Nick Ferreira and his lady Kerry recently opened up Amigos Shop in Providence, RI (in addition to Amigos Publishing). Amigos shop will sell Zines, Art, Books etc. I threw some questions at them about it all, so check that out.
Nuno Olivera: How did Amigos Publishing & Shop come to be?
Nick Ferreira: Originally, Kerry and I started Amigos Publishing as a side project when we were living in LA. We just thought it’d be cool to publish stuff that our creative friends made. We never really had any big goals for it and since we both work or go to school or whatever, it was just a fun side project, and continues to be except as a legit business which is interesting and weird at the same time. And as for the shop, it’s something that I’ve wanted to do since I graduated high school probably. Well, some sort of art space that is. Then the first time I went to Printed Matter in New York at its old location pretty much solidified my ideas and real interest for art books and art objects offered in an affordable manner. Also, while living in LA my girlfriend and partner, Kerry, interned at Ooga Booga. Between attending events there and just experiencing the real positive vibe that Wendy, Max, and crew put off, I really saw how important and helpful a place like that can be to an area. A good way to look at it is your local bike shop. The vibe I got from Ooga Booga was always welcoming, similar to the two bike shops I’ve frequented most over the years, Dick Maul’s and Circuit BMX.
NO: What is the goal with the shop, and what will be available there?
NF: The goal for the shop is to offer a large selection of independent publications, books, media, and art objects. We’re not really going to pigeonhole what are goals are too much in the beginning because I like the idea of things sort of coming together naturally and learning from previous things. But we do hope to offer a good amount in the form of release parties, movie screenings, and small openings that use our tiny space wisely. I’m looking forward to working with local and non local artists and, like the zines we publish, our friends who make and are about interesting things. Right now our inventory is pretty small but we will have books and zines published by us, Amigos, Swill Children from Brooklyn, The Kingsboro Press, Hamburger Eyes, Elk, Mothersnews, Teenage Teardrops, etc. We also have a bunch of stuff from various artists.
NO: How did the name “Amigos” come about?
NF: It came about because it seemed like the simplest and best looking name we could think of. We’re about our friends but, friends doesn’t look as good as Amigos. I hate naming things.
NO: For those who are not familiar, give us a little insight into the Zine scene. Even though it’s pretty niche, it is definitely a popular creative outlet.
NF: Well, I’m no expert but there’s a lot of cool stuff going on with zines, and art zines in general. Way more than your sort of stereotypical peace punk, vegan recipe zine. If you have been to the N.Y. Art Book Fair that Printed Matter has been putting on for a few years now, this year especially, the whole third floor of MOMA’s P.S. 1 was taken over by some real awesome and interesting zines. It was so overwhelming. Publishers like Swill Children are doing real cool things in a sort of “zine” format. Their new Peter Sutherland book Worked, is great. Basically, what I’m trying to say is that there’s a whole bunch of things going on with art books and zines right now.
NO: You have been doing Holeshot for a minute, what is it about Zines that gets you stoked?
NF: Just knowing how getting zines in the mail used to make me feel sort of keeps me going and psyched. I also just really like creating this space that is exactly how I want it to look. My knowledge of web based things is limited so I can’t manipulate it as well as I can with print. My interest in zines and art books has also sort of led me to the only normal job I can see myself actually doing, which is a Librarian. It’s super niche and competitive but eventually, and hopefully, someday I’ll be able to work with artists’ books as a special collection. If that doesn’t work out, I’ll be happy to work a reference desk or be a Young Adult librarian.
NO: What are some of your favorite zines?
NF: Elk Zines and Books are consistently awesome. They are like the analog version of a site like Them Thangs but with contributors, images culled from archives, old skate zine covers, and just a whole bunch of ephemera. He also publishes books with artists and writers. It’s pretty awesome and I highly suggest checking it out when you get a chance. Some other cool zines I’ve grabbed recently were a No Age/Brian Roettinger collabo zine. The layout is dialed, its printed on a RISO machine and has letters that one of the band members wrote to Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth and in turn a letter Lee Ranaldo wrote back. Also, this series of Fanzines Oliver Payne makes Safe Crackers are sweet. The newest one was a fanzine devoted to arcade tokens and a 12 inch LP was released with it that featured field recordings of arcade games remixed. Prashant Gopal’s Locals Only, which is part of his series called Yo Sick, is one of my favorite newer BMX zines. My all time favorite BMX zine though is Skunk Zine. So raw and basically sums up what BMX means to me even to this day. It was made by some Skunk Bros affiliates in the late 90′s and blew my 13 year old mind.
NO: What can we expect from Amigos Publishing & the shop in the future?
NF: More titles published by Amigos and a constantly growing inventory. Right now we’re in the very early process of working with a few friends on a Black Sabbath inspired sound/print book. We also plan on having monthly events and rotating art installations, for this month we have an installation by Providence based artist Rachel Fae Coleman. April is set up for a surf themed month to sort of help usher summer in. We’ll be showing Point Break on April 20th and having some surf inspired art and books featured.
NO: Thanks, and good luck with the shop! Anything you would like to add before we wrap this up?
NF: Thanks for caring! If anyone reading this comes through Providence we’re located at 200 Allens Ave. Studio 7F (Second Floor), Providence RI 02903. There’s a bunch of sick spots by if that helps! You can also check us out on the web at www.amigospublishing.com.
1. Francois Truffaut on Michelangelo Antonioni:
“Antonioni is the only important director I have nothing good to say about. He bores me; he’s so solemn and humorless.”
2. Ingmar Bergman on Michelangelo Antonioni:
“Fellini, Kurosawa, and Bunuel move in the same field as Tarkovsky. Antonioni was on his way, but expired, suffocated by his own tediousness.”
3. Ingmar Berman on Orson Welles:
“For me he’s just a hoax. It’s empty. It’s not interesting. It’s dead. Citizen Kane, which I have a copy of — is all the critics’ darling, always at the top of every poll taken, but I think it’s a total bore. Above all, the performances are worthless. The amount of respect that movie’s got is absolutely unbelievable.”
4. Ingmar Bergman on Jean-Luc Godard:
“I’ve never gotten anything out of his movies. They have felt constructed, faux intellectual, and completely dead. Cinematographically uninteresting and infinitely boring. Godard is a fucking bore. He’s made his films for the critics. One of the movies, Masculin, Féminin, was shot here in Sweden. It was mind-numbingly boring.”
5. Orson Welles on Jean-Luc Godard:
“His gifts as a director are enormous. I just can’t take him very seriously as a thinker — and that’s where we seem to differ, because he does. His message is what he cares about these days, and, like most movie messages, it could be written on the head of a pin.”
6. Werner Herzog on Jean-Luc Godard:
“Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung-fu film.”
7. Jean-Luc Godard on Quentin Tarantino:
“Tarantino named his production company after one of my films. He’d have done better to give me some money.”
8. Harmony Korine on Quentin Tarantino:
“Quentin Tarantino seems to be too concerned with other films. I mean, about appropriating other movies, like in a blender. I think it’s, like, really funny at the time I’m seeing it, but then, I don’t know, there’s a void there. Some of the references are flat, just pop culture.”
9. Nick Broomfield on Quentin Tarantino:
“It’s like watching a schoolboy’s fantasy of violence and sex, which normally Quentin Tarantino would be wanking alone to in his bedroom while this mother is making his baked beans downstairs. Only this time he’s got Harvey Weinstein behind him and it’s on at a million screens.”
10. Spike Lee on Quentin Tarantino (and the “n-word” in his scripts):
“I’m not against the word, and I use it, but not excessively. And some people speak that way. But, Quentin is infatuated with that word. What does he want to be made — an honorary black man?”
11. Spike Lee on Tyler Perry:
“We got a black president, and we going back to Mantan Moreland and Sleep ‘n’ Eat?”
12. Tyler Perry on Spike Lee
“Spike can go straight to hell! You can print that… Spike needs to shut the hell up!”
13. Clint Eastwood on Spike Lee:
“A guy like him should shut his face.”14. Jacques Rivette on Stanley Kubrick:
“Kubrick is a machine, a mutant, a Martian. He has no human feeling whatsoever. But it’s great when the machine films other machines, as in 2001.”
15. Jacques Rivette on James Cameron (and Steven Spielberg):
“Cameron isn’t evil, he’s not an asshole like Spielberg. He wants to be the new De Mille. Unfortunately, he can’t direct his way out of a paper bag. “
16. Jean-Luc Godard on Steven Spielberg:
“I don’t know him personally. I don’t think his films are very good.”
17. Alex Cox on Steven Spielberg:
“Spielberg isn’t a filmmaker, he’s a confectioner.”
18. Tim Burton on Kevin Smith (after Smith jokingly accused Burton of stealing the ending of Planet of the Apes from a Smith comic book):
“Anyone who knows me knows I would never read a comic book. And I would especially never read anything created by Kevin Smith.”
19. Kevin Smith on Tim Burton (in response to “I would never read a comic book”):
“Which, to me, explains fucking Batman.”
20. Kevin Smith on Paul Thomas Anderson (specifically, Magnolia):
“I’ll never watch it again, but I will keep it. I’ll keep it right on my desk, as a constant reminder that a bloated sense of self-importance is the most unattractive quality in a person or their work.”
21. David Gordon Green on Kevin Smith:
“He kind of created a Special Olympics for film. They just kind of lowered the standard. I’m sure their parents are proud; it’s just nothing I care to buy a ticket for.”
22. Vincent Gallo on Spike Jonze:
“He’s the biggest fraud out there. If you bring him to a party he’s the least interesting person at the party, he’s the person who doesn’t know anything. He’s the person who doesn’t say anything funny, interesting, intelligent… He’s a pig piece of shit.”
23. Vincent Gallo on Martin Scorsese:
“I wouldn’t work for Martin Scorsese for $10 million. He hasn’t made a good film in 25 years. I would never work with an egomaniac has-been.”
24. Vincent Gallo on Sofia (and Francis Ford) Coppola:
“Sofia Coppola likes any guy who has what she wants. If she wants to be a photographer she’ll fuck a photographer. If she wants to be a filmmaker, she’ll fuck a filmmaker. She’s a parasite just like her fat, pig father was.”
25. Vincent Gallo on Abel Ferrara:
“Abel Ferrara was on so much crack when I did The Funeral, he was never on set. He was in my room trying to pick-pocket me.”
26. Werner Herzog on Abel Ferrara:
“I have no idea who Abel Ferrara is. But let him fight the windmills… I’ve never seen a film by him. I have no idea who he is. Is he Italian? Is he French? Who is he?”
27. David Cronenberg on M. Night Shymalan:
“I HATE that guy! Next question.”
28. Alan Parker on Peter Greenaway (specifically The Draughtsman’s Contact):
“A load of posturing poo-poo.”
29. Ken Russell on Sir Richard Attenborough:
“Sir Richard (‘I’m-going-to-attack-the-Establishment-fifty-years-after-it’s-dead’) Attenborough is guilty of caricature, a sense of righteous self-satisfaction, and repetition which all undermine the impact of the film.”
30. Uwe Boll on Michael Bay:
“I’m not a fucking retard like Michael Bay.”
This December, in a surprisingly simple yet ridiculously amazing installation for the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, artist Yayoi Kusama constructed a large domestic environment, painting every wall, chair, table, piano, and household decoration a brilliant white, effectively serving as a giant white canvas. Over the course of two weeks, the museum’s smallest visitors were given thousands upon thousands of colored dot stickers and were invited to collaborate in the transformation of the space, turning the house into a vibrantly mottled explosion of color. How great is this? Given the opportunity my son could probably cover the entire piano alone in about fifteen minutes. The installation, entitled The Obliteration Room, is part of Kusama’s Look Now, See Forever exhibition that runs through March 12.
The first four images courtesy Queensland Art Gallery and photographer Mark Sherwood. Additional images from Stuart Addelsee and heybubbles.
At a meeting of Gibellina City Council on the 25 of September 1979 it was resolved, following the advice of Mayor Ludovico Corrao, to issue an official invitation to Alberto Burri. The resolution read as follows: “The merit and significance of your artistic message is considered to be human and poetically inspiring more than any other it is able to translate for the present generation and for future generations the tragedy, the struggle, the hope and the faith in the land of the people of Gibellina”. They asked Burri to add one of his works to the many artists’ contributions already scattered in the new town. As Burri did not react, the Mayor went to visit him at his home in Città di Castello and issued him a personal invitation to be a guest at his home.
In a newspaper article of April 2006 calling for the completion of the monuments, known as the Cretto, the now Senatore Ludovico Corrao recalls Burri’s first visit and the genesis of the Cretto as a monument. A few days after the personal invitation was issued, Burri had relented and arrived in Sicily. He wanted to meet with the locals and was taken through the elaborate, newly erected welcome gate, Stella, a sculpture by Pietro Consagra, into the now mostly completed new city. Corrao does not elaborate on the visit to this location. We known that Burri thought that “in this place for sure there is nothing for me to contribute as the place has plenty works of art.” Alberto Zanmatti, the architect involved in the project, in his comment on this said that knowing Burri, he would have never agreed to be one of many. At Burri’s request, Corrao took him to the site of the destroyed old city. The sight of the devastation and ruins brought Burri close to tears, but Burri remained silent. They continued and drove to Segesta to the ruins of an old Greek amphitheatre that Burri wanted to photograph at dusk. There he told Corrao, “I have the project in mind” but did not elaborate.
The archaeology of the future.
Later that evening Burri told Corrao that while they were walking in Segesta and he saw how the shadows on the steps of the amphitheatre changed the appearance of the architecture from one minute to the other, giving it both life and immortality, he decided to create a large Cretto over the ruins of the destroyed city. “Above all” he said, “strength like history had to emerge from the comparison of the great civilizations of Segesta, Selinunte, Motia and the ruined world of the poor and the dead.” He defined his work as “the archaeology of the future” which would be a testimony to the continued presence of great civilizations in this land.
A Cretto resembles a dried up clay lake bed. Burri started incorporating craked surfaces into his work with other materials as early as 1951, turning the Cretto into a painting in the 70s. On the genesis of the Cretto, Burri says: “when I was in California, I often visited Death Valley. The idea came from there, but then in the painting it became something else. I only wanted to demonstrate the energy of the surface.” The Cretto design had also been used by Burri in sculptures. In 1976 and 77 he created two ceramic sculpture walls (5 x 15m), one for the Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden in UCLA, Los Angles, and the other is located at the Capodimonte Museum in Naples. Another sculpture based on the Cretto design is a metal Grande Ferro of 1980 (5.18 x 0.61m) located in Palazzo Albizzini, Collezione Burri, in Città di Castello.
Burri produced his Cretto paintings in collaboration with the forces of nature, in this case, a chemical reaction that causes the surface of the material, when it dries up, to crack. It is a process of destruction/construction that also involves time. The eventual destruction of the surface becomes the construction of the work. The material he used to produce the Cretto was a mixture of wet kaolin, resin, pigment and polyvinyl acetate that was applied as a smooth layer on to a horizontal surface. By changing the composition of the chemicals, the concentration of the catalysts and the depth of the layers the artist was able to control the density of the cracking, but not the exact location of the cracks.
The enormity of the Gibellina project did not become apparent until 1981 when Burri presented the city with a model of the monument. In the model, Burri had recreated in plastic, an aerial view of the topography of Old Gibellina and its surroundings on which he had superimposed a Cretto that covered the side of the destroyed old city. The footprint of Old Gibellina’s main street and one other thoroughfare were incised into the work, while the rest of the Cretto cracks has been allowed to form spontaneously.
Alberto Burri and “The International Land Art Panorama”.
In his speech at a convention titled: Alberto Burri; nel Panorama della Land Art Internazionale, help in Gibellina in October 1998, Zanmatti, the architect of the project and a friend of Burri, said, that Burri, whose original profession was a Doctor, had arrived in Gibellina with the spirit of Asclepius, the Greek God of Medicine. As one who had taken the Hippocratic oath, Burri could not refuse a call for help, but had managed to wriggle his way out of contributing to the many works that had already been constructed in the new city, and came up with the idea of the Cretto. It was a project so immense that even the Pharaohs would have been bewildered by it. Zanmatti was faced with unstable ruins, a type of construction never attempted before, no funds, no materials and no organized labour force. It looks two years to raise sufficient funds, mostly donated by Italians and material donated by a cement factory in Palermo, for the experimental construction of the first irregular shaped block. At the same time a controversy was stirred by those who wanted the ruins left untouched. In an area filled with ruins of previous civilizations that are greatly admired and income-producing, it was a strong argument. Countering this argument, mayor Corrao likened the ruins to a corpse of a beloved that was left to rot, “It is unconceivable to allow the debris of the old city to rot as a testimony to death.” The need “to obliterate the ruins in order to commemorate them” was accepted.
Each section of the Cretto, averaging 700 sq.m, had to be surrounded by reinforced concrete, with the rubble piled and compacted into it to a height of 1.6 m. and the whole covered by a layer of white cement. The gaps between the sections, the walkways, were paved in white cement; these gaps form gullies of varying width from 1.5m to 4m. The army was called in to assist with the clearing of the ruins. All the debris and everything found on site in the ruined buildings, included clothing, dolls, wine and olive oil bottles, farming implements and household items, were piled and buried in the confined perimeter of each section.
Fondazione Orestiadi, the new beginning.
Further funds were raised through a public lottery, the white cement continued to be donated and work on the project commenced in August 1985. Lack of funds stopped the work in December 1989. In 1997 a petition calling for the completion of the work was signed by prominent Italians, from art historian to politicians, authors and academics. This petition succeeded in raising further fund from institutions and another nine acres were added to the monument. As is evident from Senatore Corrao’s call in 2006 for the completion of the monument, it has yet to be completed. Now that the ravages of time and weather are evident, its fate is somewhat reminiscent of that Gaudi’s Sacred Family Church in Barcelona. The monument is no longer the pristine white it was, moss, weeds and trees have invaded it, the surrounding weeds are as tall as the sections themselves, and it is in need not only of completion but of restoration, a task Corrao, who now heads Fondazione Orestiadi, a Regional Art Institution, is still engaged in.
For the casual visitor guided to the place by the sign Gibellina Ruderi (Gibellina ruins), after expressing astonishment at this huge apparition of cracked off white cement in the middle of a rural setting, questions of – What is it? Why is it here? – come to mind. It is useless to look for an explanatory sign, as there is none there. There are a few signs honoring the latest financial donor that mention the earthquake, but these are incorporated into the cement walls and are hard to find. However a feeling that an event, that connects the structure to the site, had occurred there, soon creeps in. The question of what the event was is answered by the few ruined structures that are still standing, by the upturned land, and the abruptly ending roads that abound in the area and the separation from the cultivated land. The scale of the event is transmitted, when wandering through the cracks does not transmit a sensation of desperation such as being lost, on the contrary, it transmits a sensation of adventure, as at no time, despite the silence within the structure, in the cultivated land surrounding it is obscured; it remains visible between the cracks and over the top of the structure, and completes the integration of the monument with the living landscape that surrounds it.
One of Japan’s most iconic purveyors of early-‘70s heavy/blues/psych rock, Speed, Glue & Shinki was composed of three uncommonly talented, freakishly tall (six-foot-plus!), and exceptionally wasted longhairs of mixed descent; Shinki was half Chinese, “Glue” half-French, “Speed” a Filipino, and, yes, their drugs of choice inspired the group’s moniker. As is often the case, the group’s legend was established primarily posthumously, but the improbable nature of their very existence and the retrospectively appreciated uniqueness of their spare musical output totally warrants it.
Speed, Glue & Shinki started out as the brainchild of Atlantic Records impresario Ikuzo Orita and guitar hero Shinki Chen, who was just 21 but already deemed the “Japanese Hendrix,” thanks to a résumé boasting stints with Brit-blues purveyors Powerhouse, Super Session emulators Foodbrain, and the house band for Japan’s own production of the musical Hair, to name just his most then-recent exploits. However, rather than settling on faceless no-names to support Shinki’s genius, the duo sought his instrumental and charismatic equals in highly respected bassist Masayoshi “Glue” Kabe — himself a veteran of Group Sounds staples the Golden Cups, among others, including Shinki’s first pro band years earlier — and the comparatively inexperienced, Filipino-born singing drummer Joey “Speed” Smith (aka Pepe), whose larger-than-life persona, pharmaceutical fixations, and songs to match helped define the group’s radical musical vision. Ironically, and despite its shared instrumental pedigree, when the band unveiled their 1971 debut album, Eve, it was distinguished by astonishingly raw, loose, and at times even clumsy extrapolations on the era’s reigning heavy blues and acid rock templates.
Even more astonishing was how its abject commercial failure to chart on Japan’s still very buttoned up hit parade actually surprised all involved, expediting Speed, Glue & Shinki’s dissolution when the easily distracted Kabe took to vanishing after just a few scattered public band performances. The far more driven Joey did manage to coax a chronically unmotivated Shinki back into the studio, alongside former Zero History bassist Mike Hanopol, but the band’s sprawling eponymous sophomore double album, literally lost the plot in a maze of proto-metal/art-rock chaos and indulgence. The LP was pretty much dead on arrival upon release in early 1972, and it wasn’t long before Joey and Hanopol both gave up the fight and moved back to Manilla, where they founded a new power trio named, oddly, Juan de la Cruz. Shinki Chen proceeded to squander his six-string gifts by forming an organ-dominated outfit named Orange before fading away into session work, while the free-spirited Kabe resumed his itinerant lifestyle, whereabouts unknown (just kidding: he settled down in old age, but where’s the romance in that?). Speed, Glue & Shinki duly graduated to cult band status, and yet, for a brief moment, in a flash of light, this ragged trio forced the rock & roll firmament to its bended knees and carved a monument to primal guitar rock for the ages.
Bill Elkins has been called “one of the true fathers of the space suit.” Within months of the Sputnik 1 launch in October 1957, he began working at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio on “restraint couches” for astronauts. In the late 1960s, as a chief engineer at Garrett AiResearch, his team outcompeted four established space suit manufacturers to win the NASA contract to build long-endurance lunar suits that were to have flown on Apollos 18, 19, and 20. His suit never made it to the moon, however, because NASA cancelled all landings after Apollo 17 in December 1972. Since then Elkins, who is in the U.S. Space Foundation’s Space Technology Hall of Fame, has founded several companies. Today, at age 80, he lives outside Sacramento, California, and continues working, having founded bioCOOL Technologies in 2004 and the consulting firm, WElkins in 2007. He spoke recently with Air & Space Associate Editor Mike Klesius.
Air & Space: How did the first astronaut restraint systems compare to jet pilot systems already in use?
Elkins: A jet pilot restraint system has a hard backpan and seat. It mainly is trying to contain the pilot in the seat, in a sitting position. In an astronaut couch you’re lying on your back. [In the late 1950s] they were planning a cast, form-fitting, backpan restraint couch for the astronauts. But in tests at high G it was causing substernal pain, where the sternum of the occupant would compress into the chest. I designed a sophisticated hammock supported by a tubular steel frame. It left your body in a more normal, natural form at high G. The Mercury project was then transferred to NASA and I lost track of that research. In the end, they went with the harder, backpan restraint couch.
A&S: You once sustained 16.5 Gs, an apparent record for pulling Gs and remaining conscious.
Elkins: We were examining a worst-case G scenario for a Mercury launch. So they put me in the 20-foot-arm centrifuge at Wright-Pat. The G profile was based on the maximum G that could be experienced during the launch. If the escape rocket was fired at maximum dynamic pressure—Mach 1 at roughly 40,000 feet—then 15.5 G would be experienced by the astronaut. So we [added] one G…and “flew” it on the centrifuge. The whole run duration was about three minutes. I began to gray out a bit at 13 G. Then I was above 15.5 G for about six seconds. I “flew” a tracking task with my right hand, and I had a button I could press with my left hand to respond to peripheral lights. I recently discussed this matter with Jim Brinkley, who was contemporary with me at Wright-Patterson. He became the head of the Biodynamics Lab and is an internationally recognized biodynamicist. He confirmed, to the best of his knowledge, that the 16.5 sustained G remains a benchmark achievement. They shut down that centrifuge for good not long after we did those runs in December 1958. We burned it out, I guess.
A&S: How did you get into designing space suits?
Elkins: Those runs are what got me into the spacesuit world, first at Litton where I developed the RX (rigid experimental) series of suits, and then at AiResearch, where, in about two years, I became chief engineer and developed the EX-1A and the AES [Advanced Extravehicular Suit] that won the competition for the extended Apollo mission suit.
Early on, a physicist at Litton was developing a vacuum chamber pressure suit, but Litton thought they were causing permanent heart damage. I had miles of EKGs from my centrifuge runs, so I had a certified healthy heart and was chosen as the test subject to verify or deny the problem. The lab they brought me to was in Beverly Hills, California, of all places. For lunch that day, at a local deli, I made the mistake of ordering a corned beef sandwich with the hottest mustard they had, and shortly before the test began, I started getting some serious heartburn. Well, they put me in a pressure chamber and took me up to 400,000 feet equivalent. The doctor asked me how I was feeling, and I said, “Fine, but I’m feeling a little heartburn.” He said, “Lay back!” and made me swallow a nitroglycerin pill. A subsequent conference of heart specialists determined there was no problem with the vacuum chamber suit.
A&S: What’s the biggest challenge in designing an effective space suit?
Elkins: Well, a big one is mobility, specifically the joints. If you look at the Apollo [suit] joints, the farther you bent them, the more effort it took and the harder it was to hold that position. Those suits were spring loaded to come back to the neutral position. So it took a constant force to keep them out of neutral, and that was very fatiguing. But when you move a constant volume joint to a new position, no further force is needed. When I left Litton and went to AiResearch, I invented the toroidal joint. Toroids maintain constant volume so long as the centerline remains constant. At AiResearch I designed the EX-1A [suit], the first prototype suit to use toroidal joints, in 1967. It was an outstanding suit.
A&S: What were the advantages of the hard suit versus the soft suit? Why two totally different kinds?
Elkins: There are some advantages of the hard suit, although I did not remain a proponent of it. The hard suit had value for being able to go to much higher pressures. The higher you go, the less likely you are to have the bends when exiting a higher-pressure space vehicle. So if you were wearing one, you could scramble to do an emergency [spacewalk] because you didn’t have to pre-breathe for four hours. It’s a very mobile little spaceship, if you will. Vic Vykukal, a NASA Ames engineer, also did pioneering work on the hard suit. Although it demonstrated excellent mobility, it was heavier because of the hard structural components, and the joints did not exhibit the long-life capability of the toroidal joint.
The soft suit came from a line of pressure suits used by the Air Force and Navy. BF Goodrich’s soft suits for the Mercury project were evolved from a Navy pressure suit. David Clark made soft suits for Gemini. Then ILC came into the Apollo program. They all came from that same soft emergency pressure suit lineage. It was a question of cultures and politics within the R&D labs. There was the West Coast technology such as Litton, and NASA’s Ames Research lab; but then the older timers from the East who knew soft suits. Ultimately, soft suits won out.
A&S: It’s often pointed out that the moon suits were so heavy. What was the single heaviest element?
Elkins: I think it was the PLSS, portable life support system [backpack]. The suit by itself would weigh about 60 pounds.
A&S: What was driving the desire for design changes in lunar suits for the extended Apollo missions?
Elkins: They had to be different from the earlier Apollo suits because the lunar rovers would carry astronauts some distance away from the lunar lander. They wanted to explore interesting geological features on the moon. NASA wanted a suit that, should the rover fail, had the mobility for the astronaut to quickly traverse back to the lunar module.
Apollo 16 and 17 used the ILC A7L suit that was not much of an improvement over the previous Apollo suit. In the competition for the extended Apollo missions, the AES was the first truly high mobility suit. It had about 95 percent of nude mobility range. It had significantly greater lifecycle capability. I don’t remember, but I believe the [target length for a lunar stay] was about eight days.
A&S: It’s interesting to see that so much of Constellation, such as the shape of the crew capsule, the composition of the heat shield, the launch abort system, etc., is almost identical in their general design to what was used on Apollo. It appears we figured a lot out the first time around. Will the same be true of the suits?
Elkins: Well I’m hoping to influence that. I hope to work with Oceaneering International [a NASA contractor for the Constellation lunar suits]. I have a concept for an EVA [extravehicular activity] suit with some pneumatic restraints. I think elements might apply to Constellation. It’s already applied to a host of applications in the medical field in liquid cooling and pressurization for MS and epilepsy and head trauma patients.
A&S: How will the new suits handle the damaging lunar dust?
Elkins: Good question. I have some concepts. I’m in the beginning stages of some ideas on electrostatic solutions to dust. One of the suits I studied for Lockheed was for doing polar [Earth] orbits, in which you’re introduced to more radiation than with east-west orbits. I came up with the idea of using high density tungsten fabric to increase radiation protection. Tungsten is highly conductive electrically, but still flexible. That high conductivity woven fabric with an electrostatic charge might repel lunar dust.
A&S: What do you think of the proposed suit that would attach its back entry to the outside of a moon base? After a moonwalk, the astronaut exits the suit to enter the base.
Elkins: I’m not a great proponent of the rear entry arrangement. It’s heavy, and uses valuable real estate that interferes with full mobility. My philosophy is to allow the human to operate as the magnificent machine it is. Back door entry does not easily allow for a two-axis waist joint, and that’s especially risky in unprepared terrain. Almost any maneuver you do, you’re unconsciously using your waist. I doubt that you can make the back door entry suit with the waist joint. Furthermore, there would be maintenance issues. Eventually you’ll need to replace components. So you’ll need access to the suits. For me, the human body is an engineering marvel that took several million years to develop. I want the pressure envelope over that body to exhibit the same mobility. That would minimize learning time in using the suit, and allow rapid solutions to problems during [spacewalks].
A&S: The old Apollo suits were used for one mission and retired. How will the new suit be built to handle repeated use?
Elkins: It will have to have a three-million-cycle life, minimum. One bend in one direction, and returning to neutral, that’s one cycle. The Apollo suit joints, and the latest shuttle suit joints, are not much good above 60,000 cycles.
A&S: What drives you to continue your work?
Elkins: I’m 80, and I’m still pretty much working around the clock. If I can contribute to mankind, space, medicine, and other-life hazardous protective applications, it keeps me young.
“It’s worth the battle, it’s worth the stress, it’s worth waiting for, and it really does do what art’s supposed to do. It makes you remember that we can go for it, and then life isn’t just normal and average.” – Wayne Coyne
This appropriately quirky residence and music studio is as free thinking and boundary pushing as the art and music of its owners, Michelle Martin-Coyne, a photographer and artist, and her husband Wayne, front man of the Flaming Lips. Located in an eclectic neighborhood of Oklahoma City, the addition/renovation of their home is the first phase and central piece of a larger master plan developed for six adjoining properties. These properties, referred to as “the compound” for those familiar with it, is being transformed in phases.
Phase one consisted of the partial refinishing of the main house, and the renovation of an existing garage and storage space into a large family room, and a new master suite including the master bath “dragon egg”. The existing low roof structure of the storage space was removed, making room for a new “fractured plain” roof that floats above a ribbon of clerestory windows. This angular roof cantilevers away from the house off a thin exoskeleton of steel, shading the patio below while still allowing indirect daylight to flood the living space. This connection to the outdoors is further emphasized by a wall of sliding glass doors that open to the outdoor patio and expansive yard.
The master suite was converted from a former attached apartment and includes the bedroom, water closet, powder room, large dressing room, and a hall to the “dragon egg” a concrete walled, egg shaped pod that contains the shower and Japanese-inspired soaking tub.
The Coynes have been actively engaged in the renovation of their house from design phase through construction. The creativity they share and bring to the design table has been as asset to the Project. Michelle’s artistic talent, excitement, and willingness to take an active role in the projects finer construction details and finishes has led the architects to creating rooms and structures as “blank canvases” to receive the final finishes guided by her vision for the house.
Perhaps the most important attribute of the Project and the Compound is its expression of commitment by the musician and his wife to stay and live in a long troubled neighborhood where he grew up. through their commitment and the architects work on other projects adjoining the neighborhood, signs of renewed revitalization efforts are beginning.
To call Canadian artist Michael Snow a filmmaker somehow seems woefully inadequate. For while Snow undeniably makes films, he may be more aptly described as a film sculptor, or perhaps a cine-alchemist. For five decades now, this founding father of avant-garde cinema has been tearing apart and reassembling the DNA of film language in a series of dazzling experiments — and lest that sound austere or forbidding, I should add that Snow possesses a healthy reserve of impish good humor.
Born in Toronto in 1929, Snow graduated from the Ontario School of Art and, by 1956, had already made his first short, a four-minute animation titled A to Z. But at that time Snow was preoccupied with his painting, photography and jazz musicianship — interests he continues to pursue today — and so movies were put on the back burner until the 1960s, when he moved to New York. There he found himself at the epicenter of a heady experimental-film scene whose guiding lights included Hollis Frampton, Jonas Mekas and Ken Jacobs.
Wavelength (1967) remains Snow’s best-known work, and it is some kind of historic achievement, a movie in which time, space and movement are the stars, with human characters tossed cavalierly to the sidelines. Famous for having the longest zoom shot (45 minutes) in cinema, and as an influence on filmmakers from Stanley Kubrick to Chantal Akerman, Wavelength offers an uninterrupted traversal of a New York loft space from one end to the other, accompanied by a sound track of waves (both sonic and oceanic) and the Beatles singing “Strawberry Fields Forever.”
Yet it’s hardly as single-minded as it sounds. Without cutting, Snow employs tricks of exposure and filtration to take us from day to night to day again, from the dingy-gray environs of a Lower Manhattan walk-up to a shock-white mod nightmare. Wavelength catches us up so profoundly in the raw possibilities of movies’ structural (as opposed to narrative) properties that when its own “murder” occurs, most viewers don’t immediately realize anything has happened.
That a paint salesman from northern Illinois created the tool through which rebels, gang members, artists and anti-Wall Street protesters alike have expressed themselves merely confirms that inventors can neither control nor predict the impact of their innovations. After all, Jack Dorsey never imagined that Twitter would facilitate Anthony Weiner’s self-immolation.
The spray-paint can, however, has eminently practical origins. Ed Seymour, the proprietor of a Sycamore, Ill., paint company, was in search of an easy way to demonstrate his aluminum coating for painting radiators. His wife suggested a makeshift spray gun, like those used for deodorizers. And so, in 1949, Seymour mixed paint and aerosol in a can with a spray head. As it turned out, compressing paint in a can made for a nice finish.
THE EARLY YEARS
Seymour’s humble creation quickly proved so popular that Seymour of Sycamore began customizing its own manufacturing equipment and eventually expanded into new businesses, including the auto and industrial-machine markets. Soon afterward, home-furnishing heavyweights like Rust-Oleum and Krylon jumped in. And by 1973, Big Spray was producing 270 million cans annually in the U.S., according to the Consumer Specialty Products Association. Last year, U.S. spray-paint manufacturers produced 412 million cans.
By this time, of course, aerosol spray paint had begun to forge an industry beyond home improvements and quickie D.I.Y. projects. As the safety pin did with punk, it eventually transcended its utilitarian roots. Early nonradiator-painting devotees tended to split into two camps: protesters and vandals. While it is impossible to determine the first student or activist to aim an aerosol paint can at cardboard or buildings, forefathers of the latter include Cornbread and Julio 204, the Philadelphia- and New York-based artist-defacers, who took advantage of the technology to make their tags (né names) well known in the ’60s and ’70s. Spray paint, after all, was the ideal medium for this form of branding. It came in small, easy-to-conceal, easy-to-steal cans. It was paint and brush in one. It dried quickly. It worked well on building materials and subway cars. More important, perhaps, the imprecise application lent it an inherent disregard. Its inability to be perfectly controlled also made it an apt metaphor for rebellion. In other words, it was pretty badass.
THE RECKONING
Public outrage, and laws restricting spray paint sales to teenagers, ensued. Though not all enthusiasts were deterred. “There was a Red Devil spray-paint factory in Mount Vernon, which is near where the 2 and 5 trains end in the Bronx,” says the graffiti artist Caleb Neelon wistfully. “There are a couple of great, legendary stories about breaking into that factory for the ultimate shoplifting.”
According to Neelon, who, with Roger Gastman, wrote “The History of American Graffiti,” there were not a lot of options for high-quality spray paints in those days. The American spray-paint giants like Krylon and Rust-Oleum resisted tapping into the graffiti-artist market, refusing to upgrade their colors or valves to allow for more creative tagging. In recent years, however, graffiti’s outlaw status has been softened a bit through the auction circuit’s embrace of guerrilla art. In 2006, Angelina Jolie paid $226,000 for a painting called “Picnic,” by Banksy, an artist who made his name through graffiti. The painting features starving Africans watching a white family picnic. Banksy’s “Keep It Spotless” sold for $1.8 million two years later.
THE EUROPEAN REVOLUTION
In the late ’90s, serious graffiti writers noticed the influx of higher-quality paints made by European companies. “Honestly, if you win the graffiti prize and you get to take home a palette of different colors of either American or European spray paint,” Neelon said, “you’re taking the European.” The European paints now come in colors with names like quince and Mad C Psycho Pink and attributes like weather resistance and UV-protection.
Companies like Montana, based in Spain; Molotow, based in Germany; and Ironlak, based in Australia, were pleased to associate with street artists. They offered professional-grade enhancements too, like different kinds of valves that emit different types of mists. (Some artists now complain that American alternatives are like buying a tube of paint with only one brush.) “The control you can get with the can, from the pressure, is phenomenal,” Gastman said.
Such innovation is not without blowback. Some spray writers dismiss the European brands as “fancy paint,” and in pursuit of lost authenticity, stick to Krylon, which is based in Ohio, and Rust-Oleum, which is located outside Chicago. “American writers really want to be loyal to Rusto,” Neelon said. “Rust-Oleum is like the Ford F-150 of spray paint. It’s the workingman’s paint.”
As the Shropshire sky gradually deepens from yellow to orange and finally angry red, so the noise levels build above the reed beds. A swirling, chattering,flock of starlings swirls above the wetlands of Whixall Moss on the Welsh Border, shimmering dark then light as it drifts like a plume of smoke from some monstrous pyre. Back and forth it twists like an out-of-place tornado before suddenly, when it is almost too dark to see, the flock streams to earth and is gone.
“Numbers build up slowly near the roost over the afternoon as small groups of birds return from foraging in the area,” explains Paul Stancliffe of the British Trust for Ornithology. “By late afternoon there is a huge swirling cloud. It’s all about safety in numbers – none wants to be on the outside, none wants to be first to land.”
A “murmuration” of starlings, as this phenomenon is known, must be one of the most magical, yet underrated, wildlife spectacles on display in winter. Impenetrable as the flock’s movements might seem to the human eye, the underlying maths is comparatively straightforward. Each bird strives to fly as close to its neighbours as possible, instantly copying any changes in speed or direction. As a result, tiny deviations by one bird are magnified and distorted by those surrounding it, creating rippling, swirling patterns. In other words, this is a classic case of mathematical chaos (larger shapes composed of infinitely varied smaller patterns). Whatever the science, however, it is difficult for the observer to think of it as anything other than some vast living entity.
Until recently such sights were common over London. Indeed, in 1949 so many roosted on the hands of Big Ben that they stopped the clock. Sadly, such invasions are a thing of the past, but Rome is currently subject to a vast influx of several million birds each winter. This produces spectacular swarms, but the problems associated with the roosts are not so wondrous. Starling droppings are extremely acidic and the authorities are worried about the damage to ancient ruins, while car owners have to pay out millions of euros for resprays.
The logic behind this spectacular behaviour is simple: survival. Starlings are tasty morsels for peregrines, merlins and sparrowhawks. The answer is to seek safety in numbers, gathering in flocks and with every bird trying to avoid the edge where adept predators can sometimes snatch a victim.
Flock sizes vary around the year. During the breeding season, groups are rarely more than a few birds gathering at a good food source, but in late summer juveniles begin to congregate and are soon joined by adults. These flocks are in turn swollen by continental birds fleeing the harsher winters. During the Seventies a particularly large murmuration of one and a half million birds regularly gathered near Goole in East Yorkshire, but the current flock of around 5,000 at Slimbridge is more typical.
During the day, big flocks disperse into smaller foraging groups. The search for calories is now critical and grouping allows each to put more effort into finding food, safer for scores of watchful eyes. These tend to scour rough pasture for insects, but they punctuate these bouts by preening and chattering in tree tops or on telephone wires where there is good all-round visibility. In late afternoon, however, the smaller groups move back to the main roost, flying up to 20 miles to coalesce in ever-growing numbers. By dusk this murmurating cloud can number thousands or even millions of birds.
Sadly, starlings have recently declined sharply; the breeding population is down by some 73 per cent since 1970. It is not clear what lies behind this fall, but it is probably due to the loss of suitable nest cavities and a decline in the rough pasture where they find most of the insects which form the backbone of their diet.
To put this drop in context, however, a shortage of literary references to the birds before the 18th century suggests they were comparatively uncommon even two centuries ago. Certainly their Welsh name adern y eira (“snow bird”) suggests they were regarded as winter migrants. It seems that they expanded rapidly after the Industrial Revolution, probably aided by milder weather and better food thanks to agricultural improvements.
There is another glimmer of hope. In 1890, an American eccentric, Eugene Schieffelin, decided to introduce all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare to his native land. He released 60 starlings in Central Park and the birds have thrived, spreading as far as the Pacific. There are now 200 million and thus, in years to come, it seems we are as likely to see murmurations over New York as a Shropshire peat bog.
WHERE TO SEE THEM
Flocks are unpredictable and move around, but huge gatherings are usually on show at the following: Brighton and Eastbourne piers; Westhay Moor, Somerset; Slimbridge, Gloucestershire; Aberystwyth; Whixall Moss, Oswestry; Leighton Moss, Lancashire; Gretna Green.
But what if you’re looking for a more recent, if less familiar, brand of Russian cinema? Like, say, Vitali Moskalenko’s 2002 Volga river-boat comedy, “The Chinese Tea-Set.” Or Emil Loteanu’s 1979 adaptation of the Chekhov novella “The Shooting Party” (original title “My Tender and Affectionate Beast”).
For those, you’ll need to go to the YouTube channel of Mosfilm, the Russian film studio and production company. Over the last month 50 or so films from the company’s library, with English subtitles, have been posted.
Determining exactly how many films are available, or what they are, takes a little work for a non-Russian-speaker, since the site is entirely in Cyrillic. With the help of your browser’s translation function and a little cross-referencing on the Internet Movie Database, it’s possible to identify what you’re looking at.
There are some older, more familiar titles in the mix, like Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Andrei Rublev” (1966) and “Solaris” (1972) and Mikhail Kalatozov’s 1957 film “The Cranes Are Flying.” Perhaps the most noteworthy director represented is Kurosawa, whose Siberian adventure “Dersu Uzala” was a Soviet-Japanese co-production.
Other films, while little known in America, have opened here and won praise, like Mr. Loteanu’s “Shooting Party,” which Vincent Canby of The New York Times called “a fascinating, almost intoxicating experience.”
But American viewers will probably be most interested in what they consider oddities, like Eldar Ryazanov’s “Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath!,” a cult comedy in Russia, or “easterns” like “White Sun of the Desert.”
Five films will be added to the channel each week, according to Agence France-Presse, which quoted Karen Shakhnazarov, the company’s director, “The aim is to give users the possibility to legally watch high-quality video material and prevent the illegal use of our films.”
During the last ice age northeastern Siberia remained a grassy refuge for scores of animals, including bison and woolly mammoths. Then, about 10,000 years ago, this vast ecosystem disappeared as the Ice Age ended.
Now, though, the Ice Age landscape is on its way back, with a little help from the Russian scientists who have established “Pleistocene Park.”
The scientists hope to uncover what killed off the woolly mammoth and other Ice Age animals. To do so, they’re restoring the prehistoric ecosystem once found in what is now the remote Sakha region of eastern Russia.
The land is slowly being turned into willow savanna, as it was 10,000 years ago. Dozens of wild horses are already grazing in the refuge, and there are plans to import bison and musk oxen.
Most spectacularly, the wildlife park may one day become home to a genetic hybrid of the extinct woolly mammoth and the modern-day elephant. But the park probably will not see its most majestic potential inhabitant for several decades, if ever.
Japanese scientists, working with Russians, have for years been searching for mammoth carcasses to use for reviving woolly mammoths, which would then be introduced into Pleistocene Park.
The plan: to extract sperm DNA from frozen mammoth remains and inject it into a female elephant’s eggs to produce a hybrid offspring. By repeating the procedure over generations, scientists would eventually create an animal that is mostly mammoth.
One problem, however, has been finding mammoth DNA that is sufficiently well preserved in ice to still be viable. The DNA in mammoth fossils that have been found has been unusable, damaged by time and climate changes.
Also, many mammoth experts scoff at the idea, calling it scientifically impossible and even morally irresponsible.
“DNA preserved in ancient tissues is fragmented into thousands of tiny pieces nowhere near sufficiently preserved to drive the development of a baby mammoth,” said Adrian Lister, a paleontologist at University College London in England.
Great Mystery
Sergey Zimov, who is not involved in the mammoth-recreation effort, initiated the project to restore the Pleistocene ecosystem in 1989. He hopes to test the theory that hunting, not climate change, wiped out the animals that once thrived in northern Siberia.
“I want to show how many animals can exist if nobody hinders them to live,” said Zimov, who directs the Northeast Science Station in Cherskiy, about 93 miles (150 kilometers) south of the Arctic Sea in the Russian republic of Sakha (also known as Yakutiya).
In the area of Sakha where the park is located, temperatures fluctuate between highs of about 85 degrees Fahrenheit (30 degrees Celsius) in the summer and lows of -58 degrees Fahrenheit (-50 degrees Celsius) in the winter.
During the driest periods of the Pleistocene, which lasted from about 1.8 million to 10,000 years ago, the vegetation was mainly low grass.
During warmer periods the land turned into meadows and steppes, ideal grazing grounds for woolly mammoths, rhinoceroses, bison, horses, elk, and yaks. Among the predators were cave lions and wolves.
When this vast ecosystem disappeared 10,000 years ago, the land turned into mossy tundra. The only plant eaters to survive were reindeer that grazed on lichens and moose that fed on willows.
The cause of the extinctions of large animals such as woolly mammoths has been a topic of great debate. Many scientists argue that the sudden shift to a warmer and moister climate proved catastrophic to the steppe vegetation and the animals that thrived on it.
“I’m completely on the side of natural, environmental causes of extinction,” said Andrei Sher, a well-known paleontologist at Moscow’s A.N. Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution.
Skilled Hunters?
Zimov, however, believes that humans, using increasingly efficient hunting practices, killed off the woolly mammoths and the other large animals.
But could a small population of hunters kill millions of animals?
“Imagine a picture in which someone from the neighboring tribe teaches you to make new … weapons” such as spears, Zimov said.
“Now you kill the first animal. Will you carefully prepare and consume all the meat, surrounded as you are by clouds of mosquitoes? Or will you just cut out the tongue, knowing that there are millions more [animals]?
“Over time, people probably understood that they should take care of the animals, but by then it was too late,” he added.
By reintroducing the Pleistocene animals, Zimov says scientists may be able to determine what role the animals played in maintaining their own habitat. Researchers may also better understand the forces that vanquished the Ice Age ecosystem.
While much of the Siberian tundra is now covered with moss, the 160 square kilometers (62 square miles) designated for the park is an even split of meadow, larch forest, and willow shrubland.
“All plants that were there in the Pleistocene epoch are preserved there today,” Zimov said.
The park will eventually be cordoned off, though it will remain open to adventurous tourists who can get to such a remote location, which is accessible only by helicopter.
So far, only 20 square kilometers (about 8 square miles) have been fenced off. Within the park hardy Yakutian horses, the closest descendants of the Pleistocene horse, roam alongside reindeer and moose. Plans to import of Canadian bison, however, are on hold due to fears of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease.
Zimov says he hopes to increase the density of plant eaters sufficiently to influence the vegetation and soil in the park and stabilize its grasslands. Once herbivore populations have been established, the plan is to acclimatize Siberian tigers, predators whose modern survival is threatened by poaching.
We might as well call it: Cinema as we knew it is dead.
An article at the moviemaking technology website Creative Cow reports that the three major manufacturers of motion picture film cameras — Aaton, ARRI and Panavision — have all ceased production of new cameras within the last year, and will only make digital movie cameras from now on. As the article’s author, Debra Kaufman, poignantly puts it, “Someone, somewhere in the world is now holding the last film camera ever to roll off the line.”
What this means is that, even though purists may continue to shoot movies on film, film itself will may become increasingly hard to come by, use, develop and preserve. It also means that the film camera — invented in 1888 by Louis Augustin Le Prince — will become to cinema what typewriters are to literature. Anybody who still uses a Smith-Corona or IBM Selectric typewriter knows what that means: if your beloved machine breaks, you can’t just take it to the local repair shop, you have to track down some old hermit in another town who advertises on Craigslist and stockpiles spare parts in his basement.
As Aaton founder Jean-Pierre Beauviala told Kaufman: “Almost nobody is buying new film cameras. Why buy a new one when there are so many used cameras around the world? We wouldn’t survive in the film industry if we were not designing a digital camera.” Bill Russell, ARRI’s vice president of cameras, added that: “The demand for film cameras on a global basis has all but disappeared.”
Theaters, movies, moviegoing and other core components of what we once called “cinema” persist, and may endure. But they’re not quite what they were in the analog cinema era. They’re something new, or something else — the next generation of technologies and rituals that had changed shockingly little between 1895 and the early aughts. We knew this day would come. Calling oneself a “film director” or “film editor” or “film buff” or a “film critic” has over the last decade started to seem a faintly nostalgic affectation; decades hence it may start to seem fanciful. It’s a vestigial word that increasingly refers to something that does not actually exist — rather like referring to the mass media as “the press.”
In May 1999 — a year that saw several major releases, including “Toy Story 2,″ projected digitally for paying customers — editor and sound designer Walter Murch wrote a piece for the New York Times headlined, “A Digital Cinema of the Mind? Could Be.” In it, Murch pointed out that only two major aspects of the analog filmmaking process had survived into the late ’90s, the recording of images on sprocketed celluloid film and their projection onto big screens by casting a beam of light through the images. Murch predicted that once digital projection became widespread, it would “trigger the final capitulation of the two last holdouts of film’s 19th-century, analog-mechanical legacy. Projection, at the end of the line, is one; the other is the original photography that begins the whole process. The movie industry is currently a digital sandwich between slices of analog bread.”
Near the end of 1999, my former New York Press colleague Godfrey Cheshire published a two-part article titled “Death of Film/Decay of Cinema“, which in hindsight seems eerily prescient. He predicted just about everything that would happen within the next decade-plus, including the replacement of old-fashioned film print projection by digital systems, the replacement of film cameras by digital cameras, and the near-total takeover of traditional cinematic language by techniques that had once been the province of television.
“Camera, projector, celluloid,” Cheshire wrote, “the basic technology hasn’t changed in over a century. Sure, as a form of expression, film underwent a radical alteration with the addition of sound, but that and other developments – color, widescreen, stereo, etc.–were simply embellishments to a technical paradigm that has held true since photographic likenesses began to move, and that everyone in the world has thought of as “the movies” – until this summer. [...] For the time being, most movies will still be shot on film, primarily because audiences are used to the look, but everything else about the process will be, in effect, television – from the transmission by satellite to the projection, which for all intents and purposes is simply a glorified version of a home video projection system.”
Although I’ve become more of a surly classicist with age, I was an early defender of movies shot on video, and I really don’t see the point of doing a Grandpa Cinema routine, waving a cane and hollering that the movies somehow “equal” film. That’s silly. Cinema is not just a medium. It is alanguage. Its essence — storytelling with shots and cuts, with or without sound — will survive the death of the physical material, celluloid, that many believed was inseparably linked to it. The physical essence of analog cinema won’t survive the death of film (except at museums and repertory houses that insist on showing 16mm and 35mm prints).
But digital cinema will become so adept at mimicking the look of film that within a couple of decades, even cinematographers may not be able to tell the difference. The painterly colors, supple gray scale, hard sharpness and enticing flicker of motion picture film were always important (if mostly unacknowledged) parts of cinema’s mass appeal. The makers of digital moviemaking equipment got hip to that in the late ’90s, and channeled their research and development money accordingly; it’s surely no coincidence that celluloid-chauvinist moviegoers and moviemakers stopped resisting the digital transition once they realized that the new, electronically-created movies could be made to look somewhat like the analog kind, with dense images, a flickery frame rate, and starkly defined planes of depth.
But let’s not kid ourselves: Now that analog filmmaking is dead, an ineffable beauty has died with it. Let’s raise two toasts, then — one to the glorious past, and one to the future, whatever it may hold.
The Portland Radio Authority, also known as PRA, is a non-commercial, listener-supported and web-based radio station based in Portland, Oregon. It touts itself as a “free form community media source”.
PRA was founded in 2003 a Pirate Radio station which at the time was broadcast on low-power locally and across the web.
PRA went Internet-only in 2006 after pressure from local media through the FCC.
PRA has a roster of deejays (over 50) who produce weekly two hour shows that cover a wide variety of music styles and programming.
For more information on PRA or to listen to it’s Internet stream, visit www.praradio.org.
In-N-Out Burger has a secret unpublished menu for insiders who are in-the-know. Next time you’re at In-N-Out order a bag of these off-the-menu specials. While it’s not on the printed menu, there are buttons on the cash register for these items. You can pretty much order anything you want, as long as they have the ingredients (e.g., putting onions in a milkshake). While the “secret” menu is listed on the In-N-Out corporate site, it is far from complete.
“3-by-3″ = three meat patties and three slices of cheese.
“4-by-4″ = four meat patties and four slices of cheese.
“2-by-4″ = two meat patties and four slices of cheese.
*Note: You may get a burger with the exact number of meat patties or cheese slices you want (up to 4×4). Just tell the In-N-Out Burger cashier how many meat patties and how much cheese you want and that is what you’ll get! For instance, if you want 4 pieces of meat and 3 pieces of cheese tell them you want a “4-by-3.” the number stands for MxC with a 7×3 being 7 patties and 3 pieces of cheese.
“Double Meat” = like a Double Double without cheese.
“3 by Meat” = three meat patties and no cheese.
“Animal Style” = the meat is cooked and fried with mustard and then pickles are added, extra spread and grilled onions are added.
“Animal Style Fries” = fries with cheese, spread, grilled onions and pickles (if you ask for them).
“Protein Style” = for all you low-carbohydrate dieters, this is a burger with no bun (wrapped in lettuce).
“Flying Dutchman” = two meat patties, two slices of melted cheese and nothing else – not even a bun!
Fries “Well-Done” = extra crispy fries . . . even better than the regular!
Fries “Light” = opposite of fries well-done, more raw than most people like ‘em
“Grilled Cheese” = no meat, just melted cheese, tomato, lettuce and spread on a bun.
“Veggie Burger” = burger without the patty or cheese. Sometimes we call this the “Wish Burger.”
“Neapolitan” Shake = strawberry, vanilla and chocolate mixed together.
The friendly employees of In-N-Out Burger will take your special order without question, if you use the right terminology. The printed receipt will have your special request typed on it just as you ordered it.
The falls are known as Kerepakupai Merú or Parekupa Vena in the language of the indigenous Pemon, and are more commonly known as Salto Angel or Angel Falls, is the tallest free-falling waterfall on earth. The Río Gauja flows from the sandstone plateau-mountain Auyan Tepui, the largest of many Tepuis in Canaima National Park in the southeastern part of Venezuela. As the river nears the edge of the mountain, it sinks into channels in the bedrock and disappears underground completely, emerging 50 feet below the top of the cliff and plunging a sheer 2,648 feet to the floor of the canyon below. The river flows all year long, but during the dry months it is severely reduced in volume and isn’t anywhere near as impressive.
HISTORY AND NAMES
Kerepakupai Merú, or Parekupa-vena are the proper names given to Angel Falls by the indigenous Pemon Indians. The name Angel Falls, as the world knows it, was bestowed upon the falls after James Angel, a bush pilot who crash-landed his plane on the mountain above the falls in November of 1933 while conducting aerial prospecting surveys in the area. The falls were, however, first seen by a non-native in 1912 when Venezuelan explorer Ernesto Sanchez la Cruz stumbled upon the fall. His name is not often attached with the waterfalls because he did not seek to publicize his find.
In 1949 an American Journalist named Ruth Robertson conducted an expedition to the waterfall, taking along surveyors with hopes to record the height of the waterfall. National Geographic is often credited with leading the expedition, but they appear to have had very little to do with it. The survey team measured the falls as dropping 3,212 feet.
OUR THOUGHTS
While Kerepakupai Merú is most certainly one of the greatest waterfalls on the planet, we grow more and more skeptical that it is either the tallest on earth or as tall as is claimed. The survey team which measured the waterfall in 1949 took their measurements from the shores of the Rio Churun, almost a mile away from the base of the waterfall. The elevation difference from the top of the Tepui to the Rio Churun is, conveniently, just over 3,300 feet and there is more than 500 feet of loss in elevation from the base of the waterfall to the point where the Rio Gauja flows into the Rio Churun. Secondly, we are of the opinion that Kerepakupai Merú should only be considered the 2,648 foot plunge, as the river below the falls – aside from a 100 foot fall 1/4 mile downstream from the base of the main drop – is more or less flat. This would make South Africa’s Tugela Falls the tallest on earth.
To further heighten the engima, we’ve seen botanical sources that claim surveyed height figures of 2,937 feet total, with a clear leap of 2,421 feet. The height controversy aside, this is clearly a giant.
The infant Tugela River makes a series of 5 consecutive leaps down the amphitheater wall in the high Drakensberg Mountains. The initial horsetail is on the order of 597 feet (182m), followed shortly afterward by a leap of 1350 feet (411m). The three subsequent falls, which over the years haven’t consistently been included in the overall height given for the falls, occur in rapid succession and comprise the balance of the 3,110 feet (948m) of elevation loss.
SEASONAL DISCHARGE
This waterfall occurs along a stream that is known to vary greatly in volume and as a result may not flow consistently year round or may dry out completely during certain periods.
HISTORY AND NAMES
Tugela is a phonetic spelling of the word “Thukela”, meaning “sudden” or “startling”. Indeed, this gentle stream makes a very abrupt leap off of a massive escarpment.
OUR THOUGHTS
We’ve seen Tugela Falls variously listed between 1,800 feet (549m) and 3,110 feet (948m) depending on the source. Other height claims are 2,014 feet (614m), and 2,853 feet (870m). It is our theory that the two lower figures only refer to the first two drops. Photographs clearly show that the 3rd tier follows the 2nd tier just as closely as the 2nd tier follows the 1st tier. The three tiers together most likely account for the 2853 feet (870m) height figure. Since the 4th and 5th tiers are still more or less continuous, with no lengthy interstitial stretch of river between, we feel that the height figure of 3110′ (948m) is wholly credible. At any height, this is a very tall waterfall.
The only drawback to Tugela Falls is the flow. Most of the water that collects on the relatively flat surface of Mont Aux Sources flows either west or north. There is a rather small portion that slopes east, and this accounts for several very tall, but meager waterfalls, Tugela being the largest in terms of flow. It really only flows well after periods of rain. When it flows however, it is most impressive.
LOCATION AND DIRECTIONS
There are two trails to the falls. The trail to the top of Mont Aux Sources leaves the parking area for “The Sentinel”. The trail is about 4 miles (6.4km) to Tugela Falls, gaining perhaps 1,700 feet (518m) in elevation. A cursory glance might suggest that isn’t TOO hard, but the elevation at the parking area is about 8,300 feet, and the lip of Tugela Falls is close to 10000′ (3048m) above sea level. The air is a bit more thin here.
The second means of access follows the Tugela River upstream through the Tugela Gorge. This trail is 4.3 miles (7km) in length, but the gradient is much more level, gaining perhaps a thousand feet in elevation. The trailhead is roughly 5,200 feet (1585m) above sea level.
Insight was an Emmy-winning syndicated television series produced by Paulist Productions that aired 250 episodes from 1960 to 1983. The series presented half-hour dramas illuminating the contemporary search for meaning, freedom, and love. Insight was an anthology series, using an eclectic set of story telling forms including comedy, melodrama, and fantasy to explore moral dilemmas.
The series was created by Roman Catholic priest Ellwood E. “Bud” Kieser, the founder of Paulist Productions. A member of the Paulist Fathers, an evangelistic Catholic order of priests, he worked in the entertainment community in Hollywood as a priest-producer and occasional host, using television as a vehicle of spiritual enrichment.
In the United States the series was typically shown on Sunday mornings or late night. Often stations aired Insight in order to meet theFederal Communications Commission‘s public interest standard for broadcast television.
Tom Swift finishes inventing something major in this book, the Electric Rifle. Introduced in a previous episode, (The Caves of Ice) the device is now more-or-less complete. It still needs some work, as the stun/kill/disintegrate adjustment is too indiscriminate. Also, due to the extreme destructive power at the terminal distance, safety issues regarding accidental discharge or mis-adjustment need to be addressed.
The rifle resembles an oversized (but lightweight) heavy-game firearm in appearance, except for “dials, levers, gears and wheels” on the shoulder stock. It throws a (plasma?) “bullet” that can be adjusted to “discharge” at a given range with a force varying from “stun” to “disintegrate.” The WSoD part (Willing Suspension of Disbelief) of this invention, is the ability of this charge to travel thru walls and intervening barriers without loss of energy, “find” a target that cannot be seen and selectively dump its’ energy on that target only. A lion, carrying off a tribesman is killed in its tracks, while the injured native (clamped in the lion’s jaws) is unharmed. The rifle is charged by a small dynamo and contains a storage device for this charge in a cylinder contained in the butt-stock. This is presumed to be a capacitor or battery, although no details are given. No “magazine capacity” is quoted, but Tom never seems to have to reload. Also, there is no annoying recoil, noise or smoke produced when it is fired.
The secret of the Electric Rifle seems to have been lost to modern man. The idea of a variable strength, select-range weapon that is “safe” until it reaches the intended target, is still beyond the technology of 2005. Self-seeking missiles and timed ranging small-arms projectiles are reality, today, but not in the clean, simple and environmentally friendly package that Tom has invented. Have no fear, though. We will some day develop this weapon. A glimpse into the Hollywood time machine confirms this.
One night in December, house movers plopped the beat-up bungalow onto the empty double lot at 3705 Lyons.
They didn’t appear to have done a good job. The little pink house sat both backward and crooked on the bedraggled lot. The front door only sorta-kinda faced the back fence.
But the neighbors didn’t complain. The Fifth Ward is full of weird empty houses on weedy lots.
Then, early this summer, a couple of white guys showed up. First they pried off the portico that once sheltered the house’s front door. Then they started generally smashing the place up, gutting the interior walls that held it up and replacing them with a thicket of wooden supports nailed at bizarre angles.
One day, Sherman Miller, who lives across the intersection, ambled over and asked the guys what they were doing. They said something about making the house into art. So he asked if they had any work for him.
He thought they were crazy. But they paid in cash.
Six years ago, the white guys – Dan Havel and Dean Ruck – smashed up a couple of other bungalows, and in the process, created Inversion, one of the most astounding of pieces of art that Houston had ever seen. A giant horizontal vortex, made from the bungalows’ own wood siding, seemed to rip through the houses – a sight that literally stopped traffic on Montrose Boulevard.
It was public art that the public loved. People who never set foot in galleries asked their neighbors whether they’d seen it. Parents snapped photos of their kids crawling into the funnel’s mouth; dog owners snapped photos of their mutts peeking out the little hole at its tail. Pranksters stuck Realtors’ signs out front. Inversion appeared on Christmas cards, newspapers, magazines and the TV news. And naturally, it was a Web sensation.
But it was easy, too, to read meaning into the spectacle. Montrose, like other neighborhoods, was gentrifying fast. Its bungalows and other old houses were disappearing; townhouses and highrises seemed to appear overnight, out of nowhere. The time-space continuum seemed in flux. The past was being sucked into the future. A vortex was ripping through.
You were free to decide whether that vortex was good or bad. Obviously, the Art League of Houston – which had commissioned Havel and Ruck – thought it was great: The Art League was about to replace its cramped pair of bungalows with a brand-new building, one with galleries designed to be galleries and classrooms designed to be classrooms. Inversion was intended as a way to send the old, not-quite-right houses off in style, a temporary way to connect to the public, an artful way to make way for the new art space.
It worked almost too well. After the better part of the year, when the Art League finally demolished the work that was always supposed to be temporary, some Houstonians were sad or angry; they’d wanted Inversion to last. The Art League responded by naming its new coffee shop Inversion. And now, embedded in the reflective window facing the parking lot, there’s a big photographic image of Inversion The longer you look at it, the stranger it seems: a permanent picture of a temporary artwork; a shiny, glassed-in window celebrating a rough wooden hole; an unchanging snapshot of something all about change.
Wooden chaos
Fifth Ward Jam, as Havel and Ruck call the piece they recently finished, isn’t at all a copy of Inversion. Jam is made from one bungalow instead of two, and it has multiple vortexes, not just one. In front of all the wooden chaos, there’s an area that could serve as a stage. But anyone who remembers Inversion will immediately recognize Jam as its kin.
The main difference, really, is the site: The Fifth Ward is wildly different from arty, gentrifying Montrose. In the past decades, change has crept in, here and there – a new-ish apartment complex sits directly across Lyons Avenue from Jam – but the neighborhood remains much the same: mostly African American, mostly poor. Weedy lots and vacant houses are problems here; gentrification and whirlwind change are not.
Ruck and Havel scrounged much of the stuff they nailed onto the house. They reused much of the house’s own pink siding. Other inch-thick bits of flotsam and jetsam came from the city’s ReUse Warehouse, which recycles building material that would otherwise end up in a landfill.
But the big stuff they needed to create Jam – the money, house and real estate – came from official sources: the Houston Arts Alliance and the Fifth Ward Community Redevelopment Corp. “Dean and I were asked to ‘revitalize the neighborhood,’” Havel said, staggering back and rolling his eyes: That’s a lot to ask from a piece of art.
But on that recent Monday evening, before Jam’s official debut on Oct. 1, the artwork was at least enlivening that stretch of Lyons. Cars slowed down so drivers could get an eyeful; bicyclists stopped; drivers asked questions. Recently, Havel said, a Metro driver stopped his bus to take a photo.
But will people leave the street to come hang out there? Jam is supposed to last about two years before time and termites take their toll. In that time, will its newly, lightly landscaped lot function as a little park, as the Arts Alliance and CRC hope? Now that they’ve built it, will people come?
Havel likes imagining Jam’s stage taken over by politicians or preachers. He likes the idea of kids investigating Jam, trying to find out where its vortexes lead. And he likes the idea that people might hang out at the park’s round white concrete picnic tables, the kind that grandmas have in their backyards.
But most of all, he likes the idea that Jam might be taken over by a new generation of Fifth Ward musicians: rappers or anyone else who could use a free stage. He loves the Fifth Ward’s rich music history – loves knowing that Lyons Avenue, in the ’40s and ’50s, had a legendary music scene. Peacock Records recorded R&B and gospel greats there; among them, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Texas Johnny Brown, Big Mama Thornton, and the Mighty Clouds of Joy. The record company’s sister club, The Bronze Peacock, hosted acts like T-Bone Walker and Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown. Havel is thrilled that the Jam’s opening celebration included a scheduled performance by Texas Johnny Brown, once Peacock Records’ house guitarist.
Inversion’s vortex seemed to whip Montrose out of its past and into a future that was arriving all too fast. Jam’s gentler vortices connect Fifth Ward’s past to its present – and its future.
“Do you still think we’re crazy?” Ruck asked Miller.
“No,” Miller said. Then he paused a couple of seconds to think. “Well,” he corrected himself, “maybe half crazy.”
Some philosophies of aesthetics enumerate seven primary art forms derived from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s “Lectures on the Aesthetics” and the writings of film theorist Ricciotto Canudo: architecture, sculpture, painting, dance, music, poetry, and cinema.
The order is disputed, and architecture is sometimes shuffled to the third position, as it was by aspiring filmmaker Alex Roman for the title of his breathtaking work in progress, The Third & The Seventh, an artful combination of photorealistic architectural renderings and stylish CG cinematography.
In Roman’s able hands, the combination is undeniably poetic. His reverence for light borders on transcendent, and his attention to detail is inspiring. We caught up with Alex for a little background information.
Justin Cone: Tell us a little about yourself. Who are you? Where are you from? What do you currently do?
Alex Roman: I was born in 1979, in Alacant (Alicante), a city in Spain. I would first like to say that my real name is Jorge Seva, but I use “Alex Roman” as an artistic alias for publishing independent work. After being trained in traditional painting at a few academies, I discovered this other world called CG. After school, I made the move to Madrid and began working at a visual effects company. That stint did not last too long due to the lack of demand for visual effects in the Spanish market at the time. It was then that I switched into the VIZ (architectural visualization) business. I have been working for several companies since. After that, I took a sabbatical year for to work on an “already-built work” visualization series, which will be stitched together into a short animated piece.
JC: Were you formally trained in architecture?
AR: Nope, never. But I was very interested in architecture since I was a child. Maybe it’s not too late.
JC: Can you tell us a little about the TheThird & The Seventh film?
AR: Well, after working in VIZ for years, I realized that there was a huge aesthetic difference between most clients’ commercial demands and photography of already-built structures. The lack of respect for the architecture itself in some “pure” commercial illustration was very frustrating to me. (Well, this is just my opinion, of course.) Then, I decided to start a personal journey: to experiment with a more cinematographic and/or photographic oriented point of view of some of my favorites architects’ masterpieces. Hence, the “The Third & The Seventh” project…
JC: After thumbing through a book of Frank Lloyd Wright’s sketches once, I chatted with an architect friend of mine about the art of architectural rendering. He told me that sometimes architects intentionally leave sketches vague or messy. It not only creates wiggle room when it comes to client negotiations, it leaves room for the imagination to paint in details. How would you respond to that idea?
AR: Well, there are of course several purposes behind computer graphics benefits. That “messy” representation style is very useful at a birth-idea/growing-process stages. Also, there are of course many architects that use CG as a sketching oriented tool… why not?
JC: Your sensitivity to light is amazing. How would you describe the interplay between light and architecture?
AR: Thanks! I think architecture is sculpting with light most of the time. There’s neither volume nor colors and materials without light and shadow. Like Kahn said once: “In the old buildings, the columns were an expression of light. Light, no light, light, no light, light, you see…”
JC: The level of realism in the The Third & The Seventh is stunning. Your render times must be incredible. What software and hardware do you use? How long is an average render?
AR: I use 3DS Max and Vray for rendering, Photoshop for texture work, AfterEffects for compositing and color grading and Adobe Premiere for edit it all. My desktop PC (i7 920) it’s now the only hardware i have. Every frame rendertime may vary from 20 sec to 1:30 hr (720p) It all depends on how complex the scene is. However, i invested a lot of time in scene optimization for rendering. I think it’s the key for a flexible workflow.
JC: How can we see the full The Third & The Seventh film?
AR: I’m finishing the latest shots, fighting with the music—the hardest stage for me—and editing at the moment. We will see it complete around the end of the summer of 2009. I really hope so!
A percussion instrument that creates a loud clapping or slapping sound, often called a whip. This instrument has been used in the theatre for hundreds of years and can be traced back as far as the theatre performances of Plautus in the 3rd century BCE.
Through the years, the slapstick has been used extensively to add extra comic effect for sight gags in theatre, vaudeville, and in cartoons. It is seen occasionally in classical music, such as the 6th Symphony of Gustav Mahler and is used as the sound of whips in a number of light classical and more contemporary compositions.
The slapstick is a simple instrument that consists of two flat pieces of wood, hinged at one end, which, when struck together produce a slapping sound.
The sound of the slapstick is a sharp crack, slap or whipping sound that can be performed loud our soft. The size of the slapstick (and strength and composition of material to some degree) provides the quality of the sound. A larger instrument can produce a louder and slightly lower pitched crack.
The slapstick has no way of altering or adjusting accurate pitches, so there is no range, nor is there any specific pitch or set of pitches associated with the instrument. It is used solely for rhythmic reinforcement and effect.
In this era of instant cultural gratification, it is rare to have to wait 36 years to watch a film. But that’s how long it took for me to see “Maidstone,” Norman Mailer’s legendary exercise in improvisatory semifictional cinéma vérité. It finally arrived at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center this past July like a video transmission from the faraway Planet ’60s — a civilization in the throes of a crackup. I had been itching to see it ever since reading Mailer’s extraordinary essay on its creation, “A Course in Film-Making,” in New American Review in 1971, by which point the film had come and gone. For reasons its creator could hardly have anticipated, this lurid, ludicrous, lunatic spectacle was worth the wait.
At one level, “Maidstone” is a Norman Mailer version of a Rat Pack movie, albeit in the manner of Artaud. Filmed over five booze-, drug- and sex-soaked days in July 1968 in several Hamptons locations, it was a “guerrilla raid on the nature of reality,” as Mailer described it. Such forays were his speciality in those years, when he dominated a hopped-up, stressed-out American culture like a hipster-intellectual king of all media. No mere scribbler, he was a mega-celebrity and an oracle in an age that adored fame. Not since Hemingway had a novelist so stood astride the culture. Richard Poirier, in his 1971 study, “The Performing Self,” captures Mailer’s style precisely: “furiously self-consultive, so even narcissistic, and later so eager for publicity, love and historical dimension.”
Mailer had already made two smaller films in a similarly ad hoc style: “Wild 90,” a profanity-laced sub-“Sopranos” exercise that Pauline Kael called “the worst movie that I’ve ever stayed to see all the way through,” and “Beyond the Law,” an exploration of the psychodynamics of cops and criminals. Both films were unscripted experiments in le style Warhol that cost little and were screened at the tiny venues where underground movies were shown.
“Maidstone” represented a quantum leap in ambition, size, logistical complexity and expense. The huge cast and crew included scene makers, hipsters, hangers-on, socialites, amphetamine-thin actress/models, black militants, the publisher Barney Rosset, the boxing champ Jose Torres, the Warhol superstar Ultra Violet, Mailer’s wife at the time — Beverly Bentley — two of his ex-wives, and a sprinkling of professional actors, including Hervé Villechaize and, most crucially, a smolderingly intense Rip Torn. This ménage made its way to the bucolic East End of Long Island, where five separate camera crews (one led by the documentarian D.A. Pennebaker of “Don’t Look Back” fame) began shooting on several estates.
“Maidstone” had no scripted dialogue, but it did have a framing scenario that put Mailer and his outsize ego front and center. The conceit was that Mailer was to incarnate a high-art film director of the Buñuel/Fellini sort named Norman T. Kingsley (Mailer’s middle name), who was planning an improbable run for the presidency. Surrounding him was a circle of advisers termed the Cash Box, headed by Torn as Kingsley’s half-brother and confidante. Meanwhile, men in expensive suits and horn-rimmed glasses assess Kingsley’s threat level to the military-industrial complex and consider having him assassinated. This overreaching exercise in self-valorization can be understood only in the context of Mailer’s career, in which his running for existential president has been a recurring motif, and the assassination of Robert Kennedy on June 5. The distinction between psychological breakdowns and breakthroughs having been erased, “Maidstone” was in perfect sync with such contemporary phenomena as art world “happenings,” the Living Theater and the Doors’ sex-and-murder freakout, “The End.”
In the panel discussion that preceded the screening in July, Mailer characterized the role of film director as “equivalent to being a general in a war in which no blood was shed.” But back in 1968, Mailer’s troops were in a constant state of mutiny, and a fair amount of blood was shed. The scenario slipped away as things devolved into a saturnalia, “a psychic pigout” in the words of one participant, and a dangerous one. Mailer strides about shirtless and self-important, declaiming in his weirdly variable accent. His bullyragging, mock-seductive treatment of the nakedly needy actresses “auditioning” made my skin crawl. “You’re not a dyke, are you?” he sneers at one, making Kate Millett’s and Germaine Greer’s future case. The equally squirm-inducing interchanges between the black activists and the white women reek of radical chic and Eldridge Cleaver-ism. One blonde proclaims, “If I meet a Negro I’ll have a Negro habit,” and the camera pruriently lingers on Ultra Violet making love with a black man and briefly on an outdoor session of interracial oral sex.
A bright thread of violence wound through the shooting, giving “Maidstone” its ominous air and notorious climax. At one point, Rosset emerged from his house to find a drunken Villechaize drowning in the pool. An exasperated actor grabbed Mailer around the head and got a shot to the mouth and a broken jaw for his trouble. Everyone was convinced that persons unknown were packing real guns.
Much of this and more unfolded on the screen like some long-delayed acid flashback to a bad trip I had never taken. Then came the last three minutes, which guarantee “Maidstone” a kind of immortality. The filming proper was supposed to have ended one very late night in a so-called “Assassination Ball,” where Mailer/Kingsley, in top hat and tails, delivered a vainglorious speech to the assembled cast, though disappointingly to many, no attempt on his life was staged. The next day the cast went to rustic Gardiners Island to decompress and use up some leftover film. Pennebaker’s camera captures them strolling about the fields and then focuses on Rip Torn, who removes a hammer from a backpack, strides over to Mailer and hits him on the head twice, announcing: “You are supposed to die, Mr. Kingsley. You must die, not Mailer. I don’t want to kill Mailer, but I must kill Kingsley in the picture.” Shocked, Mailer wrestles him to the ground, and they roll down the hill in an ugly tussle, Mailer biting Torn’s ear as Mailer’s wife and children scream. Finally separated, the two bloodied men walk at a wary distance from each other, Mailer hurling curses, Torn explaining calmly: “When — when is an assassination ever planned? It’s done, it’s done.” The sequence ends with Torn calling Mailer “a fraud” and pointing a finger at the camera, taunting, “Hoo hoo!”
In the film “Performance” (1970), the reclusive rock star played by Mick Jagger declares: “The only performance that makes it, that really makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness.” Rip Torn took Mailer’s premises more seriously than Mailer himself did and acted them out, in the process both stealing Mailer’s film and making it for him. Over the next two years, as Mailer struggled to edit his 45 hours of footage into something workable, he was forced to accede to Torn’s logic and made his attack the centerpiece and culmination of the film.
“Maidstone” was screened for two weeks in September 1971 at the Whitney Museum, selling out its entire run. In his New York Times review, Vincent Canby cites the final scene as “complex and dense and very much in keeping with what a major author is required to give his public in this era of Total Revelation.” Mailer’s company then rented a commercial movie theater on Third Avenue, but the public stayed away in droves. “Maidstone” went on to become an essential part of the Mailer legend, in good part as a result of never being seen.
As I watched the film, the thought struck me that “Maidstone” functions for the intelligentsia of the ’60s in much the same way that “Gimme Shelter,” Albert and David Maysles’s documentary about the Altamont festival, does for the counterculture. Mailer’s essay ends with the oft-quoted sentence “We are a Faustian age determined to meet the Lord or the Devil before we are done, and the ineluctable ore of the authentic is the only key to the lock.” Both Mailer and Mick Jagger had loudly proclaimed their sympathy for the Devil, fancying themselves masters of the revels, but they were undone by the irrational forces they had unleashed.
In our diminished age, “Maidstone” provokes renewed amazement that artists ever really did such things, as well as nostalgia for the vivid presence of literary action heroes like Mailer. And if I ever see Rip Torn, I’m determined to shake his hand — checking first, however, that the other one does not hold a hammer.
A couple of years ago, 72-year-old Polish film director Jerzy Skolimowski’s car skidded off a forest road and he found himself “alone in nature”, surrounded by animals. He realised the same thing could happen to a van carrying dangerous prisoners, and that’s pretty much the premise of Essential Killing, a beautiful, bonkers, man versus nature slugfest starring Vincent Gallo as a man of implicitly Middle Eastern origins who is tortured for exploding some American soldiers before escaping into the forest.
Out there in the snow, all morality hurls itself through an open window as he attempts to survive, battling anything and anyone that gets in his way, eating ants and stealing fish while being chased by dogs and crushed by trees.
The precise origins of Gallo’s character are never determined, but his name is ‘Mohammad’. The casting decision furrowed a few brows, but everyone’s favourite sperm-selling Italian-American plays his role expertly, which is high praise when he’s given no dialogue whatsoever to work with.
I met the director (who co-wrote Roman Polanski’s Knife In The Water and acted in David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises) in London to talk about Gallo, politics and waterboarding.
Vice: When it was announced that you’d chosen Vincent Gallo to play a Middle Eastern fundamentalist, were you surprised that people said it was provocative casting?
Jerzy Skolimowski: Well it was kind of extravagant casting. Wouldn’t you say?
Vice: Yes. But when you’re watching the film he looks right. You don’t question it. Was he excited about playing the part?
Jerzy Skolimowski: Yes, he wanted to play it very much. When I approached him he got very enthusiastic, and he was even saying that he’s so used to the cold weather because he’s from Buffalo where it’s always cold. He said he was willing to run barefoot in the snow. Which in practice wasn’t that easy.
Vice: Did you always have him in mind for the character?
Jerzy Skolimowski: No, that was pure accident. I met him in Cannes in 2009 after a screening of Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro, and I liked him in the film. I saw him walking in front of me and I observed certain animalistic movements of his body, and I thought that would be good for the part. And I was walking behind him for a while wondering whether to approach him or not, and then just instinctively I tapped his shoulder and I said, “Hi Vincent, I’ve got an idea for a film you might be interested in,” and I gave him five pages of treatment. And he called me literally two hours later and he said, “This is phenomenal, I want to be in it, I MUST be in it! I’m physical, this is the ideal part for me!” So I said, “OK, grow a beard, grow your hair,” and six months later we were shooting the film.
Vice: Did you talk to him about the political aspect to the character?
Jerzy Skolimowski: I told him that I’m not interested in politics and that I was going to treat the situation at the start of the story as ambiguously as possible. I don’t point out where we are, which war it is, which year it is, it could be many different places. We know on one side there’s a well-equipped American army, and on the other side there are some guys in turbans. It could be anywhere: Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan.
Vice: Did he talk about his own politics?
Jerzy Skolimowski: No… you know, we were not on very friendly terms. Let me explain something. Vincent is a method actor. So he accumulates all the negative things to play that character. So he was actually antagonising everybody just to feel like that character. This is the method.
Vice: What was he doing?
Jerzy Skolimowski: Making scenes about every little detail. He wanted to have berries for breakfast, and we were in a remote place in Poland where the nearest civilised shop was hundreds of miles away. So we said: “We cannot get you berries for breakfast, we can have it maybe tomorrow or the day after.” We got him berries the next day and he didn’t want them any more. So the crew ate the berries. But he was looking for reasons to explode, to be angry, he wanted to be, he needed to be angry. And he was! But, look. What really counts is the final result on the screen, and he’s just sensational, he’s phenomenal! So whatever price we had to pay, him as well, it doesn’t count.
Vice: Did you clash with him? Did he go too far?
Jerzy Skolimowski: Yeah, we had difficult times. Let me give you an example – the scene where he kills the logger, this giant guy, I brought him aside and said, “Look, you jump on his back, you roll down and you struggle,” and he looked at the guy and said to me, “Err, it has to be a body double, not me.” I wanted to have it in one shot, because I wanted to show his face, not cut to a double’s body and then desperately cut to a glimpse of his face. You have to see the real fight. So I said, “Listen, it’s not such a dangerous thing, you’re a physical man, you said that you could do anything, and jumping on the guy and rolling down, it’s nothing that would harm you.” And he said, “Would you do it?” I said “Sure.” I jumped on the guy, I rolled down with him, I got up, the crew was silent. I got the snow out of my clothes and the crew started to applaud. So he didn’t have any choice. But things like this happened every day, many times a day.
Vice: Was it harder than you expected, being out there in the cold?
Jerzy Skolimowski: It was. The cold temperature really got to us. It was -35ºC, night shooting, night after night after night, most of the film was shot at night.
Vice: Where were you staying?
Jerzy Skolimowski: We shot for 40 days in three countries. In Norway, because I had to have snow, in Poland, and in Israel. So it was a lot of travelling, it was probably the most difficult film I ever shot.
Vice: How did Gallo deal with the weather?
Jerzy Skolimowski: Well the scenes where he’s barefoot – he was brave, doing this, but at the same time, he was demanding so much care. Immediately after I said “Cut” each time, there was an army of people running towards him with everything, blankets, hot tea, this and that. And if anybody was a split second late he was immediately angry, shouting, “How do you treat me! I am the star of the picture!” Things like this.
Vice: How heavily did you research the film, in terms of people surviving in the wild?
Jerzy Skolimowski: No research at all. It’s pure fantasy. I didn’t study anything about the political situation either. Let me give you an example: Everybody knows what waterboarding is and that the US military applied it. But no one knows how it looks. There are no witnesses. So I had to make my own waterboarding torture how I imagine it. How to get the water drops into the nose. I said, “Ok, the guy has to lie down, there has to be some kind of apparatus, maybe very primitive.” I didn’t need to research anything, because this is not a documentary, it’s not even realistic. It’s a brutal, modern fairy tale. A poem.
In the 1920s and 1930s, Jim Tully was something of a household name. His writing — his singular brand of rough and tumble realism — was both popular and critically acclaimed. In his heyday, Tully’s books appeared on bestseller lists, were adapted for the stage, made into movies, and got both good and bad reviews in major publications across the country. One of his controversial books was even banned, and a large part of its first edition destroyed.
Despite his past celebrity, few today have heard of Jim Tully. In the years following WWII, his reputation waned — but not because he was considered out-of-date. If anything, Tully was ahead of his time.
Some consider Tully a precursor to the “hard-boiled” school. In the twenties, Tully wasn’t writing about the glitz and glamor of the Jazz Age. Rather, his sometimes muscular prose concerned petty criminals, addicts, hobos and other misfits of society. Charles Willeford, one of the leading post WWII hard-boiled crime fiction writers, has praised Tully and written of his influence.
Over the last year and a half, the Kent State University Press in Kent, Ohio (Tully’s one-time home) has begun reissuing this forgotten writer’s long-out-of-print books. So far, they’ve released Circus Parade (with a foreword by the late comix artist Harvey Pekar), Shanty Irish (with a foreword by film director John Sayles), The Bruiser (with a foreword by critic Gerald Early), and Tully’s breakthrough work and what’s likely his best remembered book, Beggars of Life (with an introduction by series editors Paul Bauer and Mark Dawidziak). Two more titles will follow in 2012.
Next year will see the release of Bauer and Dawidziak’s biography, Jim Tully: American Writer, Irish Rover, Hollywood Brawler. That book will include a foreword by documentary film maker Ken Burns, who has called it a “wonderful, hugely important biography.” All together, these forewords by so many celebrated contemporary figures suggest this little remembered author has a still strong following, at least among the cognoscenti.
Born near St. Marys, Ohio in 1886, Tully experienced an impoverished childhood. After the death of his mother in 1892, Tully’s Irish immigrant ditch-digger father sent the boy to an orphanage in Cincinnati. He remained there for six years until the misery became more than he could bear. Tully ran away though he was only a teenager.
Thereafter, what education this wild boy of the road received largely came in hobo camps, railroad yards, and public libraries scattered across the country. Tully is known to have stolen books by favorite writers (such as Dostoyevsky) from the local libraries in which he often found shelter.
After moving to California, Tully began writing in earnest. He also became one of the first free-lance writers to cover Hollywood. His journalism and celebrity portraits appeared in Vanity Fair and other leading magazines of the day, from Scribner’s to True Confessions. Tully was highly paid for his no holds barred accounts.
Tully wrote about Hollywood celebrities (including Charlie Chaplin, for whom he had once worked) in ways that the studios and the stars did not always find agreeable. For these pieces, Tully became known as the most-hated writer in Hollywood. It was a title he relished.
His first book, Emmett Lawler (1922), was originally composed as a single paragraph of 100,000 words. In an autobiographical statement published in 1933, Tully wrote “My first book was bad, and is now forgotten. I found myself, I think, in Beggars of Life, which I wrote in six terrifying weeks, while living with a bootlegger.” The book was “intended as a compilation of dramatic episodes in the life of a youthful vagabond, which I was for seven years.”
Published in 1924, Beggars of Life was the first of five autobiographical books Tully regarded as part of a larger single work. His “Underworld Edition” included Circus Parade (1927), “a series of none too happy and often ironical incidents with a circus,” Shanty Irish (1928), “the background of a road-kid who becomes articulate,” Shadows of Men (1930), “the tribulations, vagaries, and hallucinations of men in jail,” and Blood on the Moon (1931). Of his books, these autobiographical works were the closest to his heart.
Tully also wrote celebrated novels about Hollywood, Jarnegan (1926), boxing, The Bruiser (1936), and the down-and-out, Laughter in Hell (1932). Shortly after publication, a novel about prostitutes set in Chicago, Ladies in the Parlor (1935), was seized by the police due to claims it was obscene. Most copies were destroyed and today it is a prized rarity.
Tully’s last book, A Dozen and One (1943), includes an introduction by Damon Runyon. It features biographical portraits of 13 famous people he encountered during his life including Chaplin, H.L. Mencken, Jack Dempsey, Clark Gable, Diego Rivera and others.
With the May, 2011 publication of their long-in the-works biography, Bauer and Dawidziak will take to the road and revisit some of the cities and towns the hobo author once stopped in decades earlier. They even plan on visiting a local jail where Tully was incarcerated for vagrancy.
Whether or not Tully’s work will strike a chord with contemporary readers remains to be seen. It could take time, as Tully is an acquired taste. Certainly, readers of Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, William Vollmann or Stephen Elliott will find something of interest in Tully’s stories and prose.
His champions Bauer and Dawidziak have described Tully as “the greatest long shot in American literature.” Considering his ramshackle life, it is a miracle he wrote at all. If you’re a sucker for neglected books or lost classics, the work of this “literary bum” is worth a gamble.
Thomas Gladysz is an arts journalist and author. His interview with Allen Ginsberg on the subject of photography is included in Sarah Greenough’s “Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg” (National Gallery of Art, 2010). And recently, he wrote the introduction to the Louise Brooks edition of Margarete Bohme’s classic novel, “The Diary of a Lost Girl” (PandorasBox Press, 2010). Gladysz will speak about “The Diary of a Lost Girl” at the Village Voice Bookshop in Paris on January 13, followed by a screening of the film at the nearby Action Cinema.
It’s not an unusual story per se. The music business is literally riddled with the carcasses of former artistic greats who’ve been conned and cast aside. Nor is it bizarre for a one time Billboard fixture to fall on very hard times. Unlikely comebacks are also part of the pattern, as is fanboy worship that can often work against the individual in question.
In the end, a documentary about a defeated former superstar has to play by a certain set of narrative beats, lest we lose the melody all together. Perhaps this is why The Weird World of Blowfly is so refreshing. Yes, it offers up the typical riches-to-rags trajectory we just discussed and showcases an unfairly dismissed genre icon. But more so than most Behind the Music overviews, this movie makes the case for Clarence Reid, aka the infamous filthy ‘rapper,’ as his own biggest champion…and worst enemy.
Reid, a fixture in the Miami music scene since the ’50s, forged a career out of writing, producing, and occasionally recording, his own uniquely funky soul songs. By the ’70s, he was penning hits for Gwen McRae (“Rocking Chair) and her husband George (“Rock Your Baby”). Yet there was another facet to Reid’s career, one built on the back of those secret scatological gems of the era — the party record. Made famous by comedians such as Rudy Ray Moore (Dolemite) and Redd Foxx, these X-rated recordings flew under the mainstream radar, picked up by fans looking for something a little more rude and crude. Reid’s raunchy alter ego was named ‘Blowfly’ (after his grandmother’s critical comment about his talent) and consisted mainly of the singer mocking popular hits, adding his own curse-laden lyrics to the tune.
The Weird World of Blowfly picks up nearly 40 years later. It highlights a series of missteps by Reid (desperate and nearly bankrupt, he sold his catalog for a pittance years back) as well as his tenuous relationships with family, friends, his own race, and his new business manager, Tom Bowker. Set against the backdrop of an attempted return to the limelight, we get the typical talking head accolades (from such standard sources as Ice-T, and such unusual fans as The Dead Kennedy’s Jello Biafra) as well as some sit down moments with the star. In between, concert footage argues for the 70-year-old’s continuing viability as a performer, as well as the numerous uphill struggles he faces as a forgotten fixture in rap and hip-hop’s history.
This is not just some saccharine overview. Reid is a feisty, angry individual and director Jonathan Furmanski makes sure to highlight his cynical, curmudgeonly personality. Before a show, our subject screams about his pizza touching the seat cushion of a chair. Later, he delivers a stinging denouncement of all African Americans. While his ex-wife and two children are interviewed (and they all have wonderful things to say about him), he seems unable to connect with anyone on a compassionate level. Even fans flummox him, a combination of arrogance and obliviousness destroying a perception of appreciation.
One of the most telling scenes comes early on, when Reid is asked by a famed German rock band to open up for them on a European tour. Fans who’ve come to see their favorite black leathered metal gods give Blowfly an immediate thumbs down. Later, when faced with even more heated hostility, he breaks out a lewd lampoon of The Clash’s hit “Should I Stay or Should I Go” and the hand sign throwing throng suddenly love him. It’s a perfect dichotomy and allusion to Reid’s professional life. Though he wants to be taken seriously, it’s the vulgarity the audience values.
“To show the process of illumination of a hero, then a people, then an entire planet (which in turn is the Messiah of the Universe since in abandonning its orbit, the holy planet leaves to spread its light through all the galaxies)…
I didn’t want to respect the novel, I wanted to recreate it. For me, Dune didn’t belong to Herbert just as Don Quixote didn’t belong to Cervantes.
There is an artist, one alone among millions of others artists, who one time in his life, by a piece of divine grace, receives an immortal theme, a MYTH…I say “receive” and not “create” because works of art are received in a state of mediumness directly from the collective unconcious. The work overtakes the artist and in some way it kills him, because humanity, in receiving the impact of Myth, has a profound need to erase the individual who receives it and transmits it: his individual personality hampers, stains the purity of the message which, at the root, asks to be anonymous… We don’t know who created the Notre-Dame cathedral, nor the Aztec solar calendar, nor the tarot of Marseille, nor the myth of Don Juan, etc.
One feels that Cervantes gave HIS version of Quixote–of course incomplete–and that we carry in our soul our total character… Christ didn’t belong to Mark, Luke, Matthew or John… There are many more gospels called apocryphal and there are as much lives of Christ as there are believers. Everyone of us has their story of Dune, their Jessica, their Paul… I feel fervent admiration towards Herbert and at the same time conflict (I think the same thing happened to him)… He hampered me… I didn’t want him as an advisor of technique… I did everything to keep him away from the project… I had received a version of Dune and I wanted to transit it: the myth had to abandon the literary form and become image…
In the film, Duke Leto (father of Paul) would be a man castrated in a ritual combat in the arenas during a bullfight. (The emblem of the Atreide house being a sacred bull…) Jessica–Bene Gesserit nun–, sent like a concubine to the duke to create a daughter who would be the mother of a Messiah, falls so much in love with Leto that she decides to blow a link in the chain and create a son, the Kwizatz Haderach, the saviour. In using her powers of Bene Gesserit–as soon as the duke, madly in love with her, confides his sad secret–Jessica lets herself be inseminated by a drop of blood of this sterile man… The camera followed (in the script) the red drop through the ovaries of the woman and accompanied its meeting with the ovule where, by an miraculous explosion, it inseminates the egg. Paul was born of a virgin, and not by the sperm of his father but by his blood… In my version of Dune, the Emperor of the Galaxy is mad. He lives on an artificial planet of gold, in a palace of gold constructed according to the non-laws of anti-logic. He lives in symbiosis with a robot identical to him. The resemblance is so perfect that the citizens never know if they are facing the man or the machine… In my version, the spice is a blue drug of a spongy consistency filled with a vegtable-animal life endowed with consciousness, the highest level of consciousness. It doesn’t stop taking all sorts of forms, shifting without cease. The spice continually reproduces the creation of innumerable universes.
Baron Harkonnen is an immense man of 300 kilograms. He is so fat and heavy that, in order to move, he needs to continually use antigravitational bubbles attached to his extremities… His delusions of grandeur have no limit: he lives in a palace constructed as a portrait of himself… This immense sculpture stands on a sordid swampy planet…In order to enter the palace, one has to wait for the colussus to open its mouth and stick out a tongue of steel (landing strip…) At the end of the movie, the wife of Count Fenring bounds towards Paul, who has already become Fremen, and she slices his throat. Paul while dying says: “Too late, you can’t kill me… because…” “Because, (continues Jessica with the voice of Paul) in order to kill the Kwizatz Haderach, you would have to kill me too…” And every Fremen, every Atreide talks now with the voice of Paul: “I am the man collective. He who shows the way.”
Reality transforms rapidly. Three columns of light shoot out from the planet. They mix. Sink into the sand of the planet: “I am the Land that awaits the seed!” The spice dries up. The sun trembles. Drops of water form a piller surrounded by fire.
Filaments of silver surge from the spice. Creating a rainbow. They merge into a cloud of water, producing a red “lava”. Then vapor. Some clouds. Some rain. Some rivers. Some grass. Some forests. Dune becomes green. A blue ring now surrounds the planet. It separates. It produces more and more rings. Dune is at present an illuminated world which traverses the galaxy, that leaves it, that gives its light–which is consciousness–to all the universe. In order to conceive this final sequence of transmutation of matter, I had the chance to come in contact with some real alchemists… Some mysterious beings (one of them seemed to have more than a hundred years, an advanced age which yet permitted him to move about with the energy of a young adolescent) approached me because Dune could be a philosophical stone, the stone which changes all the other metals into gold… In this sequence, they described what really happens when they transform, in their alchemical ovens, matter… For the “guerilla” war that Paul and the Fremen lead against the imperial army, I had the chance to contact a guerilla expert in South America… He had fought in Bolivia, Chili, Peru and Central America… His precious information brought to the story a soldierly reality…
When Jessica becomes the supreme mother of the Fremen and has to go through the ceremonies of initiation, learn sorcerors’ medecine and contact other dimensions of reality, I knew of gypsy magical medecine through Paul Derlon, already deceased… And the ceremony of magic mushrooms and the miraculous operations by the witch Pachita, a being who had way more powers than the so-called Phillipino surgeons. My son Brontis, who had to play Paul, was initiated at age nine by a legendary bodyguard–Jean-Pierre Vigneau–at knife combat(real combat), at karate, at archery… He received lessons from an almost real mentat–Michel de Roisin–who possessed an encyclopedic brain… I remember seeing him give Brontis a lesson on the fable La Cigale et la Fourmi which lasted more than fifteen days… Through the verses, he described a whole age and its civilisations.
With the production, we traversed the Sahara. I wanted to film Dune in the Tassili, braving with the actors, the thousands of extras and the technical teams, the torrid heat and the dryness to get a real lunar landscape… The Algerian government was very interested by the project…
One time, divinity really wanted to tell me in a lucid dream: “Your next film must be Dune”. I had not read the novel. I got up at six in the morning and like an alcoholic who awaits the opening of the bar, I waited for the bookstore to open to buy the book. I read it in one stroke without stopping to drink or eat. Right at midnight, the same day, I finished reading it. At a minute after midnight, from New York, I called Michel Seydoux in Paris… He would be the first of the seven samurai that I needed for the immense project. Michel was for me a young man (26 years old) without experience in the cinema but his society Camera One had bought the rights to The Holy Mountain, my last film and had distributed it very well… He told me: “I would like to make a movie with you.” I didn’t know much about him but, by intuition which surprises me today, seeing him, despite his youth, I recognized in him the greatest producer of this age… Why? Mystery… And I wasn’t wrong. When I told him I wanted to purchase the rights to Dune and that the film had to be international because it would be more than ten million dollars (a fabulous sum for that time: even Hollywood didn’t believe in science-fiction films, 2001 would be unique and unsurpassable) he didn’t move a muscle: “Alright. We’ll meet in two days in Los Angeles to buy the rights”. He hadn’t read the book… I think that he still hasn’t read it because the prose of Herbert is bored him… And the rights could be bought– easily because Hollywood found the book unfilmable and non commercial… Michel Seydoux gave me a carte blanche and an enormous financial support: I could create my team without economic problems. I needed a precise script… I wanted to direct the film on paper before filming… Now all films with special effects are made like that, but at that time this technique wasn’t used. I wanted a comic artist who had the genius and the speed, who could serve as camera and at the same time give give a visual style…I found myself by accident with a warrior: Jean Giraud alias Moebius(at the time he hadn’t yet done The Airtight Garage). I tell him: “If you accept this job, you have to abandon everything and leave tomorrow with me for Los Angeles to talk with Douglas Trumbull(2001 A Space Odyssey)”. Moebius asked me for some hours to think it over. The next day, we left for the United States. It would be a long story…Our collaboration, our meetings in America with strange illuminaries and our conversations at seven in the morning in the little cafe that was the base of our work and was by “chance” called “cafe Univers”. Gir made more than 3000 all marvelous drawings…The script of Dune thanks to his talent is a masterpiece. You can see the characters living, you follow the movements of the camera. You visualize the editing, the decors, the costumes…All that with, each time, some strokes of a pencil…I was behind his shoulders asking him for different points of view…In directing the actors, etc. We had filmed the movie…
For the third warrior I needed and ingenious dreamer who could paint the space ships in a different way than the American films. That’s why I wrote to Christopher Foss, an English painter who illustrated science-fiction book covers… Like Giraud, he had never thought about cinema… With great enthousiasm, he left London and came to settle in Paris… This artist, with the ships that he produced for Dune put a mark on cinema. He could create semi-living machines that could metamorphose the rocks of space with colour… He could create “battleships made thirsty dying century after century in a desert of stars waiting for the living body who would fill empty reservoirs with subtle secretions of its soul…”
After I found Giger, the Swiss painter whose catalogue Dali had shown me…His decadent art, sick, suicidal, genial, was perfect to create the Harkonnen planet… He made a project of the castle and the planet which really touched metaphysical horror. (Later he created the sets and monster for Alien.)
For the special effect, thanks to the power that Michel Seydoux gave me, I could refuse Douglas Trumbull… I couldn’t swallow his vanity, his big boss airs and his exorbitant prices. Like a good American, he played at looking down upon the project and tried to mix us up by making us wait while talking with us the same time as ten other people on the telephone and finally by showing us the superb machines that he was trying to perfect. Tired of all this comedy, I told him to fuck off and went looking for some young talent. I was told that in L.A., it was like looking for a needle in a haystack. I saw in a modest amateur science fiction film festival a movie made sans moyens that I found to be marvelous: Dark Star.
I contacted the young man who had done the special effects: Dan O’Bannon. I almost found myself with a wolf-child. Completely outside of conventional reality, O’Bannon for me had a real genius. He couldn’t believe that I could confide in him a project as important as Dune. He was forced to believe it when he received his airplane ticket for Paris. I wasn’t wrong: Dan O’Bannon later wrote the screenplay for Alien and many other successful films. With Jean-Paul Gibon, who was the executive producer of Camera One and loved the project as much as we, we left for England to find the musician. A vital aspect for me: each planet had its style of music, for example a group like Magma could realize the Harkonnen warrior rhythms which would be capable of cristallizing the beauty of the sand planet with its mystery and its implacable force, the strange symphony of rings of giant worms.
Virgin Records met with us and offered us Gong, Mike Oldfield, Tangerine Dream. At this moment I say: “And why not Pink Floyd?” The group at that time was having such success that almost everyone considered that an unfeasible idea. I had the chance, thanks to my film El Topo, to be known by these musicians. They happily agreed to meet us in London at Abbey Road Studios where the Beatles had recorded their success. Jean-Paul Gibon was very pleasantly surprised that the group would see us. At that time, I had already almost lost my individual consciousness. I was the instrument of my sacred, miraculous work where everything could happen. Dune wasn’t at my service, I was like the samurai that I had found, at the service of the work. They were in the middle of recording Dark Side of the Moon. Upon arriving, I didn’t see a group of musicians in the middle of making their masterpiece, but four young guys eating fried steaks. Jean-Paul and I, standing in front of them, had to wait for their voraciousness be to satisfied. In the name of Dune I was taken by an anger and I left slamming the door. I wanted some artists who knew how to respect a work of such importance for human consciousness. I think that they didn’t expect that. Surprised, David Gilmour ran behind us giving excuses and made us attend the final mixing of their record. What ecstasy… After, we attended their last public concert where thousands of fanatics cheered. They wanted to see The Holy Mountain. They watched it in Canada. They decided to participate in the film by producing a double album which was going to be called Dune. They came to Paris to discuss the financial part and after an intense discussion, we came to an agreement. Pink Floyd would do almost all the music of the film.
With the best music on our side, I started to look for actors. I had seen Charlotte Rampling in Zardoz. I wanted her for Jessica. She refused the role. She wanted at the time to do two or three commercial films, the life of love interested her more than art. David Carradine came to Paris, interested by the role of Leto. The actor that I wanted the most was Dali: for the small role of the mad Emperor… What an adventure!…
Dali accepted with much enthusiasm the idea of playing the Emperor of the galaxy. He wanted to film at Cadaqu”s and use as his throne a toilet made up of two intertwined dolphins. The tails would form the feet and the two open mouths would serve one to hold the “pipi”, the other to hold the “caca”. Dali thinks that it is in very bad taste to mix the “pipi” and the “caca”.
He was told that he would be needed for seven days… Dali replied that God made the universe in seven days and that Dali, not being less than God, must cost a fortune: 100000 dollars an hour. Probably upon arriving on the set, he would decide to film each day no more than an hour for the same price.
The Daliesque happening would cost us 700000 dollars. We asked him for time, a night, to make a decision and we left each other. That night, I tore a page from a book on the tarot; it had a card reproduced on it: the Hanged Man. I wrote him a letter saying that the film couldn’t pay him 700000 dollars.
For 150000 dollars, I wanted three days and no more than an hour and a half of filming. I also wanted to have a polyethylene puppet, his replica, to use as his double in the film. Dali got angry. He cried: “I’ll have you like rats! I will film in Paris, but the set will cost you more than the landscape of Cadaqu”s and the cadre of my museum. Dali costs 100000 an hour!”
Bitter, he calmed down and accepted the idea of reproducing him in plastic if after the film the sculpture was given to his museum. We decided to definitively finish with the contract the next day. I had a discussion with Jean-Paul Gibon and we arrived at the conclusion that it was impossible to haggle with Dali. I meditated for a long time and I took this final decision: I reduced the role of Dali to a page and a half of script. I accepted his price, 100000 dollars an hour, but I would only use him for a single hour. The rest, I would film with his double. Dali couldn’t allow himself to go back on his price. We went to see him. I gave him the little page and a half and Dali accepted the proposition because his honor was safe. He would be the highest paid actor in the history of cinema. He would earn more than Greta Garbo.
Dali, with enthusiasm, showed me his wooden bed as the sculpture of a dolphin. A worker was there, already making the blueprint of the dolphin to make the toilet. As much for Dali as for me, the card of the Hanged Man on which some words were written served as a contract. Dali liked the aristocracy and like all men of noble spirit, he respected his word.
I liked fighting for Dune. We won almost all the battles, but we lost the war. The project was sabotaged in Hollywood. It was French and not American. Their message was not “Hollywood enough”. There was intrigue, plunder. The storyboard was circulated amongst all the big studios. Later, the visual aspect of Star Wars strangely resembled our style. To make Alien, they called Moebius, Foss, Giger, O’Bannon, etc. The project signalled to Americans the possibility of making a big show of science-fiction films, outside of the scientific rigour of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The project of Dune changed our lives.
All those who participated in the rise and fall of the project of Dune have learned to fall one and a thousand times with a fierce stubbornness, until learning to stand up. I remember my old father who, while dying happy, told me: “My son, in my life, I have triumphed because I have learned to fail.”
also, check out this – “Dune: Book to Screen Timeline” – that charts all the attempts to produce the film, including ones by Ridley Scott and Arthur P. Jacobs…
see also — the films of ALEXANDRO JODOROWSKY: PART 1 and PART 2…
