Thursday 2 May 2019

2001: A Space Odyssey, Jerome Agel and Smoking In Space



I'm not sleeping too well recently but was under long enough last night to dream that an alien monster was tearing London apart. I didn't catch a glimpse of it, only feeling the terror as all around me fled for their lives. This dream of an alien can only be down to watching Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey in stages, as we are. During the Tuesday night session I snoozed whilst Bowman tried to get back on the ship and was woken up by loud beeps from his controls, thinking it was my alarm and I had to get up for work. LJ happened to be watching me, not the film, so she caught the moment - "Time to get up for work!" I said, jokingly. Oh how we laughed.

The best book on 2001 is the one above, created by master editor and coolest coordinator of text-images interface in the 60s, Jerome Agel, who was involved in McLuhan's The Medium Is The Massage, War And Peace In The Global Village, Buckminster Fuller's I Seem To Be A Verb and his own Is Today Tomorrow? A Synergistic Collage of Alternative Futures. All worth getting if you can find them at the right price.


More than a head trip 2001 is a sexy Super Panavision 70 voyage of exquisitely composed shots in colour that makes you salivate. It's pure eyeball cinema, so perfect you could freeze every frame and have a masterpiece. Seeing the pristine modernist interiors I wondered if all spaceship decor would really look that way one day. You and I will never know if Kubrick got that right. Astronauts don't smoke, of course, but will crews in space ever act as Ridley Scott's did in Alien? I mean will some wake up and light up with a cough and splutter like John Hurt? Will Scott's idea, which seemed like a radically realistic vision at the time, ever come to be if ordinary, working class folk get to work in space? No popping out for a fag if smoking's not allowed on board! Imagine the cravings once awakened from a machine-induced slumber for several years. 


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