Rudy Rucker's Blog, page 26

Photo Bin: N.Herbert, Occidental, SF, Journals.

I have a lot of old photos that I never got around to putting into a post. So I thought I’d reduce my inventory in a few long Photo Bin posts. But first a word from your sponsor. Click for a larger version of the book cover. Nice blurbs for my Journals from two of […]

Art Show. New Paintings. Fujifilm X100T Camera.

My art show at Borderlands opened this week. It’ll run through July 6. We’ll have a reception part on Saturday, June 13, at 3 in the afternoon. We’ll hang out, I’ll do a reading from Journals 1990-2014, and give a little tour of the paintings. Click for a larger version of the poster. And here’s […]

Podcast #84. Reading from JOURNALS, Santa Cruz

May 1, 2015. Event in Santa Cruz, sponsored by Scott Clements of LOGOS Books. The tape includes part of an introduction by Scott’s partner Andrew, the organizer of the “Santa Cruz College” lecture series. I read about six passages from my Journals 1990-2014, and then we did Q&A. Good sound quality and a lively, responsive […]

Podcast #84. Reading from JOURNALS, May 1, 2015.

Event in Santa Cruz, sponsored by Scott Clements of LOGOS Books. The tape includes part of an introduction by Scott’s partner Andrew, the organizer of the “Santa Cruz College” lecture series. I read about six passages from my Journals 1990-2014, and then we did Q&A. Good sound quality and a lively, responsive crowd. Subscribe to […]

Cyberpunk Day in LA with Bruce Sterling

I’m giving a talk about my Journals 1990-2014 on Friday night at 7:30 above Logos Books in Santa Cruz. Details in this image below. “Santa Cruz College” is just a manner of speaking, the sponsoring group isn’t “really” a college.

Last weekend I was at the University of Southern California in LA for a day of talks, panels, and workshops about cyberpunk. My old pal Bruce Sterling was there too, also Mark Pauline of SRL, famed for his “bad robots.” The pioneering VR maven Scott Fisher—now a film school dean at USC—hosted the event, and eventually his group will be posting some video.

[Photo by Karen Marcelo]

In the afternoon they played a compilation video with about a hundred clips from Hollywood movies showing people’s minds being removed from their brains and/or being implanted into robots. I like to claim that my 1982 book Software was the first SF novel to talk about this precise idea—although sometimes people argue with me about this. Somewhat in the same ballpark, the ancient movie Metropolis has a cool scene with a woman’s body-shape being copied onto a robot in a lab amid showers of Tesla coil sparks.

But I do think Software was the first novel where (a) A human’s mind is extracted and stored on a computer, and then (b) The mind is copied onto a robot body. (I once got involved in a comment thread debate on this somewhere on this blog, but I can’t find that thread today.)

I’m issuing a new second edition of my Complete Stories this week, including all my stories from 1976 right up to 2014. You can browse the whole book online, and you’ll find buy links there as well…it exists in Kindle, generic EPUB ebook, and in (two volume) paperback form.

In LA, we stayed in the downtown Standard hotel. The downtown of LA is a lot livelier than it was a few years ago. A few blocks are as bustling as Manhattan, and with all these 1950s tan-brick office buildings. The LA Library is very cool, with weird languages on the front steps.

Bruce and I took a walk one morning, and were pleased to see a movie shoot in progress. The extras and the two actors were fleeing from something up in the sky, maybe a monster, maybe a UFO. The cameraman was using, incredibly, nothing but a Canon 5D SLR camera, mounted on a rack with a good directional mic. Another few years you’ll be able to make hi-def movies of your life, just walking around with a “third-eye flat-cam” on your forehead.

[Photo by Bruce Sterling]

We came across a huge wall of conduit pipes—later someone told me the pipes are stuffed with internet fibers. Like an Aztec monument, kind of.

We also saw a cool poster advocating quake preparedness. Note that those cracks in the ground spell “QUAKE.”

Bruce and I were basically taking pictures of all the same things. Similar sensibilities. Great to see him. He gave a good talk on cyberpunk at the meeting, saying something about the style being characterized by crammed sentences and eyeball kicks…and then he somehow got into a rap about Lafcadio Hearn, an expat writer like Bruce.

Bruce has a good Tumblr blog going these days…the pictures kind of clarify his in-person word avalanche.

Dig these rails laid down for a dolly camera shoot. Stairway to the heaven of media omnipresence.

Harking back, here’s a nice water tank I saw near Occidental, California, a few weeks ago.

Another shot of me and Chairman Bruce, this one by Scott Fisher.

And here’s Bruce, USC Prof Henry Jenkins, and Scott Fisher.

“Dangerous Pass,” Journals, SF Scenes, Talk & Panel

Today’s eye candy, my latest painting. This one took me about thirty hours, a lot of layers and detail.

“Dangerous Pass” oil and acrylic on canvas, April, 2015, 40” x 30”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

I painted Dangerous Pass to help previsualize a scene in my novel Million Mile Roadtrip. My chracters are on an endless world, and they’re migrating from one Earth-sized basin to the next. They have two flying mascots, one is a UFO named Nunu, the other is a blobby creature who calls herself Meatball. My party includes Villy and Zoe in front, being lovers, with Villy just a bit uneasy, and Villy’s younger brother Scud is in back. The cadmium-red Scud is on the alert, and he’s noticing that the stones in this mountain pass are…alive. The composition and vibe of this painting were inspired by Peter Bruegel’s Conversion of St. Paul.

My 828 page book, Journals 1990-2014 is on sale now

* Paperback ($24.95) Amazon.

* (Kindle) ($4.95) Amazon.

* (Kindle and EPUB) ($4.95) via Transreal Books

And you can read a hefty free sample of the Journals as an online webpage.

I’ll be giving a one or two hour talk on the Journals at the so-called “College of Santa Cruz” group on the 3rd floor of the Logos Books building on Pacific Ave in Santa Cruz at 7:15 on Friday, May 1. The door is in the back of the building. Talk title, “Rewriting My Past.”

Oh, and another upcoming event, on Friday, April 24, I’ll be on a Cyberpunk Panel at the University of Southern California in LA. Bruce Sterling, Marc Pauline, and other fellow droids will be there too.

We spent Easter with our son Rudy Jr. and his family. Got a nice big collection of eggs. And endless line. Love the bare feet in this photo, so human.

We also went to our grandson’s third birthday party at Rudy’s house. They have a toy plastic play house and they put up a towel so the kids could “fish” by holding a line over the towel and getting, maybe, a kid-drawn paper fish in the clothespin at the end of the line. This image is like a Fairyland tollbooth.

Sylvia and I stayed in downtown SF for two nights for my 69th (!) birthday. At the cute Hotel Boheme in North Beach. We hit the recently refurbished Coit Tower. This mural is bird related.

Another shot of son Rudy’s patio. I like the plants and the toys. It’s like a diorama of life in the early 21st century. All the picture needs is people.

The top of Coit tower has a nice open feel, with high arches and the open sky. Some of the little windows around the bottom open up and you can breathe in that high ocean-scented air.

Branches on the floor of an old growth redwood grove. Like calligraphy.

We saw this on another trip, this one up to Occidental, CA—a spot I’d never visited, between Sebastopol and Bodega Bay. A friend of mine, Roger House, and his wife MaryLu let us use their AirBnb cabin for two nights. I got to know Roger as he proofread the Journals. He has a great eye for typos. And another of my friends, Michael Troutman did copy-editing and fact-checking, helping to get the proper names spelled right, as well as picking up the remaining typos.

View from Coit Tower. Click for a larger version of the panorama.

SF really isn’t a very large city, but it’s a gem.

I always like getting out of the house.

It’s good to finally have the Journals done.

Mojo Working. JOURNALS Funded.

I got my writing mojo back, returned from the underworld one more time, and I’m busy with my next novel Million Mile Roadtrip again, piling on the eyeball kicks, the unlikely incidents, and the rude dialog. Having fun with it. Kicking with my third hip. Like a Puppeteer, if you remember those three-legged guys from Niven’s classic Ringworld.

Here’s my current design for the cover for my Journals. You can click on it to make it bigger. I made it to the fundraising goal for my Kickstarter drive a couple of days ago. Many thanks to you kind and generous souls out there.

The odd thing is that, financially at least, I do better by self-publishing my books and running Kickstarters for them. Which is not to say that I might not go back to a commerical publisher for Million Mile Roadtrip — which is meant to be a book that can sell into the young adult market. At least that’s what I think, but publishers have been known to disagree with my judgements! I’ll have to see what happens. Even if I do have a commercial option for it, I may ultimately go the Kickstart / self-pub route anyway. In any case, Million Mile Roadtrip won’t be done till late this fall at the earliest. My characters are still just fixing up their car and they’ve got…a million miles to go.

Last week my wife and I hit this ancient North Beach bar called the Saloon. They have live blues there all the time and real x-section of people…not techs and yups all that much. Brown people in the mix.

I loved this one Hawaiian couple sitting at the bar near us. At some point, with no change of expression, the woman gets up and starts dancing—or, rather, making ritualized dance gestures with her arms, forearms up, forearms down. Love the dance gesture.

The band (Johnny Nitro and the Doorslammers) played one long, mostly instrumental, song with the chorus, “I’ll take you there,” and indeed the music did take me “there” to a land of peace and zonkfulness and clear white light.

“Saucer Hall” oil and acrylic on canvas, February, 2015, 30” x 24”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

And then I turned around and used that song/experience in a new chapter for my novel called “Saucer Hall.” I love it when the real world snaps right on top of whatever I’m writing. The muse in action.

Contact sheet of some images to appear in my online Photo Supplement for my JOURNALS. Click for a gigundo zoomable version of the sheet.

If I can raise a little more dough for my Journals, I’ll put in the time to make an online photo supplement with lots of photos to plug into the text.

At this point in tech, it’s not practical to put the photos into the paperback/hardback or into the ebooks. For a print book, it makes the books too long and too unwieldy to edit, and for the ebooks, it makes the file too big to comfortably download. So I’ll just figure out some kind of web site design for posting the images.

Saw all these people digging for beach glass in Davenport, CA, last month. Like sea turtles laying eggs. Maybe the beach was, in the old days, a dump? (Thus the profusion of glass.) Always interesting to see a crowd of humans intent on something like this.

Hadn’t been to Davenport in awhile. Love the water-sculpted rocks, and the patterns of the seaweed. Mother nature, always the greatest artist of all.

My Journals Project.

So I’m about to launch a new book, my Journals 1990-2014 written over the last twenty-five years. The finished volume is as long as three or four novels combined. A long-running adventure. Kind of tour of my life.

Me in 2004 leading students in Geneseo, NY, on a “reality tour” including the house where my novel White Light is set.

Editing the Journals was a pleasant, nostalgic exercise—and it’s given me a clearer idea about what kind of person I am. The image above shows an early marked-up draft proof, which has a different cover from the final version. The final cover is more like the one in the image below.

As I often do these days, I’m publishing the new book via Transreal Books, and I’m running a Kickstarter drive to raise money for it. If you sign up there, you get an ebook, paperback, or hadback—it’s not so different from placing an advance order. The books will be going out in May or June.

https://d2pq0u4uni88oo.cloudfront.net/projects/1689561/video-512159-h264_high.mp4

I made a nice video for the drive.

One of my inspirations was The Diaries of Franz Kafka: 1910-1923. I love Kafka’s spontaneous surrealism and his intimate tone. Another model is the mammoth Andy Warhol Diaries. I found Warhol’s book hypnotic. A portrait of a certain time.

What’s in my Journals?

• Introspection and philosophizing. I turn to my journals when I’m undergoing a personal crisis—I find it calming to write what’s on my mind. And I’m always looking for a easy path to enlightenment.

• Journalism. I like to describe the things that I see going on in the daily world around me. I’ve always enjoyed Jack Kerouac’s practice of using words to sketching the scene around me as it’s going on.

• Travel. I’m particularly likely to work on my journals when I’m on the road or on a day-trip. I have many series of entries in San Francisco, New York, Europe, Mexico, the Caribbean, and the South Pacific.

• Writing notes. As a transrealist, I like seeing the world in terms of science-fiction, casting daily events as ideas for my books. It’s hard to keep writing year after year, and sometimes in my notes I’m encouraging myself to keep at it. Here’s a page listing my books and software whose creation is described in the Journals.

To give you a fuller overview, I’ve posted an extensive table of contents as well.

I don’t expect many people to read my hefty Journals straight through. Dipping in is fine. And of course the ebook versions of the book will be searchable.

Another approach might simply be for you to root around, subliminally guided by the muse. You’ll find what you need.

Skiing in Wyoming. New Hip.

Sylvia and I were in Pinedale, Wyoming, for four nights, visiting our daughter Isabel.

You fly into Jackson Hole, and wham, you’re in the Tetons.

Isabel has a jewelry store in Pinedale. I love looking at all the stuff in her shop.

Nothing more fascinating than the studio of a working artist.

For me the high point of the trip was when I went cross-country skiing on virgin snow on a high mountain ridge above Fremont Lake with Isabel and her husband Gus. Such a feel of being on another planet.

On the trip I was reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 all the while. Alternating between feeling despair and hope about my own novel. He has lot of so-called terraria and aquaria, which are little worlds made from hollowed-out asteroids, in some ways like the basin worlds my characters will drive through. I like his focus on the different kinds of biomes, like alpine, rain forest, taiga, arctic, forest.

KSR excels at nature writing—staggering scenes on Mercury, Saturn, and Earth. And he gets into deep stuff about social history, quite serious and enlightening…when I do that, it’s more in a satirical Sheckley-style way.

It’s always fun walking around Pinedale. I like how this one guy has an old 1930s car in his front yard. Very R. Crumb, I think of the cover of Zap Comix #0 .

Another shot of me high up on the peak. I wear these things called gaiters around my ankles and my shins when I ski—they keep the snow from getting into your low-cut ski shoes. A tricky thing about my old gaiters is that, in order to fasten the snaps on their outer sides, I kind of need to push my knees in towards the center and twist my body.

But this is a bad thing to do if you have artificial hips, you can pop your hip out this way. I have two artificial hips: one (less good) from 2011, and one (slightly better model) from 2012.

On my last afternoon in Pinedale, I popped out the old artificial hip on my left side by twisting, squatting, and turning my knee to fasten that button my ski gaiter. I was pitifully excited about taking another ski, this one was to be on the surface of the frozen lake.

A slow crunch and slide and it’s out. It’s the third time a pop has happened on that truly crappy left hip. The previous two times I went to a clinic and the people there sedated me, pulled really hard on my leg, and popped the hip back in.

But the medics in the Pinedale clinic were somehow unable to do this, although at first we didn’t realize that they’d failed. Long story short, I underwent a grinding level-eight-out-of-ten pain haze on a very long and much delayed air trip back to my regular hip doctor in Los Gatos. I was taking a pain pill every two or three hours, which leveled it out for me. Flatness of affect.

I did see one pain + meds hallucination, a guy at a table near us in a terminal during our endless airplane trip, the guy was wearing a dark beige parka, and for a moment the wrinkled hood shape looked like a creased face containing a single large eye. Everything’s of value if you’re an SF writer.

I’d hoped my Los Gatos doctor could just pop the hip back in, but he felt it would be better to do a full re-install—with a new fake hip. An “amendment” as they call it. Went to the hospital and pre-registered, which took a really long time, with lots of redundant filling out of very nearly identical forms.

As I was riding the pain pills, the very prolonged form-filling-out process didn’t bother me. Calm acceptance. At ease in the moment. Able to stare at a talking face without caring what it’s saying. But, it’s not like being high—it’s not satisfying. It’s more like being tired. I can use this mental quality for the state of mind of one of my aliens.

Driving back from the pre-registration, with the operation slated for the next morning, we stopped by the supermarket and I wondered if I might be about to die. I used a trick I like to do when in this situation, I looked for the beauty in the world around me. Fluorescent lights and reflected trees.

The next morning I went under the knife for three hours, with spinal tap anaesthetic for my lower body, and they dosed me with Michael Jackson propofol for my head. Eventually I awoke in fits and starts in a large room with at least a dozen or maybe twenty patients coming to. Like deep-sleeper starship troopers being resuscitated. Everyone is completely out of it. Like, “Huh?” and “Wha?” The surgery recovery room. No family members allowed in here, just nurses and aides, fully unintelligible.

Conversations around me, and I imagine the conversations are important and that they include remarks directed towards me, or instructions I’m supposed to follow, or opportunities I need to pick up on. I have the feeling that the conversations relate to surfing. I try to say something in response, but I’m not sure I really do. I keep nodding off, sinking back into deep inattention.

I spent a day in the hospital, and the doctor let me go home early. Lots of pills. On the nod. He scraped my bone away from the old socket like a diver using his knife to free an anchor fluke from fans of overgrown coral. And sliced and sewed my flesh.

These two pushy physical-therapy-counselor women kept coming by my hospital room right before I left. They wanted to lecture me about the importance of exercise and careful motion, and even though at some level I knew they were right, they seemed bossy, impatient, condescending. One of the women was threatening to block my release.

It was handy to be fully loaded on meds—so I that could vacantly and insolently stare at this talking face that annoyed me, tuning it out.

Back home now, with a solid new hip, recuperating pretty fast, already able to walk, and doing an hour of therapy exercise every day. With a fresh bundle of useful SF material. And none of the pain takes away the joy of skiing that high ridge. And the joy of seeing the Isabel Jewelry world headquarters.

3 New Paintings for MILLION MILE ROAD TRIP

I’m moving along on my next novel, Million Mile Roadtrip. I’m maybe 20% done, which feels like it’s enough so that I can act like I’m actually going to write the whole book. I already posted about the book on January, 11, 2015, talking about how I was thinking of this as a YA book, as my characters are 13, 17, and 18.

I’ve done three new paintings for the novel recently.

“Deep Space Saucers” oil on canvas, January, 2015, 24” x 20”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

This is, in a way, an abstract painting. An exercise in composition and hue. I was thinking of the painter Larry Poons, who flourished in the ’60s with compositions of ovals scattered across a large canvas. Of course I’d rather draw 3D saucers than 2D ovals. So I started out with the saucers, then found a nice background color that makes me think of deep space, very far from any nearby stars. Over several days layering hues onto the saucers, I slowly homed in on the colors for them. I was thinking of the colors of Populuxe ’50s cars. I see those ovals on the undersides of the saucers as being eyes.

This isn’t a direct prefiguring of anything in the novel—but I am in fact thinking about having a bunch of flying saucers in there. I’m seeing the saucers as organic living beings who are in a sense like vampires. They glom onto people and suck their blood. And if you get bitten often enough by a saucer-thing, you may turn into one yourself. Yeeek!

“Tree of Life” oil on canvas, February, 2015, 40” x 30”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

For this one, I started out by putting a lot of paint and gel medium in the top half of the canvas and finger painting with it. Doing that made my finger hurt—and Paul Mavrides was quick to tell me that paint is poisonous. So next time I fingerpaint on a canvas, I’ll wear a rubber glove.

Anyway, I decided this would be the foliage a tree, and that I’d put cool aliens under it—I needed mental images of aliens for Million Mile Road Trip. My characters were just driving into a night market in the alternate world where they’re gonna do their big drive. I used variations on a Picasso-style face that Jasper Johns included in his 1990 painting called, unhelpfully, Untitled. And then I put a little one of these guys in the tree with an umbilical cord. I think of this painting as showing parents awaiting the birth of their baby.

I didn’t much use the baby in the chapter I ended up writing, but one of those bobbly heads joined my characters and will go along on the road trip. She calls herself Meatball.

“Saucer Hall” acrylic on canvas with oil paint glaze, February, 2015, 30” x 24”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

I started this more or less at random, playing with the paint, using acrylic for a change. I was out in my back yard, painting with my twin granddaughters, each of us with their own canvas. And then the triangle made me think of the Supreme Court building, which suggested a “Saucer Hall” where UFOs gather. We ran out of yellow acrylic paint, so the painting was a little greener and bluer than I wanted, even after I worked on it the next day.

So the day after the next day (Feb 25, 2015) I did another session on the painting. Turns out its okay to glaze on oil paint layers on top of an acrylic painting, once the acrylic is good and dry, and with the proviso that the acrylic isn’t super glossy. So I didn’t have to go out for a tube of yellow acrylic paint. So I layered on some glazes and now the final version looks good/

Before I added the final oil-paint glaze layers, the painting had that dreaded “art school hallway” look, with all the color areas flat and monochromatic and raw. Nice and rich now. And in the final touchup, I had the idea of putting a sun/star/wormhole/eye in the middle of the triangle. The saucers have a hypertunnel inside of Saucer Hall, you understand…

And now I’m gonna put a Saucer Hall into my novel. All those nasty saucer-beings are gathering there, and if a human wanders in, they are in big trouble.

As always, these paintings are for sale. You can find more info on my Paintings page.

What else is new? I rode my bike 24 miles to Santa Cruz on Saturday, that was kind of awesome. Not the the ride was that stupendous—it was a foggy day, and the traffic was kind of heavy. But the fact that I could do this ride and not fall over dead made me feel pretty optimistic.

Synchronistically enough, when I rolled into downtown Cruz, I saw a street rod that looked like—a rolling coffin. But not for me, not this month.

And in the evening Sylvia and I went to see the Santa Cruz Derby Girls at the Cruz Civic Auditorium, a cozy old place, a good time.

One more derby girls shot. It was a round robin among the three SC teams: Redwood Rebels, Steamer Janes, and Organic Panic.