Phone Calls From Far Away

“One must be of one’s own time, and paint
what one sees, without worrying about fashion.”

Edouard Manet
quoted in “Manet”
by Francoise Cachin

“Beginning of the End” is a 1957 American science fiction film directed by Bert I. Gordon and starring Peter Graves and Peggie Castle. The film is about an agricultural scientist (Graves) who has successfully grown gigantic vegetables using radiation. Unfortunately, the vegetables are then eaten by locusts (the swarming phase of short-horned grasshoppers), which grow to gigantic size and attack the nearby city of Chicago. The film is generally recognized for its "atrocious" special effects and considered to be one of the most poorly written and acted science fiction motion pictures of the 1950s.

“Beginning of the End”
at Wikipedia
(The image is actress Peggie Castle
pretending to be a reporter talking
on the phone in her car.)

“The Giant Gila Monster” is a 1959 hot rod monster science fiction film directed by Ray Kellogg, and produced by Ken Curtis. It stars Don Sullivan, a veteran of several low budget monster and zombie films, Lisa Simone, the French contestant for Miss Universe of 1957, as well as Fred Graham, comedy relief Shug Fisher, KLIF disc jockey Ken Knox and Bob Thompson. This low-budget B-Movie featured a cast of unknown actors, and the effects included a live gila monster filmed on a scaled-down model landscape. The movie has been released on DVD and is considered a cult classic.

“The Giant Gila Monster”
at Wikipedia
(The image is actor Don Sullivan
pretending to be an auto mechanic talking
on the phone on the garage wall where he works.)

All my life I’ve seen people talk on phones.

Often they were talking about monsters.

Before astronauts landed on the Moon
phones mounted on walls and under dashboards
had wires connecting their various parts.

Often wires connected phones to phones, too.

Now we’re all like astronauts with no wires
and those phones are extinct like dinosaurs.

Now we’re all like paleontologists
when we look at old pictures or old films
as if they’re rocks and we’re chipping away
at random accumulations of stone
to reveal ancient things that once were here
but now are hung up on. Disconnected.

All my life I’ve seen people talk on phones
and when they finished talking they hung up.

The dinosaurs are disconnected now
just talked about as if they were monsters.

Is extinction like getting hung up on?

Did the dinosaurs finish and hang up?

The dinosaurs are disconnected now
but nowadays most phones do not use wires.

Now maybe the dinosaurs can call back.

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Parsimony And Aberrant Forms


Ancient Cities Of The Moon