Philip Jose Farmer, one of the great SF minds of our times, passed away in his Peoria, Illinois home. The tributes and obits are flowing in from all corners of society. SF Site has posted a great 1975 interview conducted in Minneaopolis by Dave Truesdale, (editor of Tangent fanzine), which primarily deals with the identity of Kilgore Trout.
Attending Antonio Di Mambro‘s lecture last night at Boston Public Library, it was amazing to see the giant crowd that packed Rabb Lecture Hall. Who would have thought that an urban planning talk — stoked with dire warnings and gloomy facts — would bring out such a vibrant cross-section of the city? It is almost as if, after thirty years of vapid hand-wringing and self-gratifying acts of “green” living, the mass of architects, planners, designers, and technocrats are beginning to realize that if they do not actually change the way America is built starting immediately, that our cities are literally going to fall apart. Cities can only take so much pillaging by the greed heads, then they go belly up.
This year’s Boskone had a stellar line-up of artists, including the likes of Donato Giancola, Daniel Dos Santos, Omar Rayyan, Dave Seeley, Bob Eggleton, Ruth Sanderson, Alan Beck, Margaret Organ-Kean,
Yikes, just home from Boskone…and the table is piled with loot! Working on my notes for the con report, so stayed tuned!
Thinking about Master Sheng Yen prompted me to run back over my own history of attempts at meditation, which dates back to the early 1970s and takes a ragged course up to the present day. It occurs to me that even without touching on the teachings themselves, just a brief note on the course of events might be an amusing trip for those of us who took similar journeys, or who might not have been born yet.
The parting message written by Master Sheng Yen to all of us: **Grown old while busy with trivial matters, Shedding tears and laughter over emptiness… But in the beginning there was no I, So birth and death can both be tossed aside.**
This will be my first time to participate in the Boskone Art Show, woot! I’m having fun getting some prints mounted and ready for the show. There will be four 8×10 prints available for the t
Reading Famous Long Ago, My Life and Hard Times with Liberation News Service brings to mind the fact that struggle is never finished. Yes, we need to have some hope, we need to stand up and cheer every day when another decent, humanizing, and reasonable executive order is delivered by the Obama White House… and yet, we also have to remember that there is a reason why we still need change in the first place. The memoir by the unlikely hero, Raymond Mungo, and the ghost of his alter-ego, Marshall Bloom, is riddled with the brazen and ridiculous posturing of green college grads and their acid-dropping cohorts who are hell-bent on saving the world. And yet, it is also true to itself, to its own ingenuity, self-deceptions, and aspirations. In a way, their self-determination to create the alternate news service, the non-lapdog, non-suckup, non-yesMan, non-corporate shill news service; where independent bylines gathered together under a loose umbrella called freedom of speech and freedom of the press, was noble indeed.
My first impression of Arisia was one of sartorial richness, stirred together with equal parts of humor, history, literary allusion, and performing arts. The non-stop schedule of movies, panels, gaming sessions, readings, parties and demonstrations got lost in the spectacle of costumed attendees swarming randomly around three levels of the hotel, and visible from any number of perspectives along the balustrades of the atrium. Out of this dizzying scene the iconic image of this con, for me, was that of a black-clad woman with blonde dreadlocks, jacked up on really tall stilts, and moving hazily across the rippling lobby carpet while slashing playfully at people with her foot-long razor nails. There were plenty of other costumes…indeed far to many to describe, except to say that the standard for corsets, ray-guns, battle-armor, cloaks, boots, scabbards, gowns, ragged wings, top hats, gloves, goggles, spats, walking sticks, holsters, capes, chain mail, and hardened-leather bustiere was conspicuously high! This managed to fit in with some of the subtexts running through the con, such as hentai anime, freemasonry, and steam punk vs. cyberpunk. And you could follow some of those threads on the con Twitter feed.
I was talking with my friend Don about this cool book I am reading about the rocket scientist John Whiteside Parsons — Strange Angel — when the conversation somehow changed tracks to Leon