Posts from — July 2008

Now where have I heard a similar story before? Where was it again? Give me a minute! It’ll come to me, if I think about it. Hmmm… something to do with crime. Something to do with politics. Yes, yes… Something to do with the President of the United States. But what was that example that I was thinking of? Hmmm… Okay, think about evil, think about some perverted rotters who would turn the Presidency into a criminal operation. Think of traitors. They would stoop to nothing. They would tear up the Constitution itself, even torture random people off the street in order to pillage and steal from the U.S. treasury. They would not even hesitate to kill and destroy their own people, for what?! To get their hands on stinking money, covered in blood… That’s it! I remember now! This is exactly the story called “Woody Woodpecker, the Evil Genius,” by John Stanley, which appeared in Four Color Comics #169 (1947). Whew! For a minute there, I though I was losing my memory.

If you haven’t yet seen the film, Dark Knight, please do that first before reading this post, because you will definitely spoil the “tension” of the plot, assuming there is any. For some reason this film is a runaway hit, with critics pissing all over themselves to outpraise each other. From my perspective, despite some excellent cinematography and a stellar performance by Heath Ledger as the Joker, it is really just another Batman movie, but with a troubling dichotomy at its core that is getting scant attention. There are clearly two very conflicted subtexts in the film, one centered on Batman and the other on the Joker. Batman’s supposed internal conflict we are all familiar with — having to take the law into his own hands in order to fight evil — dating back to his first appearance in Detective Comics #37; on the other hand, unlike the ridiculous slapstick Joker that Burton and Nicholson gave us, Ledger pushes his exploration of the Joker’s mercurial psychology into whole new realms of uncharted territory.

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Amusing story from Airboy Comics vol 4 # 9 (1947), by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby.   Kirby’s aggressive and yet fluid brushwork fills the panels of this comic, which also features a series of aircraft rendered in flawless perspective.  Although the flying machines bring to mind the work of Milton Caniff in Steve Canyon, they begin to have Kirby’s generalized bodies and a hint of the circuitry patterns that were to explode from the pages of Fantastic Four (in the 60s) and the New Gods (in the 70s).

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!

Of course, I was intrigued by the advertisement in this year’s Boskone mag for the Illustration Master Class. Just the idea of Julie Bell, Donato Giancola, Scott Fischer, Dan DosSantos, Boris Vallejo, and Rebecca Guay all being in the same room and talking about painting was a mind-numbing concept. Throw in the fact that Greg Manchess showed up, too, and that the “students” were all virtuosoes to begin with made for a really amazing event.

Fortunately, Irene Gallo, of Tor Books blogged the entire week, and now we ordinary mortals can get an idea of the marathon art session that transpired in my alma mater town, Amherst.

Days One and Two

Day Three

Days Four and Five

Sample from Day Six

Days Six and Seven