Are we having fun yet?

Traveling to Las Vegas last week-plus, clearly located in the sub-basement of hell as evidenced by being in a valley below the desert floor, the young wahinis in the back of the plane began woo-hooing for the benefit of the rest of us stuck in the airborne tube. This followed by cha-chaing up and down the aisle, hooting "Viva Las Vegas", shimmying somewhat like someone's sister Kate, and generally confirming that some people do in fact have no shame. Can't say for the rest of my fellow Americans, a good number of which were not my fellow Americans but Germans in plastic cowboy hats traveling for a Swinging Bachelor Party with pockets full of euros and a banjo on their knees. I'm having enough trouble with the five hours from Dulles; seems to me that spending the better part of a day leapfrogging from world airport to world airport to get to Las Vegas is ... well, I hear Paul Scofield in my head chastising his on-screen son-in-law, "It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world ... but for Wales?" I'm pretty sure I'm the only person on the plane making that connection; the Deutschers are yammering a mile a minute in Deutsch, the Young Wahinis would surely be classified a near occasion of sin were it not for the collective several hundred extra pounds unevenly distributed among the lot of them, the plane is yes orbiting, not descending -- that or the Luxor has been put on wheels sometime in the last couple of years and is being towed around the valley, and the pilot feels constrained to repeatedly crack wise about, wait for it, Lost Wages, nyuck nyuck nyuck ... if you just let me please get off this plane and go about my business I promise I'll wander the city in sackcloth n ashes buttonholing lawyers and advising repentance, or perhaps prance about flicking my tail and demanding that way be made for my master, the Marquis of Calabash, one ... Fortunately my reverie into 50s Let's Make a Deal Catholicism is interrupted by the plane finally landing, the cabin door popping open, and the promise of stepping into the perpetual cloud of nicotene glory that shrouds The Garden. Fi-na-ly.

Hello, what's this? We are not greeted by the perpetual cloud of nicotene glory and the asynchronous gonging of the airport slots that hold down the center of the D concourse. That's because no one's dispiritedly dropping quarter after quarter into the airport slots that hold down the center of the D concourse; and if no one's there to drop quarters then no one's there to fog up the biosphere with burning pipeweed either. In fact, the airport sounds remarkably like ... the Charlotte airport at eleven PM on a Thursday night. Except this is The Garden's airport, and it's seven PM on a Thursday night, and quite frankly downtown DC was a lot livelier. Something seems to be amiss here.

Continuing to my next milemarker on La Tour D'Enfer, I hike to the baggage carousel (I figure that if the only thing my airfare buys anymore is luggage check, we're going for it; besides, there's no room in the overhead bins as they seem to be full of, um, luggage and as I'm not a big fan of being klunked in the chin with steamer trunks swung out of the overhead bins I figure that the person behind me will appreciate me all the more for not klunking him or her in the chin with my steamer trunk), which me trusty pedometer tells me is a couple of miles from the jetway, and the cab stand snake line another half-mile or so beyond that. The snake line is about three hundred feet long and snakes back and forth on itself five times ... and there's no one in it. The line is still set up, I guess on the off-chance that a few thousand people might suddenly deplane, embaggage, and crave immediate transport to The Strip or adjacency. The Garden is the epicenter of wishful thinking. The Deutschers and I serpentine back and forth with teutonic determinism, the Deutschers because they cannot but follow the rules and me because I'm now hearing Peter Falk in my head urging me to "serpentine, Shelly, serpentine." Fortunately I have a driver who doesn't speak English, doesn't know where I'm going, doesn't have a map, doesn't have a GPS, insists on confusing "Carpenter's Training Center" for "Corporate Center", but does have a friend with a computer who can get on Mapquest and give him directions in any of several polyglot Arabic languages. All I know is we seem to be going back and forth a lot on the same nondescript industrial access road, the meter seems to be spinning like I'm buying gas (which come to think of it I am), and frankly none of us are getting any younger or prettier. I'm seriously considering breaking out into "Viva Las Vegas" my own damn self, but the irony is about as appealing as the gelatinous glop that's likely to be what remains for dinner tonight. Finally and quite by we stumble across my lodgings, right about the time the hack is berating me (this time in English) for not staying on the Strip in some whitened sepulchre he's familiar with.

This is going to be one productive week, ho ho. Can't hardly wait to get to work and hobnob with my brother wizards n such.

Now, one of these things is not like the other.
This
is not much like this
although both probly represent about the same investment of human and financial capital, adjusted for the time. Perhaps one day I shall do the math and confirm this, for no reason other than sheer cussedness. But one is nobler -- visibly so. Besides the WPA deco touchs (I particularly like the clocks on the intake stations, that tell me that it's Nevada Time on the left and Arizona Time on the right), I was touched by the dedication inscription: an Exact Representation of the stars in the night sky the evening of the dedication. This done in the certainty that someday Mankind would Journey to the Stars, exploring Strange New Worlds and New Civilizations, and generally Boldly Go Where No One has Gone Before; and when they did, and brought back snapshots, Learned Scientists would compare those pictures with the Night Sky Plaque and learn Something New. I'm OK with that.

I'm just having a hard time getting all deconstructivist with Phake Noo Yawk; I can barely work up enthusiam to get all deconstructivist with Real Noo Yawk.

Back to the future

Trying fecklessly to keep to a schedule with 2/3 of the boys down with the ague, laboring under the foolish assumption that a Nice Night of Family Television would be just the ticket, what should we discover but a TCM offering of 2001, uncut and remastered just like it was on the premiere roadshow engagement of spring 1968? Well, here's a teaching moment to show at least budding cineaste Andrew th' source of more movie cliches in the last forty years than I don't know what. We decided to play the "They ripped that off from (insert more contemporary pop reference here)", although I'm not entirely sure that the notion of backwards-compatible ery was chronologically sound ("I think the point is to establish that the earlier image shows who came first." "I saw my image first, so it came first." "No, it came second." "I'm not talking about who came second." "Who came first." "I dunno." "He came third, we're not talking about him.")

On the one hand, the opening images of the moon-earth-sunrise szygny, with the Zarathrusta theme, still carry the weight of seeing the Real Moon on the gajillion-foot Cinerama screen, as did the Blue Danube approach and docking effects setpieces. And the shots are gorgously composed and lit, especially with the color remastering. And the pacing for the Dawn of Man sequence seems about right. And maybe we'll concede that the teeth-grinding banality of the dialogue once it gets started makes the point that we waste our highly developed sophistication and technology by taking it for granted.

On the other hand, I can't help but thinking as we watch: What a 60s poser. Here a bunch of the boys have rallied through the phlegm to whoop it up over the vision of swinging London haute design carried forward in a triumph of the Bauhaus will to rule the future. And Our Andrew and The Michael are catching on, "Oh, it's like flying to Grandma's." "Yeah, pretty much. Pan Am was the world's biggest and most ous airline back then. Of course it doesn't exist anymore." "But we've got videoconferencing through webcams." "Yeah, Bell Telephone was working on that in the 60s." "What's Bell Telephone?" "It was the phone company, it doesn't exist anymore." "Like Sprint." "Well, yeah since Sprint doesn't exist anymore either, but there was only one phone company." "Like Vonage." "No, we have one phone company for our landline, one phone company for our personal cell phones, another phone company for our long-distance calls, one phone company for our work landline, one phone company for our business cell phones. Back then there was one. phone. company. Period." "Well, why didn't he use his cell phone from the moon?" "They probably were out of the area." "No, nobody could imagine carrying your phone around with you and calling anybody whenever you felt like it. Phones were attached to wires that came out of the wall where the phone company ran them. You couldn't put a phone where you wanted it, the phone was put where it was easy for the installer to put it." "That's stupid. Why didn't you just tell him to put it where you wanted it?" "Because it was the phone company. You didn't tell the phone company what to do. They did what they wanted. That's why the government broke up the phone company." "Well, what kind of dumb movie about the future only has one phone company?" "Well, when you imagine the future you're really imagining your present and trying to make it better, kinda sorta. You can't imagine what you can't imagine." "George Lucas did." "But he did because he saw this movie when he was a kid, and realized that he could imagine the future just like this guy did." "Well, this guy got it wrong. I remember 2001. No space station, no colonies on the moon, and I didn't get what I wanted for my birthday. That's all that happened." "Well, some mopes drove some planes into buildings." "He missed that, too."

Well, yeah. We watch for a while in silence, interrupted by the occasional snort of "That's a computer? Computers don't look anything like that." "I don't even think the Apple guys were out of grade school by then, much less building their little boxes in their garages. Computers were still big racks in sealed rooms, and if you wanted to use the computer you had to get the computer guy to run it for you." "Well, what about games?" "They're playing chess, that's a game." "Chess is boring. This movie is boring. George Lucas made a better future." And I think again: What a 60s poser, rubbing our noses in his smug cold egotistical misanthropy. And we, including my own personal self, fell for it.

Outta th' mouth o' s. George Lucas did make a better future. And I want fries with that.