Cover illustration by Brazilian artist Gabriel Bá. Control click to hear Paul Desmond play Luiz Bonfa's "Manha de Carnaval" from Black Orpheus. Control click to hear "The Girl from Ipanema" by Dictionaraoke (songs created by splicing together online dictionary audio clips). Go to Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá blog. Click to read Casanova #1. Click for The Umbrella Academy excerpt. Gabriel captures Fábio inking Casanova:

In the years before he created Dick Tracy, Chester Gould (1900-1985) drew several other strips, the movie parody Fillum Fables (1924), the interview feature Why It's a Windy City and the Siamese cats of Radio Cats (1924). Although he had been earning $100 a week at the Evening American, he dropped Fillum Fables ("I wanted to get away from that because it was not my original idea") and moved over to the Chicago Daily News (taking a salary drop to $50 a week) in order to develop his own properties. While drawing ad art and editorial cartoons at the Daily News he was offered the opportunity to do another strip, The Girl Friends (1931), as he explained:Chester Gould! ©2008 Ed Piskor and Jay Lynch

In the chaotic Cabbie (1987) the brilliant Barcelona artist Marti Riera unleashed a cast of depraved characters in a remarkable recreation of Chester Gould's art style.

Comparison of strip in progress with finished Wood inking.

Greg Theakston's cover design for Pure Imagination's Sky Masters (1991) was used by Ferran for reference, serving as a spin-off springboard.

This week marks the end of a year since I posted any Wally Wood art. We veered off in other directions. But to get back on track, here is a moody montage by Wood in this illustration for "The Creature Inside" by Jack Sharkey from Worlds of Tomorrow (December 1963). Click to see the enlarged details in the very controlled cross-hatching.

And click on the heading above to hear Robert A. Heinlein's Universe on X Minus One (May 5, 1955).

Damn Yankees dance demo with Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon

on The Garry Moore Show (1962)


Bob Fosse and Tommy Rall in My Sister Eileen (1955)

Fosse (1999)

Control click above for 1977 PKD interview on Mike Hodel's Hour 25.

I met Philip K. Dick in 1969, and some months later, chance events interleaved so that I seemingly became a character in PKD's fiction. Or was it the reverse? Is the power and magic of a Dick novel so talismanic that it led me directly down causality corridors into his own past?

During a visit to Washington, D.C. in the summer of 1970, I had been reading the 1968 MacFadden-Bartell paperback edition of Now Wait For Last Year, Dick's tale of reconstructed pasts and time-travel via the JJ-180 drug. With me was Paula, and at my suggestion, she was also reading the book. She carried it with her as we traveled from museums to malls to restaurants, sometimes a planned route, sometimes drifting.

"What shall we do later today?" I asked.

"Well, I'm going to see my friend Margaret," said Paula, inviting me to join her. So later in the afternoon, we climbed into a cab. Unfamiliar with D.C. streets then, I had no notion of where we were headed -- only that I was to visit someone I'd never met at a house I'd never seen on a street where I'd never been. The taxi door closed, and I learned our destination for the first time when she said to the driver, "3039 Macomb Street."

But the address did sound familiar. Had I seen it before? Read it? I asked to see the novel in her purse and began idly flipping pages, dimly recalling that Dick might have used a similar address in his description of Wash-35, a “painstakingly elaborate reconstruction” of 1935 Washington, a "babyland'' where Virgil Ackerman entertains guests in a lifesize model of his own childhood world:

As we rode down Connecticut Avenue, my eyes went to the paragraph on page 30 where "their ship coasted along Connecticut Avenue." We turned from Connecticut Avenue onto Macomb Street, and I noted the spelling discrepancy in this sentence:

The cab stopped. I looked up. There was the tiny lawn. There was the black wrought-iron fence. We were parked in front of 3039 Macomb. I held in my hands nothing more than ink on paper, an author's fantasy, but through the taxi windows I could see the sun shining through the trees and the "five-story brick apartment building where Virgil had lived as a boy." Past the fence, just as described on page 31, I could see the children playing at the doorway. In Dick's novel, these children are "robants in the shape of small boys," so I watched them closely as we walked past them, entering the doorway of 3039 Macomb for the first time, knowing I had walked through a Synchronicity Portal into PKD's version of reality.

In Dick's The Man In The High Castle, Mr. Tagomi, referring to the I Ching, says, "We ask it questions as if it were alive. It is alive. As is the Christian Bible; many books are actually alive. Not in metaphoric fashion. Spirit animates it. Do you see?" I see. Had I read Now Wait For Last Year the previous year, or even a month earlier or later, the address in the book would have slipped by unnoticed. It could have sat inanimate on my bookshelf for decades, and what was buried on pages 30 and 31 would have remained unseen. Skim milk masquerades as cream.

It occurred to me later that the address might have been used in the novel because Virgil's past was, perhaps, Phil Dick's past, so I wrote to him, asking why he had chosen to fictionalize this real location. He responded, "I used that building and address because I had lived there in the Thirties as a kid. So you visited it... my god, that is eerie. Really freaks me. The ghost of a little boy who is now a middle-aged SF author must still be playing there."

I first told this story in 1982 in The Comics Journal, and two years later, Paul Williams reprinted it in the PKDS Newsletter (April 1984). Paul prefaced it with a facsimile reproduction of hand-printed sentences written by PKD at the age of seven or eight. Phil was seven years old when he and his mother moved to 3039 Macomb in 1935, and they stayed there until 1938. The paragraph confirmed the address, previously unknown to PKD readers:


A few footnotes: I made the screenshot of 3039 Macomb by stepping into the "mirror world" of EveryScape. "Mirror world" actually sounds like something PKD might have concocted 50 years ago, but now it actually exists. EveryScape just got $7 million in venture capital funding to compete with Google Street View. Oddly, using EveryScape to go around Washington seems very much like the Wash-35 of Now Wait for Last Year. How did PKD know the future so well?

In the novel excerpt above, PKD mentioned the Uptown Theater and the Peoples Drug Store (which has no apostrophe). Only months after PKD and his mother moved into the Macomb neighborhood, Warner Bros. opened the Uptown Theater in DC on October 29, 1936, just around the corner from Macomb at 3426 Connecticut Avenue NW. It's still there today, the last movie palace in Washington still playing first-run films. The Peoples Drug Store was right across the street from the theater. (The one in the above photo was three miles away at 7th Street NW and Massacusetts Avenue.)

Hi Fructose cover by d'Holbachie Yoko. See her gallery. Below is excerpt from her statement in Direct Art 12:

In Blazing Saddles when Cleavon Little rides past the Count Basie band in the desert, why doesn't Basie say, "One more time... One more once!"?

Francis Ford Coppola had the rights to do Kerouac's On the Road, yet he never filmed it. A Coppola adaptation of Marcia Davenport's My Brother's Keeper could have been a great film; the option to Davenport's novel floated about among different individuals for decades.

At the end of Into the Wild, an aerial shot and a map could have shown how the real-life Christopher McCandless would still be alive if he had simply walked a few miles in the other direction toward cabins and a road, as explained by Jon Krakauer in his book Into the Wild (1996).

Since all of the actors in The Magnificent Ambersons were alive during the 1960s, there was industry talk of reshooting the film's lost ending. Further, the actors had aged appropriately, so no makeup would have been necessary. However, no one stepped forward and gave Orson Welles the financing to begin the project. Control click "Missed Opportunities" heading to hear Orson Welles' October 29, 1939 radio production of ''The Magnificent Ambersons" with Walter Huston.

Dave Wallis' dystopian novel Only Lovers Left Alive (1964) tells of a bleak future in which people over 45 commit suicide. Teen gangs run wild, but eventually they have to learn survival skills. In May 1966 the Rolling Stones announced that they would appear in a film adaptation to be directed by Nicholas Ray. Since Ray made films about young people in the 1940s (They Live By Night), the 1950s (Rebel Without a Cause) and the 1970s (We Can't Go Home Again), there's an unfortunate gap.

Promoting The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), Anthony Minghella said, "More than anything else, it's Chet Baker that makes you feel the late '50s." So why didn't he direct Matt Damon in a Chet Baker biographical film?

Driving Miss Daisy has some interesting shots of the countryside during the road trip but no location shots when they arrive in Mobile. According to Google Maps, a drive from Atlanta to Mobile should take about five hours, so why is it night when they get to Mobile? To disguise the lack of location scenes? Perhaps a recreation of old Mobile will reach the screen if someone makes a biographical film drama based on Mobile native Eugene Walter's book with Katherine Clark, Milking the Moon: A Southerner's Story of Life on This Planet (2001).

Why didn't Bert Stern make a documentary film about Lambert, Hendricks and Ross?

George Stevens, after the death of James Dean, had Nick Adams dub some of Dean's lines in the banquet speech near the end of Giant to make the dialogue more clear. Watching the scene, one can easily spot where Adams' voice begins. Thus, Dean's true intention for that scene was obliterated.

Ken Burns said he owned "maybe two" jazz CDs, so why Ken Burns Jazz? In fact, his disinterest in music is evident in his other films, mixed so words take precedent and the music is a minor element or not authentic. "Ashokan Farewell" is not a song from the Civil War as many believe. Why not Anthony Minghella's Jazz? Terry Zwigoff's Jazz? Bert Stern's Jazz?

Who allowed Little Iodine (1946) to become a lost film?