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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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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.

Reading the excellent articles on the intrepid wanderer, Socialist, ex-pat, Science Fiction writer, Mack Reynolds, in the latest issue of eI by Earl Kemp, and was amused by the anecdotes of the Institute of Twenty-First Century Studies, which was an organization of professional SF writers during the 1950s. Kemp mentioned that the Proceedings of the aforementioned society were collected and published by Advent, so that the PITFCS are preserved. Looking around on Google to see if a copy is extant anywhere, I discovered that there is also a Center for Twenty-First Century Studies at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, of all places, but it has nothing to do with Science Fiction, and proclaims as its focus (without irony!) as:
critical reflection in such areas as feminism, media theory, multiculturalism, postcolonialism, cultural and social theory, and lesbian and gay studies.

Well, I hope to dig up a rogue’s gallery of mug shots of the two identically named centers and compare them for my personal edification. I’m also curious to see what the level of discourse is in their proceedings, of course… what do some drunken, cantankerous SF writers look like when stacked up against our post-modern scholars?

Philip Jose Farmer, one of the great SF minds of our times, passed away in his Peoria, Illinois home.   The tributes and obits are flowing in from all corners of society.   SF Site has posted a great 1975 interview conducted in Minneaopolis by Dave Truesdale, (editor of Tangent fanzine), which primarily deals with the identity of Kilgore Trout.

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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.

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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?

Another legend is lost!  Only days after Studs Terkel, the mysterious singer Yma Sumac, self-described descendent of an Inca emperor, has passed away.   As described by Los Angeles Times music critic Don Heckman, she was “a living, breathing, Technicolor musical fantasy — a kaleidoscopic illusion of MGM exotica come to life in an era of practicality.”

Sumac’s absolutely unforgettable face, with a sort of smoldering sexuality, was matched only by her utterly bizarre vocal range, from growling jungle beast to piercing soprano, which she effortlessly projected into cheesey mambo arrangements.  The result is a sort of high-cheekboned Screaming Jay Hawkins shining down on us from a secret golden temple on Macchu Picchu.   Well, enjoy for yourselves a couple of tunes to remember the one and only Yma Sumac:

Goomba Boomba

Gopher

Browsing for a cheap paperback at Goodwill in Davis Square, I just happened to find a beat up first edition hardcover copy of The Fifty Minute Hour, by Robert Lindner. I grabbed this for the collection, because it contains the famous essay on the subject “Kirk Allen,” who some have said was none other than Paul Linebarger. Linebarger, of course, is the SF writer we all know and love as the amazing Cordwainer Smith.

**Update! The full article is now available on Harper’s:  Part 1, Part 2**

Was Linebarger actually the model for Kirk Allen? That exceptionally interesting question has been delved into by Alan C. Elms in his essay: Behind the Jet-Propelled Couch, where Elms discusses attribution of Linebarger’s identity. Supposedly the secret was revealed by Dr. Lindner to Leon Stover at a cocktail party hosted by Harvard’s Fairbank Center in 1951 or 1952, and Stover later leaked the information to Brian Aldiss. Since Aldiss published this claim in his classic Billion Year Spree (1973), it has been a subject of feverish speculation throughout fandom. Or so I would imagine.  Linebarger’s daughter, Rosana, has also discussed the Kirk Allen identity question on the excellent Cordwainer Smith website that she maintains.

I am such an admirer of C’Mell and the Underpeople, that I plan to examine the Jet-Propelled Couch chapter in great detail. In the meantime, I hope you all enjoy the strange dust-jacket that wrapped the 1955 edition, with its technicolor floating brains!

Only by chance did I notice that Lloyd Dangle, cartoonist and creator of Troubletown, is currently tramping across America on a 20th Anniversary Book Tour, celebrating two decades of ceaseless trouble! How can it be that most people know Dangle only because of his Airborne packages, and not for his amazing comics?

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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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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!

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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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!

Among the many brilliant comedy sketches by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, their dialog over sandwiches at the art museum is a riot.

Questioning the value of huge investments for public art, they pass judgement on Rubens, Da Vinci, Frans Hals, and Cezanne, while lamenting the absence of duck paintings by Vernon Ward.

Here are both parts on YouTube:

Part One

Part Two