Are you stuckwayze? I'm not; I mean I am!

UFO’s, Turing Test (artificial intelligence), Gliese S281 (the first likely planet to contain places with Earth-like conditions), even TVC-15 (couple of jokes about David Bowie music-as-transmitter)---this, along with inspiration from Kirby’s Eternals and my own parallel race of mockeries of Man, all took packed places in my mind, like shirts from which I might choose. The hard AI didn’t get harder than Autocron Rover Ten-For, Japanese robot movie and American comic book crashed into the present-day based pages of Machine Man. The world has definitely changed in thirty years, and an old comic book or science fiction story can just as easily serve as a mirror to altered theories and “but if’s!” lapping like waves on the consciousness shore.



With maybe one more day where she felt better, Dixie would’ve happily chimed in on responses to these---which together form an essay yet written---with facts we know, some each other didn’t, and a healthy share of wonder, with intermittent bursts of prophet-lipped excoriations of ways and unintentionally dark comedies of society. I had a short story that, given one more time with each of them, I could’ve worked on, discussed, having all the business of hearing about their lives and routines clear, found another layer of old memories (Remember seeing Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, at the movie theater across from the hotel where you stayed and we all swam?), and started plotting! At least, I figured, I should soak in my friends and family in ways that would remind me later of them as I peered into the myths and myth stakes.

As it so happened, though, that “mockery of Man”, that Stuckwayze disposition, had played so much a part of our ways of late out here that its humor and insight was much closer at hand, with just enough time to think out loud alike and make jokes quickly while we forget about dying and illness and sorrow for a spell. We made
Stuckwayze faces from our own, like Man made in God’s Image, laughing already and so inspired to make more fun, and sure enough, everyone we left back there in Georgia still has a Stuckwayze face on hand they can show you!
So now, when I finish my “Stuckwayze Forev-uhghh!?!” tale, it will be so much better, its actions lit as the ways of my friends, parading around the Crib in their Stuckwayze Vases, uhghh.


Our adventures making t-shirts and the nature of taking creations to comics conventions poured from my lips as Charlotte kicked the boredom creeps with my company. I made eye contact but also worked through about thirty five yoga poses over the dog and cat loved carpet over the next hour or so, joyous, frankly, to have a listener, and one thing you can count on, you know when Charlotte is listening. I heard about life with Punk and Marley and Ginger and Sebastian, dogs and cats in harmony and relative balance: that’s another thousand words I could probably pull up on its own, because pets are a big part of your home life, and these days your home life’s quality is inescapable, right?


We had a fun Peace bracelet each; I drew Dixie and Charlie, a rough sketch, from a promise tucked away for just this moment, on pad and paper and pencil supplied by Dixie. Man, anything they had we needed or might even want, it was ours for the asking, if even that! You can’t abuse such hospitality and you’d do well to reward it, so taking down a wallet-sized portrait I drew my two friends before we all took off to return improperly crushed pills to the vet, take a look at the sad remains of Jeffery and Bobby’s old place so close by, and finally to devour Taco Bell and speak freely of things I just knew some fellow patrons wondered about!



Finally, the Peek’s Park location had become, by virtue of being closest to our sure attendees, the most likely place for the picnic Eric had dubbed Cecilpalooza. Taking a look around, we found it cozy and enjoyed hearing how they brought David, Austin and Ci Ci out to have fun and hazard in the water spout (built to replace the less-tenable public pool) centered in the shallow ampitheater half-circling it.


Half a circle, half a moon: I look at both and see a point where you need context to know does it wax or wane, but in its balance it’s a fine place to suggest a new beginning, such as our performer sides needed after two intense seasons filled with drawings, even stories, but mostly home quiet, while music we make is encouraged to be loud and played in places much larger than the Apartment of Ideas. We talked of ideas of children, children in our lives, children we’ve never had, and walked off our modest fast food lunches under trees and breeze.


A text: Peek’s Park, checking it out. Coming to your house next, Bean!

Next:First welcome to Gypsy Cave

(my conservative estimates, a hundred words per topic, served their purpose. Unbridled creation of kind memories in word came as 843 more words before I'm half out of events! There's a lot of set-up of the week as a whole as well as by the hour, and this is but a rough draft of what could be done)

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First, Betsy Thompson personally asked me to review her book, Walking Through Illusion, based probably on my last post. Like her, you too can send me anything through the mail that you think is of interest to Be Chill, Cease ill. I'm pleased as punch someone thinks that way of my humble scrivenings.









MACHINE MAIL

“A Persecuted Machine”




Maria, from the movie Metropolis, is probably the first "robot who thinks it's a person" in popular fiction, though Pinocchio has a claim on the concept, too, as much as does the organically-based Frankenstein, at least.

“Science like Pandora’s Box has released a marvel too hot to handle. What’s more, the advocate of Machine Man’s extinction is a vengeful and determined “Javert” who will track him down to the ends of the Earth.” ---Jack Kirby

Along with his colorful turns of phrase---more at home here on the text page where he is himself, free of the criticisms that traditionally come against his ear for dialogue---Machine Man’s first issues mixed Kirby’s pitch for the title with the opening of a conversation I’m sure he looked forward to having on the letters pages. Unlike these days, when a history lesson is de rigueur for the resurrection of characters for new titles, Kirby’s efforts were new, unpreviewed, personal occasions as well as properties. When he invites us to see our relationship to the title character to ourselves “howling to reduce him to harmless hardware,” he’s really giving us a panorama of the possibilities present in our post-person.


He really gets into his sensibilities to sympathize with every character, from his dark side in Ten-For to Dr. Spalding's desire to observe and the new reporter friend's sympathy (she's popping up in #5) to scarred, angry Colonel Kragg himself, with a directly related wound and fatalities that make his motivations, if not always his turn of phrase, believable.


“Our past performances demonstrate our eagerness to rid ourselves of what we consider and impending threat.” I wonder if an American of my generation would think so today? Or tomorrow? Certain reality shows may be some indication of a popular desire to sneer at decadence. I think, depending on the outward good our machine person could demonstrate, political agendas would use him as a distraction every August. His popularly- acknowledged existence would lead to many attempts to impose authority on his life. He would be considered a hoax by a quarter of the country at any given time, too!




I think Machine Man’s life would be closest to Brad and Angelina. (Now as to him adopting children...there was a lot of places to take Machine Man, if you think of him as a man first. Trick was, in 1978 he had to be competitive as a super hero first.) He would be the humanitarian, travelling abroad, retreating to a secure villa for privacy...he might even take up a residence in France. Though he’d be offered free land in Siberia if he would just go there, you can bet! I cannot blame him for realizing he should go Kerouac and look for the individuals and different flavors of regions, not deal with some monolith of anomie called “society.” But how long would it probably be before we found him hitchhiking again to the “sad, walking away music”?





As a being that doesn’t eat or presumably smell, it’s difficult to imagine how to touch his mind with the fellowship and history cuisine offers. There must be legions of robo-porn cartoon clips and anime I will never, hopefully, see, but Jack didn’t give him attributes readily available for romance and its biological, squishy component. I’m not saying he couldn’t appeal to older people, especially with all the identity questions on hand, but I definitely thought he was made to make kids say “Wow!” And childhood comes in all ages and sizes.


You could imagine our prototype post-person, probably under the best of circumstances, signing agreements not to work as an invading force for any nation...the trial for his citizenship will be one of the century, and would involve exciting, Kirby-perspective pointing!



Let’s face it, though: one successful Machine Man is one idea, but fifty other working models/ possible psychotics is a whole other matter. I’ve already pondered the story as Machine MEN. I think, like every great comic hero, he’s often profoundly alone. Would we---or Kirby?---have him any other way? There is no one to relate this condition to, though he may share common cause with any socially marginalized being. But then, to a point, while mental capacity may limit or engender one towards a particular similarity, ultimately people of all looks and capacities and social standings have found themselves befriending people of all stripes.

Machine Man really couldn’t be blamed for participating in the existence of another of his kind, or even the creation thereof. How would we feel about this cybernetic procreation? I think something akin to the fear of mutants would follow the founding of the Machine Man Family Reunion. But would they have t-shirts and hot dogs?


If we decided fear was against our better judgment, we might actually be rooting to have one of them as our friend. Notice the difference in some remote government machine man soldier under orders, and your reaction to one going for a walk with you. Kirby’s Machine Man quite self-consciously recognizes this.

When do pants stop being pants?

A "satisfycing" look at artificial intelligence (and Kirby)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_artificial_intelligence#Mainstream_AI_research


For some reason, while Machine Man grew up in the pages of 2001: a Space Odyssey, he’s generally considered as unrelated to the actual Kubrick film as anything else he included in the eclectic run of the comic it inspired. However, when one finds the genesis of H.A.L. in Al Simon’s 1965 prediction that “in twenty years, we should have machines that can outperform men at any task.” (see the article above for quote).


This point proves part of Kirby’s thesis for his new character as well, as portrayed first in his text pages in each of the first three issues. Kirby’s given his creation an emotional tie to the human race, as well as an emulation of the conscience, if it is not, in fact, truly Machine Man’s own conscience. If so, this is part of his make-up as an individual. Can you imagine paranoia that some vital few molecules of storage space could be bonded to a destructible piece of matter carried in your person? Yet, in as far as mentality resides at an interface with our own grey matter, our individuality is similarly fragile.


Machine Man also represents a fantasy in the world of strong artificial intelligence, far ahead of its time. The character can access computations and work out extra-ordinary principles of logic. Yet this tendency towards thinking that does not serve an objective task---this wool-gathering, this hypothesis he has that he is one of us, so based in a type of faith that is, perhaps, the Occam’s Razor solution---the satisfycing---represents emotional qualities that seem in part based on our interweaving with physical, biologically-based being. So for some reason, negative and positive emotions alike are taken aboard, to play with the decision making process, forever altered by his new ability to take things personally.

How can a human being without an ethnic background or family shape an identity? His mechanical being, in this case, is a hideous disability that assures him never more than a fringe position relative to human society. Yet his body also makes him the strange new protector of a race he always struggles to understand, which somehow has originated him and molded him with elements that dominate his tabla rasa, his blank slate life. What makes him perform with altruism, gratitude, kindness, and courage, for the sake of relating him to us by way of values, if not biology, would be just as difficult to trace in the world of neurons as in his hypothetically bolted bod. A much different objective, say, than beating Bobby Fisher at chess!

Perhaps Machine Man less reflects why being like US is a logical thing for an inorganic being to do, so much as he allows us to take our own feelings and reflections and sense of imagination into another new super-human form, providing another strange refraction in which to see the enigma of person hood.