Lenny Von Dohlen was an American actor.
I remember him for Electric Dreams (1984), which can be read as a prequel to Her.
Lenny Von Dohlen was an American actor.
I remember him for Electric Dreams (1984), which can be read as a prequel to Her.
William F. Nolan was an American author best known for co-writing Logan’s Run, a dystopian novel which shows similarities to Blade Runner.
Logan (the protagonist from Logan’s Run) is Rick Deckard (the protagonist from Blade Runner). Both chase renegades, rebels from the system. Logan is a sandman (a cop chasing people who refuse to be euthanized) and Deckard is a blade runner (a cop who chases robots who refuse to be put out of circulation).
Both change sides during the story, becoming renegades and rebels themselves.
For interesting thoughts on these similarities, check Hollywood Utopia: Ecology in Contemporary American Cinema (2005) and Blade Runner 2049 and Philosophy: This Breaks the World (2019).
Earl Kemp was an American publisher, science fiction editor and critic.
During the 1960s and 1970s, Earl Kemp was involved in publishing erotic paperbacks through a company, Greenleaf Publishing, where he was employed by William Hamling. In an example of détournement, in 1970 Kemp published an Illustrated edition of the Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography. According to Pornography and Sexual Representation: A Reference Guide, the book was “replete with the sort of photographs the commission examined.” Kemp eventually was sentenced to a one-year prison sentence for distributing the book (as was Hamling). However, both served only the federal minimum of three months and one day. The story of their arrest and prison time was covered in Gay Talese’s Thy Neighbor’s Wife (1981).
Syd Mead was an American concept artist best known for his work on Blade Runner (1982), Tron (1982) and Aliens (1986).
His death comes only three months after the death of Luigi Colani (1928 – 2019) who was in a different but comparable branch of concept art.
Both Colani and Mead were obsessed with futuristic aerodynamics.
André Previn was a German-American musician best known for his film scores.
He first came to my attention when his ex-wife Dory Previn died in 2012.
After some quick glancing through my archives, I find that a ‘porn groove’ on the compilation The Mood Mosaic Vol. 3 “The Sexploitation” is of Previn’s hand, a track called “Executive Party” composed for the film Rollerball.
In the clip above that song is heard in a wonderfully strange scene “shot in the pre-dawn “magic hour,” as the wealthy, decadent upper-class fire explosive rounds at a line of towering trees, setting fire to them one after another, reveling in destruction” [1].
A example of pure wanton waste of excess energy.
The Possibility of an Island is very much a philosophical novel, as is most of Michel Houellebecq‘s fiction. In this particular novel Houellebecq juxtaposes Plato’s soulmate theory to Saint Paul‘s ‘one flesh’ remark in the Epistle to the Ephesians, remarking that this ‘love craving’, this need for emotional symbiosis is the origin of much unhappiness.
In the words of Houellebecq:
Below is Plato’s soulmate theory in which Zeus split the four legged and four armed primeval humans in two parts, giving birth to creatures who are forever searching for the other half, the soul mate, to reunite their flesh:
And this is Saint Paul’s remark in the Epistle to the Ephesians: