Starman

Good day fellow Flashbackians… Flashbackers? Flashers? Oh lord no, that all sound wrong, wrong, wrong.

Anyway, today’s Blog entry will be a short one as I have other, real world commitments to deal with – filming mini documentaries for the local council and it looks like I’m off to a sheep sale… yup, you heard it right, a sheep sale.

What I thought I would do is share a few snippets from the project I was working on before I switched gears and revamped and revived Flashback. As you may know from earlier entries it was entitled Starman and was to be the homage to Michael. Very different in feel to Flashback – well, it was to be an animated video for one thing – it also featured the voice of a narrator who told the story of the Starman’s visit to Earth and how he influenced the narrator’s own boring life even after he had departed this world, so to speak.

I didn’t know who would play the narrator. I hadn’t got far with casting ideas, just writing. Some of the writing was lifted from Michael’s own work directly and I was going to somehow adapt it to fit into the overall story. But here are a few raw snippets that might make you glad I did switch track to Flashback!

“NARRATOR: You know, I often think of the millions of moments we might have shared together in this impossibly expansive universe of ours; moments that keep on adding up at a rate of 31 million, 556 thousand, 926 seconds a year. Moments that would have shaped the way I saw the world and probably help change the way I thought about my own existence, and yet it was not to be. His time here was so brief, to most it may have seemed like he had never visited us at all, but to me it is still incredibly hard to believe that it has been 220 million, 898 thousand, 482 seconds since I finally lost touch with him…”

“NARRATOR: Thanks to my on-line Death Clock prediction, I should expire on Wednesday, September 3, 2042 and at the time of researching this fascinating factoid, I had over 1 billion seconds left to live. That’s another billion plus moments I need to find more and more interesting ways to entertain myself.”

“NARRATOR: “You’re barely on the internet these days…” I said to him, “hardly a mention, really.” He smiled and shrugged and told me that “a memory is only truly valid if it happens to be greater than 64 MB”

For a time we worked together. He got me a job in the Videotape Erasure Facility in the big city. There we spent many a night debating who had the better laugh in this-or-that movie. He said it was so-and-so and I said the opposite and there was one scene that obviously proved it. We must have watched that scene a hundred times – before we erased it. He then became all philosophical about the work. “That’s no way to censor so-and-so’s laughter,” he said solemnly to me over tea and pickles. “You’ve got to do it right, if you’re going to do it at all” But if there was one thing we both agreed on it was that embarrassing mediocrity seemed to dominate the popular tastes of the masses and judging by the mound of tapes that we had to erase, that wouldn’t be changing any time soon.”

“NARRATOR: My degree in art meant that I was able to accurately write my name in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics – a skill that came very much in handy at that time I remember. I never saw him write his name. Even the cheques he endorsed were virtual, he once told me.”

“NARRATOR: I wasn’t prepared the day he left. It was like he just fell into a hole that was deeper than six feet…”

And to finish, a snippet of Michael’s own writing. For some reason I love this passage and wanted to find a way to include it in Starman:

Xanax, Zerit and Indinovir stood poised at the edge of intergalactic eternity, their enlarged crania jutting forward like three eliptical crixivans, collectively forming an image of magnetic resonance.

“Where do we deposit the testicular repligene?”

“Xanax has replaced the modular neopostplastic smegma simulator in the psychotomax.”

Their crypto-pharmacologica-tech-talk was interrupted by the familiar sound of webmusak at 600 beats per minute, so fast that only Zerit, with his huge aural endowment, could detect the vibrations and react appropriately. He began the Dance of the Zadivudine Genomes. Very soon, mutant Transcriptors were appearing from the transparent, multifaceted, rotating three dimensional CorpsLogos which filled the infinite space that the three superheroes had previously occupied.

“Do you think this will work as animation or should we use live action with digital spaceships and shit?” Dave Bergmark was hunched over his GatesPowerMac 196000 super-computer (20,000 terabyte and 64,000 megahertz).

“We need more fucking memory,” he screamed, pounding his fist onto the keyboard, doing more damage than good, I suspect … (hmm … I also suspect that with his temper, soon he would not have a keyboard. Note … think of a ridiculous post-space-age substitute for keyboard. Maybe a genetically controlled wand of some sort with a corporate name that sounds like a mood altering drug — World Weary Wastetime presents the Wazax Wand 3000)…