Friends of the Armchair Traveller

"RESTORATION ISLAND" My friend Tom went on an expedition to a paradisal island. Tom's trip was inspired by a painting created by a friend from the sixties, Mick Glasheen. This is the painting which led to the expedition to see the real bar and Dave Glasheen on the island off far far North Queensland. While he was there Tom made a little film about the place and about Mick's brother Dave Glasheen . Here's the link to the Vimeo which I can't get to embed properly: RESTORATION ISLAND from Tom Cowan on Vimeo . Tom has also sent me these notes about his friend Mick Glasheen whom I met through Tom in the late sixties: Mick Glasheen is a legendary creator I met in Sydney in the sixties. I only know half of his interests but here are some of them: Mick escorted Buckminster Fuller in Australia and made a psychedelic video of the lecture Bucky gave here. He was one of the people who formed OZ magazine when it began in Sydney. With his time lapse camera Mick expl...

How nice it is to have friends who care to share, even when they prefer to remain anonynous. This piece came to me with no strings attached, a gift to brighten my day, to lift my spirits. I hope it does the same for you... Without much effort a carfeul netsurfer may find some "companion pieces" presented by the same opera company in marketplaces of other Italian cities. Wherever they go they surprise shoppers and spread joie de vivre! Dear Anonymous, I wish you were not so shy. I would like to tell my friends why this piece brought tears to your eyes, but now they will just have to guess. pt

  The Apocalyptic Now                                                                                                                                                                                                               by Wheeler Winston Dixon The Apocalyptic Now from Wheeler Winston Dixon on Vimeo . "The general public perception of the apocalypse is that it will manifest itself all of a sudden, as some cataclysmic event, which will sweep all before it into oblivio...

  Dear friends, I would like to propose a challenge... I propose a challenge for anyone to create what seems to be a documentary , i.e., to all intents and purposes it will look and sound like a doco, but it will be all about the future, not the present and not the past. It will be a sci-fi documentary which examines “future possibilities” from the standpoint of now. It won’t need to involve any of the standard sci-fi narrative formats such as “time travel”, “space wars”, “invasion by aliens”, “missions impossible”, it should be rather an attempt to “document the future” with or without a “storyline”, without “dramatisation” and without too much in the way of expensive CGI. No matter how factual it may seem at any time, it will be entirely speculative, entirely hypothetical, because all we can go by in examining possibilities in the future are trends from the past till now, and extrapolate from now into the future. Now you may be surprised to know that a very interesting docu...

  On Science Fiction  by David King.   Peter's recent ruminations on science fiction got me thinking about my own attitude towards the genre and what it means to me.  Much of my creative work has been in science fiction - from the very first national short story award I won in 1971 at the age of 16, the Young Australian Short Story Award for a yarn called Aeons After which, in just under 1,000-words, spanned several hundred thousand millennia from somewhere around the beginning of the Universe until just after the first Moon landing and left the judges gob-smacked by its stylistic ingenuity (their words and the reason it won) - to The Last Agent , a twisted riff on Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville with echoes of Terry Gilliam's Brazil cocooned in Burroughsian literary style and published on the now sadly-defunct original Scum Gentry website as well as on Armchair Traveller during Peter's brief flirtation with Facebook.  Then there are my films which often seem...