Logan’s Run and the Case of the Disgusting Cover
The cover of this Italian paperback of Logan’s Run freaks me the fuck out. I mean it makes me almost physically nauseous. You know that terror you feel when you’re dreaming that you have no teeth? This book cover does that to me. I look at it, and I have to swallow saliva as my stomach churns with the expectation of vomiting. I exaggerate only slightly — my stomach does indeed get tight when I look at this, but I don’t think I’d puke.
Sorry for the smallness of the image. A word of explanation about the book as it relates to the book cover:
In Logan’s Run, a “palm flower”, really a crystal, is embedded in the palm of your hand at birth illuminates when you reach the age of 21, at which time you are weeded out to prevent overpopulation. The illustration on this cover pre-dates the film version in which the “palm flower” was depicted as a tiny button-sized crystal, so the imagination of the illustrator went wild.
The cover illustrator drew the “palm flower” as an immense shape coming out of the back of the person’s hand, which is itself detached from any body in an surrealistic way. Look at it floating there. Look at the gentle swirls of the flower, almost like paper ribbon, like a bow.
I look at this enormous flower, and my mind panics over “what the hell would I do if I found a giant flower living out of my hand????” I’d want to rip it out, burn it, flatten it… but then there’d be a giant gaping hole in my hand according to this illustration. So it’s a no-win situation. You’ve either got a parasitic plant growing out of your body on one hand (pun intended), or you’re going to do some radical surgery to destroy this, and will likely be left with something just as horrible, on the other.
This freaks me out in the way that tomatoes sometimes upset me. (Because of the way they look so purposeful, with their chambers and such. Who is designing this shit? I ask myself, and am scared that we don’t know the answer.
Sometimes I think the only way I’ll overcome my disgust at the inexplicable way that things grow with purposeful shape and design will be to observe an autopsy. I seem to have a deep-seated fear of the way that internal organs (or in the case of this illustration, an external flower) are.
Milla dream
I dreamed I took part in an anti-drug, pro-insurance PSA with Milla Jovovich. (Like she was doing man-on-the-street bits with random people). “I can get you insurance and drugs. But, let’s hold the drugs” was my comment. And for a moment, in another moment, she was on top of me. And in another moment I told her that actually, even though I didn’t do it myself, if I had a kid I’d let them try pot, especially if they were taking art classes, “just to see what they’d paint.”
And then I ended up in a bad dream in which I was lost and shirtless in some obscure town (the boonies) miles from anywhere. There was a river running between houses, low and icy and rapid, flooding the houses a bit on either side with mud. Like you’d go down an alleyway expecting to find a street or back yards, and instead there was this mud-colored river flooding through. Somehow it did not alarm the neighbors, whose homes I had to walk through to reroute around this. Also I was searching for food. I was chilly, lost, hungry and barefoot.
But I got good sleep.
Dream of another body
My dream last night was odd for me in that I was not myself. I could see myself as I am, but others saw me as another person entirely — a technique not unfamiliar to many a television show, I grant.
Others saw me as a wildly successful female burlesque sort of artist, whose videos and choreographed performances had elevated me to cult stardom. (even though there was no sex per se, just nudity).
A younger woman who wanted to match my success was suggesting to me that if we did a new film with my performances, and then added her doing more explicit content, it would be a huge hit, a best-seller. I felt the pang of silently recognizing that she wanted to use me as a way to make a breakthrough for herself, to use my platform to launch her own more fleeting sort of stardom. My eroticism to get people interested, and her blatant sexuality to fire the loins so to speak. I did not immediately say no, but spoke about how our usual investors expected a particular kind of film and we’d have to look outside our usual funding sources if we were to do that.
We were in a group: my usual filmmaking troupe, including a guy who I believed was the chief cinematographer, who was heavyset and had a bit of a beard, and managed to be completely non-sexual in the way that he was an important part of the group and had been so for so long that there simply wasn’t any issue. He sat on a piano bench of an upright black piano that was in this living room in which our group was decompressing. And there were other team members both male and female in this circle, production assistants I expect. They did not feature in the dream but I mention them to show that this was a team effort, even if I was the “star”.
The younger woman with the idea made an effort to be my friend, and in this dream I got to experience the sort of efforts that real-life lesbians have when they are entertaining the possibility of a relationship. (I hate that expression — “entertaining the possibility” — in fact it is precarious, not like hosting a party at all. More like clamoring along a cliffside looking for handholds among the rocks.) I knew the possibility that she wanted to be my friend because of my fame. I also knew that perhaps that was not a bad thing, that even if she was drawn to me because she saw it as a way to advance her own life, it implied a sort of envy or respect to want to emulate me. But rivalry too, wouldn’t there be, I wondered? She asked me what I did with my time when I wasn’t making movies. What my hobbies were, in a sense.
This was a difficult question because I was sort of visiting this person’s body/life. I could still see my own hairy chest where she saw a woman’s bosom. (Don’t ask me how sex would work, or even touching — it appeared the illusion was complete). And to answer her question, I didn’t know if I should search the mind/brain of this life (the life of the woman she saw), or if I could make stuff up on the spot. In short I didn’t know where my responsibilities lay — was I inhabiting a real person’s life, or was the person I was in this dream a fictional creation of my own mind? Different answers, different rules would apply. So I was vague, and I took her home or to a place I stayed, a futon bed with wine-red sheets and beige walls glowing yellow from floor-lamps, and we talked, and I wondered again about how starting a relationship with someone who also wanted to use my minor-stardom was probably sure to end badly.
The lines were also difficult because on one hand, we worked together (she in some minor, bit part, more costume than character), presumably emulating some sort of eroticism for the benefit of the artistic pieces I choreographed, the films I made. But in those, even with another actor, there was isolation as each person kept themselves within their own spaces of body and mind, even if the illusion was intimacy.
Frilly fans, 1920s period costumes, all sorts of artistry were the dominant way of eliciting impressions of eroticism in the mind of the film viewer. In contrast, if I started a real relationship with her, snogging with her, having breakfast with her, that would be completely different. A few steps from her in a room was a huge distance; by that I mean, if I were to walk three steps to her and hug her and kiss her, that would be a massive leap. I was taken by the contrast of how such a small distance of space could make such a huge difference in one’s lives. I was edging towards going ahead with this (as my taking her back to my place was evidence of my inclination.) In this experience I also saw how being a lesbian was no easier nor more difficult than any other type of preference. The same sort of stilted approaches applied.
The dream drifted, and we were driving over an overpass in some city I didn’t recognize …
Standup Detective
For years I wondered what the name was of a comedian I saw in the early days of cable television, circa 1989 when the Comedy Channel was brand new (and yet already having repeats).
He wore a London Fog trenchcoat and fedora hat like detectives of the (possibly mythological) past wore, and his act was replete with film noir phrases like:
“She had a great pair of gams…getaway-sticks…pins…”
Indeed I don’t recall any jokes, just a series of noir expressions that filled his whole act, to the delight of the audience.
I finally took some time to figure out who he was…
He was Michael David Farrow, known to the public as:
Tommy Sledge, Stand-up Detective
He’s “currently enjoying retirement” at the old age of 65 or so, and while I was pleased to learn about him (click here for info) I was sad to see that he never released any audio recordings of his act.
He did however pen a pair of noir detective books, presumably into which he laid bits of his act — Eat Lead, Clown and then several years later, Kiss It Or Die!. I’ve ordered the first one even though the second one has the better title.
If his voice has held up — and I appreciate that such is not always the case by the time one is in their sixties — he should try to record them as audiobooks, for future denizens of the world who agree than the gams are the best part of a dame.
Chicago O’Hare sighting back in the news
An exchange on HuffPo about the Chicago O’Hare UFO sighting of a few years ago.
First the skeptic, then the advocate:
“Google produces nothing on this except some hearsay rumors…Look, I don’t mean to be nasty, but just as there’s such a thing a mass hallucination, there’s such a thing as mass misinterpretation. Years ago in a little place called Tickfaw in southeast Louisiana, someone claimed to have sighted the Virgin Mary in the sky over a certain piece of farmland. Soon thousands of people came to that piece of farmland. Some harmed their eyes by staring into the sun looking for the Virgin. Some, using cheap cameras, caught cross-shaped refraction from the sun through the plastic lenses and offered this as evidence that something holy was going on. It came out later that the farm was owned by a man in New Orleans who also ran a bus tour company, which company also brought most of the faithful up to Tickfaw to witness the “miracle.” And it also turned out that it was one of this man’s relatives who had the original “sighting.” Yet hundreds of people to this day will tell you it was all legit, and they were there.”
—–
“But what you describe wasn’t a mass hallucination, was it? It was an attempt by many people to have a vision, arriving at different times, each of them trying to have a vision, and they each tried and they each saw different things, or different versions of whatever they thought was holy. That’s a far cry from people in an airport seeing the same object at the same time. I can’t believe you honestly thought there was any comparison, or that what you cited was even an example of a mass hallucination. If that is what a mass hallucination is (people seeing different things at different times), then there doesn’t even seem to be such a thing as mass hallucination.”
Here’s another back and forth. The skeptic is really trying hard to make sure that people don’t believe what people see.
Advocate: Lack of photos and lack of physical artifacts suggests that we’re dealing with something that is outside of the perception of mechanical objects, but within the perceptual ability of people, and oddly enough, radar. Don’t take the blurry photos as a failure — take them as an indication that they’re not the same kind of objects that are usually photographed.
Skeptic: Let me see if I’ve got your meaning here… Lack of evidence that something exists is evidence that it exists. Blurry photos are evidence that the subjects of these photos are not something ordinarily photographed, even though we photograph everything from viruses in a supermagnifying electron microscope to extremely distant galaxies via the Hubble Space Telescope?
Advocate: No, you’re forgetting the first evidence: the experiential evidence. If it were not for that, there’d be no contradiction to explore. The contradiction is that people see these things, but there’s crap as far as photos are concerned. Since this contradiction has been running for, what, fifty years now, it seems to indicate something of the nature of the things being seen. Either that they’re in people’s imagination, or they’re something that doesn’t photograph well. First possibility is easy to embrace, second possibility takes patience since we may need different technology to record them. You bring up electron microscopes — good example. My guess — and it is only a guess, of course — is that the entire experience of aliens and UFOs is more interdimensional than interstellar, but I’m wise enough to appreciate that we don’t even have the language prepared for such theories, let along the technology to peer into other worlds that may sometimes be touching ours. Have to have patience for the equivalent of the electron microscope to be discovered. Until then, we just have to note there’s a contradiction, and wonder why that is.
Dream
Neo: You ever have that feeling where you’re not sure if you’re awake or still dreaming?
Choi: All the time. It’s called mescaline, it’s the only way to fly.
I feel (or, by the time I am writing this, I felt) like I was still dreaming, due to having woken up late. Car sailed through green lights all the way to work, accentuating the dreamlike feeling. Easily distracted today by children playing in the fountain outside, as if it is interesting in a way it hasn’t been for months.
What I learned from my actual dreams this morning:
-It is better to have a pet dog than a pet lion. Especially when the lion decides to put your leg in its mouth and your pant cuff gets hooked on one of its big fang teeth.
-If a group of people are having a political debate in a room adjoining your apartment, but they didn’t invite you and have no explanation as to how they got into the building, you may have to eject them even if it isn’t clear if that’s the landlord’s responsibility or your own.
-I look silly wearing black sweat pants and a black sweatshirt with a Mickey Mouse on the front. (For the record, I do not own such a sweatshirt!)
Interesting names
Those sneakers are fantastic, by the way. They arrived a few days ago and I’ve been wearing ‘em. They’re light, secure (as in, no feeling I’m about to tilt over), and look as good as the pics.
I was just browsing for a company, and came across this name of a human being: “Tordis Solient”. Isn’t that an interesting name? (She’s attractive too – maybe it is a Nordic name or something?) It’s like a Doctor Who meets Soylent Green sort of name.
Merrell Chameleon shoes
Had to get new shoes, because my casual sneaks are too flat and are hurting my feet. I looked all ’round my house for any good substitutes I already had, but nothing breathable enough for summer.
So: The Merrell Chameleon 3 Velum:
