SCIENCE FICTION/FILM $39.95 EMSHWILLER:TWO INFINITY X THE ART & LIFE OF ED AND CAROL EMSHWILLER FROM ALEX EISENSTEIN’S FOREWORD: R t can be said that Ed Emshwiller did it all LE IL Iin his 14-year, 700-odd-cover career in W illustration, including men’s adventure work SH and mystery mag covers. Simultaneously, M he conducted a modestly successful E L career as a New York gallery painter in the O Abstract mode. After 1965 ... he left illustra- R tion and gallery painting to be a full-time A C creator of art cinema .... Although he was D more than competent at all forms of draw- N ing and painting, and a skilled incidental portraitist, it is probably safe to say A that, outside film and video art, Ed will be remembered best for his science fic- D E tion work. Especially that vast, varied array of stunning SF covers. In the F words of Samuel R. Delany: “for thousands on thousands of readers, Emsh O provided the vision of a vivid, material, and living world, a world that ranged E from newly imagined subjects to newly imagined objects, a nature and a cul- IF ture, an organicism and a technology, that ... no one had seen before.” L & T R ISBN-13: 978-1-933065-08-3 53995 A E H T ËxHSLJNDy065083zv&:$:^:^:& LUIS ORTIZ LuisLuis OrtizOrtiz NONSTOP introductionsintroductions byby PRESS CarolCarolAlexAlex EmshwillerEmshwiller EisensteinEisenstein && LUIS ORTIZ introduction by Carol Emshwiller foreword and artwork captions by Art Consultant Alex Eisenstein nonstop press NEW YORK 2007 for Karan Library of American Artists, vol. two EMSHWILLER: Infinity x Two First edition Copyright ©2007 Luis Ortiz Art copyright ©Ed Emshwiller Estate Introduction ©2007 Carol Emshwiller Alex Eisenstein foreword & captions ©2007 Alex Eisenstein No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopy, recording, or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher and the artist’s estate. Nonstop Press [email protected] POB 981 Peck Slip Station New York, NY 10272-0981 publisher’s catalog-in-publication available upon request BOOK & JACKET DESIGN Luis Ortiz COPY EDITOR Beret Erway PRODUCTION BY NONSTOP INK ISBN-13 cloth: 978-1-933065-08-3 ISBN-13 ebook: 978-1-933065-09-0 Printed in S. Korea CONTENTS acknowledgments 4 Introduction 5 Carol Emshwiller Foreword 7 Alex Eisenstein 1: Looking into The Future 17 2: Infinity x 2 23 3: The Art of Things to Come 29 4: Red Maple Drive 45 5: Science Fiction Boom 55 6: Art first, Story second 67 7: So be a Camera 75 8: “Oh, there he goes again” 91 9: Rainy day scenarios 107 10: Take a number 121 11: all kinds of branches 131 12: illusion of reality 141 13: digital blobs 147 14: Avantopia 155 notes 164 Ed Emshwiller Filmography 169 Index 170 captions for Emsh artwork, unless indicated, are by Alex Eisenstein ACKNOWLEDGMENTS HERE ARE MANY people that helped in bringing this book about. Foremost, I would Tlike to thank Carol for always taking the time to answer more of my errant queries — and also for reading and commenting on the manuscript. My thanks also to Susan Emshwiller for her help in filling in details of her father’s CalArts days, and for supplying images and family letters. Peter “Stoney” Emshwiller, for his reminiscences of family life in Levittown. And Mac Emshwiller for giving me many details of his brother’s early life. Many thanks also to Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg, and Alex Eisenstein for the sharing of Emsh stories. I am also beholden to Alex for making many Emsh images, which he has collected over the years for his own delayed Emsh book, available to me. To Robert Haller, of the Anthology Film Archives, my appreciation for allowing me to dig through their Emshwiller film and video library, and also for supplying slides of Emsh art from his personal SF collec- tion. A special thank you to Aniko “Coco” Halverson, Reference Coordinator and Instruction Librarian, California Institute of the Arts, for going above and beyond the call of duty to track down Emshwiller’s personal and professional papers, and expediting access to them. And Alvy Ray Smith for all his help in filling in details of Ed’s work at NYIT. I would also like to acknowledge the bibliographical work on Ed Emshwiller done by Kathryn Elder through the Anthology Film Archives. Her efforts saved me much wear and tear. Special thanks are also due to: Earl Kemp, Gary Lovisi, Bill Griffith, Jane Frank, Paul Di Filippo, Andrew Porter, Joe Wrzos, Dick Eney, Todd Mason, Curt Phillip, Michael Waite, John Boston, Stephen Jones, Hagit Hadaya, Robert Weinberg, Jonas Mekas, Lee Gold, Ted White, Greg Pickersgill, Ned Brooks, Anne Panning of the Brockport Writers Forum, Vibeke Sorensen, Eric Solstein, and Ed Hulse. I NTRODUCTION Wanderings and Wonderings Carol Emshwiller CAN’T IMAGINE all the work Luis did for this book … some of it with me. He must have Carol painted by Ed Emshwiller, I taken dozens of tapes interviewing me. I enjoyed our meetings. He always brought me cof- 1957. fee from the Starbucks on the corner. Sometimes a couple of bottles of sparkling water. He knew I liked that. Then there were his calls to Ed’s brother and to my son. We had one meeting with my daughter when she was visiting NY. Also calls to our neighbors in Levittown, and then to the people who worked with Ed on his first videos, and I’m sure to many more people than I know about. So much material! I’d have given up long before, or tried to whittle things down to some small part of Ed’s life, but Luis, instead, enlarged his research, going out to a history of the science fiction magazines, and then of the movie peo- ple and companies Ed worked with, and then the video people. I can’t think of anything that isn’t in this book. Well, here’s one thing, there’s a book that influenced us both a lot: Robbe- Grillet’s book FOR A NEW NOVEL. I read it to Ed over and over. That’s one thing we both loved, me reading to him. He hardly ever read except for the mag- azine Scientific American. Reading to him, I could share the things I loved with him and he liked being read to, sometimes as he was painting or in the car when he was driving. I’ve forgotten that book by Robbe-Grillet though I think it’s part of me now. I do remember part of it was about not personifying things. I remember one exam- ple of what not to do. Don’t have the mountain glowering or frowning down on the village below. Also, don’t have similes, though in my class with Kenneth Koch, 5 he said always “simile” things “down.” Don’t say the ice cream cone is like a snowy mountain, say the mountain is like an ice cream cone. Ed fit right in with that idea when he had, in Relativity, a plan- et that, as it came closer, became a golf ball. (But, actually, in my own writing I don’t have similes at all unless one of my characters thinks them.) Ed and I already believed what was in Robbe Grillet’s book, but he clarified it for us. Our whole life together was mostly discussing art and movies…and our children. Those are all we talked about … and we talked about them ALL the time. Having gone to the same Bauhaus ori- ented art school, we mostly agreed on art and movies and music so we just reinforced each other. The University of Michigan Art School was into avant-garde art, but also strong on the old tech- niques, too. Ed’s realistic painting of an old army boot that so impressed the art editor, Washington Irving van der Poel, at Galaxy Magazine was done in a class called rendering, where you had to paint something — just about anything you picked — as realistically as possible. I never took that class so I was always awed by what came out of it. Actually I was always awed and impressed by just about everything Ed did. Watching his paint- ings developing little by little was like magic. And later the movies impressed me, too, and then the video work. I may have gotten mad at him plenty of times, and we had plenty of arguments, but I never, ever, ever stopped admiring his work. hat last trip, driving across the country with Ed a few months before he died was awful. Ed was Tin a lot of pain the whole time. I think I did most of the driving, but I don’t remember much about it. We had just had a wonderful visit at our daughter’s in Maine and with our grandchild adopted from India. Ed had some pain then, but not as much as a few days later when we were half way across the country. I remember one rainy night going out to try and find an open drug store to find something for him for pain. Aside from that cold rainy night I don’t remember anything more about the trip. I do remember, back at his house near CalArts, taking him to doctor after doctor and test after test—in a wheel chair. He could hardly walk because of the pain. Finally they put him in the hospital.