========================================================================
Cybernetics in the 3rd Millennium (C3M) -- Volume 8 Number 3, Dec. 2009
Alan B. Scrivener --- www.well.com/~abs --- mailto:abs@well.com
========================================================================
If It's Just a Virtual Actor,
Then Why Am I Feeling Real Emotions?
(Part One)
As always, it was good to see some the actors I know [at the
Adventurer's Club], who I once cajoled into speaking on a
1994 SIGGRAPH panel on interactive entertainment and "virtual
actor" (VActor) technology, called "The VActor and the Human
Factor." (One day I will tell this tale in detail.)
-- C3M v. 2 n. 11 "War Games, Money Games, New Games and
Meta Games"
( www.well.com/~abs/Cyb/4.669211660910299067185320382047/c3m_0211.txt )
Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion;
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
-- William Shakespeare's "As You Like It"
( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_world%27s_a_stage )
O gentle readers, thank your for your patience as I sporadically
produce this eZine.
This issue deals with a subject I have strong feelings about: the technology
of computer-generated human-operated personalities, electronic puppets
in effect, sometimes called Performance Cartoons, Real-Time Characters,
and Virtual Actors,or VActors(TM) for short.
NOTHING LASTS
"Accept loss forever."
-- Jack Kerouac
( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Kerouac )
In preparing for this 'zine I began to accumulate a list of this decade's
"losses," people and things I thought were wonderful that went away, on
a small piece of paper. Alas, I seem to have lost the list -- just another
loss, it seems -- and so must reconstruct it from memory.
Here is the reconstructed list:
* Since 2000 my daughter has lost two grandparents.
* Wildfires in San Diego in 2003 and 2007, especially the earlier
ones, destroyed (at least for half a generation) some of my favorite
places to hike and camp, and burned down a historic cabin in
a wildlife preserve we frequented.
* One of my best friends, Bob S., moved away, to the Indianapolis
area, a few years ago.
* Bob's wife Ann, who he was in the middle of divorcing, died
of cancer this year.
* This year Bob's brother Thaddeus also lost his wife, Sandhabeth
who he was very attached to.
* This year my friend P.S. found out her cancer has returned, and her
prospects are not great.
* This certainly seems trivial by comparison, but last summer I probably
saw the last new "Star Wars" movie I will ever see in a theater,
"The Clone Wars" (2008), ending a 31-year run of endless sequels
and prequels.
( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B001GQSY5K/hip-20 )
* Last year for the first time the SIGGRAPH conference did not hold
their traditional "Electronic Theater" which began as a "really big
show" which nearly all the conference attendees saw, and was eventually
split into multiple evenings, before being re-invented in a format
more like a film festival in 2008.
* Recently the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) closed their visitor's
center and gift shop in Baker, California, next to the World's Tallest
Thermometer. I used to like to buy books and maps there when driving
to Las Vegas.
* In 2008 the Star Trek Experience Las Vegas closed. It was a mini-theme
park based on the Star Trek universe with two excellent rides and a
great retail/restaurant/bar complex that looked just like the space
station in "Deep Space Nine." I especially enjoyed interacting with
actors who played aliens: fierce Klingon warriors and their sexy/scary
women, aloof Vulcans, and sly Ferengi.
( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_trek_experience )
* When we visited Star Trek Experience for the last time last year,
we dropped by the Luxor Egyptian-theme casino and resort, and
reflected on all the great entertainments it had when it opened
in 1993, that are now gone: the Swan Boats that took you on the
"Nile River" past the fake Egyptian monuments while touring the
casino's perimeter, a three part show called "Secrets of the Luxor
Pyramid" about ancient levitating aliens that used motion base, 3D,
and IMAX, the cocktail waitresses that dressed like Cleopatra in toga,
gold sandals, wig and asp headpiece, and a SEGA-sponsored video
arcade full of cutting-edge games, and featuring a multi-player
3D rendered Point of View (POV) game with realistic racecar cockpits
called "SEGA Virtua Racing."
( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxor_Las_Vegas )
( www.komotion.com/Portfolio/Right/Thril%20LuXor.htm )
( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtua_Racing )
* This summer, 2009, the Museum of Neon Art in Los Angeles closed
its doors. I had been a fan since shortly after they opened in 1981,
( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_Neon_Art )
and in 1986 had taken a group of friends there for an exhibition by
light and kinetic sculptor Larry Albright, who helped create the
"lightning" plasma ball found today in Spencer Gifts in every mall
in America. So when I read on their website that they were closing
and going into storage after a final show of Larry Albright through
September 27, I hurried up there, but when we arrived on August 8
they'd already completely cleared out.
* In our neighborhood it seems like restaurants have been dropping like
flies. A cute little Hawaiian place called "Da Kine," with authentic
saimin and loco moco, and occasional ukulele concerts was open for
about a year.
( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saimin )
( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loco_Moco )
* Another that survived less than a year was KB's Memphis Style BBQ
here in Santee,
( maps.google.com/places/us/santee/carlton-hills-blvd/9225/-kb%27s-memphis-style-bbq )
which had the comfort food of my youth from visits with relatives
in Memphis,
( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_variations_of_barbecue#Memphis )
and posters of Elvis,
( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvis_Presley )
who my great aunt taught in high school, and of W. C. Handy,
( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W_C_Handy )
who used to bring his band to perform at parties at my great
grandfather's house on Spottswood Ave.
( maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=spottswood+ave,+memphis+tn&sll=35.113554,-89.949642&sspn=0.008689,0.013561&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Spottswood+Ave,+Memphis,+Tennessee&z=13 )
* In nearby Lakeside, Annie Oakley's Cowboy Cafe was a long-time
favorite family restaurant owned by former PSA stewardess Lee Perry,
famous around these parts for its vast collection of cowboy
memorabilia, including souvenirs from Lee's horse competition
days as well as the most Sheriff Woody figures I've ever seen
in one place. It closed last year. I wrote about it briefly
in C3m v. 2 n. 8, Aug. 2003, "Remembrance of Things Proust (Part Two)."
( www.well.com/~abs/Cyb/4.669211660910299067185320382047/c3m_0208.txt )
* A small chain of restaurants in San Diego county called "Boll Weevil"
went bankrupt last year, after 42 years. I remember them from my
boyhood, how they began as a hamburger joint next to the Cotton
Patch restaurant, which my father the PSA pilot told me was a popular
watering hole for off-duty pilots in San Diego, a few miles from the
airport.
( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boll_Weevil_%28restaurant%29 )
* It's been a lousy run for bookstores for a generation, and it
keeps getting worse. I hadn't been there in years (my bad) but
in 2008 the venerable old huge used bookstore Acres of Books in
Long Beach closed.
( www.acresofbooks.com )
( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acres_of_Books )
Author and rare book dealer Larry McMurtry, winner of the best
screenplay Oscar and the Pulitzer Prize,
( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_McMurtry )
has raved about this place.
* Here in San Diego I was stunned this summer when our own Wahrenbrock's
Book House shut down. It was a three story downtown walk-up chocked
full of wonderful books, with excellent literature, architecture and
local history sections. After 74 years the familiar economic pressures
had been closing in for a while, and a recent fire was the final blow.
( www.yelp.com/biz/wahrenbrocks-book-house-san-diego )
( www.sdnn.com/sandiego/2009-08-07/lifestyle/book-end-wahrenbrock’s-book-store-closes-after-74-years )
* We bought our last two vehicles at Saturn of El Cajon; it was the best
vehicle-buying experiences we'd ever had. As I write this it has been
announced that GM's talks with Penske broke down, and the Saturn brand
is being retired.
* With all these other losses it still came as a shock over the
summer when California's "governator" Arnold Schwarznegger announced
that -- due to a budget impasse with the state legislature --
all of the state parks would be closed, including our beloved
Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, where my daughter and I have both
won the annual Pegleg Smith Liar's Contest.
( www.desertusa.com/mag00/jun/stories/pegleg.html )
(The shutdown was averted for now.)
* A lot of things I feel like I've lost recently have to do with Disney.
Slowly, since at least 2004, they've been shutting down my favorite
pavilion at the EPCOT theme park in Florida, "The Wonders of Life,"
with it's innovative motion-based "fantastic voyage" through the
human body, "Body Wars," and its whimsical tour of the mind,
"Cranium Command."
( www.yesterland.com/erasing.html )
( www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMFJKjGBgOs )
* In 2005 the Walt Disney Company ceased publication of their magazine,
which began as the "Disney News" in 1965, and changed to "Disney
Magazine" in 1994, which I had been fairly faithfully reading for
over 40 years.
( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_News )
* There was a Disney fan magazine I was fond of called "The E Ticket"
which was slowly dying for a while and finally perished in the summer
of 2009. It was the only periodical I knew to publish Imagineer
interviews and engineering drawings of theme park rides.
( www.the-e-ticket.com/ )
* In 2008 Disney closed the small attraction "Seasons of the Vine"
at the Disney's California Adventure (DCA) theme park in Anaheim,
CA, a film about the California wine industry. I hear it was "like
watching grapes grow" but I always wanted to see it and just never
managed to.
( www.yesterland.com/seasons.html )
* After reading the sci-fi novel "Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom" (2003)
by Cory Doctorow,
( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/076530953X/hip-20 )
I had a renewed interest in "Liberty Square" where most of the action
takes place -- about 500 years in the future. It is the only "Land" in
the Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World in Florida which is not found
at Disneyland in California. Last summer I began reading on-line about
character dining at the Liberty Tree Tavern. It sounded like a blast.
I saw YouTube videos of diners meeting Mickey and Minnie Mouse dressed
in Colonial outfits. It was adorable. I wanted to experience it.
Character dining at the Liberty Tree Tavern ceased in January 2009.
( www.youtube.com/watch?v=65dejAi16gE )
* Since Disneyland opened (I think) there has been a checkerboard next
to the pot-bellied stove in the Market House on Main Street, where you
could sit and play a game of checkers. This year they got a bigger
stove and got rid of the checkerboard.
* It used to be my favorite place to chill at Disneyland was the Disney
Gallery, a museum and store that drew upon The Walt Disney Company's
vast collection of original artwork, from cartoons, concept art from
movies, and mostly concept art and models from its theme parks.
( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Disney_Gallery )
The space was designed to be a private apartment for Disney family
members above the Pirates ride, much like Walt's apartment above the
firehouse. It had a New Orleans style courtyard and fountain. I could
often be found there, reading a $40 book I'd just bought, while my
friends and family rode rides. It closed in 2008.
* In 1995, as part of celebrating Disneyland's 50th birthday, Disney
began experimenting with an massively multiplayer on-line game (MMOG)
called Virtual Magic Kingdom (VMK). My daughter and some of her
friends loved this game, and my wife enjoyed it as well. You could
play on-line or at a pavilion in the Innoventions building in
Tomorrowland at Disneyland. If you created a character at Disneyland
and then continued playing at home you got a special Virtual Pin.
If you bought a real hat at the Mad Hatter shop at Disneyland you
got a code number good for a special Virtual Hat (gold mouse ears)
in VMK. You could play games in VMK and win points with which to
RENT ROOMS AT A VIRTUAL DISNEYLAND. You could decorate the rooms
with magic furniture: waterfalls, teleporters, enchanted props
of various types. You could share your rooms with others. My
daughter built a Hogwarts-like schoolroom, a tiki room, and lots
of other cool stuff in the game. It all went away in 2008, when
Disney pulled the plug. I realize it was free, and supposed to be
temporary, but WE WOULD'VE PAID MONEY TO KEEP PLAYING. HELLO?.
( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Magic_Kingdom )
* Of course the greatest losses have been the people, and we fear for
those at risk. My daughter has two living grandparents, about to
turn 80 and 90. But after the people, the biggest recent loss to
me was the Adventurer's Club, a so-called "nightclub" at Pleasure
Island, Walt Disney World, Florida. I had called it "my favorite
place on the planet." It offered a unique form of interactive,
semi-improvisational theater with actors, props, costumes, special
effects and puppets creating a British explorer's club of the 1930s.
It closed in 2008. What tore me up about it was that we -- the
"members" of this club -- lost a real community, even though that
community included imaginary characters.
( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventurers_Club )
[I should add that while working on this 'Zine I lost my job, which was
pretty darned inconvenient. I am now consulting but am looking for
another full time position. My resume is on my web site at:
( www.well.com/~abs/home.html )
Scroll down to "Professional Interests." Any leads will be appreciated.]
THE MIDDLE HALF OF 1994
"All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions
and arbitrary values."
-- Marshall McLuhan
( www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/marshall_mcluhan.html )
Must of been about, oh, nigh onto fifteen years ago that I decided to
write -- or more accurately design -- a book based on Marshall McLuhan's
"Culture Is Our Business" (1970),
( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0028GM0Z2/hip-20 )
which I entitled "The Media Is the Masses" -- ironically, having both a
grammatical and an epistemological error. As I worked on it I decided
that the events of April through October 1994 belonged in the book as
a sort of "braid" of material, along with McLuhanesque polemic and
obscure cultural references. (There was this mad push for interactive
technology that was going on during that time interval, involving movie
companies, phone companies, cable companies, and computer companies in
a feeding frenzy of investment in "new media.") Perhaps one
day I will complete the book.
But as I reviewed the "losses" above, especially the more vacation-related,
I was struck with how many of these closed-down entertainments came out
of that innovative, optimistic era.
PUNCH AND JUDY
More than one person has reminded me, while I was prattling on
about the patterns in pop culture, that many of them derive
from the old Renaissance "pantomime" shows, usually called
La Commedia dell Arte.
( www.delpiano.com/carnival/html/commedia.html )
Here is how I map these characters onto the "Gilligan's Island"
men's parts:
-------------------------------------------------------------
Harlequin = Gilligan (the fool who makes fools of them all)
Pulcinella = Skipper (the sad clown)
Pantalone = Thurston Howell III (the miser)
I Dottori = Professor (the self-inflated academic)
-------------------------------------------------------------
-- C3M v. 4. n. 3. "Skeleton Key to Pop Culture"
( www.well.com/~abs/Cyb/4.669211660910299067185320382047/c3m_0403.txt )
The Commedia dell Arte gave the Anglicized puppet characters of Punch and Judy.
Of course, there is nothing new under the sun. The problem of the
real community with imaginary members is as old as the puppet show.
In my historical studies, looking for a context for Virtual Actor
technologies, I was amazed by how often the pantomimes and puppet shows
got shut down for making fun of the royalty and/or the priests.
I remember several times seeing George Bernard Shaw's hilarious play
"Caesar & Cleopatra" (1901)
( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1434451259/hip-20 )
which begins with a mask addressing the audience, as Wikipedia
( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesar_and_Cleopatra_%28play%29 )
explains:
The play has a prologue and an "Alternative to the Prologue". The
prologue consists of the Egyptian God Ra addressing the audience
directly, as if he could see them in the theater.
The god is immortal, though imaginary, and pities the real, mortal humans.
Somehow I'm reminded of a scene in a Jerry Lewis movie, where he gets
advice from a mute bunny puppet, without ever seeming to wonder who
the puppeteer is. (Gina Davis, star of "Stewart Little" opposite
a Computer-Generated mouse, said the hardest question to field on
the press tour was "What's it like working with Stewart?")
Norbert Weiner, founder of cybernetics, in "God and Golem, Inc.: A
Comment on Certain Points where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion " (1966)
( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262730111/hip-20 )
raises the specter of the religious parable of "golem" to address
anxieties about the new computer technology and its role as a possible
intelligence among humans.
Again Wikipedia
( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem )
explains:
In Jewish folklore, a golem is an animated being created entirely
from inanimate matter.
* * * * * *
Depending on the version of the legend, under Rudolf II, the Holy
Roman Emperor, the Jews in Prague were to be either expelled or
killed (pogrom). To protect the Jewish community, the rabbi
constructed the Golem out of clay from the banks of the Vltava
river, and brought it to life through rituals and Hebrew
incantations. As this golem grew, it became increasingly
violent, killing gentiles and spreading fear. A different
story tells of a golem falling in love, and when rejected,
he became the violent monster as seen in most accounts. Some
versions have the golem eventually turning on its creator and
perhaps even attacking other Jews.
* * * * * *
The Hubris Theme
...In its earliest known modern form the story has Rabbi Eliyahu
of Chem creating a golem that became enormous and uncooperative.
In one version of this the rabbi had to resort to trickery to
deactivate it, whereupon it crumbled upon its creator and crushed
him. There is a similar hubris theme in "Frankenstein," "The
Sorcerer's Apprentice" and some golem-derived stories in popular
culture. The theme also manifests itself in "R.U.R. (Rossum's
Universal Robots)," Karel Kapek's 1921 play which coined the term
robot; the novel was written in Prague and while Capek denied
that he modeled the robot after the golem, there are many similarities
in the plot.
THE MIGHTY WURLITZER
"[Pastor Josef] Mohr decided those words would make a good carol for
his congregation the following evening at their Christmas eve service.
However, he didn't have any music to which that poem could be sung.
So, the next day Mohr went to see the church organist, Franz Xaver
Gruber. Gruber only had a few hours to come up with a melody which
could be sung with a guitar. However, by that evening, Gruber had
managed to compose a musical setting for the poem. It no longer
mattered that their church organ was broken. They now had a Christmas
carol they could sing without it."
-- The story behind "Silent Night"
( home.snu.edu/~hculbert/silent.htm )
Yesterday was Thanksgiving, and at my in-laws we sang the old hymn "For
the Beauty of the Earth" before dinner accompanied by organ, and after
dinner played "Beatles Rock band," and I was reminded of the shift from
organ to guitar in our societies dominant stories, from:
"For Thy Church, that evermore
Lifteth holy hands above,
Offering up on every shore
Her pure sacrifice of love."
to:
"There's nothing you can know that isn't known.
Nothing you can see that isn't shown.
Nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be.
It's easy.
All you need is love, all you need is love,
All you need is love, love, love is all you need."
It also got me thinking again about theater organists, and how they used to
interact with their audiences.
Until Edison gave us the phonograph and the motion picture, virtually
all entertainment -- outside of reading, music boxes and player pianos --
was interactive. Even a congregation chanting the the Lord's Prayer or
the Nicene Creed together is subtly interacting. But there was something
very interesting going on in the Nickelodeons and their "silent" movies.
The Walt Disney Studios attempted to re-create the theater organ experience
as a segment in "The Story Of The Animated Drawing" (TV Episode, 1955), now
available on DVD as part of "Walt Disney Treasures - Behind the Scenes at
the Walt Disney Studio" (1941).
( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00006II6P/hip-20 )
What I realized while watching it was that the movies came and went but the
same organist and the same audience, pretty much, would come back week after
week. This meant that the organist could play little games, such as playing
a creepy "riff" when the villain appeared in a melodrama, and then later
playing the same riff when a mother-in-law appears in a domestic comedy.
Only the "regulars" would get the joke.
Bless them, the Walt Disney has brought back the theater organist, though
only for the pre-show, for its special movie screenings at the 1926 art
deco El Capitan Theater in Hollywood.
( disney.go.com/DisneyPictures/el_capitan )
HOUSE OF FUN
"Why would you want to build an amusement park?" {Lillian] asked
[Walt]. "Amusement parks are dirty. They don't make any money."
His reply didn't make her feel better. "That's the whole point.
I want a clean one that will." But she was at Disneyland the
night before it opened with a broom, sweeping up the dust off
the Mark Twain Steamer.
-- "Mrs. Disney" by Stephen Schoceht
( www.streetdirectory.com/travel_guide/10341/women/mrs_disney.html )
We used to have a "fun house" here in San Diego, as part of the Belmont Park
amusement park.
( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belmont_Park_%28San_Diego%29 )
It had many of the elements identified by Wikipedia
( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fun_house )
as found in a fun house:
* A large spinning disk. While the disk was stationary patrons would
get on and sit in the center, then the operator would start the
disk spinning, and people would be thrown off by centrifugal force,
ending up against a padded wall.
* A horizontal revolving cylinder or "barrel" to try to walk through
without falling down.
* Sections of floor that undulated up and down, tipped from side to
side or moved forward and back, either motorized or activated by
the person's weight. Stairs that moved up and down, tipped from
side to side, or slid side-to-side alternating directions between
steps. The industry refers to these and similar devices as "floor
tricks."
* Compressed air jets shooting up from the floor, originally designed
to blow up women's skirts, but effective at startling almost anyone
and making them jump and scream.
* An array of distorting mirrors.
When I was a boy in the early 1960s the big crowd pleaser was the air jets.
There were bleachers set up so the folks who'd just exited the fun house
through the air jet could sit and watch other "victims." By the mid-1970s
most of the women were wearing miniskirts of stiff material -- or just
jeans -- and the prank didn't work much any more.
UP POPPED THE DEVIL
On one occasion, [Einstein] interrupted a high-level conference
by announcing, "You will have to excuse me, gentlemen. It's
Time for Beany."
-- Stan Freburg, 1988
"It Only Hurts When I Laugh"
( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0812912977/hip-20 )
My family was inspired by "Time For Beany,"
( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_for_Beany )
"Kukla, Fran and Ollie,"
( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kukla )
and later Jim Henson's Muppets(TM),
( muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Muppet_Wiki )
and we produced puppet shows of our own from my early childhood,
at first for our own amusement, then for school shows, and finally
for church fundraisers. One of the most hilarious was done by my parents
after I left for college, to the soundtrack of Mal Waldron's "Up Popped
the Devil," with a Sheriff hand puppet and a Devil marionette.
Of course, the most modern incarnation of the puppet show is the
ventriloquist with a "dummy" on their knee. The human inevitably
apologizes while the dummy insults the audience.
ELIZA
The vanguard audio comedy quartet The Firesign Theatre were exposed
to a minicomputer (PDP-8?) running the popular psychiatrist simulator
"Eliza" over an acoustic modem connected to a teletype at a campus
gathering. People would type words into the teletype and Eliza would
respond with vaguely encouraging questions. It was a big hit at parties.
-- C3M v. 8 n. 2 "Top Tech ~ or ~ Architecture in Buildings and
Software (Part Three)"
( www.well.com/~abs/Cyb/4.669211660910299067185320382047/c3m_0802.txt )
Recently my daughter was flipping through the comedy book "Science Made
Stupid" (1985),
( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0395366461/hip-20 )
and came to a checklist for the kids to fill out, of when future
predictions come true, like:
flat screen TV you can hang on a wall
flying car
domestic robot
computer that can pass the Turing test
"What's a Turing test?" she asked,
( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test )
This triggered a conversation about Turing's observing a party game:
trying to guess someone's gender over a teletype (or by passing notes),
and how he repurposed it to be the famous test of machine intelligence.
And then I was reminded of the great old BASIC-language computer program Eliza,
( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA )
that fascinated students and partygoers for decades, first on minicomputers
in university labs, and later on personal computers all over the place.
One of the creepy things about Eliza is that people sometimes asked to
be "alone with the doctor," and claimed they could talk to Eliza about
things they couldn't talk to anyone else about. And this is a 30-page
BASIC program!
( www.atariarchives.org/bigcomputergames/showpage.php?page=22 )
(It's worth noting that it didn't save its input, and so preserved
patient privacy.)
After a little looking around we found a web-accessible Eliza written
in Javascript.
( www.manifestation.com/neurotoys/eliza.php3 )
There's also an iPhone version.
( www.textually.org/textually/archives/2009/03/022907.htm )
My daughter finds it hilarious, capable of entertaining her for a half-hour
at a time, just like a "Futurama" episode. "She doesn't know I'm insulting
her!" she exclaims. "She?" I reply.
PAY NO ATTENTION TO THAT MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN
Fun Facts About [Walt Disney's Enchanted] Tiki Room
The Enchanted Tiki Room opened 1963. The title song was written by
Richard M. Sherman and Robert B. Sherman, who also wrote the scores
for the films "Mary Poppins" and "The Jungle Book."
Jose the Macaw once sat over the entrance to Adventureland, but the
crowds who stopped to watch created so much congestion that they had
to remove him.
-- About.com California Travel
( gocalifornia.about.com/od/toppicturegallery/ig/Disneyland-Rides-Adventureland/Enchanted-Tiki-Room.htm )
It's been a long time since an animatronic bird could draw a crowd at
Disneyland. People are inured to the pre-recorded at this point.
(They also aren't frightened by people in masks. I remember when the
tram tour at Universal Studios Hollywood used to stop at the Eastern
European Village and Frankenstein's monster would come out and make
people shriek. That stopped about 1974, when people stopped shrieking.)
As he was getting ready for the 1964 World's Fair, when Walt used to
demo his new technology of "audio-animatronics" to visitors, he always
wanted comedian Wally Boag to operate the bird.
Wally was a veteran comedian who probably began in vaudeville, and was
recently honored in a "Roast" near Disneyland, for his decades of great
work at the Golden Horseshoe Cafe in Frontierland, doing teeth-spitting
schtick, physical gags, and pioneering work in balloon animals. He
mentored a young Steve Martin on that stage.
( www.youtube.com/watch?v=634SzojF0Q4 )
( www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-YfnKA476o&feature=related )
Wally would take a stupid joke, "When they operated on father they opened
mother's male," and he would riff on it like a jazz musician, stretching
his face and pulling up his belt too high as his voice rose in pitch, while
saying, "Must-a been, ah, OOOH, must-a been, ah, OOOH, must-a been about,
ooh, nigh onto ten year ago that they operated on father," until he
brought down the house with his bug-eyes.
At one point he pulls off his toupee, and while the audience howls asks,
"What were you expecting, feathers?" which is actually the punchline
to a DIRTY JOKE!
( www.ianswers.com/question/20070302092630AALHgr7.html )
He pulled this on national TV! (Chuckling to self.) Yes indeed,
what was I talking about? Wally Boag, and how Walt always made him
drive up from Disneyland in Anaheim to Imagineering in Glendale to
operate the audio-aniomatronic bird for visitors.
( maps.google.com/maps?f=d&source=s_d&saddr=1313+S+Harbor+Blvd+Anaheim,+CA+92802&daddr=1401+Flower+Street.+Glendale,+CA+91221&hl=en&geocode=&mra=ls&sll=33.975975,-118.0958&sspn=0.563714,0.86792&ie=UTF8&ll=33.98778,-118.104401&spn=0.563638,0.86792&t=p&z=10 )
The reason Walt wanted Wally was that he was a skilled entertainer using
the limited medium of what was essentially a telerobotic puppet. It wasn't
the same as the recorded Tiki show the public can still see in Adventureland.
It was INTERACTIVE. Wally's bird would hassle Walt while he tried to
explain the technology, and Walt -- who was usually a control freak --
loved it. (It was like the insulting ventriloquist's dummy all over again.)
But Walt never made the connection that THIS could be a new entertainment
medium. He was so enamored of recording the performance that he missed the
fact that he had a special experience for only his VIP visitors.
CAREFULLY REHEARSED FAKE INTERACTION
"Karla printed out the following letters and posted them all on her
cubicle. They're HAL 9000's letters from 2001:
ATM HIS MEM LIF FLX CNT COM NUC VEH"
-- "Microserfs" (novel, 1996) by Douglas Coupland
( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060987049/hip-20 )
( textfiles.meulie.net/russian/cyberlib.narod.ru/lib/cin/coupla01.html )
Animation pioneer Windsor McCay
( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winsor_McCay )
used to perform his famous "Gertie the Dinosaur" illusion around 1914,
( www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OWt1HkCQns&feature=related )
( www.toonopedia.com/gertie.htm )
on Vaudeville, interacting with an animated character with carefully timed
movements and dialog to make it LOOK interactive. The art of animation was
unknown to the public then. Audiences were mystified.
In the Disney theme parks animatrons are routinely introduced by human cast
members, who time their responses to make their introductions look
interactive, for example, when the pretty lady in the Enchanted Tiki Room
awakens Jose by tapping on his perch.
In Stanley Kubrick's film masterpiece "2001 - A Space Odyssey (1968)
( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_%28film%29 )
audiences were treated to a vision of a future with ultra-modern industrial
design and awesome (sometimes fearsome) computers.
( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000UJ48SG/hip-20 )
The sophisticated-looking interactive computer graphics that appear throughout
the film were rear projections of hand animations; again the illusion of
interactivity was painstakingly created in advance and "played back."
(Some maniacal 2001 fans have created a modern display simulating HAL 9000
that you can run on your home computer.)
( www.halproject.com/hal/ )
When the ground-breaking TV show "Max Headroom" (1987) appeared,
( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom_%28TV_series%29 )
based on the Cinemax made-for-cable movie, people asked how the
computer-generated title character was produced: what hardware
and software? The answer was: it was a foam rubber mask on actor
Matt Frewer.
A charming attraction in Orlando, FL, at the Universal's Islands of
Adventure theme park,
( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islands_of_Adventure )
was the Triceratops encounter. As Wikipedia describes:
Triceratops Encounter/Triceratops Discovery Trail (1999-2005)
(name changed in 2003), where guests could get up close and
interact with a full-scale animated replica of a Triceratops,
while a "veterinary technician" performed a semi-annual exam
on the Trike. The attraction actually featured three different
Trikes -- Topper, Chris, and Cera. All 3 were female. Chris was
named after a member of the team that created the dinosaurs
who died before the attraction opened. The attraction is now
permanently closed.
What the article doesn't explain is that the "Trike" is an animatron
following a pre-recorded sequence, and the humans rehearse until they
can make it look interactive, just like Gertie & Mccay before them.
A recent You-Tube sensation uses this trick again, purporting to
show a technical demo from hell in which everything imaginable goes wrong.
( www.lumalin.com/lumalin_films/last_lecture.php )
THE TALKING HEADS
John Hammond: All major theme parks have had delays. When they opened
Disneyland in 1956 [sic], nothing worked!
Dr. Ian Malcolm: But, John. If the Pirates of the Caribbean breaks
down, the pirates don't eat the tourists.
-- "Jurassic Park" (movie, 1993)
( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00003CXAT/hip-20 )
When I worked at Walt Disney World in 1976, all of the entertainment
was pre-recorded except for: the Jungle Cruise, some animals on what
was then called "Treasure Island,"
( www.wdwradio.com/Ask-Lou/Treasure-Island-a.k.a-Discovery-Island-a.k.a.-Riles-Island-a.k.a-Blackbeards-Island...a.k.a.html )
and the famous Disney characters, like Mickey Mouse -- who was mute -- and
Snow White -- who could actually talk. (Oh, and there was a Luau show at
the Polynesian Resort.)
We frequently would see advertising planes flying over with signs that said
"Follow me to Rosie O'Grady's." This was a Victorian-era themed night
club near downtown Orlando, on Church Street, which featured a high degree
of audience participation. Every evening the Disney parks would close down,
usually around 9 or 10 PM, and a line of cars would carry tourists up I-95
to Church Street. Since my main squeeze was under 21, and we didn't have
a car, we never made it out there.
Of course I could get into the Magic Kingdom for free and, over the course
of my 10 weeks of employment, I saw it all several times, including the worst
dark ride ever made, "If You Had Wings" (at least there was never a line).
( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_You_Had_Wings )
So, to amuse myself, I looked for unusual scenarios. One particularly
bogus ride copied from Disneyland was "The Country Bears Jamboree," which
was apparently based on an off-hand remark Walt Disney made shortly before
he died.
( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_Bear_Jamboree )
Three of its animatronic characters are animal heads mounted on the wall:
Buff the buffalo, Max the stag and Melvin the moose. They introduce the
show -- after a human "wakes" them of course. Singing bears ensue. At
the end of the show, everybody, the 3 heads included, sings the grand
finale as doors bursts open and the audience exits the theater ... into
a Pepsi-Frito-Lay-sponsored restaurant where you can buy sodas and Fritos,
and there on the wall above the queue were copies of Buff, Max and Melvin,
singing away. I got to thinking, those 3 heads aren't ALWAYS singing,
and when the audience exits the theater they are ALREADY singing, so they
must START singing BEFORE the doors open. Hmmm, I wonder what that looks
like, I thought. Having plenty of time to study the situation, I waited
in Pepsiland for the show to end. Sure enough, Buff, Max and Melvin
"woke up" on their own, did a little schtick, and started singing. I figured
sooner or later this event would surprise someone. I watched about weekly.
Sure enough, one day, and with a witness (now my wife) I saw a very interactive
and entertaining sight. A couple was waiting in line for their Fritos,
standing under Buff the buffalo (who was motionless at this point), and
she looked up at Buff's brown beard and asked her companion, "Is it real?"
"Why don't you touch it and find out?" he answered. (Come to think
of it, I got the same answers when I was a kid and asked my dad if the
crocodiles on the Jungle Cruise were real.)
She reached up and pulled Buff's beard. As fate would have it, at that
moment Buff's eyes popped open, and he began his "bit" with the boys before
they start to sing. Well, that lady shrieked like you wouldn't believe,
and literally JUMPED INTO HER DATE'S ARMS.
It was definitely worth all the times I waited.
YOU MAY GET WET
"YOU DON'T HAVE TO GO THIS WAY, IF YOU GET WET IT'S YER OWN FAULT!"
-- sign on Pontoon Bridge, Tom Swayer's Island, 1958
( www.flickr.com/photos/imagineeringmyway/518923387 )
The story goes that when Walt Disney was having union troubles in the
1940s his brother Roy O. Disney packed him and his family off to Europe
to get out of the way so they could negotiate. It was here Walt saw
places like the castles of Mad King Ludwig
( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_II_of_Bavaria )
which helped inspire Disneyland. One such folly was Hellbrunn Palace
in Salzburg, Austria, famous for its water pranks.
( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellbrunn_Palace )
As Wikipedia describes it:
Hellbrunn Palace (German: Schloss Hellbrunn) is an early Baroque
villa of palatial size, near Morzg, a southern district of the city
of Salzburg, Austria. It was built in 1613-19 by Markus Sittikus
von Hohenems, Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg, and named for the
"clear spring" that supplied it...
The schloss is also famous for its jeux d'eau ("watergames")
in the grounds, which are a popular tourist attraction in the
summer months. These games were conceived by Markus Sittikus,
a man with a keen sense of humor, as a series of practical
jokes to be performed on guests. Notable features include stone
seats around a stone dining table through which a water conduit
sprays water into the seat of the guests when the mechanism is
activated. However, one seat lacks a conduit: that of the
Archbishop. Other features are a mechanical, water-operated and
music-playing theatre built in 1750 showing various professions
at work, a grotto and a crown being pushed up and down by a jet
of water, symbolizing the rise and fall of power. It should be
noted that at all of these games there is always a spot which
is never wet: that where the Archbishop stood or sat, which is
today occupied by the tour guide.
And so in Walt's Disneyland he delighted with water, and threats of water,
all over the place. The Jungle Cruise boat almost goes under a waterfall,
and elephants almost squirt passengers. Matterhorn Mountain, the first steel
roller coaster, includes a splash -- though mostly simulated, there is a
risk of getting wet and it's happened to me -- and was followed by Thunder
Mountain with a fake splash, and Splash Mountain with the real thing and
sometimes buckets of water in your lap, which can sure get your attention.
In fact, all the mountains but but Space Mountain involve water. (The newest
Disneyland coaster, Gadget's Go-Coaster in Toontown, has frogs spit on you!)
I remember especially enjoying the pre-show for the Enchanted Tiki Room.
Out in the tiki garden, where you can buy Dole pineapple whips, you are
surrounded by a seemingly static collection of tikis representing Polynesian
gods. One by one the speak and make drumming noises, but sometimes also
added elements such as motion, wind, fire, and the finale of newborn babies
falling like blossoms from the great tree into the crowd from above.
But the tiki with the biggest potential for reaction is the one that squirts
water, Hina Kuluua.
( photosfromtheparks.blogspot.com/2007/12/wind-and-rain.html )
I've seen a cast member repeatedly try to warn a guest who was too busy
talking to her friend to heed, and then she shrieked when the water
mist hit her.
(Of course, for decades Sea World has had a problem with keeping people out
of the splash zone in the Shamu "killer whale" shows among others. The front
rows are soaking wet, and marked with paint, and announcers over loudspeakers
warn people in English and Spanish, and they show giant hi-def videos of
people getting soaking wet with BRINE, and then they send employees to
escort the people with small children out, and still somebody is
ASTONISHED to covered from head to toe in cold salt water.)
I remember in the 1980s attending midnight showings of "The Rocky Horror
Picture Show" (1975),
( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00004U8P9/hip-20 )
( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_Horror_Picture_Show )
which were filled with audience interaction. An exciting moment came when
on-screen rain was accompanied by folks with spray bottles spraying the
audience. As the on-screen characters used a newspaper to keep off the rain,
the more prepared audience members would also don newspapers as protection.
In the late 1990s some theme parks began advertising "4D movies" such
as Sea World's "Pirates 4D," Universal Studio's "Shrek 4D," and Disney's
"Honey I Shrunk the Audience." I asked my 5-year-old daughter what "4D"
means, and she said "it's like 3D but then they spray you with water."
( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4-D_film )
SOME PRE-EVOLVED VISIONARIES
Chester ran up the dune, slid down a step and finished the scramble
with the assistance of his hands. He stood, dusting off his pants,
and Alex was gratified to note that the Lore Master was a shocked as
he was. Awe, surprise, disbelief, a growing hint of laughter --
"He's kidding! There never was anything like that!"
Less than a hundred yards out from shore floated a tremendous
seaplane. It looked as big as any flying thing had ever been,
short of a dirigible or a spacecraft. There were four lean-
looking propeller-tipped motors on each huge wing. The hull was
a nearly blank wall with a tiny afterthought of a windscreen on
top, and a tiny door open in the flank, with lines trailing out
into the water.
Margie was sitting spraddle-legged, helpless with laughter.
"There was. There was," she giggled.
-- Larry Niven, 1981, describing a virtual version of the
"Spruce Goose"
( www.sprucegoose.org )
in the sci-fi novel "Dream Park"
( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0765326671/hip-20 )
Early in my career I made several stabs at getting involved with the video
game industry. In the late 1970s, when I was an arcade floorman in the
1907 Casino at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk,
( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Cruz_Boardwalk )
( www.beachboardwalk.com )
I saw the original video arcade games from Atari wheeled in: first Spacewar
(a single-player bore), then Pong )a two-player crowd pleaser), and I knew
I was seeing a revolution. So:
* In 1982 I was invited to manage a team of programmers producing the
first 3D arcade video game, but funding stalled.
* Around the same time R.B. invited me to be involved with a loose
confederation of dreamers who wanted to create an "Adventure Parlor"
where you could go play interactive 3D adventure games. We called
this the "Adventure Project" and we had a lot of fun but didn't come
up with anything salable. One problem was we found that computers
at our price point didn't have the horsepower to do what we wanted.
Another problem was we had no customer, funding, or deadline.
Later R.B. declared that his original vision had been achieved by
the "Dragon' Lair" laser disc game
( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Lair )
-- whose development team included an Adventure Project alumnis --
and the "Virtual World" 3D game parlors.
( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_World_Entertainment )
* In 1985 I was invited to manage a team of programmers producing a
computer game based on a "Blade Runner" sort of dystopia, under the
code name "Team Banzai," but the funding stalled.
YOU WANT TO GO WHERE DUMMIES KNOW YOUR NAME
"Sometimes you want to go
Where everybody knows your name,
And they're always glad you came;
You want to be where you can see,
Our troubles are all the same;
You want to be where everybody knows your name."
-- "Cheers" theme song
( home.online.no/~espenas/cheers/theme.html )
"Catch me a flight to St. Somewhere and get out of this cold weather.
Go somewhere where no body knows my name. Gotta keep my mouth shut.
Try to go to confession at least once a week..."
-- Jimmy Buffett, 1994,
in epilog to a cover of the Kinks' "Sunny Afternoon"
( www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/Sunny-Afternoon-lyrics-Jimmy-Buffett/3AE1946FC3F10AA8482569A100286B25 )
( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000002OS8/hip-20 )
In C3M v. 4 n. 8, "DV For Me, C? (Part Two)"
( www.well.com/~abs/Cyb/4.669211660910299067185320382047/c3m_0408.txt )
I wrote about low-tech interactive entertainment, including:
"Sad Eyed Joe" in the Ghost Town Jail at Knott's Berry Farm,
a dummy who could talk and knew kids' names! (While kids waited
in line parents were accosted by a Knott's employee who used
a wireless mike to pass on names to the voice of Joe.)
When I worked as a ride operator at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk I came
up with the idea for "YOUR NAME IN LIGHTS 25 CENTS" hooked up to a big
Times Square-style scrolling news sign.
When I did demos of a pioneering 3D computer graphics system called the
"POLY 2000" in 1984, I found that everyone's favorite demo was what I
called the "YOUR NAME HERE" demo, which allowed me to rotate their name
made of 3D polygonal letters,
( www.well.com/~abs/Graphics/CGBAS.gif )
sort of like the old "Entertainment Tonight" flying logo.
( www.okino.com/customer_case_study_a.htm )
THE ROLLER COASTER ADVENTURE DISASTER
"The VCR is to the American film producer ... as the
Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone."
-- Jack Velanti, 1982
( bpdg.blogs.eff.org/archives/000037.html )
Yes, the folks over in Big Entertainment have been trying to hold back the
technological tsunami for some time.
( arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/10/100-years-of-big-content-fearing-technologyin-its-own-words.ars )
But one of the biggest Charlie Foxtrots (Google it) of lost opportunity
I remember was the "Rollercoaster" Laserdisc game fiasco in the early 1980s.
I haven't been able to find the whole story on-line the way I remember it all
unfolding at the time, but Wikipedia
( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_movie )
tells how it began. Shortly after the new LaserDisc format
( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laserdisc )
came out, computer hobbyists realized they had all the "pieces of the
puzzle to crate an interactive game with random-access video sequences.
An early attempt to combine random access video with computer games
was "Rollercoaster," written in BASIC for the Apple II by David Lubar
for David H. Ahl, editor of "Creative Computing" [magazine]. This
was a text adventure that could trigger a laserdisc player to play
portions of the feature film Rollercoaster (1977). The program was
conceived and written in 1981, and published in the January 1982
issue of Creative Computing, along with an article by Lubar detailing
its creation, an article by Ahl claiming that Rollercoaster is the
first video/computer game hybrid and proposing a theory of video/computer
interactivity, and other articles reviewing hardware necessary to run
the game and do further experiments.
When the movie studios got wind of this they got freaked out, realizing
that somebody could make a game out of one of their movies and they wouldn't
get paid extra. The hobbyists were just concerned with a technical proof-
of-concept, and they had a very small choice of LaserDiscs, and so picked
the B movie "Rollercoaster" (1977),
( www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1017815-rollercoaster/# )
which they repurposed into a simple text-plus-video-clips game. But the
people who owned the rights to "Rollercoaster" realized this would allow
people to hook up the hardware like the hobbyists had, type in some BASIC
code, and then proceed to have EXTRA UNAUTHORIZED FUN THEY WEREN'T BEING
CHARGED FOR. But did they sue Creative Computing? No, they went after
the LasrerDisc player manufacturers, and pressured them into TAKING OUT
THE ABILITY TO DO INTERACTIVE STUFF. Paradise lost.
MAN IN THE LOOP
"First you have to put the rabbit into the hat."
-- banner on the wall of man-in-the-loop testing lab
at Rockwell International, Downey, CA, 1984
Between 1983 and 1985 I worked for a company in San Diego called GTI
producing the aforementioned POLY 2000 computer graphics system.
I designed the C language Application Program Interface (API) for the system,
and later ended up programming using it, which had a kind of poetic justice.
One of our customers was Rockwell International in Downey which started
out with the Space Systems Division (SSD) making space shuttles and
bidding on the new space station, and then split into the Space
Transportation Systems Division (STSD) and Space Station Systems
Division (SSSD). We initially sold one POLY 2000 to each division.
My main customer contact at SSSD was Steve Tice, rumored to be the
youngest manager at Rockwell, and without a doubt a technical visionary.
We had to animate a computer model of the shuttle orbiter in real time
to convince these guys to buy; luckily they gave us the coordinates
of the model. After that the shuttle became our favorite demo.
In 1985 I left GTI prematurely to participate in a computer game
effort that didn't pan out, and then my friend Phil M. and I put
together a six month consulting gig with Rockwell, programming
a key frame animation package for Steve Tice's group to run on
their POLY 2000. As that wound down in March of 1986 I found myself
calling up Steve Tice and asking for a job at Rockwell.
"Why didn't you tell me you were available?" he said, and all the
rest was formalities. He got me in. This began my 12 years in the
L.A. basin, and I had stars in my eyes. Working in the same building
where the space shuttle orbiter was built!
Shortly afterwards Tice left Rockwell to start Simgraphics, a high-tech
computer graphics research company that was looking for new markets in
aerospace and entertainment. More on them later. (He offered me a chance
to join him, but I'd just started getting a regular paycheck and wanted
to enjoy my relative security for at least a while if I could. That "while"
lasted one more year when Rockwell lost the space station main structure
contract to McDonnell Douglas.)
( www.nytimes.com/1987/12/02/us/4-companies-win-nasa-s-contracts-for-space-station.html?pagewanted=all )
The following year I was hired by a startup called Stellar Computer. My new
boss said he wouldn't have hired me if I'd been at Rockwell much longer,
because it would've ruined me.
A SUPERNODE NAMED GREG
Here, then, is the explanation of why Paul Revere's midnight ride started
a word-of-mouth [chain reaction] and William Dawes's ride did not. Paul
Revere was ... a Connector. He was, for example, gregarious and intensely
social. When he died, his funeral was attended, in the words of one
contemporary newspaper account, by "troops of people." He was a fisherman
and a hunter, a cardplayer and a theater-lover, a frequenter of pubs
and a successful businessman. He was active in the local Masonic Lodge
and was a member of several select social clubs.
...
Nor is it surprising that when Revere set out for Lexington that night,
he would have known just how to spread the news as as far and wide as
possible. When he saw people on the roads, he he was so naturally and
irrepressibly social he would have stopped and told them. When he came
upon a town, he would have known exactly whose door to knock on, who
the militia leader was, who the key players in town were. He had met
most of them before. And they knew and respected him as well.
But William Dawes? ...he had none of the social gifts of Revere, because
there is almost no record of anyone who remembers him that night. ...
Dawes did not awaken the town fathers or militia commanders in the towns
of Roxbury, Brookline, Watertown and Waltham ... Once he left [Boston]
he probably wouldn't have known whose door to knock on.
-- Malcolm Gladwell, 2002
"The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference"
( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0316346624/hip-20 )
explaining why Paul Revere, who was arrested en route, made a
bigger difference than Billy Dawes, who rode all the way to Concord
It seems like throughout the computer graphics phase of my career I always
knew a guy named Greg Panos, who came out to SoCal from Manhattan after a
stint at the famous Computer Graphics Lab (CGL) at the New York Institute
of Technology (NYT),
( www.cs.cmu.edu/~ph/nyit/masson/nyit.html )
seeking the CG promised land. I first knew him as a coworker at GTI,
working on the POLY 2000, and then he went to GTI customer Rockwell Space
Division, working for Steve Tice, about a year before I did. Greg wore
multiple hats: producer, animator and editor, in the creating of CG videos
of space station construction. He was extremely helpful to me when I
consulted for Rockwell and later when I joined the company. I especially
remember Greg was always a "hustler" (I mean that in a good way), seeking
new projects, expediting new equipment acquisitions, and later after he
left Rockwell very active in promoting CG and VR (he even ran "1-900-VIRTUAL"
at one point), and a relentless cheerleader for the industry in SIGGRAPH
and other organizations. Also remember that he was a supernode (in network
theory jargon): he knew everybody. When I'd first moved to L.A. county he took
me to a party on the west side, probably in Santa Monica, at the apartment
of Maxine Brown
( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxine_D._Brown )
( www.evl.uic.edu/core.php?mod=5&type=4&indi=206&rel=5 )
a CG pioneer who had moved to L.A. recently from Illinois, where she had been
doing good work at the National Center for Supercomputing Application. This
was at the beginning of her L.A. career phase, which culminated at Digital
Productions. (She has since moved back to Illinois, and is doing good work
at the University of Chicago.) But I wasn't quite sure who she was. I
remember complimenting her black blouse and leotard with neon highlights
(this was 1986 after all), and she said, "Well, it's L.A. ..." I spent
most of the party reading a book ("Cosmic Trigger" ?) and eventually ended
up in the kitchen, where an animated conversation was going on, mostly just
listening. I completely failed to recognize what an awesome networking
opportunity this was, and also was too shy to capitalize on it. Soon I
would resolve to work on this defficiency, and Greg was a big inspiration to me.
MISSED IT BY THAT MUCH
"The once-bustling harbor community became a ghost town.
But in 1987, Disney Imagineers discovered the island among
the acres of Walt Disney World resort property. Some buildings
were renovated and some were reopened. Pleasure Island became
a nighttime hot spot with seven nightclubs, 12 shops, and a
10-screen movie theater."
-- Pleasure Island back story (as reported at Mickey Xtreme)
( www.mickeyxtreme.com/PITribute.htm )
In the summer of 1989 my wife and I went on a road trip with our friends
R.B. and P.S., starting at Boston and the 1989 SIGGRAPH conference held there,
( www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/conf/siggraph/siggraph1989.html )
and ended up in Titusville, FL, by happy coincidence, watching the launch
of the space shuttle Columbia with a classified payload (STS-128).
( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-28 )
followed by a trip to Walt Disney World that included our first visit to
the new EPCOT Center.
( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epcot )
(That entire trip was full of happy coincidences; some day I should write
about it, using my notes from a Waffle House placemat).
We left a day earlier than our friends, to attend a family reunion in North
Carolina, and later they told us they'd visited Disney's new night club
complex, "Pleasure Island," after we left.
( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleasure_Island_%28Walt_Disney_World_Resort%29 )
By this time old Rosie O'Grady's in downtown Orlando had expanded into
a complex of nightclubs called Church Street Station, and they were linked
together with elevated walkways and you could get into to all of them by
paying one cover price.
( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Street_Station_%28Orlando%29 )
Apparently the Disney folks had tired of watching all that spending money
drive off of their property every night, and so the Pleasure Island (P.I.)
complex was basically a rip-off of Church Street Station.
Our friends described how the comics at comedy club at P.I. made jokes about
the trials and tribulations of a trip to Walt Disney World (which apparently
was a big hit with the tourists but provoked hostility from some of the
Florida-based Disney employees!),
The next bit will only make sense with some context: I had once told my
friend R. S. how inspired I was by Walt Disney's Enchanted Tiki Room, and
how I had an idea to one day put a tiki bar in my house, with a remote-
controlled talking tiki which could be operated by someone behind a one-way
mirror. The idea would be to wait until someone was quite drunk, and have
the tiki begin talking to them. But then, when they fetched others to
witness this, it would remain mute and immobile. Hilarity ensues. (This
is kind of like the famous 1955 Warner Brothers cartoon of the singing frog,
"One Froggy Evening.")
( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singing_frog )
R.S. told me, "Alan, there's a club there you'd really like. It's called the
Adventurer's Club, and they have a gag that's very similar to your talking
tiki idea."
THE WIND JUST KIND OF PUSHED ME THIS WAY
"We climb the highest mountain
Just to get a better view;
We swim the deepest ocean
Because we're daring through and through;
We cross the scorching desert
Martinis in our hand;
We ski the polar ice cap
In tuxedo looking grand;
We are reckless, brave and loyal
And valiant 'till the end;
If you come in here a stranger
You will exit as a friend."
-- Adventurers Club Creed
( keithbarrett.com/blog/adventurers-club-final-hoopla )
In May of 1990 I made another trip to Orlando, FL, this time to attend a
conference on "chaos theory" and related topics sponsored by the Society
of Industrial and Applied Mathematicians (SIAM).
( www.siam.org )
The actual name was "The SIAM Conference on Dynamical Systems"
( www.netlib.org/na-digest-html/89/v89n42.html#7 )
at the Marriott Hotel and Conference Center, 8001 International Drive at
Sand Lake Rd. (now the Wyndham Orlando Resort). It was a fascinating event
which I took vacation time to attend and self-funded. It's where I first
met Yorke, who with Li coined the term "chaos" in mathematics.
( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_A._Yorke )
I made an extensive record of the trip with camcorder and dictaphone. Some
day I will chronicle it in detail, perhaps even in this 'Zine.
But what is relevant to this story is what I did with my evenings.
I spent them at the Adventurer's Club, which I later came to describe
as "the coolest place on the planet."
I was obsessed with the chaos theory concept of "attractors" that week.
I made made a mix tape for the trip which I called "The Wind Just Kind of
Pushed Me This Way,"
( i164.photobucket.com/albums/u12/c3m_2007/TheWind.jpg )
a line from the song/word jazz piece "Somewhere Down the Crazy River"
by Robbie Robertson.
( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00191LXIM/hip-20 )
The spoken intro goes:
Yea, I can see it now
The distant red neon shivered in the heat
I was feeling like a stranger in a strange land
You know where people play games with the night
God, it was too hot to sleep
I followed the sound of a jukebox coming from a levee
All of a sudden I could hear somebody whistling
From right behind me
I turned around and she said
"Why do you always end up down at Nick's Cafe?"
I said "I don't know, the wind just kind of pushed me this way."
On the tape cover I put a picture of a dynamical systems attractor from
Electro-Encephalography (EEG) data, from a paper that showed that
brainwaves during a seizure have a lower fractal dimension than healthy
brainwaves. (I'm pretty sure it was "The Fractal Dimension of EEG As a
Physical Measure of Conscious Human Brain Activities" by Xu Nan and Xu
Jinghua, Academia Sinica, Shanghai, China, "Bulletin of Mathematical Biology"
50:3 1988 pp. 559-565.)
( www.springerlink.com/content/1t1u4w868560m10q/ )
Some of the songs on the tape were songs I had played over and over. I'd just
bought a boom box with a programmable CD player, and so when I heard a song
that intrigued me I'd put it on auto-repeat. I did this with Alannah Myles'
"Black Velvet"
( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000002IO1/hip-20 )
as I drove over and over around and through the Cal-110 tunnels in L.A.'s
Elysian Park
( www.losangelesforvisitors.com/photos/elysian-park-freeway.htm )
(which were the inspiration for the entrance to Toontown in the 1988 live
action/animated movie "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?")
( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00007AJGH/hip-20 )
until I finally realized the song "Black Velvet" was not about the whiskey,
but paintings of Elvis on black velvet.
( images.google.com/images?rls=en&q=black+velvet+elvis&oe=UTF-8 )
So that song went on the mix. And so on.
So while playing this mix tape in my rental in Florida (they were having a
special on red Cadillacs) I did some random driving there. One evening after
the chaos conference I came back to my motel and my favorite parking space
right in front of my room was taken. So I didn't park. I exited the lot
and continued north on South Orange Blossom Trail until I got to Colonial
Drive, which I remembered from 1976 and a bicycle journey. I turned right,
East, and continued as the road became Florida state highway 50 and took me
straight out to the space coast. In Titusville I happened upon a motel
near the Kennedy Space Center where we'd stayed the year before with our
friends R.B. and P.S., with its signature motortrike shaped like a space
shuttle parked out front. I turned right, South, on U.S. A1A, the Atlantic
coast highway, and headed down to Patrick Air Force Base and the huge launch
pads there. Finally I vectored back to Orlando as the mix tape finally
began to repeat. "The wind just kind of pushed me this way..."
Two hours after not parking at my hotel I returned to find my favorite space
now free, and I parked in it.
But the most attractive attractor of my journey was the Adventurer's Club.
I returned to it every night, and finally bought a one-week pass to save
money. It seemed like the ideal home-away-from-home, it helped me overcome
my shyness, and it changed my life.
WORDS FAIL ME
"The whimsical, corny, but thoroughly entertaining Adventurers Club
forms a conceptual bridge between the world of empire in Adventureland
and that of international commerce at World Showcase."
-- Stephen M. Fjellman, 1992
"Vinyl Leaves: Walt Disney World And America"
( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0813314720/hip-20 )
Dear readers, I must confess to have reached a point of "writers block"
in this project. I had intended to describe in detail what a "first visit"
to the Adventurers Club is typically like, with something like this:
You enter the ornate, Edwardian building on the second floor, oblivious
to the inscriptions, banners, warnings and a crashed airplane outside.
You are in the Zebra Mezzanine of a 1930s club for world-traveling
adventurers. All around you the walls are covered with bizarre -- but
compulsively documented -- artifacts from the members' travels.
You can see down into the Main Salon, where a statue of Zeus casting a
fishing rod dominates the room...
and so on. But I find it is too painful, like trying to write erotic poetry
about a dead lover. So instead I will point you to others who have bravely
recorder their impressions. A woman named Julie, age 30, from Nashville, TN,
who goes by the handle "USRoadTripper" on themeparkreview.com,
( www.themeparkreview.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=20945&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=50 )
has posted detail descriptions and photos. I recommend you take a look,
but here is the summary:
...I [want] to introduce everyone to one of my favorite places in
Disney World, the Adventurer's Club. I've barely heard it mentioned
on this website, which is a shame since it's crazy, funny, kooky and
extremely unique. I've never found any other place like it.
When I first started on [RADP, the rec.arts.disney.parks newsgroup],
all the evening meets were held in the Adventurer's Club, so I got to
know it when I was only 19. I've had a tough time getting friends
my age to appreciate the club since sometimes you can walk in, and
nothing is going on at that second. It might look like a place to
get a martini and have quiet chat, but it's not! So most of my
non-RADP friends give it 30 seconds and decide they don't like it!
Generally, the club is improv comedy, though the structure of the
night is all scripted. Certain things happen at certain times, but
they incorporate the audience and you never know what may come out
of it. There have been nights when I have laughed so hard in this
club that my stomach was sore the next day.
I think that everyone who has Pleasure Island admission should give
the Adventurer's Club at least an hour of your time. There is almost
always something going on, be it characters wandering around chatting
with guests, or shows in the Main Salon, Library, Mask Room, or
Treasure Room. The club is geared to older teens and adults, but
even kids as young as 9 or 10 should really enjoy it, and it doesn't
get so risque that mom and dad would have to worry.
TO BE CONTINUED...
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