When I was blogging from the train the other week I meant to mention this piece too:

Mainly to get a reaction from @Hinchcliffe.

It’s a flyer for a Jason Chalker show, but it was just the Snoopy as Red Baron thing that drew my attention. I’ve always drawn a straight line from Snoopy’s flights of fancy to the dizzy heights of Calvin & Hobbes. Back in my metal days when most of my friends had Maiden and Anthrax going on, my own leather jacket featured a full back acrylic painting of Calvin and Hobbes.

I did go through the horns ‘n’ demons phase, but as much as a good piece of album art touched me it was always the stronger narrative that won out and I’ve always believed there’s something more real in the tale of a small boy and his tiger than even most of the literature I studied.

Than again I think Watership Down is a vast improvement on Homer*.

*The original one – no eyes, no overbite.

Don’t want to turn the blog into a quote-fest, but this is relevant to something new I just started working on:

“We do have one thing going for us. Miss Watkins was a nobody. She was a drifter. No family, no close friends. She said she had hitch-hiked East from Idaho. So she won’t be missed”.

That’s Mayor Vaughan’s closing remark on the one off freak shark attack to Chief Brody in Jaws by Peter Benchley. I haven’t read the book since I was a kid and @squeezeomatic was kind enough to send me a neat edition to reread. The book lasted 35 years with no idiot scribbling in it and then I come along with my pen.

I’ve started getting asked the ideas question recently. Where do they come from, or more precisely where do I get them from. The easy answer is the same place as everyone else.

I read a lot and that helps. And if opportunity knocks then ideas have me on speed dial. The above quote jumped out of me in relation to something very far removed from sharks and that something came to me almost fully fleshed out when a quick look online for a character name wound up three hours later with the sun coming up and an iPad full of notes.

I was asked about naming things last week too. Nipped into the BBC to do that so if the few words of mine make it into something linkable I’ll drop the URL here.

So this made me sit up a little straighter:

Not because I have a lot of cables under my desk (I do), but because I wrote a scene last week that is almost – almost – this brought to life.

It’s only a first draft so she may not survive, but it was nice to see her up and about briefly. Even if she was cheating on me in someone else’s brain.

Great Sunday viewing this. An Orson Welles fronted documentary based on Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock:

Been a fan of Orson since I was a kid and thanks to F for Fake I tend to be more interested in the stuff he did during his ‘decline’. This taps into one of the projects I’m currently working on, but also into stuff like Shift Happens that we’ve been banging on about for years.

To be honest though I can watch/listen to Welles in anything. Once I get this next workload under control I’m treating myself to an evening of old Welles docs that I just acquired.

Life is good.

I was talking to a friend this evening about my love of old school Republic serials and notably Buster Crabbe as Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. The conversation reminded me I meant to post this ages ago when I was babbling about how movie marketing used to get it so spot on:

It’s part of the original teaser campaign for the then upcoming Flash from some time in the 30s (actually reprinted in the July 1962 of Spacemen magazine).

How the cameramen performed all their magic remains a secret of the studios, never to be revealed…

Which in turn nudged me to link to this post, wonderfully entitled Screenplay Structures, Flash Gordon and the Death of Cinema.

Well worth a read as I think it’s spot on. In fact I was talking about it this morning with a friend in LA as we discussed small format webisodic productions. Most people don’t get it yet, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a few years and there’s so much turmoil in the large format right now that it’s gonna pay off to take a closer look at what Buster was up to before WWII.

Exciting times ahead.

MELKONIS
Somebody get the cat.

Roby picks a limp cat out of a freezer.

The above is from the original ALIEN script by Dan O’Bannon. The image is from an original storyboard by Ridley Scott himself.

It was always about the cat.

“Let’s not talk about it anymore,” I said. “It gets worse and worse somehow. I wish I’d never laid eyes on the stupid book.” I remember his exact words then. “We can’t turn back the clock now. It’s in us. If we close our eyes, it will jump out at us in the darkness”. I didn’t know what the “it” referred to, whether he meant the story or evil or an amorphous presence, and I didn’t ask. By then I didn’t want to hear. At the same time, I was ensnared like a person in a horror movie who covers his eyes and then peeks.

The Blindfold, Siri Hustvedt

A segment from “On Screen!” looking at Cronenberg’s Shivers (1975):

San Francisco in 1905:

1906

What is that little thing?

I’m good at avoiding the trivial (yet am pretty good at trivia – go figure). Twitter brings hints that there’s a wider world out there – a mention of a footballer here or a pop star there. If what ever it is that they’re doing (besides shifting tabloids) explodes into something big enough to become a movie or get referenced in a (good) tv show then off I’ll go to Wikipedia for the context. I’m aware Michael Jackson died, but I’ve heard maybe four of his songs. I did actually buy the Thriller album on vinyl, but for the Vincent Price bit after seeing the John Landis video – still confused why they ruined a perfectly good zombie/werewolf short with all that dancing crap. Come to think of it I’m not sure I ever played the other side of that record.

My dad had a lot of Johnny Cash and Charlie Parker records.

But let’s get back to that little pixelated white dot. Little doesn’t mean trivial:

Descent of Phoenix with a crater in the background taken by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter

The Reddit thread I spotted this on is worth a read.

“Although it appears that Phoenix is descending into the crater, it is actually about 20 kilometers (about 12 miles) in front of the crater.”

O_0

All this made me think of Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot. Good to revisit that every now and again – Voyager 1 is too busy.

Next time you get bored of the tabloids or are about to complain about the weather just look up. You need really good eyes, but the imagination part is helped along a lot by some little metal things doing their thing on an entirely different planet. On behalf of us.

High five.

Fuck Mad Men.

A show about the only guys in the 60s who weren’t pulling guns on each other.