The Cinema of Space & Missing Pages
Episode 11:13:2023 - Prompt: Space
Where Space took me…
The final frontier.
The original Star Trek series ran 3 seasons, from 1966 - 1969. The 79 episodes follow the adventures of the Starship U.S.S. Enterprise and its crew through space a decade before George Lucas launched Luke Skywalker into Star Wars.
Meanwhile, Stanley Kubrick was concurrently working on 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and Andrei Tarkovsky followed soon after with his mesmerizing 1972 film, Solaris.
When I think of the Cinema of Space, these films were the ones that left lasting impressions.
There is no CGI version of space travel that can replace the simplicity of an inventive set, creative cinematography & sound effects, an epic score, and great characters.
My best friend, Rane Ivory, and I were adventurous kids and spent most of our time cavorting outdoors on the grounds of Cranbrook Academy of Art (whose promo video is titled This is the Space).
With space came freedom to imagine worlds & invent roles.
The only TV show I recall us watching with any dedication was Star Trek, already in reruns by the late 1970s when we were kids.
We would build a pillow castle on her parents’ bed for the proper height to comfortably view their small, color TV.
Time suspended while we watched Kirk, Spock, and the gang navigate costume changes, in camera special effects, and prosthetics to impart stories that were larger than our imagination of space.
Which brings me to the space of missing pages.
The need for storage space predated me.
My mom has always had storage units. It comes with the territory of being an artist, especially a painter (although sculptors have the same needs for space).
For as long as I can remember, we have had spaces outside of our primary residence to house large works on canvas by her first husband and then later her own.
Over the years & moves, these units grew with pieces of furniture, boxes of documents, old phones, my stereo & speakers, Oriental rugs, bed frames, sheets & bedding, little trashcans for bathrooms, portfolios of my large format series of color photographs, boxes of albums, CDs, cassette & VHS tapes, my grandmother’s full set of dishes & crystal, and so on.
We could be classified as nomadic hoarders.
By the time my partner & I moved to Spain, about 12 years after my mother, there were 3 storage units in a Northern Liberties facility in Philadelphia (my mother’s last US residence).
When we did the math, the annual expense of storage was difficult to ignore or justify. I knew my belongings were partly to blame, but my mom had kept enough furniture for a one-bedroom apartment - perhaps thinking she might need it one day.
We could have bought new furniture for the cost of storing the old.
The project to eliminate the storage units began gently. My mom was going to Philadelphia. We asked her to start by shredding old documents and tossing anything that could go to the dump.
She agreed it needed to happen, but was not excited about the process.
I called her on the second day to see how it was going.
“Were you able to free up some space in there, Mom?”
“I got rid of some things,” she said. “I donated grandmom’s crystal glass wear.”
“What? Why? What if I wanted it?”
“And I went through my journals. There were so many pages I wouldn’t want anyone to read, so I tore them out,” she admitted.
“Journal pages don’t reduce the storage space size!”
Clearly, she was not up for the task on her own, so my partner & I went in to help.
My partner loves organizing space, throwing things away to create more space, and saving money.
This was his project to manage.
In the end, we reduced the three spaces to one and packed everything else to ship overseas. Three months later it arrived.
When we unrolled & unpacked the work, it breathed new life.
Now, all of my mother’s artwork lives here where she’s had three retrospective exhibitions, and we can hang it on the wall.
Stories, like art, have to get out into the world.
Otherwise, our minds are like storage units, holding onto ideas that take up mental space while waiting to be unpacked & appreciated.
YOUR TURN: Space is an awesome word.
It’s literal & metaphorical. Tangible & suggestive.
Where does SPACE take you?
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My parents were hoarders. Mom had a huge collection of unused appliances she was gifted by the casinos she frequented. And a closet of clothes spanning 50 years, plus defunct computer equipment – like a big dot matrix printer for continuous paper with perforated sides and accordion folds.
Dad was a man of words. He had a vast collection of paperback and hardcover books. His tall metal file cabinet overflowed with partial and whole stories and maps of made-up worlds to accompany them.
They each lived for decades in their own separate houses, making things easy to accumulate.
As for me, I have a hard time parting with kitchen stuff, books, and old cameras. Rarely do I throw away clothes, and when I do, it’s all the more annoying when they come back in style. Everyday observations and ideas for creative projects collect in journals that are started but never finished. With each move, a few items get tossed, but always with a tinge of melancholy. They stand for times less distracted by finances, family, or fear of failure. Weeding out the old to make room for new doesn’t feel as good as clinging to dreams of the past.
My cousin and I used to play together in a way that felt real. One night at Gran’s, we were in bed but weren’t sleeping. We’d invented a game where we pressed our fists into our eyes.
We found that when we pressed really hard, we could see stars. We narrated what we were doing out loud. “I’m spinning through space.” “I can see a red star!”
The next morning we discussed our discovery. “Now we know we can go to space in our heads,” said my cousin. “What else can we do?”
Last weekend I went to a ‘VR experience’. My boyfriend’s friends had organised it for his 40th. When we took the headsets off, I couldn’t believe we’d stayed in the small room – we’d walked, ducked and jumped through a whole world. (In reality, we must have been going round in tiny circles.)
Once headsets are cheaper, and the graphics are even better, I’m sure kids will spend most of their time playing in VR. I know I would have done.
Maybe someone will invent bodysuits that make us feel like we're floating, and we can all explore the stars from home – even the billionaires.