Simon Houpt
Hands up, all of you out there, who remember spending a trippy Friday or Saturday night at the McLaughlin Planetarium in downtown Toronto, giving over your soul to the mesmerizing aural wash of Pink Floyd fused to some freaky dancing lasers? Naw, put your hands down: Like they say about Woodstock, if you remember it, you weren't really there.
Laserium is what they called the original laser rock show when it began in Los Angeles in 1973. By the time it reached planetariums across Canada, it had morphed into Laser Floyd and eventually the less inspired Laser Beatles and Laser Zeppelin. Provincial budget cuts by the Harris government shut Toronto's planetarium in 1995, cutting off an entire generation of would-be night trippers from the joys of jiggly light, not to mention a proper science education. (It's possible that some of them resorted, as I did when I was still too young to follow my elder siblings downtown, to cranking up Dark Side of the Moon and sending flashlight beams skittering across their bedroom ceilings.)
Yes, you can still catch the laser shows at places like Vancouver's H. R. Macmillan Space Centre -- they're now called Laser Doors or Laser Radiohead or, who knows, maybe Laser Britney -- but their heyday is long past, killed by better entertainment options and the fact that anyone can buy a laser at Radio Shack for $3.99 plus tax.
Like a rising phoenix, though, there's a new generation of shows that will blow your mind again (without, I'm happy to report, benefit of hallucinogens). I have seen the future of planetarium music experiences and its name is SonicVision. The swirling, jaw-dropping, 38-minute body-and-soul embrace is now playing on Friday and Saturday nights at the Rose Center for Earth and Space in Manhattan, which is part of the Museum of Natural History.
When the planetarium re-opened in 2000 after a $210-million (U.S.) renovation, it was outfitted with an amazing new Zeiss projector for the 6,550-square-foot dome and powerful computer-imaging technology. That has now been supplemented with about
$1-million in servers donated by Sun Microsystems. Museum execs call their facility "one of the world's largest virtual-reality simulators." I just call it one of the coolest things I've seen in years.
Casting their eyes downtown, the planetarium brought in Moby to mix a dreamy soundtrack of 19 tunes, and then commissioned a handful of artists and animators to come up with complementary computer-generated visuals.
Moby's atmospheric music choices run the gamut from classic to cutting-edge, soothing to acidic.
Radiohead's softly anxious kickoff to Kid A, Everything in Its Right Place, draws us in, married to visuals reminiscent of the blinking audio-level lights on a stereo. This morphs into an observatory -- we are, after all, in a planetarium -- and then a spaceship, before blasting off on an intergalactic roller-coaster ride of stars, wormholes and ethereal whimsy.
The audio mix, which also includes U2, Fischerspooner, Moby, Spiritualized, Prodigy, Zwan and even David Bowie's Heroes, among others, has inspired some firecracker flights of visual imagination. Audioslave's screaming Cochise takes us to an underwater realm; Brian Eno and David Byrne's Mea Culpa is set against a grid of tribal masks and a blood-red sunset; Boards of Canada's Julie and Candy takes us into a cathedral that keeps spinning and changing perspective with terrifying visual and audio thunks. To be honest, I tried to take notes, but my brain kept hiccupping in delight.
I saw the show at a glitzy launch party a couple of weeks ago, where the suits from Sun Microsystems mingled uncomfortably with funny-haired hipsters from MTV2, which is promoting the show. Just before the first screening, Moby stood up to explain, apropos of nothing, that he'd spent the morning at a downtown primary school, judging an art competition. The kids were so cute, he told the straight-laced crowd of VIPs, "that for the first time in my life, I want to make babies. So if anybody wants to make babies, let me know."
His talk of babies, and all that money and sparkle on display that night, made me nostalgic for my adolescence, and frankly melancholic over the fact that Toronto's planetarium is still lying disused and ignored. Perhaps the new Liberal government can find some cash to reopen it. Certainly that's the hope of the Planetarium Renaissance Group, an ad hoc association of civic-minded science-education advocates who have been trying for a few years now to get the planetarium reopened.
I wish them well. I know they're more interested in the daytime uses of the planetarium, like astronomy education for the next generation. Still, some day when I move back to Toronto I'd like my kids to see SonicVision or, more likely, its next-generation progeny, at a lavishly restored McLaughlin Planetarium. So when they turn to me with their wide, earnest, full-moon faces and say, "Dad, did you have SonicVision when you were young?" I can nod and say, Yeah, something like that.
