Friday, August 05, 2005Fire and BrimstoneI just came back from watching Christian Ristow and his Robochrist team use their flame-throwing robots to destroy a parking lot's worth of tables, chairs, toys, oil drums, and other sculputures. Watching one of these shows is to witness a magnificent act of anarchy.My partner in the opera gigs, John Besse, is one of Christian's merry band. John sports a blue mohawk, Elvis Costello glasses, wears a lot of hardware in his ears and is one of the most intelligent, artistic and articulate people I've ever had the privilege to know. Words absolutely fail to describe it. It makes me crazy. I watch and try to find a noun or a verb to capture what the robots look like, what the whole experience feels like. I can't do it. For example. There was one robot, about 2 1/2 feet tall and about three feet long. It was about the size of an ottoman and cute as can be. It was covered in armor, pointed. If I had to, I'd say it felt like a hobbit. Or a hobbit's house. The armor was kind of peaked up in the middle. It had a little spout at one end from which shot sparks of green and white and orange fire. It moved rapidly, with short little determined bursts, and turned quickly. It was like a beagle on crack. It would dart here and there, rolling over the wreckage, its little flame shooting up like a jaunty feather on a hat. While the huge robots would take their monstrous claws and hold up an oil drum like a wrestler carrying his opponent, this guy would buzz over, spout some green sparks, and dart away again as the drum came crashing down. The machine with the huge claw is named The Subjugator. The claw is about four feet in diameter and stands on an articulated arm that reaches maybe 16 feet in the sky. It rides on tractor treads. Aereated combustible liquid occasionally shoots out from a hole in the front and center. When the pilot light is working (which ceased to happen at one point last night), that instantly becomes a huge explosion of flame, reaching out about ten feet in front of the machine. John had built a propane accumulator the night before and shot it off during the show. This is really what it's called, but what it is is a standup flame thrower. You take some propane tanks and hook them up so that they feed into a five gallon drum. You take a sprinkler valve with a little electronic trigger and put it on top of the drum. Then you put a pipe on top of that. Finally, you rig a pilot light on top of the pipe so there is a constant flame waiting to ignite it. Using a feed from the trigger, you can juice it up and briefly open the valve. The propane has been gathered up in the drum and when you open the valve it shoots up the pipe, runs into the pilot, and WHOOSH explodes up into the nighttime sky. It is impossible to watch without gasping or screaming with pleasure. It's beautiful and BIG and scary and magnificent. John and I and some crew members and my kids built one of these during a long gig up in Napa last year. The whole thing cost about 100 bucks at Home Depot and took a day or two to rig. We shot it off in a construction zone one midnight after a show and thought we'd never seen anything as beautiful in our lives. Another machine I dubbed "Skullator" because it had a cattle skull mounted on a frame with eight legs. It's a new guy. It lurches around unsteadily on the legs, the skull making it more animate than the others. It didn't have a fire component, poor guy, but it was graced with humor and an illusion of intelligence (because of the head) that the others didn't have. Let me try some snapshots:
The overwhelming destruction is unspeakably liberating and joyful. Watching a half an hour of this is incredible for scaring away those nasty cloying voices in your head. It is purging beyond rational explanation. It's like the voices are suddenly scared into submission. "You see what this bitch is capable of enjoying?" the voices inside my head say to each other incredulously. "You see how nuts she is? We are OUTA here." And then the Shoulds and the Coulds and the What Ifs take a little vacation. # posted by Katherine Doughtie Nolan @ 11:11 PM  
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