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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