Saturday, January 23, 2010
Venus Rising
Time: January 2010
Place: somewhere in deepest wild sub-tropical Florida.
Players: visionary elder extraordinaire Jacque Fresco; Mr Fresco’s superwoman pilot, builder and wholly dedicated partner in love Roxanne Meadows; beaming-faced director Frank Da Silva; surf dude ace cinematographer Mark Drifting Waters; executive producer love bomb actress Princess D-Day (also known as Princess Unobtanium due to her consistent state of being busy); and yours truly (gaffer, runner, key grip, etc).
So, here I am in Jacque Fresco’s main living pod at his remote sub-tropical residency in Venus Florida. Mr Fresco is, of course, the director of The Venus Project whose championing of a resource based economy (according to which money is vanquished, all of the Earth’s resources are shared, and we cease struggling to secure advantage over one another) is to be featured in Earth 2.0. I am pretty much supine and well relaxed on a comfy orange lounger chair – which is sort of 1970’s retro futuristic. My small netbook is on my lap and I can type as I observe the proceedings. Earth 2.0 cinematographer Mark Drifting Waters is setting up his gear and is about to film Mr Fresco giving a demonstration of architectural stability. This footage might be used as supplementary Earth 2.0 material. The real good stuff was filmed earlier in the day around the scenic grounds of Fresco’s place. It was all storyboarded in advance. Fresco, once he has donned his trademark Indiana Jones hat, is a terrific actor (whippersnapper Harrison Ford has nothing on him). The resulting footage is top-notch – as are Mr Fresco’s discourses. Cinema audiences in 2012 will be bowled over both visually and conceptually. This is guaranteed.
No surprise then that 93 year-old Mr Fresco is best described as an utterly amazing force of Nature. He comes across as impressive in the Zeitgeist Addendum movie and on various YouTube clips, but he is even better in the flesh. Although he is small and fragile, strength lies deep within him and he is always eager to unleash this. Give him the slightest chance and he will vocally launch himself and wax majestic on all manner of paradigm shifting social observations. Although we have been filming him all day, he still has enough energy to insist that we do this extra bit of film inside his main living pod. I suspect he runs on geothermally charged Duracell batteries from the future he is so fond of, or maybe he eats some kind of special Florida spinach. In any case, a little earlier we were all rather knackered and were thinking of packing up. But Mr Fresco wouldn’t let us leave. He has loads more to say, more tales of technology to tell, more practical wisdom to impart. I know that he also has a gun (there are big alligators in the area) so we all decide to comply with his wish to be filmed again and let him do his piece on architectural stability.
Mr Fresco suddenly notices my T-Shirt which features a somewhat flippant picture of Yoda from Star Wars (Yoda is wearing sunglasses and has hi-fi headphones hanging loosely around his neck). Mr Fresco recognises Yoda (well, they are two of a kind). That seems apt as the pod we are in (built by bare hand by Jacque and his partner Roxanne Meadows many decades ago) is akin to the pods in the original Star Wars movie – sort of white and round, a bit like an igloo. Like the chair I am in, the style of the pod is retro-futuristic. Anyhow, Mr Fresco wants to talk about strong building structures. For this purpose we have him sat at a table which has a cylinder of paper on it. A sheet of paper lacks structural strength. But if you roll it up into a cylinder, it can carry a remarkably large load. This will be demonstrated by getting Roxanne to place a stack of heavy books on top of the paper cylinder. In this way, Mr Fresco can readily convey notions of efficient construction and design.
While props and lighting equipment are being set up, Jacque is dismissing various metaphysical notions and ideas. The Venus Project has no time for metaphysical thinking. Airy fairy New Agers will not find obvious solace in Fresco’s vision and work. Intelligently applied science and technology for the good of all humanity is what The Venus Project is about. At a stretch one can view this as a sort of mathematically engineered love, or a practically engineered spirituality. But still, surely Mr Fresco must acknowledge a certain interesting something about the nature of reality, a certain astonishment that Nature can birth life and consciousness? And yet Fresco dismisses Einstein’s notion of an intelligent harmony to the Universe (he once met Einstein when he was very young). He talks of violent supernovae. How can they be harmonious? I reply that these stellar events make the crucial heavier elements of which life is made. We debate a bit more and conclude that everything depends upon how one defines harmony. With an objective definition (pertaining, let’s say, to the lawful interconnectedness of all things), the Universe can indeed, as Einstein suggested, be considered an exquisitely harmonious and smartly operating system. Come to think of it, the very real existence of Jacque Fresco here on planet Earth at this crucial period of time is testimony to such an assertion. For me at least, the fact that the whole system of Nature has both constructed and primed Mr Fresco is ample evidence that life is far smarter than we may imagine.
Later that night, just as were making our final departure, Mark Drifting Waters and I spoke of our sadness to be leaving. Then we realised in no uncertain terms that we loved Mr Fresco! So I ran back to the pod and told him. He said he loved us too. That’s cool with me. May we all meet again in similarly extraordinary circumstances. Heap big Pachamama make it so.
By Simon Powell - EARTH 2.0™ Scriptwriter
