The “Life of a Modern Day Sculptor: Christopher Slatoff” event at the Pasadena Museum of History on July 24 featured a conversation between artist Chuck Kovacic and Christopher Slatoff, creator of the Bradbury-inspired Father Electrico sculpture.
Once famous for traveling the world to make sculptures out of sand, Slatoff is now known for his impressive body of work cast in bronze. Hear how Slatoff became friends with legendary author Ray Bradbury and how that friendship inspired The Illustrated Man, one of the sculptor’s favorite works. (The maquette of this work is currently on view at PMH.) A short documentary, Father Electrico: Ray Bradbury Lives Forever by John Sasser, will be shown about the creation of this sculpture.
Mockup given to Ray
Sculpture: The Father Electrico.sculpture is available exclusively through American Legacy Fine Arts.
…is a documentary film based on the creation of a sculpture which was a collaboration between author Ray Bradbury and sculptor Christopher Slatoff. The frontal view of the finished sculpture depicts a father carrying his son. Turn the sculpture around and the image of the father is in reality Bradbury’s “Illustrated Man,” a character taken from his classic story collection about a tattooed man.
John Sasser, documentarian
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian for the story and the photos of the speakers.]
(1) SLATOFF’S NEW COMMISSION. Christopher Slatoff, the sculptor who did the Ray Bradbury-themed Father Electrico statue, will see his war hero memorial unveiled in Pasadena on Memorial Day.
Essentially, BBC Worldwide has put out a press release to announce a new deal with a Chinese media company, and one paragraph of the press bumf seems to suggest that the Beeb is planning for Doctor Who – in its current, post-relaunch state – to run until at least its fifteenth series.
The MOU comes on the back of a content deal that BBC Worldwide also signed with SMG Pictures yesterday evening. The deal will see the entire catalogue of Doctor Who including spin-offs, Torchwood and Class available on popular TV channels and on-demand platforms all over China.
The deal not only covers Showrunners Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat’s Series 1- 10, but also incoming Showrunner Chris Chibnall’s yet-to-film Series 11, as well as a first look for Series 12-15. [Emphasis added.]
The Wachowski sisters’ remarkable Netflix series, Sense8, is now in its second season. It is an elaborate envisioning of another race of humanoids, homo sensorium, who communicate telepathically and live among us.
These come in “clusters” that are scattered around the world, and from its opening credits, Sense8 is careful to present the viewer with the enormously diverse quilt that is humanity itself. The opening credits roll over a stunning montage of multicolored crowds, couples, celebrations, and rituals from around the globe (yes, the show has a break-the-piggybank travel budget).
The cluster of eight we follow is diversity itself — a Kenyan, a German, an Indian, an Icelander, people of color, a Brazilian gay man, and a Bay Area transgender woman. In nearly every episode, a cluster character denounces humanity’s unfortunate propensity to fear and oppress those we see as different, as the “Other.”
And yet…
Not a single genderqueer person anywhere. Not in this cluster. Not in the others. Not in any character they interact with. Even the crazy underground computer hacker named Bug is, like everyone else, quite gender-normative.
Apparently gender difference is the Other that must not speak its name. And this is from a team where not one but both siblings have bravely and publicly transitioned to be trans women. Et tu, Lana and Lilly?
Moreover, all of this occurs in science fiction, a genre invented to let creative imaginations run wild with possibility. Apparently veering from the gender binary is not among the possible. And in this, Sense8 is hardly alone….
…It is sadly to be expected that cisgender people cannot imagine us. But it is beyond sad that even when we are behind the camera and behind the typewriter, as with Sense8, we cannot imagine us either….
(4) PHOENIX COMICON UPDATE.Yahoo! News tells who the guman’s target was and quotes a statement from the actor —
Original ‘Power Rangers’ star Jason David Frank has had a bit of a close shave, as a lone gunman headed to Phoenix Comic Con with the intention of killing him.
A heavily-armed man — identified as 31-year-old Matthew Sterling — arrived at the convention on Thursday claiming to be ‘The Punisher’ with a plan to kill numerous ‘bad’ cops as well as the original Green Ranger, who was appearing at the comic con…
But why did he want to kill the Green Ranger?
It’s unclear why Sterling took umbrage against Jason David Frank, despite his claims that he previously stabbed the Green Ranger in a separate altercation.
Those claims seem to be entirely fabricated.
“I don’t know this individual, but I will pray for him,” said Frank in an interview with Fox News, adding that the alleged stabbing never took place. “I think if you mention ‘stabbed’, and I haven’t been stabbed, the story speaks for itself.”
According to Maricopa County Deputy Attorney Ed Leiter, the man was also planning to attack a number of other individuals, whose identities have not been released.
“He exhibited a dramatic threat to the community beyond police officers, beyond Jason David Frank,” he explained. “A number of other people were referenced as possible targets or people he wanted to kill….
(5) DENOUEMENT. Yesterday, after N.K. Jemisin publicly posted that she had asked Felicity Harley not to post the results of Harley’s interview with her, host site The Writing Cooperative took down the post and apologized.
(6) TO TWEET OR NOT TO TWEET. Lots of fans are tweeting about things they’re hearing on convention panels this weekend. But here’s a bit of social media etiquette I haven’t seen before —
Kinder Eggs are coming to the U.S. — legally. The hollow chocolate egg with the toy surprise inside has not been allowed in the states due to a 1930s law banning candy with non-food objects inside, though fans of the European treat have previously smuggled them in.
(9) TRIVIAL TRIVIA
(10) TODAY IN HISTORY
May 27, 1988 — Killer Klowns From Outer Space opens in theaters.
The Gollancz Festival is back! Join us on the 4th November 2017 for a day long celebration of genre authors, fiction and fans. Book your tickets now.
This year we are thrilled to continue our partnership with Foyles for a day of readers’ events at Foyles Charing Cross Road. Meet your favourite authors, enjoy a day of panel events, interviews, Q&As and signings. To find out more about our readers’ events and book your tickets click here.
We will also be running our very popular Writers’ Festival with panel events, speed dating style pitching, advice from authors and editors at the Phoenix Artists’ Club. To find out more about our Writers’ Festival and book tickets click here.
Authors in attendance include: Ben Aaronovitch, Mark Alder, James Barclay, Stephen Baxter, AK Benedict, Pat Cadigan, Ed Cox, Jaine Fenn, Joanne Harris, Joe Hill, Antonia Honeywell, Simon Ings, Tom Lloyd, Suzanne McLeod, Elizabeth May, Paul McAuley, Ed McDonald, Simon Morden, Richard Morgan, Sam Peters, Christopher Priest, Alastair Reynolds, Justina Robson, Adam Roberts, Al Robertson, Gavin Smith, Tricia Sullivan, Tom Toner, Jon Wallace, Catriona Ward and Chris Wooding.
(13) STILL NEWS TO SOMEONE! Andrew Porter announces you can now find his old fanzine, SF Weekly, online at Fanac.org.
Well, most of them. The issues #185 to #228, from 1967 to 1968, anyway.
All the news that fit, back in the day…
Not to be confused with any other SF WEEKLY, including ones published decades later. Nor with anything to do with San Francisco, or Suomi Finland.
Scanned in by a bunch of people, especially Mark Olson!
(14) PUPPY REDUX. People keep sending me links to Chris Chan’s day-late and several-dollars-short “‘No Award’: The Hugo Awards, Sad Puppies, and Sci-Fi/Fantasy Literature”. It might be a cure for low blood pressure. If you’re not suffering from that I recommend skipping it, or Chan will have you suffering from something else.
Many English departments are now beginning to offer courses on graphic novels, which integrate text and visual imagery. Graphic novels are increasingly studied alongside traditional literature, in some cases supplanting more standard text-based curricula.
For example, one course at UNC Chapel Hill titled “The Visual and Graphic Narrative”can be taken to satisfy the literary appreciation part of a student’s general education requirements. (Students are only required to take one literary appreciation class.) The university also offers a course titled “Comics as Literature”as a first-year seminar.
Given these courses’ rising popularity among students, administrators and instructors may view them in terms of their ability to renew student interest in the humanities. But while graphic novels do have artistic merit, and are of aesthetic interest, the rise of undergraduate courses on graphic novels is problematic.
One reason is that the majority of graphic novels tend to advance political agendas. The graphic novels found on course syllabi and on reading lists often deal with controversial political issues such as social justice, immigration, gay rights, etc. This is part of a larger trend in the humanities, where focus often is on oppression and identity politics.
For example, Ursinus College assigns the widely acclaimed and controversialFun Home by Allison Bechdel in undergraduate literature courses. Bechdel’s graphic novel is written as memoir, and discusses her experiences growing up in a dysfunctional family. The reader follows Bechdel as she learns about her father’s homosexuality and her lesbianism.
Another graphic novel, Bitch Planet by Kelly Sue DeConnick, also is a popular choice on university syllabi and has been described as an “intersectionally feminist text.”The book is about “a woman’s failure to comply with her patriarchal overlords….
(16) LOGAN. From last March, the stars of Logan appeared on the BUILD series.
Hugh Jackman and Patrick Stewart come to BUILD to dish on the anticipated film, “Logan.” The film tells the tale of a weary Logan taking care of an ailing Professor X in a hide out on the Mexican border. Although Logan attempts to remain hidden from the world, a young mutant soon changes what he had planned. Join us when they take the stage
[Thanks to Carl Slaughter, Martin Morse Wooster, Nicholas Whyte, Andrew Porter, JJ, Camestros Felapton, John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Charon D.]
“The Illustrated Man” is a “heroic scale” version of “Fr. Electrico”, a three-foot-tall composition awarded a gold medal at the California Art Club’s 97th Annual Gold Medal Juried Exhibition. Both are inspired by Ray Bradbury.
Slatoff told Michelle Mills of the San Gabriel Valley Tribune —
The work is drawn from Bradbury’s real-life experience of being carried home by his father. He was 13 at the time and had fallen asleep after enjoying two circuses. His father lovingly scooped up the teen and toted him more than a mile home.
Slatoff based his piece on the child’s point of view at a time when his father seemed larger than life. His creation depicts a tall, strong man cradling his sleeping son, but its story doesn’t end there.
“The back of the sculpture, for me, the metaphor for Ray Bradbury’s never-ending creativity was the ideas he put forth in his second book, which was called ‘The Illustrated Man.’ Here, a heavily tattooed man’s tattoos come to life and tell their stories,” Slatoff said. “But contrary to what it sounds like, (the vignettes on the statue) are not illustrations of his book, they’re concrete representations of our conversations.”
Slatoff did not read his first Bradbury story until 2007. They met at a Bradbury lecture and became friends. During one of their conversations Bradbury told the anecdote that inspired the design of the sculpture.
“He told me the story because he saw the ‘Pieta’ (at Mission San Diego) that I had sculpted and it reminded him of that. After we were doing the sculpture, he wrote the story ‘Pieta Summer.’ (Bradbury would say) ‘Tell that sculptor to come over, bring a bottle of wine and two kinds of cheese.’?”
