At The Turn Of The Century I Sojourned At The Cecil Hotel.

In the summer of 2001 I called The Cecil Hotel home. I had landed there for the same reasons everyone else had. I was destitute and didn’t give two shits about living amongst addicts, prostitutes and the mentally ill. I signed the registrar as had fellow anonymous denizens before me. The more notorious sleepovers guests include Jack Unterweger, newly deceased Richard Ramirez and the most recent being Elisa Lam. 

 The desk clerk was behind glass. She didn’t ask me which view I'd prefer or if I wanted a smoking or non-smoking room she just encouraged me to pay the extra fee for a room with it’s own bathroom. She did emphasize that I do not use the elevator because, as she put it “it’s probably not a good idea for you”.  

My room faced onto Main Street and was directly above the entrance. The room's only view looked directly down onto the vestibule's original awning that had become the final resting place for a dead pigeon. The room was clean enough but rank street smells wafted up in through the slightly ajar window and had filled the room with the scent of fresh despair. There would be no light raps on my door accompanied by singsong coos of "housekeeping". And the only room service available would be provided by courtesy of dialing 9-1-1. I settled in by opening and closing wobbly empty drawers, pulling aside the shower curtain and peering under the bed. In my search for assimilation I found a crack pipe. 

There were a few residents that “watched my back” and walked me up the large staircase to my room at night. “I’ll walk you up” They’d say. Self appointed security guards. Paternal types that the desk clerk would gesture OK for me to accompany by giving me the nod through the glass from across the lobby. Protocol for guests was to hand your key in when you left the premises and collect it again upon returning. The request made me feel like management cared about my comings and goings.  In reality it was a way for them to prevent pimps passing room keys around amongst their working girls. 

I can honestly say I never really felt afraid and after about a week I was comfortable living there. The muffled sounds of sex and violence were a familiar lullaby and I never felt the presence of ghosts of which it is reported, are plentiful. The only thing I was nervous about was the possibility of hearing people weeping, crying or sobbing. That was what frightened me. Thankfully that didn’t happen. 

About two weeks in I had a neighbor who was constantly in an intense dispute with some “fucking whore” he “promised to fucking kill” He screamed at her all the time and I became invested in the hellacious sounding pillow talk because I never heard her yell back at him. One day he kicked her out throwing her into the hallway slamming the door closed on her. She still didn't utter a peep. Things fell silent for a moment so I opened my door to peek out. Her remains where scattered about the grubby carpet violently ripped into crude pieces. 

My neighbor had apparently broken up with his pornographic magazine.

The Cecil Hotel has been was built in the mid 1920’s in what is today referred to as the ‘Historic District’. The hotel never got her chance to shine because the Biltmore Hotel soon came along and stole the spotlight. The Cecil was remodeled in 2007 and is presentable these days in keeping with the area’s gentrification. The gruesome discovery this past February of a young girl’s body identified as Elisa Lam found in the water tanks located on the premises rooftop suggests despite the paint job the Cecil Hotel's ambiance is set to remain in it's spooky and ominous condition.  

Daft Punk and my Automatonophobia; The Four Robot Archetypes.

I’ve had a fear of robots for a long time. Not toy robots or robots in a position of cooperative servitude like Robby the Robot or Hymie, the kind that I call Type A robots. But the malevolent, fascist Type B malfunctioning robots capable of operating with sinister intentions.
This is the story of how Daft Punk's new album 'Random Access Memories' has helped me understand and overcome my Automatonophobia

The ED-209 from the movie ‘Robocop’ (1987) is the quintessential example of the much feared Type B robot. As they're described in the movie, “...robots with emotional problems...”  

The ED-209 was co created by the film's Visual FX Supervisor Phil Tippet specifically to appear “... to have a certain dumbness, like a utilitarian stupidity.”  This dumbness and utilitarian stupidity personified my father and mother. To a child it was an obtuse fascism and indeed frightening and dangerous. Just like the ED-209 if they locked onto you as a target you had “...20 seconds to comply....”
These Type B robots also live in car manufacturing plants and have been known to disguise themselves as Type A robots by posing as motion control camera equipment and hiding on film sets.

Then there is theType C Robot. This robot is the exploited, resentful human/robot hybrid.

Lost in Space’s 'Robot' is a great example of this sympathetic robot. ‘Robot’ was objectified so much that he didn’t even have a name. He was habitually assaulted both verbally and physically by the cowardly Dr Smith (my family’s surname also.) This caused me no end of anxiety and sadness. 'Robot' was manipulated and exploited constantly for his superior intelligence and fortitude. I couldn't bring myself to "abandon" 'Robot' by simply not watching the program even though watching it made me very anxious and gave me chronic headaches. I empathized with him and wanted to rescue him but I was a helpless child. I identified with him absolutely. And then the whole ‘Star Wars’ happened and things were ratcheted up a notch.

Darth Vader was my first crush and mentor. He showed me that I could take my feelings, that at the time I didn’t understand to be resentment and shame, and detach from them by turning them into destructive superpowers and by doing so empower myself and ward off any perceived threat to my safety.

I would get very defensive while we played 'Star Wars' at school when my fellow playmates would tell me that Darth Vader was the “bad guy” in the movie. I would get into fights with other kids about it. “He wasn’t the bad guy. You just didn’t get it.”

I was in love with Darth Vader and wanted to crawl up into the dark shelter of his womb/cape and be lulled into slumber to the sound of his breath ebbing and flowing like the ocean. He'd say to me “Stay here. You’re safe now.”  I planned to hibernate there until I was old enough to take care of myself.  I implemented this lifestyle plan when I was 12 years old.

The Darth Vader life plan for success worked great until the human prototype of the ED-209 Type B robots arrested me 19 years later on the other side of the planet Earth.

“The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.” - Carl Sagan, Cosmos.

So this mean that robots too are made of the same stuff. They are inside of me and I am part of them. And we are all made of stars.  What does this have to do with Daft Punk’s new album? 

Daft Punk are the new Type D human/robot hybrids. (The Silver Surfer  falls into this category too.) As two human beings they have consciously recreated themselves into robot forms in order to fully express themselves as emotionally evolved human life forms. 'Random Access Memories' is a siren song of sorts. A call back to the basic humanity inside all of us. The message is to collaborate and celebrate that which fundamentally drives the human spirit. 

Feeling and expressing emotions by physically feeling and touching one another through the act of dance. 

Just so you dress appropriately for the Daft Punk Mothership keep in mind it looks and sounds like a yacht shaped U.F.O.
I will paint myself in silver and wear Halston. The Silver Surfer will meet me on this aforementioned yacht and we will finally have the sex he promised to have with me in a dream I had about him as a teenager. My robot companion 'Hans' will be pissed about this but he'll get over it once I get close enough to him to give him a hug. I will then be able to push the reset button located on his lower back. He knows I'm going to do this when I look up at him as he feels my fingers slip underneath the band of his underwear. He prefers me not doing this but I can't have him upset with me.