Homo Novis Caelestialis

The semester of uni for which I was doing Return of the Space Gods actually finished about 2 weeks ago; I got less blogging done than I’d intended, but it still added up to a fairly formidable word count for an art project.  In the end, there were three final pieces; this was my favourite, the culmination of the alien skulls series (Homo Noves Baratharii, Osiris, Tetropsis).  You can see some close-ups and working drawings below, but basically the work is a full size alien skeleton, four-eyed and pyramid-headed, drawn in 0.4mm technical pen.  It took forever to draw, but the final product is quite striking.

The other two final images were both oil paintings, Hyperrapture and Truth of the Space Gods. Because they were both very large, and not very dry when the semester ended, I had to put off photographing them.

Even though this is technically the end of Return of the Space Gods, I’ll keep this blog open and update it occasionally with stuff that interests me, and maybe even get round to writing those essays on CS Lewis’ Space trilogy, Olaf Stapledon and Solaris I’ve been planning.

The Secret of the Ultimaton

The Secret of the Ultimaton is the third of the Space Gods series, the other two being Are You a Starseed? and Space Gods Bring Love. I actually did it quite a while ago (a month, maybe), but due to not having a working camera didn’t manage to photograph it. It’s my least favourite of the three; I think I got the facial distances wrong on the space god, making it look a bit weird (in a not good way), and the overall look is too modern sc-fi, too matrixey… I was going for a more pulp, 70s psychedelic look. But I thought I’d bare all and show it anyway. The text is from The Urantia Book.

hot off the press: anonymous picket sydney scientology office

Not one hour ago I was waiting on Castlereagh Street in the Sydney CBD for my bus home, standing, as usual, opposite the Church of Scientology building, still busy burning carbon late into the night, with its occasionally glimpsed staff waiting for people to personality test,  auditing each other, and doing whatever else Scientologists do.  A bunch of fairly normal looking guys dressed in jeans, with backpacks and V masks walked up, one had a cigarette, then they walked over and stood outside the door.  And I realised I was witnessing an Anonymous protest against Scientology.

Not much happened.  All of us at the bus stop were pretty bored, as about a dozen identical, and useless buses had passed in the last half hour, getting our hopes up only to dash them; so watching the eight or so guys dressed in their masks hanging around was pretty exciting.  I overheard one mother having a discussion with her precocious sounding son about the cult/religion.  She compared the Thetan levels to an expensive, never-ending computer game.

The protesters had a camera, and one was carrying a bag of signs, but they didn’t really use either; possibly because the air was too cold for sign waving.  Inside, we could see the staff hurry about, on phones, chatting to each other importantly.  Whenever one went in or came out, the protesters would cheer enthusiastically and greet him enthusiastically by (a presumably made-up) name.  A group of drunk guys in suits staggered past, and were pretty surprised to see a gaggle of ninjas in their path.

Nobody called the cops, and my bus showed no sign of coming, so I went across the road to say hi.  I learned that this was the fifth protest in 5 months, and had been going on since midday.  The Scientologists sometimes try to give them flyers, and they bring their own to hand out sometimes as well.  Apparently the cops never get called, since they don’t do anything but stand there (and occasionally bounce up to look in through the windows); although they’re not allowed in, despite the scrolling LED sign inviting people to come inside for a free video.  I would have liked to ask, for curiosity’s sake, what it was that made these guys feel so strongly about Scientology, but it didn’t occur to me at the time.

So that was my excitement for today.

Indiana Jones, the Crystal Skull, Angels and Demons and Cyrillic: A Random Drunk Post

It may look like I’m being very lazy not updating my blog, but nothing could be further from the truth. Behind the scenes I’m working away at my final “Space Gods” images, to the point where RSI from delicately tracing a life-size skeleton has almost crippled my hand.

Here is my mini-review for the new Indiana Jones film, in the form of free verse:

Crystal skulls, elongated heads,
how could this film not be fun?
Cate Blanchett’s pretty cool
she was in The Life Aquatic,
I’m indifferent to Shia LeBoeuf.
I work with a Ukrainian, she doesn’t sound

like that.
You can’t survive a nuclear explosion

in a fridge.
About 40 minutes in
I started to wond when it would end.

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I was thinking about Angels and Demons by Dan Brown yesterday, and that I liked it better than The Da Vinci Code. Okay, they were both pretty dumb, but Angels was a bit more up-front about it’s schlocky campness, whereas its sequel tried to be all clever with its references to feminism and Christian opression. The worst part was the way that Brown casually threw away the ethnic love interest in the first book (Vittoria Vetra) for an almost identical, equally undeveloped ethnic love interest in the second (Sophie Neuveu). You know what? I say he should have ditched his authorial stand in, Robert Langdon, with his invented expertise, and made Vittoria the heroine, and she and Sophie could have fought the Catholic Church and its wicked albinos together. A stunning Italian Lara Croft-type physicist/biologist/yoga master studying psychic powers in dolphins (or something) and he threw her away at the end of the book. All that fluff about the ‘Sacred Feminine’ was completely empty coming from an author who doesn’t believe in 3-dimensional female characters. Cut the bits about her Italian ancestors calling for vendetta and she’d have made Da Vinci twice as interesting.

***********

If you want to impress your Slavic friends, learn Cyrillic. You will also be able to sound out things written in Russian, Serbian and Ukranian, and even if you don’t know what it means, it will give you a feeling of accomplishment. This is the site I used to learn it, it’s incredibly simple, elegant and fun:

http://www.alphadictionary.com/rusgrammar/alphabet.html

lion, witch & prince caspian

The Lion, the Witch on the Wardrobe has just finished on Channel 9, to be replaced by a programme about Alaskan crab fishing (the most dangerous job in the world, apparently,), and I saw the premier of Prince Caspian last weekend, so I was inspired to write an impromptu post.  They’re both pretty good films in my opinion; the first one didn’t quite live up to recent epic fantasy but on a second view I was able to chill out and enjoy it a bit more.

I grew up watching the old BBC dramatisations and reading the books (although I never liked The Horse and His Boy , or got round to the apocalyptic Last Battle), so it was always going to be hard for me to accept a new version.  Aslan doesn’t seem majestic enough, and while the BBC Aslan of my memory spoke in a regal growl the new Disney/Walden one sounds suspiciously like Liam Neeson.

Tilda Swinton makes a great White Witch though, one minute androgynously sexual and the next eerily maternal towards the boys in the movie.  I was trying to figure out why the designers had chosen to give her dreadlocks and braids though; to give a whiff of ethnic, pagan wickedness in contrast to the very English heroes? Still, she’s a fun villain, and when she tries to persuade Prince Caspian to resurrect her to fight his uncle in the second film I (and probably most of the audience) was hoping he’d do it.

But of course, Prince Caspian was written before moral ambiguity was acceptable in kid’s storytelling, and we have to wait until the too cutesy Lucy decides to put her faith in Aslan and asks the lion for help… like the dad in Arrested Development he’s busy teaching the kids a lesson, something along the lines of “That’s what happens when you try to do things yourself!” It would probably have been more narratively satisfying if they had called on the Witch for help, and more true to life; war in the real world is at best a moral grey area, and Hiroshima and Dresden are more White Witch than Aslan.  Lewis, a great writer, seems to have a number of blind spots, and the casual (bloodless) killing throughout the Narnia films is one of them.  (Another one is making all his Scottish characters cantankerous old bastards.)

So if Aslan is Jesus, then the White Witch is the devil; My gender studies class must be getting to me, because it seems like quite a lot of depictions of Satan are female these days- The Passion of the Christ, The Last Temptation of the Christ, Bedazzled. Maybe the temptation to conflate the two villains of Christianity- Eve and Satan, is increasingly irresistible.

Another thing that occurred to me was Santa; isn’t he a human? And if so, shouldn’t he be a king of Narnia too? Then I realised that he was Father Christmas, so probably more like a pagan god… which in Lewis’ stories tend to be good guys, like his satyrs and centaurs, as long as they don’t get worshipped like the capital-G God.  I’ve been reading a bit of Lewis recently, so I could see a few themes from other works: his idea of the Tao, a universal law of nature, from the Abolition of Man, is echoed in the Deep Magic of Narnia; and his concern with believing despite lack of evidence, or at least lack of unambiguous evidence, is the central theme of Til We Have Faces. As a prolific pop-apologist, Lewis was very much concerned with why people believe, or don’t believe; I wonder if he ever got to the bottom of it.

Where am I going with these ramblings? Nowhere really… Prince Caspian is a good film for the kid’s fantasy it is.  The moral message is a bit confused, but less heavy handed than in the first story;  The effects and action are great, the characterisation satisfying.  The producers do a good job of juggling their audience’s expectations; Christians get subtle admonitions to “believe”, skeptics get a cynical dwarf not all that impressed with the patronising kids and lion.  I miss the old giant Reepacheep, along with Doctor Who and Monkey one of the heroes of my childhood,  but I can forgive it for the cool griffins.  I award this film 7.5 talking animals out of 10.