Science of Aliens Exhibit

June 23, 2008 — I crossed the fuzzy gray thing that passes for a border between the U.S. and Canada for one reason only: to see Her Majesty the Queen...Alien. That's right. Canadians might have Queen Elizabeth II on their coins, but they are currently playing host to a much more notable (and I assume fanged) queen, who is holding court at the Montreal Science Center in Quebec.

Individually, the words alien and queen are generic enough to not really stick out either on page or in conversation. However, 22 years ago, director James Cameron put them together to dub one of the most impressive and terrifying creature creations in science fiction cinema history and the centerpiece of his film Aliens...speaking of generic names.

So what’s a girl like that doing in a place like that? Well, this R-rated creature that our parents wouldn’t let us see in theaters is now part of a child-friendly educational science exhibit. It’s called “The Science of Aliens,” and it’s touring the world for the purpose of exploring the theoretical science behind the possibility of extraterrestrial life. Or because it’s just a cool thing to do and could probably bring in solid cash. They had me at the concept on this one, but add some science fiction pop culture to the idea, and the bait is set. Overall, though, I just wanted an audience with the Queen...Alien. I’ll stop doing that.

The Montreal Science Centre is located on King Edward Pier, in the Old Port area of the city. I have to say, I’ve only been to better science centers. The exhibits are sparse and over-rotated toward young children. Still, it had what I wanted to see, so that made it the coolest place in the world to me.

After purchasing our tickets, we passed through the turnstile and one of those car-wash-type curtains into the exhibit.

And there she was. Moet et Chandon in a pretty cabinet and perfume naturally from Paris.

In a move that saved me from running frantically through the exhibit and missing most of it, the exhibit creators displayed the Alien Queen right at the entrance so that it’s the first thing we passed. Except that we didn't want to pass it. We wanted to set up camp right there on the floor and offer pagan sacrifices to it.

Cold-blooded, deep-space black, and acid-bleeding, the Stan Winston (R.I.P.*) and James Cameron adaptation of the H.R. Giger design has always ranked among the top creature creations in all cinema. In my opinion, it beats most of the fauna of the natural world, as well.

For the exhibit, she’s portrayed in an aggressive stance (although, admittedly, you could dress her up like Whistler’s Mother’s and stick her in a go-go dancer cage and she’d still look aggressive...if a little silly), her mouth baring multiple jaws of metallic fangs as she looms protectively over a trio of her eggs. In addition, she’s lit surreally in colored lights, while a possibly motion-activated roar is occasionally played over the loudspeakers. I was awed. I didn’t want to move on to the rest of the exhibit...or the rest of my life.

The only real problem I had with the Queen’s display was that it was tucked unemphatically into a corner. As a result, its impressiveness suffered due to well, being crammed in a corner, and you couldn’t walk around it for a more full perspective. But then again, I really didn’t go to see her skeletal alien arse anyway.

But don’t let me kill the drama. Standing there in front of that monster made me feel a lot like I imagine Ripley must have in the scene where she first sees Madame Xenomorph, minus the giant, transparent ovipositor, and the impending sense of being ripped apart like stale taffy (or a milk-filled Lance Henriksen).

Unfortunately, the Alien Queen on display here is only a life-sized replica, and not the original hydraulic puppet, but they lighted it well so that the lack of fine detail is easy to forgive and not really noticeable. I’ve included a shot with the camera flash canceling out the lighting effect. As you can see, still cool enough.

Because it’s only a replica, though, the remainder of this article will deal with the rest of the Science of Aliens exhibit. If this had been the actual Alien Queen, I would have devoted this entire article plus three more, two volumes of my personal diary, the lion share of my cocktail party conversation for the rest of my life, and a few square inches of my gravestone for the rest of my death to it. Stick around, though, because the exhibit still has cool stuff, even if it has to inevitably go downhill after the 15-foot-tall matriarch of a race of eyeless reptilian nightmares.

The next exhibit in the Science of Aliens show is another replica movie alien, albeit one a bit more tame...unless you stumble into one of its poetry readings or happen to live on a planet on its demolition schedule. It’s a Vogon guard from the 2005 film The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, based on the Douglas Adams’ book of the same name, which, along with Ray Bradbury stories and the backs of Cap’n Crunch boxes, I count as one of the formative texts of my existence.

Next was a giant screen showcasing clips from science fiction moves like the Day the Earth Stood Still and The Man Who Fell to Earth and an interactive feature where you’re encouraged to try on the goatee of Ming the Merciless from Flash Gordon, the cranium of one of the Metaluna Mutants from This Island Earth, or slanted sun glasses to make you look like a classic gray alien.

Then the exhibit got weird....with a couple of display cases featuring horror cinema icons.

I rarely spend my time in museums reading the exhibits, so I just have to assume that they had a good reason to include pieces on Dracula, Frankenstein, and Curse of the Beast, in addition to a book featuring examples of spirit photography and a copy of Fuseli’s painting The Nightmare.

In addition, the displays even feature very terrestrial characters such as Maria from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Robocop from, well, Robocop. They seemed to have gotten way off message by temporarily confusing aliens and monsters and robots and never caught the mistake.

On top of all that strangeness, many of the exhibits in these display cases were toys. And not rare vintage toys, but toys like I’ve seen recently in Toys “R” Us...um, buying my nephew a birthday present. These toys included action figures, stuffed animals, and a Halloween mask. At least the mask was of the Predator, though, which fit the theme.

But that ends the popular culture bait, um, bit. Next is the interactive science part that Science Centers love and that is still worth going through because you paid a lot of money to get in.

After passing an artwork consisting of a fiberglass glob of flesh (not as cool as it sounds, unfortunately) that is supposed to illustrate how easily normal things can feel alien to us, we arrived at a couple of interactive exhibits detailing possible alien environments and the ways we might come in contact with them. I remember giant planets hanging from the ceiling, satellite probe replicas, and other space-type items. But all of my attention was drawn to a series of transparent jars displayed on a cool exhibit case of branching tubular columns.

Inside each liquid-filled jar were creatures like the gulper eel, ogrefish, octopus, and other terrestrial ocean denizens that looked highly alien…which was the purpose of that exhibit. I think. I was too busy imaging how that thing would look in my living room. I have no idea if the creatures in the jars were actually preserved specimens or more replicas. The exhibit didn’t say either way, and I kept going back and forth on it. Some of them looked like well-made replicas and others looked real.

The last area of the Science of Aliens exhibit featured a pair of sloping eighteen-foot-long touch screens that depict alien landscapes. You select one of the items on the planet’s surface, and interactive boxes appear at your fingertips with information and images about the creature or plant that you’ve selected. When I went, a section of one of the screens was down, showing just a blank blue DOS screen, while a man on a step ladder did tool stuff above it, hurting the illusion and the chance for a cool shot of the entire room. The interactivity itself was cool, but way cooler was how you looked interacting with it.

The Science of Aliens is only in Montreal through September 1st. After that, it’ll probably be in other places, but I have no clue where. And the exhibit varies. I know when it was in Tokyo, it featured Logray the Ewok from Return of the Jedi and an alien autopsy-like exhibit that I wish I could’ve seen. To my knowledge, though, they all have the all-important Alien Queen. Every once in a while, the world makes sense.

My overall impression of the exhibit is that it’s a little bit schizoid. It’s like two groups worked on it…one that totally got it and had tons of cool ideas like commissioning a replica Alien Queen and the design of giant, sloping touch-screen computers and one that was a bit hazy on the concept and found themselves rummaging through the clearance bin at their local toy store and throwing random things into display cases.

Still, it’s a great idea for an exhibit, even if I skipped most of the interactive part (which I always do...I like my exhibits to just exhibit). Of course, the whole thing made me wish that the entire showcase was just life-sized replica movie alien after life-sized replica movie alien and that the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame wasn’t on the opposite coast from me. Stupid Seattle.

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*The recent loss of Stan Winston is a void I can only understate, so I won't. I’m just going to pop Pumpkinhead into my DVD player and be sad.

ex-Princess Theatre

June 15, 2008 — We often visit the graves of the deceased as closure to allow us to move on in life, but my here-chronicled visit to the official location of Houdini’s decomposition had just the opposite effect on me. It resurrected him, and now he just won’t die...in my head. I have a zombie Houdini in my head. As a result, when I found myself in Montreal, Quebec, after a tangled string of events that I’m still kind of sorting through, I felt compelled to find a certain location inextricably tied to the deathing of Harry Houdini, legendary magician and escapist.

And I found it...and it was a wall.

Now, it might look like I’m standing in front of vacant retail space in this picture, but before this place was a blank spot on the Rue Sainte-Catherine in downtown Montreal, it was the Le Parisien cinema house. That fact is completely irrelevant, and “the Le” might be redundant. However, decades ago, before it was Le Parisien, it was the Princess Theatre, where Houdini had a performance engagement in October of 1926.

It was backstage at this theater that Houdini, after a brief speaking engagement to the college kids at nearby McGill University, entertained three of those students. One of them was J. Gordon Whitehead. Houdini was publicly proud of his ab strength, so Whitehead insistently launched a completely uncalled for and oafish volley of punches at the abdomen of a prone and unprepared Houdini that, while not killing him directly as the story usually goes (and which I perpetuated in my already-referenced article), at least contributed indirectly to it.

Houdini mistook the pains in his stomach for minor injuries from that altercation instead of going to the hospital to learn that the pains were actually caused by acute appendicitis. His appendix ruptured, and he died in a Detroit hospital, pus-filled and weak, nine days later on Halloween afternoon at the age of 52.

The ex-Princess Theatre building is located at the corner of Rue Sainte-Catherine and Rue City Councillors. Unfortunately, Le Parisien closed just last year, along with my opportunity for a) a visually interesting picture, b) a chance to actually enter the building, and c) a better article to devote to the topic. Currently, the site of the Princess Theatre is labeled “ESPACE A LOUER,” which is Montrealian for either “space to rent” or “Houdini’s death was not our fault.”

Yes, it was.

Avalon Danvers Apartments nee Danvers State Hospital

June 8, 2008 — Once it was a place where lobotomized maniacs shuffled in white slippers down never-ending corridors, the criminally insane drew caricatures of old victims on the walls with crayon stubs, and trembling lunatics gibbered alien syllables into slobber-drenched pillow cases. Now it’s a suburban luxury apartment complex complete with swimming pool, fitness center, and billiards lounge, all within easy commute of Boston.

The Danvers State Hospital in Danvers, MA, was completed in 1878 during the big sanitarium boom of that century. Apparently, the U.S. was suddenly producing mentally derailed individuals at an alarming rate. We desperately needed a place to put them, but the state of Georgia was already taken and reality television hadn’t been invented yet. Diligently scrutinizing our dictionaries, we came across the phrase “insane asylum,” and it seemed the perfect solution.

All across the country, states began building asylums faster than the Amish raise barns. Many of these institutions, including Danvers, were constructed according to what was called the Kirkbride plan, after its originator, Dr. Thomas Kirkbride. His theory was that if you treated the insane well then they would get well. Or at least they would seem happy, and we wouldn’t feel as bad about their existence. So these Kirkbride buildings were usually large, sprawling, architecturally interesting affairs that basically followed the same grandiose layout and were purposefully constructed in idyllic settings. Danvers was one such Kirkbride building.

Also known as the Danvers State Insane Asylum, Danvers had a central administration building with two staggered wings that made the entire construct seemed shaped like “a giant flying bat,” to quote a movie yet to be referenced. Danvers was red-bricked, many-gabled, and set like an evil queen’s castle on the crest of Hathorne Hill, a scenic hump of forested land within eye shot of Boston.

At its most crowded, Danvers housed 2,400 inmates plus support staff, whose main jobs were to care for the inmates and to sometimes perform wacky experiments on them like shock treatment, hydrotherapy, prefrontal lobotomies, and whatever else was the latest fashion of the psychiatric community.

If that all sounds hard to fund, read on…to the next sentence. Eventually, the second law of thermodynamics set in for all of these sanitariums, and the conditions of the Kirkbride asylums worsened due to budget cuts, the basic expense of keeping such expansive things running, and general overcrowding. Most of them shut down after a century or so. Danvers lasted until 1992, although it had been experiencing death spasms regularly over the preceding years.

For the next decade, Danvers sat decaying on Hathorne Hill like a stubborn, cancer-ridden vulture daring the state to put its crumbling interiors to some purpose other than as playground for urban explorers and fodder for local spook stories. Meanwhile, it grew to a new height of popularity over its sister establishments when the horror movie Session 9 was filmed within its rotting halls in the year 2000.

A few years later in 2005, the Danvers State Hospital property, amid mildly frantic protests by preservationists, was finally sold to AvalonBay Communities, a real estate company that wanted to make the edifice a functioning and lucrative part of society. After much demolition, a large fire the cause of which was never determined, and more of those mildly frantic protests, the re-christened Avalon Danvers
opened for business this year, 2008.

And just like that, a foreboding, danger-ridden property where trespassers used to be violated became a welcoming neighborhood with pristinely paved roads, evenly clipped grass, and helpful signs directing you right to the front door. I gladly accepted that invitation.

Of course, most of the original building and its outliers are now gone. The only thing really preserved was the façade of the iconic main building (the “head” of the bat). We drove around the entire circuit of Hathorne Circle, a road that loops around the property, without seeing anything of real interest that you couldn’t find in any other suburban klatch of mini-domiciles. It seemed like a nice place to live, honestly.

The one aforementioned preserved bit is now referred to as the Kirkbride building, and even though I visited just before the official grand opening, it had already been fully tenanted. After seeing a few of those tenants enter and exit the building, we decided to go in ourselves. I was hoping it would just be an empty lobby in which we could look around briefly and then leave, but of course there were attendants with brochures who asked if they could help us, and of course we pretended to be interested in renting an apartment on the premises. Which reminds me, I still need to finish the application. I like to follow through on my lies until they cease to become such.

But the place isn’t totally ignoring the fact that thousands of crazies insaned right there where its occupants now make home-made biscotti and watch prime-time game shows on their flat-screen televisions.

Outside, a discreet distance from the front of the building, is a generic-looking memorial that I’m sure is manufactured in bulk by some wholesale retailer of memorials. Just flip through a catalogue, pick the model, and then personalize it with your own plaques. In this case, they hadn’t gotten around to affixing those plaques when I visited, so it was just a couple of benches and some angled blank stone. The only reason I knew it was a memorial is because it was labeled as such on the apartment map outside the Kirkbride building.

But now this story suddenly gets better (I thought I’d state it before your internal monologue did). There was one more relic of the original Danvers property that I had heard still existed, but I wasn’t sure. The cemetery of the dead Danvers insane. I know. Sounds like a badly translated Lucio Fulci film title. But just because they’re lunatics doesn’t mean they don’t die and need to be buried, and somewhere in the neighborhood of 700-800 of the unclaimed ones had been interred on the grounds throughout Danver’s history. That’s right. Unclaimed lunatic corpses.

Apparently, at some point, preservationists stumbled across the burial ground, which was off in the forest a ways and completely hidden in waist-high weeds and tangled undergrowth. The graves themselves were marked only by small stone pegs adorned with anonymous numbers instead of names. These causists got out their rakes and mowers, cleared the area, researched and replaced as many numbers as they could with names, and then erected a memorial in the middle of it. As part of the deal with the state, AvalonBay promised to upkeep the cemetery.

I knew the cemetery was far enough away from the apartments that it wouldn’t be immediately obvious that there was one on the premises (which is probably the big reason that AvalonBay had no problem with the existence of a hard-to-market cemetery of the dead insane within the confines of their cozy little habitat). I just wasn’t sure how far away it was.

The cemetery was supposed to be somewhere in the forest surrounding the property. We paced along a perimeter sidewalk for a bit hoping we could see the cemetery through the foliage. We didn’t really want to go charging off down the hill and into the woods in the hopes of just lucking across it, even though the out-of-date Google satellite map that we had told us we might have to do just that. You see, the first time I was asked, “What are you doing here, sir?” instead of “What are you kids doing here?” is when I realized I was too old to be that guy anymore.

Eventually, we found it. Here are the directions: If you’re facing the Kirkbride building, head right on the sidewalk through the memorial and to where the apartments stop and the condos begin. Downhill from the sidewalk is a small field at the edge of which is the opening to the cemetery. I marked it for you on the below Avalon Danvers map. Ignore the “You Are Here” part. You are not.

The entrance is marked by a large stone inscribed with the name “Danvers State Hospital Cemetery” and the subtitle, “The Echos They Left Behind”...which is the first time I’ve ever seen a corpse referred to as an echo, but not the first time that I’ve seen the word echoes misspelled.

And here I want to make another quick interjection before I start talking about this graveyard like it’s a regular cemetery. Keep foremost in mind that this is without dissimulation a cemetery full of the dead insane. And, hello, Gordy, I was standing above them. Who am I kidding? I was Thriller dancing above them. I find the macabre invigorating, and I’m only kind of ashamed of that.

Granted, it definitely doesn’t look like a cemetery of the dead insane. There are no old headstones set at jarring angles or broken-open mausoleums harboring ghouls or ex-patients who just can’t leave, and I didn’t see one giant rat. Instead, it was nicely kept, open, with a few trees, a low stone fence running along two sides, and polished stone plaques inlaid into the ground with the name and date range of the interred.

In the center of the cemetery is a stone bench that faces a trio of stone markers with plaques listing all the names of the dead that the researchers (many of whom, according to the memorial, were ex-patients from Danvers) could find. Also, just inside the cemetery entrance is a black marble bench in memoriam to one of Danvers’ more famous patients, Marie Rose Balter, who after being released from Danvers after two decades of residency, later returned to serve as a staff member. She had a movie based on her life called Nobody’s Child.

But if you’ve seen Session 9, you know the first thing I did once I entered the graveyard was to look for grave #444. It’s there, but only the number marks it, as apparently they couldn’t find who was buried there. In my mind, of course, it’ll always be Mary Hobbs. You’ll also remember that the graves in the movie were marked with two-foot-tall concrete pillars topped with numbered hexagons instead of the stone pegs and slates that I’ve described here. Those old headstones stacked on the edge of the woods that forms one of the boundaries of the cemetery. I didn’t find #444, which was featured in the movie, but I did find #455 and one that was broken after the “#44.”

I hope Danvers and I aren't done yet. My next mission is to make friends with someone who lives at Avalon Danvers so that I can watch Session 9 on the precise spot where it was filmed. Consider this paragraph my public plea. If there ever was any opportunity for this website to make my life even a little bit better, it’s now.

All right. One last time. Cemetery of the dead insane. It’s out of my system now.

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UPDATE: My life is now a little bit better. Check out ex-Danvers State Hospital, Revisited.