Ever since I started this series, I’ve been meaning to write a post about Chris Foss. For a sci-fi nerd growing up in the 1970s and ’80s, it was impossible not to see and be familiar with Foss’s artwork. After all, he illustrated more than 1,000 book covers during his long and celebrated career. His style is so distinct and memorable that one can recognize it on a bookshelf (or a computer screen) from twenty yards away.
I remember seeing some of his sci-fi book covers back in the 1970s and being struck by their originality and vividness. He specialized in images depicting spaceships or futuristic craft, which he rendered with a strange, industrial-style realism that was new and striking. In particular, his spaceships look like real, constructed things with visible welds and spanners and plates, often painted in bright, almost nautical color schemes. He also likes to depict smoke. Or mist. Or dust. Something to give the otherwise static vacuum of space some drama and sense of motion.
His work was so good, in fact, that no one seemed to care whether the depicted image had anything to do with the plot of the book itself. Often, it did not. But that didn’t matter. The cover always said two things: science fiction and drama. And that was enough. It was plenty.
While I was doing a bit of research for this post, I was delighted to learn that Mr. Foss is still alive and still working. You can see more of his artwork on his website, which I encourage everyone to visit.
I’ve always been a huge fan of Steve Winwood. Even as a kid, I loved how clean and bright his songs were, without ever being sappy or trite. Rather, they kept an edge somehow. Eric Clapton once said that Winwood was like a young, White, British Ray Charles. I kind of think he was right.
Not long ago, I stumbled upon one of Winwood’s music videos. It was for “Valerie,” one of his greatest solo hits and one of my favorite songs of all time. The video was on YouTube, of course, and whoever posted it included lyric-captions. Normally I don’t like to follow the captions on a music video, but for some reason I did this time. And as I followed Winwood’s phrasing, I noticed something I had never seen before. Namely, the way he often splits single syllables into multiple notes. Take the line: “Music, hi and sweet.” It’s five syllables, but he sings it as six notes.
If you are a music major, or anyone who knows a bit about voice training, you are probably rolling your eyes right about now. The technique that Winwood is using is so basic that it’s been around for thousands of years at least. But, being a musical ignoramus, I never thought of it before. It is, I just learned, called melisma and is usually contrasted with syllabic singing, in which notes and syllables match each other one for one.
Ironically, as I did a bit more searching on the internet, I found a Facebook post by Winwood himself, mentioning melisma. It was in reference to the passing of the great singer Christine McVie of Fleetwood Mac. Winwood commented on how McVie stood out from many of her contemporary singers by virtue of her syllabic singing. And he’s right. McVie’s phrasing was so sharp it was almost like that of a jazz singer.
And yet, off the top of my head, I can think of several instances of when McVie used melisma to great effect. My favorite example is in “You Make Loving Fun,” when she splits the word “believe” into so many notes I can’t even count them. And each one goes right through me each time I hear it.
It’s taking me this many years to learn the definition of melisma. Go figure. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but you can teach them some new words.
What’s worse than a shameless plug? A rerun of a shameless plug!
I’ve been laid up with back problems all week and haven’t been doing much, so I thought I would repost this oldie. I had a lot of fun writing this essay. Many thanks to the good people at CrimeReads for giving me the opportunity.
If you had a clever and edgy punk/garage band back in the 1980s, and if that band got picked up by indie college radio stations, you were likely to get slapped with the label of “college rock.” Many great bands suffered this fate. Some, like R.E.M. and the B-52s, were able to grow beyond it. Others, like The Replacements, never really did.
I knew a girl who was so into The Replacements that she would only refer to them by the insider-fan name, “The Placemats.” She had great taste in music (and probably still does). I thank her, belatedly, for introducing me to one of their best songs, “Alec Chilton” (entitled, obviously, after another great indie rocker).
Once again, I’m writing a very belated obituary for a fine actor. The great British character actor Kenneth Colley passed away a couple of weeks ago. Thanks to the enduring magic of Star Wars, many young people today will know Colley from his brilliant, understated performance as Admiral Piett (a.k.a. the closest thing Darth Vader has to a trusted friend) in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.
With his stern voice, dour face, and no-fucks-left-to-give demeanor, Colley specialized in world-weary, authoritarian roles. But like Gene Hackman (who also passed away recently), Colley was an amazingly versatile actor who appeared in dozens of films and TV shows, playing everything from Jesus in The Life of Brian to Frédéric Chopin in Lisztomania.
My favorite of his performances was that of a revenge-corrupted cop in the great Inspector Morse series episode “The Second Time Around.”
There is a moment in Nancy Myers’ excellent 2015 film The Intern when the main character, Jules Ostin, complains about a man who has accused her of running a “chick-site.” Played with winning smarts and verve by Anne Hathaway, Jules is the powerhouse CEO of The Fit, a start-up on-line fashion company which she founded and which is doing gangbuster business out of its Brooklyn headquarters. This is a very telling moment in the narrative, not only because it reveals so much about Jules’s character—i.e., that she hates being pre-judged by chauvinistic men—but also because it gets at some larger aspect of the film as a whole.
When critics, and especially male critics, put the prefix “chick-” before something, what they are really saying is that the thing in question has been cynically designed to appeal to women. When applied to films or books, the term means that the work is guilty of a specific kind of sentimentality. That is, it contains tropes and cliches, which women are (supposedly) prone to react to, regardless of whether they work dramatically or not. Puppy dogs. Cute kids. Men crying. Women crying. Break-up scenes. Makeup scenes. The viewer’s/reader’s emotional reaction is not earned. It’s pre-programmed.
Of course, it goes without saying that men are just as susceptible to sentimentality as women. That’s why so many male-focused “action” movies always have some kind of buddy-aspect (a “bromance”), as well as the hero’s beautiful but angry girl-friend who just doesn’t get his need to fight evil. But getting back to The intern, this moment struck me as profound because many critics accused the movie, itself, of being a “chick-flick.” Not in so many words perhaps, but the accusation was there nonetheless.
There are, indeed, moments of sentimentality in The intern, especially toward the end. And, yes, the movie sometimes feels like a chick-flick. But it’s much more than that. It is, in fact, one of my favorite movies of the last ten years or so. It’s also one of the best, most complex performances Robert De Niro has given in decades.
Part of my appreciation for the film can probably be chalked up to my own personal history. When I first watched it on DVD some years ago, I had, like the older protagonist Ben in the movie, been working for a trendy software consulting company (based out of India, in my case). Many of my workmates were so-called millennials, with very different backgrounds than my own, and I came to have a great appreciation and admiration for their talents and concerns. And, like Ben, I often found them exasperating.
So, I was probably destined to enjoy a story about a 70-year-old retired corporate soldier, Ben, who takes a job as an intern at The Fit. Obviously, Ben has a lot to learn about the internet and modern technology from his 20-something workmates, but they have even more to learn from him about the work ethic, self-discipline, and good old-fashioned level-headedness. Surprisingly, many of the film’s best jokes have to do with Ben showing his very young male colleagues how to….well…be a man. That is, how to respect women, how to respect themselves, and how to behave with dignity and honor.
But the heart of the film, naturally, has to do with Ben’s relationship with Jules. When he finds himself assigned to work for her directly as her intern, he is up for the challenge. Jules however sees the whole matter as an enormous pain in the ass, not to mention elder abuse. (She is, ironically, guilty of her own brand of prejudice—ageism.) Of course, Ben soon wins her over with his quiet confidence, shrewd intellect, and limitless wisdom on matters both corporate and personal. (Not to mention his burglary skills.)
One of my favorite scenes is when Jules is working late and Ben, being an old school company man, refuses to go home until the boss does. The two workaholics share a pizza, and Ben prevails that he worked in the very same building where the fit has its headquarters for forty years. Jules is understandably impressed and even a little moved. One senses that this might be the first time that she has contemplated what an entire lifetime in business might look like, and where she might end up. The scene really works because of the way de Niro gradually reveals this information to her. He brilliantly conveys how much admiration—and even love, of a sort—that Ben feels for her. After all, she’s a lot like him. She is him—the modern version of him. A driven entrepreneur and gifted business person who will do anything to make her vision a reality.
In some ways, The Intern, is nothing less than a celebration of old school capitalism. What capitalism, at its best, can be, and what it can do for both individuals and communities. Jules’s company, The Fit, is a community of hard-working, like-minded people, all doing their best for a shared goal. Never mind the fact that most of them are millennials. The ideal of American Business remains the same.
More importantly, though, The Intern is just a damned funny movie. The acting is uniformly excellent from both young and old players. Hathaway, in particular, radiates so much old-Hollywood grit and charm that she sometimes feels like the new Katherine Hepburn.
The Intern is streaming right now on Netflix. Check it out….
In this latest episode of our on-going YouTube series, Read a Classic Novel…Together!, Margaret and I go over the first half of The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic literary science fiction novel. We also address other topics such as was Communism doomed from the start, are flashbacks overused in fiction, and do New York City rats constitute their own, separate species?
I thought I would use this Fourth of July 2025 installment of my Friday Night Rock-Out series to celebrate one of the greatest triumphs of enlightened American capitalism: Schoolhouse Rock! The brainchild of ABC executive David McCall, the series ran on Saturday mornings during cartoon-time and was seen, enjoyed, and effortlessly memorized by millions of America kids, myself included. Even kids today will be somewhat familiar with the series—mainly because their Baby-Boomer and Gen-X parents made them watch it on DVD!
My favorite episode is Verb: That’s What Happening, which was performed with great soul by Zachary Sanders, along with a little help from The Pointer Sisters (allegedly). After fifty-odd years, it still hits.
When I was a kid, my parents bought me a book called A Pictorial History of Science Fiction by David Kyle, which covers the history of science fiction illustration from Jules Verne all the way through the 1970s. (The book was printed in 1976.) I still have it. I remember being especially enthralled by covers from pulp magazines in the 1930s like Astounding Science Fiction and Amazing Stories. Many of these covers were devoted to some artist’s vision of The City of The Future—usually some towering, high-tech, hive-like metropolis.
It makes sense that sci-fi nerds of the 1930s would imagine a vertical, urban future. At the time, the most sophisticated places on earth were the great western cities of Europe and America. Paris. Berlin. And especially New York—Manhattan—with its great skyscrapers reaching ever higher. The obvious extrapolation of this trend was that someday everyone would be living in some vast, super-tall version of New York or Los Angeles, with buildings hundreds of stories high and millions of people living in close proximity. Ramps and walkways would connect these towers in the sky, allowing residents to hardly ever venture down to street-level. Airplanes, blimps, and elevated high-speed trains would speed residents from one end of the city to the next.
For most of these sci-fi artists and writers, this was going to be a good thing. A utopian vision, in fact. Future cities would be paradises of high technology, dense but egalitarian. Robots would do all the dirty work, and everyone would be rich. For others, though, the City of the Future would be a capitalist hell, with the decadent rich living high above the exploited poor. These upper-classes would hoard resources and technology, either out of fear or greed or sheer meanness. It is this dystopian vision that informs works like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, as well as every instance of the cyberpunk genre from William Gibson’s Virtual Light to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner.
Despite this dark side, however, the vision of an artificial, high-tech utopia has long existed in sci-fi, and it still does today. But the vision itself has changed. Relocated. These days, the City of Future is almost invariably depicted as being in outer space—”off-world,” in the lingo of movies like Blade Runner—either on a nearby planet or the moon or on a station floating in space.
Space stations, in particular, have captured the imagination of science fiction fans for the past four decades, ever since Princeton physicist Gerard K. O’Neill published The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Outer Space. In that landmark book, O’Neill explained the advantages of living on a space colony as opposed to a land-based colony like Mars or the moon. These include the fact that one could spin the colony to produce the same gravitational pull as Earth, thus avoiding any physiological problems the colonies might suffer from living on a smaller world. Unlimited solar power is another plus, as is the fact that, living outside the gravity well of a planet or moon, travel between colonies would be vastly cheaper. Trade would thrive, fueled by a steady flow of cheap, raw materials from the asteroid belt and various moons throughout the solar system.
Artist’s Depiction of Stanford Torus Interior, c. 1970s
O’Neill was the first, legit scientist to take the idea of people living in outer space seriously, and he was able to back up his ideas with hard data, including actual blueprints for working stations. Namely, he invented the O’Neill Cylinder, a tube-shaped world the size of a city with its residents living on the inner surface. Other designs were created by a diverse group of like-minded theorists. Of these, the most compelling is the Stanford torus (named for the university where the plan was cooked up). Instead of a tube, it’s a giant wheel. For whatever reason, it’s this ring-like design that has dominated most sci-fi stories of recent decades. Larry Niven’s Ringworld is basically a humongous Stanford torus (large enough to encircle a star). And the design is also represented in the wheel-worlds of the Halo videogame franchise and the fabulous Orbitals of Iain Banks’s The Culture novels.
As was the case with the high-rise super-cities that were imagined of the 1920s, the space-colony vision isn’t always utopian. In the 2013 film Elysium, for example, the titular space station is an exclusive haven for the ultra-rich, desperate to escape an Earth ravaged by global warming and end-stage capitalism. Perhaps this is why many people become uneasy when billionaire tech-bros like Jeff Bezos openly embrace the idea of building giant colonies in space. They seem to be confirming the dystopian side of the space colony coin.
I have very little in common with Jeff Bezos. But, like him, I must confess to be completely captivated by the idea of colonies in space. They are not only fun to imagine, but I believe that they probably do represent the best possible, long-term vision for the future of humanity. I don’t know if they will happen, but I hope they do.
Recent Artistic Depiction of Stanford Torus
Why do I harbor this hope? Lots of reasons. For one, space colonies offer our best chance of surviving as a species into the far future. Even if we somehow avoid the worst consequences of global-warming, there will always be some other looming disaster that threatens to exterminate life on Earth, from planet-killer asteroids to super-volcanoes to the next pandemic. With space colonies, there would soon be more people living in space than earth—perhaps trillions of people within a few centuries—thus making us a lot harder to wipe out.
For another, the quality of life on space colonies would probably be much, much higher for the average citizen than it is likely to ever be on Earth. This is due to the advantages I listed above, like abundant solar power and cheap resources for asteroids. And overpopulation would never be a problem—at least, not for long. Whenever a colony got too crowded, any citizens who craved more elbow-room would simply build a new space colony and move into it.
Of course, many people will never be disavowed of the idea that space colonies represent nothing more than a “Plan-B” for the ultra-rich. That is, after all the rich people trash the earth with their greed and unfettered capitalism, space colonies give them the ultimate chance for escape from the consequences of their actions.
This is, I think, a real possibility for why space colonies might eventually be built. But it’s not the only possibility, nor even the most likely. Rather, my guess is that space colonies will be built for the positive reasons that I mentioned—abundance, room, and quality of life. Indeed, one could imagine an era—in the three or four-hundred perhaps—when so many people choose to emigrate to space that Earth could become a giant Hawaii. That is, an ecological and historical preserve, with less than a billion people on the entire planet. People who are born on space colonies might endeavor to make a pilgrimage down to Earth at least once in their lives, the way many Irish-Americans eventually take a vacation in “the Old Country” of Ireland.
One thing Bezos and I vehemently disagree on (one of many things, actually) is the time-table for when space colonies will eventually be built. It won’t happen any time soon–not in Bezo’s lifetime (unless he has a store of some immortality drug stashed somewhere), nor in mine, nor in the next generation. But I think it will happen.
Artistic Depiction of a Roofless Bishop Ring
Which leads to the question: Will space colonies really be utopias? That depends on your definition of utopia. If a citizen of mediaeval Europe were to be magically transported to a modern, western city, they would probably perceive it as a utopia. I mean, running water? Toilets? Central heating? All the food you can eat? How much more utopian can you get? Such a person would probably dismiss any argument we might make to the contrary—that people in the 21st Century have as many problems as those in the 13th. Bullshit, they would probably say. And they’d be right. For, while modern western civilization isn’t perfect (and it seems to be getting less perfect by the day, alas), it’s still pretty freakin cool. Yes, we still have evil and stupidity and greed. And all of those human failings will find their way onto space stations.
But still, we will be making progress. It’s a worthwhile vision, and exactly the kind of dream that good sci-fi can deliver.
If you were a nerdy poor kid growing up in the 1970s and ’80s, you probably watched a lot of public television. Starting with kid shows like Sesame Street and the Electric Company, you graduated in your teens to science shows like Nova and edgy entertainment shows like Monty Python and surreal action series like The Prisoner, which PBS stations played late at night.
As for myself, I also watched a lot of PBS news, especially The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. And Bill Moyers. Lots of Bill moyers. If MacNeil and Lehrerwere the Kings of PBS news, then Bill Moyer was the high-ranking courtier. Moyers, who passed away last week, specialized in thoughtful and intelligent interviews with brilliant people of various stripes. As a would-be teenage intellectual, I really loved and appreciated these shows, and they introduced me to a lot of very smart artists, politicians, and writers. Chief among these was the iconic scholar of world mythology Joseph Campbell. Moyers’s now-famous interviews with Campbell, conducted at George Lucas’s Skywalker ranch (Lucas was inspired by Campbell’s writing when he penned the Star Wars saga), were probably the pinnacle of both men’s careers.
I’ve been a fan of Campbell ever since, and also of Moyers. A one-time Baptist preacher, Moyers was a gentle, kind-spirited man who never descended into sentimentality or fatuous optimism. He was, rather, a first-rate journalist. And God knows there are very few of those these days.
Moyers has been the subject of many on-line tributes in the past few days, including this one by the excellent historian Jonathan Alter.
Ash Clifton, Writer 