Word: alienness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...first time in a long while, I turned on the television in my room. As a program started, some odd letters flashed on the left hand side of the screen: TV-something. What were they, these mysterious letters? A glitch of the emergency operating system? Some odd code to alien spaceships so their attacks could be synchronized? Perhaps even a subliminal message? In fact, the strange message in the corner of my screen was a part of the new system of television ratings...
Also impressive are the "millennium monologues" in the show. Each cast member wrote an original monologue about the year 2000, and these pieces easily match the energy and passion of the rest of the show. Some take a humorous approach, discussing alien encounters or the possible effects of cloning Calvin Klein models. Others talk about starting anew when the millennium comes--and doing it right this time. Most of the monologues exhibit the good humor and underlying dignity that characterizes the entire production...
...presence among the dead of the brother of a Trekkie demigoddess was only the most startling intersection of reality and science fiction. The cult's work space in Rancho Santa Fe was decorated with posters of alien beings from The X-Files and E.T. On the farewell tape, a cultist even brings up Nichols' oeuvre in explaining his decision to leave behind his human "container": "We watch a lot of Star Trek, a lot of Star Wars, it's just, to us, it's just like going on a holodeck. We've been training on a holodeck...
Last Friday, I was riding through central New Jersey, seated in a minivan next to my 8-year-old cousin, Andrew. He had just recently begun to enjoy reading, and was curious about the newspaper in my hands. Andrew was drawn to the image of an alien accompanying the lead story of the day: the mass suicide of the Heaven's Gate cult. He then began to read aloud what they had left on their web page: "As was promised--the keys to Heaven's Gate are here again in Ti and Do as they were in Jesus...
...they were all definitively gone, the artists who put American art on the world map after 1945: Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell and the transplanted Dutchman who jumped ship into the New World in 1926 and settled in New York as an illegal alien. Fortunately for American art, the immigration officials never caught up with de Kooning...