Monthly Archives: November 2013

These Aren’t The Plans They’re Looking For

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Instead of announcing a winner at its November 22 meeting, the Presidio Trust Board sent advocates for the Lucas Cultural Arts Museum and two other finalists back to the drawing board to make more changes to their proposals for redeveloping San Francisco’s Crissy Field.

Despite the board’s complimentary remarks about all three plans in its public statement, Trust chairwoman Nancy Bechtle told SF Chronicle editors the 93,000-square-foot art museum, as presented, is an “inappropriate configuration” and “too big.”

Lucas complained in a recent New York Times article that Trust staff members “hate us” and are putting unreasonable conditions on his development team. He’s threatened to move the project to Chicago if his plan is turned down.

However, a Lucas spokesman said The Lucas Cultural Arts Museum will respond to the Presidio Trust’s request by the January 3 deadline.

Rivals for the space received critiques of their own reports the SF Examiner:

The Bridge proposal’s weakness has always been funding; no clear game plan for raising money was defined other than the inclusion of the Chora Group as the fundraising arm of the project. Their program concept—sustainability—is an important idea and in harmony with a Presidio location. The building, by WRNS, is a strong statement that is an enhancement to the site.

The Presidio Exchange, the strongest of the three proposals, was called out by the Trust for a lack of “focus”. However, when National Parks Conservancy director, Greg Moore, presented the proposal in a public session last month, the programmatic concept came across as solid and in sync with the Presidio mission. The EHDD building design is another strong effort that would be a welcome addition to San Francisco.

lucas museum artist rendering

Snapshots 127 Graf Zeppelin

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Here are 13 developments of interest to fans plus one horrible pun.

(1) Charles Pierce discovered while visiting his mother’s hometown in Ireland there’s one truth about writers everyone knows:

John Brendan Keane was a poet, a novelist, a playwright, an essayist, and a pubkeeper. (One of his plays, The Field, was made into a movie that got Richard Harris an Academy Award nomination.) He spent his entire life in Listowel, and he died there in 2002. Half the county turned out for the funeral. The first time I ever went to Listowel, I sat at the bar and ordered a pint from Mr. Keane. He asked me what I did for a living. He then pulled me another pint free of charge. “Take this,” he said. “You’re a writer. You have no money.”

(2) And not only writers — comic book collectors need charity, too. Detcon 1 guest of honor Kevin J. Maroney explains in a Yahoo Finance story why the comics market is in a tailspin.

He’s not the only would-be investor who’s discovered in recent years that his comic collection isn’t worth nearly as much as he’d hoped. Kevin J. Maroney, 47, of Yonkers, N.Y., decided to sell 10,000 comics, roughly a third of his collection, on consignment with various comic book stores in Manhattan. Thus far, fewer than 300 have sold for a total of about $800. He’s not surprised by the lack of interest. “A lot of people my age, who grew up collecting comics, are trying to sell their collections now,” says Maroney, who works in IT support for Piper Jaffray. “But there just aren’t any buyers anymore.”

(3) On Veterans’ Day I learned from Neatorama that Alec Guinness commanded a landing craft in WWII:

Alec Guinness (1914-2000) played Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars. During World War II, he was an officer in the Royal Navy Reserve. He was trained on the HMS Raleigh, a “stone frigate” or naval base in 1941, and then at a similar establishment in Hampshire, before completing his training on Loch Fyne. After getting practical experience on the HMS Quebec, Guinness sailed to Boston in January 1943 to pick up his first command, a landing craft designated LCI(L) #124. He took his ship through strafing runs by German aircraft to North Africa, where he prepared for the Allied invasion of Sicily. On 9 July, he landed 200 men on Cape Passero. Due to a communications breakdown, he did not receive a message that the landings had been delayed an hour, and consequently, his ship arrived at the Sicilian beach alone. Further miscommunication led a Royal Navy commander on the scene to accuse Sub-Lt. Guinness of not being early, but being late, and insinuated that the young officer’s acting career had not adequately prepared him for his military duties. Guinness responded:

And you will allow me to point out, sir, as an actor, that in the West End of London, if the curtain is advertised as going up at 8:00 PM, it goes up at 8:00 PM, and not an hour later, something that the Royal Navy might learn from.

(4) Meanwhile, the fake zombie wars of The Walking Dead have inspired Grantland’s Andy Greenwald to suggest an improvement on the season’s story arc —

I think that the current season of The Walking Dead should have made itself into a sitcom (like Hogan’s Heroes) about life on a human against zombie internment camp. Thoughts?

(5) Coincidentally, Veteran’s Day (November 11) was also the date of the dedication ceremony for Professor Norm Hollyn’s endowed chair.

Film Editor Michael Kahn first worked with Steven Spielberg on 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In the years since then they have collaborated on most of the director’s films including Schindler’s List (1993), Saving Private Ryan (1998), for which they both won Oscars, and last year’s Lincoln. On Monday November 11th, the Director honored their 37-year relationship by dedicating the Michael Kahn Endowed Chair in Editing at the School of Cinematic Arts.

(6) “I ran across a new sort of breakfast in the supermarket today,” reports Sam Long, “Erewhon brand gluten-free cereals of several sorts, distributed by Erewhon Markets. This company sells many sorts of natural/health foods of many sorts, including free-range turkey for the holidays.  Angelenos are probably aware of this company, but I’ve never run across them before.

“I wonder what Samuel Butler, the English author whose best known work is his utopian novel titled Erewhon (‘Nowhere’ backwards and slightly modified) would think of that.”

The Serutan advertising campaign convinced my parent’s generation that things spelled backwards are healthy. I leave identifying the connection as an exercise for the reader…

(7) Did you know that in the 1920s the government built a series of giant concrete arrows pointing the way for mail delivery planes, with searchlight installations to illuminate them at night? A few still exist.

In 1924, the federal government funded enormous concrete arrows to be built every 10 miles or so along established airmail routes to help the pilots trace their way across America in bad weather conditions and particularly at night, which was a more efficient time to fly.

Painted in bright yellow, they were each built alongside a 50 foot tall tower with a rotating gas-powered light and a little rest house for the folks that maintained the generators and lights. These airway beacons are said to have been visible from a distance of 10 miles high.

(8) When Roger Ebert interviewed L. Q. Jones about a Boy And His Dog in 1976, the filmmaker gave more credit to the dog than to Harlan Ellison:

The real star of “A Boy and His Dog,” he said, was the dog; a trained animal named Tiger.

“The son of a bitch did better than I did,” he said. “Had his own car, his own motel room. And where we were shooting, the mosquitoes were so big, the only sleep you got was when they lifted up to the ceiling; you could doze off on the way down, before you hit the floor.

“That dog knew 40 or 50 words. Once it did six tricks in a row, without us having to cut, and that’s unheard of for a dog. He works all over the place. He was in the Brady Bunch, now he’s on the Cher show . . . but I think he liked our picture best, because in the farewell scene, he cried. And those were real tears, too.”

And Harlan is still rankled, says Don McGregor, in “A Boy, A Dog, A Woman – and L.Q. Jones and Harlan Ellison: A Writer’s Wounds 40 Years Later”.

(9) Hammacher Schlemmer is offering a life-size (I think) plush talking Yoda for $99.95. Since this is a kid’s toy I hope Yoda’s repertoire includes warnings like, “Sit on my head do not!”

(10) Weird Tales is looking for fiction for a theme issue involving Nicola Tesla.

(11) It turns out our space program has discovered a new lifeform – in spacecraft clean rooms.

(12) FX has ordered 13 episodes of Guillermo del Toro’s The Strain. Ironically, the series ended up being adapted from a book only because del Toro originally couldn’t get the idea made as a TV show —

FX is looking at July 2014 to premiere the series, which will star Corey Stoll (Midnight in Paris, House of Cards) as Dr. Ephraim Goodweather (fancy!) investigating a viral, soon-to-be-vampiral outbreak in New York.

(13) And when del Toro gets finished with The Strain, he’s slated to begin filming Crimson Peak:

Guillermo del Toro’s gothic thriller Crimson Peak begins shooting February 2014 once the director has wrapped work on The Strain for FX, reports THR.

Charlie Hunnam, Tom Hiddleston, Jessica Chastain and Mia Wasikowska are set to star.

According to the outlet, an April 2015 release month is being eyed for the film.  Legendary Pictures is shepherding the production.

When we spoke to Del Toro earlier this year, he told us:

“Crimson Peak is a much, much, much smaller movie, completely character-driven.  It’s an adult movie, an R-rated movie, pretty adult.  Shockingly different from anything I’ve done in the English language.  Normally, when I go to do a movie in America for the spectacle and younger audience, for Blade or whatever.  This movie’s tone is scary and it’s the first time I get to do a movie more akin to what I do in the Spanish movies.”

(14) Lastly, James H. Burns says he heard this joke from George Wells:

“Do you know why Thor likes to ride the subway?

“He has a Loki-motive.”

[Thanks for these links goes out to John King Tarpinian, Bob Vardeman, David Klaus, Martin Morse Wooster and James H. Burns.]

Update 11/26/2013: Corrected incredibly embarassing misspelling of headlined aircraft. And while I’m at it I suppose I should take the “x” out of Alec Guiness’ first name before somebody notices that, too. What a maroon I am. P.S. The number 127 was the registration number assigned to the Graf Zeppelin.

Michael Burgess aka Robert Reginald (1948-2013)

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Publisher, author and scholar Michael Burgess, who used the professional name Robert Reginald, died November 20.

He founded the Borgo Press in the 1970s, initially publishing 35 chapbooks about sf authors in The Milford Series: Popular Writers of Today — the first of them Robert A. Heinlein: Stranger in his Own Land (1976) by George Edgar Slusser (now curator of the Eaton Collection). The imprint also issued 10 full-length novels by Piers Anthony, D G Compton, and others.

Reginald also was an important sf bibliographer credited for “persistent exactness and enormous energy” by John Clute and Peter Nicholls in the Science Fiction Encyclopedia. He won the Science Fiction Research Association’s Pilgrim Award in 1993.

His major non-fiction works include Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature: A Checklist, 1700-1974, with Contemporary Science Fiction Authors II (1979), Cumulative Paperback Index, 1939-1959: A Comprehensive Bibliographic Guide to 14,000 Mass-Market Paperback Books of 33 Publishers under 69 Imprints (1973) and A Guide to Science Fiction and Fantasy in the Library of Congress Classification Scheme (1984).

[Via Locus Online, SF Site News and the SF Encyclopedia.]

Crowdfunding Free 2014 NASFiC Memberships

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Detcon1, the 2014 NASfiC, has created FANtastic Detroit Fund (FDF), a crowdfunded program to provide free memberships to Detcon1 to fans in need, with priority given to Detroit and Wayne County residents.

Donations are sought to help fund these memberships. Donations are being accepted via the Detcon 1 webpage. A $55 donation to the FANtastic Detroit Fund will buy a membership for someone who otherwise couldn’t attend Detcon1 for financial reasons. The committee states the donations are not tax deductible.

Detcon will work with local non-profit organizations, schools, and other groups to identify recipients of the sponsored memberships. Individuals may also apply using a form on the Detcon1 website.

The full press release follows the jump.

Continue reading →

C.S. Lewis Receives Memorial in Poets’ Corner

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Lewis stone in poet's cornerC. S. Lewis’ memorial stone in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey was dedicated today, November 22, on the fiftieth anniversary of his death.

Over one hundred poets, novelists, dramatists, actors and musicians are buried or commemorated in the Abbey. Geoffrey Chaucer was the first poet buried there, in 1400. Other honorees include Shakespeare, Wordsworth, the Brontë sisters, and Jane Austen.

About 1,000 guests from around the world attended the service to unveil the stone. Eddie Olliffe gave this account on his blog.

As the memorial was dedicated, there was a reading from The Last Battle: ‘Now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no-one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before. The draw for many in this audience was the past Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, and an authority on the Narnia books who gave a short but erudite address. He wisely left Narnia well alone, concentrating instead on Lewis’s science fiction trilogy. Lord Williams of Oystermouth homed in on how Lewis deplored the misuse of language; how he saw it is used to hide from ourselves and to hide from reality. Our questions fall away; we have nothing to say because we have too much to say. Rowan noted Lewis’s aversion to the King James Bible which he saw as getting in the way of our understanding. Instead Lewis preferred Moffatt and J B Philips to ‘hear’ the freshness of the words.

Douglas Gresham, the son of Lewis’s wife Joy, also spoke at the service, which was the culmination of a conference at the abbey about the impact of the author’s work.

Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.

 

Where Were You?

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foucaultBy Mike Glyer: My fifth grade class was on a field trip to Griffith Park Observatory that day in 1963. We’d watched the Foucault Pendulum swing in answer to the earth’s rotation. Stared in awe at the Zeiss Projector’s recreation of our night sky on the observatory’s central dome. Eaten bag lunches and reboarded the school bus where the radio news was droning in the background. The driver said he had a very important announcement to make. President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas and taken to the hospital.

I think the kids who were immediately upset had the right response. But it was not yet known that the President had died, and my best friend and I had a more detached reaction. We’d lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis just a year earlier so we wondered how Cold War adversaries might try to exploit this tragic development. And had grandiose ideas about lowering the flag to half-mast when the bus arrived back at school. Yet I’d actually been quite a Kennedy fan as a boy — I’d even gotten relatives to take me to his Senate office on a summer trip to Washington D.C. in 1960 (he was away on campaign).

My parents’ generation remembered where they were when they heard the news about Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, or V-E Day and V-J Day in 1945. Of course I hadn’t been born yet. The JFK assassination was the first “where were you?” event in my generation. Doubtless for many of you that epochal moment is as remote as WW2 was for me. Perhaps the Challenger explosion or 9/11 was your first cultural snapshot moment. Or some other event altogether?

Burns: A JFK Moon Race Stunner

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By James H. Burns: Having read extensively about John F. Kennedy, I think it’s safe to say that he would have been dismayed by the attention given his tragic end.

Would it not be better, after all to mark his birthday?

Although surely he would have wanted his killer(s) brought to justice, I’m reminded today of the words of his brother, Robert, when he said (paraphrasing, here), that it’s too easy for people to get caught up in the minutia of possible conspiracies, instead of engaging in the much tougher task of trying to build a robust and just society.

Of course, there are also many compelling and fascinating developments to learn from fresh studies and revelations of history!

Here’s an element generally ignored about fifty years ago, one I associate with family lore. I was a BABY on that dark day, and my parents coincidentally were taking one of their first afternoons out, since my birth. My Dad was a very bright guy, an engineer, someone who could have qualified for First Fandom (having been reared on Amazing, Astounding, Alex Raymond, The Witch’s Tale, Kong and Things To Come…); a decorated WW2 infantry vet who later worked once or twice on classified projects.

When news came over the car radio from Dallas, my Dad told my Mom they should head back to the house, with me and my sitter. He knew — as others did, but which is generally not remembered as a concern of that moment — that a military coup might be about to unfold….

More to the point of this note:

Maybe your readers already know this, but I was stunned to learn recently that President Kennedy seemed to be on the verge of making our first manned mission to the moon a JOINT venture, with the Soviets. 

History, of course, could have been changed greatly, as this 1997 article suggests, along with some other recent writings…

Headlined “Soviets Planned To Accept JFK’s Joint Lunar Mission Offer”, a SpaceDaily article published October 2, 1997 reported —

Soviet Premiere Nikita S. Khrushchev reversed himself in early November, 1963 and had at the time, decided to accept U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s offer to convert the Apollo lunar landing program into a joint project to explore the Moon with Soviet and U.S. astronauts, SpaceCast learned Wednesday from one of the last remaining participants in the decision still alive.

On the eve of the 40th anniversary of the world’s first space satellite, the Soviet Sputnik 1, Sergei Khrushchev, eldest son of the former Premiere and Soviet Union Communist Party General Secretary said that his father made the decision in November 1963 following a renewed Kennedy initiative to sell the Soviets on a joint manned lunar program.

“My father decided that maybe he should accept (Kennedy’s) offer, given the state of the space programs of the two countries (in 1963)”, Khrushchev told SpaceCast following a talk before a NASA conference in Washington on the effects of the historic Sputnik launch on Oct. 4, 1957. Sputnik was the world’s first artificial satellite of the Earth, and its autumn 1957 launch into orbit is widely credited with starting the superpower space race that lasted until the end of the Cold War in 1991.

…Kennedy had made the offer of a joint manned lunar program to the Russians on several occasions, but his most aggressive effort was made in a speech before the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 20, 1963 in New York.

At the end of that address, Kennedy said: “In a field where the United States and the Soviet Union have a special capacity – space – there is room for new cooperation, for further joint efforts.”

Porter: It Was 50 Years Ago Today

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By Andrew Porter: In 1963, I was a 17-year-old student at Milford Preparatory School, in Milford, Conn. I was in my second year, due to graduate in May, 1964. Milford was a small school, all male then, now long shut down. I was, even then, known for my love for science fiction. My nickname there was “spaceman”; those who didn’t know me thought it was an insult, but I was happy with the moniker. Among other things, they let me keep my growing SF collection, as long as I kept my grades up, and, even better, I was allowed to use the school’s electric Ditto machine to run off the first several issues of Algol..

We had Friday afternoon after lunch off from classes, and I’d gone into Milford’s small center, to the variety store that had been supplying me with new SF paperbacks. Afterwards, I went to the local Goodwill store on the way back to the campus. That store had received a big batch of mint condition pulp magazines – Planet Stories, Startling, Thrilling Wonder, etc. — from the late 40s through the end of their days in the early 1950s. I’d been buying them up, as many as I could carry, each time I went in. (And I still have them, a little dustier, today.)

There, with customers and employees clustered around it, was a big old b&w TV set, and …

When I got back to school, the dorm master, teacher Francis Gemme, was running around the dorm in his underwear, holding an antique whaling harpoon he owned, shouting about a conspiracy. The students in the dorm, and likely much of the school, thought he was acting like a madman. (In later years, Gemme did introductions to academic paperback editions of such books as The War of the Worlds, Leaves of Grass, Our Town and The Bridge of San Luis Rey, etc. He and his wife were on the DC-10 headed to the 1979 American Booksellers Association Convention in Los Angeles which crashed just after takeoff from Chicago’s O’Hare, killing everyone on board.)

That evening, at dinner, they announced that the school would close early for Thanksgiving Recess, sending everyone home the next day. From my parents’ reaction on finding me unexpectedly returned from school, apparently they failed to tell anyone about this.

Lost in the press of events: C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley also died on November 22nd, 1963…

Top All-Time Radio Shows in RUSC Poll

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The internet old-time radio service RUSC – for its motto “R U Sitting Comfortably?” – got 600 votes in response to a poll asking listeners to name “The Best Old Time Radio Series Ever!”

For a dramatic unveiling of the Top 10 watch this 3-minute video —

You ask, did any sf and fantasy programs make the top of the list? Absolutely!

Classic science fiction anthology series X Minus 1 (#9) and pulp adaptation The Shadow (#4) are both in the Top 10.

Inner Sanctum, the mystery, terror and suspense series with the iconic creaking door ranked #18.

Two other shows that cast a wide net and occasionally did sf/fantasy made the Top 20. At #17 is Escape, which did an adaptation of Bradbury’s “Mars Is Heaven.” At #6 is Suspense, mostly mystery, but its fantasy and horror offerings included the “The Hitch Hiker,” later adapted as a Twilight Zone episode.

What is #1? The Jack Benny program was voted the all-time best radio show.