Posts from — June 2008

While cleaning up a shelf, I discovered a folder full of freebie cards that I picked up at the Alternate Press Expo (APE) in 2006. It was a fun time that year, with Keef Knight as one of six GoH, and a fine cast of erstwhile comix artists and DIY crafters filling the concourse. There is no point in just stashing these away in a box, so let’s look at some eye candy!

First up, Doug Sirois and Steamcrow :

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Yes, it has now been 22 years since I last finished writing a novel. A short career that began during a delirious summer (amid a gaggle of noisy ducks and cases of Liebfraumilch) and lasted until confronted with rewriting my third novel for the fourth time for yet another agent who just wanted a bitter laugh, no doubt. Six years altogether, during which I earned less than enough to buy a cup of coffee every week, and yet demanded from myself the discipline of a fakir and the liver of Charles Bukowski. So you can imagine it is with no small irony or sense of unbounding freedom and joy that I can look back over the last 22 years and thank all the Bodhisattavas in the Western Lands that I have not got the itch to write another novel during the entire time!

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It can now be revealed: in 1993 I returned to Yunnan in order to realize my childhood dream of becoming a tea baron. Yes, it all started in 1975 when I encountered the magnificent book by Robert Fortune, A Journey to the Tea Countries of China; Sung-lo and the Bohea Hills (1852), in which the intrepid Fortune manages to steal into the interior of China and abscond with the tea plants that subsequently helped to establish the British tea industry in colonial India. Disguised in wooden clogs, straw hat, and a wig with a long black queue hanging down his back, Fortune managed to punt along the waterways in the lowliest of riverboats. He dined on what he described as a miserable gruel, called congee, and reconnoitered the tea plantations and temple gardens along his route. Once, caught red-handed in a private garden while trying to steal a flower specimen, he was — instead of being turned over to the local yamen — given a nice cup of tea and a neatly potted living sample to take with him. Having yet to discover the reckless undertakings of Kingdon Ward and Joseph Rock, I was fascinated by the idea of botanist-explorer.

This of course led me to read various volumes on tea barons, tea manufacturing techniques, and to distinguish a broken orange pekoe from a souchong.  Many a pot of oolong was brewed for me that year by the sympathetic owner of the Golden Dragon Chinese restaurant that once was located next to the Pyramid Adult theatre on Route 66.  Later on, when I founded the tea club at Albuquerque High School in 1977 (with Tim Crews, Erik Stout, and Lars Tomasen), I thought becoming a tea baron was a fait accompli!

Little did I know, that tea is produced in quantities on the order of 3 million tonnes per year, and at the time of my venture to the China National Native Produce and Animal By-products Import and Export Corporation Yunnan Tea Branch that there was a total glut of tea on the market and thousands of unsold tonnes laying about at every market in sight. Nonetheless, I was introduced to the delights of various pu-erh teas, which have since then become my personal favorite… not the dessicated bricks of tuo-cha that look like donkey shit laced with straw, but rather the delightful, freshly dried pu-erh, which tastes of the very soil of Yunnan, a rich, hearty, unforgettable flavor as thick as coffee and tangy with minerals, pineapple sweat, and snake venom. The manager of the Yunnan Tea Branch gave me a wonderful descriptive flyer, reproduced here, for your edification:

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Although it is exciting to think about water and soil on Mars, and new horizons for human exploration of space, still we should bring our heads back out of the clouds and face facts: human civilization is a bloody mess! While people in the so-called “advanced” economies continue to suck energy likes pigs at the trough, and while “developing” nations such as China and India are racing to catch up like wild-eyed racecar drivers hyped up on dexadrine, untold billions of people are left starving at the margins… We are at the point of no return, and yet our so-called “leaders” can think of nothing better to do than rape, loot, and pillage whatever they can get their hands on. What is a thinking man or woman to do?

The only thing I can suggest is to ratchet down your own energy footprint, ride a bike, eat locally grown foods, and focus on two key tactics: creating pesticide free & bee friendly habitats, and implementing appropriate technology.

If the human race does nothing but blindly spin its wheels, we will very be soon left with no option but to become scavengers when the unsustainable mess comes tumbling down. Koyanisqaatsi, my friends.

These thoughts occurred to me when I saw an article on rocket stoves. These make a great deal of sense, because they can burn the smallest scraps of fuel and turn them into cooking energy with the lowest exchange of gases and smoke. The use of appropriate technology clearly should not be limited to people who must be resourceful to avoid starvation, and clearly cannot wait for the approval of idiots who continually drive their ridiculous gas-guzzling monsters to WalMart for 20 pound slabs of read meat.

Appropriate technologies need to be tested and used by all of us.

Shouldn’t there be a little Bollywood, or as the case may be Tollywood, Kollywood, and Lollywood, in all of us? If not for these bizarrely enterprising cinema juggernauts, we would never have seen the sublime musical masterpiece, Gumnaam - Jan Pehechaan Ho! From farcical nonsense to horror, Indian cinema is spicy!

Thinking about Bollywood today because I just got my copy of Darjeeling Limited, and can’t wait to watch it again!

The caption for this image is:

a) Douglas Feith  still defending his wretched lying treason in the year 2025

b) Beaver Cleaver (reincarnated in 2025 with the brain of Tom Cruise) is asked to hold the e-meter

c) Joe Sixpack is told how much he *actually* owes the bank in the year 2025

Actually it’s an illustration by Alex Ebel for James Gunn’s Breaking Point.

Enjoyed reading a copy of Heinlein’s novel “Have Spacesuit Will Travel,” with an especially nice cover by Steele Savage. Which made me curious to look up more covers by the same artist. He seems to have a predilection for disembodied, floating heads. Not to mention a very suspiciously unrealistic name! Gimme a break! “Steele,” with a silent “e” on the end? This has got to be a pseudonym…which led me to speculate on who Savage is, if not Steele Savage… If I had to pick a likely candidate, I would note the similarity of brushwork, the pale skies, and smoothly modeled surfaces in the work of Carlos Ochagavia, one of my all-time favorite artists (though lamentably almost forgotten today).

But since his work dates back to some World War II posters, we might have to accept the incredible name. Not to mention the incredible SF covers Savage painted in the late 60s and early 70s!

See also a listing of Steele Savage covers at ISFDB.

A few covers and illustrations on flickr.

A small gallery of Arabian Nights illustrations, circa 1932.

Yes, in the late 1970s there were some *very* weird science fiction fans at Columbia University. Some read stacks of comics and novels every day, then meticulously reviewed them for the Columbia University Science Fiction Society Fanzine, affectionately known as CUSFuSsing. Others could be found deep in the necromancy sections of Magickal Childe or Sam Weiser bookstores, or else whistling into various telephone handsets, or else hanging top secret infra-red satellite photo prints of Manhattan on random walls, or else swinging wildly on tenement house fire escapes while high on various kinds of herbal remedies, or else inventing and playing mind-numbing marathon sessions of cosmic board-games, or else careening in public buses while madly scribbling con reports, or else building better worlds in outer space, or else nibbling inoffensive slices of apple pie under the hideous gaze of other-worldly water pitchers… It all happened!

And for some reason, known only to the deeply mystical person we called “fearless leader,” many of these escapades were recorded–alongside the most innocent looking trivia pages and LoCs–in the annals of CUSFuSsing. Now, returned from its slumber at the bottom of the black lagoon, and thanks to the mad skillz of a faceless trio in New York City, the archive has risen to strike again! The digital archive of CUSFuSsing walks among us–beware!

“Amerindians have always mocked the palefaces for looking at clocks to know when they ought to be hungry.  It is in the same clock-mad spirit that we are all supposed to “work” from nine to five on such preposterous projects as accounting for what we have done upon billions of square miles of paper derived from devastated forests, frittering away our time upon such dreary gambling games as playing the stock market or selling insurance in drab offices, turning out drillions of lines of chatter for people whose minds cannot be peace unless perpetually agitated with information and misinformation, and manufacturing, selling, and advertising bizarre, noisome, and pestilential automotive contraptions for taking us all to and from these same projects at the same hours–thereby blocking the roads and jangling our nerves, presumably to give ourselves the message that we really exist and are really important.”

from Watts’ autobiography, In My Own Way (1972).

As the Boston Phoenix explores the possibility that Harvard will once again be involved with research on the affects of LSD, we do pause to wonder: haven’t the yard and the square been pretty trippy places all along? After all, when you think of the fact that Harvard is, in fact, a private corporation that engages in research on every topic under the sun, you sometimes get the feeling that mind-expanding drugs have been laced into the coffee urns. On the other hand, when you face facts, the University often resembles a revolving door for the generals, military contractors, and policy wonks that cook up projects like the current fiasco in Iraq… which is a major bad trip! From my perspective, Tim Leary wasn’t wrong when he took microdots out of the hands of the scientists and “put them into the hands of dirty hippies everywhere.” Let us hope that when the new Veritas blotter is brewed that its a “sunshine” batch, and not some sort of evil “Cheney war forever” dose. We’ve had too much of that already!