Jack Latham - Lux Laze (Utter)

..........................ooh......nice space-age business here by Jack Latham, originally released as a soundtrack to Daniel Swan's film, Lux Laze (ltd edition VHS, comic, cassette) in 2010..........it pushes all the right buttons (on the futurist console....buttons pushed, no doubt, by fingers enclosed in a shiny silver glove).....no idea what the film's about but the music is a perfectly constructed fusion of John Capenteresque minimal synth & mood music for a cold digitalised semi-human future in colour negative where people roam a quasi-psychedelic VHS vision of things to come (a desolate landscape of rubble filmed in Hackney whilst it was being gentrified....probably).....................I'd love to see the film, so if the maker is reading, please send it because if the future is grim it matches my current bank statement........ha-ha (it's true, why am I laughing?)..........but for those of you with £10.99 to spare the new package is available here...

Meet My New Friend, Robot 6N7

Funny little fellah, ain't he? I made him this morning because I was feeling lonely...so I went to work in the lab. 6N7 isn't much of a name, so I call him 'Les Monk' ('Monk' for short) because I programmed him to play piano and he sounds like a cross between Thelonious Monk and Les Dawson. Although he appears harmless I also programmed him to fire lethal rays (from his eyes) at anyone who pisses me off. Sod Asimov's laws of robotics...

Robo-traffic-cop

Guadalajara, 1957...a robot directs traffic...

TV In Space

Yes, RCA Victor proudly announces it New Vista TV, placing it in a cosmic setting despite the fact that it looks like the outer design hasn't changed since the 1940s...no matter, it has Space Age Sealed Circuitry!

TV Eye

Hugo Gernsback wearing his 'teleyeglasses', 1963

Cybernetic Anthropomorphic Machines, Chelsea Harbour Horror & Michael Caine's Wormholes

Before Ripley proved she could operate this power loader in 2179 (aren't films great, the way they can show you the future?)...

...Ralph Mosher was operating a CAM (cybernetic anthropomorphic machine) in the mid-60s, having worked on variations for General Electric... 

...I don't know if the 'outer mechanical garment', or 'Powered Exoskeleton', as GE later called it, ever caught on in any sphere of work. All I see used in factories are these...

...which have perhaps proved more trustworthy in the long run...although not as sci-fi futuristically exciting as a exoskeleton, obviously. Perhaps a few CAMs were tried out in warehouses, only to find them being abused horrifically when pissed-off, underpaid workers went on unstoppable rampages, tearing limbs off managing directors before smashing the factory to pieces...maybe. You can't do that with a forklift...though you could run someone over, I suppose.

My experience with work-based machinery that you climb into is limited to operating an elevated work platform (or 'cherry-picker') for one day when I helped my brother-in-law clean windows at Chelsea Harbour. It was self-inflicted torture since I hate heights, by which I mean being higher than than when I wear shoes. I've got worse since I stopped wearing platforms in 197-. 

So I'm in this thing and having to elevate myself by pressing a button. That's how desperate for money I was. 'Can I sink any lower?' I wondered as I rose alongside one of the posh apartment blocks. I desperately wanted to sink lower, believe me, but the only way was up if I was to earn some cash. Worse was to come when I had to climb out of the basket and onto the balcony of an apartment. Somehow I managed. The view would have been magnificent, if you like that sort of thing. I was too busy trying to forget that I had to climb back in as I wiped those windows.

The actor Michael Caine lived at Chelsea Harbour, supposedly. Perhaps he still does. Returning to the sci-fi theme, I read a funny response from him when he was doing a press conference for Christopher Nolan's Interstellar. When asked if he'd always been interested in wormholes he replied. "I'm a very good amateur gardener, and I see a lot of wormholes. That’s what I thought they meant."

Space Age Pinball Machines

1963

1963

1973

1974

1976

1967

1967

1976

Space Age Commemorative Stamps and Envelopes

Found on Aylesbury market last Saturday. 50p each. There's also one commemorating 'Modern University Buildings' which I'll be posting at a later date.

First Man On The Moon

Gemini USS Wasp

John Glenn First Orbit

Seattle World's Fair Space Needle

I Act Out This Dream - Page From Space-Age Pulp Word Files

First major project of this year is to collate all of the space-age pulp word investigation texts and put them in a single file thus creating one entity from many passages of cut prose. It's untitled as yet, although a lot of it appeared as Shadows here, which was taken down due to lay out problems. Some also appeared in What Remains Of Words. The themes are mind control, identity, word control and the blurring of fiction & fact. Publishers interested in what will undoubtedly be a best-seller may contact me via this site. 

New Worlds Magazine No. 213 feat JG Ballard's 'Mr F Is Mr F'

After the post about the recently published New Worlds book, here are some pages from my copy of issue no.213, 1978. J. G. Ballard's Mr F Is Mr F was written in 1958, according to the editorial. This, however, was the first time it was published. You can read about Ballard's early experimental work here.

Eduardo Paolozzi at New Worlds (Savoy Books)

My copy arrived recently. This really is a superb production. 

Lots of art from Paolozzi, of course, but also New Worlds covers when they went New Wave. 

Buy one for your best friend this Xmas...I did...

More here

The Door Into Summer - Robert A. Heinlein (Panther, 1960)

I haven't posted a good pulp cover for a while so to put that right here's one.

it stinks like an old paperback frequently does; that pungent aromatic stain

of ancient cigarette smoke, dust, damp & unknowable things that leave a trace

embedded in the pages.

it's also on the verge of falling apart but I'm trying to read it anyway.

I love this cover because it combines the staple ingredients of pulp -

sex & sci-fi. 

Flying Saucers Explained - God & Cosmic Teapots

The answer, at last! By travelling back to 1947 I found an explanation for mysterious 'flying cutlery', as they used to call it. In Boris Artzybasheff's cartoon you can see Neptunians (yes, that's what they are) firing saucers at Earth. It's not clear where the teapots are going, or why Earth was only deemed worthy of saucers and not the pots. 

And talking of flying teapots, perhaps Gong were onto something...

Their album was inspired by Bertrand Russell's cosmic teapot analogy in response to the question of whether a Christian God exists.  In his words: 'nobody can prove that there is not between the Earth and Mars a china teapot revolving in an elliptical orbit, but nobody thinks this sufficiently likely to be taken into account in practice. I think the Christian God just as unlikely.'

My first response upon seeing the cartoon was to think of H.R.Giger's work on the Alien film. Had he seen Artzybasheff's cartoon? Were Ridley Scott's aliens firing cutlery through space as part of some cosmic joke? And if one of their stray teapots did get dragged into orbit between Earth and Mars, does that in turn validate the concept of a Christian God? See, you thought Alien was just a great sci-fi film when in fact, buried deep as a sub-sub-text, it's about the existence, or not, of God. And cosmic teapots.

Astrophilately? Rocket Mail & Stamps

Before Mail Art amateur rocket enthusiasts were designing their own stamps, embellishing envelopes and firing them off in their rockets. Ray Johnson, eat your heart out. If not exactly Art, I'm sure you'll agree that these stamps are wonderful... 

Polish Rocket Society, 1962

India, 1934

India, 1934

India, 1934

Austrian, 1930s

Dutch, 1938

Dutch, 1935

German Rocket Society

German Rocket Society

Olympic-Rocket Mail, 1960