Archive
George Lucas Vs. The Laser
In the near future, will we walk around projecting Obi Wan holograms out of our smartphones? How long will it take for a smartphone or hand-held device to shoot out a lightsaber? And the ever-pressing question: will George Lucas sue you?
Further proving that not only does life imitate art but that technology imitates both, the company Wicked Lasers released their Spyder III Pro Arctic laser last year, with a design that looks curiously similar to the lightsabers in Star Wars. So similar, in fact, that George Lucas threatened to sue the company if they didn’t cease and desist.
The Spyder III laser–which can be used for a wide range of utilities, including presentations, construction work, surgical operations, bar code scanners and DVD players—pumps out an entire watt of energy and is the first consumer laser to have four modes of operation. If used incorrectly, it can also be potentially hazardous (possibly causing blindness if shined into the retina), which caused the manufacturer to release a series of product modifications.
The modifications haven’t stopped the legendary Star Wars guru from threatening to take Wicked Lasers to court if it doesn’t change the design. While the laser is being marketed to industrial, military, and research agencies, there is certainly nothing to guarantee that a zealous Jedi fanatic won’t shell out the $200 on the price tag in order to be able to walk into Starbucks looking like Count Dooku (even though Dooku is a Sith lord).
And therein lies the danger. So far, the laser has not been responsible for any major burn injuries, blindness or radiation exposure claims. But who’s to say Lucas and his people won’t manufacture one in order to kill off the lightsaber imitator?
Historically, Lucas has been spiteful, sometimes in surprising, accidentally progressive ways, and unabashed about protecting his Star Wars brand from copyright infringement. But to the point where he would sue a laser company over its “hilt” designs? Lucas may just have to accept that handheld devices and contemporary gadgets could bear striking similarities to movie weapons.
In our mashup society it’s becoming more and more popular to blend different aspects of pop culture—copyright monsters like LucasFilms, Google and Disney may just have to CHILL out and make room for a little Fair Use. At least when it comes to lasers and pirates.
An Organic Search Engine and A Post-Human Magnate
My forthcoming e-book, which I am currently fundraising for with an IndieGoGo campaign, will feature four sci-fi stories, each with a strange little twist. Below are new summaries for two of the stories.
future organic search engine for machines
In “AutoPhil” the main character, Phil, is a financially desperate human looking for work a few days into the Singularity. He accepts an ominous job archiving human minds for a superior artilect named Rasputin.
Beyond just introducing the idea of a biologically organic search engine (the human mind, which, in this fictional universe, is still evolving) used by machines in order to optimize their marketing tactics, this story poses the question of how post-Singularity entities will compete with each other economically. The way I depict it, things are more cutthroat than ever, with the entire human noosphere open to horrifying data mining tactics.
In my novella “Someday This Will All Be Yours” I trace the life and times of Dr. Jim Jacoba, a biotechnology scientist turned post-human magnate, who, in his quest to achieve an indefinite lifespan, unwittingly assists in the machine takeover, all the while losing his family to death and betrayal.
In this story, I depict the Singularity as the new Manifest Destiny, a spaceward expansion based on privatizing and patenting regions of the solar system in order to mine for computronium. As AI artilects merge, acquire one another, and step on each other to suckle off the all-powerful Dyson Spheres being constructed around the Earth, humans struggle to maintain relevance.
Tupac’s Using Instagram?
At first I didn’t understand. Everyone kept talking about Tupac and something ‘gram. I thought they were saying Tupac’s using Instagram. But that didn’t make sense. How can you use social media if you’re dead?
Then I realized they were referring to the hologram of the deceased rapper Tupac Shakur displayed alongside Snoop Dog at this year’s Coachella music festival. By now virtually everyone’s heard of this and it’s spreading like a nerdcore meme wildfire across the Internet. And rightly so. It’s pretty darn neat. Some would say mind-blowing. I would say ‘just the beginning.’
Already people are calling out their lists of dead celebrities who they’d like to see resurrected by the new hologram technology. Sinatra. Elvis. Mozart. John Candy….? The Beatles sons’ may not be needed to reanimate the Fab Four anymore—we’ve got holograms!
What most people aren’t quite connecting the dots on yet is the full implication of what we’ve seen. The incredible ease with which groundbreaking technological innovations—Watson, exoplanet detection, augmented reality, nanotechnology, etc—are now streaming into our daily lives may blind us from seeing that the Tupac hologram represents more than just the ability to project the digital likeness of someone for entertainment purposes. It represents the ability of technology to essentially recreate someone.
The company that created the Tupac hologram, the Digital Domain Media Group, did so by piecing together video recordings of Tupac performing during his life. Advanced computer graphics were used to reanimate not only his mannerisms, movements, and voice but smaller details like jewelry and tattoos.
Prominent transhuman scholars and Singularitarians, such as Ray Kurzweil, maintain that a vastly more complex form of simulation will be possible in the future, in which not only our likeness but our subjective existence will be able to be resurrected. This would entail uploading our minds onto software and instantiating them onto an entirely non-biological substrate. Once our physical bodies die our minds would then be projected into a virtual universe, which by then will probably be the village square of choice. In this sense, I guess I’ve answered my initial question of how a dead person could use social media.
We may look back on this year’s Coachella as more than just the birth of a mainstream consumer love affair with holograms. This could go down as an oddly pop culture-friendly watershed moment in transhumanism.
HELLHOUSE
click on picture for teaser trailer
Most people don’t openly profess an interest in serial killers or the subject of murder, as these topics are considered morbid and untoward. But the 24 hour news cycle has it’s own sardonic obsession with brutality, and you can see evidence of this every night on the local news and CNN. For months at a time, people crowd around their television sets, listening with bated breath for the salient details of a buried baby or a raped teenager. But we are not obsessed with violence and terror. I repeat, we are NOT obsessed with violence and terror!
But for those of us who do secretly wonder about the final thoughts of a tortured soul, or the sounds a serial killer makes when no one else is around, have I got a film for you! My film, HELLHOUSE, which I am co-writing/directing with my friend and fellow horror movie fanatic, Jared Salas. We have launched a KICKSTARTER campaign for our movie and are expecting to begin shooting principal photography in spring.
HELLHOUSE is about a financially desperate couple, Collin and Aria, who decide to start robbing houses in order to pay their bills….they pick the wrong house. What they find inside will keep law enforcement officers and scientists baffled for years to come, and hopefully moviegoers too!
Right now we need help funding this movie. We’re not asking for much and the money we do get will be used for camera equipment, lenses, and for the creation of a haunting prosthetic mask for the film’s antagonist. Anyone out there who wants to support an independent avante garde horror film in the vein of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Rosemary’s Baby, The House of the Devil, and Quarantine is encouraged to visit our KICKSTARTER page, watch the teaser trailer and get on board the HELLHOUSE production!
Future Movie Review of a movie called Future Dead
Every once in a while a film comes along that is so ground-breaking, so cinematically revolutionary, so awe-inspiringly vital that all you can do is sit back, take a deep breath, and say “wow.” The Future Dead is not one of those films. Despite the fever pitch fanfare and sociological hysteria accompanying the release of the first artificial intelligence-directed feature film, the payload delivered was about as enticing as a sack of mealy apples. If this is the kind of cinema we have to look forward to with the arrival of the Singularity, voices calling for technological relinquishment may have cause to turn up the volume.
The story starts appealingly enough—Sarah Plume (played by a ravishing Janet Ashara), awakens in only her panties and a bra to the sound of a siren echoing through the streets of suburban Chicago. She will come to learn that a secret government project has turned a chunk of the human population into red-eyed brain-hungry derelicts. The president has declared martial law and is evacuating the citizens to an underground facility. It is here she meets intrepid molecular biologist Reese Ryans (Dale Reinhart), who believes the entire situation was actually caused on purpose in order to weed out the weaker genes in the human blood-pool. This idea of evolution-by-zombie-uprising is perhaps the one resonant note in an otherwise quacking duck of a script.
Where Future Dead fails as a horror film—or even as an utterance of creative expression—is it’s auto-populated cache of characters. Even Ashara seems stale and awkward in her role as heroine-turned-investigator. We won’t even address the love scene between Ashara and Reinhart, which was about as steamy as a donkey in a sauna. In his attempt to create compassion for the side characters, director Art 5 seems to have gone embarrassingly overboard. Case in point, the sequence in which Sarah must rescue a room full of blind, handicapped children seems excruciatingly desperate, and not in a way that is beneficial to the narrative. Blind or handicapped alone for one kid would have been enough to build dramatic tension. Both for a room-full of kids is just funny. Which is not to say I laughed. The only time I even cracked a smile during this film (even though there are numerous attempts at lowest common denominator gallows humor) was when one of the 3D holographic zombies stumbled a little too close to an elderly woman in the front row and she swung her purse irritably into the light.
In perhaps Art 5’s only overt reference to the heritage of advanced technologies predicating the film’s release, Janet Ashara’s character is seen wielding a virtual reality cypher that allows her to lead the blind (literally) in a daring escape from the horde of post-humans. There’s little else to imply that this film was helmed by a non-human entity, which is perhaps a call for both shame and a joy to humankind and artificial intelligence alike.
If you believe the industry gossip rags one of the early conflicts during pre-production of the film centered around whether Art 5 should inhabit an android body or simply reside in studio mainframe, issuing directives through his assistants and producers. Executives opted for the latter, and it is easy to see how the actors’ inability to interact with their director played into a general atmosphere of confusion and disconnect on the set. To make matters worse, all reports point to Art 5 losing the faith of his crew early in the production.
With Hollywood gripped by paranoia over “the new workforce”, the conversation over humanity’s dying monopoly over creative industries may be overhead by more than a view ticketholders leaving the theater after Future’s credits roll. Now it’s not only digital doubles threatening to fleece jobs from the once recession-proof entertainment industry, but powerfully trained artilects with the very real ability to replace Hollywood’s writers and directors too. We’ll need more than an uncanny valley to stop this uprising, we’re going to need an impossible canyon.
While Art 5 may have attempted to tap into the human fear of reanimating the dead, he may have unwittingly tapped into a much bigger fear. Some critics have said he embraced that fear and that the movie itself can be read as a satire, with a pro-sentient rights agenda built in. Unfortunately, if there was an agenda here it was buried under a million feet of bad film and a production budget equaling some countries GDP. Though the film saved money by using nanotechnology to reconfigure the sets, the final price tag (upwards to a billion dollars by some tallies) doesn’t seem to mash well with the Sentient Filmmakers Union’s assertion just last week that artificial intelligence will restore financial parity to America in a time of economic hardship.
Tall order for a horror movie marketed to the already frightened. But with so much of the film’s box office take supplied by moviegoers who are simply too scared to not see it (lest they offend their AI boss or neighbor), the world’s first feature film written and directed by artificial intelligence is set to make a killing.
This reviewer finds the tongue-in-cheek cuteness of the whole thing a little hackneyed for an event billed as the most significant cinematic movement in history. In this age of exponential irony (when futurist Ray Kurzweil can die just hours before the invention of mind uploading), it seems worth noting that perhaps we should feel uncomfortable with the idea of humans assisting machines on a movie set.
The day a computer sent a human on a mail run was the day irony passed from this earth and was reborn—reanimated, so to speak, from the dead.
-Jake Anderson
The Future of Marketing, part two: Web 3.0
Cover via Amazon
The public sphere, our little clown’s autopsy. With marketers so ravenous to calibrate our consumption patterns they actually embed themselves among us– donning tattoos and piercings, or whatever styles their subjects embody– and document our lifestyles. They compile their findings into power-point presentations and sell them to companies that want to tap into consumer spending habits. This relatively new form of guerilla marketing, called “cool hunting”, often targets the youth demographic (whose annual spending is well over $100 billion). It is either an innovative method by which to conduct market research or an impediment to the organic evolution of culture—it depends on who you talk to.
After first reading about cool hunting in Naomi Klein’s No Logo years ago during my intensely liberal Santa Cruz education (full disclosure), I began sending my resume to some of these firms in the hope that they would unwittingly afford a Gonzo-style cynic an inside look at their methods. Only two of them took the bait. A Los Angeles based cool hunting company called Look-Look paid me $150 to photograph examples of green-washing and experiential retail. Another company, The Intelligence Group, supplied me with a real gem: sample pages of The Cassandra Report, their tri-monthly analysis of Gen X/Gen Y lifestyle trends which companies like Verizon, Microsoft, MTV and dozens more subscribe to at the annual cost of $35,000-$50,000.
One of the trends featured in that issue is something called HyperSpace. According to the Cassandra Report: “Everyday objects will become computer interfaces – new opportunities for marketers and brands to embed advertisements and fully understand consumer preferences.” This concept deposits social networking into the real world. People with Internet-ready cell phones will be able to access on-line information about objects and locations in their physical environments by entering codes found there, or by simply scanning them with their phones. Users of this network will be able to tag these objects and locations—clicking on them as if hyperlinks, essentially—and share their latest finds (such as a great new diner!) with friends and people prowling for recommendations.
Pioneering entities, such as Yellow Card, Socialight, and Semapedia.org, are promoting what they consider to be functionalities of Web 3.0. Semapedia.org is a non-profit that wants to “connect the virtual and physical world” by providing cell-phone readable 2D barcodes that people can use to link to wikipedia.org. These barcodes, and “triggers” like them, are already common in Japan and parts of Europe. According to Socialight Co-founder Dan Melinger, HyperSpace represents a “new paradigm for communication, [utilizing] asynchroyonous place-based messaging.” Melinger stresses that the application is opt-in only, and that although the technology will allow mobile carriers to track users’ physical locations down to within a few blocks (using GPS-like systems), guidelines are in place to ensure that their information is kept private.
Will linking objects and locations in our physical environment to on-line networks help to someday purge the public sphere of its marketing mayhem? A profusion of small “triggers” and symbols replacing traditional advertisements could certainly make our Main Streets less audio-visually grotesque. But if the triggers themselves are gateways to brand marketing platforms, anything and everything we see could be imbued with commercial transmissions (similar to how we oblige to watching short ads at the beginning of CNN videos).
Make no mistake, companies will be closely monitoring whether or not we elect to receive these transmissions: Hyperspace will allow marketers to track our clicks in the real world the same way they currently track our links on the Internet. This will forever transform the public sphere. Instead of the old days of navigating through public spaces that contain discrete advertisements, denizens of the Web 3.0 era will live in Web-encoded corporate environments.
The clown’s autopsy will move inside of our heads.
The Future of Marketing, Part One: Audio Spotlighting
Image via Wikipedia
After watching a movie a couple years ago (can’t remember which one, probably Air Bud 2) I was jiving down the sidewalk in rhythm to the Commodores’ Machine Gun (the hip-grinder from Boogie Nights) when I looked up and saw a monolithic face rushing toward me out of the sky. It was a holographic billboard advertisement for the new A&E series Paranormal State. When I got home I looked it up and read about their even more audacious advertising scheme in New York.
A&E was also promoting their new series by utilizing a technology called “audio spotlighting”. In NYC, on Prince Street, as people walked by a billboard for the show, a voice in their heads whispered, “It’s not your imagination. Who is that? Who’s there?”
Traditionally used by libraries and museums, audio spotlighting transmits beams of sound onto specific targets the same way a light bulb projects rays of light. While it seems like the voice is speaking directly in your mind, it is actually just reverberating outside your skull. Holosonics President and founder Joe Pompei says the technology will help cut down on excessive noise in crowded city areas like Time Square. The technology has attracted criticism from groups like the Center for Cognitive Liberty & Ethics (cognitiveliberty.org), who charge the technology violates the individual’s right “to have decision-making authority over matters affecting his or her mind.”
I spoke with Pompei about whether his audio spotlighting technology, when used in marketing campaigns, qualifies as subliminal advertising. He dismissed this as propaganda disseminated by his detractors, or the “tin-foil hat paranoids”. Anyone who actually understands the technology, he says, knows there is nothing malicious going on. The debate is likely just the opening salvo for a new civil rights battle over mental privacy. The CCLE also points out “neuro-marketing” organizations like the BrightHouse Institute in Atlanta as violating mental privacy. BrightHouse uses MRI scanning to decode patterns in people’s thought processes and devise custom-tailored advertising schemes.
this is your brain on advertising
If traditional advertisements compete through noise and glare to get our attention, will replacing them with quieter, more surreptitious advertisements (such as ones beamed into our heads) make the public sphere less of a madhouse? Or are we simply making it easier for marketers to reach us?
What’s to stop a company or government agency from shining an audio spotlight on your front lawn, or your bedroom window, or the driver’s side door of your car?
Instead of having to trash those annoying flyers on your windshield in the morning you may find yourself humming loudly to drown out the voices in your head.
RISK 2210 AD: Violent Rhetoric, Prosumer War Crimes in Space
Risk map, land and water territories
Last weekend the members of my absurdist friendship quorum (a motley crew of jaded but brilliant blue-collar art-house left-wingers hailing from San Francisco and Los Angeles) met again for our ceremonial Risk 2210 AD clash. It’s quite possible your only exposure to Risk is an episode of Seinfeld in which Kramer declares that “the Ukraine is weak.” FYI, that was old, classic Risk they were playing. Still fun, but a far cry from the vastly more complex and exciting Risk 2210 AD, which won the Origins Award for Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Board Game of 2001.
For fear of inciting self-destructive thoughts in the minds of the reader, I will not attempt to explain the rules of the game except to simply state that the newer game involves colonizing water territories and the moon, as well as wielding nuclear weapons and diplomats. Additionally, over the years my friend Travis has made several addendums to the game: most notably, a MAD (mutually assured destruction) card and a separate continental shelf for Antarctica, as well as a corresponding Global Warming Card that, if played, overturns all MOD’s (machine soldiers), space stations, and commanders positioned there.
some of Travis' original Risk cards including Emporer Palpatine's "I Will Make It Legal"
It would be impossible to overstate the significance of RISK 2210 AD to my friends and I. If you can imagine combining a fun game, a ruthless battle of wits, and a hallowed religious rite into a drunken six hour mind-fuck, you’re close to grasping how dear it is to our hearts. It almost always results in one or more players verbally abusing each other. Again, precious.
Our legacy of Risk is riddled with instances of broken alliances and compromised childhood friendships. My friend Matt claims my friend Jason’s soul is rotten to the core because once Jason violated a non-aggression pact at a crucial territorial border. Jason disavows this, claiming that, on the contrary, it is he who has been the victim of multiple instances of corrupt gameplay. He frequently rails against AFQ (Absurdist Friendship Quorum) member Pat for an alleged history of “illogical attacks that make no sense” in a wider strategic sense except to screw Jason over (“ream”) and remove him from the game.
Jason, victim of Risk "blood libel", and Matt
Speaking of illogical attacks, Jason once tried to strangle someone during a game of Risk. The end result was Jason getting beat up. The guy he tried to strangle went on to serve as a sharp-shooter in the second Iraq war. Huge planet, small world.
This round took place at a ski resort in Salt Lake City. After we had lassoed in several cases of beer, vis-a vi grappling hooks, unemployment insurance and student loans, we took our seats at the table—it was time to establish our initial positions on the board. This is one of the most exciting parts of the game, because you get your first overview of where some of the great battles may occur, as well as fairly reliable hints about who might be planning to station themselves on the moon. You also get a chance to look deeply into the grinning faces of your fellow Mancationers and try to sniff out what their strategy may be. You witness, first hand, the transformation from sanity to insanity, from man to animal.
Machinations of Travis
My friend Chris is soft-spoken and remarkably laid back, but get the boy in front of a Risk board and he turns into blood-thirsty monster. Travis, who has internalized the rules of the game like clergymen embrace the Bible, gleams with tactical ingenuity while he plays. You always get the feeling he’s working toward the unfolding of some epic master plan that inherently entails your destruction. Matt is much the same; he often starts off the game controlling a small continent, then uses water colonies to quietly posture himself for larger power plays. Jason is the eternal victim. Even when he’s not being triple-teamed and screwed over—which is most of the time—he argues and whines about the decade-long conspiracy against him. If you hear a high-pitched voice using five-syllable words to bitch about a lunar attack from two years earlier, it’s undoubtedly Jason’s.
Leap Year card
This time around, we played with some of Travis’ new cards: including Lunar Shift, High Tide, Mayan Calendar and Leap Year, which allow you to add or subtract years to the game; and Rigged Election, Under Tow, and others which allow you to change turn order. Pat had played a Scatter Bomb Moon card, and effectively wiped out half of Jason’s MODs. Jason, predictably, flipped out, throwing his iPhone across the room and accusing Pat of yet another “capricious and perennial injustice”.
Pat: "One love, Jason. Die!"
To add insult to injury, Pat played the card while declaring, “Just tryin’ to see what that’d be like.” A kind of ‘one love’ smirk on his face.
During our 4th game, I was terrified that a Global Warming card would be played, which would flip my arctic shelf like a tiddly-wink, and send my Earth-bound forces sliding into the icy sea—to freeze, drown, or be eaten by polar bears themselves starving from depleted seal populations—so I absconded to the moon.
Jason, who had attacked Matt and angered him so badly that he declared that his next five games would be devoted to making sure Jason finished last, realized he would soon be wiped from the surface of Luna-lita. He took on the pallor of a freshly snipped eunuch. “Oh my God…” he uttered. “Oh my God!”
“Beyyaaaaaaahhhhh!!!!” I shrieked, summoning the life force of Howard Dean with a whip of my forefinger. Realizing I would win my first game in several years I stood up and drove it home. “We’re going to CAL-I-FORNIA, and TEX-AS, and NEW YORK, SOUTH DA-KOTA, and OREGON, and MICHIGAN, and then we’re going to WASHINGTON DC and take back the White House—BEYYAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!”
And so I continue the ardous task of forging my independence on the harsh mistress that is the Moon: population 1.
-Jake Anderson
photo by draikinator
Braco: Eye Contact Champion/Spiritual Healer
On Sunday Alli and I went to a guru, a spiritual healer. We’d heard about him from a friend who swore the man was a conduit for universal Source energy, that to be in his presence was to enter a sacred contract with divinity. Naturally, I was a little skeptical, but also fascinated. Both the skepticism and fascination stemmed from the guru’s manner of healing: the gaze. Apparently the guy just came out, stood on a platform and stared. For this, the gazee was charged $8.
photo by dervishcandela
The healer’s name is Braco. He comes from Croatia and looks like a boyish hippy with beautiful locks of silvery hair sweeping down over his shoulders. He wasn’t always a spiritual guru. He started off skeptical of a healer named Ivica that his mother was going to. Braco accompanied his mother to a session and found himself completely transfixed and overwhelmed by admiration. He began to spend every day with Ivica, until Ivica drowned while the two were swimming in the ocean. His community demanded that Braco take over Ivica’s healing duties, so, reluctantly, he did. Now his God-given gift for transformational healing draws over 200,000 people a year. Thousands upon thousands of them claim miraculous recoveries and transformations have occurred in their lives since standing in Braco’s gaze.
We arrived at the Marriott in Woodland Hills eating breakfast burritos. Quickly bypassing the throngs of people and merchandise tables stacked with DVD’s and books, we bought our tickets and entered the crystal chandelier-decorated ballroom. A blond publicist with a cinematically cadenced voice told the healer’s backstory, adding–much to our chagrin–that at one point in his life Braco had actually escaped from a mental institution. My friend, who was volunteering for Braco’s slate of weekend staring contests, had left out this detail during his initial pitch. It’s not a deal closer, but definitely a game changer. You can wage as many Foucaldian critiques of institutional psychiatric evaluation as your heart desires, when the cook tells you he escaped from a mental institution you don’t eat the mystery meat.
photo by nothingstock
Then New Age flute music started playing and Braco came out, stood in front of the projection screen, on which they had shown some video clips, and commenced gazing. His head moved from left to right almost imperceptibly as he slowly swept his line of sight across the ballroom. This went on for about twenty minutes. My friend had predicted I would see an aura around him. Sure enough, I did start to see a kind of white force-field of energy outlining his head. But I also saw this outline on the people in front of me, who also happened to be backdropped by the white projection screen. Later, Alli explained to me that a white backdrop, combined with a spotlight, could easily produce an effect like that. Or, I was actually seeing their spiritual aura. I couldn’t see the force-field on anyone not standing in front of the projection screen though.
When the gazing was over, several people in the crowd raised their hands and testified to feeling the awesome powers of Braco’s gaze. One man said he felt “activated”, like he was flying through the air. He also said he had been there at the Marriott attending Braco gazings for three days, then started laughing maniacally. Another man stood up and gave a very earnest and touching testimony of a boy who had died of cancer recently. The boy had witnessed a Braco gazing and afterward had called forth all of his friends to his hospice in order to write them each a personal love letter before he died.
I can’t say I felt anything out of the ordinary. But the blond publicist did say that some people wouldn’t feel any energy directly but would rather act as vessels, carriers, disseminating the energy to others who come into contact with them over the following days, months and years. Like a virus of goodness.
When my friend had first told me about Braco, a couple months earlier, I happened to be staying at this house in Agoura Hills. I went down the street one day to get a bite to eat at the local diner, the Canyon Grill. There I saw a man that looked exactly like Braco, to a T, sitting with a woman who looked like the blond publicist. Braco had a tattoo on his arm and sat staring at the floor. At the time, my friend said it was a sign that Braco was already a part of my life, which kind of creeped me out. Now, having witnessed his gaze, I can say that my experience of him staring at the floor of the diner was the climax, retroactively attained through irony and gastrointestinal discomfort caused by a breakfast burrito.
I’m sure any number of crowd psychology studies, peppered with convergence theory, groupthink, noosphere, collective hysteria, and communal reinforcement, would help explain why so many people feel that their lives are transformed by a man staring at them for twenty minutes. Or, Braco could legitimately be a vessel for the resplendent energy flowing through the conjoined universal fibers of mind and matter. Or, he’s a bat-shit crazy con artist who drowned his mentor in the ocean in order to take over a potentially lucrative spiritual healing business. Or maybe both, “one of God’s own prototypes…too weird to live, too rare to die.” Though in this case, he was considered for mass production.
The only truly nebulous thing that happened to me during Braco’s gaze occurred about halfway through, when I looked to my left and saw a middle aged woman making direct eye contact with me. She sustained it for two full minutes, then slowly looked away. Thanks, Braco!
-Jake Anderson
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