Q:
L: It’s a different creature; it went away from here this little creature and it is returned magnificent. The spirit is growing in its presence in the world.
Q:
L: Yes, the horse was the first thing of this desert to really alter space and time. It’s almost as if time is being taken away from us … a sense of timelessness …
Q:
L: Aging sun lizard?
Q:
L: But we must be storylisteners, Joshua. And so we are all prophets. When the Spaniard returns on the horse, this magnificent creature, we had listened and so knew already that the horse would come here again and so know the long outwaiting will end too. When this thing you say, aging sun lizard, returns riding the rocket, it will be so too. I’m seeing the prophetic nature of the return of the horse … What’s going on with Galactic is a part of the story of what comes of this time of our long outwaiting.
Q:
L: Never good. Never bad. A prophet is only a storylistener. We all have prophetic ears, Joshua.
Q:
L: All lizards have ears. But no lizards vocalize—no sound comes from the lizard. Ears only, to hear beyond what’s said. The lizard is the ideal prophet.
* Eventually the money for building this Welcome Center will dry up too and the Spaceport Authority will take over the senior center in downtown Truth or Consequences, displacing the elderly citizens in favor of some space exhibits and a rather tacky G-Shock simulator—basically a glorified single-seat, 360-degree merry-go-round. The warnings for this simulator do not specifically exclude use by the elderly but the Spaceport Authority will never offer any members of the displaced senior center lifetime passes to ride the G-Shock.
* Beaver was, at one time, in the running to design the Spaceport America Visitor Experience with his pal Douglas Trumbull. You’ve no doubt seen Trumbull’s work. He’s a Hollywood special effects guy who changed the whole industry with his work on 2001: A Space Odyssey and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Blade Runner. He’s one of those guys who you almost never hear about, but whose vision for things, such as space stations and aliens and future cities, pretty much becomes the entire culture’s vision because his art is great and he keeps quiet while slipping it into other people’s projects. Beaver and Trumbull pitched their Visitor Experience as a virtual reality simulation of the Overview Effect, which sounds cool unless you watch Trumbull’s film Brainstorm starring Christopher Walken. Brainstorm is the only major film Trumbull directed, a lovably ambitious flop that proves he was born to be the magic ingredient in someone else’s recipe. Brainstorm is about the mortal dangers of virtual reality—lots of murderous insanity ensues when the VR gets too real. The film uses the Wright brothers’ Kitty Hawk as a backdrop for its climactic scene of Christopher Walken’s VR-induced episode of violent insanity. Perhaps it was best that Trumbull and Beaver’s VR Visitor Experience didn’t get the spaceport contract, as the link to Brainstorm and violent VR-induced psychosis at Kitty Hawk might have been a bad omen for our spaceport that aims to be, they keep insisting, the modern-day Kitty Hawk. Plus, I’ll let you ponder all the possible societal fracturing implications of giving Rich Space Tourists the actual life-altering spiritual experience of the Overview Effect while sticking Terrestrial Space Tourists with some computer-generated facsimile playing on the scratched screen of a headset all sticky from the muck of spit and space ice cream dripping off thousands of grubby hands of the children of Terrestrial Space Tourists who are getting nothing spiritual out of the virtual reality video but are maybe getting primed for the relentless disappointments of impoverished life and maybe getting also the chance at a psychotic episode. Right now—on December 4, 2013—President Obama is live on TV saying, Income inequality is the defining challenge of our time. And he doesn’t even know how close our spaceport came to ushering in a society of Overview Effect–enlightened 1 percenters presiding over the unenlightened masses all prone to psychosis from their shitty Brainstorm-inspired epiphany-simulation machine.
* Easter Friday is not Good Friday (the Friday before Easter Sunday). That’s a common misunderstanding. Easter Friday is the Friday after Jesus has risen and spooked Mary and Peter and the giant rabbit has come and gone and had coffee with Pops and all the little kids have gathered up all the many-colored eggs in their little baskets and are finishing the last of the chocolates birthed by the eggs and there are so many shiny wrappers left all around everywhere because in the end this is what is left: trash. The tomb of Jesus was discovered, the story goes, empty of everything but trash, one soiled and bloodstained shroud left behind while somewhere the reanimated corpse of a carpenter roams. Easter Friday observances aren’t as widespread as those on Good Friday, where the reason for the observance is clear—our Lord hangs from the cross. Easter Friday is a lot more amorphous; it’s just one more day in that strange period of forty days after you’ve heard rumor of a resurrection but before you’ve heard rumor of an ascension and you are waiting around to see if the Son of God will stop by to collect on what you owe him.
* Just to complicate the Spielbergian cloud hanging over this event: next year Spielberg will be announced as the director of the film adaptation of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One. Zak Penn, the director of the documentary here at the Pit, will be the screenwriter, presumably because he’ll become friends with Cline during their time here at the landfill. Alamogordo’s dump is not just a tomb or graveyard for popular culture but also some kind of node perpetuating it. Ready Player One is expected to be the first major feature film to extensively utilize virtual reality technology. In the story, a media mogul creates a virtual reality so compelling that people never want to be in regular old reality again. Then the media mogul dies and pits everyone against one another inside the virtual reality, sends them on a violent Willy Wonka–esque treasure hunt for his vast fortune, a race to find so-called Easter eggs hidden in the virtual reality game. The clues for the treasure hunt are all based on 1980s pop culture, the decade in which the media mogul was raised, for which he feels great nostalgia. But the virtual spills into the actual and high jinks and tragedy and triumph ensue. As part of his adaptation, Spielberg reportedly plans to have Penn remove from the script any references to films Spielberg directed or produced, either out of great humility or fear of being perceived as overly masturbatory. So in the virtual reality film about a future virtual reality obsessed with eighties pop culture, there may be no E.T. or Indiana Jones. All reasons we are gathered here tonight at the Pit will be erased. The node of the Pit in Alamogordo is so strong that it is writing itself out of the future.
* Lightbox actually came to the project late. Fuel Entertainment first secured the exclusive rights to dig in Alamogordo’s landfill in 2011 after Joe Lewandowski had already been approached by numerous media outlets, including the Discovery Channel, about locating the E.T.s. In 2013 Xbox Entertainment decided to finance Fuel’s beleaguered efforts as part of a series of documentaries about the digital gaming revolution, which Lightbox would produce. Souder, Miller & Associates was brought on as the environmental firm to work with Lewandowski on the Waste Excavation Plan. Mesa Verde construction is doing the actual digging. People from all of these companies comprise the crew and keeping them separate is difficult because of ubiquitous bandanna usage, but the confusion of it all lends itself to that classic American joke: How many corporations does it take to make a profitable show of digging up one bankrupt corporation’s illegally dumped e-waste?
* The excavation of this legendary videogame graveyard will eventually inspire an episode of Elementary, the latest TV revival of Sherlock Holmes. So that’s why I coyly quoted the great detective. And also as an excuse to give one more tally of the depth of the nerdgasm we’re dealing with here, the power of the pop culture node of the Pit, in case you haven’t kept track. (1) We’re digging for a videogame that defined the rocky beginnings of that industry, (2) a videogame based on the sci-fi blockbuster E.T., (3) digging in an overtly Raiders of the Lost
Ark style, (4) to make a documentary film for Xbox under the direction of a guy who wrote X-Men and The Avengers, (5) with a DeLorean along for moral support, a car paid for by (6) the sci-fi bestseller Ready Player One, soon to be (7) the first virtual-reality Spielberg film, and (8) all of it with enough intrigue to actually weasel itself into the canon of Sherlock Holmes cases. That’s an eighth-level nerdgasm. And eight, as I’m sure you know, is the number of chakras some practitioners say need to be activated to achieve tantric sex. Well, alright. Also maybe relevant: in Dante’s Inferno, the eighth circle of hell is Fraud.
* This is equally true of other archaeologists, as evidenced by founding punk Bill Caraher’s hour-long interview with a baffled and frankly stubborn Dr. Joseph Schuldenrein on the radio show Indiana Jones: Myth, Reality and 21st Century Archaeology. Schuldenrein seems confused by Caraher’s references to Lou Reed and MC5 and the Replacements, seems confused by the idea that the chaos of punk can be translated to methodology or field practice. The point, Caraher suggests, is to never establish an overarching methodology. In Schuldenrein’s defense, this is a particularly confusing concept in the context of the Pit, where the Arch Punks keep begging the film crew for a bit more semblance of methodology. Caraher’s broader point is that punk archaeology fights the trend to commodify artifacts, particularly when those artifacts are coming from late capitalism where they have been discarded exactly because of the urge to commodify more and more objects. If we only value the things that will make us money, we will end up with so much trash, will end up with culture that is synonymous with capitalism. That’s shitty culture. So, in an academic context, the Punks might use less field methodology in order to upset the status quo that leads to commodification. But at this commercial dig, they need to use more field methodology in order to upset the status quo that leads to commodification. Either way, their goal, stated in the simplest punk terms, is basically to fuck shit up.
* Everyone agrees the dig barely scratched the surface of the graveyard. Thousands upon thousands of videogames are still down there. The EPA, which I contacted about the possible absurdity of digging up just a little bit of industrial waste as a marketing gimmick, tells me the obvious: they recommend that videogame manufacturers explore reuse and recycling options before sending large deposits of game cartridges to landfills. Presumably this recommendation extends to game companies excavating large deposits of cartridges in landfills. But in Alamogordo there was never any talk of Microsoft paying to dig up (or recycle) any more cartridges than necessary to confirm Atari’s improper dumping had occurred. Fixing others’ mistakes is often less lucrative than exploiting them.
* The money Lewandowski raises from eBay sales will go to the Tularosa Basin Historical Society (TBHS). They’ll use it to build a museum on White Sands Boulevard, down the road from the Pit. But the E.T.s will only be one exhibit in the TBHS museum. Most of the exhibits will tell the stories of this town and this land from way back, all the stuff ignored at the Pit. And in that way Lewandowski will have, in some small measure, managed to break the curse, to defeat the node of the Pit.
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