Mars! Art! Replicants! Sports!
Jeanette Bolden, 1984 gold medalist, remembers the 1980 boycott
The Olympics games have gone so well lately it's startling to remember when politics collided with the hopes of Olympic athletes in 1980 and 1984. After the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, President Jimmy Carter called a US boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, and more than 60 countries followed our lead. Four years later, the Soviets boycotted the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles and took 14 countries with them. What did the boycotting countries do instead? They created their own Olympics.
In July of 1980, athletes from 29 nations descended upon Philadelphia for the Liberty Bell Classic. Competitors from Canada, Egypt, West Germany, even China participated. It wasn't as big as your typical Olympic event: most of the competitions were limited to track and field. No gymnastics or swimming. In July, 1984, the USSR hosted the Friendship Games. It wasn't until 1988--in Seoul, South Korea--that the entire world would again compete in the Summer Olympics.
Jeanette Bolden, head women's track and field coach at UCLA, ran in the Liberty Bell Classic in 1980, and she vividly recalls the experience.
Bolden grew up in Compton and told me that she started running in the 8th grade because she was born with, and still suffers from, asthma. "Running track was a way for me to be normal." She won the high school state meet at UCLA in 1977, ran track at UCLA, and qualified for the Olympics in 1980.
So, was she devastated by the boycott? She admits only to being disappointed. "For me, I was just starting out in my career. There were some athletes toward the end of their career and this was the epitome of what they'd been training for and sacrificing for. So it was really really hard for some of the older athletes." But she knew she had the possibility of the 1984 Olympics ahead.
The feeling at the Liberty Bell Classic? First of all, Bolden had never been to Philadelphia, so that was exciting. And then to run on the same track as the famous Penn Relays! She remembers the "USA" chants and the waving US flags. But she admits the level of competition was less; she ran a time in the 100m that won her a silver, but that wouldn't have medaled in Moscow.
Four years later, with the Olympics in her home town, it seems like any residual disappointment melted away in a hurry. "I can't even put it into words," Bolden says. "I'm from Compton, California. I'm right here local. I grew up right down the street from the Coliseum. Just having the Olympic trials here was important, and then to turn around and have the games .. have my family and friends" there.
Bolden won a gold medal in the 4x100 relay and took it home with her that day. Friends were stopping by all evening to see her and it. And how could they miss it? Her mom, Bolden says, had put a big sign on the house telling the world about her daughter.
Marc Haefele, Philip K. Dick editor, reviews "How to Build an Android"
Frankenstein’s movie monster was immolated by raging peasants. "Blade Runner’s" replicants were shot by Harrison Ford. The android hero of a new non fiction book simply vanishes in the most mundane possible way.
Who thought up the first Android? Maybe that prize goes to Frankenstein’s young creator Mary Shelley, almost 200 years ago. When did the term for a man-made human-like creature first appear? It seems to have originated somewhere in the 1930s science fiction of guys like Jack WiIliamson, Murray Leinster, and Edmond Hamilton.
By the 1950s, all us sci-fi buffs knew the difference between a robot and an android. Robots were mechanical men. Androids were replicas of men and women. Robots clanked when they walked, but the Andys could be sexy and even seductive — and treacherous … Because they could and often did deceive you into thinking they were human. And this possibility sparked many a lurid sci-fi covers from the years of “Spicy Science” magazine to this day, when the name "android"’ has become so diluted in the corporate cyber aquifer that it can mean nothing more sinister than a high-end smart-phone.
Meanwhile, along came Philip K. Dick, who wrote a book he called "Do Androids Dream?," published as "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?," a book I edited along with two other Dick hardbacks. Dick had touched on the android concept a few times in his previous 22 novels, particularly an early
paperback called "The Simulacra." But in all of his books, the central concept was the matter of how we know what is real and what is not. "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" presents the possibility that artificial, unreal life can be more real than the real thing. The book was transformed, rather than made into, a great cult film called 'Blade Runner." It set the standard for the who-is-really-human android story for all time.
The film was released in 1982, weeks after Dick died, and helped make him what he is now — perhaps the most influential and talked-about of all sci-fi writers.
Which was probably why around ten years ago, when a handful of young cybertypes from Texas and Tennessee decided to create one of the world’s first real life androids, they chose Phil for the model. Now, Australian David Dufty has written a bright little book on the project called "How to Build an Android." Of all the many strange books about Phil Dick that have appeared since his death, it is perhaps the strangest.
It’s the true story of an artistically trained roboticist and Phil Dick fan from Texas named David Hanson — who with University of Memphis scientists Art Graesser, Andrew Oley, and an increasing circle of others, built a “replicant” of the late writer and took him on the road to venues as various as the annual Artificial Intelligence convention and San Diego’s Comic Con.
It’s a well-told story, complete with an absurdly sad conclusion, when the replica head of Phil, the fruit of thousands of hours of research, engineering, and construction, vanishes from an airliner’s luggage compartment.
The grand project deflates, and its participants go their several ways. But a huge step in the creation of humanoid cyberlife has been accomplished, and Dufty tells us very well just what it takes to get modern technology to bring life to a favorite and feared human vision of long ago.
(In our audio segment, after Marc review's David Dufty's "How to Build an Android," John and Marc talk about Marc's experience editing Philip K. Dick.)
RIP Karl Benjamin, art trailblazer, "hard-edge" but happy
UPDATE: Karl Benjamin died July 26, 2012, at the age of 86.
Pacific Standard Time is the huge art project that tells the story of Southern California's rightful place as a leader in Modern Art. One of the featured post-war trailblazers is Karl Benjamin, who lives in Claremont and who painted in what came to be called the Hard Edge style.
Hard Edge sounds harsh, but Benjamin's works are riots of colors getting along very well; it's just the borders between them that are hard. One art critic, Dave Hickey, wrote "I can think of no other artist whose paintings exude the joy and pleasure of being an artist with more intensity than Karl Benjamin."
Off-Ramp host John Rabe talked with Karl Benjamin at the Orange County Museum of Art's "Birth of the Cool" exhibit in 2007, where he learned he wasn't just a painter, but an enlightened teacher, too.
Good intentions, bad art: a Crawford Family Forum discussion
I imagine this scene: Thousands of years ago, a guy and his buddy – we’ll call them Fred and Barney – drive down to Fairfax and Wilshire. They find parking, and then after they pick the bugs out of each other’s hair, they poke around. They go look at the big rock at PreLacma. It’s not a rock, somebody tells them; it’s art. They don’t get it. Fred says, “I got one of those. I use it for a dining room table.”
They go get a bagel at PreCanter's. It’s as hard as a rock. It is a rock.
And then Fred hears Barney yell, “Hey, watch this!” Famous last words. Barney has a stick and he’s teasing a saber tooth tiger. Fred rushes home to his cave, grabs a piece of charcoal, and sketches a picture of what happened.
This was the first front page newspaper photo: "Saber Tooth Tiger Bites Man." And ever since, artists have been interpreting the news. For better or worse. As a journalist who specializes in arts coverage, I’ve seen a lot of bad art. And what bothers me most is not art that’s poorly rendered – if there’s heart in it I generally like it. What bugs me is when it’s message art where the message predominates. Usually, the message is so obvious, there’s nothing left to wonder about. But worse, you can’t criticize the art without seeming to be criticizing the subject. "Oh, he hates that painting; he must hate orphans."
At the Crawford Family Forum Thursday (July 26), artists Jill D’Agnenica and Robbie Conal -- who do it well -- joined me to explain their process, which includes figuring out how to keep the message from overwhelming the medium. In other words, how to make sure their art, which is often made in reaction to politics and current events, is good art.
Jill is most famous for her sublimely simple idea of – one year after the 1992 riots – placing thousands of angel statues around Los Angeles. You know Robbie from his scathing caricatures of the rich and powerful. After talking about their work, we turned to the most famous "message art" in the world: Picasso's "Guernica," commissioned specifically as an anti-Franco piece. It depicts the mayhem of the bombing of the town of Guernica.
"Why does it work?" I asked Robbie and Jill. They were at first a little stunned to be asked to evaluate the master, but the part of their answer was that Cubism -- a shattering of reality -- is the perfect way to depict the shattering of a town and a democracy.
Why does it work - or not - for you? Please leave your comment below, and be sure to attend the Crawford Family Forum soon to engage in conversations like this one.
Bookman David Kipen: California invented Mars
KPCC reporters have been talking to Southland scientists and engineers and counting down the days until NASA's most ambitious rover yet — Curiosity — prepares to land on the Martian surface. Follow the series online.
California invented Mars. Don’t believe me? Then take my quick quiz.
Question one: Who wrote “A Princess of Mars,” the sci-fi novel that launched the famous Barsoom series of books, and inspired the recent movie “John Carter of Mars”? If you said Edgar Rice Burroughs, I don’t know, give yourself a Mars bar.
Question two: Who wrote “The Martian Chronicles,” the groundbreaking book of fantasy stories about man’s colonization of the red planet -- which works as an allegory for the suburbanization of Southern California. Ray Bradbury.
Three: Who wrote the sci-fi novels “Red Planet,” “Podkayne of Mars,” and “Stranger in a Strange Land,” the last of which found a huge readership in the 1960s with its portrait of a gentle, freedom-loving Martian who refuses to adjust to life on earth? The answer: Robert Heinlein -- you hippie you.
Four: Who wrote “Black Amazon of Mars,” a delightfully cheesy novelette about the sword-wielding interplanetary hero Eric John Stark -- and then co-wrote the screenplays for “The Big Sleep” from 1946, “The Long Goodbye” from 1973, and The Empire Strikes Back, from 1980? The same woman, Leigh Brackett.
Last question: What do all these Mars-obsessed writers have in common? In 1939, Edgar Rice Burroughs was still living near Encino on a ranch he named after perhaps his best novel, a little spread called Tarzana. Also in 1939, you could have walked into Clifton’s Cafeteria downtown on any given Thursday and found a meeting of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society: Bradbury, Heinlein and Brackett -- and frequently fellow Martian pulp writers Fredric Brown and L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology. They were all sipping Clifton’s free limeade and, just incidentally, altering the future of American popular culture and literature.
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If H.G. Wells, the father of modern science fiction and author of the Martian invasion classic “The War of the Worlds,” couldn’t make it on Thursdays in 1939, it was only because he was in Europe, watching the world war he predicted.
Nowadays, a short drive from both Tarzana and Clifton’s, most of the scientists at JPL prefer Kim Stanley Robinson’s epic Mars trilogy, “Red Mars,” “Green Mars” and “Blue Mars.” Although Robinson was born in Ray Bradbury’s hometown of Waukegan, Illinois, he’s a Californian, too. He lives up in Davis and went to school at UCSD, where it so happens he published a dissertation on the novels of Philip K. Dick.
That’s Philip K. Dick, author of “Martian Time-Slip” and the Mars-set story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” which comes out in a new movie adaptation entitled "Total Recall" next week (but without the Mars setting of Arnold Schwarzenegger's 1990 movie of the same name). As any Dickhead could tell you, Dick couldn’t make any meetings of the Science Fantasy Society either. In 1939, his father was taking him to the World's Fair in San Francisco, where he saw such seemingly benevolent gifts from the future as the TV and the cyclotron.
For better and worse, TV and particle physics have come a long way since 1939. But the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society still meets, at its present-day headquarters near the Van Nuys Orange Line station. It’s hard not to hope that building’s lights will be on Sunday night, while they watch a new spaceship crash-land on the surface of a planet their founding members more or less invented.
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly referred to Philip K. Dick's story as "Total Recall." The correct name of the short story is “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” which was the basis for the two films titled "Total Recall."
Off-Ramp visits the 38th annual National Stereoscopic Association Convention
The 3D world is familiar ground for Off-Ramp.
We've interviewed Queen guitarist Brian May about his collection of 3D photography that dates back to 1850, toured museums filled to the gills with stereoscopic photos.
Most recently, Off-Ramp producer Kevin Ferguson went to Costa Mesa for the 38th annual National Stereoscopic Association Trade Show and Convention to see how 3D loyalists are receiving their newfound popularity.
At the Hilton in Costa Mesa, guests check out, and a flight attendant waits for her shuttle to John Wayne Airport. It's an otherwise typical day if it weren't for the slow trickle of men and women carrying odd-looking equipment into the hotel's Catalina Ballroom.
Welcome to the National Stereoscopic Association's trade fair. It's like Comic-Con for 3D enthusiasts: There are hobbyists, professional photographers, artists and even those hoping to make a few bucks by selling old stereoscopic equipment to people even more fanatical than they are.
"It all started at a garage sale, I picked up a box of Viewmaster reels from the 1950s," said David Starkman, who is selling cameras at the convention. "Being the age I am it reminded me of the ones I had as a kid that I no longer had. I thought these were cheap and it might be fun to collect."
Barry Rothstein is a 3D photographer specializing in photographic phantograms, which can resemble holograms. "Its almost like holographic photography, its the illusion that that object is truly there, that you would reach out and touch it," said Rothstein. "Most of the time if its in paper you're going to use a pair of red and blue anaglyph glasses."
Anaglyph is just a fancy way of saying red-and-blue 3D glasses. You know, the cheap, flimsy paper ones most of us have used at one time or another?
Believe it or not, 3D is not all that new. They might not have had James Cameron's "Avatar" back in the 19th century, but that doesn't mean they didn't know how to produce 3D images.
"They took more 3D photography during the Civil War than anything else," said David Richardson of Civil War In 3D. "They were't using red or blue glasses, what they had was they had a viewer called the Holmes Viewer. You would see the left hand view and the right hand view. Looking in there would produce and actual 3D stereo image for you to see."
Richardson's company takes old Civil War photographs and retouches them to add color, cleans up damage and then transforms the 2D images into 3D. You can see a sampling of the images on his website... if you have a pair of anaglyph glasses handy, of course.