Saturday 31 March 2018

Egg Language











1973.  A bit about the Council for Colony Holidays for Schoolchildren (a British version of Summer Camp) here: CCHS

Friday 30 March 2018

Dream Makers - Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers at Work






Charles Platt interviews all the big names in 1983.  Fascinating reading.  The UK lot do much bitching and sniping, while the US lot talk about guns and money.  Pournelle is a classic right-wing gun nut, Vonnegut is sniffy about Farmer, Moorcock is sniffy about Christopher Priest, Platt himself is snooty about Sturgeon.  Ellison is the suspect in an episode of Columbo.

The interview with PKD is pretty amazing - this is where he first speaks to a journalist about his encounter with a "non-human, rational mind" in 1974.

Be warned if you go after a copy: there were two volumes featuring different authors, and a confusing array of re-prints, some of which combined material from both.  This one was published in 1987 by Ungar in New York, and includes an afterword where Platt (an English journalist who moved to the US) does a What Happened Next on all of the interviewees.

Platt himself is quite interesting - seems he got into personal computing in a big way and is now a devotee of cryonics.


















Les Shadoks


This piece here tells you all you need to know: Dangerous Minds

The gist: France, 1968-1974, political satire, weird soundtrack that has recently been released on CD by WRWTFWW ("We Release What The Fuck We Want").

It was shown on Thames telly in Britain in 1973, with English narration, in the Magic Roundabout slot.  Any of you lot remember it?


Sunday 25 March 2018

An Orgy of Poe

Spirits of the Dead is a 1968 Omnibus trilogy  Directed by Roger Vadim, Louis Malle and Fedrico Fellini, and staring a mighty 1960s iconic cast consisting of Jane Fonda, Terence Stamp, Brigitte Bardot, Peter Fonda and Alain Delon. Loosely (Very Loosely) based on the Edgar Allan Poe stories Mitzengerstein, William Wilson and Never Bet the Devil your Head. The French Title of the film was Histoires extraordinaires which is from the first collection of Poe's short stories translated by French poet Charles Baudelaire, the English Title has been taken from Poe's 1827 Poem Spirits of the Dead. Have to admit up to recently I was not aware that this film existed or had been made, and have never seen it, but will try to rectify that sometime soon.
You can see various Film and TV Trailers for it here