I realize that most of you who are following this blog are big fans of Jeanne and Spider Robinson. You may have seen Jeanne dance, you have almost certainly read their collaborations, and likely have read a bit of Spider's fiction to boot.
"But what of this Jim guy who sometimes contributes to this blog, and about whom Jeanne says nice things?" you say. "I haven't seen any of his fiction stuff." Well you may have seen "The Intelligent Designer Speaks" but if you met me you might say that the piece doesn't qualify as fiction, and I wouldn't consider Designer Speaks cinematic in any case. So travel with me back in time, back when Jeanne and Spider were publishing Starseed - back then we didn't do "HD Digital Video" - when young filmmakers like that earlier version of James Sposto shot in good-old-fashioned Eastman T-Grained film stock - and didn't know if we "got" the shot until we saw it in the dailies, and we had to trust our guts to know when to say "that's a keeper" and move to the next setup.
A quick note of thanks: You are seeing this through the auspices of my good friend Mike Trevarthen, who still had a VHS copy of the film and digitized it for me. (I have all the original prints, but they are getting kind of scratched up - not to mention difficult to project over the Web.)
So sit back and enjoy Gin and Tonic. It has very little to do with space travel, but a lot to do with aspiration, self image and the nature of success as indicated by choice of drink.
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