I bet you all didn’t know that I drew comics. Well, I do. And, I’ve been drawing them for 13 years. No joke.
Anyway, I wanted to offer you my latest drawings, which are an emotional reaction to the last episodes of LOST, one of the popular television shows this decade. I’m not in the least sorry to tell you that I did  not watch a single episode of this last season, but heard what happened 2nd hand. I’m glad I didn’t watch it, it sounded more confusing, cheesy, and boring than ever. I think that the whole time-travel season really threw me off, but I figured that J.J. Abrams was just practicing for Star Trek, which was an amazing movie. Also, I decided that anytime my roommates would watch LOST, I watch back-episodes of Dr. Who. Anywho, I hope that the time-travel is easy enough to follow and that you enjoy the comic as much as you enjoyed the series.

Our Life – Disappointed LOST Fans

June 2010

Click on the image for full-size.
Part 01:

Part 02:

I found this image when a friend recommended I look at the work of artist Stephen Hendee. Hendee’s work is laced with sci-fi influences, especially dystopian and doomsday genres. I’m very excited about this find and went straight to the blog to share it with you.

Am I the first person to ever have The Double Abyss?

2009 Abyss in one hand, remote control in the other. The other night I paired Deschutes Brewery’s The Abyss beer with The Abyss science fiction film. It’s The Double Abyss! So, do the two go together? The movie does indeed bring you to a dark place, well below the surface of the earth where there is no light, just dark. You get a sense of being claustrophobic as you watch it. The Abyss beer does provide some of the darkest, thickest beer, you can find but the flavors open up up as you sip it, revealing layer after layer of rich complexity – quite the opposite of claustrophobia. Drinking the beer may actually help relieve your claustrophobia. The movie makes you cold, knowing the people are so far down underwater that there would be very little heat. The beer is 11% alcohol, an imperial stout, if my memory serves me, so it warms you right up. That’s a good combo. The movie is a very long one so if you wanted to drink a full beer you would need to sip it. And the beer is definitely made for sipping, but I can’t imagine drinking the whole thing in one 3 hour sitting. I would say make sure a couple friends are with you and sip very slowly. But a beer with such high alcohol volume just serves to increase your tiredness during a slow movie, so by the end of the movie you will likely be asleep. If you’re wanting to watch the full movie, I recommend a different beer. If you’re not worried about watching the whole thing, this beer would make a great choice.

Did you know that Portland has a mysterious geographical location where gravity is different and paranormal happenings take place? A place where those fascinated with either beer or science fiction or both will find themselves trapped and unarmed? When friends visit Portland the first place I take them is not Forest Park or the top of Big Pink, but rather Portland’s Bermuda Triangle (click for map). It’s a little spot on the east side of town where the hours will pass and you may never leave. At each point in the triangle is a business that feeds off the other points in the triangle, creating a force-field that allows people to enter but only few can leave. In all of Portland, the Triangle is my favorite thing.

What are the businesses in question?
Before I go on I must say that there are a few rules that the Triangle, by existing, naturally oblige us to. The first is that in order to be in the Triangle, you must visit all three points in the Triangle. The other rule is simply that you must walk in the Triangle. If you were to visit each point without stopping, you could walk the whole thing in about 10 minutes. So, what are the points of the triangle?

1. Movie Madness – 4320 SE Belmont

The first stop in the Triangle is Movie Madness, where you will rent some sort of sci-fi or horror flick. Movie Madness is home to the Pacific Northwest’s largest collection of Sci-Fi, Horror, and Cult films. The first thing I would do in the Portland Bermuda Triangle is go into this store, go straight to the back and check out the collection. Their horror videos are arranged in further subcategories, so you can browse by “Rampaging Teenagers” or “Nature’s Revenge” or “Ghosts” or a large number of other topics. The sci-fi collection is right next to the horror collection and it promises to have some rare gems that would surprise you. Don’t see the title you’re looking for? Search the computer because there’s a chance it’s located under a director (they file movies by directors too). You can also browse around and find the “Male-Chauvinist Fantasies” section where you can find things like Beach Babes from Mars (I made that up), or you can look through the Red Scare Collection. On your way out, be sure to check out the collection of costumes and props from all sorts of movies including Alien, Blade Runner, and H.G. Well’s Time Machine (You know the little miniature test-version of the time machine…yeah it’s at Movie Madness!!!). It’s really a wild ride. If you aren’t careful, hours will have passed. You can always come back, but tonight you are on a mission to get lost in the Triangle, so you must move on.

2. Horse Brass Pub – 4520 SE Belmont

A block or two away you will find one of Portland’s most important pubs. Now that you’ve got a movie picked out for later you must come in here for a few drinks. I’m going to take a stab and say that Horse Brass has about 60 beers on tap. There are two menu’s – the guest tap list and the mainstay list. I’d say that about 20-25 of their beers are on the guest tap list and so the likeliness of you drinking a beer from that list again next week is pretty slim. Usually the guest beers last no more than 2 days. They serve 20 oz pints and 10 oz glasses. I usually do 10 oz glasses and I’ll order 2-3 for sampling. Horse Brass is a cozy place that is perfect for hanging out with friends and talking, it’s a real pub. There’s also a few dart boards. The servers are very knowledgeable about their beers and even Portland beer history. The selection here is so nice that it will be difficult to make an easy decision, and you may just have to stay till you’ve sampled everything you feel you might otherwise miss out on. This is why Horse Brass is such an integral part of getting lost in Portland’s Bermuda Triangle. (photo credit to Paul Lowry)

3. Belmont Station – 4520 SE Stark

If you finish up your drinking at Horse Brass before 10pm you need to come here. If you are going to take longer at Horse Brass, you should come here first. Don’t miss Belmont Station, your life depends on it. Belmont Station is going to be about a 5 minute walk from the other locations, but it is this short walk that helps form the perfect triangle in the first place. Belmont Station, the biercafé, is currently home to about 1200 different bottled beers. You will have no easy task ahead of you, picking out a few beers to drink with your movie. And you thought Movie Madness took a long time to make a selection! Beers are arranged mostly by geographical location of brewery. What are you feeling tonight? You feeling like something local? Maybe an IPA to go with your schlocky cult film, or a lager to go with your slow-paced sci-fi drama? Maybe a foreign stout to go with your Scottish foreign film? It’s your choice. Can’t figure it out, ask the staff, they are super knowledgeable and helpful. Attached to the store is a small pub with about 15 uncommon beers on tap. These beers are going to be different from the ones you will find 4 blocks away at Horse Brass so stay for a pint.

By the time you’ve finished your time in the Triangle you will be pretty exhausted. Now it’s time to make your way home (don’t drink and drive), pop in the movie from Movie Madness, and pour yourself a pint from the beer you bought at Belmont Station. Portland’s Bermuda Triangle has made it’s way to your living room. It’ll provide some good leisure, don’t miss out!

I’m a little behind in watching the $10 movies – why spend $10 at a franchise theater when I can wait 2 months, pay $3 to watch it at Laurelhurst Theater and drink beer? Or wait for the DVD and browse the incredible selection of horror and science fiction at the famous Movie Madness?

Anyway, I saw both Surrogates and District 9 recently and I guess I had very different reactions than most movie reviewers. Over at Rotten Tomatoes, District 9 received a 90% while Surrogates is sitting well below the fresh pick list at 39%. Surrogates doesn’t actually receive too many awful reviews, a lot of people say that there are some good ideas, that it fits nicely into the genre of warning-movies, but that it does a lot of things that have been done before too. District 9 has been applauded as very original, relevant and timely, and a movie that doesn’t require top-tier celebrities to be good. It is possible that my opinion of these movies boils down to perception. I was informed that D9 was one of the best science fiction movies of recent and that it was a low budget movie and I was told that Surrogates was no good. For Surrogates I wasn’t expecting much, and for D9 I was expecting too much. So, what do I think, what would my review of Surrogates and D9 look like?

District 9, is undeniably a creative movie with a story that has not been overplayed and that links its conceptual framework to humanities inability to treat everyone as human. I think many people have forgotten the movie and television series Alien Nation, which starts with a large alien ship not to dissimilar from the D9 ship, finding free parking in the desert, being granted permission to stay by humanity, and then the aliens try to integrate themselves into society. In Alien Nation, they look enough like humans, but they are not easily accepted, and are often blamed for bad neighborhoods and violence. D9 doesn’t sound too different does it? But after the first 30 minutes D9 turns away from dealing with the societal issues arising with the new aliens and turns instead to a story that seems more of a chase/thriller than a didactic and worldview-changing film.

What made the first bit of the movie so interesting is sacrificed for hollow special effects. The main character is working for the government to capitalize off the alien race and while doing his job is infected with an alien virus that slowly turns him into an alien. In this moment we are supposed to feel attached to him as a human, and be appalled by the inhumanity of those that once employed him, and maybe even feel compassion for the alien race that adopts him. The problem is that the aliens are so slickly animated that they lose any sort of real credibility; they don’t feel real the way Gollum felt real. And I am never saddened by his transformation the way I was saddened by Jeff Goldblum in The Fly. What was needed in this movie was a moment where you realize that even in his transformation, things would be okay, the aliens are not as bad as you thought they were, that it’s not a big deal – but this moment never came because they were never believable in the first place. I would recommend my readers watch Creation of the Humanoids, a movie from 1962 that quite nicely addresses these same issues of inhumane treatment of humans. Lastly I wanted to say that I’ve never seen anything else that Niel Blomkamp has made, but it seems that some of his shorter movies were direct inspirations for D9, and were maybe even incorporated into the movie (can anyone verify this?). These are the parts at the beginning that show people on television reports saying that they want the aliens to leave. These, along with the next 15 minutes of the movie, were the best parts of the movie – they seemed the most thought through and the rest of it felt rushed and thin, relying on the visual effects more than it should. I’m wondering if when Peter Jackson got behind the movie it was pushed in directions Blomkamp would not have chosen. I’m not sure what happened, but I’d be interested in finding out. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the movie, I thought it had a lot going for it, but I’m trying to say a few things that I don’t hear too many other people saying about it.

Surrogates never promised to be anything but a slick movie, I mean it’s got Bruce Willis in it for crying out loud. You have to take it for what it is. For me, it might sit well with movies like Soylent Green and Logan’s Run which were slick for their day, relying on celebrity, adding cliché and cheesiness. When you are able to agree to that, Surrogates is much more pleasant than if you were to have the typical “Hollywood Bashing” attitude. A lot of movies over the past few years have suggested that we are just robots feeding the system, and that we need to break free and rediscover our humanity. I’m thinking of Wall-E, The Matrix, there’s a few zombie flicks you can throw in there too. Stepford Wives is another movie where people are replaced by an other-robot for the pleasure of whoever’s paying for that bill. I very much appreciated that Surrogates used it’s slickness to its advantage the way that a Spielberg film would do the same – like Minority Report. It did not, however, rely on the boring farcical treatment that most people mistake as humor in movies such as Idiocracy or the 2004 Stepford Wives. Mostly though I think that Surrogates has more relevance than people give it credit for. How often do we hide behind our internet identities, how often do we try to live vicariously through other people, how often do we allow our dreams to fade away while we sit by and let our employers feed off of us, how often do we not go do anything with anyone because we become tired or afraid of meeting new people, how often do we let ourselves live in the past. Maybe I’m just partial to these questions and that’s why I liked Surrogates more. I do think though, that Surrogates had a didactic element that it maintained for the whole movie, much like the original The Day The Earth Stood Still. This element did not get lost in the story, or with the slick effects.

Haven’t we learned anything about pollution from these movies? Guess not:

And here’s another video that I’ve shown before of that giant plastic soup area in the Pacific Ocean:

I’ve been travelling this summer and I came across this amazing postcard in Bozeman, Montana. It reads “Bozeman Montana, where the past eats the present.” As I travelled South into Yellowstone National Park I couldn’t  help but think that, at least at Yellowstone, this is not as true. The present definitely eats the past. So I have a couple movies to recommend based off my experience there, but first let me tell you a little more about my experience.

I honestly thought Yellowstone would be a place where I would park the car, grab my gear and enter the wilderness to set up camp and I would probably run into a couple people along one of my hikes. This is not at all what it is!!! It’s a giant tourist attraction, much like Disneyland. People wait in lines and follow specially built pathways to experience nature. Actually most people don’t experience nature there, they just take a picture of it and move on. You can buy some ice cream right next to Old Faithful geyser as you wait for it to blow. Ever major stop on the route has a nice sized gift shop. My least favorite of all was everyone’s desire to “hunt for animals”… One person drives while the other people in the car will be on the lookout. “Oooh, there’s a deer, or is than an elk, or a moose? Quick stop the car!!!” The family pours out of their car, stand in the middle of the road and shoot pictures for a couple minutes before they hop back in and look for bison and bear. It’s a real wilderness experience, that’s for sure! After my initial bit of tourist shock I was able to allow myself to enjoy the park for what it was – an amazing display of nature. But here are the movies I recommend based off the tourist industry:

Jurassic Park (1993) and Grand Tour: Disaster In Time (1992)

I’ll start the recommendation with Jurassic Park because, chances are, you’ve already seen it so why make it the last movie you watch? But, it’s probably been a while. Grab a nice summery wheat beer that you’d take with you camping and get ready to enjoy the ride! This is the best account of the tourist industry gone wrong and reminds me very much of Yellowstone. The people in the movie are dying to see dinosaurs the way Yellowstoners are dying to see a grizzly bear. But with a little bit of luck, a little bit of chaos, a little bit of survival of the fittest, and a little bit of scheming, you’re tourists won’t know what hit em.

Grand Tour: Disaster in Time is much less known but is still a wonderful flick. For this movie you should grab yourself some trail mix for your journey. Get the healthy kind though please. So, in this movie beautiful people from the future travel back in time to watch horrible natural disasters because in the future everything is perfect and they love watching things go wrong. But you can’t watch something, even if from a distance, without changing it slightly right? Tourists from the future!!! How genius is that? It’s genius.

I’ve been thinking about science fiction and activism lately and how the two can come together in some way. My recent art exhibition, Building in the Post-Apocalypse addresses alternative and radical education in a society that desperately needs it. I will show you photos of that soon. I don’t claim to be an activist, but I think that many of my socially engaged art projects have activist elements tied into them. I’ve been trying to view a lot of my projects through the lens of science fiction – topics such as the blurry lines between utopia and dystopia and surviving an economic apocalypse by creating alternative, generosity-based communities, etc.

Here are a couple interesting links where I see activism and science fiction mixing it up in different ways:

Think Galactic – “Think Galactic is a Chicago-based reading group that seeks to discuss speculative fiction from a radical left perspective. Discussing SF lets us have fun *and* explore issues of oppressive hierarchies, confronting topics of race, gender, sexuality, class and more.” I don’t actually read a whole lot of science fiction, I just watch movies, but the descriptions of some of the books on their reading list are really amazing and I decided to order a couple and read them. If they are interesting I will blog about them. I think I will try to visit this reading group if I’m in Chicago some time.

Sleep Dealer – An indie science fiction movie that deals with issues of Mexican border control, the fight and control of other countries natural resources, and what seems to me to be problems of so-called globalization. I haven’t seen it yet, but this is my take based on what I’ve read. The movie opened this week in limited theaters in only New York and Los Angeles, so I’m super super pumped about seeing it on DVD soon.

Public Social University – A group that organizes free forums and classes as an act of radical education for the people by the people. As part of the art exhibition, Building in the Post-Apocalypse, Public Social University created an event called “Apocalypse.” They had participants play Destrukto a drawing game where you create and destroy over and over. They organized a discussion about whether or not we are currently in an apocalypse and they had someone lead a participatory dance session that explored, in form, the idea of destruction and rebuilding. Next an Urban Planning student talked about rethinking public space and the event finished with a forum of ideas on living more sustainably and re-invisioning social space.

update: photos from the exhibition are below

BUILDING IN THE POST-APOCALYPSE

An exhibition that explores and documents options of community, collaboration, and education through socially engaged practices.

Please see below for details about times, events, and goings-ons.

APRIL 10TH-23RD

MK GALLERY

2000 SW 5th (2nd Floor) Portland, Oregon

SCHEDULE OF EVENTS:

Go to beerandscifi.com/exhibition for updates.
Some events appear twice because they are in multiple categories…

GALLERY HOURS:
Monday – Thursday 9-5
Saturday April 18th, 12-4

ARTISTS RECEPTION:
Thursday April, 16th
3-6pm – Public Social University event
6-9pm – Exhibition Reception
9-12pm – Sci-Fi Screening: Panic in the Year Zero & The Man From Earth

SCHEDULED ACTIVITIES:
April 13th – Monday – 10pm – Sci-Fi Screening – The Man Who Could Work Miracles
April 16th – Thursday – 3-6pm – Public Social University event
April 16th – Thursday – 6-9pm – Exhibition Reception
April 16th – Thursday – 9-12pm – Sci-Fi Double Feature (see above for titles)

MOVIE SCHEDULE:
Daily movies subject to change:
April 13th – Mon. – playing all day – The Lathe of Heaven
April 13th – Mon. – 10pm screening – The Man Who Could Work Miracles
April 14th – Tues. – playing all day – The Man Who Could Work Miracles
April 15th – Wed. – playing all day – Fantastic Planet
April 16th – Thu. – playing until 3:00 – The Man From Earth
April 16th – Thu. – 9-12pm screening – Panic in the Year Zero & The Man From Earth
April 18th – Sat. – playing 12-4pm – Panic in the Year Zero
April 20th – Mon. – playing all day – The Man From Earth
April 21st – Tues. – playing all day – A Boy and His Dog
April 22nd – Wed. – playing all day – Silent Running
April 23rd – Thurs. – playing all day – The Lathe of Heaven

*****Update: photos from the exhibition are below. Click on thumbnails to see larger images:

The gallery was divided into two spaces. The first was a classroom space where free and alternative educational exercises took place. This is where Public Social University hosted their Apocalypse class.

I led a public exercise called the Morphology Chart. The exercise gets people to place subjective interpretations onto random objects, create meaning where there may have been none.

The second room was the beerandscifi room (inspired by this blog). The room encouraged students at PSU to skip their classes, watch movies, drink beer together, and hang out.

At the opening I paid two of my students to drink beer with their friends at the picnic table in the gallery.

Panic in the Year Zero (1962) and The Man From Earth (2007).
Welcome to the 4th installment of the sci-fi Double Feature Recommendation. To see more recommendations, click here.

Inspired partly by my recent post about how post-apocalyptic movies should start focusing on rebuilding the world after it disintegrates. The movies I’m recommending are not exactly what I was suggesting in that post, but they have elements of people attempting to address the problems and issues that face them.

Start the night off with Panic in the Year Zero. I’m not sure whether you should get yourself some popcorn for this or a can of spam, baked beans, and canned green beans. This is a post-apocalyptic film where Los Angeles has been bombed and survivors pack up and head for the country and begin practicing a little game theory. So when it’s time to start everything over, and everyone will be fighting for survival, do you go into seclusion and try to rough it out, or do you work with a group of people, pooling resources and skills? What worldview do you develop?

The next movie for the night is The Man From Earth. For this movie you’ll need either a couple bottles of your favorite beer, or a cup of coffee or tea. Caffeine it up if you’re tired. A man was born blessed/cursed with inability to age and he claims to have been alive for 14,000 years.  He’s living in his own post-apocalypse. The apocalypse for this man happened during his first 1,000 or so years of living when he felt that there was something wrong with him. He eventually moves on, playing various roles in history where he tries his hand at having a positive effect on people’s lives. This movie takes place entirely as a conversation that this guy is having at 14,000 years with a group of his friends. No flashbacks or anything, but the conversation is great. At times it may just feel like philosophy 101 but most of the time it’s a pretty fun movie and wild idea.

In almost all post-apocalyptic films we see the destruction and disintigration of life as we know it. Because of famine, plague, disease, war, natural disasters, or a slew of other “acts of God” the framework that human kind has built comes to a screeching halt and humans are forced to rethink how to proceed. I want something new! Most of the post apocalyptic movies we currently see do one of three things:

1.

Either spend the majority of their time portraying the destruction of the world…

2.

…OR the main character goes from place to place encountering various groups of the oppressed, or oppressors in search of some greater meaning. Often the groups are subcultures who have formed localized militia out of the rubble…

3.

…OR they show how, after the chaos of the apocalypse, a dystopian government has risen to oppress the people.

The dystopian variety are my favorite version of post-apocalypse because they often envision a place where people are nothing more than machines, property of the state, or tools for profit. Much of the way our world functions, in the 1st world and in the so-called 3rd world, is like this even though there has not necessarily been any apocalypse. Many of the movies are warnings about our behavior towards other humans as well as our behavior toward our planet.

I see many of these post-apocalyptic movies warning us but I see very little in the line of suggestions for post-apocalyptic living or specific life-changing prescriptions for our current situations. What I would like to see is more movies where we see the apocalypse, but then we ALSO see how hard work, changing our life-style, and being supportive can bring communities together. I don’t want just a “look we saved the day by killing the enemies” ending or a “we found the cure that saved the world” ending, but I want a film full of actual steps toward making our world a better place to live in. How do we do that?

Movies like Wall-E are a step in the correct direction. In Wall-E we experience the future consequences of OUR current actions and decisions. But we see a group of people that learn how to reclaim the land, grow their own food, and learn how to incorporate human interaction back into their lifestyles. I would have loved to see more of the clean-up and rebuilding of the dirty earth. What would the new economy and political structures look like? Why end the movie right as they enter the New World?

Let’s look at the 2008 version of The Day The Earth Stood Still. Regardless of whether or not we think the movie is successful or not, I thought the issues being raised were pertinent and similar to that of Wall-E. The earth is at a point where it’s in crisis mode and we can avoid the apocalypse if we change. However, the place where this movie ends is when one or two people convince the aliens that humans can change. We don’t get to see any of that change, and we aren’t really even convinced that our main characters care all too much about the state of the earth, but imagine if the aliens had put some demand and ultimatum on the humans where we got to see them restructure everything and attempt to turn everything into sustainable systems. Maybe that would be boring, but don’t you want to at least have some time to imagine what this new system could look like? How would humans change the world in one year if they were given that ultimatum? How could we get creative quickly? I think that could be wild. Agree?

Besides Wall-E, another movie that adds to this conversation is the 1970 film Gas-s-s-s. I don’t necessarily recommend the movie to anyone; I thought it was quite bad. In it, there is a gas that kills everyone in the world over 25 and a group of young hippy-types travel across the country in search of some sort of meaning. I’m less interested in their quest for meaning than I am in the very last scene. They ended up finding a place that just threw a big party and that was how they solved the problem of hatred and oppression in the world. While I think it’s a really silly idea to think that just throwing a party will make everything better, I do think that, in some ways, this movie addresses the need for community, friends and a sense of family. The movie itself doesn’t do a good job, but it has some little nuggets that are interesting. I would like to see what happens post-party. Partying will not solve the world problems, but it could create a very temporary moment of togetherness. Can this moment of togetherness leave enough positive residue to form a community of people that will work together? What would that look like? Would it look anything like the movie Commune? How does a community congegrate post-apocalyptic style?

My problem is that most of these movies end right as the movie is getting good. I want to see the aftermath, I want to see the challenges. I don’t want to just see that the world was saved, or that meaning was found, I want to see things being rebuilt and I want to see how to form communities. I want to see how a vision for a better place is addressed after the life as we know it disintegrates. Does anyone else agree with me? Maybe one thing that I will do on this blog now is offer alternative endings to the post-apocalyptic movies I’m watching.

I have some new drawings from my neice. She’s drawn some evil robots, bad monsters, and of course some humanitarian-type good robots and monsters. First we acted out scenes where I was a bad robot terrorizing buildings and people and she was the good robot that came in and saved the day. Then I asked her to draw out the scenes we created together. I enjoyed her idea that for every mean monster or bad robot I came up with, she knew there needed to be a good robot or monster to respond and protect the people. Here’s what she came up with:

This robot has tank rolling wheels for feet and it eats people. It is ready to destroy the world! But there is an army of friendly robots with claw hands that have come to stop the destruction and save the day.

This is me, a tall fire-breathing robot. The good robot has a sword and shield and presses my power button to get me to stop breathing fire at people. It’s good to know there’s an easy way to shut off a menacing monster. There is a person “far away” celebrating the good robots victory.

At one point I was a cyclops robot with laser beam eyes and I was, once again, destroying buildings. You can see the one-eyed robot monster on the right. The good monster had super powers that melted anything it touched. The only way the cyclops could be stopped was by removing its head. Eventually the superhero monster won and the townspeople voted to turn my machine parts into a building that could walk around. People were happy to live in a skyscraper that moved around town. Power to the people.

Finally we have a good robot, one that we have seen before, that takes old shoes and makes them new for people who can’t afford new shoes. We can see the robot sucking up the old shoe with a vacuum type extension and then the new shoes are given to the happy people nearby. She suggested that the robot could also buy coffee for people that needed it. It’s interesting that this robot keeps coming up, I wonder what my niece’s fascination is with robots that act as a type of Robin Hood Robot.

Yesterday I experienced a couple random events that seem to relate to each other in some way but I can’t quite figure it out. Maybe you can help?

At 5:30pm, I went to the Deschutes Brewery Beer Geek event, where I enjoyed tasting three beers while having fun conversations with people I hadn’t met yet. The brewer would come around and talk to us about how the beer was made. I had wonderful conversations about how to taste beers, and beer-tasting classes that I might look into in the near future. The theme for the tasting was “dark beers” so I tasted the exclusive and limited Black Pearl Dark Ale, the Oregonian classic Black Butte Porter, and the other classic Obsidian Stout on Nitro. I think it may have been a little silly to put two of their classic beers on the lineup, as if we hadn’t already tasted those. Three beers, but one great experience.

I had to leave somewhat quickly because the artist Edgar Arceneaux was speaking down the street. I wanted to be sure to see this. One of the first images Edgar showed was this one. A drawn image of Tuvac from Star Trek Voyager, Tupac Shakur, and Spock. He said Tuvac was the connection between Tupac and Spock. But maybe Spock is the connection between Tupac and Tuvac? Or maybe Tupac is the connection between Tuvac and Spock? It’s confusing, I know. Three people, three beers, one interesting night.

I found this wonderful dialog (scroll down) in the movie Dark Star about how we perceive our reality and how what we think is our reality may not be true or the same for others. Doing what we think we need to do has effects and consequences on other people’s lives. The conversation takes place between Dolittle and Bomb 20. The bomb has been given orders to explode but if it does so it will destroy the ship and crew, so Dolittle is speaking with the bomb to make it realize that it may be understanding its orders incorrectly.

Maybe it’s a bit of a stretch, but I was wondering if this dialog might have any correlations with the theme of the movie Commune, which I just discovered and plan on checking out soon. What I read on the back cover sounded a lot like what I have explored in some of my art projects and a little on this blog too: mainly that there are no two people alike and one person’s ideals are not going to be the same ideal’s for the next person. Conflict ensues when one person tries to force their ideals onto another.

Anyway, here’s the text:

Dolittle -But how do you know that anything else exists?

Bomb 20 – My sensory apparatus reveals it to me. This is fun

Dolittle – Now listen, here’s the big question. How do you know that the evidence your sensory apparatus reveals to you is correct?…
What I’m getting at is this: The only experience that is directly available to you is your sensory data. And this sensory data is merely a stream of electrical impulses that stimulate your computing center.

Bomb 20 – In other words all that I really know about the outside world is relayed to me through my electrical connections.

Dolittle – Exactly

Bomb 20 – Why that would mean that I really don’t know what the outside universe is like at all for certain.

Dolittle – That’s it, that’s it

Bomb 20 – Intriguing, I wish I had more time to discuss this matter

Dolittle – Why don’t you have more time?

Bomb 20 – Because I must detonate in 75 seconds

Earlier this evening I went to the Bagdad Theater, drank a Terminator Stout and watched Alien on one of the original film reels. I’ve never seen Alien in such quality. Nor have I seen it with a crowd that is as nerdy about it as I am. You could hear cheers and laughter after scenes such as the one where the alien bursts through the guy’s chest.

The Bagdad is one of many theaters in Portland that charges you $4 to watch a movie and allows you to drink beer during the movie. At this particular theater you can order food and it will be delivered to you while the movie is playing. Unbelievable right? Well, it’s totally true. While there are many theaters like this to visit in Portland, I have written more about this particular theater here.

When I saw that Alien was going to play I knew that I would need to make it to the showing. I rounded up a few friends and made it out to the late night showing. Turns out next week they are showing the movie Tron, and it will be one of the last showings of Tron on the original film reels because now that the movie is being remade, Disney is shelving the archives.