Diary Of An Artist In A New World

Fumbly And Other Creatures

Philip Aspden

I have known Philip for many years. I was just 20 and had just arrived in Kings Cross. I entered an exhibition, and he was in it (both looking at the art to decide who to vote for for "People's Choice", both too innocent to vote for ourselves. We met, we voted for each other, and then he suggested we go for a drink at a pub he knew.

A couple of weeks later he invited me to take a room in Jake's Monastery. The Monastery was neither religious, nor reputable. It was in fact a rabbits warren of tiny rooms inhabited by artists, writers, musicians, and other bohemians. I thought it was heaven.

Phil was, and is, an artist. A very good one. But unfortunately too left field for a fashion driven art world. He paints delightful creatures like the Fumbly and writes poetry and songs about them.

This Fumbly painting had been on my wall for the last four years. I love it, and so when Phil said he needed it back to sell, I bought it from him. Of course as happens between artists, especially ones who are long term friends, it became a practical swap of some stretchers for the artwork, otherwise artists would rarely be able to afford to buy any art, so I am grateful that I could do this and Fumbly will grace my wall for many years to come.

Take a look at some more of Phil's artwork at his new web site.

Artist Swims 2 Kilometers!

Doesn't sound like much when you say it fast, but tonight I swam 2 km continuously. It is a big achievement for me, that is why I am telling the world!

Review Of In The Shadow Of The Moon: Pure Brilliance

There are certain events that etch so deeply in the memory that years later we can remember every detail of our surroundings and thoughts as we heard the news. 9/11 is like that for me, as was the deaths of John Lennon and Elvis Presley. High on my list of memorable events, however is one that is not about death. It is the positive and inspirational moment of those first steps on the moon.

Other people saw it on television. Our school, being in a provincial town, had no TV and the radio broadcast was piped through the school PA system. No doubt by a secretary holding the mike up to a transistor radio. It sounded like it - screechy and indistinct, but in the middle of that chaos of squawky noise one of the greatest moments in the history of humankind was discernible. A man was stepping onto another world for the first time.

In The Shadow Of The Moon is a newly released movie that brings that experience to life again by piecing together previously unseen footage from the NASA archives and digitally enhancing the original. Previously seen film from the control room, for example, was silent. The makers of In The Shadow Of The Moon spliced together audio tapes from the control room and using the same techniques musicians use to lip sync music, they put the voice back into the moving lips as the drama unfolds.

Likewise the footage shot by the astronauts in orbit and on the moon is brought to life by the addition of an audio track. In this case it is the astronauts themselves describing what was going on from their perspective as human beings looking back to events they can never forget.

Michael Collins the astronaut who stayed in the lunar orbiter while Armstrong and Aldrin descended to the surface of the moon, and for a while became the most isolated human being in history, has revealing insights and  remarkable observations that turn something that could easily be the dry ramblings of a pilot into the exciting human story that this great adventure was. After all the millions of dollars spent, and the incredible machinery put to work (Apollo Five is still the most powerful rocket ever made), it is in the end a story of the courage and adventurous spirit of some visionary people that made the lunar landing possible.

It seems incredible some of the risks that were taken. It should not be forgotten that the effort to get to the moon was at the cost of precious human lives. The movie reveals in the astronauts own words their own fears surrounding certain exposed wiring in the pure oxygen atmosphere of the space capsule. These fears were proved real when the 3 astronauts of Apollo One were burned to death on the launchpad. It appears they were fearful of the wiring, but more fearful of complaining due to the risk of losing their place as astronauts on the project.

The production notes for the movie demonstrate the extraordinary steps the producers took to recreate these awesome events and the sensitivity they exercised as the project developed:

"Producer Duncan Copp and co-producer Chris Riley spent many weeks in the NASA film library examining cans of film - some of which had not been opened for over 30 years. This search uncovered many gems, including astonishing space shots which have been re-mastered from the original film rolls to reveal the Apollo program with a visual clarity and impact it has never had before. The mute 16mm rolls shot in Mission Control have been laboriously lip-synced with the 16-track audio recordings of the mission controllers' voice loop to re-unite the pictures and sound of many historic moments for the first time, lending a striking immediacy to many dramatic scenes.

"The film has some stunning shots in space of the spacecraft separating and docking. This was engineering footage shot so that the engineers could investigate the cause of any problems – in effect a sort of visual "black box recorder". There were cameras built into the various stages of the Saturn V rocket which would automatically shoot key moments, usually at high frame rates on 16mm film. The cameras would then eject (you can see this happening on one particularly spectacular shot of the final stage firing) and re-enter the atmosphere, where they would be caught in mid-air by high-flying aircraft equipped with nets! It's an amazing story we plan to tell in one of the DVD featurettes. One of things we wanted to do was really allow the audience to luxuriate in this amazing footage – and so some shots we play in their entirety."

"Perhaps the most astonishing thing to me about this project is that this film had not already been made," said director David Sington. He then went on to describe the surviving astronauts who were able to participate in the film. "The best thing about it has been meeting and talking to ten of the most remarkable individuals I have ever met."

This movie has enough blasting rockets to please hardened technophiles, enough tales of courage to please the adventurous, and enough heart and soul to please the rest of us.

Ron Howard Presents In The Shadow Of The Moon
Blasting off September 2007
Website / Preview of In The Shadow Of The Moon

Kylie Newman, Beautiful Bride To Be

Kylie has the sweetest bunch of friends. It is a pity they live out Liverpool way because I would love to see them more often. It was sad to see them go.

The Poet Of Silence

Bohemia lost its genius of silence today. Marcel Marceau, who performed for 50 years as Bip, the clown, and never said a single word, while still able to communicate volumes. He died today at age 84. No one else has ever spoken directly to so many without saying anything before. Now he joins the eternal silence. He was rich in words he never spoke. The world is poorer for his passing.

Tanya Schmid, A Hens Party To Remember

From the moment they arrived, Tanya's hens party was buzzing. Kate wrote in the guest book "Everything I wanted for my friends but didn't know I wanted." What a beautiful thing to say. The event did have that feeling of being just right for everyone, and with just the right amount of surprise for all.

Friends Walking The Chalk

The Chalk The Walk Urban Art Festival is on now. Forty artists are making artworks on Pyrmont Bridge. Rudy told me last night that he was in it. Looking on the website I discovered that a friend of many years, Anton Pulvirenti is also in it. Check out the Chalk The Walk web site here. The site has lots of photos of the marvelous artworks they make. Meanwhile here are two by, first, Rudy and second, Anton:

The Green Fairy

Some beautiful absinthe posters from the late 19th century. They are most interesting in how they reflect an association of absinthe with strong and independent women on the one hand, and romance on the other. Absinthe had been associated with artists since mid century, but the posters reveal that manufacturers were marketing it towards women. Even the poster showing a man pouring absinthe shows, on closer inspection a woman in the window who is being invited in by the man.

Absinthe was banned due to public hysteria surrounding the murder of a family in France by a man who had a history of violence, who had been drinking wine and brandy all day, but had drunk 2 glasses of absinthe during the day. The press blamed the absinthe and public prejudices due to the association of absinthe with the bohemian lifestyle lead to its banishment in most countries until recently.

I can't help but feel that if the drink was not associated in the public mind of the time with strong women and bohemians, that there would have been less prejudices involved in unfortunate event. Why, for example, were the wine and brandy not seen as at least partly to blame, along with the man's history of beating up his wife?

Absinthe is my favorite drink. I have it with fresh lime juice. Its flavor is divine, its color is gorgeous. Yet even today many in the public retain the belief that absinthe is particularly dangerous. A curious belief, because absinthe is like any alcohol, safe and enjoyable in moderation, and associated with drunken behavior when abused.

I enjoy the green fairy.

Arthur C. Clarke, Message To Nasa

Transcript of a message to Nasa when the Cassini spacecraft flew close by Iapetus. Iapetus was the original setting for the monolith in Clarke's book.

Hello! This is Arthur Clarke, joining you from my home in Colombo, Sri Lanka.   

I'm delighted to be part of this event to mark Cassini's flyby of Iapetus.   

I send my greetings to all my friends - known and unknown - who are gathered for this important occasion.   

I only wish I could be with you, but I'm now completely wheelchaired by Polio and have no plans to leave Sri Lanka again.   

Thanks to the World Wide Web, I have been following the progress of Cassini-Huygens mission from the time it was launched several years ago. As you know, I have more than a passing interest in Saturn.

And I was really spooked in early 2005, when the Huygens probe returned sound recordings from the surface of Titan. This is exactly what I had described in my 1975 novel Imperial Earth, where my character is listening to the winds blowing over the desert plains.

Perhaps that was a foretaste of things to come! On September 10, if everything goes according to plan, Cassini would give us our closest look at Iapetus - one of Saturn's most interesting moons.

Half of Iapetus appears as dark as asphalt, and the other half is as bright as snow. When Giovanni Cassini discovered Iapetus in 1671, he could only see the bright side. We had a better glimpse when Voyager 2 flew past in August 1981 - but that was from almost a million kilometers away.

In contrast, Cassini is going to come within a little over one thousand kilometers of Iapetus.   

This is a particularly exciting moment for fans of 2001: A Space Odyssey - because that's where the lone astronaut Dave Bowman discovers the Saturn monolith, which turns out to be a gateway to the stars.

Chapter 35 in the novel is titled 'The Eye of Iapetus', and it contains this passage:   

"Iapetus was approaching so slowly that it scarcely seemed to move, and it was impossible to tell the exact moment when it made the subtle change from an astronomical body to a landscape, only fifty miles below. The faithful verniers gave their last spurts of thrust, then closed down forever. The ship was in its final orbit, completing a revolution every three hours at a mere eight hundred miles an hour - all the speed that was necessary in this feeble gravitation field."

More than 40 years later, I cannot remember why I placed the Saturn monolith on Iapetus. At that time, in the early days of the Space Age, earth-based telescopes couldn't show any details of this celestial body. But I have always had a strange fascination for Saturn and its family of Moons. By the way, that 'family' has been growing at a very impressive rate. When Cassini was launched, we knew of only 18 moons. I understand it is now 60 - and counting.I can't resist the temptation to say:

My God, it's full of moons!   

But in the movie, Stanley Kubrick decided to place all the actions at Jupiter, not Saturn. Why this change? Well, for one thing it made a more straightforward storyline. And more important, the special effects department couldn't produce a Saturn that Stanley found convincing.

That was just as well because if they had done so, the movie would have been badly dated by the Voyager missions, which showed Saturn's rings to be far more implausible than anyone had ever imagined.

I have seen enough instances where Nature imitates art, so I'm going to keep my fingers crossed on what Cassini discovers at Iapetus.

I want to thank everyone associated with this mission and the overall project. It may lack the glamour of manned spaceflight, but science projects are tremendously important for our understanding of the Solar System. And who knows, one day our survival on Earth might depend on what we discover out there.

This is Arthur Clarke, wishing you a successful flyby.   

End Of Moore's Law As We Know It

Gordon E. Moore is the visionary co founder of Intel who famously said in 1965 that the number of transistors on a chip doubles roughly every two years. Around that time the state of the art chip made by the fledgling Intel had about two thousand transistors. That was considered remarkable. The latest Intel chips have more than five hundred million transistors. That is astounding.

I can still remember my first transistor radio. They were rare then. I took it apart (and put it back together again). I contained just a few transistors. Each were large and very visible. The transistors in modern Intel chips require powerful microscopes to be seen.

Over the years Gordon Moore has expressed surprise that his 1965 statement has been repeated and called a law. He has also has expressed surprise that it has remained true all this time.

At this years developers conference in San Francisco he gave reasons why it must come to an end. He said the limits  lay in basic laws of physics such as the speed of light and the size of atoms. He thinks his law will  finally come to an end in about 10 to 15 years.

He may be right, but he has said similar things in the past and his own company has surprised everyone by finding new ways of doing things. The current generation of chips uses insulating layers just 5 molecules thick. It is not long ago that was thought to be impossible. Only time will reveal if Moore's Law will continue to confound its inventor.