Collected Essays

by Rucker, Rudy

  Everyone introduced themselves after we’d been eating and drinking for awhile at the Shape Culture luncheon. A heavy student with thick glasses says, “I am a graduate student and have not discovered anything yet.” He smiles and rubs his hands as vigorously as if he were washing them. “But I want to!”

  August 10, 1993. Dinner in Kyoto.

  We move on to Kyoto for a signing in a bookstore. The evening of the first day in Kyoto we have the best dinner of all. It’s raining due to what the papers called “Typhoon Number Seven.” On the way to the dinner, we see a haiku out the taxi window:

  In Kyoto a woman in a green kimono walks on clogs in the typhoon rain.

  We use new-bought umbrellas to wind down the back streets to the restaurant which is known to our host Mr. Mori from his having gone to university in Kyoto. A plumpish juicy woman in a brilliant blue kimono serves our dinner. She comes in to the room and kneels right away, somehow making me, pig that I am, think of a porno video, only this isn’t porno, she’s the dignified wife of the owner/chef. I’m excited to see this strange, immaculate woman kneel. She has a mole on her face somewhere. Her lipstick is fresh and bright red. She smiles and speaks to us in English. She is proud of the room we are eating in, her husband the cook is also a carpenter, he built this room, the air smells like incense from the fresh wood. On one wall is paper printed in clouds from a sixteenth-century wood-block. Mr. Arima and Mr. Mori order hot and cold sake, plus an endless stream of big Sapporo beers. The cold sake comes in beautiful glass bottles that are shaped like two spherical bulbs, the top one smaller than the bottom one. The glass bottles sit in chipped ice and have vines around them. The hot sake is in raku. You always have to pour for other people instead of taking for yourself. Isabel keeps Mr. Arima’s glass full and starts giggling. Mr. Arima eventually leaves to go to the bathroom. When you go to the bathroom you put on special shared slippers that are out in the hall, toilet slippers. Isabel and I have a running joke that one of us is going to goof up and come back into our shoeless tatami dinner room wearing the toilet-slippers with two meters of toilet paper trailing from the heel.

  August 11, 1993. Fever Powerful.

  Outside our hotel in Kyoto is a pachinko parlor designed like a classic Greek temple, the archetypal house shape: a nearly cubical box with a single peaked roof. It is all glass, and the roof is broken into squares with colored lights that march across in patterns.

  One of the pachinko games has a little video screen that shows a girl who eats a fruit and gets big and strong and then the words Fever Powerful appear across her. The name of the machine is Fever Powerful. On the top of the machine is a picture of Fever Powerful on her back, arching her pelvis up, with her boobs sticking out, she looks like she’s fucking.

  August 13, 1993. Zen rock garden.

  Back in Tokyo, we hit a high point, a visit to the most famous Zen rock garden of them all, Ryoanji, raked gravel with fifteen rocks grouped something like:

  2 2

  5 3

  3

  Isabel saw an ant on the edge near us, then I saw a dragon-fly landing on the other end, and then later, alone, I saw a skinny Japanese lizard crawl under the biggest rock of the 5 group. The world’s most enlightened lizard. To put my head into the head of that lizard—this is a durable enlightenment trick that the rock garden has now given me, this is something that I am bringing home with me to mix into my visions, a life as the skinny lizard under the Zen garden rock. There seemed to be quite a space under the big rock, it looked like a lizard-sized cave, plenty of room in there.

  The rock garden was up against a wood building, an empty Zen temple with three empty rooms with tatami mats on the floor and faded ancient Zen landscape paintings on paper leaning no big deal against the walls. Around the corner from the rock garden was some moss with diverse mushrooms under trees, around the next corner was more moss and bamboo and a fountain trickling through a bamboo pipe into a round stone with a square hole in the middle. The four Japanese characters on the fountain said “I only learn to be contented.” Sylvia liked the fountain best, she bought a little metal copy of it. Getting up from looking at the rock garden for the third time I had a line of sight through the plain wood temple to see Sylvia stepping barefoot down to the fountain and washing her hands, and then stepping up onto the old rubbed wood temple floor and moving her body in such a perfectly Zen and perfectly Sylvia way, I saw the cuteness and wonder of her motion. “Yes, I’m stepping up from the fountain onto the smooth wood deck. This is me! Me the exclamation mark, me the same as ye.”

  The garden has been there for maybe six hundred years. People only started noticing it in the 1930s. The clay walls around the garden have a messy fucked up pattern, with one piece of wall quite different from the others. The Japanese like asymmetry.

  After the rock garden we had lunch in a Zen teahouse near the rock garden, two Zen monks there eating also, big Japanese guys with burr haircuts and gray robes; the lunch was a pot of warm water with slabs of tofu, and strainers to fish your slabs out to put in a little pot that you pour soy sauce into. Some veggies on the side: a few beans, a piece of eggplant, a pickled pepper. We sat on cushions on the tatami mat floor by a slid-open paper door, outside the door a little pondlet with miniature trees and big carp in the pond. One of the carp jumped halfway out of the water. “Did you see that?” I ask Isabel. “Yes!” says Isabel. “That right there happening was a haiku!” We all felt very happy and high.

  August 15, 1993. The JAL warning film.

  Back in Tokyo for a last day, in the morning through a hotel door I heard the sound of a woman’s voice in sexual ecstasy. “Hai, hai, hai, hai!” In the breakfast room, the couples look like high school students. “Hai” means “Yes.”

  We make one last run to the Ginza. In the basement of the Tokyo department store, a plump girl leans over her soba noodle soup. A single noodle dangles from her lips, swaying as she sucks it in.

  Everywhere there are the voices of the “Good Dolls,” the breathless childlike voices of the Japanese advice women. The best Good Dolls run the elevators in person in the department stores. Their motions are a beautiful dance, with their white gloves they make the virtual moves of pulling the doors open. We’re tired of the voices of the Good Dolls, but in even in our last bus to the airport to leave Japan there is a Good Doll voice. It’s like in the movie Alien when Sigourney Weaver escapes into a lifeboat ship…and there’s an alien in it with her. What if when I get my car at the airport back in SF there’s a Good Doll voice in it?

  On the plane back: the eager violence of the unfolding inflatable slide that pops out of the airplane in the instructional video JAL shows us. When we near the shores of Californee, JAL shows a short film about AIDS and a long film about drugs. Close shot on an apple. A big syringe injects narcotics into the apple. Close on a Japanese girl lying on her stomach on a towel at the beach. A hand moves into frame holding the apple. English translation of the voiceover: “They may ask you if you want to have fun or if you want to have a good time. They will not mention drugs. They will offer you something that looks harmless, but it is drugs.”

  When I got to my car at the airport it looked wonderful.

  “I’m Rudy’s,” it said so I could hear it. “I’m Rudy’s car. The old red Acura.”

  “You?” I said. “It’s you? Thank you, my dear faithful hound. Thank you for having continued to exist. We have been in Asia for very long.”

  “Get in and drive me home,” said the car. “And next week you and me are going to start commuting to work again.”

  * * *

  Note on “Cyberculture in Japan”

  Written 1990 and 1993.

  Appeared in Transreal, WCS Books, 1991 and in Axcess magazine, Summer 1994.

  I had two exciting trips to Japan in the early 1990s, basically because of my involvement with Silicon Valley. The first trip was to some extent under the aegis of the magazine Mondo 2000, and the second was a a commercial venture organized by a pair of Ja
panese entrepreneurs—perhaps as close a thing to a rock tour as I ever made.

  Use Your Illusion: Kit-Bashing The Cosmic Matte

  What with Al Gore’s data superhighway initiative, the Time magazine cover on cyberpunk, the new HDTV standard, the Wild Palms miniseries, and the computer-generated dinosaurs of Jurassic Park—- well, it starts to feel like computer reality is finally here.

  Why do so many of us care so much? What is the big attraction of things like networking, virtual worlds, artificial life and cyberspace? I think we want computer reality because we want to transcend the mundane.

  City-dwellers tire of the panhandlers and the crowds. Country-dwellers tire of the rednecks and the isolation. Commuters have to commute. If only we could get out of our flesh and crawl inside the computers, maybe then we could have it all—we could be safe, in the thick of the action, and capable of travelling at the speed of light!

  I remember in the Fifties reading a paperback science-fiction book called The Hedonists. The hero was a boy who found the pods of the hedonists. The hedonists were humanoids who lived their whole lives in jellied capsules, intravenously fed, with their brains wired into pleasure-buzzers and communication networks. I remember the disgusting image of a burst-open pod with a twitching larval hedonist lying in a melting pool of slime.

  In a Nineties cyberpunk novel, a hedonist would not end up this way. He or she would long since have turned his or her twitching larval body into a computer program that could be uploaded to any suitable host machine. What is it that we want to transcend? The body, old sport; the flesh, old bean.

  But for now, just about the only creatures who really do live as silicon-pure computer data bases are the dinosaurs of this summer’s smash hit Jurassic Park. They inhabit computers at George Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic in Marin county, California. And no, those nasty dinos are not idle, no indeed. They’re busy evolving themselves into new colors and shapes so that they can star in a new movie: The Flintstones, which will be a live-action film starring John Goodman, Rick Moranis, and possibly Sharon Stone.

  Shortly before the release of Jurassic, I spent some time hanging around ILM, trying to get a feel for what’s happening at the interface between the old analog world and the new digital realties.

  The visual production unit of ILM is disguised as a series of nondescript garages and office buildings. The main entrance bears a misleadingly bland sign that says something like “THE GLOVER COMPANY. OPTICAL RESEARCH LAB.” When the Star Wars craze was at its peak, fans and nuts made nuisances of themselves trying to penetrate to the source of the world they’d fallen in love with. One demented seeker even got run over by a car. To this day, ILM is pulled-back and security conscious.

  Inside ILM, things are busy and happy. Model makers, computer hackers, animators, and film technicians work in teams to provide the extra zing for many of Hollywood’s biggest films.

  In making any film, the producers try to shoot as much of it as possible with actors, sets, props, backdrops, and people in costumes. It’s up to companies like ILM to enhance the master film by adding the missing pieces: the chrome robots, the spacewar dogfights, the cosmic backgrounds, the melting flesh.

  The traditional method of doing this is to build scale models and paint mattes of the missing pieces—a matte being a large, detailed painting, often on glass with part of it left transparent so that a moving film image can be set into the gap. Films of the models and mattes are made, and these model films are then layered onto the master film by a process called optical compositing.

  How does optical compositing work? If you’re doing something like, say, adding spaceships to a sky background, you might film your model ships and project these model films onto a big screen that is showing a film of the actors beneath the sky. Then you film the combined images directly from the big screen.

  If there are only one or two elements to add to a scene, optical compositing is quite cost-effective. But scenes like a space-battle or a dinosaur stampede can involve dozens of different models, each of which needs to have its image added as a separate step.

  To get around the problems of optical compositing, ILM and Kodak jointly developed a machine which can turn a frame of film into about twenty megabytes of digital information. In a fine example of industrial altruism (or buck-passing), Kodak calls it the “ILM scanner,” and ILM calls it the “Kodak scanner.” It’s a bulky device that looks like a workbench with lenses on top and computers underneath.

  The point of scanning film images into digital form is that it then becomes much easier to cut and paste the images together. Each part of the process is perfectly reversible, and you can undo old things without harming newer additions. Optical compositing gives way to digital compositing.

  Of course once you have the ability to turn your movie film into digital images, the entire range of digital processes become accessible to you. It’s easy to erase the guy-wires that are used to make a truck fall over in the right direction, for instance. And, most radically, you can add in computer-generated images that are not of any physical model at all. Let one byte of a computer into your tent, and it drags all of cyberspace in there with you.

  Computer animation was used to a limited extent for the water snake alien of The Abyss and for the chrome-skinned robot of Terminator 2. When it came time to create the dinosaurs for Jurassic Park, the computer graphics faction at ILM decided it was time to go digital in a big way.

  “We began planning for Jurassic in December, 1991,” says Mark Dippé, an ILM Visual Effects Supervisor who is a strong advocate of computer animation. “There was a question of should we use computer animation or should we use latex puppets over metal armatures, along with men in rubber suits and some big hydraulically driven arms. The problem is, you can only shoot a hydraulically driven device from one angle. And a man in a suit moves wrong. And a puppet can’t readily roll on its back if the armature is on its left hip. There’s limitations from the physical things. And when you want a herd of animals—are you going to build five hundred rubber models?”

  Dippé and his group modeled their first virtual dinosaurs by measuring some dinosaur sculptures. The resulting numbers were used to create computer meshes: assemblages of mathematical triangles in three-dimensional virtual space. Next came the problem of writing programs to move the meshes around in a realistic way. “We had to communicate their massiveness,” says Dippé. “What do they notice, what are they afraid of, are they wary? We shot photos of each other acting out the dinosaur roles. We played with little puppets. The others still weren’t sure. But I knew this was the opportunity. And in spring of 1992 we had the deal. The computer animation team has about twelve people, and they’re shifting us into every arena.”

  Adding computer animations to a movie involves four steps: modeling, animating, rendering, and compositing. A model is a three-dimensional static model of an object—like a wireframe dinosaur. In animation, you set some keyframe positions you want the thing to be in, and have the computer smoothly fill in the positions between. Rendering converts the computer’s three-dimensional model of the camera, the lights, the objects and their surface textures into a two-dimensional image. Compositing is combining your rendered image with the film of the background, with the matte paintings, and with the film of the actors. A typical shot involves doing this for a couple of hundred frames.

  The old “animatronix” approach to positioning a model was to have the model be a foam and latex creature built over a hinged metal armature with lots of little motors. A wire or a radio control would connect the motors to a puppeteer. But, points out ILM programmer Eric Enderton, “As soon as you have a data link like the radio control, you can replace either end by a computer.” Using this insight, the computer animation group built a skeletal data-dino which they could move around to change the position of virtual dinosaur skeletons inside the computer. The data-dino acts like a mouse, or like a data-glove. The skeleton on the screen emulates whatever pose the data-dino is in.r />
  Once the virtual dinosaur skeletons could be positioned at will, there came the question of the dinosaurs’ muscles. Mark Dippé says, “We attached models of muscles to the dinosaur bones, and then we assigned one guy to be the muscle expert for each dinosaur. The muscle expert had to program a complex procedural system of relationships between the muscles and the angles of the joints. The shoulder, for instance, affects the a lot of muscles. And if some muscle doesn’t swell dramatically enough, we use a secondary set of muscle controls called bulgers.”

  At the rendering stage, the material of the dinosaurs’ skins was taken into account. What kind of colors and textures go into the tiny triangles of the moving wireframe computer meshes? “Part of the game is image complexity,” says Enderton. “And on a computer you have to work for everything. One trick is to bring real world information into the computer. You can scan in actual skin textures. But we had to do more. The dinosaurs’ skin was a big deal.”

  “We finally ended up building a three-dimensional paint system called Viewpaint,” adds Mark Dippé. “You get a three-dimensional computer model, and spray some paint onto it. Then you turn the model and the paint turns with it, and then you paint some more.” In addition to colors, the “paints” which Viewpaint can apply include such subtle things as shininess, dirtiness, bumpiness, and the coarseness of a dinosaur’s reptilian scales. As a final touch, the skin textures were subtly roughened with computer-generated chaos to give them the indefinable level of detail that characterizes images of the real world.

  This seems like an unbelievable amount of work for one movie but, as Dippé happily points out, “All the dinosaur technology can be used again for The Flintstones. The dinosaurs are vicious in Jurassic Park, they have to kill to exist. But in The Flintstones they’re like people, they’re pets, they complain, the escalator is dinosaur in a hamster wheel, they’re more anthropmorphized. But the techniques are the same. And it doesn’t just have to be dinosaurs. We can do all forms of animals now. And superheros are okay, too.”