The mystery of the image of an astronaut cleaned by Rudesind

David Stockhoff · 02 Jul 2010, 01:59 · from 2010-July.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Thu, 01 Jul 2010 21:59:49 -0400
Subject: (urth) The mystery of the image of an
	astronaut	cleaned	by	Rudesind
In-Reply-To: <4C2CAE17.8020407 at io.com>
References: <SNT123-W186492E2214C7539E99F09CFCA0 at phx.gbl>	<3A73230B-61D0-461F-B223-68814BF7E670 at liftingfaces.com><92c575f2988ee19de16e2cce8902a5fb at imap.io.com>	<4C28F766.6030605 at verizon.net>	<004f01cb1700$8b115980$53ce4a0c@rclackey><61E50C31-27CD-484F-8480-645329555113 at liftingfaces.com>	<4C2919A9.5040206 at verizon.net>	<8FC63659E0974CDC93D035CBE24C3597@jill>	<4C2A8E44.5040704 at verizon.net>	<4C2BFC40.6060404 at verizon.net>	<4C2C07E6.3040303 at io.com>	<4C2C8246.4000506 at verizon.net>
	<4C2CAE17.8020407 at io.com>
Message-ID: <4C2D4815.5060101 at verizon.net>

That's true. So perhaps this painting is not something Wolfe made up, 
but rather a painting by a person he made up, in Borgesian fashion.

Either way, it is a study in symbols/icons becoming more real than reality.

Unless, of course, there IS a real model.

Jeff Wilson wrote:
> On 7/1/2010 6:55 AM, David Stockhoff wrote:
>> Jeff, no one said pulp covers were more inspirational than photos.
>>
>> But if you eliminate Apollo 11 photos and Alan Bean, what's left?
>
> A composite of iconic images, as you speculated. The Apollo 11 photo 
> of Buzz saluting the flag has the grey regolith and the gold visor as 
> well, but it was earlier Apollo 8 orbital photos that show the earth 
> rising over the lunar horizon that were hugely popularized. Some of 
> the Apollo 11 photos do show the earth in the sky, but not terribly 
> prominently. IIRC, Van Gogh was known to have put Ursa Major above 
> southern-looking European landscapes; no reason some unborn master yet 
> to paint couldn't do the same for Neil and Buzz.
>

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