Paul Hersey creates what he calls Organic Armor:
We create handmade costume pieces, jewelry and props that look like ancient metal, bone and leather. But unlike the real thing — you’ll find the pieces lightweight and comfortable. Wear them for hours through active movement — especially suited to performance. Wear it to clubs, rituals, festivals, on stage, or in the backyard!
(Hat tip to Gizmodo.)
Researching the Secret Origins of Mr. A led me to research the Secret Origins of the Bat-Man. I knew that Batman was inspired by Zorro and The Shadow, but I didn’t realize that the first Batman story, “The Case Of The Chemical Syndicate,” was “borrowed” from a Shadow novel, “Partners of Peril” — which has been recently republished:
I also knew that Batman was created by Bob Kane, but I didn’t realize he had a partner, Bill Finger, who did most of the work, but who was too shy and reticent to demand credit. In fact, Bill Finger lived paycheck-to-paycheck and died young — which brings us to this doctored Shadow piece:
And that brings us full circle, back to Mr. A, who is really a Randian version of The Shadow — ruthless and prone to judgmental monologues.
Never heard of the Quarry Men? Well, here they are at George’s brother Harry’s wedding reception in 1958:
After watching Jonathan Ross ‘In Search of Steve Ditko’, I couldn’t help but research the Secret Origins of Mr. A, the Objectivist hero Ditko created after he left Spider-Man and Dr. Strange behind.
Dial B for Blog has the entire five-page first Mr. A story scanned in and online — and, yes, it’s black and white.
BBC4′s Jonathan Ross’s ‘In Search of Steve Ditko’ is up on YouTube — at least for now — and, if you ask me, it really gets going in part 3:
Ditko is best known for co-creating Spiderman with Stan Lee; Ditko was the artist, Lee the writer. Ditko is also known for creating Dr. Strange, the master of the mystic arts, who travels via astral projection through psychedelic tableaux — which led liberal hippy fans to embrace the politically conservative Ditko as a Leary-like guru.
Where things get particularly odd is when Ditko leaves Marvel to create independent comics featuring his own crazy brand of Rand’s Objectivism. The Question is a bit odd, but Mr. A? Wow.
I’ve been meaning to pick up Marvel Visionaries: Steve Ditko for some time now. I suppose I should really pick up the 1088-page Amazing Spider-Man Omnibus, which includes the entire Ditko run. It’s a shame that the Essential Doctor Strange doesn’t come in color.
“Happy Feet” director shooting “Justice League”:
“Happy Feet” director George Miller is in talks to bring the superheroes of the “Justice League of America” comic books to the big screen.
I prefer to think of it as “Mad Max” director shooting “Justice League”:
Miller wrote and directed the Mad Max movies starring Mel Gibson (Mad Max, The Road Warrior, and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome); co-wrote Babe and wrote and directed its sequel; and Lorenzo’s Oil. He also directed The Witches of Eastwick, starring Jack Nicholson, Susan Sarandon, Cher and Michelle Pfeiffer and he directed the fourth segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie, which was hailed as the best in most critical reviews.
There some challenges to overcome:
One thorny issue the production needs to deal with is casting. Warner Bros. is in production on “The Dark Knight,” a sequel to “Batman Begins,” starring Christian Bale, and is in development on another Superman movie with Brandon Routh as Clark Kent/Superman. Those two actors will not reprise their roles for the “League” movie as the studio is intent on keeping all of its superhero movies as separate franchises. “League” also is looked at as a launchpad for other comic book movies.As such, the studio is hoping to cast the movie with lesser-known actors, and an international search is under way.
The smaller names in the movie will help with the second issue facing the production: budget. A “League” movie was long thought impossible simply because the thinking was that any undertaking would break the bank on big-name actors and special effects. On the effects front, media like animation were considered before deciding to stick with live action. Miller’s “League” will be effects-intensive. Some motion capture likely will be used as well.
As you might imagine, anyone who directs both Mad Max and Babe is an interesting fellow — he was a medical doctor before becoming a filmmaker.
Orson Scott Card reviews Airport chocolate, ReBooks, and Dune — but I’ll skip to the part where he takes another look at Dune and its uncanny prescience:
There was considerable irony in Dune‘s use of Arabic culture and language as the explicit basis of the “Fremen,” the desert dwellers who become the source of Paul Atreides power and, when he unleashes them, the scourge of the universe.Herbert traces the roots of Fremen culture from world to world, and makes it clear that, while the specifics of Islamic belief are never laid out, the customs and culture of these people have been Muslim all along. (One of the great sources of their seething anger against the empire is that they have been denied the right to the Haj — the pilgrimage that Muslims make to Mecca.)
The emotional core of the novel, then, comes from a T.E. Lawrence-like character, Paul Atreides, coming to dwell with and learning to live as an Arab Muslim, until he is able to lead them to victorious battle.
Paul, being a non-Muslim, treats the idea of jihad as an abhorrent one; he long tries to resist the blood and horror of such a thing, though by the end of the book he has given up and realizes that the jihad will happen and cannot be prevented or even controlled.
So here’s the thought that occurred to me during such passages of Dune: What if Osama bin Laden somehow read Dune during his formative years? Or, if he did not read it himself, certainly there were Arab Muslim students in America who did read it, and the book might well have been part of the reason they became receptive to Osama’s ideas.
Because a Muslim would not read this book the same way I did. To an Arab Muslim, the Arabic words and names would leap off the page; the Fremen characters would be the ones an Arab reader would most identify with.
Such a reader would not feel any of Paul Atreides’ reluctance for jihad — on the contrary, he would be hoping Paul would fail to stop the jihad.
And when, at the end of the book, the Arab jihad is triumphant, this reader — Osama or another of his ideology — would not only feel great emotional satisfaction, he would have the blueprint for his own future.
Because the Fremen in Dune triumph, not just because of the force of their arms or their courage in battle, but because they control the only source of the “Spice,” a substance only created in the complex desert ecology of Arrakis, the planet they control. Without Spice the starships cannot navigate, and interstellar trade would grind to a halt.
The whole economy of the interstellar empire is dependent on and therefore under the ultimate control of the Fremen. Anything the offworlders do to them will hurt the offworlders far more than it hurts the Fremen. The parallel with oil is obvious.
I can just see such a reader thinking, This isn’t fiction. This is the future. This is why jihad not only can work but must work; we lack only a leader to show us the way. The novel made it a European (in culture) who comes to the poor Fremen and leads them, but this is nonsense.
To such a reader, the true founder of the victory of the Fremen is Liet Kynes, the native-born Fremen who studied offworld science and then came home and, under the noses of their colonial rulers, prepared the Fremen for jihad and victory.
Remember that Herbert wrote Dune in the 1960s, before the first oil embargo, before any Islamist government was ever formed.
Whether Dune had any causal influence on the rise of Al Qaeda, Herbert certainly did a superb job of predicting the rise and the power of such an ideology. I would be surprised if there were not, among the followers of Osama bin Laden, at least a few readers of Dune for whom this book feels like their future, their identity, their dream.
In other words, Herbert got it horribly right.
Meanwhile, it’s one of the seminal novels of science fiction, and one of the most important novels in the English language in the second half of the twentieth century. It’s a shame that it is only taught and discussed in classes on science fiction instead of taking its rightful place in literary studies.
It is laughable to think of some of the trivial books from the same period that are taught — by professors who sneer at all science fiction. They still celebrate literature about the adolescent “counterculture” of the 1960s, while the fiction that was capturing the imagination of the best and brightest of that generation, and which still bears a significant relationship to the real world, is ignored.
I guess that’s what the ivory tower is all about.
You don’t have to have seen the movie to know that Soylent Green is not made from plankton — nor is it made from a mix of soy and lentils, the original source of the name.
I’ve seen bits and pieces of Soylent Green over the years, but I finally sat down to watch the whole thing, and I was soon shocked by a scene where the rich man’s young mistress — who comes with the “furnished” apartment — is playing a video game. Is she playing Asteroids? In 1973? No, she’s playing Computer Space, which I hadn’t even heard of before, a bridge between Spacewar! and Asteroids:
Computer Space is a video arcade game released in November 1971 by Nutting Associates. Created by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, who would both later found Atari, it is generally accepted that it was the world’s first commercially sold coin-operated video game — and indeed, the first commercially sold video game of any kind, predating the Magnavox Odyssey by six months, and Atari’s Pong by one year.
I can’t believe they were able to make a game with this hardware:
Computer Space utilizes no microprocessor, RAM or ROM. The entire computer system is a state machine made of discrete 74 series TTL logic elements. Graphic elements are held in diode arrays. Physical configuration is made up of 3 PCBs interconnected through a common bus. Display is rendered on a General Electric 15″ black-and-white portable television vacuum tube set specially modified for Computer Space.
The video game isn’t the only interesting bit of trivia:
Charlton Heston’s tears at Sol’s death were real, as Heston was the only cast member who knew that Edward G. Robinson was dying of terminal cancer. This was the 90th and last movie in which Robinson appeared. He died nine days after the shooting was done, on January 26, 1973.
So, I finally got around to watching Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 “silent” classic:
Chaplin began preparing the film in 1934 as his first “talkie”, and went as far as writing a dialogue script and experimenting with some sound scenes. However, he soon abandoned these attempts and reverted to a silent format with synchronized sound effects. The dialogue experiments confirmed his long-standing conviction that the universal appeal of the Tramp would be lost if the character ever spoke on screen. Indeed, this film marks the Tramp’s last screen appearance, and is arguably the final film of the silent era.
I was not at all surprised by Chaplin’s fantastic physical comedy, but I was surprised by a few other things.
First, the iconic factory scenes do not form a large fraction of the movie. It’s not a movie about life in a factory. More than anything, it’s a movie about the Great Depression, and some people didn’t like that at all:
This was one of the films which, because of its political sentiments, convinced the House Un-American Activities Committee that Charles Chaplin was a Communist, a charge he adamantly denied. He left to live in Switzerland, vowing never to return to America.
The second surprise comes when the Tramp is in prison and a fellow prisoner has smuggled some “nose powder” in. I was not expecting a coked-up Tramp in a 1936 comedy.
While a feature-length silent comedy can seem a bit monotonous to a modern audience — a bit like a feature-length music video, I suppose — I can definitely see why the AFI ranked it as one of the 100 greatest movies of all time.
I’d always liked reading Jules Verne and I’ve read most of his novels; but it wasn’t until recently that I really understood I hadn’t been reading Jules Verne at all.
I’ll explain what I mean. Verne has been globally popular since the 19th century, and all his titles have been translated into English, most of them soon after their initial publication. But almost all of them were translated so badly, so mutilated that “translation” is something of a misnomer.
Some of this I knew already. I’d heard that the original translators into English felt at liberty to cut out portions of Verne’s original text, particularly where they felt he was getting too “technical” or “scientific”; and I’d heard that one of those early translators — the Reverend Lewis Page Mercier — had bowdlerised any sentiments hostile towards or injurious to the dignity of Great Britain (such as might be uttered by Captain Nemo, an Indian nobleman who had dedicated himself to an anti-imperialist cause). I knew too that the original English translators tended to mangle the metric system measurements of Verne’s careful measurements and descriptions, either simply cutting the figures out, or changing the unit from metric to imperial but, oddly, keeping the numbers the same.
But I didn’t understand just how severe the issue was until I set about preparing an English edition of a Verne title myself. It came about because I was publishing a novel of my own called Splinter, a 21st-century and fairly postmodern riff upon one of Verne’s lesser-known titles Hector Servadac. My publishers decided to put out a special box set of Splinter and Hector Servadac together, and asked me to sort out copy for the latter. I thought it would be a simple matter of reprinting the original, usefully out-of-copyright 1877 English translation, and blithely said yes.
But when I checked the 1877 translation against the original my heart sank. It was garbage. On almost every page the English translator, whoever he, or she, was (their name is not recorded), collapsed Verne’s actual dialogue into a condensed summary, missed out sentences or whole paragraphs. She or he messed up the technical aspects of the book. She or he was evidently much more anti-Semitic than Verne, and tended to translate what were in the original fairly neutral phrases such as “…said Isaac Hakkabut” with idioms such as “…said the repulsive old Jew.” And at one point in the novel she or he simply omitted an entire chapter (number 30) — quite a long one, too — presumably because she or he wasn’t interested in, or couldn’t be bothered to, turn it into English.
He does recommend William Butcher’s recent Oxford World’s Classics translation of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea — which, by the way, refers to the distance traveled while under the sea, not the depth.
Fans of War of the Worlds should enjoy The Mercury Theatre on the Air:
The finest radio drama of the 1930’s was The Mercury Theatre on the Air, a show featuring the acclaimed New York drama company founded by Orson Welles and John Houseman. In its brief run, it featured an impressive array of talents, including Agnes Moorehead, Bernard Herrmann, and George Coulouris. The show is famous for its notorious War of the Worlds broadcast, but the other shows in the series are relatively unknown. This site has many of the surviving shows, and will eventually have all of them.The show first broadcast on CBS and CBC in July 1938. It ran without a sponsor until December of that year, when it was picked up by Campbell’s Soup and renamed The Campbell Playhouse. All of the surviving Mercury Theatre shows are available from this page in RealAudio format (some are also in MP3 format). There are several Campbell Playhouse episodes available here as well, in both RealAudio and MP3 formats; the rest are being added gradually.
The folks at Dark Horse have published a War of the Worlds eComic online, and it looks capital!
(Hat tip to Drawn!)
Kathy Griffin’s Emmy remarks to be censored:
In her speech, Griffin said that “a lot of people come up here and thank Jesus for this award. I want you to know that no one had less to do with this award than Jesus.”She went on to hold up her Emmy, make an off-color remark about Christ and proclaim, “This award is my god now!”
The comedian’s remarks were condemned Monday by Catholic League President Bill Donohue, who called them a “vulgar, in-your-face brand of hate speech.”
It’s such a fine line between hate speech and comedy.
American Gladiators is coming back, as Variety reports in NBC pumps up for ‘Gladiators’ redo:
Airing in syndication from 1989-96, “American Gladiators” focused on physically fit amateur athletes who competed against the show’s regulars (action stars, stunt professionals and pro athletes) in various physical strength and endurance competitions.The show hit it big by showcasing David vs. Goliath-style battles in events such as the Joust, the Wall, the Eliminator and Hang Tough. Coincidentally, the original “Gladiators” shot its first several seasons at Universal Studios.
Plestis said he was particularly interested in the original U.K. version of “Gladiators,” which focused even more on the characters and the behind-the-scenes stories of common folk going up against the show’s powerful stars. The new “Gladiators,” he said, “will have the scale, scope, different characters and family drama that the U.K. version had.”
“We’re not going to completely reinvent the wheel here,” he said. “But we’re making it better, faster and stronger.”
Show will follow eight gladiators — four men and four women — as they take on contestants both male and female. This time, in a new wrinkle, the players will be given the opportunity to train for their match — and viewers will be given a glimpse of their personalities prior to the actual competish.
MGM Worldwide TV co-prexy Jim Packer said reviving “Gladiators” was part of a strategy to mine the company’s library and revive franchises for a new generation of TV viewers. Repeats of the original show are currently posting decent ratings on ESPN Classic, he noted.
I had no idea there was an original UK version.
From the land of haiku comes a new poetry for the modern age, Pecha Kucha — pronounced peCHAH k’CHAH — which might be summarized as “Get to the PowerPoint in 20 Slides Then Sit the Hell Down”:
Let us now bullet-point our praise for Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein, two Tokyo-based architects who have turned PowerPoint, that fixture of cubicle life, into both art form and competitive sport. Their innovation, dubbed pecha-kucha (Japanese for “chatter”), applies a simple set of rules to presentations: exactly 20 slides displayed for 20 seconds each. That’s it. Say what you need to say in six minutes and 40 seconds of exquisitely matched words and images and then sit the hell down. The result, in the hands of masters of the form, combines business meeting and poetry slam to transform corporate cliché into surprisingly compelling beat-the-clock performance art.The duo — Dytham is British, Klein Italian — invented pecha-kucha four years ago to help revive a struggling performance space they owned. The first presentations were such a hit that they began hosting monthly pecha-kucha events, boozy affairs at which Tokyo architects and designers showcased their streamlined offerings to crowds of hundreds. Now there are pecha-nights in 80 cities, from Amsterdam and Atlanta to San Francisco and Shanghai. Why? Dytham believes that the rules have a liberating effect. “Suddenly,” he says, “there’s no preciousness in people’s presentations.” Just poetry.
The writer, Daniel Pink, shares his own pecha-kucha presentation on an usual topic: