christopherbollinger
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Monteczuma
I have bathed again, the water rich In frothy copalxocotl, I am made clean. As I dress, I am informed that there are representatives from a king across the sea approaching our city. From my palace I can see the glints of sunlight coming off of their metal clothing-standing among them are huge beasts which…
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Cortez
Walking down from out of the small hills, we saw on the lake, floating like a ship in a fevered dream, Tenochtitlan. Its palaces and temples and strange structures unnamed, its majesty rivaling anything in Europe. Everything in ordered rows, painted in bright colors, marketplaces full of people and fruits and vegetables and wares, everywhere…
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Jupiter From Europa
This is an acrylic on canvas painting, with color pencil for outlining and scragglies on the surface ice grooves. Larger version:
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A Warm Place to Eat
Illustration for my story, A Warm Place to Eat.
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Australopithecus
My wife and I visited with this little creature when she came to Seattle in 2009. Our kinship extends across time and space, where the exploding supernovas of billions of years ago provided the raw materials to allow our creation. Evolution gives us insight into what we are and how we came to be. It…
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Inspace
Garcia held onto the fusion radiator assembly, looking towards the bright light of Beta Centauri. She felt at one with the cosmos, right now at this perfect moment in time. She knew-and soon the solar system of her birth would know too; humankind was not alone in the universe. The hour would come when we…
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What Does God Need With a Starship?
The plot of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier is that a charismatic religious leader hijacks the starship Enterprise in order to fly to the center of the galaxy and literally meet God in the alien equivalent of Eden. The movie is widely considered the least entertaining in the Star Trek canon, one where the…
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Curtis LeMay
Red and orange glints off of the buffered stainless steel bellies of cruel butterflies, and in curious curvatures the collapsing wooden homes are reflected on bubble glass. The flicker and leap of crackling paper browning and blackening where once was a room partition and a sleeping mat. The horrible bee buzz rumble overhead is the…
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The Ballad of Pete Seeger
One of my great heroes has passed. Pete Seeger was America. He stood up for the rights of workers, fought against corporate warmongers, and worked to unite the races. His music is classic and eternal. His dreams a gift to all of us. This is a meager little song I wrote for him: Pete Seeger…
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Listless
There are shallows of water- here after the tides receded. Gathered together lie small urchins and slimy anemones, tentacles laying flaccid in the salty water. The stones around the pool’s perimeter are stained with dark purple mosses and have cracked through over thousands of years of altered weather. The water is hot, hotter…
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Her: A Man-Machine Interface
Her a film by Spike Jonze On the surface, Her is a traditional love story told from the point of view of an emotionally damaged writer named Thomas, played by Joaquin Phoenix. We meet him working in his futuristic Los Angeles office, dictating a love letter to someone, only to find out that his job…
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Five Til’ Midnight
“What time do you have?” Looking down at his watch he saw in the smallest of flashing increments the minute hand twitch along its orbit, and the second hand swooping past around the face to pass the last notch at vertical zero. “Five til’ midnight,” was the terse reply. And yet he watched the…
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LB Civic Center: A New City Hall
The current Long Beach city hall is a fourteen story tower of rough concrete and steel, faced in Darth Vader-black glass overlooking a decrepit and frankly hideous civic center plaza. A marvel of 1970s design and engineering, its structural flaws threaten to topple it in event of a major earthquake. In my dream redesign of…
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LB Civic Center: A New Main Library
The current main library in downtown Long Beach is a dark concrete cave set into the vibrant urban fabric of the city. At one time it was considered a modern marvel and it’s brutalist aesthetic was the height of 20th century design. As part of my dream plan redevelopment of the current civic center I…
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LB Civic Center: Historical Society Building
This is the standalone model of the building I designed for the Long Beach Historical Society as part of my LB Civic Center dream project https://thenuminouscosmos.com/2013/12/28/a-new-long-beach-civic-center/ The building would have space for traditional museum displays as well as research areas and a large model of the city, similar to the Panorama of New York city at…
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A New Long Beach Civic Center
The city of Long Beach, California is currently in the midst of pouring over proposals to replace it’s vintage 1970s era Civic Center with a newer, larger, more environmentally friendly structure. Long Beach has a rich history of city halls, starting from its first building constructed during the last decade of the 19th century. It…
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Forbidden Planet
I watched again the classic science fiction film Forbidden Planet and I am still struck by how advanced it was for its time period. The story is now a fairly standard trope of a human exploration vessel sent out to track down and determine what happened to a ship lost in space. The crew and…
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The Unlived Ones
The fear. It’s a striking piece of information that lands in your lap and causes more obscene gesturing than would a cup of scalding hot coffee. People go through life with the deeply held notion that there is somehow meaning behind it all. The sharp, full bodied scent of life fills the nostrils and…
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A Novel Situation
I am currently experimenting with the layout of the graphic novel concept I am working on titled “Colloquium.” This is a sample mock up of the first page, using an original pen and ink layout drawing that has been digitally inked and processed. I used an open source font for the ‘hand’ letting in the…
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1930’s Long Beach, Colorized
I love visualizing cities as they existed during the many decades of their lives. The city of Long Beach has changed dramatically in the years since these original photos were taken. I ‘borrowed’ them from the Los Angeles Public Library’s digital archive. The photos show a semi-aerial view close to Lincoln Park and the second…
The Numinous Cosmos 