclosing the pod when the machine reaches full power. A passenger would see her surroundings instantly change from departure point to destination without ever experiencing a tunnel. Whatever tunnel there is that connects these two points in space exists outside our three dimensional universe and is therefore invisible to us.

Yes, Sagan used tunnels in the book. But I think he included the tunnel adventure more for entertainment than scientific value. Since the entertainment value was negligible and misleading he would have done better to leave it out.

In the book the pod is completely encased, which conveniently doesn't allow an outside observer to see anything. The popcorn machine simply leaves out any telling spacial effects (aside form a cheap fireworks display). Both of these theatrical devices serve to reinforce the assumption of the flat-earth powers-that-be that the pod went nowhere and the bitch made it up. That's drama and it's good. But it only works to a point. The book answers the doubters, but the movie does not. The movie's only rebuttal is the usual, typical, predictable appeal to faith. 'I experienced a vision of the universe, a revelation if you will, that only I was allowed to see... Trust me.'

*barf*

So the term 'wormhole,' is a kind of misnomer. What's a better nomer? Oh hell, I don't know. Let me think...

How about 'Independently Spacial Relativity-not! Focusing Aperture,' or 'ISRFA' for short. No, too complicated, too abstract, and too removed from everyday life. Not to mention being far too inaccessible to the general public (from whom science funding ultimately originates, like it or not).

And besides, it lends itself to so many unflattering acronym extensions:

ISuRFloridA
ISuRFAholes
ISRaeliFatwA
ISReFerAddictive?
ImSuReFloyddidn'tsAythat
InlawsareSometimesReallyFuckingAnnoying

When generating a wormhole one connects two places that are not connected otherwise, forcing them to occupy the same location at the same time. A wormhole, therefore, can be understood as being like a screenplay... where the novel is the entrance, and the movie an exit.

But in the case of the popcorn machine, the wormhole is more akin to a digestive tract. Fillet mignon in... shit out.

The 'Popcorn' Machine

I’ll give the producers credit for one thing... representing the Machine as a large open air device was a good idea. It was visually interesting, and it implies a technology that was extra-worldly. But the details are all wrong and it is too complicated.

The novel states that the Machine is not a wormhole generator, and obviously, it doesn't have to be. The Aliens already have wormhole generators. They can fashion a hole through to us easier than transmitting the means for us to go to them. All they need from us is the destination, a specific time and place through which they can enter our space. All they need from us is a 'now.'

Thus the Machine represents the last piece of the wormhole puzzle, the final and simplest link in the functionality of the wormhole network. Its only purpose is to make a small dent in spacetime to which an awaiting wormhole nozzle can attach. The Machine is only a spacetime marker.

It could have been anything, but for proper dramatic reasons Sagan chose a device that has 'weighty energy' for his novel. And because international cooperation was a major theme in his life he also made it hard to build, forcing humanity to work together, more or less. The movie Machine satisfies these goals in some ways, but not in others.

I like the rings. They have power through shear size, and I like the way they resemble an electron shell. But the other more dangerous elements of the Machine are a transparent effort to manipulate the audience. For example, the fireworks display when the Machine fully activates is just a lot of noise. Maybe it's there to distract us from the complete lack of interesting dialog or a satisfying ending.

The drop/catch mechanism, the needless conflict over the inclusion of a chair, the goofy thing where Ellie's face peals itself off her head, the pod becoming transparent in her line of site and the child-Ellie face substitution have no intellectual justification. They are a discontinuous assemblage of unrelated nonsensicals.

Why have her drop through the machine at all? It's not dramatic as much as it is a thrill ride. This movie should be smarter than that. Couldn't she be somehow suspended in the center, thus avoiding the need for a drop/catch mechanism?

The special effects for the machine/wormhole journey are very good, technically. But how good are they really without a strong foundation in logic and storytelling?

I beg of you, make sense.

Scriptology

I've discovered a version of the Contact script dated September 8, 1995, credited to Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, among others. This script is essentially what appeared on film.

So… I guess I can no longer pin all my dislike on the director/producers. It pains me to say this, but my problem with this movie is Carl Sagan.

Many artists have difficulty translating their work from one medium into another. If you enjoy reading Sagan’s books you know this guy simply could not touch lightly on any subject. It just wasn’t in him. He had to explore everything inside and out and three days from backwards. Of course he had to make certain concessions for the popular media, but he always managed to do so with clarity and effectiveness. In the bookish freedom from practical constraints on length he could be concise in message. In book form Sagan was finite, yet unbounded.

Film, however, is a very different animal. Extraordinary films require extraordinary screenplays. The screenplay format forces you to do one of two things: write a condensed book, or write a movie. A screenplay is its own species, related to a book in DNA only. Where the book is the fossil, the screenplay is its living, animated descendant.

I think the screenplay, as a process, was fundamentally at odds with Carl Sagan. The physical limitation of a hundred and twenty pages must have felt suffocating to him. He couldn’t fit that big brain of his into that small a space. So instead of translating his work into film by penetrating its internal bureaucracy, Sagan simply gutted it.

He touched on the religion v. science conflict too lightly and with no rebuttal. He removed most of the dramatic potential by simplifying Ellie’s family structure. He took out all the good stuff: the wit, the skepticism, the cosmic perspective, and worst of all, the conclusion.

The inescapable irony is that Sagan probably would have been much more comfortable writing Contact as a television mini-series as it was originally conceived by he and Francis Ford Coppola. It could have been ten hours long. It could have been another Cosmos, and me and a hundred million other people would have loved every minute of it. (This in no way condones Coppola’s despicable attempt to halt production on Contact immediately after Sagan’s death.)

Of course Sagan was not a filmmaker. The filmmakers, however, are filmmakers, and they should have known better. They made a film based not upon Sagan’s wonderful book, but on his wholly inadequate screenplay, which in my view amounts to culpable negligence.

I doubt Foster (didn't have to), or Zemeckis (did have to) ever read the book.

The God of Hollywood

Contact, the 'movie,' is a thing where the only standard of evidence worth noting is human emotion. Contact, the 'movie,' is a courtroom drama, where ones embarrassing moments count as empirical evidence. Contact, the 'movie,' is a place on a flat Earth where mental defects are messages from the hereafter to be hailed as indisputable fact. Contact, the 'movie,' is a place where anecdotal evidence and conjecture will get you laid... Not necessarily a bad thing in itself, but it shouldn’t be the end product of this story.

Contact, the 'movie,' is a bouquet of pretty flowers, that smell bad.

Contact, the 'movie,' is a one-hundred and fifty-three minute long version of 'The Price Is Right.' This 'film' is a complete sellout to butter and sugar, popcorn and Coca-Cola. This 'movie,' so called, is a slave to the industry. Its only redeeming quality may be as studio fodder. Revenue from Contact could, possibly, one can only hope, have greased the wheels of some other truly artistic film.

The book is filled with intrigue, history, genuine human emotion and grand motives by inscrutable, yet entirely real higher powers. It soars. It has a social conscience and a reason for being. It releases energy and comes to more than the sum of its parts.

This 'movie,' on the other hand, comes to nothing. It’s as if the demolition crew showed up a day early and struck the set before an ending was put in the can. Forth wall minor functionaries assumed control of this project and ruined it, and were well paid for their ruining.

And I say this to you, Carl Sagan (deceased) and Ann Druyan, you played a part in this ruining. You sold your souls (and I don't even believe in that crap).

The most glaring absence is of course the wonderful book ending where Ellie finds scientific proof that god exists. One might argue that this is too complicated for a movie. And I agree, but only insofar as it is too mathematical in nature. This concept only needed to be translated into the more visual medium. But instead it was simply dropped. And I do not think this is merely a case of expedient story telling. There is a more insidious force at work here, namely religion.

The faithful hijacked this film and made it theirs. This movie celebrates the peculiar religious notion that the unknowable is a form of pure knowledge. What is wrong with this film is what is wrong with religion, where the meaningless question becomes an argument from authority. ‘The bible says God exists, because God says so in the bible, doesn’t he?’ - that sort of thing. For these folks God is the irresistible force and the bible is the immovable object.

So instead of discovering proof of a higher level of existence our impotent heroine, Ellie (a.k.a., the poor little atheist girl), is left floundering in self-doubt. This is because religious people hate proof. They hate it to such a degree as to disallow evidence of their own argument. To prove god exists negates faith.

In the end the protagonist becomes a thinly veiled TV evangelist complete with very public and tearful appeals to belief. She might as well be wearing a pink, cotton-candy wig and Spackle makeup. The producers of this film have cloaked ignorance in sentiment.

And that's not all they did. Crimes against art have here been committed. In the hands of these filmmakers the term 'science fiction' has taken on a completely unintended, and loathsome meaning. It has become an oxymoronic, grotesque parody of itself. One might as well classify this movie as 'religious fact.'

'The world is what we make of it.' Yes, it is. When we are children. But adults are not permitted the childish luxury of making it up as they go. To paraphrase Sagan, at some point we must abandon our most heartfelt beliefs in favor of cold hard reality. The universe is no fairy tale. Sagan never pandered to children the way this film panders to the childish adults who still believe the universe is just a metaphor for a struggle between quarreling super beings. He gave it to us straight without appeals to mysticism.

Science and religion are not equal partners. There is no common ground between them, with the possible exception of using science to deconstruct the evolutionary imperative for religious belief. Beyond that science destroys religion. It kicks its ass. Sagan knew it, although he hedged his bets in public. But this rotten 'movie' gives the same weight to miracles as it does physics, perhaps more. It panders to the mob in the name of Jesus and candy bars.

I often hear people say that a movie can never be as good as the book. Boloney. Kubrick, among others, could do it because he knew the formula. Here's the formula: a movie is not a book. It doesn't have to be and it shouldn't ever be. What it does have to be is original to its own unique medium. Think visual people. Find an element of visual interest within the story and let that be your guide to translate the entire work.

In this regard Sagan handed the producers the key to this particular enterprise on a silver platter, and still they missed it entirely. Within the last chapter of the book lay the movie. And again, the reason they left out this proof is because the truly faithful despise proof.

The subtitle, instead of 'A Journey to the Heart of the Universe,' should have read, 'Don't Confuse Me with Facts.' This film is terrible. It is a complete surrender to abject unthink. It abandons science. It abandons Sagan (he actually abandons himself).

This film is a betrayal of everything for which Carl Sagan stood and fought.

2 is yellow

Writing this thing is kind of a pain. It takes a long time for me to turn a thought into words. I don't think in words. I think in shapes (mostly shapes), colors, faces, sounds... And I can't not tweak a sentence or a paragraph to death. I surrender to fatigue faster than satisfaction.

Blogger is good for me because the text field where I write and the preview window where I preview and the actual blog where I actually blog all look different from one another. It's great. It overrides the 'auto-correct' feature in my brain. On Word I'll skim right over a dropped letter or missing/wrong word a dozen times before I see a mistake, if ever.

The Brave One

Jodie Foster is a fine actor. She is not responsible for her performance in Contact. She was given a terrible script and worse direction. She was stifled, cloistered, caged.

Foster was handed a character who apparently has undiagnosed multiple personality disorder, completely unfitting for the story. One minute she's a powerful, independent feminist, the next she's wallowing in self-pity and pandering to the stupidity of the mob.

And why the hell is this bitch crying?

Did you see the 'final statement' scene in the wonderful film, 'The Contender?' Senator Laine Hanson (Joan Allen) wins because she is unyielding in her principles. Hanson's statement should have been Ellie's statement, practically verbatim, before the machine selection committee in Contact. Instead... whimper.

Instead Ellie is embarrassed by her atheism. Why? Because the last thing this movie wants is a strong nonbeliever with the courage of her convictions. The point of this movie is not science, or even skepticism; it is to buttress the weird religious idea that doubt and uncertainty are where god live.

He's there. He's waiting for you. You just have to concede his unknowability, and you'll be just as right as rain. At the end of this fucking movie reason and evidence and truth are suppressed by the inquisition. The bad guys win. And we lose.

Extraordinary movies require extraordinary screenplays.

What's a fine actor to do with a screenplay that isn't worth the paper it's written on? Answer: Cash your check and move on to something better.

Who are we?

Within the story of Contact is a framework for understanding our place in the scheme of evolution. But in this particular work I don't think Sagan took some of his previously established ideas far enough. I'm talking specifically about our impending 'singularity.'

The term singularity is borrowed from astrophysics, where it defines the center of a black hole; a point between relativity and quantum mechanics where our understanding of physics breaks down. But the newer definition I refer to is in the context of the evolution of intelligence.

Singularity is a massive discontinuity in history, a point in our near future where prediction breaks down due to the acceleration of change in our world. In other words, as evolution accelerates to infinity our ability to predict the future drops to zero. Super intelligence is one possible result. Death is another.

It amazes me that even before there was a word for it, Dr Sagan sensed intuitively what we now call the singularity. The term was coined (applied?) in 1981 by retired San Diego State University professor Vernor Vinge.

"Here I had tried a straightforward extrapolation of technology, and found myself precipitated over an abyss. It's a problem we face every time we consider the creation of intelligences greater than our own. When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity - a place where extrapolation breaks down and new models must be applied - and the world will pass beyond our understanding."
-- Vernor Vinge, True Names and Other Dangers, p. 47.

Sagan touched upon the notion of the emergence of a global consciousness in The Persistence of Memory (Cosmos, episode XI). So he was certainly aware of this idea when he wrote Contact. But he left it out. The concept of ultimate life v. death was a recurring theme in his public work, especially in the context of nuclear war. But maybe the specific idea of singularity hadn't quite congealed in his mind, and so he couldn't connect it to his story. At any rate, I think this is a loss that can be corrected postmortem. Singularity theory provides a motive for the aliens to contact us. (More later...)

For a far better explanation of the singularity I refer you to Staring Into the Singularity 1.2.5 by Eliezer Yudkowsky, and The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, (click on Overview). These folks are hellbent on making it happen as soon as possible. Give them money!

OK, back to us...

If you consider singularity theory carefully you will understand that humans are the end product of natural selection, but not of evolution as a whole. Natural selection (NS) has taken life as far as it can, namely to us. We can surely evolve farther through NS, but the point is we don't have to wait that long. Where before we were riding on a donkey's back, now we're ocean hopping in a Concorde.

Agent Smith from The Matrix was right in comparing us to a virus. But this demeaning insult doesn't take into account our macroscopic (compared to a virus) brains. Sure we reproduce like crazy and run riot over our environment, just like a virus. But our brains, not our sex drive allowed this to happen.

Because our brains give us a huge advantage, other large organisms simply cannot compete with us on a global level. Micro-organisms are still a legitimate threat, but we're gaining on them fast. A virulent outbreak of Ebola may yet have a chance to get us, but not a pack of wolves. (In fact the only large animal we still have to fear is ourselves.)

So we are not in equilibrium with the rest of life on Earth. We kill other species and whole environments on a par with the greatest mass extinctions of the prehistoric past. And any means we posses of destroying ourselves will almost certainly take a big chunk of the biosphere with us. NS would never, by itself, allow a species to proliferate to the point of endangering all life. So what did?

Right now on Earth 'Externally Self-Optimizing Selection' is the name of the game. Through the power of our large brains, eSOS created a global civilization. Our brain and its ability to manipulate the world outside our bodies has extended our power over matter to a point that has no equal. Wagon wheels, fishin' poles, computers (especially computers), cars, airplanes, frozen foods, nukes, mousetraps; all are evolving at a previously unheard of rate. The key point being that none of them are having sex.

Of course eSOS begs the question... What happens when 'external' becomes 'internal?' When Internal Self-Optimizing Selection, iSOS, begins to recursively self-improve our genes and our very minds (or the surrogate minds we create), singularity will be knocking on our door.

In the real world, as in the fictional world of Contact, we humans occupy an extremely narrow, and highly volatile zone between the invention of radio astronomy and super-intelligence. The way I see it there are only two possible outcomes... Give me singularity or give me death.

Does anyone else see the potential for a really great movie here?

The Invasion

Nicole Kidman is very pretty and certainly talented, but I think I like her mostly because she was in a Kubrick film. That always rates special appreciation for me. Then again I'd give Slim Pickens a foot massage for the same reason.

I'll give Kidman this, she's a whole person in this movie. And that makes her completely unlike the split personality, spineless panderer portrayed by Jodie Foster in Contact. I think Foster's a fine actor, too. The fault in Contact lay in its writing and direction...

The use of all that current news footage of Bush, Iraq and whatnot in The Invasion didn't bother me nearly as much as the use of President Clinton in Contact. There's a huge difference between a relevant real life addition and a gimmick. The moment Zemeckis saw real-life Clinton's Mars microbe news conference he just had to have it in his movie. Don't bother asking whether it actually enhances the story! Who cares? It's newsworthy. It steals importance, and lends credibility through association with some other important event. Use it!

The Invasion added a suitable, current events background that enhanced the story. This is global invasion after all. We need a sense of the before and after. The use of current media creates a viable alternative history within the film. In Contact, Clinton is more like a sight gag, or an inside joke. Wink wink. It's just so much Gump.

I do wish this movie had taken the time to slow down a little. They started out fast, and that's fine. But I needed more breaks, a little more emotional closeness between the principles. The dinner table conversation foreshadowing the conflict felt very fresh and smart. It definitely helped the ending and the film as a whole. But I think the period right before Dr. Bennell pulls the trigger should have been longer, more reflective. The entire movie was logistically set up for that scene, but it felt too rushed to me. More emphasis was placed on the following chase scene. A proper rest will always naturally enhance a crescendo. It just didn't have quite the emotional climax I needed.

I have an idea. In the final chase scene Bennell could have plowed through a city block long mob of changelings. It would have been a better contrast to the lone woman in the tunnel and would have emphasized her cross-over to the darker side of raw animal instinct. It could have been an admission of guilt, as it were.

And please, more Law&Order, and less CSI. If they'd left those stupidass red corpuscle close-ups out I might have been happier with the happy ending. Maybe include a track without the showoffy CG blood vessel crap on the DVD release?

The Invasion did get under my skin a little. I found myself looking over my shoulder even more than usual on the walk home last night. And my natural facial resting state has never been so stoic.

And regarding the dismay I hear on those horrible morning 'news' shows over how serious it is... it's serious, it is. It's the serious, smart side of scifi. What's your problem? You mentally retarded, fucking, hairdos on 'Good Morning Ameriduh' didn't complain about the equally dark 28 Weeks Later being 'too serious' for a summer flick. Did ya? Huh? No!

Think of this movie as summer school. OK, bad example.

Try this: go see Transformers, then turn your brain back on and see The Invasion. Then go home, drink a six-pack and take a dip in the pool to get you back in summer vacation mode.

Orange

I got one fairly decent, low-res photo out of last nights light show.

Eclipse

We had a great view of the lunar eclipse from Denver this morning.

It was raining around eleven when I walked home from work, thinking I might miss it. But the night turned out cool and clear a few hours later, just in time for the show. I even woke up without an alarm. I got out my camera and snapped a few pictures.

After totality there wasn't much to do but wait for the moon to reemerge, so I opened Photoshop and started playing. Thinking earth might look even more bazaar than the moon during a total eclipse I imagined this series of pictures.

Ambient light during such an event is the name of the game. The earth is much larger than the moon, and so will completely obscure the sun. I think the solar corona would also be blotted out if one were dead center of the shadow, but I'm not sure.

I think the most interesting feature would be a bright ring caused by the bending of sunlight through our thick, movable feast of an atmosphere, into the shadow zone. Unlike the rough, airless horizon of the moon the atmospheric ring around earth would be like a smooth reddish halo.

During such an eclipse one could observe every sunrise and every sunset on our tiny little planet, simultaneously.

I think the stars and city lights might still be visible, depending on the relative brightness of the ring. And the background stars might be very bright as well, or not. I've never been shot into space, so I don't know.

I modeled this fake picture, minus the rings, after this amazing photograph taken by our collective robot, the Cassini space probe, in the shadow of Saturn.

As the sun reemerges, a 'diamond ring,' a marriage of technology and art, similar to that seen during a solar eclipse on Eerth appears.

The solar corona would rise first...


...followed by the ultra-bright disk of the Sun.

Ten Years...

It has been ten years now since Carl Sagan’s death and the release of the movie Contact, and I remain unhappy about both. It's some kind of epic tragedy that he died right before his message was about to reach the largest possible audience. But worse is that the message itself was distorted, diluted and made minor.

I first became aware of Dr. Sagan on public television, Channel 39 in Fort Wayne, Indiana; that weird science/puppet show channel from beyond the moon. I loved the way his multi layered teaching style put physical science into historical and social context. Before Sagan, at least on television, the stars were separate from the earth; removed from everyday life. But after Sagan everything got connected and became interrelated in the most intimate way. In the very first episode of Cosmos, in contrast to our usual earth-centric way of thinking, he starts his cosmic journey not down here, but out there, at the edge of the universe. He better showed us our place in the scheme of things by putting us between immensity and eternity, and then showed exactly what those limits ought to mean to us.

Sagan opened my eyes to a much larger world, and changed me for the better. We need people like him to appear among us poor dumb apes more often. And as an atheist I will say this much 'for Carl'… In Cosmos, Carl Sagan elevated my soul.

That said… There is something seriously wrong with this movie.

I watched a few episodes of Cosmos again the other day and was amazed how relevant it remains, nearly thirty years after it’s initial release. But I am sorry to say that Contact has not improved with age. In fact it is now painfully dated.

The most glaring absence for me is of course the wonderful book ending where Ellie finds, hiding in the infinite permutations of pi, scientific proof that there is an intelligence which predates the universe. This proof is represented as a simple, elegant signature, a circle of ones written out on a field of zeros. It is an unambiguous sign that on some higher level our universe is somebody else's construct.

The key to this fine film that never was lay in the last chapter of the novel.

For this reason I have entitled my blog... The Artist’s Signature