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Curriculum Vitae
 The
4 Secret Meanings of Apollo 13
by Perry Vasquez
Photo by Michael Farr
In order to delve into the reality behind Apollo13 Art.com, know that
it has four secret meanings. Two of these were immediately
obvious when the name was chosen and the others revealed themselves over
time. The first secret meaning is the name of the NASA
mission to the moon that was launched on April 11, 1970. Technical failures
nearly doomed the ship and its crew to a death farther from home than
any human has ever known. Only the quick intelligence of NASA's engineers
and flight handlers as well as the talents of the ship's crew saved her
from drifting into the eternal void. When the ship finally returned safely
to earth seven days later, the mission was categorized a "successful
failure", a gripping paradox made all the richer in light of the
fateful overtones of the number 13 and the mission's namesake, Apollo,
the god of Fine Arts.
Alongside this technological and historical context lies the second
secret meaning and a more anthropological one, as the Spanish
word pollo (chicken) refers to those marginal and clandestine
crossers who render themselves up as human cargo into the hands of coyotes
whose infernal work it is to ferry them across the US/Mexico border
under sublunar conditions. In negative terms this implies a passive status,
put dialectically, a pollo's movement from one side of the border
to the other symbolizes the dynamics between staying put and going forth
into an unknown frontier.
One of the primary missions of this web site is to function as a learning
site where students can educate themselves in multimedia skills. To that
end, this site is filled with lecture material, assignments, and other
related resources. That leads us to the third secret meaning.
Apollo in Spanish is pronounced ah-poyo and also sounds
like apoyo which means assistance, help or aid.
Most importantly we now come to the mystical number 13 ( Not forgetting
that the Apollo 13 mission was to the moon) and we immediately find that
the Mayan moon calendar contains 13 months and was closely based on the
phases of the moon and the female menstrual cycle. Refulgent with the
idea of human reproductivty and procreation as well as of the cycles of
death and rebirth, this is the deepest secret of the four secret
meanings of Apollo 13. The number 13 activates, equalizes and
seals the emergent powers of our electronic media age in crisis, touching
off the transfer of intelligence and creativity via the fingers through
the keypad's coded interface of icons and symbols.
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