Category — HUMAN BEINGS

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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The parting message written by Master Sheng Yen to all of us:

Grown old while busy with trivial matters,
Shedding tears and laughter over emptiness…
But in the beginning there was no I,
So birth and death can both be tossed aside.
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Irina baked this amazing birthday cake for my brother, Sangpo, in the shape of the ubiquitous Domo-kun character from NHK Japan Satellite t.v.   According to the artist, the cake was coffee flavored (with some vanilla and grapefruit juice in the dough), and the icing was chocolate…not to mention the screaming pit of strawberries and marshmallow teeth!   Happy Birthday, Po!

Reading Famous Long Ago, My Life and Hard Times with Liberation News Service  brings to mind the fact that struggle is never finished.  Yes, we need to have some hope, we need to stand up and cheer every day when another decent, humanizing, and reasonable executive order is delivered by the Obama White House…  and yet, we also have to remember that there is a reason why we still need change in the first place.

The memoir by the unlikely hero, Raymond Mungo, and the ghost of his alter-ego, Marshall Bloom, is riddled with the brazen and ridiculous posturing of green college grads and their acid-dropping cohorts who are hell-bent on saving the world.  And yet, it is also true to itself, to its own ingenuity, self-deceptions, and aspirations.  In a way, their self-determination to create the alternate news service, the non-lapdog, non-suckup, non-yesMan, non-corporate shill news service; where independent bylines gathered together under a loose umbrella called freedom of speech and freedom of the press, was noble indeed.

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I was talking with my friend Don about this cool book I am reading about the rocket scientist John Whiteside Parsons — Strange Angel — when the conversation somehow changed tracks to Leon Theremin, the enigmatic Soviet inventor.   This conversation prompted me to check out the recent biography by Albert Glinsky, Theremin: ETHER MUSIC AND ESPIONAGE, with an introduction by the late great Robert Moog… yes, that Bob Moog!  In his introduction, Moog mentioned that he wrote an article for Electronics World in 1960 that detailed his early work selling theremin kits by mail order.  Hmm, I thought…wonder what became of that article?  Turns out that someone scanned it for a website, which later vanished, but miraculously it was archived by the Wayback Machine!   Mr. Peabody and Simon, I know you’re out there watching out for us miserable earthlings, and I have to thank you, sincerely. Hope you will enjoy the scanned images of the article, which appeared in the January 1961 issue of Electronics World:
page 1 (288k jpg)
page 2 (472k jpg)
page 3 (400k jpg)
page 4 (342k jpg)
page 5 (135k jpg)

Now we can build our own authentic 1960-style theremins and aspire to the magnificent soundtrack of the original The Day The Earth Stood Still.

If you are interested in other kits, check out the amazing kit details by Art Harrison,  Theremin Enthusiasts Club, and the geeks at Theremin World.  If you are into the latest theremin music, check out Thereminvox.

Another legend is lost!  Only days after Studs Terkel, the mysterious singer Yma Sumac, self-described descendent of an Inca emperor, has passed away.   As described by Los Angeles Times music critic Don Heckman, she was “a living, breathing, Technicolor musical fantasy — a kaleidoscopic illusion of MGM exotica come to life in an era of practicality.”

Sumac’s absolutely unforgettable face, with a sort of smoldering sexuality, was matched only by her utterly bizarre vocal range, from growling jungle beast to piercing soprano, which she effortlessly projected into cheesey mambo arrangements.  The result is a sort of high-cheekboned Screaming Jay Hawkins shining down on us from a secret golden temple on Macchu Picchu.   Well, enjoy for yourselves a couple of tunes to remember the one and only Yma Sumac:

Goomba Boomba

Gopher

Studs Terkel, the great American historian, radio host, and defender of civil liberties, has died. His radio spot lasted 45 years, the entire second half of the 20th Century. His books gave voice to the voiceless, and he wrote the history of the lives that get lost between the lines of the rich and famous…the history of real people who work and struggle to makes ends meet. Terkel was as much a product of Chicago as Nelson Algren, and yet his works span the continent, embracing the breadth and width of the American Experience.

I actually had no idea who Terkel was until one day that I met him by accident at La Guardia Airport in New York City in the Winter of 1979. I was waiting for a flight to Albuquerque on a cold dark evening in December, typing up some notes on my old glass-keyed Royal portable typewriter. Studs came walking along the terminal and asked where I was going. I explained that I was going to visit my father during the winter break from college. After a few more words of idle chit-chat, Studs put down his bulging, beat up leather briefcase and asked me to watch it for him while he went to get a cup of hot tea. I said sure thing and after about fifteen minutes he came wandering back, blowing his nose in a handkerchief and breathing steam rising from a styrofoam cup. “Thanks a lot, kid,” Terkel said. “Terrible cold I got this trip.” I asked him where he was going back to, and he said Chicago. I told him I was from Chicago too, after which he introduced himself and we had a rambling conversation. When he got up to go to his gate, he said, “By the way, this bag you were watching has the manuscript of the new book I’m working on.” Then he thanked me again and went on his way. I sat back and thought, what an amazing man! He trusts his current book with a total stranger! And remember, this was back in 1979, when manuscripts were reams of paper, painstakingly typed, whited out, blue-penciled and stet-marked. But there it is…

Later on, I found out that the book he left with me was the draft copy of American Dreams: Lost and Found. And that’s how I got introduced to both the man and his work. Studs Terkel knew what it means to struggle and dream, and he trusted his fellow men and women to be able to comprehend their situation, to describe it in their own words, and to transcend their problems. Studs Terkel knew the meaning of trust, which is why we could always trust him to tell the truth.

Does anyone seriously think the current economic collapse is surprising? There is a reason that Reagan’s first term in office spawned the “me” generation, and a reason that the wipeout of the Savings and Loan industry happened almost overnight. It all began with Reagan’s strict deconstructionism of the regulatory systems that protected us from predatory Wall Street sharks. Just to keep our facts straight, vicious greed is nothing new to U.S. financial circles. Read Mathew Josephson’s The Robber Barons, if you have a strong stomach for exploitation and naked avarice. Of course, if you prefer you can just stick your head in the rubbish bin and pretend that our leaders are all beneficent “industrial statesmen.” Nonetheless, after the misery of the Great Depression years, some reasonable barriers were raised to prevent excessively over-leveraged cash-to-debt ratios, which causes banks to collapse. Reagan, of course, would have none of that!  According to Reaganomics, aka trickle-down economics, aka voodoo economics, the only thing we ever need to worry about is how fast the rich become richer.  Remember Michael Milken, anyone?  Or Gordon Gekko?

When the dot-com meltdown finally occurred, after the decade long run-up of irrational exuberance, did it take anything more than a micron of brain-matter to see that the frenzied flight of assets from stocks into real estate was not a good idea? Apparently, as long as the brokers and other sharks can make their dime, it is a trifling matter if the entire economy is banked on fantasy, zero-collateralized debt based on hyper-inflated prices. Brilliant! You see that broken down flea-bag dump, with flapping chunks of old asbestos siding falling off the termite-ridden particle boards? It can be yours for only $879,999, today! No money down! Sign here! [Read more →]

Browsing for a cheap paperback at Goodwill in Davis Square, I just happened to find a beat up first edition hardcover copy of The Fifty Minute Hour, by Robert Lindner. I grabbed this for the collection, because it contains the famous essay on the subject “Kirk Allen,” who some have said was none other than Paul Linebarger. Linebarger, of course, is the SF writer we all know and love as the amazing Cordwainer Smith.

**Update! The full article is now available on Harper’s:  Part 1, Part 2**

Was Linebarger actually the model for Kirk Allen? That exceptionally interesting question has been delved into by Alan C. Elms in his essay: Behind the Jet-Propelled Couch, where Elms discusses attribution of Linebarger’s identity. Supposedly the secret was revealed by Dr. Lindner to Leon Stover at a cocktail party hosted by Harvard’s Fairbank Center in 1951 or 1952, and Stover later leaked the information to Brian Aldiss. Since Aldiss published this claim in his classic Billion Year Spree (1973), it has been a subject of feverish speculation throughout fandom. Or so I would imagine.  Linebarger’s daughter, Rosana, has also discussed the Kirk Allen identity question on the excellent Cordwainer Smith website that she maintains.

I am such an admirer of C’Mell and the Underpeople, that I plan to examine the Jet-Propelled Couch chapter in great detail. In the meantime, I hope you all enjoy the strange dust-jacket that wrapped the 1955 edition, with its technicolor floating brains!

Only by chance did I notice that Lloyd Dangle, cartoonist and creator of Troubletown, is currently tramping across America on a 20th Anniversary Book Tour, celebrating two decades of ceaseless trouble! How can it be that most people know Dangle only because of his Airborne packages, and not for his amazing comics?

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In an interview recently posted on StarShipSofa, Michael Moorcock said that he really didn’t want to write a memoir because he didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings by remembering things differently than his friends who must necessarily appear in the story. Since many of them are still alive, Moorcock wanted to avoid conflicts. Despite the pleas of his editor… who said “look, you just write the book, and let our lawyers sort out the rest” …Moorcock still felt badly about a tiff he’d gotten into with J. G. Ballard over the origins of the book Crash.

Out of curiosity I went to the bookshelf and pulled down the copy of New Worlds Quarterly #2 to see what was in it, and lo and behold! the Ballard contribution is an essay on Wyndham Lewis‘ classic trilogy, The Human Age. It’s too bad that this essay (Visions of Hell) is so long out of print, but in the interest of protecting Ballard’s copyright, I won’t reproduce it here. Suffice it to say, that the commonly used quote from the article, which appeared in Maria Faustino’s Heaven and Hell (2004), is not by any means the best, though conveniently for some readers, it does occupy the opening paragraph!

Hell is out of fashion — institutional hells at any rate. The populated infernos of the twentieth century are more private affairs, the gaps between the bars are the sutures of one’s own skull… A valid hell is one from which there is a possibility of redemption, even if it is never achieved, the dungeons of an architecture of grace whose spires point to some kind of heaven. The institutional hells of the present century are reached with one-way tickets, marked Nagasaki and Buchenwald, worlds of terminal horror even more final than the grave.

Interesting, of course, but it only sets the stage for Ballard’s discussion of Lewis, which is quite juicy. As a casual aside, Ballard mentions a radio performance of The Human Age, in which Donald Wolfit performed as the Bailiff:

Put on by the Third Programme ten years ago with tremendous style and panache, and with a virtuoso performance by Donald Wolfit as the Bailiff, the trilogy came over superbly as black theological cabaret.

Written in 1965, this puts the radio play in 1956, the year before Wolfit was knighted for his service to the theatre! Apparently the performance of surrealistic black comedy based on the works of a madman like Lewis is no drawback when it comes to being vetted for Knighthood, which is a great relief really, when you think about it. The radio program was produced by D. G. Bridson, and strangely enough, Harvard seems to have a copy of the original radio script… which warrants further inquiry on my part!

Getting back to Ballard’s essay, Visions of Hell, personally I found the most fascinating aspect of the piece to be Ballard’s appraisal of Lewis:

Although his criticism is written with a tremendous elan, a boiling irritability and impatience with fools, Lewis’s reputation began to slide, particularly as his right-wing views seemed to reveal a more than sneaking sympathy for Hitler and the Nazis… The inner eye of the blind painter, warped by his own bile and malign humour, illuminates a landscape beyond time, space, and death. Already cut off by temperament from the mood of his age, he inhabits a private purgatory or, rather, sits with the other journeymen to the grave on the nominal ground outside the walls of limbo, waiting to begin his descent into hell.

Hmm, sounds a lot like Vermilion Sands to me! But, of course, those were the stories that Ballard was writing at the time he published this piece in New Worlds, so the imagery may be a projection of his own onto The Human Age.

Nonetheless, being one of the half-dozen humans in North America who has actually read the trilogy, I can tell you that Ballard’s description of the bizarre circumstances of the work is spot on, and I detect more than a casual link between the ineffectual and morally tranquilized character, Pullman, in Lewis’s trilogy, and the oddly distant protagonists of Ballard’s works.

What Ballard managed to do — and one of the reasons I love his writing so much — is to transmute the leaden trappings of Christian theology and Miltonian brimstone into the alienated gold of the modern built environment. If anything, Ballard’s world in High Rise is colder, more aloof, and twice as sinister as the Hell depicted in The Human Age. There is a disturbing sense of displacement in Ballard’s hell, because we are not so much removed from the world of the living, but merely trapped in it, and forced to examine it with unrelenting consciousness of the flaws that we have built in to everything around us… We drift helplessly onto a concrete island and lay trapped there, immobilised by the terror of realization — this is the world we have made, and there is no escape!

With Phoenix Lander scooping ice cubes and sand castles from the polar beach of Mars, it seems that planetary geology is becoming popular. Images from the Messenger fly-by of six months ago are now being recycled through the news media, showing vulcanism on the surface of Mercury. Even the New York Times gets into the act, featuring articles on Moon rocks and lunar soil chemisty. However, these are just the latest pages in a long story, and can’t really compare to the excitement of the planetary geology craze that erupted during the time of the Apollo missions. Back in those days of the late 60s and early 70s, the first samples were carried back from the Moon, and whisked under armed guard to the Institute of Meteoritics at the University of New Mexico.

Luckily for me, my father became friends with the Institute’s Senior Research Scientist, Marty Prinz, who was one of the leading geologists working on Moon rocks when they first arrived to planet Earth. In recent years, I was sure that a Wikipedia page or other resource would provide a biography of Marty. After all, how many geologists have an asteroid named after them?

But strangely enough there is hardly a mention of him outside of the literature on spinels, llmenites, and electron microprobe analyses of Apollo lunar samples. So let me tell you a little bit about the wonderful Prinz family…

Marty was actually one of the most wordly and widely read people you can imagine. His bookshelf was no more dominated by books on geology and science, than any other kind of literature, ranging from the classical to the modern, from the serious and abstruse to the purely absurd. Vicky Prinz, Marty’s wife at the time, was equally gregarious. They were among the few people who could keep my father spinning and diving for cover during a dinner conversation. Of course, being the tender age of 12 or 13 years old at the time, I was mostly interested in playing with the Prinz’ children: Martha, Will and Michael. Say, if any of you three run across this article, drop me an email! We should put together a proper Wikipedia page.

But here is something you will not find out anywhere else: when I left New Mexico to go to college, I got a one-way ticket from Albuquerque to New York City. By that time, Marty Prinz had taken the job as curator of the Mineral collection of the American Museum of Natural History. Since he was probably the only person my family knew in Manhattan, he was asked to pick me up at the airport and escort me over to Columbia College. Well, Marty showed up in his Volkswagen van and swept me over the Triborough Bridge. In practically no time we were heading West along East 97th Street towards the Transverse Road that cuts through Central Park. While we were waiting for a stop light, being the first car behind the crosswalk, I was amazed to discover that the host of Masterpiece Theatre, no less than Alaister Cooke himself, was walking right in front of our car!

“Marty, that’s Alastair Cooke, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, so it appears,” said Marty and then proceeded to honk his horn and wave his arm in a menacing circle out of the driver’s window. Cooke scampered across the street with a terrified look in his eyes. The light had turned green while Cooke was in the crosswalk, and Marty stepped on the gas barely before the 70 year old had cleared our front bumper. Suddenly, the reality of being in New York City dawned on me in that little encounter…you might be a celebrity, you might be the bloody host of Masterpiece Theatre, but when you come to the big city, get the hell outta the way when the light turns green, okay buddy!

Needless to say, when Marty subsequently dumped me without ceremony on the corner of Broadway and 114th Street and then drove off immediately I had my own breathless taste of coping in a hurry. After that, Marty & I met occasionally for a chat over some Chinese food at Hunan Garden, or at the Museum where he showed me–with very uncharacteristic amount of trust, I always thought–the elaborate alarm system that he had installed to protect the amazing minerals collection, which included nothing less than the shimmering Star of India Sapphire.

Marty Prinz was always witty, sometimes irascible, and fond of bitingly humorous ripostes. Although he passed away in 2000, Marty’s Guide to Rocks and Minerals (edited with George Harlow and Joseph Peters) is still in print and considered the standard book on the subject. So as we turn once again to the craze in Moon rocks and harvesting the dust of nearby planets, let’s raise a toast to one of the pioneers in that field… ad astra, Marty!