CAPTAIN FANTASTIC & THE BROWN DIRT COWBOY

Manufacturer: Bally, 1975

Type: Electro-Mechanical

Alchemical Element: Earth

Tarot Card: Queen of Wands, upright

Half a hair color ago, I hailed a cab in San Francisco.

He lead: “Are you a musician? You look like a musician.”

“Yes.”

“What instruments do you play?”

“Lots. I used to teach guitar and bass, but mostly focus on the musical saw and ukulele.”

“I took up the ukulele after my divorce. It’s just, something so small and simple.”

“With infinite room to grow and enjoy without competition.”

“Yeah. It helped me through a really rough time. I’m working on becoming a music teacher, now. I stopped drinking.”

“The word ukulele translates to ‘the gift that came here’. A lot of people take up the ukulele later in life, and I think it’s a gift you give yourself.”

The divorcee and the devotee; delineations of discrepancy. Both demarcated to develop along a design we never made. Grow up. Go to Prom. Learn a trade. Settle down. Buy more, shut up, Law & Order, sign this in duplicate and stay the fuck out of our way.

The All-American Almanac of Adulthood carries not appendices on addiction or tutorials on how to time your escape from the pendulum of Pyrrhic academic stability. Also, my sex ed teacher wouldn’t even say the word “penis” aloud. How the fresh hell was I supposed to know about this supposed alternative to codeine confliction and failing out of pre-nursing biology you call “coming out”? WAKE UP, AMERICA.

All this to say: symmetry is a placatory of the masses. We do not all grow up, learn the meaning of friendship and marry someone who makes us laugh. Some are siphoned, others are swerved, left to languish and die in a swarming hive of hurt.

We do not all bleed the same. The white men bleeding San Francisco dry with their apps that steal restaurant reservations and public parking spaces do not bleed in the same way as a mother in Gaza comforting her children during the air raid.

This ain’t growing up. This is genocide.

Aspire to asymmetry, precious cadet. Conspire to contend with Lies That Kill!

But first, ready your ruminations upon this, the next in our coin operated curriculum: Captain Fantastic & The Brown Dirt Cowboy.

A byproduct of Pete Townshend’s meager, mediocre multimedia franchise Tommy, Captain Fantastic was commissioned in 1975 as a karmic consolation prize for the chronic headache those of us without the Cheap Trick back catalog get when we hear “Pinball Wizard” coming from the jukebox once every fifteen fucking minutes.

The backglass is a black pearl of perverse portraiture. The question of the commodification of women’s sexualities in an industry that did not actively welcome their participation aside, it still, with its throng of unrestrained, unthreatened female sexuality, joins the Street Fighter movie and that song about fucking a Unicorn on the list of things that, while tangibly problematic, still rock harder than Tommy. At least, my understanding of unicorns is that they cannot consent, but maybe magical animals are best considered on a case by case basis.

Captain Fantastic’s backglass is an unwitting biographer of pinball’s future. From the PPM in Alameda to Oakland’s Hi-Life down to SF’s Free Gold Watch, women are inseparably ingrained in the burgeoning revival of pinball/arcade culture in the Pacific Northwest. We replace broken flippers. We wax on the playfields. We exaggerate and expatiate backglass art for wallside murals. We form leagues, we peddle spare parts at convention booths, we wait in line to play Wizard of Oz.

The masculinity and entitlement that permeates pinball may not possess the bitter aftertaste of that “gonna get mind” college party mindset but it is in every way detrimental. At Pin A Go Go this year, a woman confronted a man who was touching her without consent. She was told, without consequence for her assaulter and in full view of other attendees, to “go fuck [herself]”. The Underside of Dracula explains why electronics and games are just more of a man thing; the first computer programmer was a woman born in 1815. Our struggle is not limited to erasure. But still. We’re the draw of [ALMOST] [EVERY] [PINBALL] [MACHINE] [YOU’VE] [PLAYED] but there is not one woman in PAPA’s current Top 20 Rankings.

To say nothing of a pinball machine based on a man who sings about putting a woman who tries to leave him in a stranglehold–except that it needed to exist, for some fucking reason.

Asymmetry, precious cadet: we play the same game but we have not been given a reciprocal amount of turns to play.

The placard above Captain Fantastic at the Pacific Pinball Museum suggests the style and tactics of the machine are unusual and “best left to figure out by playing”. Be not betrayed by this playful dun-dun-dun, precious cadet. This machine has not earned the pursing of your lips!

The double flipper dupes many a first (and second, and third) timer. Our instinct is to favor the left side: there is a more favorable flipper-to-everything-else ratio and thus therefore you may be inclined to believe there is a smaller margin for fucking up if you try to doublefist your way through the game.

The tandem flippers, while offering a wider “hitbox”–

I’m meeting you halfway here, you rotten digital games journos–

affords you a smaller range of trajectory. So you’re hitting the flipper like the hotel lobby waffle maker the morning after midnight mini-golf but you’re not getting the drop targets or the upper right pop bumper and the ball’s coming back at you faster because you keep hitting it so hard and you drain. You’re stuck in a Dickian time loop. Be kind, rewind times 5, and now your milk money is Elton John’s milk money. And he’s rich. He probably doesn’t know how a quarter works anymore.

And you really thought the Crocodile Rock would last.

Asymmetry need not be a symptom of systemic fuckery. Asymmetry can be beautiful, or rather, it can be believed to be beautiful: all things being beautiful in the infinite eyes of infinite beholders. Harmony and balance are a collective fever dream, the spoonful of sugar that helps the homeopathy go down.

Life is chaos. Love is anarchy. If you find yourself driving a cab in your 40’s with a divorce and addiction under your belt and a new song in your heart, you are not a failure or “off-course”. You have, through a combination of your own will and that of circumstance, been derailed from from the course set for you, for all of us, by The Once and Future Powers That Be. Mastery of magics requires a sympathy for the systems that quell the spark of would-be witches. Oppression is cradled by the composite falsehood that everyone is given an equal chance to make the “right” choices. Symmetry.

To progress through the game, you will need to use your left flippers to “pass” the ball to the flippers on your right. This affords you access to the drop targets, the upper right pop bumper, and allows you to better anticipate and guide the flow of the ball.

Asymmetry can be a design. Asymmetry can be a form of control, of collaboration of movement and mechanics with the machine.

Consider: are you playing against the machine, or against yourself?

The answer lies within…another machine, probably.

Be it blessed and beheld as a “classic” by most, Captain Fantastic & The Brown Dirt Cowboy fails in that most basic element of design and play: to respect the gaze of the viewer.

Instead of plying a relic of the 70’s back to life with pocket change, you could be at home, applying heat to proteins to induce chemical reactions between amino acids and sugars to create maillard reactions to allow for the food to be healthy and delicious upon eating. You could be petting a shelter dog, or participating in social media activism through radical hashtags.

You deserve a little more effort and credit than this:

All machines were created equal, but do not merit equal time and attention. Not everything old is good; not everything new is irrelevant.

I did not turn away a tenable niche writing about more socio-economically ubiquitous games so that you could let a greedy cheap tchotchke tell you that you don’t understand pinball because you weren’t blown away by Captain Fantastic.

The designers of the machine thought so little of your discretion that when Bally management realized 1975 was a little too early to release a pinball machine adorned with handjobs, Hitler, and middle fingers, the design team just staggered haphazard stars over the art. They didn’t even bother to cover up the questionable content with the stars. You were deemed not worth the time for actual censorship.

Fight through the fake out. Tap out tender sleight of hand with the tandem flippers. Left passes to right. Right knocks some shit around. Back to left. There is a flow, there is a rhythm. Graceful. Organic. Awkward. Asymmetrical.

You will now take back your milk money–metaphorically, in the form of an extra ball or high score–and having exhumed its existential treasures with your lithe and limber fingers, you will survey its surrendered circuits and find the strength within to say: LOOK COME ON I GET THAT HE PLAYS PINBALL IN THE MOVIE BUT ITS ELTON FUCKING JOHN SURELY YOU COULD HAVE THOUGHT OF SOMETHING ELSE FOR HIM TO DO ON THE PLAYFIELD INSTEAD OF PLAY PINBALL WITH HIS BACK TO ME LIKE I DUMPED HIM ON HIS BIRTHDAY.

Your studies, if sustained, will take you to equinoxes of equine horror and congregations of covens along the coral reef. You will find yourself laid to waste light years from all reason, with only your own broken solace to occupy your mind. Once we cross the border into Portland it’ll get a bit better, though.

You will never know a perfect system, for you are angel of the ascent of asymmetry. The moment you turn the game on you introduce elements immeasurable and unfettered by imagination. No schematic, regardless of how tight and concise its elegance, will ever be able to dispel your sphere of disorder.

Precious cadet: should you find yourself teetering on 40, driving a cab and preocuppied by the dreamplucking of a ukulele waiting for you at home, you are not lost. Though there be no path or signs to direct you, you are not lost. Keep going.

And really, Lasercue does what this machine tries to in such more modish and majestic ways.