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8 O'Clock in the Morning

2012-01-14T12:00:00.000-08:00

This short story by Ray Faraday Nelson appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in August, 1963. Though anthologized since, it has been out of print since 1998, despite being the story inspiration for John Carpenter's immortal They Live (1988).

Eight O'Clock in the Morning
Ray Nelson

At the end of the show the hypnotist told his subjects, "Awake."

Something unusual happened.

One of the subjects awoke all the way. This had never happened before. His name was George Nada and he blinked out at the sea of faces in the theatre, at first unaware of anything out of the ordinary. Then he noticed, spotted here and there in the crowd, the non-human faces, the faces of the Fascinators. They had been there all along, of course, but only George was really awake, so only George recognized them for what they were. He understood everything in a flash, including the fact that if he were to give any outward sign, the Fascinators would instantly command him to return to his former state, and he would obey.

He left the theatre, pushing out into the neon night, carefully avoiding any indication that he saw the green, reptilian flesh or the multiple yellow eyes of the rulers of the earth. One of them asked him, "Got a light buddy?" George gave him a light, then moved on.

At intervals along the street George saw the posters hanging with photographs of the Fascinators' multiple eyes and various commands printed under them, such as, "Work eight hours, play eight hours, sleep eight hours," and "Marry and Reproduce." A TV set in the window of a store caught George's eye, but he looked away in the nick of time. When he didn't look at the Fascinator in the screen, he could resist the command, "Stay tuned to this station."

George lived alone in a little sleeping room, and as soon as he got home, the first thing he did was to disconnect the TV set. In other rooms he could hear the TV sets of his neighbors, though. Most of the time the voices were human, but now and then he heard the arrogant, strangely bird-like croaks of the aliens. "Obey the government," said one croak. "We are the government," said another. "We are your friends, you'd do anything for a friend, wouldn't you?"

"Obey!"

"Work!"

Suddenly the phone rang.

George picked it up. It was one of the Fascinators.

"Hello," it squawked. "This is your control, Chief of Police Robinson. You are an old man, George Nada. Tomorrow morning at eight o'clock, your heart will stop. Please repeat."

"I am an old man," said George. "Tomorrow morning at eight o'clock, my heart will stop."

The control hung up.

"No, it wont," whispered George. He wondered why they wanted him dead. Did they suspect that he was awake? Probably. Someone might have spotted him, noticed that he didn't respond the way the others did. If George were alive at one minute after eight tomorrow morning, then they would be sure.

"No use waiting here for the end," he thought.

He went out again. The posters, the TV, the occasional commands from passing aliens did not seem to have absolute power over him, though he still felt strongly tempted to obey, to see things the way his master wanted him to see them. He passed an alley and stopped. One of the aliens was alone there, leaning against the wall. George walked up to him.

"Move on," grunted the thing, focusing his deadly eyes on George.

George felt his grasp on awareness waver. For a moment the reptilian head dissolved into the face of a lovable old drunk. Of course the drunk would be lovable. George picked up a brick and smashed it down on the old drunk's head with all his strength. For a moment the image blurred, then the blue-green blood oozed out of the face and the lizard fell, twitching and writhing. After a moment it was dead.

George dragged the body into the shadows and searched it. There was a tiny radio in its pocket and a curiously shaped knife and fork in another. The tiny radio said something in an incomprehensible language. George put it down beside the body, but kept the eating utensils.

"I can't possibly escape," thought George. "Why fight them?"

But maybe he could.

What if he could awaken others? That might be worth a try.

He walked twelve blocks to the apartment of his girl friend, Lil, and knocked on her door. She came to the door in her bathrobe.

"I want you to wake up," he said

"I'm awake," she said. "Come on in."

He went in. The TV was playing. He turned it off.

"No," he said. "I mean really wake up." She looked at him without comprehension, so he snapped his fingers and shouted, "Wake up! The masters command that you wake up!"

"Are you off your rocker, George?" she asked suspiciously. "You sure are acting funny." He slapped her face. "Cut that out!" she cried, "What the hell are you up to anyway?"

"Nothing," said George, defeated. "I was just kidding around."

"Slapping my face wasn't just kidding around!" she cried.

There was a knock at the door.

George opened it.

It was one of the aliens.

"Can't you keep the noise down to a dull roar?" it said.

The eyes and reptilian flesh faded a little and George saw the flickering image of a fat middle-aged man in shirtsleeves. It was still a man when George slashed its throat with the eating knife, but it was an alien before it hit the floor. He dragged it into the apartment and kicked the door shut. "What do you see there?" he asked Lil, pointing to the many-eyed snake thing on the floor.

"Mister...Mister Coney," she whispered, her eyes wide with horror. "You...just killed him, like it was nothing at all."

"Don't scream," warned George, advancing on her.

"I won't George. I swear I won't, only please, for the love of God, put down that knife." She backed away until she had her shoulder blades pressed to the wall.

George saw that it was no use.

"I'm going to tie you up," said George. "First tell me which room Mister Coney lived in."

"The first door on your left as you go toward the stairs," she said. "Georgie...Georgie. Don't torture me. If you're going to kill me, do it clean. Please, Georgie, please."

He tied her up with bed sheets and gagged her, then searched the body of the Fascinator. There was another one of the little radios that talked a foreign language, another set of eating utensils, and nothing else.

George went next door.

When he knocked, one of the snake-things answered, "Who is it?"

"Friend of Mister Coney. I wanna see him," said George.

"He went out for a second, but he'll be right back." The door opened a crack, and four yellow eyes peeped out. "You wanna come in and wait?"

"Okay," said George, not looking at the eyes.

"You alone here?" he asked as it closed the door, its back to George.

"Yeah, why?"

He slit its throat from behind, then searched the apartment.

He found human bones and skulls, a half-eaten hand.

He found tanks with huge fat slugs floating in them.

"The children," he thought, and killed them all.

There were guns too, of a sort he had never seen before. He discharged one by accident, but fortunately it was noiseless. It seemed to fire little poisoned darts.

He pocketed the gun and as many boxes of darts he could and went back to Lil's place. When she saw him she writhed in helpless terror.

"Relax, honey" he said, opening her purse, "I just want to borrow your car keys.

"He took the keys and went downstairs to the street.

Her car was still parked in the same general area in which she always parked it. He recognized it by the dent in the right fender. He got in, started it, and began driving aimlessly. He drove for hours, thinking--desperately searching for some way out. He turned on the car radio to see if he could get some music, but there was nothing but news and it was all about him, George Nada, the homicidal maniac. The announcer was one of the masters, but he sounded a little scared. Why should he be? What could one man do?

George wasn't surprised when he saw the road block, and he turned off on a side street before he reached it. No little trip to the country for you, Georgie boy, he thought to himself.

They had just discovered what he had done back at Lil's place, so they would probably be looking for Lil's car. He parked it in an alley and took the subway. There were no aliens on the subway, for some reason. Maybe they were too good for such things, or maybe it was just because it was so late at night.

When one finally did get on, George got off.

He went up to the street and went into a bar. One of the Fascinators was on the TV, saying over and over again, "We are your friends. We are your friends. We are your friends." The stupid lizard sounded scared. Why? What could one man do against all of them?

George ordered a beer, then it suddenly struck him that the Fascinator on the TV no longer seemed to have any power over him. He looked at it again and thought, "It has to believe it can master me to do it. The slightest hint of fear on its part and the power to hypnotize is lost." They flashed George's picture on the TV screen and George retreated to the phone booth. He called his control, the Chief of Police.

"Hello, Robinson?" he asked.

"Speaking."

"This is George Nada. I've figured out how to wake people up."

"What? George, hang on. Where are you?" Robinson sounded almost hysterical.

He hung up and paid and left the bar. They would probably trace his call.

He caught another subway and went downtown.

It was dawn when he entered the building housing the biggest of the city's TV studios. He consulted the building director and then went up in the elevator. The cop in front of the studio recognized him. "Why, you're Nada!" he gasped.

George didn't like to shoot him with the poison dart gun, but he had to.

He had to kill several more before he got into the studio itself, including all the engineers on duty. There were a lot of police sirens outside, excited shouts, and running footsteps on the stairs. The alien was sitting before the TV camera saying, "We are your friends. We are your friends," and didn't see George come in. When George shot him with the needle gun he simply stopped in mid-sentence and sat there, dead. George stood near him and said, imitating the alien croak, "Wake up. Wake up. See us as we are and kill us!"

It was George's voice the city heard that morning, but it was the Fascinator's image, and the city did awake for the very first time and the war began.

George did not live to see the victory that finally came. He died of a heart attack at exactly eight o'clock.

Today's Date in Apocalypse History

2012-01-07T13:23:00.000-08:00

A new project I've put MUCH more effort into than I had anticipated.

Take a look:
apocalypsehistory.blogspot.com

I like this guy's comment.

2011-10-31T07:48:00.000-07:00

...on simulating brains electronically.

That Goddamned Dog!

2011-08-27T11:52:00.000-07:00

Cop and a Half: An Appraisal

2011-06-24T21:54:00.000-07:00

This 1993 Burt Reynolds paycheck was developed by Ron Howard and Brian Glazer of Imagine Entertainment, with their Night Shift collaborator Henry Winkler helming a story by Arne Olson (according to the production notes, Olson conceived Cop and a Half in traffic while imagining what it would be like if the work of some police officers he was watching were done by children).

However, a good deal of the film's shape still seems to have been taken at Reynolds' hands. The location, Tampa, was selected at his urging (In Reynolds' autobiography My Life, published a year after Cop and a Half, he spoke of his desire to develop projects allowing him to live and work in his native Florida). And the story - about a paternal bond between a boy and a police officer - resonates with Reynolds' own childhood as the son of a chief of police.

Given these personal connections to the story, it's surprising how removed Reynolds' character, Nick McKenna, remains from it. A father/son dynamic feels both like the heart of this film, and also strangely absent. For one thing, we learn nothing of McKenna's personal life. Naturally he expresses a dislike of children early on, as required to establish the story's tension - but as a middle-aged man, has he ever been in a serious relationship with a woman, or considered being a father? If no, is there a special reason for it in his past? What was McKenna's relationship like with his own father? Cop and a Half is silent to these questions.

And consider the other side of this equation - the "half' - eight-year-old Devon Butler (performed by the child actor Norman D. Golden II, presently known as an aspiring hip-hop artist under the moniker Enormous). Devon is every bit the cypher Nick McKenna is. Raised by a long-working and often absent grandmother (noted communist Ruby Dee), we soon gather that Devon's parents are gone, but are never told why. Further, we have scant indication that this troubles him. Certainly, in retrospect, Devon's obsession with TV police procedurals might be seen as a longing for a father figure. But this isn't particularly obvious up front. When Devon briefly goes missing 2/3 of the way through the film, and an aggrieved Nick shouts at him for having sneaked out to buy them donuts, Devon blurts, "You're not being a very good father!" This falls like a thunderbolt, without antecedent.

A subplot is played lightly in which two thugs at Devon's school, both very much older and larger than he, extort money from him daily. He shows that despite being powerless against them, he isn't afraid, making several sarcastic quips - to which the thugs respond by turning him head over heels and dunking him in a toilet bowl. None of this seems to bother Devon as much as one would expect. Neither does the fact that he witnesses a murder, performed by a drug kingpin who receives cocaine shipments concealed in tubas and french horns when not moonlighting as a doo-wop singer.

Devon has a lot of pluck and independence- always ready with a wisecrack or an improbably precocious observation - to such a degree that his need of a father can also feel absent. When Devon refuses over several hours of interrogation to share information about the murder (including his knowledge of the killers' first names and license plate number) until he is allowed to shadow McKenna for a shift, the boy simply comes across as a petulant, Miami-Vice-obsessed brat, not a lonely child in need of a dad. Later, when Devon's life is directly threatened by the doo-wop singer, and he is offered no police protection beyond moving into Burt Reynolds' apartment, he seems to treat the situation as little more than a sleepover.

None of this is to say there aren't highlights along the way. McKenna entertainingly manhandles offenders without thought of repercussion (after driving through several private homes' wooden fences, he breaks a man's nose in front of a crowd, then leashes him with handcuffs to the back of his car to force him to run behind his bumper to the police station). In another scene, when Devon grabs a police car microphone to bark out some cop-speak, and Nick angrily switches off the amplifier, the boy folds his arms across his chest and sighs, "You give me no joy." It was an unimportant moment, but it caused this viewer to laugh out loud.

There are also moments of surrealism. A portion of the second act is taken up looking for a suspect named "Bobo". One false Bobo is an experimental artist who, in a scene foreshadowing The Big Lebowski of four years later, trusses himself to the ceiling and swings across his loft in a suit coated in blue paint to imprint a canvas. Even more improbable is the artist's incuriousness about being visited unannounced by two police officers, one of whom is an eight year old boy.

A second false Bobo is a man experiencing a domestic dispute with a character who, according to the credits, is named "Mrs. Bobo". Because Bobo had forgotten their anniversary, Mrs. Bobo is throwing plates at him in the street through her window when Nick and Devon arrive. It is Devon who is able to defuse the situation, somehow letting himself into the apartment and approaching the distraught woman to dispense wise relationship advice.

A long bar-brawl scene may possibly be the film's silliest. But its minor climax, in which a playground yard of schoolchildren recreates the "I am Spartacus!" scene from Stanley Kubrick's film for a pair of gangsters searching for Devon - then pelts the fleeing criminals with Twinkies - is also very silly.

But even as the limits of length and patience impinge upon this appraisal, nothing has yet been said of the long warehouse fight, the lengthy motorboat chase scene, the fact that Reynolds' character is shot, or the vexing fact that the entire film concludes on a scene of Nick rowing Devon and his grandmother across a lake in the park. No mention has been made of the surprising absence of race as an issue in the film - or of the internal dynamic driving this unlikely group of doo-wop-devoted mobsters.

Just one last observation will be made, because it does seem telling: namely, one notices Mr. Reynolds doing an unaccustomed amount of irate shouting in this film, whereas his laugh - one of the actor's greatest trademarks - is not heard in it. The show brings us many amusements and unlikely scenarios along its way, but like Devon himself commented, there seems to be little joy.

Finally, the song played over the credits, Joey Lawrence's "Nothing My Love Can't Fix" has lyrics bearing no identifiable connection whatsoever to the storyline. But as a piece of music it was just awful enough that this viewer found it quite entertaining to listen to.

MVC #2: Subway

2011-04-30T14:43:00.000-07:00

MVC 1.1: Technical Difficulties

2011-04-25T09:59:00.000-07:00

MVC #1: Art History

2011-04-13T11:31:00.000-07:00

Starting off by running late! But this is my beta period, man. I am working out kinks.

MVC #0: Sea Cucumber

2011-04-04T20:47:00.000-07:00

Monovlogcast is a new project of mine to post one illustrated - maybe even semianimated - film per week. This first is the video I made to Ariela Morgenstern's alt-rock shanty Sea Cucumber:

A new video will be posted here each Monday for... at least the next fifty Mondays.

Note: Of course this will probably not happen. Hell, if you scroll to the next post you'll see this blog hadn't been touched for a year and a half before today.

My Pal Foot Foot

2009-01-14T11:02:00.000-08:00

This is some pretty good stuff:

RIP Jerry Reed

2008-09-08T10:04:00.000-07:00

He died of emphysema one week ago today. It was a few days afterward when I first heard the news - Hurricane Gustav and the RNC were temporarily keeping more important stories like this one at bay - but I find several days later that I am often pausing in my thoughts to mourn the passing of the Snowman.

I just had a great idea.

2008-08-20T12:41:00.000-07:00

Art education isn't all that it could be in America. And Americans love sitting in their cars, yes? So what we need - this is going to be a big moneymaker - are drive-through art museums.

I have prepared a terribly photoshopped (MS paint, actually) rendition:

This idea is great. Each artwork can be attached to a low-radius radio transmitter so that as you idle beside it, you can tune in to 88.1FM (say) and hear a pleasant description of the work's aesthetic significance and history.

In line with the automotive theme, each painting will be outfitted with a windshield wiper and cleaning-fluid jet for periodic washing away of exhaust buildup.

The best video clip in the history of video clips

2008-05-12T16:52:00.000-07:00

A new pointless link

2008-05-11T22:06:00.000-07:00

I received some words of concern from my father about my last post, which contained a link to a page from the website of the death-metal band Slayer. The band has made babywear available for sale on the page I linked to. Needless to say, I'd simply thought this seemed silly. But dad felt people might not understand what I was getting at: after all, on the linked page the name SLAYER is in great prominence, and the header "babywear" is miniscule.

So I thought I would offer this link instead, which I trust everyone will find more wholesome and patriotic.

My Monster

2007-04-18T21:31:00.000-07:00

A couple months back I put together this demo video for the song "Sickness" by my pal Mike Shockey's band My Monster:

I had a hell of a time getting a version online without shredding the image quality. This version's - nyeagh, it's adequate. But I was going for a very precise visual feel.

See, my original thought was to create a rotoscope-animated video of "Sickness". I tested the Photoshop effects in the clip above as an alternative to that. Rotoscoping is pretty laborious, you know: each minute of A Scanner Darkly (for instance) took 500 animator-hours to trace and color. At that rate, a 4-minute music video would take a guy a 40-hour-a-week year to finish.

This (greatly-crappier-than-A-Scanner-Darkly) rotoscope test, depicting Michael Shockey as a rockstar, took me one long night to make:

Here's a flashy version of the same test.

So - there are some interesting possibilities here....

Parting thought: if a full "Sickness" video were made - and it's a great song, by the way, deserving of the effort - I think a combination of the two styles may work best (Photoshopping + some rotoscoping). You can catch a hint of that in this clip, which shows original video with overlaid tracing and coloring.

PDO

2007-04-17T03:42:00.000-07:00

Pickle's Day Out, yo.

Speaking of YouTube and the word "pickle", I don't mind admitting that this video scared the living hell out of me. ...Yet here I am, days later, still thinking about the thing. You ought to give it a look.

New Orleans, June 2006

2007-04-14T09:13:00.000-07:00

I made a trip homeways last summer, and while down visiting a friend in Atlanta (hi Eric), I decided to make a side trip to New Orleans. For those of you not in the know, New Orleans is not close to Atlanta. But my thinking was that (1) travel and adventuring were paramount, and (2) I needed to stick the damn car rental people for as many miles as possible, since they were certainly sticking me for all the insurance-fee dollars they could.

East bound and down, baby.

Hence - a trip to the French Quarter to get a beer. This took some ungodly amount of time, 12 hours one way or something. No big deal if you pull off into the rest stops when you can't stand it anymore and get an hour's sleep here or there. And I would do the whole thing again in a heartbeat. My single regret, obviously, is that I only stayed in New Orleans for about three hours: I needed to get back up to Louisville to my dad's house....

--Well, my other regret was that I had no camera, leading me to pick up a disposable in a truck stop. Ran me about $30 when you add in the processing costs. And it turns out that available light at 5am in the French Quarter gets you precisely nothing on film. Even if you are standing beneath a lamppost.

But the sun was up enough to catch this shot out of my passenger window on the way out of town. I was quite struck by the fact that this apartment complex, right off the side of I-10, still said "HELP" on the roof about nine months after Katrina:

I know. But you really can sort of barely see it if you click on the picture to zoom in.

Here's a shot of a strip mall that I pulled off the freeway to investigate. The front had essentially been torn away from the entire building, and the contents of all the stores had been bulldozed into a vast pile in the middle of the parking lot. You didn't have to look hard for this kind of thing. There were miles and miles of it right off the side of the freeway - let alone what you'd find if you actually ventured further south into an area like the Ninth Ward.

Pictures of Andersonville National Historical Site in a minute....

Waste of time

2007-04-07T00:11:00.000-07:00

Well sure, working on this clip helped smooth over my nascent knowledge of Premiere Elephants (Elements). Which isn't such a waste of time.

But I question the value of Peeps as subject matter.

St. Stupid's Day Parade 2007

2007-04-01T14:54:00.000-07:00

It was a fine afternoon today as a decently-sized crowd (a couple/few hundred) gathered at the foot of the Transamerica Building:

Our first stop as we headed up Columbus into North Beach was at the San Francisco Scientology headquarters, where we issued a few homages (taunts). For example: "Give me an L!" ("L!") "Give me a Ron!" ("Ron!") "Give me a Hubbard!" ("Hubbard!") "What's that spell?" ("Bullshit!")

The view from the head of the parade, looking backward up Columbus. Imagine drums, brass, and hundreds of exuberant voices calling out, "No more chanting! No more chanting!" etc.:

Frank Chu, famed bearer of the "12 Galaxies" sign, regales the St. Stupid Day celebrants as they gather in Washington Square Park with an address which can only be described as - yes, stupid. I couldn't make out much of what Frank was saying, but it seemed to regard his personal frustration at not receiving enough coverage on Fox News:

Then Dr. Hal Robbins, of Church-of-Subgenius fame, took the stage to deliver a few inspiring words in praise of stupidity ("Ignorance is a state of not knowing. Stupidity is a state of never being able to know. And I know that we all know that none of us can know." Or something like that).

"Do not look upon one another on this day and say, 'I am stupider than you,' or, 'I am dressed much more stupidly than you are.' No, by merely coming here today we have each of us shown beyond any doubt that we are all stupid." (--This was a relief, since I'd felt sorely underdressed for the occasion.)

Dr. Robbins' best line: when he vouchsafed the importance for us all of achieving, "a work-free drugspace."

In all: stupid. Too bad next year it falls on a frigging Tuesday.

Poor Mechanical Skills

2007-03-31T01:14:00.000-07:00

Here I am at age 10 on Chicago's "Bozo Show" (widely syndicated through the midwest at the time on cable). The challenge: to toss ping-pong balls into a series of ever-further buckets. The verdict: I suck.

Points to note while watching the video - [1] how bizarrely closely I stand behind the girl (hey, I was nervous, anxious, something.); and, [2] my awkward lunge to grab my prizes and get the hell off the stage the nanosecond after I miss bucket #4.

Oops, I gave away the ending.

Post-Scriptum: This video has been pulled from YouTube as a result of all those people out there posting Colbert-Show clips. So watch it QT instead.

"Turkey in the Straw" (a poultry theme emerges?)

2007-03-23T02:50:00.000-07:00

This is my Piano 1 midterm, performed last week for the benefit of my fellow students at the City College of San Francisco.

"Performed", I should say.

The final next month will comprise the playing of two songs, one of them Fur Elise. I've got a pretty damn long way to go (and a short time to get there).

Hey, this ding-dang blog software doesn't let you put in umlauts.

--Für Elise. There you go. It works if you paste it in from Word.

Meow! Cluck!

2007-03-23T02:38:00.000-07:00

Since I'm busy larding up this blog with links to my personal nonsense, this sure is pointless. So's this, albeit a bit less so.

Santarchy

2007-03-23T02:30:00.000-07:00

Pictures from last December's San Francisco Santarchy in Fisherman's Wharf....

TEST

2007-03-23T02:20:00.000-07:00

Hi. As the header indicates, this is a test.