I am unwavering in my conviction that Auto-Tune will somehow bring about the destruction of civilization as we know it. And yet… I’ll always have a soft spot for early 80s talkbox/vocoder robot vocals. This morning I’m grinding my beans to Michael Jonzun and his band of space cowboy brothers, The Jonzun Crew.

Left: Michael Jonzun in Manhattan, 1983, photographed by Janette Beckman. Right: LP cover art for Jonzun Crew’s single, “Space is the Place”.

The Boston-based band’s sci-fi theatrics borrowed heavily from the likes of Sun Ra and Parliament, but their electro-funk/hip-hop sound was something quite different. Jonzun Crew had several releases on Tommy Boy between ’81 and ’85. For the most part, their over-the-top costumes kept them sidelined as a novelty act. Eventually, tragically, Michael and his brother Maurice embraced the dark side of the Force, ending their epic space adventure to become executive producers for the likes of New Edition and New Kids on the Block. (Actually, if you click below, you can watch a Jonzun Crew video that includes footage of baby Bobby Brown pop-and-locking for his lamé-clad uncles.)

J. G. Ballard died today. He was 78 years old.

There’s not much I can say about Ballard that hasn’t already been said. He was definitely a Coilhouse patron saint. Because so much has been written about Ballard’s influence on everything from cyberpunk (check out this rich article, which buzzes with the excitement of the genre’s earliest memories of itself) to modern music (as this article asserts, Ballard could be credited for having “inspired the entire genre of industrial music”), I’m going to make this obituary very subjective and leave you with my favorite Ballard memories.

The first one was watching Empire of the Sun with my parents. I didn’t know at the time that this movie, starring a 13-year-old Christian Bale, was actually based on Ballard’s autobiography. But I remember that even then, watching that film, I wondered: how would this kid, with his confused Stockholm Syndrome identification with the Japanese who kept him prisoner, his fetishization of aircraft and explosions, turn out later in life? Later, a friend helped me put 2 & 2 together, and I found out exactly how he turned out. He wrote Crash. And it all made perfect sense. Here’s Young Ballard in Empire of the Sun; haunting to re-watch on this day:

My second favorite Ballard moment is actually a famous quote of his. This was his response to a question in Re/Search 8/9 on October 30, 1982:

I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that’s my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again… the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul.

Suburb of the soul. It still makes me shudder.

Post your favorite Ballard memories/impressions/quotes in the comments. We honor his influence, and we will miss him.

Raquel Welch (Crucifixion) by Terry O’Neill.

“Raquel Welch is the rudest, most unprofessional actress I’ve ever had the displeasure of working with, and if I could, I would spank her from here to Aswan.”  -James Mason, on working with Welch in the murder mystery flick The Last of Sheila.

Well, good MORNING. James Mason quote, meet Stroke Material tag! Go ahead and take a minute to visualize the sexily sinister three-time Academy Award winner taking Welch, undisputed Bikini Queen of the 20th Century, over his knee… preferably while you watch a few of Welch’s most VA VA VOOM performances available on YouTube. We’ll start things off with this 1970 clip of the astronomically hot Ms. Welch and two swishy spacemen dancing in the Ruta de la Amistad public sculpture project of Mexico City:

Moog-a-licious, no? The clip originally aired in Raquel Welch’s 1970 television special. Added bonus to the Barbarella bikini action: her killer Parisian Red Riding Hood steez in that latter number!

Go ahead. Read it. Just don’t send me your psychiatric bills.
-from the Analog review of Antibodies

Welcome back, dear Coilhaüsers, to All Tomorrows. This time we’re going a bit outside of our usual Deviant Era range to take a deep, long (yeah, you’ll never forgive me) look at David J. Skal’s 1988 novel Antibodies. A little later than the usual works, yes, but if anything gets captures the guts of Deviant Era’s transgressive glories, it’s this pitch-black wallow on the wrong side of Transhumanism.

Skal, mostly a horror historian, wrote only a handful of science fiction novels, and this was the last. It’s not hard to see why. Antibodies is a horror tale in future clothing: a detailed examination of how nasty it gets when humans try to permanently scrap flesh for metal, and how easily believing plebs are still led to the slaughter by their puppet-masters.

I’ve recommended a lot of disturbing books in this column and I don’t plan to stop anytime soon, but I will warn you right now: Antibodies is not for everyone. It is a deeply disturbing, brutally unsparing book. The anonymous reviewer from Analog wasn’t fucking around. This is a tale with no mercy and no illusions. You’ve been warned.

“Long before I became a feminist in any explicit way, I had turned from writing love stories about women in which women were losers, and adventure stories about men in which the men were winners, to writing adventure stories about a woman in which the woman won. It was one of the hardest things I ever did in my life.”
-Joanna Russ

The most glorious achievements of sci-fi’s Deviant Age were about breaking boundaries, in many cases those that were so deeply entrenched that readers might not have even known they existed. That is, after all, what the future does — gets rid of nearly everything we thought timeless or immortal.

No one has done that better than Joanna Russ, especially in the brilliant short story When it Changed (read the whole story here) and the follow-up (even more brilliant) novel The Female Man. They are the opening salvo and an outright blitzkrieg, respectively, against everything you thought you ever knew about gender. It’s been mentioned here before how gender is a loaded word. Loaded like a fucking ammo dump, and Russ came to set the whole gunpowder-packed mess ablaze.

Both works hinge around the future, all-female society of Whileaway. Both are in my pantheon of favorites. But fair warning, dear reader: for all the talk about transgressive literature, there are still few works that really, truly shake you up. Both When it Changed and The Female Man made me deeply, viscerally uncomfortable the first times I read them.

I’ve since gone back to both multiple times, and they remain some of the most wrenching, beautiful and utterly human writing I’ve ever seen.

Revelation du jour: as much as I adore all things Ye Olde (read: stained, blanched, sepia-tinted, distressed, Dover-collagey… or just plain black) and will undoubtedly continue to incorporate time-honored neo-Victorian aesthetics into my decor and wardrobe, an internal plate has shifted. Lately I’m finding myself –possibly for the first time since I was a toddler cutting my teeth on primary-colored Legos and rubber balls– infected by an entirely different strain of retro: mod-futurism.

Rest assured, no one’s about to run out and buy some garish, orange one-piece pantsuit (though I’ll freely admit to a burgeoning obsession with the OVALIA “Egg Chair”). What I am doing is poring over every last Peggy Moffitt/Rudi Gernreich photo book I can find. Via FIDM:

Hers is the face that launched a thousand ripples through the fashion world when she wore the world’s first topless bathing suit. “Designer of the future” Rudi Gernreich considered Peggy Moffitt to be his muse and model of choice for his controversial designs. With her Kabuki-inspired face painting, Peggy created her own unique look in the Sixties. Gernreich collaborated with super hair stylist Vidal Sassoon to create Peggy’s trademark hairstyle. He gave her a short helmet haircut, with precise geometric bangs cut right to her eyebrows. She also created her own makeup style with heavy black and white eyeliner and long false eyelashes to exaggerate her huge dark eyes. She took the term “strike a pose” very seriously in front of the camera. She made Gernreich’s clothes all the more extreme with her striking presence.

Peggy Moffitt is an icon and innovator of fashion who didn’t just wear designs, she inspired them. Even super sixties model Twiggy said, “She taught me how much more a model puts in her work than just a pretty face.”

A few of those frocks look hideously dated now, but more often than not, Gernreich’s colorful, daring designs read to me like peals of laughter in a musty tomb. And Moffitt always looks smashing; an updated technicolor incarnation of Lulu Brooks; fearless and versatile. I don’t know that 95% of these pieces are something I would ever want wear, but they sure do make me happy.

Click below for more smile-inducing images of the Muse of Mod after the jump.

Writer, speaker and techno-progressive guru Jamais Cascio is one of the most inspiring people I know. Guess what his day job is? Basically, it’s Trying To Save The World. (I mean, I doubt that’s on his business card, or how he introduces himself at dinner parties, but it’d be a pretty accurate title.)

“Pessimism is a luxury in good times… In difficult times, pessimism is a self-fulfilling, self-inflicted death sentence.” –Evelin Linder (as quoted by Jamais Cascio during his 2006 talk at the TED conference)

On any given day, Jamais keeps busy wrangling with a wide variety of ideas that may help keep our “hellbound handbasket” from going down in flames. He speaks and writes frequently on the use of future studies as a tool for anticipating, combating or averting all manner of crises, be they related to environmental change, exponential technological growth, natural and man-made catastrophes, or global development. We’re talking Serious Business.

He’s a Fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. He’s a Global Futures Strategist for the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology. He’s a Research Affiliate at the Institute for the Future. Jeez a loo. You guys impressed yet?! (If not, don’t come anywhere near me. I don’t truck with zombies.)

Jamais has recently written a book called Hacking the Earth: Understanding the Consequences of Geoengineering. Here’s the gist:

Pay attention to the nice futurist. He’s here to help. Buy the book.

They raise the call of destruction. They called upon alternate laws of science — the powers of nature men had once called witchcraft, the necromantic anti-science of the past brought forward to save the world by destroying it! – From the back of Gordon R. Dickson’s Necromancer, 1962 edition

Welcome back to All Tomorrows dear reader. It’s been far too long since our last foray into the glories of sci-fi’s deviant age. For that, you have my apologies. My day (and night sometimes) job of journalism has been keeping me busier than usual, and on top of that, a box full of many of my best old books, including a lot of future subjects for this column, disappeared, probably eaten by something unspeakable.

Starting with this column, All Tomorrows will shift to every other week. This will give me the time to write pieces of deserving depth on the works we’ll be tackling. Believe me, we’ve got some doozies ahead.

This time, it’s Gordon R. Dickson’s 1962 Uber parable Necromancer, the tale of a future where the enterprising Chantry Guild has figured out a way to make magic work. Not just metaphorically, but also in the “I chant and stuff blows up” way. Necromancer follows an ubermensch-in-training, who joins the guild’s quest to tear down society.

Way back in the very first All Tomorrows I mentioned a certain subgenre of sci-fi hero that fit this description: With his Uber name, imposing looks and knowledge of a vague future super-social-science, Bron is a riff on the sort of character that, in the hands of older school sci-fi writers, would end up at the head of a space armada, woman breathily clinging to his leg, humorlessly announcing the next stage ™ in human evolution.

Well, Necromancer is kind of like that. Dickson was very definitely a product of that older school, but, on a mystical kick that would presage some of the cultural movements about to rock sci-fi (and everything else) he went out on a limb. While this book has all the implied flaws of the old ways, it keeps many of its strengths — big ideas, tight plotting, suspenseful twists and over-the-top action — while offering a glimpse of what was to come.

What a historic day! Big, bonecrushing hugs from all of us here at CH headquarters to everyone else on planet earth who is rejoicing at the departure of the Bush administration. There will never be a better time to post the following human rights essay and interview that our staffer Jeff Wengrofsky (aka Agent Double Oh No) has been working on for months. At Coilhouse, we’re glad to supply subject matter ranging from the utterly frivolous to the deeply involved and intense. This piece goes in the latter category. We’re honored to provide a forum for Jeff’s in-depth, thought-provoking conversation with human rights activists Suzette Brunkhorst and Ronald Eissens. We hope that their story and struggle will move some of you as much as it has moved us. ~Mer

“Human institutions appear to be the obvious and obtrusive causes of
much mischief to mankind; yet in reality, they are light and superficial
…in comparison with those deeper seated causes of impurity
that…render turbid the whole stream of human life.“
– Thomas Malthus  (1798)

As membership is constitutive for a society, its conditions are routinely, if not essentially, contested.  More than any other society, America has wrestled with two competing notions of membership: one based on exclusion (class until 1824, race formally until 1870 and practically until 1965, and gender until 1920) and another based on inclusion and rooted in the Declaration of Independence’s influential clause: “all…are created equal.”  This quarrel over defining principles was apparent even in the drafting of the Declaration. Thomas Jefferson’s original document, later altered in a compromise, called for the abolition of slavery.  Jefferson himself was in love and sired children with Sally Hemings, an African-American who was the half-sister of his wife and his slave. And so, America was born in original sin under a star of some perversion with an ever-present element of redemption. Even today, America blinks like a giant, Masonic hologram, simultaneously symbolizing and embodying our greatest hope and, in the Bush years, our greatest disappointment.

In 1903, W.E.B. DuBois declared “the color line” to be the defining issue of the 20th Century. The election of Barack Hussein Obama Jr. opens up the question as to whether the United States has begun the new century by transcending racial exclusion. Surely the America of 1903 looks little like the America of today: African-Americans are no longer its largest ethnic minority, its citizenry includes significant numbers of people who do not fit into the black-white axis, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts rendered discrimination illegal 43 years ago, Affirmative Action dates back to J.F.K., intermarriage is not unusual, Martin Luther King’s birthday is a national holiday, racial bigotry has long since fallen into disrepute in the sciences and is not tolerated in polite conversation, and even the Bush Administration had African-Americans in its cabinet. On the other hand, police departments are often charged with brutality and “stop and frisk” policies that target black youth, African-Americans continue to be overrepresented among our nation’s most impoverished and undereducated and imprisoned, and African-Americans are the victim of more hate crime than any other group in the United States.

Certainly it is very unusual for the people of any society to select a member of a minority (however understood) to its highest office and, perhaps, this event is even more profound in a country whose entire history can be understood as a long and troubled march toward the fulfillment of its inclusive promise. Can 300 years of racial difference be transcended by legislation or election? Will Americans whose biographies are not like Obama’s accept his leadership in a time of economic and ecological crisis? With the election of Obama, is the United States once again poised to provide moral leadership (as it surely did in 1776)? Is international moral leadership possible? It seems as though history itself has opened and the full range of human potential – the good, the bad, and the ugly – are all equally likely.

What is “racism”? Are all bigotries a form of racism? Is racism conceptually distinct from other forms of ethnic chauvinism? The major genocides of the past century were, aside from the Nazi extermination of the Jews, not understood in racial terms: the Turkish-Armenian genocide (1915-18), the Turkish-Greek genocide (1914-23), Stalin’s liquidation of the Kulaks (1932-33), the Japanese-Chinese genocide in Nanking (1937-38), the Nigerian-Biafran genocide (1966-1970), the Pakistani-Bangladeshi genocide (1971), the Tutsi-Hutu genocide in Burundi (1972), Pol Pot’s Cambodian purges (1975-79), the Hutu-Tutsi genocide in Rwanda (1994), and the Serb-Bosnian genocide (1992-95).

Where do these cleavages, these notions of belonging and otherness, come from? They are found in various forms in every human society.  Sadly, our closest kin in the animal world also share this trait. Wars among chimpanzees and between apes have been noted by biologists since 1970. Are hatreds naturally rooted in “selfish genes”? If so, do we need unrealizable principles to inform our behavior and ground social criticism?

Is cosmopolitanism – the idea that one can be a “citizen of the world” – possible? Aren’t we always already embedded in cultural conversations, genetic inheritances, and political communities? Does anyone have arms long enough to embrace humanity as a whole? What do we do with those who return our embrace with bullets and bombs? Is cosmopolitanism an unrealistic retreat from the world as it actually is? Is cosmopolitanism a rhetorical strategy of the weak to keep the strong from winning?

Suzette Brunkhorst and Ronald Eissens.

On Thanksgiving, an American holiday whose lore bespeaks inclusion and exclusion, I sat down to discuss hate, race, and the limits of freedom in Holland, often considered among the freest places in this world, and on the internet, a transnational network, with Suzette Brunkhorst and Ronald Eissens, the Directors of the Magenta Foundation.  In their own words, “Magenta is a foundation that aims to combat racism and other forms of discrimination primarily on and through the Internet.” They have organized many high profile events in the name of inclusion and understanding, and have presented reports on bigotry before the United Nations and the O.S.C.E. Undeterred in the face of many death threats, they are cosmopolitan heroes. Sadly, just one day after this interview, Suzette was diagnosed with cancer and has since gone into chemotherapy. On this day, full of hope, let’s wish her a fast and painless recovery.

(Jeff’s full interview with Suzette Brunkhorst and Ronald Eissens appears after the jump.)

“Meredith Anne Yayanos, I ABSOLUTELY FORBID IT.”

—My Dad (standard response whenever I expressed interest in skydiving, bungee-jumping, para-surfing, parkour, driving a motorcycle, skateboarding, driving without a seat belt, crossing the street against a red light, not washing my hands before dinner, forgetting to floss, etc) 1976 – ?

“Have you ever heard of proximity flying? Fascinating. I’m thinking of getting myself a wingsuit for my birthday. If you hear a loud, dull thud, you will know my jump from our roof was unsuccessful.”

—My Dad, 2009

My dad is getting quite XTREEM in his golden years, it would seem! He’s just about the last person I’d expect to get base-jumping links from. Nevertheless, pops just sent me this clip from the Matchstick-produced “action sports” documentary, Seven Sunny Days. It is, hands down, the most beautiful wingsuit footage I’ve ever seen. Instant adrenaline rush. Thank you, Doctor Yay!

Click below for more astounding “squirrel suit” clips from around the world.