So difficult it is to show the various meanings and imperfections of
words when we have nothing else but words to do it with. -John Locke,
philosopher (1632-1704)
Hi Patrice, Trusting all is well at Casa Pentictione! Would have sent email sooner but due to hectic schedule combined with technical issues on internet it was
difficult. Just wanted to send a brief note to say hi and fondestos to you both and hoping you are settling in well. I'm guessing you are getting some breaks
judging by your posts regarding your bike outings. Colleen said you made
some nice comments in a post regarding the move etc. But didn't get a
chance to see it before it was absorbed into cyberspace! much appreciated
anyway.Can you send me your new telephone numbers so we can call soon?. Must carry on unpacking and catching up with backlog of crapola so we will talk
soon. Take care, Al
Bob Altwein Granville Island, Vancouver, BC We urban sketchers were part of today's 2015 Vancouver Draw Down event. One of our co-organizers led us to two locations on Granville Island. http://www.vancouverdrawdown.com Bob Altwein Metal sculpture near the far end of Granville Island. Patrick James Dunn Almost makes me wish we hadn't moved!
Bob Altwein Family bike by the Children's Waterpark on Granville Island.Patrick James Dunn Your sketch makes me proud to be a cyclist!
carry on unpacking and catching up with backlog of crapola so we will talk
soon. Take care, Al
Pic: Giving our Peruvian family host daughter a shoulder ride
After the wonderful dinner at Maxime's, many of the gang drove out to Falcon but Cora Lee and I wanted to wait until next day to return to the lake as a friend, [Ironically, Ken Chapman is in Vancouver at the moment!], was displaying a number of his paintings at a group art exhibition in st Vital and we were keen to attend.
After we
had loaded the car the next morning we drove to the Forum Art Centre
where exhibition was mounted and spent about 45 minutes taking in the
works, chatting with two of the organizers. One
of them, Garth, taught Ken water colour when he first took lessons and
the other, Glenn, knows the owner, Pierre, of the Dream Cafe, in
Penticton, a very well known local spot that is highly regarded for all
the wonderful performers booked into the venue.
[Lounging on a lookout on the Inca Trail]
Around
11:30 am we headed back to Falcon and were there at just after 1:00 pm.
Guests for an all family gathering were scheduled to arrive at 2:00 pm
so we had plenty of time to unload and shower/change
for party, although no time for a ride, unfortunately! This time around
all the grandchildren/great-grandchildren were invited so it was a
fun-filled time with about 24 people in all. Sky had been quite overcast
that morning but by the early afternoon there
was plenty of blue sky so we were able to sit outside and enjoy all the
wonderful food and drink.
[Bird's eye of Machu Pichu]
Not an overly late affair as many people had
to drive back into Winnipeg so we waved goodbye to those so headed
around 9:00 pm. Rest of us chatted inside, (to
escape bugs, mainly blackflies!), for an hour or so before heading to
bed to read. The two days had been extremely busy, what with driving into Winnipeg and visiting with family there, sleeping in an unfamiliar bed and just generally, still being a bit tired from the move to Penticton and endless unpacking before leaving, not to mention the three days of long distance driving. Still, more than worth the effort to celebrate such an incredible milestone in the lives of such unbelievably wonderful, generous in-laws. For They Are Jolly Good Fellows! Hip Hip Hooray! Hip Hip Hooray!! Hip Hip Hooray!!!
When taking pictures of the gathering today, I was struck, once again, at all the incredible lives that came into being with the union of Clara and Dusty 70 years ago. Makes one marvel at the wonder of creation and family life. Feel more than blessed to be a small part of this remarkable Clan Durston!
[An arch dividing communities on the island of Tequile in lake Titicaca.]
"This seems to have been Lucas's lightbulb moment. The vague space movie idea he'd been running through the projector in his head for years -- there was no reason that couldn't be better than Flash Gordon. After his meeting at King Features, he and Coppola dined at the Palm Restaurant in Manhattan, and Coppola could sense his friend's disappointment -- but also his new outlook. 'He was very depressed,' Coppola would recall in 1999, over lunch with Lucas and producer Saul Zaentz. 'And he says, "Well, I'll just invent my own." '
"Coppola paused to consider. 'What a limitation, if they had sold him Flash Gordon.'
" 'I'm glad they didn't,' concluded Lucas. Years later, he reflected on why that was. 'Flash Gordon is like anything you do that is established. You start out being faithful to the original material, but eventually it gets in the way of the creativity .... I would have had to have had Ming the Merciless in it, and I didn't want to have Ming. I wanted to take ancient mythological motifs and update them -- I wanted to have something totally free and fun, the way I remembered space fantasy.'
"In the meantime, though, Lucas needed a more bankable movie. If Fellini was to take Flash Gordon, maybe Lucas could take something from Fellini -- for instance, the idea behind the movie I Vitelloni, about four teenagers in a provincial town who talk about leaving for Rome but never do. What if you followed a bunch of guys, on the cusp of leaving a small town, and follow them through one night of cruising -- a ritual that had died out in the last decade?
"Lucas would set his version in the summer of 1962, the moment everything changed for him, and end it with a car crash. He came up with a semi-Italian title: American Graffiti. It sounded odd to contemporary ears. The Italian word had not yet gained common currency. New York subway trains were about a year away from being covered in spray-painted signatures. Lucas hadn't intended that debased usage of the word in any case; he meant the word invented at Pompeii in 1851 that means nostalgic etchings. He wanted to record the legacy of a lost decade: an American Pompeii, frozen in time forever."
from How Star Wars Conquered the Universe by Chris Taylor. When George Lucas's first movie, the emotionally cold and austere THX 1138, failed to find box office success,
he lost the confidence of the studio and needed to make a warmer, more bankable movie. For inspiration, he looked to the movie I Vitelloni, about four teenagers in a provincial town who talk about leaving for Rome but never do. This led to the smash
success American Graffiti. However, prior to making American Graffiti, Lucas was already daydreaming about making a new Flash Gordon movie, but was unable to secure the rights:
"One night [Lucas and his new
friend producer Gary Kurtz] were at a diner and looked in the paper to
see what was playing at the local theaters. There was nothing they
wanted to see. They enthused about how great it
would be to see Flash Gordon on the big screen, in color.
"Nobody can remember at a forty-year remove what was said in that conversation or who started it (Lucas and Kurtz were both Flash Gordon fans). Kurtz says they were talking in more general terms about how science fiction pictures hadn't really been enjoyable since Forbidden Planet in 1955. 'They all seemed to go downhill towards either genre horror, Creature from the Black Lagoon -- type movies, or alien invasions, or just dystopian stories about postapocalyptic societies,' Kurtz says. 'And none of that was fun. It was just the idea of capturing the energy of Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers --style space opera, really, which hadn't been done for so long.'
"Whatever was said in the diner seems to have lit a fire under Lucas. On a visit to New York in early 1971, 'on a whim,' he says, Lucas went to visit King Features to inquire about the film rights to Flash Gordon. The King executives agreed to meet with him because they were thinking about the film rights too: they mentioned Frederico Fellini as a possible director. The Italian maestro was also known to be a Flash Gordon fan.There was no way Lucas could compete with Fellini at this point in his career.
"Nobody can remember at a forty-year remove what was said in that conversation or who started it (Lucas and Kurtz were both Flash Gordon fans). Kurtz says they were talking in more general terms about how science fiction pictures hadn't really been enjoyable since Forbidden Planet in 1955. 'They all seemed to go downhill towards either genre horror, Creature from the Black Lagoon -- type movies, or alien invasions, or just dystopian stories about postapocalyptic societies,' Kurtz says. 'And none of that was fun. It was just the idea of capturing the energy of Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers --style space opera, really, which hadn't been done for so long.'
"Whatever was said in the diner seems to have lit a fire under Lucas. On a visit to New York in early 1971, 'on a whim,' he says, Lucas went to visit King Features to inquire about the film rights to Flash Gordon. The King executives agreed to meet with him because they were thinking about the film rights too: they mentioned Frederico Fellini as a possible director. The Italian maestro was also known to be a Flash Gordon fan.There was no way Lucas could compete with Fellini at this point in his career.
"This seems to have been Lucas's lightbulb moment. The vague space movie idea he'd been running through the projector in his head for years -- there was no reason that couldn't be better than Flash Gordon. After his meeting at King Features, he and Coppola dined at the Palm Restaurant in Manhattan, and Coppola could sense his friend's disappointment -- but also his new outlook. 'He was very depressed,' Coppola would recall in 1999, over lunch with Lucas and producer Saul Zaentz. 'And he says, "Well, I'll just invent my own." '
"Coppola paused to consider. 'What a limitation, if they had sold him Flash Gordon.'
" 'I'm glad they didn't,' concluded Lucas. Years later, he reflected on why that was. 'Flash Gordon is like anything you do that is established. You start out being faithful to the original material, but eventually it gets in the way of the creativity .... I would have had to have had Ming the Merciless in it, and I didn't want to have Ming. I wanted to take ancient mythological motifs and update them -- I wanted to have something totally free and fun, the way I remembered space fantasy.'
"In the meantime, though, Lucas needed a more bankable movie. If Fellini was to take Flash Gordon, maybe Lucas could take something from Fellini -- for instance, the idea behind the movie I Vitelloni, about four teenagers in a provincial town who talk about leaving for Rome but never do. What if you followed a bunch of guys, on the cusp of leaving a small town, and follow them through one night of cruising -- a ritual that had died out in the last decade?
"Lucas would set his version in the summer of 1962, the moment everything changed for him, and end it with a car crash. He came up with a semi-Italian title: American Graffiti. It sounded odd to contemporary ears. The Italian word had not yet gained common currency. New York subway trains were about a year away from being covered in spray-painted signatures. Lucas hadn't intended that debased usage of the word in any case; he meant the word invented at Pompeii in 1851 that means nostalgic etchings. He wanted to record the legacy of a lost decade: an American Pompeii, frozen in time forever."
How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise
Author: Chris Taylor
Publisher: Basic Books
Copyright 2014 by Chris Taylor
Pages 83-84
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