Lessons from Dr Frankenstein - Creating and Loving Your Own Monster

I finally read Mary Shelleys original 'Frankenstine', at last figuring I was letting Hollywood shape my literary roots instead of well you know, actually READING a classic or two. So naturally, this had to be applied to Planetariums, because.. it just does! Building a planetarium in a sense IS creating a monster. Assembling parts from places as obscure and arcane as Shelley says the prototype monster of all monster was created .. graveyards .. do you we not plunder the bygone junk yards of technology gone by? Dissecting rooms ... I have Spitz body parts littered throughout my infernal workshops.... And so I patched together this theater of wonder .. this room of dreams .. but now I wonder, is it indeed a monster? The reading in the original Frankenstine grows grimmer than I expected. The monster runs amuck and kills those who the good doctor loves .. Chases him, and he chases back in a kind of obsessive game of tag. Has this happened with my 'monster', this obscure dream that took on shape as this 8 foot moving creature. Do I obsessively chase it, or is it chasing me? Has it really been all good and in no part stifling to my other loves in some capacity? I know not that answer yet. But its out there now .. I find its uses to be thus far without end. It came to be, Frankenstine like, with a jolt of electricity - very low wattage in this case, but still the parallels are eerie. Dr Garenstein? What exactly HAVE I created? Its worth pondering...

Its the Light

How many of us enjoy paintings any more, we of the video age. There are starving artists, there are famous painters and paintings, yet in all probability it is the artist themselves that are more famous than their paintings. Rembrant. Picasso. Names more famous than their paintings (give or take a few Da Vinci's). But why, wasn't painting all about what was painted? Why do we dwell more on the reputation and fame of the artist? In a sense, the internet age has remedied this in a fashion, for we all can self publish at least our photographs and the focus will be back on the subject rendered, not ourselves. Photography, which basically replaced painting, at last has achieved a kind of parity where we all are on an equal playing field. But is it really about the object? Or is it about something even more elemental. Isn't it about the LIGHT? My planetarium will be an oxymoron almost - I will shut out 99.99 percent of the worlds light, so I can appreciate the other .01 percent - starlight. Cutting off light to appreciate light. Light was the basis for painting. It really is the basis for photography. If we are honest, we perhaps should forget the objects rendered in photography and painting, we should definitely forget the reputation of 'famous' purveyors of these arts (or crafts), and we should concentrate on what drives it all. Its the light.

Sanctum Sanctorum - Do You Need One?

The Latin word sanctum is the neuter form of the adjective "holy," and sanctorum its genitive plural. Thus the term sanctum sanctorum literally means "the holy [place/thing] of the holy [places/things]," replicating in Latin the Hebrew construction for the superlative, with the intended meaning "the most holy [place/thing]. The concept is as old as the Latin from which its name comes from. Its with us still today as it was throughout civilizations development, from withdrawing room to man-cave. Thoreau built a cabin. One Apollo astronaut 'rattled around in his mini-cathedral'. Book nooks and coffee shops shelter furtive lap-top enhanced figures. Not everyone needs their own persona sanctum sanctorum, but its pretty close to a universal drive inside us. My father went duck-hunting. Once as a boy I asked him if I could go with him .. his answer rings down through the years until at last I could understand it. It wasn't about the ducks. He said he needed time away from the family. There were worse ways he could have done it. The contents of this book, these 100 journal entries, explore my own unlikely journey to my own personal sanctum sanctorum. The end result is deceptive, and may not be anything anybody else ever achieves the same way. For its a unique embodiment of the ghosts, angels, and demons which drive me. Yours may vary. But the thought process' involved may be universal. So you may not end up with a personal Planetarium out back of your barn. You probably don't HAVE a barn, I never set out to have one either. But you probably have a backyard, a basement, a spare room, a large walkin closet. Anywhere will do, its just a matter of scale. A pair of headphones where you 'meet the Beatles' or any other musical phenomenon from history. Upon reflection, I've used all of those places too. So herein lies my personal thought process and actions to build a planetarium. Its alot more than that though too. Its my space. My place. I built it. But now I'm in the process of turning it over to everyone else, which is as it should be perhaps. Personal dreams . maybe they are meant to be not so personal after all. Maybe they belong to everyone.

So What Do You Need to Win

I titled my book 'How the Stars Were Won', because they were out there, and I knew I could bring them in to where I was, if only symbolically. Whats 'out there' for you? What do you need to win. How the west was won - the land was out there, to the pioneers. They had the wagons. The scouts. The trails. The drive and desire. The dream. So out they went, but really they were bringing their dream in to where they lived in a way. I needed to win the stars. What do you need to win? I wrote this book so that 'home planetarium' could standin for whatever you needed it to. So you could imagine if not write your own book .. How the XXXXX was/were won. Its worth thinking about. And then its worth doing.

Manage Your Dream - be the Bros...

I watch one of those 'home and garden' shows on cable, its the one about two brothers who help people choose their 'dream home' by picking a fixer upper and then rennovating. One brother is a real estate whiz, the other is the contractor and visionary who literally removes walls and completely turns lead into gold, like some modern day alchemist. But there's an important first step in this process! First, the couple looking for the dream is shown exactly what they want, they get visibly excited .. they cannot believe how easy this has all been. Then smiling, the brothers tell them that the couple with the 400K budget will need 1.5 million dollars to 'buy' their dream. Smiles turn upside down. They realize they will have to BUILD their dream, not buy it. Manage their dream. Is it not true with hobbies for most of us? It is for winning the stars. There are some who can go out and buy a 200K old commercial star projector. Nobody of course but an institution can buy a modern digital projection system - thats the 1.5 million dollar dream how ready to move in. Even the 200K old commercial fixer upper would require rennovations you'd need an expert 'brother' to do for you. But most of us ARE the bros .. we have to be both ... we have to buy what we can buy and build what we can build. So be the bros. Find a way to manage your dream. I did. I built a star projector, a theater, and I brought it in with MY skillset, MY budget. And doesnt that make sense, since it was MY dream?

How the Stars Were Won

I'm developing a book on this subject and this is the opening paragraph, or at least the first draft of How the Stars were Won! When I tell people 'I built a planetarium out behind my barn' and invite them out on some sunny day to see the stars, I get one of three reactions. By far the most common is a blank look - perhaps a vague recognition that anything ending in 'arium' can't be good. Sounds medical even, and not in a good way. Some people will pretend to know what I just said and, in their empathy and kindness, replay 'great, wow', and then quickly change the subject. Only about 2 in 100 though will stare a second, realize what I just said, and want to know more. More about HOW I made a planetarium, which assumes they know WHAT a planetarium is. And how hard it must have been. How that particular battle was fought. They want to come out and see this arcane feat of imagination and complexity. They want to see how the stars were won. Brought down from their heavenly firmanent and put within our reach, to wheel and dance for our pleasure and education. I want to share that story with you here. Possibly because you might build a planetarium for yourself. But at least so that if we meet, you'll be in that 1 or 2 percent that will say.. show me!

Whats Your Crazy Childhood Dream?

In wondering why I build planetariums, domes, theaters, I keep coming back to this - I had alot of crazy childhood dreams that never made it off the drawing board of the mind. Never leaped off the dusty shelves of long forgotten rooms and found me where I was today. Why planetariums? Growing older is perhaps an oxymoron, I noticed this in my father as he aged. The older he got, the earlier were his memories, and in greater detail. While he couldnt remember the past 20 years much at all (alarming!), he would out of nowhere tell me details of things from his childhood I'd never heard the man utter. So perhaps, as we grow older, we also grow younger. Maybe we NEED to clutch, like some symbolic teddy bear, something of those young halycon days and take it with us. The subject is fraught with cliche, mid-life crisis fueled sports cars and hair colorations. Yet if we do it right, that teddy bear - that crazy childhood dream .. can live with us forever and keep us impossibly tethered to that world we loved. That land we knew of childhood fantasy and dreams. Maybe thats why I build planetariums.

Why So Few?

Why do so few people 'make' planetariums? The easy answers are legion. You can buy them!. Toy planetariums, semi serious slide planetariums with films of thousands of stars. You can buy old commercial planetariums. You can adapt a video projector with software. Why would you want to build one in 2012? And the above is for people who wonder about the stars, who want to see them and learn them to begin with. With myriads of other options, you can buy constellation cufflinks on Etsy and everything in between. Nobody can really SEE the real stars anymore, so they are becoming non-entities in the real sky. Oddly they've merged with those other 'stars', movie stars, Star Wars Star Trek Star Search . star is one of the most overworked 4 letter words we have! But even when I started building planetariums in the 60s, very few people built them. Most of the above wasn't in play. Spitz sold the Junior but how many bought those? Richard Emmons was building them in Ohio, to be followed by Steve Smith. I was lucky to purchase works by both of these pioneers and meet them. But very few others. Building planetariums is hard. Its kindof like, I think I'll make my own bowling ball. I think I'll make my own soldering iron. When I came up people DID make things from scratch, or kits - you could build a crystal radio, grind a telescope mirror, buy heathkit tvs etc. Not so much anymore. The desire alone is practically nonexistent then, to be followed by ridiculous difficulty. Arcane requirements that are not obvious. Endless experimentation in the dark. Why WOULD anyone want to go through all that? There are many many reasons why very few people 'make' planetariums. Its got me wondering, why am I one of the few? It was early inspiration, being impressed by the Adler in the mid 60s, much as I'm sure kids in 77 were affected by Star Wars. It was a concurrent discovering of amateur astronomy, but on an incredibly modest level - a 2.4 department store scope under suburban Chicago skies. Expectation management was never difficult for me due to my roots! It was a happy environment growing up where we made everything. Skateboards, race cars, army guns, baseball fields, models, indian headresses ... we made so many things. But it still might now have happened if my mother hadnt liked cakes. Weekly brought home square white cake boxes from an old defunct discount chain called Topps. I had a flashlight bulb on a board with wires leading to a battery pack. I don't know WHY I had this. I had no earth globes. No celestial globes. I remember going to a friends house with my light and cakebox, and stars punctured in it with a safety pin. And was blown away. Maybe it was because I could see more on the ceiling than I could in those suburban skies. Maybe it was because I could only be taken to Adler twice a year, but now I had my own. Maybe it was just standard operating procedure for a kid of the 60s to make everything. But it planted seeds in my mind. Seeds that would blossom much later in life. Why dont people make planetariums? The answer must be in some of the above? They don't now, and they didnt then either. They never have. And probably never will. But I'm not like that for some reason. I'm glad.