Month: May 2016

Curiosity Rover mission page on NASA’s website:
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/index.html

The Secret History of Star Wars

https://drbeat.li/album/B%C3%BCcher/The_Secret_History_of_Star_Wars.pdf

More Wampa

Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back – Wampa Cave production shots. In addition to Jar Jar, the Wampa is one of my favorite creatures in Star Wars. It is mysterious and ferocious. I love mysterious and ferocious animals, preferably on two legs.

Looking at these odd, crude stalactites, it goes to the genius of George who managed to captivate our imagination with foam on sticks.

And here is a bit more fun with Yoda – “I consider Yoda to be just about the most evil character that I’ve ever seen in the history of literature,” said a PhD in Yoda studies

*Seriously

Couple of brilliant articles – consider them a gift:

http://www.wired.com/2012/08/geeks-guide-david-brin/all/

http://www.salon.com/1999/06/15/brin_main/

The Force Is Back – George talks to Vanity Fair just before the release of The Phantom Menace in FEBRUARY 1999

George, Star Wars

I know I know but I love The Phantom Menace and despite everyone’s very reasonable objections I will probably see it a few more dozen times and will continue to see it after that well into my 80’s, and I couldn’t care less if George borrowed his themes from the Bible, from the Martians, from Etruscans, from his home town in Modesto or just plain made stuff up to cover up bad acting in between sketchily put together scenes with bad CG. Because artists are put on this earth to steal and forge new memories, new meanings and new myths from the old ones. This is how Picasso made up brand new form of art – he stole everything african art had going for them in terms of weird eyes and noses, longish proportions and fat vanishing fingers.

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/1999/02/star-wars

Heady and overwrought sentiments to apply to a science-fiction serial, perhaps, but for a considerable chunk of the American population Star Wars is no mere science-fiction serial. In fact, there’s always been something rather flawed and off-key about the traditional adult take on Star Wars, which is that the existing trilogy is not so much an original work as a teched-up assemblage of references: to Flash Gordon, Akira Kurosawa, John Ford,Metropolis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Greek mythology, King Arthur, Triumph of the Will, etc. For those of us who were kids when the first three movies came out—those of us who, presumably, made the trilogy the huge, hulking cultural milestone it is—Star Wars was wholly, mind-blowingly original. We weren’t hip to the Hidden Fortress borrowings or the supposed whiz-bang retro-camp elements that Lucas had worked in; not for us the high-Cahiers musings of Pauline Kael, who wrote, “Lucas has got the tone of bad movies down pat: you never catch the actors deliberately acting badly, they just seem to be bad actors, on contract to Monogram or Republic.” We simply bought the myth—Lucas, that presumptuous geek auteur, had succeeded in his “conscious attempt at creating new myths” for children.