for
5/12/2001
This week, a planned parody of teen-based anti-globalization websites has been shelved.
Last night, I commenced to work on a project. It was the "Space!" playlist on my .mp3 player--mind you, read on. This wasn't a large task, but it symbolizes something that's in all of us, and a part of it that's passed on.
What kicked it off was a random discovery on the Gnutella network of a Sarah Brightman song entitled "I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper." This turned out to be the glass-voiced vocalist's (embarassingly) disco/pop debut single, from many years ago, and while it may not be a particularly good song, it was in precisely the right spirit:
Chorus:I lost my heart to a starship trooper
Flashing light in hyper space
Fighting for the Federation
Hand in hand we'll conquer space
Laid down with "The Diva Dance," from The Fifth Element, Powerman 5000's "When Worlds Collide," Monster Magnet's "Spacelord," "Rocketman," by Elton John, I Mother Earth's "One More Astronaut," "The Star Wars Cantina," by Weird Al Yankovik, Cowboy Mouth's "Jenny Says," and Spacehog's "Starside," the mix of songs was designed to evoke one curiously 20th century emotion: that of the limitless possibilities of existance. The Future, in strong caps.
Sci-Fi began as uncharted territory, and to frontiers go the cowboys. The early sci-fi serials were little more than western good-vs-evil tales in new clothes, while the pulps of print exhaustively used the motif of beautiful women being rescued from frightening, villainous aliens. Rocket ships let men go faster, higher, farther. The technological brainchildren of men exposed them to new dangers, which they could further refine their will and intelligence to defeat. In short, basic human desires were given expression. It was the very antithesis of fear of the dark.
Then this feeling became "retro sci-fi," and the genre "matured." Gritty virtual things became the norm. In today's future, the palette is small, and dark... and frightening. Limitless possibilities are just a kids' story.
Buck Rogers once spent many serial episodes chasing an evil, disembodied voice, fighting his way finally to a dark asteroid between the Earth and the moon, wherein the voice's author dwelt. He found the super villain; it was a tiny worm, with a voice synthesizer. He crushed it with his heel. What I wouldn't give to bring this story back to the big screen.
Perhaps it is retro now to see in one's imagination a vista so large it's without end. Maybe the future needn't look fun, on any basic level. Maybe this vaporous idea that I'm grasping at isn't going to apparate, and maybe a simple name and set of dates would have been best on this page, but the idea that the world is larger, nay, the Future is larger--the Future meaning next Monday, not just next millenium, the Future meaning everything that has not yet happened, whether it will or won't...
...and the Future being everything that we can see, or do, or be--if the Future is not larger than we can ever, ever grasp, if there is not one more horizon, always, to Shangri-La, then what the hell are we living for?
Always I round back on my main point, and painfully I conduct you to it: that on the day I was making up that playlist, author Douglas Adams died, of an apparent heart attack. The author who opened our eyes wider than they'd ever been, to a comedic universe without end, the author who took his books much less seriously, in a truly sane manner, than his many admirers, the man who once rekindled my interest in comedy and in sci-fi, and in the possibilities of what a book can do for the laughing soul, is no more. Adams was one of the great cowboys on the frontiers of imagination.
I had the pleasure of seeing Mr. Adams speak at MIT this winter. He seemed so lively, and down to earth, reading exerpts from his book Last Chance to See, and answering the audience's questions in an utterly ungodlike manner. Dare I say it, he was real--a man, all told, and one we're not soon to see the like of again--but honestly actual, making the news of his passing all the more shocking. I know you've seen such things written of public figures ad nauseam, but I want you to really understand it this time. Grieve, for a man, because he will be missed.
I too lost my heart to a starship trooper.
Douglas Adams 1952-2001. Thank you.
Touch the Toast