Glenn Gaslin's Astonishing Tales of Danger & Wonder

New Spaceship, Same Old Rocks

It’s nice to see the word “spaceship” on the front page again. Lockheed Martin just snagged the government billions to build Orion, a reusable capsule that’ll replace the Space Shuttle. But does it run on fusion? Or an ion engine? Can it bend space and duck through and into and out of wormholes? No? Then I’m not impressed. The thing looks--and is--pretty much like an old-school Apollo pod, launches atop a rocket and might start flinging folks into orbit by 2014. First stop, that giant waste of time and metal, the International Space Station, and then by 2020, a good 50 years after our last visit, it’ll take us back to the moon.

And while we’re dicking around with this atmosphere-free rock only a few miles away, like it’s 1967 or something, the Chinese are making a run for Mars, billionaires and madmen are building their own space fleets in the Mojave and UFOs are haunting little towns in southern Orange County. Maybe these are interesting times after all.

I'M NOT READY YET, but when I am: ninja school.

Ode on a Sitting Duck

I’ve never collected what you might call cool art, or decent art, or intellectual art. I dig movie posters, and photos of empty roads, and stuff cut out of magazines. It used to be worse. As a teenager, instead of, say, Smiths posters, my bedroom walls were covered with giant photos of beaches and palm trees and sunsets. My idea of what a “real” adult apartment might look like involved a big-city high-rise loft with huge windows, and a lot of Nagel prints.

So, of course, I was a sucker for the Sitting Duck. I loved the Sitting Duck. When I first saw the Sitting Duck--in a Red Robin, in Colorado, where I’d go and abuse the free-refills policy for entire afternoons--I decided I had to have it. So I got my own. It had this vacation-y vibe, it had pastels, it had a dry humor. It was, from my point of view, sophisticated. The thing made my teenage and then college rooms feel complete and, in some strange way, adult.

Look. See? It’s so simple, and there’s something about the colors and texture that’s so unmistakably and wonderfully...’80s.

It’s been 15 years since I last saw my banged-up, travel-weary framed print, and just as long since I thought about painter Michael Bedard, his ducks, his alligators, his life’s work. In that time, apparently, he’s turned the idea into a TV show, Sitting Ducks, which didn’t last long in the United States, but is still big in Japan, and Europe. It’s about a serendipitous duck, his ‘gator buddy and a melancholy penguin.

And according to his site, Bedard is alive and well, living near me, and put far more thought into ducks and art and the meaning of life than I ever have:

“Bedard was looking for a way to express a broad range of feelings about the human condition and wanted to use humor as a vehicle for addressing very serious issues such as vulnerability, alienation and anxiety, as well as social and political observations. Michael Bedard chose the duck because it symbolized the vulnerability and attitude that comprises the human psyche.”

I had no idea. I just thought the shit was funny.

What's right with Marfa, what's wrong with Utopia

Middle-of-nowhere Texas towns are all the rage in Hollywood these days. Witness!

1. In the funky west Texas artist haven of Marfa, famous for weird lights that nobody can explain, and for being the place where they filmed Giant, the Coen brothers and Paul Thomas Anderson have been doing some movie-makin'. Neither would be interviewed for the New York Times trend piece, but apparently what attracted them was how it looks like a actual Place, only one that’s not near anything. It’s so completely out of the way that it attracts the world.

2. Entertainment Weekly has a story about Utopia, Texas, a town of about 1,000 people (including, can you believe it, Thomas Haden Church) that did not, until recently, have movie theaters, book stores, decent TV stations, radio, nothing. No culture, just ranch work and kids driving around aimlessly, most of whom don’t really mind it, just like everywhere. There’s only one copy of Brokeback Mountain, and locals suggest that it might not be such a good idea to check it out from the gas station.

This piece probably seemed like a fascinating idea to magazine editors in New York, but it reads like a profile--in extreme, to be sure--of everywhere I grew up. Yes, most places in America are boring, backward and not terribly sophisticated. Yes, this changes slightly with 800 channels, a Barnes&Noble and MySpace. Hey, maybe there’s a book in this somewhere...

Infinite Badass

In this week's New York Times Play magazine, official Gaslin posse member Robert Andrew Powell has a long 'n' literary profile of Floriday high school running back Noel Devine, who may be the best in the nation. Great insight into this kid's life and mind:

"This is going to be an important year. He looks at his mobile phone. There are several text messages, more than one from college coaches. The messages are the same. Noel Devine is great. Everyone says so."

In fact, the whole magazine's a surprisingly hot read, including 7,000 words from David Foster Wallace about, of course, tennis.

My New, New Favorite Painter

His name is Tom McKinley, and I don't know a thing about him except that he lives in San Francisco and his stuff makes me feel like I'm kickin' back at a superbright lunar happy hour in some kind of '50s-flavored future where we'd have swanky bars on the moon by now.

Ran across his "Modern Bird" today in a random gallery, was $15,000 short of taking it home, but at least I can have it here.

Mountain Fu

Finally, a slickly produced commercial that combines two of my all-time favorite things, neither of which I actually enjoy these days: Kung Fu and Mountain Dew.

Hey, where'd The Future go?

Great new site here, Roast Beef Pills, from somebody as frustrated as I am about how much the 21st century looks nothing like what Arthur C. Clarke promised us:

"Five years ago we were supposed to have found an obelisk on the moon, traveled to Jupiter in the bowels of a cool spaceship controlled by a psychotic computer. We should all have apartments on the moon, personal helicopters, be wearing silver coloured clothing and be having our food delivered in handy pill format. Yes, roast beef should be a pill."

I've asked before and I'll ask again: Why can I not take a space elevator up to the Hilton in Orbit, yet? So pissed, but glad to know I'm not alone.

I GREW UP IN A SOLAR SYSTEM with only nine planets. My son will know a galactic neighborhood, if the International Astronomical Union adopts new definitions of celestial objects being debated right now, with twelve. Or maybe twenty-four. Or, less likely, hundreds. Of planets. Now that's what The Future is supposed to look like.

More Deviant Things You Don't Know About Yanni

I am man enough to admit that I have owned, in my life, some Yanni CDs, and that they were stored near the Vangelis and the Tangerine Dream, and that they might have seen some action. That was the Old Glenn, however, and I've long since stopped tracking the Greek god of synth's movements. And this, I learn today, means I've missed all the fun.

The self-styled silky-haired prog/ambient guru appeared on Howard Stern today, talking trash about John Tesh, boasting about his private jet, and there there's this, from the so-useful Howard show notes:

Yanni reported he grew up in Greece, and lost his virginity in “a whore house” when he was 14. Yanni then said the prostitute who deflowered him knew he was young, and the experience didn’t go well, particularly because he felt the woman in question looked like his aunt.

Oh and did you know Yanni was arrested--and released--in Florida in a nasty he-said-she-said domestic disturbance? Me neither! And look at that mug shot! This is the wake up call I've been waiting for. No more turning the other way, no more letting it slide. Yanni, I'm watching you.