Mark Allen

Feeling dislocated? Frazzled? Nervous? Having nightmares? Feeling like you’re at your wit’s end, and that maybe the world is a little creepier than you thought lately? Need something to calm you down, center you …and make you feel more at ease with reality? Then don’t watch this.

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1950’s and 60’s black and white science fiction television was a fluttering diorama of accidental live-TV light trails, space ship console panels with a zillion blinking light buttons, pointy ears poking through beehive hairdos and tinfoil box machines rumbling across sand-covered floors in front of painted backdrops (set to a woozy theremin score). Early Star Trek, Lost In Space, Dr. Who, The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits were the scene-stealers of the genre. Lesser-knowns like One Step Beyond and Kraft Television Theatre have maintained cult followings throughout the eons despite the now light-year distance of their original airwaves. One show that may have escaped your memory bank is the late 60’s German show called Raumpatrouille (trans: Space Patrol). In an age when the group-think of popular science fiction required that human mistrust of anything alien or robotic must ultimately be demonstrated as a valuable, and triumpiantly correct suspicion – it turns out even the Germans were on board.

Check out this catalogue of YouTube hosted clips (I recommend starting with this one). Great stuff. Remember how TV shows that took place in the future always had one feature on all the characters that was different than today, like everyone had sideways bangs, or they all wore normal suits but the neckties were triangular? Well in this particular scene from an episode of Raumpatrouille, the producers decided that everyone in the future will dance differently. Ironically kooky stuff from a brief moment of popular sci-fi that was low-budget, but very often much deeper. Boing Boing has many more links and sub links.

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The character Poor Tony Krause (from David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest) is a down-on-his-luck, purse(with human organ)-snatching, drug addicted, drag queen who hides claustrophobically inside a bathroom stall in a men’s room at a university building literally non-stop for months (the inside of which he decorates with clippings from fashion magazines), all while going through withdrawls, hiding from the police, and trying to maintain his dampening glamour while dream, dream, dreaming of getting his performing career back on track. NYC’s very own and very real Isobella Jadeco, who’s story has recently been spread via Mediabistro and Gawker, is not quite so surreally sordid or odd as Poor Tony – but she kinda inhabits the same realm. Isobella is a minus-size model-in-Manhattan with super-size dreams. She’s homeless, lives out of a suitcase, has been eating McDonald’s dollar menu for the past year, and has spent most of that year, when she wasn’t spending time “to go on meetings, photo shoots, and receive a potential paycheck,” standing “for hours …in heels” at the same free computer/internet console at the SoHo Apple store on Prince street, writing her memoir; Almost 5’4″, pitching her memoir to agents (in the third person), and managing her modeling career. She even has a website (check out her clothing designs). Can someone use the free computers at the Apple store as an office? Why, I guess they could! Can a homeless person use those computers as an office to manage their lives? Why not (ever been to a public library)? Can that homeless person using that computer be managing a glamourous modeling career, and be selling her gossipy, tell-all, how-to manuscript about the throbbing excitement of having said successful modeling career to publishers, as well? Apparently so! Why… apparently so! “My book is called Almost 5’4 but I am big lier… I am really only barely 5’2. My compcard reads 5’4â€? because I am lean and I can pull it off. That is why I think I am the most successful model in NYC perhaps because who else is modeling full time who is barely 5’2 hahaha!” writes Isabella, continuing; “…now I am living for the paycheck, for the ad campaign, for the brand, and out of my suitcase, sleeping on friends couches, eating dollar menu and basically a ragga muffin.” and channeling where she feels her muse; “I have laughed out loud over it, typed frantically and received comments from employees to slow down and breath while I was staring at the screen viciously, vigorously. Sometimes asking a business man how to spell a word or two, right before I got to page 100, I grabbed a Wendy’s Napkin out of my bag and saved a soda spill disaster all over the keyboard ,from a clumsy pre teen. I was at home at the Apple Store and I have even taken my heels off a couple times and stood barefoot as I wrote, and I wrote mostly in the evening and I was the last visitor to leave the store most nights. And while child howled and screamed for her mother, and 4 teenagers with dreadlocks crowded Itunes, laughing loudly with a ‘You gotta hear this,’ and swearing without shame, I let out my own smile and took a look to my right and saw 2 girls squeaking over their Myspace accounts, and then I took a sip of coffee, … … closed my eyes for 4 seconds, said a prayer and I finished my book. It was about 3 months ago, on the second computer … on the right side store … of the multi media table of the spectacular arrangement of Imacs. It was on a 17inch.”

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