Robert E. Gilbert in Black and White

6 Jul

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By Robert E. Gilbert By Robert E. Gilbert

In the 1960s and early 1970s Robert E. Gilbert (or REG as he was known) was a prolific fan artist in science fiction fandom–and a popular one. More than once the members of the Southern Fandom Press Alliance voted him Best Fan Artist, and his work appeared on the covers and inside of Hugo Award winning fanzines such as Yandro and Amra, along with scores of other popular SF fanzines.

Details on his personal life are scant, but ten years after his death in 1993, a trove of some four hundred paintings and black and white drawings by REG surfaced. A folk art gallery in Alabama, Folk Artisans, eventually purchased the works at an auction. Although some of the works have sold, pictures of many of the paintings and drawings are still up at the gallery’s website (www.folkartisans.com).

I wrote about REG’s paintings, many of which…

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A Fantastic Cover

6 Jul

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Fantastic Stories of Imagination, August, 1962 Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, August, 1962

I’ve always thought the cover to the left, from August, 1962 Fantastic Stories was great.

An internet search for the names of most Sixties Fantasy or SF artists will usually garner significant information. But I found virtually nothing when I Googled the name of Vernon Kramer, who created this cover. All I can tell you is that Kramer did quite a few covers in the Sixties for Fantastic and her sister publication, Amazing Stories. Most of them were arresting paintings, but this would be my favorite.

I’ve just always thought it was haunting and beautiful and evocative. It illustrates (and I suspect inspired) a pretty nice story, “Sword of Flowers.” Back then SF magazines would often buy a well-executed painting and then pay a writer to create a story around it. I’d bet that that was the case here. In any case…

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Why I Play “Summertime”

6 Jul

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Doc Watson–God rest his soul–made me learn “Summertime.” His recording of it on Elementary Doc Watson has a solo that’s  catchy and haunting (a great combo, that). I was thinking about it one evening when I was playing guitar and just stumbled into copping the licks from memory. After that, I played around with the solo a lot, and I mean a  lot –especially in summer. Finally, one June, my wife Dorothy got me the sheet music for my birthday.

At that point I played no jazz, and it took several months of wrestling with the sheet music before I had the song down. Then it took Dorothy and me another couple months of playing it together (her on bass, me on guitar) before we got it tight. That happened just in time for us to include the song in a set we were doing for Custer Street Fair…

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Mucho Shakin” @ Glenwood Art Fest

6 Jul

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VLUU L100, M100 / Samsung L100, M100I’m uploading video of us doing the above tune at Glenwood Arts Fest. That afternoon was pretty joyous for us, a family affair: That’s me on guitar, my wife Dorothy on bass, our son Paul on drums, and our good friend Josh Davis on harp.

A friend of ours caught this on his camera, and the sound came out nice, but the picture gets a little weird sometimes. Still, I think you’ll get a good idea–a little pixalated–of the performance.

The Glenwood Arts Fest, held every August in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood, is a good one. I recommend it. The atmosphere is urban mellow, and there is actual art on display there.

So here’s that video:

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Pushcart Annie

6 Jul

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The song “Push Cart Annie” concerns an old woman who lived in my home town down in the Ohio River Valley back in the 1960s. She was what people here in Chicago call a scavenger, someone who looks through the alleys for stuff they can sell.  Unlike scavengers up here, though, she didn’t cruise the alleys in a pickup; she plodded along with a pushcart.

me, circa 1972 me, circa 1972

I won’t claim that the song’s factually accurate, but I hope it tells the truth, and the description of her is as I remember it. I wrote the song in 1972 when I was in my early twenties, using “the ice cream chords,” a progression so notoriously cliched that it has its own Wikipedia entry. (Think “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” or “Last Kiss.”)

Twenty some years later, I set the lyrics  to a less hackneyed chord progression and melody, and…

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Neil Young’s Living With War

6 Jul

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           neil-young-living-with-war-2006-front-cover-43720DO YOU REMEMBER JUST HOW BLEAK THINGS WERE DURING THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION?  (May we never forget.)   Preemptive War, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Secret Prisons, Special Rendition, warrantless wiretaps, spying on U.S. citizens, our soldiers caught in the middle of a society disintegrating into sectarian violence, Bush talking about the Bill of Rights’ being outmoded, and Blackwater’s making a mercenary army available to him.  Any of that ring a bell?  From my personal perspective, everything was made more interesting by our son Paul’s deciding that it would be a good time to join the Army.  On top of everything else, Bush and Cheney had been cutting the number EPA and OSHA inspectors to ineffectual levels and inviting oil company lobbyists into the White House to advise them on energy policy.  And on and on.  Dark days.  One Christmas around then I received a CD from my sister Linda.  Its cover looked like it’d…

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Is Science-Fiction Dying?

6 Jul

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A Dystopian ClassicIS SCIENCE FICTION DYING? The question may seem dubious or melodramatic, but there’s been a fair amount of talk on the internet about this over the past few years. People in the Yahoo science-fiction discussion groups have discussed it, and bloggers, some of them pros, have  written about it. Myself, I don’t know if SF is dying, but it sure seems a lot less popular than fantasy these days. I base this on looking over the books-sold section in Locus, the trade journal of print SF, the last several months: Something like eight fantasy books are listed for every science-fiction title. Similarly, in lists of agents, those interested in fantasy far outnumber those interested in science-fiction. Fantasy movies released probably far outnumber science-fiction releases, too, this past summer being a possible exception. Those  who’ve read fantasy and science-fiction since the nineteen fifties or sixties (you know who you are), of course, can remember the…

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Gary’s Top Comic Books (of 2012)

6 Jul

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The following post is by Gary Brown and is reprinted from his zine, Oblio.

Each year I take some time to look back on the previous 12 months and pontificate on what I think were the best dozen comic books of that period.
As in the past, I remind my readers that these are MY opinions. End of sentence. Of course, as a reader and collector of comic books for more than 50 years, I believe I’m qualified to put my own judgmental stamp on what is good and what is not so good. This year, I estimate I read between 800-1,00 comic books.
I also need to point out that I don’t read every comic book that comes out, meaning there is no doubt that there are titles that I miss or totally ignore here that should be mentioned. So, use that to balance just how you accept…

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John W. Campbell art director?

6 Jul

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         I READ SOMETHING SURPRISINGin issue #32 of Illustration, a magazine about which I’ve long been curious but had never before picked up—probably due to its $15.00 an issue price tag. Anyhow for some reason, I finally broke down a sprang for a copy, and inside there was a short piece about Robert Adranga, who apparently did a lot of well-received covers for a Hitchcock YA mysteries series called The Three Investigators. I remembered Adranga’s name because he did a cover for Fantastic back in the sixties that I loved (I still have the issue, and the cover was also reproduced in the article.) It turns out that the Fantastic cover was Adranga’s first sale, made while he was yet in art school. The interviewer asked him about it, and it was Adranga’s answer which surprised me. Here’s what he said:

            “I took my portfolio to those two…

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Windy Con 37

6 Jul

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I wrote this con report for Bob Jennings’s outstanding SF fanzine Fadeaway back in January. With this year’s Windy Con looming on the horizon, seems like a logical candidate for my first post here.

 

MEANWHILE

BACK AT

THE CON

 

 

            Man, you gotta be really careful what you say around Bob Jennings.  He was gonna email me some info, and I said I might not get back to him till Monday, cause I was gonna be at WindyCon.  Next thing I knew, I was doing a WindyCon con report for Fadeaway.  Which meant I’d have to do more than swill beer in the con suite all weekend, I supposed.  Go to some actual events perhaps.

WindyCon 37 was held at the Westin in the Chicagosuburb of Lombard out in DupageCounty.  So Friday, November 12, I hit the expressways around two in the afternoon and rolled into the hotel parking lot…

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