Homage to the Other Cinema

Anyone in or around Valencia Street in San Francisco this Saturday might like to know that I am reading extracts from ‘Welcome to Mars’ at the Other Cinema during its first presentation of the autumn.

I’ve been looking forward to this event since it was first arranged with Craig Baldwin earlier in the summer. I am huge admirer of his work and enjoyed my previous visit to his underground laboratory, beneath the sidewalks of the Mission district at Easter 2007. For more details on the reading, please check either the Other Cinema website or Google Calendar. In the meantime I cannot resist reprinting Craig’s copy for the evening in its entirety.

‘Kook-expert Ken Hollings jets in from London-town for the North American book-launch of his "Welcome to Mars", a sub-pop Cult Study of Fifties America, on the bizarre intersection of cybernetics, behavior modification, atomic weapons, and UFOs, highlighting how these currents were refracted through the visual surfaces of popular culture, domestic design, and suburban living. Responding from the US side, Megan Shaw Prelinger, representing her own forthcoming book "Another Science Fiction: Advertising the Space Race", recalls the Eisenhower years with a fascinating flight through a pictorial history of aerospace ads, retrieved from her own SoMA library. For the third leg of this Cold War re-visitation, local A/V artist John Davis returns from, yes, Moldavia, with the media-archaeological remains of the very last Soviet newsreels, reflecting on this same period, but from the other side of the "Iron Curtain"! He screens the most astonishing agit-prop artifacts, and in fact performs an original sonic score, to a particularly uncanny iteration of Soviet Surrealism. Paranoia in orbit.’

The Other Cinema is at 992 Valencia Street, San Francisco, CA 94110 – telephone (415)648-0654. Fun starts at 8.30pm. Admission is $6.00. Bring everyone you’ve ever met in your entire life.