Posts from — January 2009

This will be my first time to participate in the Boskone Art Show,  woot!  I’m having fun getting some prints mounted and ready for the show.  There will be four 8×10 prints available for the three sketches shown below ($6 ea), and also three original acrylic sketches of some kind that I haven’t really decided on yet (with bids starting at $10 or $15).   I haven’t had any direct involvement with SF art since back in the halcyon days of the late 1970s, when John Pierard and Tom Kidd showed up from Syracuse and blew my mind with their amazing art, and I was drawing the pen & ink covers for Charlie Seelig’s infamous mimeographed run of CUSFuSsing fanzine.   So I am really psyched to jump back into the pool!

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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My first impression of Arisia was one of sartorial richness, stirred together with equal parts of humor, history, literary allusion, and performing arts.  The non-stop schedule of movies, panels, gaming sessions, readings, parties and demonstrations got lost in the spectacle of costumed attendees swarming randomly around three levels of the hotel, and visible from any number of perspectives along the balustrades of the atrium.   Out of this dizzying scene the iconic image of this con, for me, was that of a black-clad woman with blonde dreadlocks, jacked up on really tall stilts, and moving hazily across the rippling lobby carpet while slashing playfully at people with her foot-long razor nails.

There were plenty of other costumes…indeed far to many to describe, except to say that the standard for corsets, ray-guns, battle-armor, cloaks, boots, scabbards, gowns, ragged wings, top hats, gloves, goggles, spats, walking sticks, holsters, capes, chain mail, and hardened-leather bustiere was conspicuously high!   This managed to fit in with some of the subtexts running through the con, such as hentai anime, freemasonry, and steam punk vs. cyberpunk.  And you could follow some of those threads on the con Twitter feed.

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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.

Happy New Year Everyone!   Let us hope for peace and, more importantly, work together to achieve it!   Don’t let the gloom turn to gray, show your colors!