Category — ARTS

Having fun preparing for this year’s Boskone Art Show.  Of course it’s crazy to hang my crummy sketches alongside the great artists you will see there, but hey let’s face it, I’m not going to be quitting my day job…so sketching remains a completely fun hobby (thank goodness).  Below are some snapshots taken during the sketching, which I found amusing, especially the one based on a fan cosplay photo related to I Was Kidnapped By Lesbian Pirates From Outer Space.

Compiled from several panels at Arisia 2010, here are some excellent online resources for aspiring writers.   If you have others to recommend, send them along!

online zines:

http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/
http://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/
http://www.ideomancer.com/
http://nossamorte.com/
http://www.electricvelocipede.com/
http://www.shimmerzine.com/

writer’s resources:

http://www.anotherealm.com/prededitors/
http://ralan.com/
http://www.duotrope.com/

This panel featured Jeanne Cavelos , Joy Marchand , David Nurenberg , Allan Steele and GOH Gardner Dozois , who discussed the relationship between writer and editor in the SF field and how the situation has changed.

In their opening remarks, Cavelos related her experience as a senior editor in New York, where she found that the interest editors take in nurturing new authors from unknowns into big names has fallen victim to the push for blockbusters.  Today, if an editor is not advocating for a bestseller to the senior editors, to her peers, to the sales division, to the assistant editors and designers she’ll be out of a job.  Allen Steele pointed out that short fiction editors still manage to read the submissions they find interesting, and they’ll take the time to send comments back to the author or ask for changes.   “Short fiction editors still edit,” said Dozois, ” but at the major publishing houses, who’s in charge?  In fact, it’s the sales people who end up canceling book deals.”  Nurenberg emphasized how incredibly valuable the feedback he received from games publisher White Wolf was to his career, “like water to a drowning man…“  As that analogy didn’t make much sense, he said, “I mean to a thirsty.”  Somehow the object of the verb got lost, but we get the idea!

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[photo by Sean Molloy]

At my first Arisia, I found myself weaving through crowds of strangely-coiffed pirates, rocketeers, and gamers; wondering at what point my own personality would intersect with one of those cliques and, at the same time, idly speculating as to which clique it would be.  Twisting, turning, and meandering, I wondered if there was any cipher concealed for me in my conversations with Freemasons, swordsmen, and zombies, or a secret buried somewhere in the depths of a prominent decolletage.  In the end I was left with an exhilarating sense that something interesting had transpired, and though I could list any number of particulars of the fun things I did, I wasn’t quite sure how it all added up.   This year, at my second Arisia, I was more accustomed to the casual ebb and flow, the meaningless randomness of who one might meet at any given moment, and I was more attuned to simply enjoy the dance.  Indeed, some of the most startling appearances in 2009 — the stilt-walking woman in tights and razor claws, the body-gloved Harley Quin, and the immaculately nuanced Steampunk ensembles — returned.  They were all conspicuously different from last year, but instead of novelty they radiated a pleasant warmth of familiarity.  Oh that mischievous stilt-woman!  Always scratching and snarling at the Muggles as they float up behind the glass of the atrium elevator!  And Harley, the little minx, does one ever tire of contemplating the poses she strikes while strapped into that saucy leather corset, black boots and ragged stockings?

[photos by Sean Molloy - http://www.flickr.com/photos/falconn67/]

It was equally reassuring to see pieces of last year’s favorites, if not ramped up to full energy, at least lying about here and there like fragments left over from an archaeological dig.  The skull-bracketed rocket pack that was flamboyantly posing with a team of rocketeers in ‘09, was this year merely glimpsed abandoned on a table, straps dangling idly alongside.  It certainly would have been fun if somebody rushed out of the con-suite, strapped on the skull-pack, and flamed up across the atrium space to a party upstairs! And yes, there were pirates, there were faeries, and furries, and a few storm trooper types.  You could say that it was the same rich stew of individuals at Arisia 2010, but there were definitely higher concentrations of bare feet, of blood-drenched nurses, blue-green body paint (though only a few of them Navi, as fas as I could tell), and really pervasive wearing of kilts.   Sure, some people I expect to see wearing a kilt (since that’s pretty common around the office…okay, it is Cambridge!), but it seemed like every time I turned around there was another  utilikilt wrapped around some smiling, bearded dude.  Which means that this year’s Arisia (officially sub-titled “the future and the past”) has been informally dubbed by Yunchtime as the “barefoot techno-fantasy fest, in a kilt.”

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Missed the premiere broadcast of Lloyd Dangle’s live streaming video feed last week, but somehow managed to tune in to the wrap up of this week’s “Big Ass Sarah Palin Episode.”    And well worth it!

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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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The recent opening of a group show at the Merry Karnowsky Gallery in L.A. took me by surprise, because the “cover” painting of the group show is an amazing canvas by Kent Williams, called Mother and Daughter.

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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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What a curious thread unraveled from reading the scanned issue of Telepath #1 on eFanzines this weekend. The fanzine, originally published by Arthur Haddon in Dec 1951, provided some tidbits of information about Australia’s first (if short-lived) SF pulp, Thrills Incorporated. This pulp was created by Stanley Horowitz’ Transport Publications following the the success of the weird mystery pulp, Scientific Thriller which appeared in 1948. Thrills Incorporated appeared in March 1950 and lasted for a total of 23 issues, ending in June 1952.

In the pages of Telepath, one of the Sydney Futurian Society fans, Vol Molesworth (1924-1964), interviewed the editor of Thrills Inc which helped to “clear up a number of points that fans in Australia and abroad had been debating.” This may have been a reference to a series of plagiarisations that took place in the first year of Thrills issues. As the editor, Alister Innes, confessed to Molesworth, “In the early issues we were hoodwinked by certain unscrupulous writers who plagiarised American SF stories without our knowledge. As soon as this was pointed out by our readers, we sacked those writers. Our present day policy is to give an author a title and an illustration and get him to write a story around them.”

What a curious way to run a magazine!   On the other hand, there might have been no way for the editors to have known that the stories were plagiarized.   According to Garry Dalrymple (via email), foreign science fiction magazines were treated as contraband in Australia between 1940 and 1950.   As prohibited imports,  issues of SF mags were discovered during routine inspection of the mails, and returned to sender.  This quarantine resulted in a market for locally printed SF pulps of questionable quality.    At that time, said Dalrymple, just about the only new stuff getting through to Sydney (and the Sydney Futurians) were gifts from Forry Ackerman!

On the quality of production that went into those opportunistic Australian SF pulps,  one author put it this way:  “Very often, when the editor (Innes) was running to a tight schedule he would have the artwork already done and hand you a picture, saying ‘Three thousand worlds and a title, old boy, and I do need them by Friday.” One picture he gave me didn’t allow a lot of scope as far as the title was concerned, I thought, so I called it ‘Jet-Bees of Planet J’. He took another look at the picture when I brought in the manuscript, then looked at the title again ‘See what you mean, old boy’. He nodded approval. “Sort of self-propelled by their own farts.’

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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]

Pleasantly surprised to discover Indoctrinaire, the first novel by Christopher Priest, a tale of strange foreboding and paranoia, wrapped up in altered states of consciousness and alternate realities.   The protagonist, Dr. Wentik, finds himself forcibly recruited from his scientific research post beneath the South Pole, and whisked away to the Planalto District of Mato Grosso in Brazil.  Both of these places are so far off the beaten track and outside of the ordinary world of human affairs that the novel begins with an eerie sense of dislocation, which is only accelerated into total disorientation as soon as Wentik begins to trek into the strangely deforested zone of Planalto.  His guide, a tight-lipped man named Musgrove, shows signs of mental illness as the story progresses and Wentik finds himself an occupant of “the jail,” under interrogation by an equally opaque antagonist named Astourde.
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Okay, since you asked, this is a snapshot I found online of Takeshi Ogawa and four Coachella 2008 attendees.   But what I wanted to say is that Ogawa has founded a new website for translators to and from Japanese, 26to50 .   Their mission:

We’re a band of professional translators. Our job is to transcribe 26 alphabetical letters of English into 50 phonetic characters of the Japanese language. Hence our group name was born. This is our venue to promote new writings and new writers, both to our readers and to our publishers. We hope, with the encouragement of our readers, to persuade our publishers to publish our recommendations in Japan. This is our CBGB, or Fillmore in fiction. We sincerely like to introduce new writers and new writings we love to our readers. We’ll do it for free, hoping our publishers like it and decide to publish our recommendations using us as their translators.

It’s been a while since I posted a somewhat sarcastic note about the fine artist, Steele Savage.   Now I feel compelled to follow up those seven images with yet another appreciation, since I really would like to know more about Savage and his career, which as far as I can tell spanned from the 1930s to 1970s.   In this instance, I discovered that what I had assumed to be an amusing bit of fantasy in the cover illustration for John Brunner’s The Long Result, turns out to be the very likeness of the alien who is one of the major characters in the book.   Here is the passage describing the remarkable, Anovel, a Regulan visitor to planet Earth:

“Anovel stood some five feet eight or nine in height, and his resemblance to a horse was remarkable.  He had the same long, rather sad-looking head, and twin nostril-sheaths rose above his eyes to give the effect of a horse’s ears.  His skin was a vivid and beautiful blue, while the mane which ran down the nape of his neck was yellow as a buttercup.”

What a fine rendition of that odd being Savage provided us!  Projecting from the characteristic cloud of faces, in this case a sort of crescent arc that swirls backwards to the left, it is a wonderful picture, indeed.   Without spoiling the story for you, there is also an implication of the “crucial facts,” or kenekito, lurking in the oversized eyes of Anovel.

This panel included Barry Malzberg, Allen Steele, James Morrow, and Rick Wilber.   Rachel Pollack was scheduled to appear, but nobody seemed to know where she was.   By way of introduction, Rick Wilber had prepared some sort of pseudo-clever analogy about the panelists, saying that they were at different places along the timeline.  Wilber said that Allen Steele, having already published 15 novels was someplace near mid-career, and that James Morrow was “settled” into a successful career with a number of major achievements under his belt.  Then Wilber introduced Barry Malzberg, with his long and distinguished career, as “still active in the field…”  Somehow you could sense the fumble on that last note, which provoked Malzberg to pounce into action:

“What a euphemism!” he roared.  “Just say it:  I’m an ancient writer, a washed up writer! Remember when Tom Disch said we’re all just ‘robots wired for sound?’  Well you can just go ahead and say a corpse wired for sound.”

Richard Wilber, recovering, said: “Ok, late career…”

“Autumnal!” said Malzberg.

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