Posts from — December 2008

Let’s see if the traitors fleeing the pirate ship run by Bush and Cheney have as many tricks as my personal hero, Felix the Cat.  Hopefully not!  They deserve whatever is coming to them!  Meanwhile, we can enjoy this strange journey across the Universe by our feline friend, drawn by Otto Messmer, and originally featured in Felix the Cat Winter Annual #2, 1954.  [Courtesy of Comicrazy's]

Isn’t it about time we moved beyond the idiotic “central heating” concept and kicked our energy habit?   But how, you might ask, do we get this 100 quadrillion BTU monkey off our back?  The answer, as ridiculous as it sounds, is to simply build better homes, and used efficient heat exchange.   Really, that’s it!   In Germany they are already doing this, building passive heat homes, with highly efficient air flow heat exchangers, and hermetically sealed window and door edges.   The technology isn’t new, but it does rely on (a) good engineering, and (b) good construction techniques.

The American style of building — some sheets of Tyvek slapped on plywood and stud frames, thrown together by a couple of guys with nailguns — is NOT going to cut it!   What we do need is intelligent manufacture of super-efficient modular windows and doors, that can be mounted into highly insulated walls.   Why not put the laid-off crews of Republic Windows back to work, or even re-tool the auto-industry to build super-efficient home construction components, instead of gas-guzzling dinosaurs?   That’s what I proposed to Obama on his transition web blog…  not that the idea will ever get to him, but there’s no harm in trying!

For decades (yes, sadly decades) I have been advocating for a heat-exchanger attachement for refridgerators in American homes.  Doesn’t it strike you as INSANE that we pay to heat up the space inside our homes, then we pay AGAIN to chill down another space inside of our homes to store our food?   That has always been an insane idea to me!  Therefore, for anyone who lives in a climate where the temperature outside the home falls below the temperature inside the home, why not put a heat exchanger between the outside and the air pocket surrounding the fridge interior?  A temperature gauge can control when the vents open on the heat exchanger.  Therefore, when the outside temp drops to a cold enough level, the vent opens and automatically pre-cools the air pocket that exists between the fridge interior and its shell, thus saving energy when the freon compressor kicks in.   Duh!  Why not let the cold outside air cool off our fridge compartment, instead of heating it first then paying to cool it down again?  But then, that would be giving logic and energy-efficiency primacy over greed… and we can’t allow THAT to happen, can we?   Or can we!  Yes, we can!

So join me in pushing all of our alternative construction, transportation, & energy ideas to business, industry, finance, government, mom, pop, and Auntie Grizelda.  It’s a crap job, but somebody’s got to pick up the pieces of this “all war, all the time” disaster we call the U.S.A. and fix it.

On this snowbound Solstice weekend in New England, I happened to be reading reviews of The Day The Earth Stood Still remake, and pondering the ways in which humans have envisioned our first contact with alien life forms.   Without going too heavily into the subject, I pondered the range of human-alien frission typically presented in SF, from the over-hyped assumption of instant warfare, or the however improbable love at first site, to the more nuanced anthropological approaches of Chad Oliver and the intensely portrayed psychological gestalts of Theodore Sturgeon.  At that point Sturgeon’s amazing story To Marry Medusa (aka The Cosmic Rape) popped into my mind, and in particular the lush red cover image for the 1968 paperback by Paul Lehr.

This image,  so typical of Lehr (with a mountainous half-organic construction looming in the center, while miniscule beings flit around it like so many fleas,)  represents the contact between human and alien minds in the realm of abstraction and metaphor.  In that sense it fascinates more than the familiar image of some athletic dork with a ray gun zapping the tentacles off of a bug-eyed wierdo.

[Read more →]

An interesting problem:  illustrate a cover for the fiction of Stanislaw Lem.   How would you do it?   Here is a nice little gallery of rarely seen Lem covers, collected by one of the very best tribute sites to the author.  Be sure to check out the other sections of this terrific website!

Went to the opening of an exhibit called Arts of Subversion, Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union, which is a very nicely curated show that explores the lives of artists under the opressive fist of totalitarianism.   The most shocking aspect of the exhibit, which of course is deliberately unstated, is the feeling of creeping familiarity that we have when looking at the works — don’t we also live in the same space?  What makes the brutality and insanity of a regime that espouses torture any different from the KGB under Stalin, after all?   As the attendees munched cheese and sipped Hungarian red wine, did they not feel a twinge of empathy for the character of Sergei Kotov in the brilliant (and terrifying) film, Burnt by the Sun?  Or was that just me?

Still, it is always instructive to try to feel and understand what the artists were envisioning, and to appreciate the subtle (or unsubtle) ironies of how they depicted life under tyranny.   Yuri Rybchinsky’s photos of prisons and slavering guard dogs are taken as if they were totally impersonal snapshots from a Kodak Brownie, and yet are riveting for their subject matter and splendid foreshortening which electrify the images with sudden energy.

The untitled portrait (perhaps self-portrait) by the art student, Boris Sveshnikov, while living in exile at the gulag is executed with almost casual mastery.  But the expression of the subject is riven with the poignance of a man beaten but never defeated.

Back in the realm of obviousness,  the large canvas by Alexei Sundakov that appeared over the opening descriptive summary of the exhibit, showed a crowd of people with their backs turned to the viewer, all hovering toward an invisible object that may have existed — though probably did not — under a sign reading meat.    Is this enough to convey the sense of malaise and dissatisfaction that it proposes?  Only through the flawless sterility of the scene, painted with smooth mastery reminiscent of George Tooker.

The exhibit featured a number of excellent pieces, including those of Peeter Ulas, Vello Vin, Ernst Neisvestny, and Oskar Rabin, to name a few.   The substance of the commentaries seemed to be derived partly from the book, Beyond Memory: Soviet Nonconformist Photography, which looks quite good, especially the section on Subversive Photography by Ernest Larsen.

The show-stealing image, which appeared on the cover of the program, and which was reproduced on a gigantic 4 meter wide banner hanging from the atrium wall, was Boris Mikhailov’s hand-tinted photo of some Soviet apparatchiks marching along, draped with their honorary sashes.   These are ordinary politicos in a local affair, which is evident by the disorganized band of smiling young pioneers marching behind them.  Etched into these faces are the agonizing realities of being tools in the state machine, the machine that fattens them with luxuries while others go hungry, the machine that hustles them to and from meetings while others stand wearily in lines for non-existent meat.  The farcical splash of super-rich primary colors across the black and white print, gives an obscene, Walt Disney edge to the parody!   How this image provokes us to think of our own times, when party-line weasels enacted policies promulgated by the likes of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the unseen octopus of geo-politicial black artists who stood them up before us!  What sarcasm and gallows humor have we all had with their evil ways, all gaudily pumped up on their own false-flagged patriotism…don’t these bastards all look alike?