Cryptozoology

This weekend I make the substantial journey to Maine for a friend's wedding. She was getting married in Farmington, a little town two miles from Portland. Flying from Lubbock to Portland is not a simple process, so in order to make it for the Saturday wedding, I had to leave on the Thursday and return on the Monday. This meant I had a fair bit of time to explore Portland, so naturally, I took the opportunity to visit the International Cryptozoology Museum.

As a kid I always enjoyed books about monsters, and was a huge fan of the TV shows like In Search Of... and Unsolved Mysteries, hosted by Leonard Nimoy and Robert Stack, respectively. That's where I learned to scrutinize Bigfoot footage, and observe the rhetorical trends in UFO narratives. My favorite science magazine, Equinox, once had a feature on Mokele-mbembe, a brontosaurus-type creature that apparently lurks in the jungles of the Congo. On more than a few occasions, I have been able to use my knowledge from this article to start conversations with a certain kind of person, i.e. the sort of person who runs a cryptozoology museum. More on that later.

After you enter and pony up your seven dollars for admission, your first priority should be to get a photo with Bigfoot. While Bigfoot is tall, I should note that he was also standing on a pedestal, which I think is cheating.

The displays were, in many senses, even stranger than I would have imagined, in that most of them consisted of well-known animals, like foxes, squirrels, and in this case, beavers. The sign asks the enduring question "Do Giant Beavers Still Exist?" After looking at this display, I feel confident in saying "No." And yes, those are action figures of Indiana Jones and Steve Irwin, one of whom was a real person. I am tempted to read this arrangement of real and fictional people with a real beaver who only looks giant because of the scale of the plastic people as a clever commentary on the ambiguities of cryptozoology as a field of study, but I'm probably giving it too much credit.

Yetis are not white, you racist fools! I should note that this sign was placed in front of a collection of white Yeti dolls, which doesn't really clarify anything.

 This sign, which as you can see, was not well secured to the display case, seems to make a claim for the rationality of the field. However, the contents of the case consisted of stuffed animals with extra parts glued on to them, so I don't think their authenticity was ever in question:

The Bigfoot footage I remember so well from my youth is here presented on a TV, but with a picture frame around the screen, and old-timey flourishes on the sides to make you take it seriously. Are you convinced?

After making the rounds, I approached the curator to ask if he had anything on my old friend, Mokele-mbembe. He admitted that he didn't have much, but that it was one of the most likely candidates to be a real animal, almost as much as the "Giant Panda." I was tempted to inform him that the Giant Panda is a real animal and I've seen them at zoos, in youtube videos, on greeting cards, and just about everywhere else, but I didn't want to seem disrespectful. He lead me over to a display case to show me this:

This, my friends, is a plastic dinosaur toy that was autographed by a guy who wrote a book on Mokele-mbembe. On one level, this is a wonderful object and I would like to have one myself, but I also felt like in this case, they weren't even really trying.  

Rolling Roadshow

Texas is made for road trips, so last summer I took advantage of the state's abundance of weird small towns. I have been encouraged by the Alamo Drafthouse, a cinema in Austin that shows cool stuff and serves drinks, and their "Rolling Roadshow" - a scheme where they put on open-air screenings of Texas movies, in the towns where they were filmed.

One of their features was the Paul Newman 1963 movie Hud in Claude, which is just a few miles from Amarillo. I packed up my lawn chair and headed north. Now, when it comes to landscape in West Texas, I hear a lot of complaints about its flatness. Yes, it is flat, but I choose to perceive it as living in a Mark Rothko painting. For example:

Except, of course, when you come across a canyon. The transition is so rapid it is actually startling, to go from flatness to deep, red and rocky. I pulled over in the bottom of a canyon just to contemplate things for a moment.

Of course, the Grand Canyon gets more press, but the mini-versions thereof in West Texas are pretty impressive. I drove through the canyons, enjoying the novelty of their verticality, and I was pleased to notice a sign for a lookout up ahead. I pulled in, and noticed a big rig stopped there, with the driver leaning against it. I have seen enough movies to know that this is not a great place for a single woman to stop, so I pulled a U-turn and continued on to Claude. I didn't want to miss the big show, of course.

Claude is an archetypal dying town. It's close enough to Amarillo to get a bit of traffic, but the downtown was quite depressed. I stopped at the Dairy Queen, as that is a staple of the West Texas diet, and explored the main street before the movie. Attractions included the Gem Theatre, which plays itself in the film.

The old schoolhouse:

And an assortment of abandoned shop windows full of mysterious objects, such as this old car:

Or this, a bathtub with sides covered in carpet. This strikes me as a bad idea, or at least something you can only get away with in a desert climate. I'm not sure if the yoke and lantern were included in the original package.:

Finally, no small western town is complete without a cigar store Indian. This one is adorned with a sacred white buffalo. I'll tell that story another time.:

As the sun started to set, the Alamo Drafthouse crew got their projection booth truck into position and inflated their portable screen in front of the town hall. You can see the projector lenses peeking out.:

One of the delightful things about the process is we got to see things that are normally hidden at a movie theatre, like the process of calibrating the projector for the screen.

The local Legion was selling hot dogs, and some kids had been recruited to distribute free popcorn. We all staked out our spots in the parking lot with our lawn chairs, and the show began with some vintage movie trailers that might have shown before Hud back in the day. An unexpected thrill in watching the movie in the middle of town is that since it was shot there, one could perform shot-by-shot comparisons with the surrounding space. There'd be a shot of the courthouse, and then you would look to your right, and there's the courthouse. Not much has changed, except none of Claude's residents resemble Paul Newman in the slightest. 

As the sky grew darker, the light of the screen started to attract moths, which in turn attracted the local bat population. I've written before about the ways nature often competes with outdoor screenings (lightning at the drive-in, etc.), but this was quite spectacular to watch the cloud of bats swirling above us, and occasionally cruising in front of the screen. 

When the show wrapped, I drove home, but took the big highway through Amarillo, since the canyon is not such a good option in the dark. 

I think this guy winked at me on Match.com

Click here for an explanation of the Lubbock problem: Well said, Jimmy Kimmel.

Kennedy Space Center

While in Orlando, I took a day and drove out to Cape Canaveral. I sprung for the "behind the scenes" tour at the Kennedy Space Center, and was delighted to hear that this would include a visit to the Vehicle Assembly Building - a structure I've seen in many IMAX space movies. They don't normally let visitors into this area, since vehicle assembly involves enormous quantities of rocket fuel, and it would be bad PR if a bus tour was incinerated because someone ignored the No Smoking signs. Fortunately, the only spacecraft in the building was the now-retired Shuttle Atlantis, who is being prepared for permanent museum display.

I felt a bit sad to see her there, looking tired, with her nose cut open. I remember my excitement at watching launches on tv as a kid, assembling a Shuttle model kit and playing with it, and poring over the satellite images Dad would bring home from work. I was one of those who felt sentimental when the Shuttle program ended last year - much the way I feel about the decline in celluloid film projection. Dream machines being laid to rest.
We got back on the bus and went out to the shuttle launch pad. The tour guide noted the railroad tracks, which were used back in the early days of the space program, before the equipment got too heavy for trains to handle. I was so pleased that these examples of frontier-exploring-infrastructure were good enough to pose together in perfect composition.

Orlando

Last summer, my friend Elizabeth called me and asked if I'd like to do a half-marathon with her at Disney World. I figured, why not? So, this morning Ginger and Norman picked me up before dawn to take me to the airport, and now I'm sitting by a pool in Orlando. I was most impressed with the Orlando Airport's level of preparedness for Ash Wednesday. As soon as I got off the terminal monorail, there were two airport chaplains with a table, a modest sign, and ashes. As you can see, they fixed me up:

Tomorrow I'm going to the Kennedy Space Center to look at stuff at the Kennedy Space Center. Sunday is marathon day, so to prepare and scope out the scene, we're going to do Disney theme parks on Friday and Saturday. Fortunately, Elizabeth is a Disney World veteran, and I emailed her a list of my points of interest in advance so she would have time to develop a strategic plan. Of course, I have a research agenda, which is to see lots of historically-significant 3D film installations at Disney World, such as the Michael Jackson science-fiction music video Captain EO. This film hadn't been screened for years, but I gather that with Mr. Jackson's demise, the film was resurrected.

What Elizabeth doesn't know is that I've brought a special present for her. We used to be roommates in Chicago, where she developed a taste for my macaroni and cheese. Over the years, she has periodically phoned me from her kitchen to guide her through making it herself. Last weekend I made a big vat of it for the vegetarian co-op, so I froze some of it and managed to get it past the TSA. This is my contribution to our pre-race carbo-loading. Not that it's hard to find carbohydrates in Orlando.

What Movie is This? Part 2

Today, while walking Mollie, I noticed an SUV cruising the neighbourhood. It was painted with the logo for a local television station, and it contained an intrepid reporter and her videographer, hot on the trail of a big story. At one point I observed them interviewing an elderly lady in front of her house. I was a bit curious about the big news, but not enough to stray within earshot.

A few minutes later, the same SUV pulled up next to me, and the journalist asked me what I thought about "all the birds." I wasn't sure what she meant, so she elaborated: "People have been saying that there are large numbers of birds in Lubbock these days." I assured her that this didn't bother me, as "We live on a planet where there are birds." She seemed disappointed that I don't respond to flocks of birds with explosions of rage, and they moved on. I noticed her some time later, knocking on doors, looking for enthusiastic ornithophobes.

It occurred to me that this could easily be the opening scene for a re-make of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. I started to wonder how a contemporary version of that movie would play out, as it seems clear that my safety would depend very much on the film's politics. If it were an environmentalist fable, I would hope that my refusal to regard nature as a nuisance might be rewarded with survival. The birds, noting my unwashed car and vegetarian kitchen, would pass over my house and instead attack the global-warming-deniers with the unnecessarily large vehicles down the street. However, if the film had a more conservative world-view, and the overpopulation of birds was caused by a government conspiracy, then granola feminist intellectual types like myself would be the first to go.

I'll be watching the local news to see if I can get any insights.

What Movie is This? Part 1

I haven't written lately in part because I've been finding it harder to be positive about life in Lubbock, and really, a list of complaints doesn't make for good reading. I think part of the difficulty is that I'm finding it more and more difficult to figure out what kind of movie I'm in. As a film scholar, I tend to think about life situations in terms of movies, as in "If this were a romantic comedy, that thing that just happened would mean..." Of course, it never actually means that, because life is not a romantic comedy, but it's still a fun game and it's useful to pretend that things make sense and follow genre conventions. A number of recent events have caused me to wonder, which film am I in? Consider this the first in a series.

American Pie/American Beauty/American Psycho

The other day, one of my graduate students came to speak with me about ideas for her final paper. When she arrived at my office, she apologized for not having more material to show me, but her notes had been stolen. She is working on a Master's degree in Education, so she spends much of her time working in the local high schools. It seems that one of her students is a kleptomaniac, and he had stolen all of her things from her desk, including her research notes for my class. When she left the school to come meet me, he was still be interviewed by the police, and was being tight-lipped about the location of the purloined items. I offered my sympathy, and I considered revealing that it was really empathy, but thought that might be overstepping a boundary. Why empathy, you may ask?

Some weeks ago, I arrived home from teaching a night class, and realized I had forgotten my cell phone on campus. I hemmed and hawed about going back to retrieve it, but decided that it wouldn't be smart to spend the night without a cell phone. I ate some dinner, and then put Mollie in the car to head back to campus, as it is mildly safer to have your dog with you. After getting the phone, I stopped by the grocery store for a few things, then headed home. I had been gone for about 40 minutes.

When I went inside, I walked first to the kitchen to put away my groceries, where I noticed that the back door had been smashed in. In a move that reveals my priorities, I ran to my office to see if my computer was still there, and was relieved to see its power light blinking in the darkness. Then, I called the police. The dispatcher asked me if I had checked the house to see if the robber was still there. My feeling at this moment would be well expressed through what cinematographers call a "throw and go" - an effect where you simultaneously move the camera while adjusting the zoom lens to create a feeling of disorientation. It was famously used in Jaws to represent the feeling you might have when you realize that a shark is about to eat everybody. Or, say, that a person who kicks in doors is hiding in your house, in the dark, with you.

I took Mollie and ran outside, then called my neighbours, Ann and Miles. Miles came over to wait for the police with me. When the cops showed up, they had their headlights off, asked me if anyone was supposed to be in the house, then drew their guns and searched the place. Fortunately, the culprit was long gone, and the police asked me to check what had been stolen. As I looked around, I was surprised that seemingly, nothing had been taken. My jewelry boxes were open, but nothing had been removed. Miles suggested that I had probably arrived home seconds after they broke in, so they ran away before taking anything. This sounded like a plausible explanation. The police agreed, and told me to secure my back door. I thought "How? Late-night carpentry?" but they suggested that I just move my fridge in front of the door. Miles helped me with that, and I packed a bag to go spend the night at their house.

The following day, my landlord fixed the door first thing, and I returned home. I thought "Well, this has been a stressful experience, so I'm going to be sure to go to yoga class after I teach today." To be sure I would make it on time, I decided to get my clothing organized. I started to put together my yoga stuff - mat, t-shirt, pants - and then I went to get my sports bra. I opened my dresser, and paused. I thought for a moment "Did I do a bunch of laundry?" Then it dawned on me - the thief had stolen all of my brassieres. All of them. And only them. He (I'm assuming) was very precise on that point.

When faced with a situation like this, the question that comes to mind is "What movie am I in?" since that information will dictate my emotional and practical response. Is it a teen sex comedy in the spirit of American Pie, where I am the target of harmless youthful hijinks? If that's the case, it's stupid, but not terrifying. Or, am I in an independent film in the spirit of American Beauty, where people are acting in obsessive, neurotic ways, but are ultimately only hurting themselves? Or, alternately, am I in American Psycho, and I'm about to find myself on the business end of a chainsaw? Note that there is a whole series of movies that have "Texas" and "Chainsaw" in their titles, so that's a factor to consider re: the local culture.

I reported my discovery to the police, and received a call back from a detective. He asked if there were any "ex-boyfriends we should know about." I thought "You, sir, have not been reading my blog." No, an excess of boyfriends has not been a problem. He asked if any other items were missing, such as shoes or stockings, i.e. things that people have fetishes for. Nope. (Although, I have to say, if someone had taken my shoes, they would find themselves in a vengeance fantasy directed by Quentin Tarantino, and I'd be the one using the chainsaw.) At the end of our conversation, I mentioned an incident that had happened the previous summer, when I was walking Mollie and a creepy guy groped me on the sidewalk (yes, the men of Lubbock are really putting their best foot forward). The detective said it wasn't far-fetched to think that those events might be related. This added credence to the American Psycho interpretation of events, so I moved into Ann and Miles' guest room until my alarm system was installed. I shared my anxieties with Ann, who tried to reassure me that if I were in American Psycho, I would already be dead, so there's nothing to worry about. Oh, in that case, carry on.

One thing the detective suggested is that I ask my neighbours if they had experienced any similar incidents, as people often don't report such things to the police. I didn't really feel like discussing my underwear with the frat boys who live next door, so I told Ginger about it, and I felt confident that she would canvass the neighbourhood in short order. Apparently, she sent Norman over to speak to the boys, who mentioned that another house just a block over had been broken into last Christmas, and all the thieves took was men's underwear and white socks. I found this news reassuring, as it slides the creep-o-meter closer to American Beauty -- we have an area weirdo, but he (again, I'm assuming) is equal-opportunity and only interested in inanimate objects.

The upside of this is that my friend Renee responded to the situation by holding a "bra shower" for me to help restore what had been lost. Most people got me gift cards, but one friend was considerate enough to get me a camouflage-pattern number in my size. I unwrapped it and said "Awesome! Now I'm ready to go hunting!" I suspect that there is also a film genre devoted to women in camo underwear carrying big guns, but I never imagined it would serve as a model for my life experience.