Category — HUMAN BEINGS

As the new year arrives, I found that the fascinating annotated bibliography for truth-seekers, compiled by the late R. T. Gault has vanished from the web.   Therefore, as both tribute to compiler and hopeful olive-branch extended to the next generation, I am resurrecting most of Gault’s website, including the entire Absolute Elsewhere section and research bibiographies.   Fortunately, I took the precaution of saving them all several years ago, and only had to move them from the secret magneto-crystal vaults in the ice-caves over to the public website.   So take a word from the old wrinkled alien qi-gong master, and reject all negative influences you have involuntarily recieved!  Further, do what thou wilt and enjoy the knowledge transmitted from your inadvertant gurus!

**LINK**

(As time allows I will try to piece together the Order of the Twilight Star Pages from Wayback Machine.)

see also:

Retorno de los brujos (Morning of the Magicians) en español.

One thing that has baffled me for many years is the identity of the artist who painted the original covers of the Illuminatus! paperbacks, which were published by Dell in 1975.   The signature, clear as day, reads:  “Carlos Victor“, but I have never encountered any artist of that name in any reference.  Wikipedia credits all the paintings to this mysterious artist.

So let me say it first here:  the identity of Carlos Victor is almost certainly the wonderful painter Carlos Ochagavia!

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At first glance the dark palettes and almost monochrome scenes painted by Lou Feck seem rather low key.  Compared to the startling palettes of his contemporaries in the late 1960s and early 1970s, you’d think that Feck was either taking a lot of downers or painting with deliberate understatement.  Yet the more I look at his cover paintings, the more I am convinced that Feck was using a masterful and subtle style.

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Completely gobsmacked by this painting up for auction at Heritage, I wondered who the artist was.  None other than Irving Sinclar (1895-1969), who was apparently a well-known portrait and commercial artist beginning in the 1930s.  According to the SF Chronicle (24 Feb 1969):

“Born in British Columbia on March 5, 1895. After settling in San Francisco in 1917, Sinclair worked as a billboard artist for Foster & Kleiser, and in the 1920s was art director for Fox West Coast Theatres. In 1939 he studied in New York under Wayman Adams. San Francisco remained his adopted home where he painted Mayors Rossi, Robinson, and Christopher. He became well known for portraits of Hollywood stars and other famous Americans including F. D. Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Summers were often spent in Canada in his Galiano Island studio. Sinclair died in San Francisco on Feb. 21, 1969.”

With such an interesting resumé, I thought that there should be plenty of material online about the artist.  However, if Google is to be believed, Sinclair is primarily known for this realistic painting called “The Poker Game.”

It’s a nice painting, to be sure, though it might have been done by Norman Rockwell, who could never have painted the bold figurative portraits in the Heritage lot.   Where the Poker Game excels in muted detail, the portrait thrives in electric, almost psychedelic colors…if you view the large resolution version at the Heritage link (above), you will see the bold, effortless brushwork.  As if dashed off in a hurry, the portrait sings with fervent, nervous energy…I’m gobsmacked by that blue and orange, I tell you!

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It was at a Boskone panel two years ago that Howard Waldrop and George Zebrowski turned me on to the works of Chad Oliver.  I’m just getting around to reading an old copy of Shadows in the Sun (Ballantine Edition, 1954) which is literally disintegrating page by page as I read it.  What an amazing story this is!  I can certainly see why Zebrowski picked this title for Crown Book’s Classics in Modern Science Fiction series.  The strangely out-of-tune Jefferson Springs, Texas, at first seems to resonate with menace, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Jack Finney’s novel which was being serialized in Collier’s magazine later the same year, Nov - Dec 1954).  But then the story veers into unexpected directions, and though Oliver’s prose is at times poetic, it is always clear and to the point.   For example, here is the protagonist, Paul Ellery, reflecting on the human tendency towards urbanization:

What sane man would prefer to live in the shrieking chaos of a city, stacked in like sardines with his neighbors in the smoke and the dirt and the sweat? What sane man would voluntarily leave the sunshine and the green fields and the quiet companionship of home for a factory and a tenement and the grinding of machinery?

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If, like me, you can’t make it up to Montreal for Worldcon 2009, you can at least graze on the feeds and photostreams.   Enjoy vicariously!

Voyageur, official Anticipation Newsletter

Stross - Krugman dialog [MP3 on Stross blog]  [transcript!]

tweets:

Chris [Drink Tank] Garcia on Twitter

#anticipationsf  #worldcon09 feeds aggregated

some blogs with Worldcon heavy posts:

Irene Gallo [photos]

Lionel Davoust [en francais]

Kate Baker [Sofanaut Podcasts]

Cheryl [Emerald City] Morgan

Amy H. Sturgis [photos on Flickr]

Jenny Rappaport

Kyle Cassidy [photos!]

John [Whatever] Scalzi

yonmei

Cory Doctorow  [Flickr photos]

How is it that my brother, Po, marooned out in the wilds of the high desert at Canyon Blanco is first one to tell me about the synthetic brain news?    Here I am, wired up to the ears with wireless routers zapping me and servers buzzing underfoot…only a beer cap toss from a major data center…and as far as I knew I had a unique and unreplaceable hunk of gray matter floating in my skull.   Sure it’s a little frayed around the edges, has its foibles, is a beast when it comes to  cold starts on a winter morning, but still–after all it’s been through–it seemed a right decent old brain, as far as I was concerned.  But now we know that these dweebs over at Blue Brain Project have already concocted a rat’s brain, and are madly tuning their skills to create a human brain within ten years.  **BBC Story**

Is it just me, or does that seem like it might not work out according to plan?

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Reading the MOMA Book on Rodchenko, I was struck by Rodchenko’s diary entry about the early aviator Aleksandr Vasiliev.  What must a barnstorming demonstration have been like at Kazan in the year 1912?   At a time when the world was being transformed by new technology, here was a living vision of speed, of man’s ascent to the skies, of futurism come knocking at the skulls of old consciousness, and the dawning of a new age of man.    According to Rodchenko, on Sunday, June 3rd, 1912:

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This beautiful illustration for the cover of Daughter of IS (1978), by Mikal D. Huber, is a wonderful example of the science fiction art of Carlos Ochagavia.  The background is rendered in a light, airy tone that fades away, with major features that become transparent (in this case, a moon) .  The main figure is also somewhat soft — a woman rising up in cloud — while the most tangible figure in the painting (a hand on fire!) is disembodied.   In the middle distance are Ochagavia’s characteristic space-vehicles, usually saucers standing on chunky legs, and arcing behind the scene is a jet that leaves a visible trail.   The image, as a whole, is strangely ethereal; is it a realistic painting, softened at the edges?  Or a surrealistic painting, with a few concrete objects for our gaze to anchor upon?   Ochagavia tantalizes us to find out…but often as not, the books being illustrated hold few clues as to what the artist was thinking.

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The wonderful Muzafar Bhaid is riding his bicycle for peace across Pakistan!  From the highest mountains of the world in Hunza region, the intrepid Muzafar is taking annual stages on his way to Islamabad.  Is this fellow wonderfully awesome, or what?

As our government sends in a fascist whacko to launch commando raids, Muzafar is biking along the steepest grades and the dustiest highways of the world…   My hat is off to you, Muzafar, brother!   Ride on all peace-loving people, we will get there someday.

Check out the two stages of Mazafar’s route so far:   last year from Gojal (shown on map as Ghulmit) to Gilghit,  then this year from Gilgit to Abbotabad.   Amazing!

There is something strangely futuristic about the fashions of the 2009 Estetika and Wellness Fair, held this week in Bucharest, Romania.  A set of photos is floating around, depicting the weird loops and cascades of hair on display during the stylist contest.  Reuters blog snarks “Very 17th Century Brothel, Honey!” but it reminds me more of an SFnal flashback to the 70s and 80s.

Reading the excellent articles on the intrepid wanderer, Socialist, ex-pat, Science Fiction writer, Mack Reynolds, in the latest issue of eI by Earl Kemp, and was amused by the anecdotes of the Institute of Twenty-First Century Studies, which was an organization of professional SF writers during the 1950s. Kemp mentioned that the Proceedings of the aforementioned society were collected and published by Advent, so that the PITFCS are preserved. Looking around on Google to see if a copy is extant anywhere, I discovered that there is also a Center for Twenty-First Century Studies at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, of all places, but it has nothing to do with Science Fiction, and proclaims as its focus (without irony!) as:
critical reflection in such areas as feminism, media theory, multiculturalism, postcolonialism, cultural and social theory, and lesbian and gay studies.

Well, I hope to dig up a rogue’s gallery of mug shots of the two identically named centers and compare them for my personal edification. I’m also curious to see what the level of discourse is in their proceedings, of course… what do some drunken, cantankerous SF writers look like when stacked up against our post-modern scholars?

In the post-Hello Kitty Universe, the bizarre blank-faced character known as Tu Siji (Rabbit Siji) is both ubiquitous and actually making money.   Creator Wang Maomao said she couldn’t believe that her random doodles over three years turned into a marketing favorite, earning her more than 100,000 Yuan per year (US $13,000).   Not everyone can be so lucky, but it’s amusing to watch an interview with twenty year old Wang Maomao, recently featured on Zhongtian News Network.

Philip Jose Farmer, one of the great SF minds of our times, passed away in his Peoria, Illinois home.   The tributes and obits are flowing in from all corners of society.   SF Site has posted a great 1975 interview conducted in Minneaopolis by Dave Truesdale, (editor of Tangent fanzine), which primarily deals with the identity of Kilgore Trout.

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Ran over to Mass Art Paine Gallery (how apropos!) to see the R. Crumb Underground exhibit, which was written up recently in the Phoenix and the Globe.   This exhibit kicked off two years ago at the Yerba Buena Center of the Arts, and has been making the rounds from city to city, and finally seems to have drifted into Boston on a Greyhound bus, clutching an old leather bag of 78s and sinsemilla buds.

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Yes, I knew her way back when…   That is to say the original sproutling.   Here we are in the artist’s hip pad, with me sporting my usual fantastico look!

Now my daughter, Nuie, has launched her first solo art show at Backstage Studio Productions in Kingston, New York.    The website is out of date, but they actually are hosting the show this month, and held the gala opening last Saturday night, February 9th.   Nuie somehow managed to sell 9 pieces on the opening night!    Way to go, Nu!

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