Category Archives: UNIVERSES

Universes are comprised of thoughts, ideas, dreams, illusions, delusions, which may also include stars, space, time, energy and objects. Or not. These are the universes of the author Lawrence R. Spencer, and others for whom he has an affinity.

...and other stuff, ART, FREE ADVICE, LIVES, PICTURE POEMS, POETIC NONSENSE, UNIVERSES

MINDS DON’T MATTER

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Dr Seuss cat in the hat

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.”

 Dr. Seuss

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Theodor Seuss Geisel (March 2, 1904 – September 24, 1991) was an American writer, poet, and cartoonist most widely known for children’s picture books written and illustrated as Dr. Seuss.  Geisel published 46 children’s books, which were often characterized by imaginative characters, rhyme, and frequent use of anapestic meter. His most celebrated books include the bestselling Green Eggs and Ham, The Cat in the Hat, One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, Horton Hatches the Egg, Horton Hears a Who!, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas!. Numerous adaptations of his work have been created, including 11 television specials, four feature films, a Broadway musical and four television series. He won the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award in 1958 for Horton Hatches the Egg and again in 1961 for And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street.

He was a perfectionist in his work and he would sometimes spend up to a year on a book. It was not uncommon for him to throw out 95% of his material until he settled on a theme for his book. For a writer he was unusual in that he preferred to only be paid after he finished his work rather than in advance.  Geisel’s birthday, March 2, has been adopted as the annual date for National Read Across America Day, an initiative on reading created by the National Education Association.  (Wikipedia.org)

...and other stuff, ALIEN INTERVIEW BOOK, ART, MOVING PICTURES, READING MATTER, SOUNDS, UNIVERSES

THEY LIVE

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OBEYThey Live is a 1988 American science fiction-horror film directed by John Carpenter.  The film follows a nameless drifter referred to as “Nada”, who discovers the ruling class within the moneyed elite are in fact aliens managing human social affairs through the use of a signal on top of the TV broadcast, concealing their appearance and subliminal messages in mass media.   This is a clip from the famous “sunglasses” scene: “I have come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass.  And, I’m all out of bubble bum….”

The idea for They Live came from two sources: a short story called “Eight O’Clock in the Morning” by Ray Nelson, originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in the 1960s, involving an alien invasion in the tradition of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and a story called “Nada” from the Alien Encounters comic book.  John Carpenter describes Nelson’s story as “…a D.O.A. type of story, in which a man is put in a trance by a stage hypnotist. When he awakens, he realizes that the entire human race has been hypnotized, and that alien creatures are controlling humanity. He has only until eight o’clock in the morning to solve the problem.

The more political elements of the film are derived from Carpenter’s growing distaste with the ever-increasing commercialization of 1980s popular culture and politics. He remarked, “I began watching TV again. I quickly realized that everything we see is designed to sell us something… It’s all about wanting us to buy something. The only thing they want to do is take our money.” To this end, Carpenter thought of sunglasses as being the tool to seeing the truth, which “is seen in black and white. It’s as if the aliens have colorized us. That means, of course, that Ted Turner is really a monster from outer space.” (Turner had received some bad press in the 1980s for colorizing classic black-and-white movies.) The director commented on the alien threat in an interview, “They want to own all our businesses. A Universal executive asked me, ‘Where’s the threat in that? We all sell out every day.’ I ended up using that line in the film.” The aliens were deliberately made to look like ghouls according to Carpenter, who said: “The creatures are corrupting us, so they, themselves, are corruptions of human beings.”

Because the screenplay was the product of so many sources: a short story, a comic book, and input from cast and crew, Carpenter decided to use the pseudonym “Frank Armitage,” an allusion to one of the filmmaker’s favorite writers, H. P. Lovecraft (Frank Armitage is a character in Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horror). Carpenter has always felt a close kinship with Lovecraft’s worldview and according to the director, “Lovecraft wrote about the hidden world, the “world underneath.” His stories were about gods who are repressed, who were once on Earth and are now coming back. The world underneath has a great deal to do with They Live.” — (Wikipedia.org)