The Fredösphere

Science Fiction gets all the cool designed environments; see the 15 best locations from futuristic movies at Oobject (my favs being the Marin County Civic Center and Seaside, Florida), then visit the City of Ember (but only visit; it looks like you wouldn't want to live there; and what's with Bill Murray as Big Brother???  And why does Ember remind me of Ambergris so much?)

Labels: Design, Futurism

The title says it all:  The Revolution Will Not Be Pasteurized.  (Hat tip 2Blowhards.)

Meanwhile...

Rene's Apple will have what Ann Althouse is having:

I'd rather see a show where philosophers descend on a woman with a perfect exterior and rip into her for her intellectual and spiritual failings, put her on some kind of internally transformative regime, and turn her into a human being of substance. Can we get that?

...and furthermore...

Man Babies.  Plus, have a look at Nazis on the Moon.

Labels: Culture, fun, Futurism, movie, VideoClip

In an earlier post I commented with pleasant surprise on a Swedish composer's attempt to create an opera on a science fiction theme.  Commenters assured me this was hardly the first composer to attempt such a feat.  Daniel Wolf cited as ancient an example as Haydn, which impressed me to no end.  Those of you familiar with my Haydn animus won't be surprised my mental picture of Haydn as a space opera-tor is that of the salt vampire of Planet M-113.

Anyhoo, I'm pleased to add another work to this growing list:  Jacques Offenbach's adaptation of Jules Verne's Le Voyage dans la Lune.  Wikipedia has the details, including a wonderful photo showing costumes and a set from the original lush (but to the modern eye, goofy) production.  Kudos is due (hey!  I conjugates that verb real good!) to io9 for dredging up this information (especially considering that deep historical perspective is not what you expect from a Gawker-related site) in a terribly interesting roundup of info on Georges Méliès' groundbreaking 1902 SF film A Trip to the Moon, which itself was recycled in a trippy music video by The Smashing Pumpkins called Tonight, Tonight:



And I suppose I'll have to comment on The Man that Fell to Earth if I ever get up the courage to watch it.

Space.  And opera.  What else have I overlooked?

Labels: Composition, Culture, Futurism, movie, Opera, sci-fi, VideoClip

Ian Moss has a new blog, with an emphasis on arts management to go along with the composing.

Dark Roasted Blend has one of its gallaries of gorgeous retro-future art.  This time the subject is cities.  (Hat tip Gravity Lens.)

I've been looking for a good video of the Four Bettys for a while now.  I found one with them singing "So Happy Together," but they really deserve something with better sound quality.  Meanwhile, enjoy.  Female barbershop quartets use a two-staff system with treble clef on the top for the tenor and lead and bass clef (transposed up an octave) for the baritone and bass.  This way, arrangements for men's groups can be adopted effortlessly by women's groups, and vice versa.  One more factoid:  as best I can tell, the term "beauty shop quartet" has become moribund; perhaps stillborn is the better metaphor.  One is inclined to be impressed by the female bass (really, a female with something like the range of a male tenor) but don't overlook the difficulty of singing the soprano part, which can get very high, but must always stay under the lead in terms of volume.  Unlike with men's groups, there's no falsetto to solve that problem.

Labels: BarbershopHarmony, Composer, Futurism

William Gibson knocked the sci-fi world on its asteroid years ago with Neuromancer, the seminal cyberpunk novel.  Now he's back with another futuristic story Spook Country.  The futurist has an understanding of the Google "aura" (the googleverse?) that nowadays gathers around a novel (or anything, really), and what is especially interesting is the way he self-consciously manipulates it to his benefit.  Read about it in the Guardian (via ArtsJournal).

Google-driven traffic is a funny thing.  For a long time, about 10% of my traffic was coming from people searching for pictures of Hitler.  I once linked to a painting of Hitler in an over-the-top heroic pose.  It's a classic of totalitarian kitsch.  You can see it here.  (Hey!  I can feel my hits rising as I type!)  Note well, I'm talking about a link to the image; I've never displayed it anywhere on my website, yet for some reason Google sent crowds of people to me.  (Large crowds ... large crowds, chanting in German ... large crowds, wearing swastikas and screaming for blood ... Aaaah!!!)  Such is the power of the Nazi meme.  Hitler is big.  Hitler is hot.

Most recently, the Guernica Philharmonic has been popular with Dutch seekers of googly goodness.  I really don't want to know why.

In the last couple weeks, I've noticed another fascinating phenomenon.  Political blogs that support Fred Thompson for president have begun to refer to themselves as the "Fredosphere."  Oh joy!  Visions of millions of accidental visitors dance in my head!  Maybe I could even sell out to the Thompson campaign, and make my site a portal of some kind.  Money, money, and furthermore, money!

Labels: Culture, Futurism

Via Futurismic, a question:  When Will Science Fiction End?  It's a relative of the question:  will we ever know everything?  Specifically, everything related to science.  As a youth, I held a belief so essential, it was a long time before I realized anyone could hold the opposite point of view, namely, that there will always be more in physics to learn.  (I say physics because it is fundamental; all science is ultimately about the particles.)  In fact, I believed physics was inherently unknowable in its fullness; that any system cannot be fully grokked from the inside (although I would not have been able to put it into those words when I was young).  I still tend toward that belief, but I'm more open to the other point of view, and the possibilities for human mind augmentation (for now, still science fiction) make me wonder how far we can go.

More futurism:  Terry Teachout foretells the death of the last regional critic.

Labels: Culture, Futurism

Jeffrey Hart records in the January 2005 New Criterion his fond memories of the 1939 World's Fair in New York.  (I got my copy only a few days ago.  I don't know who screwed up, the publisher or the post office, but getting a magazine mid-month is pretty pathetic.  Come on, guys, I have needs.)  Hart  was a nine year-old with a season ticket and he visited the Fair repeatedly.  Clearly, it made a lasting impression, particularly the centerpiece:

In the sunshine, the first thing you saw as you came down the boardwalk and into the Fair was its dominating symbols, the Trylon and Perisphere [sic; why not Perösphere?  Looks like someone dropped the ball, har-har] the former a triangular spire fifteen stories high, the latter a gigantic globe a city block across....The Trylon and Perisphere remian in our minds today.  They have become something like the archetypes Jung imagined as central to the mind.  We have them in salt-and-pepper shakers, plates, scarves, pencil sharpeners, glasses, rings, ash-trays.  I have a copper penny rolled oblong with the image of the Trylon and Perisphere stamped on it, a souvenir of the Fair.  I wear it on a silver chain as a necklace along with a silver cross....The two gleaming structures were of course male and female symbols.  Inside the female globe, the designers had gestated their vision of the World of Tomorrow.  The called it Democracity, and it was the most popular exhibit at the Fair.

Let's look carefully at this bun in the Perisphere's oven.  Hart describes it as a model of a Corbu-inspired city planned according to rationalist principles, zoned into massive tracks devoted to worker's housing, industry, agriculture, recreation, and commerce, each linked to the others via superhighways.  Much effort was put into designing the Perisphere total spectator experience, with visitors riding revolving balconies while watching a multi-media presentation:

As the crowd watched from the two circular and suspended balconies, the familiar voice of radio announcer H. V. Kaltenborn exmplained how Democracity functioned.  After two minutes, daylight faded under the great dome of the Perisphere, and as dusk slowly deepened toward dark the dome twinkled with stars.  To a musical accompaniment a thousand-voice chorus sounded from the glittering heavens, while at ten locations on the dome you same images of marching men -- farmers in their work clothes, mechanics carrying tools -- and as they came closer you saw that they represented the various ethnic groups that make up the American metropolis, her presented as an image of national unity.

"Ah-ha!"  you cry; you see why the heck this article is quoted at length here at the Fredösphere -- its the juxtaposition of choral music and sci-fi!  Or at least sci-fi's twin, futurology.

What's with the "thousand-voice" chorus?  Clearly its purpose is to signal that the visit to the Perisphere is a religious event.

That's it.  I don't have any more points to make, really.  I saw it, I thought it was cool, I blogged it.  That's the formula.  I could express my horror one more time at the social engineers, but that's getting old.  I'm even getting tired of laughing at these outdated visions of the future, even though their predictions were so bad they failed to predict obvious stuff like this just six years away.

Labels: Architecture, Culture, Futurism