Julien Nitzberg. Shit-stirrer, rebel director, artist, punk rocker and genius are some titles bestowed on this forward-thinking, back-slapping smart-ass. You might know him from his earliest documentary on Hasil Adkins—lunatic rockabilly one man band-he thought the guy in the radio made the music that way. Hasil sang about beheading his girlfriend so she “can eat no more hot dogs.” At that time he met Adkins’ neighbors the White family, who were the focus of his next documentary, the VHS cult sensation The Dancing Outlaw, about Jesco White, hillbilly clog dancer and Elvis impersonator. If you added up all the views just on YouTube of the different clips of this film alone it adds up into the millions.

Fast forward to 2009, Johnny Knoxville and Nitzberg make the cult hit The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia. In between these Nitzberg did many other projects Like Mike Judge presents: Tales From the Tour Bus and the controversial The Beastly Bombing operetta, an equal opportunity love/hatefest about, well…the subtitle of the operetta is “A Terrible Tale of Terrorists Tamed by the Tangles of True Love,” if that helps. You can read about it here.
 
All I knew about For the Love of a Glove going in was Julien’s history and sense of humor and that it was about Michael Jackson. That alone is at least a Godzilla’s worth of possible satiric destruction in the hands of Nitzberg, and that’s putting it mildly! It seems all of MJ’s bad behavior is blamed on aliens that look like glittery gloves who come to take over humanity. Oh did I mention it’s also a musical? And a puppet show? With life-sized puppets? The main one being Donny Osmond, Michael’s mortal enemy? There’s even one of Corey Feldman! And Emmanuel Lewis!!

The show is a non-stop comedy clobbering of the senses, with a very small, very talented cast, great original music, cool effects, etc. Most of the actors play as many as four roles, and being that much of the cast is African American it was odd/funny and visibly uncomfortable (to some) when these actors donned white hoods for the big Ku Klux Klan musical show stopper! But if you know Julien…
 

 
In these days of modern mass paranoia and casual racism, over-sensitivity and dumbing down of all things, even I had a flash of looking behind me (as I saw others do) and wondering if this was cool to like, who was getting offended, who was laughing, and right then at that moment I realized I have been way more affected by all this modern bullshit than I thought. We need people like Julien Nitzberg to remind and instill in us that it is not only okay, but quite necessary to think, laugh (at ourselves AND at others) and learn.
 

 
I spoke to Julien Nitzberg and cast member Pip Lilly about all of this.
 
Howie Pyro: Okay so why now? When did the idea come to you & what brought MJ to the top of your creative lunacy? 

Julien Nitzberg: The initial idea for this show came to me almost seventeen years ago. I was approached by a major cable TV network to write a Michael Jackson biopic. I’ve been a Michael Jackson fan since I was a little kid and watched the Jackson 5 cartoon on Saturday mornings. I tried to find an interesting way to tell Michael’s story, but the later years were just too bizarre and I couldn’t find a normal way to tell it. How could anyone explain Bubbles the chimp, trying to buy the Elephant Man’s bones or sleepovers with kids. It was all too bizarre. I decided that the only way to tell it was to find a surreal way into the story. I pitched them the idea that all the boys and things in Michael’s life weren’t his choices. Instead his glove was an evil alien trying to take over the world who forced Michael to do all the bizarre things in his life. The alien gave him his talent so Michael was forced into doing things that he was severely embarrassed by.

The execs laughed at this idea but then asked me to do the normal version.  I knew it would turn out terribly, so I said no. Over the years my mind kept returning to Michael’s life and finally I decided to write my version of his life as a musical with all original music.

I spent a couple of years researching Michael’s life trying to find the most interesting obscure parts to talk about. I decided to have it focus on his religious upbringing as a Jehovah’s Witness.  Jehovah’s Witnesses have a really fucked up attitude toward sexuality. They teach that masturbating can turn you gay because as a man you get used to a man’s hand on your penis and want other mens’ hands on your penis. I thought this was hilarious. How did MJ get raised in the religion and then his most famous dance move winds up being him grabbing his own crotch?  I then realized he didn’t do the crotch grab, his alien glove forced him to do it!

I also found out more about his rivalry with Donny Osmond. The Osmonds were clearly patterned to be the white version of the Jackson 5. Five brothers singing, dressing similarly. It was creepy.  The Osmonds first big hit was “One Bad Apple.” It sounded so much like the Jackson 5 that Michael’s mom thought it was the Jackson 5 when she heard it on the radio.

The Osmonds clearly ripped off the Jackson 5 and what was worse they were Mormons which at the time taught that all black people were cursed with the “Mark of Cain” and were not allowed in their temples. They even taught that if you were black and converted to Mormonism you could go to Heaven but would be a servant to white people in Heaven. It’s some of the most fucked up religious shit you can dream of.  They also taught that at the end of days when Christ returns all black people will have the curse of the “Mark of Cain” removed and turn white. Of course, Michael did this in his life so that became a big part of the story.  We even have a song that Donny sings to Michael called “What a Delight When You Turn White.”

I felt like now was a great time to do the show. Everyone is talking about how our country has been ruined by fucked up racist and homophobic religions. We deal with one of the clearest cases of cultural appropriation that ever existed - people who belonged to an openly racist church going out and trying to sound like the biggest black music act of the day. It all felt like things that are in our country’s cultural conversation right now.

For those who don’t know you or your sense of humor…there’s quite a few things that many different types of people would/could find offensive…do you think this is a help or a hindrance to the success of the play?

Julien Nitzberg: I have no idea. I love super offensive humor. I was raised on John Waters, Mel Brooks, the Ramones, Dead Kennedys, Tom Lehrer and Monty Python and think those influences pervade For the Love of a Glove. I hope our culture has matured enough that people can enjoy my fucked-up punk rock humor. And who wants to see a non-offensive Michael Jackson musical?

In the play most of the cast is African American and all the cast members play multiple roles. The Ku Klux Klan musical number was hysterical (and obviously not pro KKK) but was it odd to ask the African American actors to don KKK hoods?

Pip Lilly: I think donning the hoods is hysterical. I never felt weird about it. I’m an actor and it’s a costume. Plus, I have  the power here. Just wearing it is a radical act that would have gotten me killed 70 years ago. Also, real talk, the Klan deserves to be besmirched and clowned over and over again. Julien does a great job of setting up the racial issues that were the foundation of 1960s black folks. 

Julien Nitzberg: Since the Jackson 5 were from Gary, Indiana, I did a lot of research into the history of Indiana.  I discovered that in the 1920’s, one third of the white citizens of Indiana belonged to the KKK. The KKK in Indiana had 250,000 fucking members! How crazy is that? 250,000 KKK members just in Indiana!  I decided we needed a song about that called “What Is It About Indiana?”  Most people think of Indiana being part of the North so that shows how fucking racist, anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant and crazy our country’s always been.  I wondered how that would have affected people growing up there so I thought we needed a song about that, contextualizing the fucked up state where the Jackson 5 grew up. It’s a very Mel Brooks number with dancing KKK members.  I feel like if you laugh at horrible people you make them into a joke and take away their power.  The show only has ten actors. Eight are black and two are white so we ended up needing some of the black actors to play KKK members. I asked the actors if they were comfortable with it and they all laughed. They thought it was hilarious. It was a lot like when Mel Brooks plays a Nazi.  You feel a certain power over the oppressors putting their clothes on and mocking them. We had the actors strolling in laughing saying “I finally joined the KKK.”  Cris Judd, our choreographer, gave the KKK members in the song all these Bob Fosse-style dance moves so it’s extra ridiculous. They are always rubbing their robes sensually, like it’s a big turn on.

It’s really funny yet disturbing.  But it lets the audience know early on this show is going to dive deep into American racism but by laughing at the horribleness of our history we are stealing their power.

My mom was a Holocaust survivor. I lived as a kid in Austria where I went to 5th and 6th grade and got  called “a dirty Jew” by one kid there.  There was swastika graffiti everywhere in Vienna. For me as a kid discovering Mel Brooks and seeing The Producers was life changing. Instead of being scared of Nazis, it was much more fun to laugh at them. This comic attitude is what I tried to bring to this show with the KKK. I don’t think there is anything that would piss off KKK members more than knowing we have black people wearing their robes, dancing like they are in a Fosse musical.

Any other major influences?

Julien Nitzberg: Another big influence was the Rutles.  When I was looking for clever musical parodies to inspire the project there was only one that really stood the test of time and that was Eric Idle’s genius Beatles parody All You Need is Cash starring the Rutles. My two favorite bands as a kid were the Beatles and the Jackson 5. I saw the Rutles movie when it debuted on TV and immediately went and bought the record. In the years since, I almost never listen to the Beatles. But oddly, I still listen to the Rutles record all the time and love them more than the Beatles. When my composing team—Nicole Morier, Drew Erickson and Max Townsley—started working together, we spent a ton of time listening to the Rutles. The Rutles’ songs were as good as the Beatles. They are great pop songs. I wanted our show to do the same thing. I didn’t want the songs to sound like musical theater songs. Nicole said she wanted the songs to sound like they were lost R&B/soul music classics that never got discovered at that time. The composers worked really hard to get that right feel of the times and I think they did it majestically.

Weirdly, a good friend of mine Rita D’Albert (who created Lucha Vavoom) is friends with Eric Idle and I met him at her birthday party. He’d heard of the musical from Rita. He came up to me and said he had a new title idea for the show. I asked him what it was. He dryly said “Rhapsody in a Minor.” I looked at him totally confused and then suddenly I got the joke. It was embarrassing how long it took me. What a genius!

So you’re at this point—and this could be more than enough for what you were going for—and then you introduce a mirror image villain!! So now MJ has aliens and uptight white nerds grinding away at him! What brought the Osmonds up and were you worried Donny might upstage Michael? 

Julien Nitzberg:  As a kid, I was a giant Jackson 5 fan and  every time I heard “One Bad Apple” I was always confused thinking “This sounds too much like a Jackson 5 song.” If you google it, you’ll even see that many people thought it was a Jackson 5 song.  So when I started writing the show, I decided to research this. I soon discovered that the Osmonds were consciously created as the white equivalent to the Jackson 5. They were five brothers like the Jackson 5.  They’d been a barber shop quartet who sang minstrel songs and then later were the blandest band ever to appear on the Andy Williams show. Suddenly they start sounding like the Jackson 5 and doing Motown songs. They start dancing like the Jackson 5. It’s extra fucked because they belong to a church that teaches the most racist ideology and won’t let black people into their temples.  Then I discovered that their transition to being Jackson 5 imitators happened just after they toured opening for Pat Boone! Fuck, that showed me what exactly was happening.  In the show we call the process of a white artist ripping off a black artist “Pat Booning” and that’s what they did.

For the more conspiracy-minded, people should note that Mike Curb was involved in the Osmonds’ career producing records by Donny. Mike Curb was a producer who was super right wing and got elected Lieutenant Governor of California with the support of his mentor Ronald Reagan. He’d dated Karen Carpenter. At one point, he was head of MGM records and kicked the Velvet Underground off the label because he considered them too pro-drugs.  It would make sense that a right winger would push back against any great black artist by helping create a pale white imitation.

Let’s discuss the second act.

Julien Nitzberg: The second act has Michael as a grown-up. Then he discovers that Berry Gordy has signed Pat Boone. Then Michael and his glove have sex for the first time. Then he gets inspired by that to write “Beat It” and record Thriller. The glove suggests that Michael should be a reverse Pat Boone and play with Toto and Eddie Van Halen.

Then he can’t take feeding the gloves anymore. He invites kids over for a sleepover party. He doesn’t like it and it ends up going on a date with Brooke Shields. His glove gets jealous and starts grabbing his crotch on TV. They have a fight. The gloves decide to kill Michael. The plan is thwarted. The glove gets burnt trying to kill himself so Michael has to masturbate with the audience to save his life. The glove and Michael realize they are in love.

The second act has demented fantasy, but also a ton of history. People don’t realize that Michael only became as big as he did because CBS Records blackmailed MTV into showing Michael’s videos. MTV did not show “Urban Music.”  That of course was just a euphemism for any music by black artists. They didn’t want to show “Beat It.” CBS told MTV they wouldn’t let them show any videos by Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel or the Rolling Stones if they didn’t show Michael’s videos. It’s a really shocking take on how American racism was still awful in the 1980’s.

And so how’s the reaction been (In a literal sense)? Not live, but reviews. Misunderstandings from simple minded types that can’t get past the sight of seeing a hood stuck on a black person by a white guy etc…

Pip Lilly: My friends like the show. They seem to love the music, the comedy, and the spectacle. People are genuinely entertained, which can only help people appreciate the satire.

Julien Nitzberg:  All our write ups have been great. The reaction has been great. We’ve had nights where it was all UCLA students who had not grown up with Michael Jackson. They were gasping and laughing the whole time. Despite the rumors about millennials being easily offended, the people who seemed most offended were in their 30s and 40s. But it’s been 95% positive and 5% super disgusted which I think is a great ratio.

 

 
Great news! For the Love of a Glove has now been extended until the end of March! Get tickets and info here.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Cracking the P.Y.T. code: New technology reveals hidden lyrics in Michael Jackson’s 1983 hit single
From beyond the grave, Michael Jackson is pissed off that he’s not buried next to Marilyn Monroe
Ghost of Michael Jackson photobombs tribute act’s autograph signing
Michael Jackson’s Neverland menagerie: What became of Bubbles and Thriller the tiger?
They Sold Their Souls for Rock N Roll: The Michael Jackson, Aleister Crowley, Liberace connection

The cover artwork by Rowena Morrill for the 1988 edition of Clifford D. Simak’s book ‘Project Pope.’
 
When Rowena Morrill scored her first book cover as an artist, the year was 1977, and she was one of a scant few women making a name for themselves in the male-dominated world of fantasy and science fiction art. According to the artist, her entrance into the world of fantasy illustration was a happy accident. After relocating to Philadelphia, Morrill found work in a local art gallery taking commissions for customers which mostly consisted of wildlife scenes. Later she would move to New York to work for an ad agency—a gig she detested, prompting her to seek a new job anywhere but there. Ace Books, the highly regarded and longest-running sci-fi publisher in the U.S. gave Morrill a job. The opportunity would result in her artwork appearing in or on over 400 books by authors like Philip K. Dick and Neil Gaiman’s hero R.A. Lafferty. Morrill’s work also appeared on the cover of National Lampoon, horror staple Creepy, Heavy Metal and was even swiped for the cover of an early demo by Metallica, Power Metal. The painting in question originally appeared on the cover of 1980 book Shadows Out Of Hell by Andrew J. Offutt. In a bizarre twist, the image would be one of two by Morrill discovered during the search and seizure of one of Saddam Hussein’s many lavish homes—in this case a tricked-out townhouse in a ritzy area of Baghdad in 2003 (images are at the bottom of this post).

Though news reports noted the paintings hanging on Saddam’s party palace walls were original works of art by Morrill, they were in fact copies, as Morrill had sold the two original paintings to a Japanese collector many years prior. When images from inside the townhouse hit the news, Hussein’s “taste” in artwork was widely mocked. A reporter for The Guardian referred to the paintings as “universal cultural gutter” and “pure dreck,” which is somewhat understandable given the fact that the copies are nowhere near as wonderful as Morrill’s originals. In fact, Morrill’s work has been rightly likened to that of her male counterparts and masters of the genre, Frank Frazetta and Boris Vallejo.

I’ve posted images of Morrill’s vast body of work below; some are NSFW. Morrill’s art has also been the subject of a few books, including one by Boris Vallejo’s first wife Doris Vallejo, The Art of Rowena (2000).
 

Artwork by Morrill for the cover of ‘Night Walk’ by Robert Shaw, 1978.
 

The magnificent artwork by Morrill for the 1977 book by Jane Parkhurst, ‘Isobel.’
 
More Morrill after the jump…

 
I had heard about this impossible-to-see episode of The Name of the Game—a cutting edge television show that ran for seventy-six 90-minute episodes from 1968 to 1971 on NBC—but until recently, I’d never seen it. The Name of the Game had the biggest budget of any show of its time and a very interesting concept. First of all each episode was, in effect, it’s own semi-standalone 90-minute movie. The series was one of the first of what was then known as a “wheel series.” A wheel series was mostly known as a time slot on TV that two or three different shows shared, alternating each week. With The Name of the Game‘s high concept though, this wheel was alternating between three different stars who were featured in their own episodes/movies. And what a high concept it was!

From Wikipedia:

The series was based on the 1966 television movie Fame Is the Name of the Game, which was directed by Stuart Rosenberg and stars Tony Franciosa. The Name of the Game rotated among three characters working at Howard Publications, a large magazine publishing company. Jeffrey “Jeff” Dillon (Franciosa), a crusading reporter with People magazine (before there was a real-life People magazine); Glenn Howard (Gene Barry, taking over for George Macready, who had originated the role in the earlier film), the sophisticated, well-connected publisher; and Daniel “Dan” Farrell (Robert Stack), the editor of Crime magazine. Serving as a common connection was then-newcomer Susan Saint James as Peggy Maxwell, the editorial assistant for each.

 

 
Which brings us to one of the last episodes of the series, LA 2017 aka Los Angeles: AD 2017. This episode was the first long form directing assignment for 24-year-old Steven Spielberg. Written by well-known offbeat author Phillip Wylie (who wrote Gene Barry’s wild episode Love-In At Ground Zero in the first season). Wylie’s work is known to have inspired the characters of Superman, Doc Savage and even Flash Gordon (from his story that was later made into the film When Worlds Collide). In this episode, Glenn Howard is hunted down in a lethally polluted, frightening and sometimes hilarious Los Angeles of the future, where the fascist government is ruled by psychiatrists and the populace has been driven to live in underground bunkers to survive the pollution. Sounds about right, right? This was the sixteenth episode of the third season, and the cast included Barry Sullivan, Edmond O’Brien, and (in a brief cameo) Spielberg’s friend Joan Crawford.
 

 
It starts out with a car crash while character Howard (Gene Barry) is seen driving through the mountains recording a memo to the President to do with an important pollution scandal story that will appear in his magazine, and ends up being a dream, which allowed the science-fiction plot to fit into the modern-day setting of the show, though in the final moments he is still contemplating what happened while driving back in his car (cue close-up shot of his tail pipes chugging out 1971 style car exhaust fumes). In the end, we see a stiff bird hanging in a tree… a close encounter of the (dead) bird kind indeed!
 

 
Watching this 1971 pop culture prophecy in the actual Los Angeles of 2017 is a total mindblower. Some of it is insanely far-fetched and yet there are a few humdingers that really freak you out and make you think, the most well known being my favorite scene where we are taken into a truly “underground” club with a demented octogenarian acid rock band totally freaking out (or at least trying to):
 

 
More after the jump…

 
Writers need stability to nurture their talent and unfetter their imagination. Too much chaos dilutes the talent and diminishes the productivity. Writers like Norman Mailer squandered too much time and effort on making his life the story - when in fact he should have been writing it. J. G. Ballard was well aware of this, and he had the quiet certainty of a 3-bed, des res, with shaded garden and off-street parking at front. Yet, Ballard’s seeming conformity to a middle class idyll appeared to astound so many critics, commentators, journalists, whatevers, who all failed to appreciate a true writer’s life is one of lonely, unrelenting sedentary toil, working at a desk 9-5, or however long - otherwise the imagination can not fly.

That’s why I have always found suburbs far more interesting places than those anonymous urban centers. Cities are about mass events - demonstrations, revolution, massacre, war, shared public experience. Suburbia is about the repressed forces of individual action. It’s where the murders are planned, the orgies enjoyed, the drugs devoured, the imagination inspired. Suburbia is where dysfunction is normalized.

And J. G. Ballard was very aware of this.

Future Now is a documentary interview with J G Ballard, made in 1986 not long after he had achieved international success with his faux-biographical novel Empire of the Sun. Opening with a brief tour of his Shepperton home, Ballard gives an excellent and incisive interview, which only reminds what we have lost.

Simon Sellars and Dan O’Hara have edited together a brilliant collection of interviews and conversations with J G Ballard 1967-2008, in one volume called Extreme Metaphors, which is a must-have for anyone with an interest in Ballard.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

Postcards from J. G. Ballard

 
With thanks to Richard!
 

 
Years ago a friend wrote me a story about how we all started talking but in doing so, stopped listening to each other. It was a short and simple story, adapted I believe from its Aboriginal origins, that also explained how our ears developed their peculiar, conch-like shape.

Like all the best tales, it began: Once upon a time, in a land not-so-very-far-away, we were all connected to each other by a long umbilical loop that went ear-to-ear-to-ear-to-ear. This connection meant we could hear what each of us was thinking, and we could share our secrets, hopes and fears together at once

Then one day and for a whole lot of different reasons, these connections were broken, and the long umbilical loops dropped away, withered back, and creased into the folds of our ears. That’s how our ears got their shape. They are the one reminder of how we were once all connected to each other.

It was the idea of connection - only connect, said playwright Dennis Potter, by way of E. M. Forster, when explaining the function of all good television. A difficult enough thing, but we try. It’s what the best art does - tells a story, says something.

It’s what Rod Serling did. He made TV shows that have lived and grown with generations of viewers. Few can not have been moved to a sense of thrilling by the tinkling opening notes of The Twilight Zone. The music still fills me with that excitement I felt as a child, hopeful for thrills, entertainment and something a little stronger to mull upon, long after the credits rolled.

Serling was exceptional, and his writing brought a whole new approach to telling tales on television that connected the audience one-to-the-other. This documentary on Serling, starts like an episode of The Twilight Zone, and goes on to examine Serling’s life through the many series and dramas he wrote for TV and radio, revealing how much of his subject matter came from his own personal experience, views and politics. As Serling once remarked he was able to discuss controversial issues through science-fiction:

“I found that it was all right to have Martians saying things Democrats and Republicans could never say.”

His work influenced other shows (notably Star Trek), and although there were problems, due to the demands of advertisers, Serling kept faith with TV in the hope it could connect with its audience - educate, entertain and help improve the quality of life, through a shared ideals.

As writer Serling slowly “succumbed” to his art:

‘Writing is a demanding profession and a selfish one. And because it is selfish and demanding, because it is compulsive and exacting, I didn’t embrace it, I succumbed to it. In the beginning, there was a period of about 8 months when nothing happened. My diet consisted chiefly of black coffee and fingernails. I collected forty rejection slips in a row. On a writer’s way up, he meets a lot of people and in some rare cases there’s a person along the way, who happens to be around just when they’re needed. Perhaps just a moment of professional advice, or a boost to the ego when it’s been bent, cracked and pushed into the ground. Blanche Gaines was that person for me. I signed with her agency in 1950. Blanche kept me on a year, before I made my first sale. The sale came with trumpets and cheers. I don’t think that feeling will ever come again. The first sale - that’s the one that comes with magic.’

Like Richard Matheson, Philip K Dick, Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Serling is a hero who offered up the possible, for our consideration.
 

 
Philip K. Dick wrote an excited letter to Jeff Walker, at the Ladd Company, after watching a television preview of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, the film version of his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

October 11, 1981

Mr. Jeff Walker,
The Ladd Company,
4000 Warner Boulevard,
Burbank,
Calif. 91522.

Dear Jeff,

I happened to see the Channel 7 TV program “Hooray For Hollywood” tonight with the segment on BLADE RUNNER. (Well, to be honest, I didn’t happen to see it; someone tipped me off that BLADE RUNNER was going to be a part of the show, and to be sure to watch.) Jeff, after looking—and especially after listening to Harrison Ford discuss the film—I came to the conclusion that this indeed is not science fiction; it is not fantasy; it is exactly what Harrison said: futurism. The impact of BLADE RUNNER is simply going to be overwhelming, both on the public and on creative people—and, I believe, on science fiction as a field. Since I have been writing and selling science fiction works for thirty years, this is a matter of some importance to me. In all candor I must say that our field has gradually and steadily been deteriorating for the last few years. Nothing that we have done, individually or collectively, matches BLADE RUNNER. This is not escapism; it is super realism, so gritty and detailed and authentic and goddam convincing that, well, after the segment I found my normal present-day “reality” pallid by comparison. What I am saying is that all of you collectively may have created a unique new form of graphic, artistic expression, never before seen. And, I think, BLADE RUNNER is going to revolutionize our conceptions of what science fiction is and, more, can be.

Let me sum it up this way. Science fiction has slowly and ineluctably settled into a monotonous death: it has become inbred, derivative, stale. Suddenly you people have come in, some of the greatest talents currently in existence, and now we have a new life, a new start. As for my own role in the BLADE RUNNER project, I can only say that I did not know that a work of mine or a set of ideas of mine could be escalated into such stunning dimensions. My life and creative work are justified and completed by BLADE RUNNER. Thank you..and it is going to be one hell of a commercial success. It will prove invincible.

Cordially,

Philip K. Dick

The tragedy is PKD never saw the finished version of the classic science fiction film, as he died 5 months later, on March 2, 1982, just months before Blade Runner was given its cinematic release.
 

 
With thanks to Jai Bia
 

 
This is fun. A short film by a Star Wars fan.
 

 
With thanks to Mare Meyer
 

 
They may have looked like the oldest hippies in town, but before Punk, Hawkwind was the unwashed boy band of counter culture. Their music - the hymn book for the disenfranchised, the geeks, the loners, the smart kids at school, who never tried to please teacher. To be a fan was like running away to some intergalactic circus. John Lydon was a fan, and the Sex Pistols regularly performed “Silver Machine” - Hawkwind’s classic Dave Brock / Robert Calvert single, with its defining vocal by Lemmy (Ian Kilmister). Like millions of others, this was the song that first introduced me to Hawkwind, when it was played under a visual cornucopia from a performance at the Dunstable Civic Hall, on Top of the Pops in 1972.

Formed in 1969, Hawkwind were a rather sweaty and masculine mix of Acid Rock (LSD was handed out at gigs) and Space Rock. They appealed to those with an interest in Jerry Cornelius, Ballard, Burroughs, Philip K Dick, Freak Brothers’ comics, black holes, Gramsci, Kropotkin, Stacia and Derek ‘n’ Clive. In sixth form at school, we discussed the merits Quark, Strangeness and Charm against Warrior on the Edge of Time; Hawklords versus Astounding Sounds, Amazing Music or Doremi Fasol Latido. Hawkwind were an albums band, unlike Punk and New Wave which then seemed defined by singles, issued as keenly as revolutionary pamphlets. There was a ritual to playing thirty-three-and-a-third, long-playing discs: opening the sleeve, reading the liner notes or lyrics, cleaning the disc and stylus, listening to all of side 1, then side 2. It was like attending mass and sharing in the holy sacrament.

Hawkwind evolved from its original line-up - Dave Brock (guitar, keyboards, vocals), Nik Turner (saxophone, flute, vocals), Huw Lloyd-Langton (guitar, vocals), John A. Harrison (bass guitar, vocals), Dik Mik (Synthesizer), Terry Ollis (drums), Mick Slattery (guitar), to include amongst others such wayward talents as poet and singer Robert Calvert (who died too soon), Lemmy, and author Michael Moorcock. Being a fan of Hawkwind was like a rites of passage, that opened doors to other equally experimental and original music.

More than forty years on, Hawkwind, under the helm of its only original member Dave Brock, is still touring the world, bringing an incredible back catalogue of music and tuning people in to a world of possibility.

Hawkwind tour the UK in December, details here.
 

 
I wonder what imagined slight led John Baxter to write such an insidious biography on J G Ballard? Does Baxter, a failed science fiction writer, who started his short-lived career around the same time as Ballard, have some deep-seated grudge against the guru of suburbia that his new biography The Inner Man - The Life of J G Ballard was aimed to settle? From its opening introduction, which begins with Baxter describing Ballard soliciting ‘automobile porn’ from his Danish translator, one wonders what exactly is Baxter’s intention, other than to diminish Ballard’s talent and originality.

If we are to believe Baxter then Ballard was an ad-man who got lucky, a psychopath scarred by childhood experiences as a prisoner of war, his whole life and career merely an exercise in skillful “image management”.

While in person Ballard had “the voice of a born advertiser, paradoxically preaching a jihad against commerce: the contradiction at the heart of Jim’s life”. Even his ambition to become a science-fiction writer could be seen as “an aspect of his psychopathology, for it echoes the hostility of someone trying to hide a physical or psychological dysfunction - epilepsy, dyslexia, illiteracy”.

Baxter continues:

In person, Jim presented a veneer of good-fellowship, slick as Formica and just as impermeable…

...This reflexive affability disguised a troubled personality that sometimes expressed itself in physical violence…

...Jim never denied that his psychology bordered on the psychopathic.

Really? But he never admitted it either. And as for the “physical violence” Baxter supplies no evidence, no eye-witnesseses, other than a now refuted quote from author Michael Moorcock. So what are we to make of Baxter’s book?

There is something interesting going on here, Baxter has created a fictional biography filled with factoids - things that look like facts, sound like facts, but are in truth fictions. It’s the kind of technique mastered by the likes of Adam Curtis or the Daily Mail, where unrelated facts are linked to support strange or spurious arguments.  Sadly, The Inner Man is riddled with such factoids, with Baxter concluding:

Jim’s skill was to speculate and fantasize, evade and lie. ‘Truth’ was not a word he regarded with much respect, least of all in describing and explaining his life. In its stead, he deployed the psychopath’s reverence for the instant present, for frenzy, for the divine, and for those forces, natural and unnatural, that are forever slipping beyond our control.

The whole biography is like an ident-i-kit photograph constructed by a man suffering from the worst affects of a bad acid trip - the image may contain likenesses of eyes, nose and mouth, but the whole is disturbingly inhuman.

There is no warmth to his vision of Ballard, everything is seen as a cynical ploy by a man who is cast as an “intellectual thug”, and whose “paramount skill was his ad man’s ability to remarket himself.” There is no explanation as to how he coped with bringing up 3 children after his wife’s tragic death while on family holiday in Spain. How he buried her in a little Spanish cemetery, then drove home with the children, having to “pull over to weep uncontrollably.”

Not surprisingly, Ballard’s children, and his partner Claire Walsh, did not take part in Baxter’s cut and paste assemblage. Moreover, there are no quotes from any of Ballard’s books, only brief synopses, which only reminded me of Terry Johnson’s portrait of Marilyn Monroe from his play Insignificance, where the glamorous star can recite Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, but hasn’t a clue what it means. Baxter can sub Ballard’s novels, but he has no real understanding of what they are about.

There are also some glaring mistakes - Eduardo Paolozzi was not a “burly Glaswegian” but was born in Leith, Edinburgh. It was Friedrich Nietzsche who said, “When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you,” and not H. G. Wells. If Baxter (and his editors) can’t get the verifiable facts correct, why should we believe him on any of his unsubstantiated assertions?

This is why Baxter’s biography fails.

He also fails to see Ballard and his work within a wider cultural perspective. Before Ballard and his family were imprisoned at the camp in the Lunghua, George Orwell predicted the world that Ballard was to write about and make his home for most of his life, in his 1941 essay “England Your England”:

The place to look for the germs of the future England is in the light-industry areas along the arterial roads. In Slough, Dagenham, Barnet, Letchworth, Hayes - everywhere, indeed, on the outskirts of great towns - the old pattern is gradually changing into something new. In those vast new wildernesses of glass and brick the sharp distinctions of the older kind of town, with its slums and mansions, or of the country, with its manor houses and squalid cottages, no longer exist. There are wide gradations of income but it is the same kind of life that is being lived at different levels, in labor-saving flats or council houses, along the concrete roads and in the naked democracy of the swimming-pools. It is a rather restless, cultureless life, centering round tinned food Picture Post, the radio and the internal combustion engine. It is a civilization in which children grow up with an intimate knowledge of magnetoes and in complete ignorance of the Bible. To that civilization belong the people who are most at home in and most definitely of the modern world, the technicians and higher paid skilled workers, the airmen and their mechanics, the radio experts, film producers, popular journalists and industrial chemists. They are the indeterminate stratum at which the older class distinctions are beginning to break down.

Orwell could have been describing Ballard’s future vision of Shepperton - a world of swimming pools, airmen, film producers, industrial chemists, who live on the arterial roads, on the outskirts of a great town.

J G Ballard deserves a good, solid, informed biography, unfortunately, John Baxter’s The Inner Man - The Life of J G Ballard is not it.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

Postcards from J G Ballard

 
An incredible interview between Philip K. Dick and Charles Platt from 1979, where the legendary author discussed his life, his writing and the strange events that inspired his famed Exegesis. At nearly 2 hours long, this interview is essential listening for anyone with an interest in PKD.
 

 
With thanks to John Butler
 

 
Going through old correspondence, I came across a collection of cards and letters from a personal hero - J G Ballard.

It’s always amazed me that Ballard took the time to respond to my daft letters full questions and queries he must have answered innumerable times. It said much about Ballard’s great humility and character.

The first, dated April 27 1993, was written on a postcard of Carel Willink De Zeppelin, the blue ink (probably a Pentel pen) has faded somewhat, but still visible are his kind words and enthusiasm for a short story I’d sent him, which he over-praised as “a powerful + original piece of work”, and his explanation of the biographical elements of The Kindness of Women:

‘...which is about my writing as much as my life - my life seen through the spectrum of everything I’ve written.’

During the 10 years of our intermittent correspondence, Ballard was always kind, gracious, encouraging and helpful - an example we all can learn from.
 

 

21/11/94

Dear Mr Gallagher,

Many thanks for your letter from LA - I think probably you should make the documentary about the city - I on the whole rather enjoyed the week i spent there some years ago - but then no one mugged me or shot at me on the freeway - part of the problem there have been too many films about LA on TV over the recent years.

Thanks for reading my stuff -

All the best,

J G Ballard

 
One more from Ballard, after the jump…
 

 
I’ve always been a fan of John Boorman’s Zardoz, no matter how camp, cheesy, or even ridiculous it may seem. Therefore, I do wish this brief 8-bit animation by nickcriscuolo was a real game.

Okay, it’s only an opening sequence, but just think of the potential Boorman’s and Bill Stair’s original story offers: as the Exterminator Zed (Sean Connery) crosses from the land of the Brutals (where “the gun is good and the penis is evil”), to a world of the Eternals, Apathetics, Renegades and the lovely Charlotte Rampling, where Zed finds himself the subject of the Eternals’ experiments and games, and uncovers the dark secret at the heart of their Vortex and its Tabernacle. O, yes this could work.

And of course, Connery and Rampling would voice it, and there’d be optional thigh-length boots. How bloody marvelous.
 

 
Bonus clip of original ‘Zardoz’ film trailer, after the jump…
 

 
There seems to be some confusion: This October will see the release of The Thing, which is, apparently, a prequel to John Carpenter’s The Thing. If that’s the case, then I’ll save my dollars as I know the ending - everyone is killed except an Alaskan Malamute that escapes (after a disastrous helicopter chase) and infects Kurt Russell’s science station with an alien life form.

If it’s a remake, well - why bother?

John Carpenter’s The Thing was a remake of Howard Hawks’ classic 1951 film The Thing From Another World.

Hawks’s original was an unforgettable classic, an adaption of John Wood Campbell, Jr.‘s fanastic short story, “Who Goes There?” - and is one of the greatest science fiction movies of the 1950s (along with Them!, Inavders from Mars and Invasion of the Body Snatchers).

As for Carpenter’s remake, I thought it one of the best films of 1982 - it reinvented the original, gave it a dark, terrifying twist, and had incredible special effects by Rob Bottin (and Stan Winston).

So now, here’s a new version, which leaves me thinking “O, FFS,” as it again confirms Hollywood’s bankruptcy of ideas , and the unwillingness or inability to invest in new talent, new ideas, and new scripts. But make your own mind up - here’s the trailer and the official synopsis:

Antarctica: an extraordinary continent of awesome beauty.  It is also home to an isolated outpost where a discovery full of scientific possibility becomes a mission of survival when an alien is unearthed by a crew of international scientists.  The shape-shifting creature, accidentally unleashed at this marooned colony, has the ability to turn itself into a perfect replica of any living being.  It can look just like you or me, but inside, it remains inhuman.  In the thriller The Thing, paranoia spreads like an epidemic among a group of researchers as they’re infected, one by one, by a mystery from another planet.
Paleontologist Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) has traveled to the desolate region for the expedition of her lifetime.  Joining a Norwegian scientific team that has stumbled across an extraterrestrial ship buried in the ice, she discovers an organism that seems to have died in the crash eons ago.  But it is about to wake up.

When a simple experiment frees the alien from its frozen prison, Kate must join the crew’s pilot, Carter (Joel Edgerton), to keep it from killing them off one at a time.  And in this vast, intense land, a parasite that can mimic anything it touches will pit human against human as it tries to survive and flourish.

 
This is great wee documentary on one of cinema’s finest directors, John Carpenter: Fear Is Just the Beginning…The Man and His Movies, which examines the great man’s work over 4 decades.

Carpenter is an auteur in the style of Hitchcock, Hawks, Walsh and Fuller, who has managed to maintain his independence and singularity of vision against the fickleness of box office audiences and public taste. He also has a tremendous grasp of film history, which he references in his work: from Donald Pleasance’s doctor in Halloween taking the name of Samuel Loomis from Hitchcock’s Psycho, to re-interpreting Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo via George A Romero’s Night of the Living Dead in the classic Assault on Precinct 13.

John Carpenter: Fear Is Just the Beginning…The Man and His Movies interviews the maverick director and has contributions from Jamie Lee Curtis, Kurt Russell, Adrienne Barbeau, Debra Hill, and includes a look at the making of such favorites as Escape From New York, The Thing and The Fog.
 

 
Star Trek: Phase II was originally planned as a follow-up series to Star Trek, but it never came to be. Still good ideas will out, and in 1997 actor, producer and Trekkie, James Cawley concocted a plan to make his own further adventures of Captain James T. Kirk, Mr Spock and Dr “Bones” McCoy and the crew of SS Enterprise.

Roll on a few years to 2003, and Cawley is not only producing these new on-line adventures called Star Trek - New Voyage but is also playing Kirk.

It proved an internet hit, and even enticed guest appearances from original Star Trek actors George Takei, Walter Koenig, and Grace Lee Whitney. In 2008, the series changed its name to Star Trek: Phase II and the adventures continue.

For a fan produced series Star Trek: Phase II is exceedingly good fun. Six episodes have been made, each one better than the last, the most recent, “Enemy Starfleet” is below. Filming begins on a new episode “Mind Sifter” next month, and certainly for the love, dedication and hard work of all involved, Star Trek: Phase II deserves its to succeed.

What next for fan-based TV? The Partridge Family, The Waltons, Dallas? Suggestions please.
 

 
Bonus episode of Star Trek: Phase II, after the jump…
 
With thanks to Tommy Udo