Science fiction has always served the writer well as a platform from which to spin a tale. The alternative settings and realities—be it past, present or future—enable classic stories and myths to run the gamut of human experience.
Mind boggling technology, alien characters and civilizations, time warps, and space travel, as well as alternative present realities, are limited only by imagination. If a movie is the intended product, the state of the art is such that if you can think it and write it…with a big enough budget it can be placed on the big screen for everyone to see and enjoy.
Music, too, when paired with an interesting image, is an integral ingredient of sci-fi presentation. If you want to gauge how important a part music is to the whole, cue up your favorite action sequence on a sci-fi DVD, cut the sound, and revel in…how incredibly dull it is without that mood altering wall of sound.
It’s easy to picture Venice, California, as a setting for a sci-fi story: When the fog rolls in from the sea with an eerie glow to blanket the coast from pier to boardwalk and stalls and shops to canals to yachts in neighboring Marina Del Rey to the Santa Monica Ferris Wheel blinking in the distance and the many bars and dives and elegant restaurants along Abbot Kinney to the oddly shaped homes and buildings in various styles of architectural experimentation, all populated with denizens from every strata of society including artists, hustlers, street musicians, alkies, junkies, skateboarders, muscle beach devotees, spiritualists, health nuts, religious and political fanatics, Hollywood celebrities, tourists from the far reaches of the planet and beyond, and the homeless who appear to have grown organically from the pavement itself, YES, Mother Venice has taken them all in and they move and groove to the musical strains of blues, country, hip-hop, jazz, and ethnic primal drum beat rhythms traveling on the night air and…yeah…it’s easy to picture Venice as a setting for some kind of weird-ass sci-fi story. And that’s how it all started…
One day, after a walk with my Toy Fox Terrier, Roxy, I took a long hard look at the fifteen square blocks where we live and said, “Yeah…that’s it, Roxy…that’s the album I want to do…Venice Sci-Fi.” Roxy agreed and said, “woof,” and sure enough, two and a half years later…here it is…Venice-Sci-Fi…with every song, image and thought in these songs loosely traced back to something that triggered my imagination within these fifteen square blocks.
Maybe I could have done it someplace else if I were in the same frame of mind, but surely it would have been different. Like Greenwich Village in Manhattan, this little piece of real estate has always been a magnet for the artistically inclined. Just Google it and you’ll see what I’m talking about. Even Jim Morrison and the Doors are part of this history.
That’s it…I’m done…check it out…Venice-Sci-Fi.
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