Crashed on earth, shipwrecked with no means to phone home, the Alien Ted tries to survive in Brussels. These are my pencil drawings in a pocket notebook, sometimes on a beer coaster, when drinking some beers in cafe Dolle Mol over a decade ago.
An accident with the car lighter made him crash on earth. I doesn’t look good and he doesn’t know what to do.
Yep, of course his ship explodes. Now he is completely shipwrecked on a planet full of crazy monkeys.
The first job of Alien Ted: barkeeper
Another job Alien Ted is trying out: begging, sitting on the ground in a shopping street. Signs: “Solden” – discount; “je faim” – I hungry. In front of him is a discarded cup from Quick, a Belgian hamburger franchise. Lots of beggars are Roma, begging as a family business or deployed by beggar pimps; others are domestic drunks/junkies. Some are just surviving the homelessness.
Alien Ted tries our habits. As a dedicated consumer, he believes that more must be better.
He can stand it anyway, his body can even resist nuclear explosions, so a cigarette won’t hurt.
Our bodies are not that strong, and we should not smoke. You get cancer, and then you die.
That’s easy: as a living statue he only needs to go stand on a bucket, and tourists will throw money in his hat.
Alien Ted is wondering about the window prostution near North station. And decides to try it out. Text on window: “demande serveuses” – waitresses wanted.
It’s free to enjoy. In Brussels, “manneken pis” (peeing boy statue) is the second biggest tourist trap.
Alien Ted is mostly silent, but when he opens his mouth, fantastic sounds come out. He is able to reproduce any sound, because his vocal organ functions like a digital-analogue converter. This is how advanced his species is. They enhanced themselves in extraordenary ways and now are post…alien? Ted has many surprising capabilities.
Alien Ted thinks the paving stones are dead, so he plants a tree in the middle of Grand Place. There needs to be some green here, that’s better, Ted thinks. “Grote Markt / Grand Place” – means “Big (market) place” is the #1 tourist attraction in Brussels. Crowded every day, sun or rain.
Alien cat. Cats are like aliens – strange creatures living among us. We don’t understand each other, but the cat doesn’t care – the deal is: you feed and house them, and they come and go as they please. Alien cat could also be a constellation. Seen from Alien Ted’s home planet of course.
Alien Ted’s response is never what you’d expect. Disproportional, for having very different standards, ethics and instincts. A guy raises his fist, perhaps for a fistbump, and Alien Ted blows a hole right through him.
We are deeply touched by a small thing, triggering an emotional response, while we don’t see or want to see that our world is on fire.
What if Jezus was an alien? Sure, everything strange to us, we would like to pin it down, so that it has a place and stays the same. And is no longer a threat. Maybe an alien, when we found one, would have been crucified by us.
Here Alien Ted is rapidly learning numbers, letters, math, geometry, calculus, and eventually designs a spaceship and calculates a trajectory to his home world. All in one quick session. Now he only has to build it.
Floating upwards to reach the apple. Alien Ted apparently can do this. We can’t, levitation is not possible for us. Unless as a metaphor for our ambition in life, to achieve that which is hard to reach. By using the forces around us, let them carry and propel us, it may seem we can float to our goals effortlessly.
