An in-depth interview with writer Harlan Ellison ... a glorious reprint of a classic guide to California ... the OCMA Triennial, Pt 2 ... how to design a space suit for the movies ...
Author Harlan Ellison on juvenile delinquents, gays, Orson Scott Card, and one of his SF classics
I'm not here to tell you how wonderfully you're doing. All you have to do is look out around you at the good things you've done, and you'll know how good you are. When you do bad, here am I, smartass Ellison, to tell you what you've done bad.
That's pretty much the life credo of Harlan Ellison, a giant in the science fiction genre and many other genres, and the writer of something like 1,800 novels, short stories, screenplays, teleplays and essays. He was a published writer when he was 15, and wrote or co-wrote, among other works, the screenplay for "The Oscar," scripts for "Star Trek," "The Man From U.N.C.L.E." and "Route 66" and the story collection "A Boy and His Dog."
Ellison also wrote, many years ago, a number of stories in the juvenile delinquent genre, which have been reprinted by Kicks Books, and Saturday at 2 p.m. at La Luz de Jesus Gallery and Soap Plant, he's coming out of book-signing retirement to help celebrate Kicks' recovery from Hurricane Sandy, which wiped out its warehouse inventory.
We did the Off-Ramp interview at Ellison's home in the Valley, a sprawling, wonderful maze of a house — which he calls the Lost Aztec Temple of Mars — full of secret cabinets, secret rooms and 750,000 books. He talked about his JD fiction (for which he joined a street gang) and his impatience with Judge Judy and bloggers. He gave us a tour of his house. And Ellison addressed the Orson Scott Card controversy.
Card is vehemently anti-gay, saying, for instance, “That many individuals suffer from sex-role dysfunctions does not change the fact that only heterosexual mating can result in families where a father and a mother collaborate in rearing children that share a genetic contribution from both parents.” There's a call for a boycott of the new movie "Ender's Game," based on Card's work.
Ellison says some of Card's opinions are "wrong, ultimately destructive, anti-human and anti-peaceful." But Card's an old friend, and just this week, Ellison says he did voice-work on the spoken word version of "Ender's Game."
You'll find Ellison's complete comment in the additional audio on this page.
Saturday, July 13, 2-5 p.m.: Harlan Goes to Hollywood, with author Harlan Ellison, introduction by Patton Oswalt. La Luz de Jesus Gallery and Soap Plant, 4633 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90027. The event starts at Sweeney Todd's Barbershop, 4639 Hollywood Blvd., where they'll get a surprise if they try to give Ellison a pompadour.
The guy who makes armor and space suits for TV and movies (photos)
At his 20,000-square-foot shop and warehouse in North Hollywood, Chris Gilman and his team at Global Effects make just about any costume or prop for the movie that you could imagine: meticulous replicas of medieval armor, sci-fi space suits.
Walking through Gilman's warehouse feels like a history book and a fantasy movie at the same time. Down one aisle, you'll find a replica of the inside of a lunar module; down another, one of the martians from "Mars Attacks."
Gilman learned how to work with metal at his father's aerospace company and eventually ended up in Los Angeles, doing the rounds at effects shops. In 1986, he started Global Effects. Gilman and his team have done everything from the flight suit Jodie Foster wore in "Contact" to 14th century Italian armor.
Gilman also collaborated on one of the space suit costumes used in "Firefly." It's an army green, rugged looking suit, with armadillo-like metal plating on the shoulders. It looks like a leaner version of Gilman's gladiator armor crossed with a flight suit. But look close enough and you can still see details from the real world in the movie costume — like metal plates that are held in place with a professional material instead of just glued or Velcro'd. According to Gilman, bits like that make a costume more believable.
Adapting reality
"We took an existing style of suit. It's called the S 1030 suit, and it was used in the SR-71 and U2 spy planes. And we science-fictioned it using different materials. We added armor plates to it. But we added armor plates to it the same way you would add it to a real suit," says Gilman.
The "Firefly" suit hangs tidily next to all the other sci-fi suits in Gilman's space suit room. Jumpsuits and space headwear of all sizes line the walls: The shiny Apollo helmet Richard Branson wore in a photo shoot. The space suit Mike Myers donned in one of the "Austin Powers" movies.
Depending on what room of Gilman's warehouse you're standing in, you could be looking at chainmail or a space suit so true to history that even NASA would have trouble telling it apart from the real thing.
Gilman says many people just don't know enough about space history to know one suit from another. "Being able to have them in two different rooms helps out because you can say everything over here is science fiction, and everything over there is authentic," he says.
But Gilman doesn't just make costumes that look real — sometimes they are. As Chief Designer for another company called Orbital Outfitters, Gilman's worked with both NASA and the commercial aerospace industry. On one Orbital Outfitters project, Gilman and his colleagues were tasked with designing a "fit check" suit for SpaceX. Gilman says fit check suits are used in "designing components that have to interface with human beings."
"Often, what I have found is that people don't understand how a spacesuit works and what it's like to wear one. There's a lot of things that I call invisible subtleties. They're things that are very, very important that only become obvious when you've actually worked in the suit," Gilman says.
These days, Gilman spends more of his time designing real space suits. Sometimes, he says, he enjoys that more. But whether he's working on a project for the real world or fantasy — NASA or Hollywood — Gilman's a craftsman at heart.
Gilman's shop at Global Effects seems like the playground of a kid who never grew up. With countless swords, space suits and movie monsters, there's something to spark anyone's imagination. It's a place where the real world bleeds into fantasy, and the fantastic can even inform function. If science fiction can ever become science fact, then Gilman's work may be the best example.
OCMA Triennial: Painter John Bankston's coloring book aesthetics go deep
In Newport Beach at the Orange County Museum of Art there's a new group show: the California Pacific Triennial, focusing on artists who live and work in and around the Pacific Ocean. You've already heard from curator Dan Cameron and installation artist Danial Nord.
Off-Ramp Producer Kevin Ferguson also talked with San Francisco painter John Bankston. Bankston creates massive, novelistic paintings drawing from fantasy, autobiography, coloring books. Take a listen, and if you want, find out even more about Bankston in this video produced by Georgia Pacific's Watching Hands project:
New edition of 1939 WPA guide to California more than a time machine
The University of California Press has just released a classic. It's California in the 1930s, the WPA Guide to the Golden State, a book published in 1939 through the Federal Writers Project of FDR's Works Progress Administration.
The introduction is by Take Two regular David Kipen, of Libros Schmibros, who says that during the Great Depression, FDR realized he needed to find jobs for everybody who was out of work, including writers, so dozens of them went to work writing travel guides.
How do you squeeze 160,000 miles into a volume that readers can lift? During a Depression at, least, you hire a lot of people – or, in contemporary parlance, create a lot of jobs. Then you sort out the gifted writers and editors from the rest , who can help in some other way, or at least do no harm. Then you turn your editorial team loose, give them their heads, and watch what happens. What happened here was California: A Guide to the Golden State, which, under a gently updated new title, now re-emerges like a refreshed bear after 70 years of hibernation.
For any reader or writer, the crowning glory of the New Deal will always be this and the other American Guides, a series of travel books to 48 states, many cities, and any number of deserts, rivers, and other wonders, books that were expressly created to "hold up a mirror to America." John Steinbeck navigated by these guides to write Travels with Charley, where he called them "the most comprehensive account of the United States ever got together, and nothing since has even approached it."
In our interview, David and I spoke about the guide in general, and chatted about its delightful survey of California literature - accurate through 1939 - but we also visited one of the recommended stops on any tour of Southern California. While many sights highlighted in the book are gone, many are still with us, like the Millard House in Pasadena, a masterpiece of architecture by Frank Lloyd Wright. Realtor Crosby Doe, who concentrates on architecturally and historically significant homes and who has the listing for the Millard House (about $5m), gave David and me a tour of the house, which gets its due on page 248 of the guide.
Langer's Delicatessen home to pastrami, fine art: the story behind Marinus Welman's deli paintings
Langer's Delicatessen has been around for over 65 years now. The MacArthur Park-adjacent institution's serves matzo ball soup, lox on bagel and the famous Number 19 sandwich. Past the hordes of pastrami-loving diners that line the booths you'll find three paintings: they show a Langer's Deli 45 years into the past.
Off-Ramp Kevin Ferguson found out the paintings are the work of a Dutch born painter named Marinus Welman who is still painting today. He went to Langers to investigate. Norm Langer, the deli's owner says despite pleas to sell them, the paintings are a treasured part of his "public collection."
Welman hasn't gone far. He's living in Southern California still and keeps a studio in an industrial part of Orange. He says he was asked by the deli's founders—Al and Jean Langer—to produce three paintings for the restaurant. In exchange Welman said Langer's gave him about $1000 and a year's supply of the deli's Number 6: chopped chicken liver and pastrami.
Welman—a lifelong artist—was 20 when he moved to the states. He grew up in Amsterdam during World War II. His first paintings showed scenes of war wrecked buildings and food, which was scarce then.
He made a career here as a graphic artist in the states but never losing his love for fine art. And touring his studio you'll find all genres: beautiful coastal landscapes, portraits of American Indians, enormous skyscapes. He says that recently though, he's confronting a topic that for a long time was hard to approach: the Holocaust.
Welman's Holocaust work was recently on display at Santa Ana's Q Art Salon. Along with a series of foreboding portraits of anonymous Nazi generals, Welman also depicts scenes of everyday life. One painting shows a group of women happily singing as a uniformed Nazi soldier plays the accordion. The blood red background and the grotesque depiction of the characters tells the viewer something isn't right here. The scene, Welman says, is based off a photograph taken at Auschwitz.
Welman says it's these kinds of images that both inspire and enrage him. "Sometimes when I come across these people having so much fun and making their music, rollicking it up in a death camp—that it just sparks me to do something nasty," says Welman.