Millenium Falcon inspired by Tutenkhamun's jewellry ?

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Zeitgeist in Cinema

Ertl kit representation of the Millenium Falcon

a) A slightly amusing piece of news recently in the Daily Mail about how ancient small scarab pendant found looked like a Star Wars Millennium Falcon, (See: Ancient Egyptian scarab seal is found on extinct volcano in Israel: 3,500-year-old carving represents Pharaoh Thutmose III (and it resembles the Millennium Falcon) However it forced me to cast my mind back in time and take note of what this space ship design was all about.

King Tutenkhamun's pectoral with Scarab and a model of the Millennium Falcon

b) However the other side to that is that once Lucas seemed to have come up with a hamburger with an olive idea for the space ship and a bite taken out of the front as a beginning point, it's likely that an Egyptian pendant perhaps a falcon pendant or this famous particular scarab pectoral with "desert glass" scarab belonging to Tutenkhamun would have served as inspiration for developing the final ship with all the details of its outer structure.

King Tutenkhamun's pectoral with Scarab

c)  Tutankhamun's Falcon Earrings
Another component from the Tutenkhamun jewelry to observe are the gold Falcon ear rings which were displayed in 1976 as part of the same collection.  Perhaps compare the circle on top of the spacecraft where the gun is found with the along with the long rectangle leading up to the front of the ship, to the bird with its ring display if wings and its long tail, and the head becomes the upper laser cannon

d) The name Millennium Falcon entered the revised fourth draft of the script for Star Wars, dated March 1976. What is interesting about the name is the fact that the Ancient Egyptians had this idea of the "boat of a thousand years" (sometimes the number could be a million years, but would also represent an uncalculable span of time) which carried the falcon headed god Ra, and then Millennium means a thousand. This pendant also inspired the likes of HR Giger around that general time with works such as Necronom II. 

Falcon headed Ra on his solar barque, the boat of a thousand years

e) The piece of jewelry also appears to have partially inspired a painting of a demonic face by HR Giger called Necronom II in 1976 , a painting that would inspire the face of the monster in the 1979 movie Alien. 
( See; Necronom II: Inspired by Egyptian winged scarab and Paintings that inspired the design of the Alien  at the Alienexplorations blog)

Necronom II

f) 1976 was the year that the The Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibition started off in America at the National Gallery of Art and this would have lead to magazine articles across the world since it was all about what was happening in America and an exhibition catalogue that year. And so this would have led the Millennium Falcon Designer and Giger finding decent images of the scarab pectoral presented before their eyes.

Poltergeist remake

a) Finally watched the Poltergeist remake, noticing the elongated quality of both the nose of the boy and the mother, and seeing the clown doll on the cover of the DVD that has a pullable nose connected by string, and still the question arises if this is Pinocchigeist as ever.

b) An incredibly pointless remake on the verge of inducing nausea. The way the little girl this time uttered the words "They're here" just seemed completely out of context other than to offer people a reminder of the original film. 

c) The other side might interest people who liked movies such as Pulse, crammed with lost decayed souls. Perhaps this vision of the other side almost seemed interesting for half a moment probably because one could only see it in quick flashes and it would most likely have all been CGI anyway.
A trip into the other dimension was sadly lacking in the original Poltergeist movie and its sequel and then what the original mentally evoked in perhaps would have been much better than this dark world filled with zombies.

d) Perhaps it's all designed to make the original Poltergeist movie seem ten or twenty times better.

New Years day mental transformations

Wmm admits that on New Years day, when crossing a road from the cafe in central Pinner to the bus stop, mistook a folded up newspaper on the side of road for a decomposing plucked supermarket turkey.

And getting to the bus stop, he saw some chicken bones still with some bits of flesh, scattered around the pavement left behind by a bunch of youths who had been filling their faces with fried chicken, and mistook them for toy deformed plastic soldiers.

The rounded ends of the chicken bones mentally transformed into bulging rounded helmets of the toy soldiers that as impressions of humanoid forms were progressively become more and more deformed by the second until they were just more easy to identify as bones on a wet street dimly lit by streetlights and then again, this sense of certainty would at various half moments easily fade away.

Star Bores: The Bore Awakens/The Bores Awaken

First impressions (21st December 2015)

a) Darth Kretin for added gameplay
I am a great fan of Star Wars but this film made me cringe most of the way through.Kylo Wren is a mentally challenged individual who for some odd reason wears a mask and is an apprentice for the a dark being who looks like an oversized Gollum sitting on a throne, played by the actor who played Gollum in the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings films. He can throw people around and throttle them with the force, but when it comes to fighting with the light sabre, even a stormtrooper who hasn't had much battle experience, but worked in sanitation could even hold his own against this agent of the Sith for a few rounds. Kylo is suddenly beaten down by a woman named Rey who suddenly discovers her ability to use the force coming from nowhere, when she holds the light sabre for the first time. It feels as if anyone could use a lightsabre in this story as if they were videogame characters, and gain points in battle. For some reason, this Kylo's menace had sent Luke into hiding for some years and one wonders how it could be that Luke couldn't handle this Kylo unless he wanted to simply stop himself from killing or maiming this individual.The giant gollum character appeared to be very forgiving for all of Darth Kretin's errors such as leaving the BB-8 bringing with him a woman who only had a memory of the map. The biggest question might be the nature of the game plan and reading what it must say in the rule book about the story. So for the sequel, Kylo's connection with the Sith would have to be upgraded for him to be an entity with any effect and eventually he will surely become Darth Kretin if a Darth at all, but a user of the force in the manner of a Jedi just with a few moments of realisation will obviously beat him whatever. Gameplay also involved trying out flying a Millenium Falcon and operating the cannons with perhaps little or no experience and crashing it all over the place and escaping from TIE fighters in an already handicapped state. Further battles were fought with all the enthusiasm of videogamers on their videogame consols. If one loves videogames then this might be fine for many people, of course they might be used to the style of film making because of this.

b) Big Macs and MacGuffins
I admit that the others around me were enjoying the movie a lot more than I was, laughing at all the jokes which I didn't really relate to. The actors as their characters are all fine and the new robot BB8 is great. Perhaps the idea that Finn was supposed to be a stormtrooper who went AWOL made the whole idea of stormtroopers seem rather less serious than they had ever been, as if they hadn't been trained at all to carry out the tasks they're supposed to, let alone told about what the objectives of The First Order are, but Boyega was fine in his role. Now stormtroopers can be of all sizes and seemed laughable to look at, Boyega seemed too short to be Stormtrooper with his thick helment too big for him, being around the same height as Mark Hamill who played Luke Skywalker who was a little short for a Stormtrooper.  Captain Phasma in her brilliant metallic armour has been used very pointlessly, easily overcome. Max Von Sydow as a character at the beginning seemed all very pointless as well. The designs for the new X-fighter and Tie-Fighters were fine as well as the tie-fighter launch bay but we had seen this before basically. Three main explosions in the film to keep people's brains occupied, when the tie fighter sinks into the sand, when the building with the alien cantina inside is bombed and when the Starkiller base is destroyed in the usual manner by the rebels with a new name. This obviously kept all the people excited and alert. They might as well have three paper bags full of air being popped through the movie to keep the audience alert. R2D2 is out of action in the movie until a cloth is pulled away to introduce him into the film and make some use out of him. Abrams loves to stuff an overinflated MacGuffin into anywhere he can squeeze it no matter how it bends anything around it out of shape. The Millenium Falcon travels through a strange tunnel in the film that makes it look as if it was likely to run into the Tardis. Obviously looking forwards to episode 8.

Jenniferamy Schlumawrence

Amy Schumer and Jennifer Lawrence merged together by Photoshop to become Jennifer Schlumawrence

Exploring the extremes of the banality of the news that Amy Schumer and Jennifer Lawrence are writing a script together. The fear that when they finish writing their script together, the merger will be complete, Jenniferamy Schlumawrence

JG Ballard on Surrealism

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J G Ballard and Inner Space
(Still In development)

a) Early precursors of inner space
So the early precursors or even the iconographers of Inner Space were surrealist painters with their landscapes of the soul, he would mention the names of Tanguy, de Chirico, Dali and Max Ernst among others, all during their most creative periods were concerned with the discovery of images in which the internal and the external reality meet and fuse.  They were one of the few schools of thought of painting that embraced the imagination without any restraints whatsoever, but also embrace the imagination within the terms of the scientific language.

b) What Surrealism did
In Surrealism, the events of the interior world of the psyche are represented in terms of commonplace situations. In fantastic art, such as Breugel and Bosch, one had the nightmare represented extremely well, chariots of demons and screaming arch-angels and all the materials of horror, but what one doesn't have there is what Surrealism has, the representation of the inner world of the mind in terms of ordinary objects, such as tables, chairs and telephones
 
c) Surrealism as a creative reminder
There was the possibility in Ballard's view that his own writing was nothing more than the compensatory work of a frustrated painter. The works of the Surrealists were not actually an a great inspiration on his writings, but reminders that the interior landscapes extended beyond the borders of his own head, they were valid for a great number of people and they confirmed his own hazy views. Despite the fact felt that he would have written the same way with or without the Surrealist painters, he regarded surrealist painters as having a far bigger influence of him than any writers had done. Ballard assumed that he looked back on Shanghai and the war there as if it were part of some huge nightmare tableau that revealed itself in a violent and gaudy way that remade the world that one found in surrealism. Perhaps he had been truing to return to the Shanghai landscape, to some sort of truth that he glimpse there and in all his fiction, and so it seemed that he used the techniques of surrealism to remake the present into something at least consonant with with past

d) Salvador Dali's Surrealism
As for Dali, from Ballard's view, he had created a completely new landscape out of the concepts of Freudian psychology. No other painter that he knew of had so well represented the world of the Oedipus complex, of people's childhood anxieties, about memory, always done within the context of the 20th Century. Also Dali''s paintings with their soft watches and minatory luminous beaches, are of almost magical potency, suffused by a curious ambivalence that Ballard found that one could see only in the serpentine faces in the paintings of Leonardo Da Vinci.  

e) Surrealism unlike dreams
It was for Ballard, a curious thing that the landscapes of these painters, and of Dali in particular, are often referred to as dream-like , when in fact they must bear no resemblance to the vast majority of dreams, which in general take place within confined indoor settings, a cross between Kafka and Mrs Dale's Diary, and where fantastic images, such as singing flowers or sonic sculptures, appear as infrequently as they do in reality. The false identification, and the awareness of the fact that the landscapes and themes are reflections of some interior reality within human minds, was a pointer to the importance of speculative fantasy in the Twentieth Century, an era of Hiroshima and Cape Canaveral. Back in the '40s and '50, he thought that the Surrealism was the most important enterprise that England had ever embarked on and he still did, to the point of considering it the biggest adventure of that century.  

f) Surrealism's relationship with science fiction
Surrealism may have seemed to be inspired by fantasy for many, but this was not true.  It seemed to him as if Science Fiction and Surrealism had a great deal in common. They both represented to him a marriage between reason and unreason. In both you have science as sort of quantifying elements. In both science fiction and surrealism the basic source of imagination is one's own mind rather than the external world. Both are the perfect model for dealing with the facts of the Twentieth Century and literally opened windows on the real world.  

g) Interests of the surrealists
The surrealists were all very interested in science, in optics, and photography and their main inspiration was psychoanalysis which to Ballard was the perfect scientific mythology for the investigation of the imagination. Ballard found that this combination of science and the imagination was very close to what he wanted to do as a writer and of it course had many affinities with science fiction itself. He was also found that the novels of writers like Kafka and Burroughs, were very much in tune with the surrealists, as well as films such as Alphaville and Last Year at Marienbad.  

h) References to Surrealists in The Drowned World
When he would come to write his book The Drowned World, he would come to make references to the Surrealists in his novel, but his publisher Viktor Gollancz wanted him to delete the references because it would demean what they thought was the seriousness of the book. It would have been okay to reference to Impressionists or even American Pop creators who were just coming up, but the Surrealists were considered digusting.
  
i) Late 20th Century Surrealism
However towards end of the 20th Century , he felt that the only surrealists around were the psychopaths.

 

Salvador Dali's Enigma of Desire

Source Quotes

1. Dr Christopher Evans: Is this phrase, Inner Space, you coined it, I think, it's talking about er, inward looking rather than outward looking, that's an over simplification
   J G Ballard: Yes, I was interested, I was, partly it was a slogan, I mean it was a sort of, I flew a few,  you know, I was flying a kite, ahm, but I, I meant it seriously. What I meant was, that, I, I thought that these sort of areas, that, that science fiction should turn its attention to, were, was, well, the sort of areas, in which, where its readers, er, were in fact, were, were living in their ordinary lives, that I was, I was talking, I was talking about a world... by Inner Space, I meant a world, um, or, or those areas of reality that have been, as it were, remade by the mind and I mean, you see, a sort of an early precursor if you like of Inner Space, you'd see, um, the novels of Kafka, let's say or various very much the same surrealist, surrealist painters, where there's the landscapes of the soul and so on, um , in films like (Last Year At) Marienbad and er,  Alphaville, in the novels of William Burroughs, um. (Writers in Conversation- J G Ballard)
2. JGBallard: I've always been very interested in the Surrealists, I think primarily because they're one of the few schools of painting that embrace the imagination without any restraints whatever, but also embrace the imagination within the terms of the scientific language. The Surrealists were interested in optics and all sorts of scientific advances. This climaxed, of course, in psychoanalysis, which was the perfect scientific mythology, if you like, for the investigation of the imagination. And this marriage of science and imagination seemed very close to what I wanted to do as a writer, what 1 was doing as a writer. (http://jgballard.ca/media/1973_spring_evergreen_review.html)
3. JGBallard: If you look at that bottom row of books, apart from the Francis Bacon, that's my brain laid out there - all those surrealist texts. I still feel surrealism. In the '40s, '50s and even the early '60s, you could not mention the surrealists without laying yourself open (in certain literate circles) to the charge of of the crudest sensationalism. Take someone like Genesis P. Orridge, whom I don't know and never had met. By analogy. most people over here, whether  writing for the serious newspapers like the Observer or the Sunday or NME - would, let's face it, look down on him: 'boring freake who hasn't got anything to say... pain in the ass... why doesn't he go away. don't refer to him'.  (RE/SEARCH 8/9 p23)
4. JGBallard: Now that's how most people in the '40s and '50s looked at the surrealists- there's no question about that, anybody will confirm that. I can remember that well into the mid '60s to many any reference to the surrealists was inviting reprehension. You still get a hint of that in references to Dali - in intellectual circles Dali is a sensation-mongering exhibitionist who works on a lurid and vulgar state. That's the attitude about all surrealists!  (RE/SEARCH 8/9 p23)
5. JGBallard: Surrealism , which has a way of looking at the world as an imaginative enterprise, was regarded in the '40s and '50s in exactly that light. In my first novel, The Drowned World, I put in a number of references to the surrealists. I remember the publisher, Viktor Gollancz, wanted me to delete these references because they felt my novel was serious, and that diminished my book by referencing the surrealists. I mean it would have been quite all right to mention the Impressionists, or even the American Pop creators who were just coming up - you know, Warhol & Co - but the Surrealists were disgusting! In the '40s and '50s, I thought that surrealism was the most important imaginative enterprise this country has embarked on. And I still do. For me the paintings of the surrealists have opened windows on the real world and I don't mean that  as any literary conceit. I mean that literally. (RE/SEARCH 8/9 p23)
6. JGBallard: My earliest three or four novel which are more explicitly science fiction or heavily influenced by the surrealists (Max Ernst, Dali) and also the symbolist painters like Gustav Moreau. Once you get to the Atrocity Exhibition, Crash, High Rise and so on, they're sort of technological books set in the present day - you've got all the imagery that the titles themselves are about. You name it everything from car crashes to Kennedy assassinations, to high rises to motorways.  (RE/SEARCH 8/9 p32)
7. INTERVIEWER: Your work also seems tremendously influenced by the visual arts.
   BALLARD: Yes, sometimes I think that all my writing is nothing more than the compensatory work of a frustrated painter.
   INTERVIEWER: You’ve written about Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst, and in particular the surrealists seem to have fired your imagination the most.
   BALLARD: Yes, the surrealists have been a tremendous influence on me, though, strictly speaking, corroboration is the right word. The surrealists show how the world can be remade by the mind. In Odilon Redon’s phrase, they place the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible. They’ve certainly played a very large part in my life, far more so than any other writer I know.
   INTERVIEWER: How did this interest arise? Were you taken to museums as a child?
   BALLARD: It has always puzzled me, because there were no museums in the Shanghai where I was brought up.
   INTERVIEWER: Perhaps Shanghai itself was a kind of museum?
   BALLARD: I assume that I looked back on Shanghai and the war there as if it were part of some huge nightmare tableau that revealed itself in a violent and gaudy way . . . that remade world that one finds in surrealism. Perhaps I’ve always been trying to return to the Shanghai landscape, to some sort of truth that I glimpsed there. I think that in all my fiction, I’ve used the techniques of surrealism to remake the present into something at least consonant with the past. (http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2929/the-art-of-fiction-no-85-j-g-ballard
8. JG Ballard: The only surrealists around these days are psychopaths. (See: http://jgballard.ca/media/1988_april25_time_magazine.html )

Signs of the inner world in the disaster zone of Myanmar

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Dream Like confusion Wmm

a) I am seeing the flooding of Myanmar, I see this eatery in the top photo here and I could obviously imagine such a restaurant concept as seen in the photo hitting the English streets in the decades to come and become completely normal at various parts of the year, as long as one doesn't mind wearing waders. I am already sitting somewhere in a dreamworld transporting it to England, up to my knees in this water. It's good to see how people are maintaining some sort of existence in the disaster zone there in Myanmar.

Food seller in Myanmar

b) Other images of the flooding open my mind up to a world where the people are still surviving, sitting in restaurants, grocery shops still open, news reporters in the water reporting, children sitting up to their waist in water at the computers in school.

School in Myanmar

Restaurant in Myanmar

Grocery Store in Myanmanr

News Reporter in Myanmar