Ernest Hogan's Blog, page 23
October 22, 2021
CHICANONAUTICA EXPOSES MY LIFE AS THE FATHER OF CHICANO SCIENCE FICTION
It’s happening in Chicanonautica, over at La Bloga . . .
Featuring Hispanic Heritage Month:
Latino lit:
Chicano sci-fi:
And the mysteries of self-promotion:
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October 14, 2021
ROAD TRIP FOR MAGGIE: PART THREE
As we got ready for the all-day cross-country jaunt from Hailey, Idaho/Sasquatchlandia to Farmington, New Mexico/Aztlán, Saigonesque scenes from Afghanistan dominated the TV. A cool wind from the east mixed with the smoke; maybe there was some fog in the haze we drove into.
A patch of naked, pale blue was devoured by the smoke as we headed back to Utah.
It cleared some as we came back to Moab. Without realizing it, while trying to get a picture of the smoke, I got a picture of some dinosaurs. While taking it Emily said, “Look! Dinos!” I didn’t see them until I looked at the picture later.
On the way to Cortez, there was residue of snow or hail in the ground.
And the Ute Mountain casino proudly announced that it’s OPEN 24 HOURS.
The next morning in Farmington, at the motel's complimentary breakfast bar, I overheard a hotel employee tell of how she’s afraid that doctors are using COVID as an excuse to harvest healthy people’s organs. As we left, I saw a sign: I MISS THE AMERICA I GREW UP IN.
We ran into similar sentiments in the nearby town of Aztec. It was cute and funky, with a store called Junque & Sister. Emily said we have to go back someday.
As we got back on the 550, a truck pulled a trailer with an AMERICA OR BUST sign.
When we got onto an Apache reservation, we documented a spectacular guerrilla mural in an abandoned structure. Nearby, past a hoodoo hill, was an elaborate shrine to a fallen biker who must have had clout with the tribe.
We went slow, and stopped for pics. That annoyed the hurried locals. Mike is an excellent cherchez le weird scout.
Eventually we checked in at the Inn By the Delta, where the streets twist around the Rio Grande, between a public library and tattoo parlor in Conquistador-founded Española. A lot of businesses sported bright, freshly painted signs.
The Mexican restaurant next to the Inn, La Fonda de Sol, doesn’t insist on dumping a mound of cheese on the entre. People get lunch while waiting to get their tattoos.
I read some of R. Ch. Garcia’s Death Song of the Dragón Chichxulub, part of which takes place in Española.
Later I dreamed I was trapped in a high tech yet satisfying theme park.
A walking stick (the insect) hung out on the window of Mike’s room. A snail made a trail across the sidewalk.
And when we picked up brisket sandwiches for later at Rudy’s “Country Store” and Texas Bar-B-Q, the Jefferson Airplane's “White Rabbit” played.
In Albuquerque we got coffee at Blunt Bros. and bagels from Einstein Bros. I had the jalapeño bacon, and Emily had a spinach fortuna. Mike doesn’t eat breakfast.
It was around this time that we scattered Maggie’s ashes, in places I’m not mentioning, just in case there are some legal issues . . . It was magical. At one point some ashes went straight up and didn’t come down.
We also saw a lot of wildflowers, an old church, an abandoned bar, and a lot of the sights that she loved.
We visited Pie Town, which has shed the Trump paraphernalia it had last year. When we crossed the VLA it started raining. It always rains when we are there.
We also passed a place that sold books and ammo.
I got a Facebook message from Daniel Scott White with the email addresses of two interviewers that I made a point of getting in touch with. Gotta keep that self-promotion machinery running.
Highway 84 North is another road of geologic wonders. A wind blew in clouds that mellowed the light, thinning the smoke, cooling things down. Could we get rain? Snow?
A sign: WELCOME TO COLORFUL COLORADO, is redundant. Maybe it should properly be translated to “colored,” or “of color.”
In Pagosa Springs the signs announced MEE: HMONG CUISINE and KILL BLOCKS VIEW. I expected to see LAW OF GRAVITY STRICTLY ENFORCED.
Why now? Anything could be possible in a resort called Purgatory, and a town called Ouray.
And in some of these Colorado towns, cannabis places outnumber liquor stores.
Some rain washed Colorado clean of the smoke, but there was still bug splatter on Zsa Zsa’s nose. The rain got so hard it was like being in a submarine.
Next day Mike led us through one of his “short cuts through a mountain pass” that twisted through a misty forest on a road strewn with potholes as clouds hung on the mountains.
In Vail, Mike set up at “Art on the Rockies Presents Vail Fine Art” which was in an upscale shopping mall.
Emily and I poked around some of the local towns, like Minturn and Leadville.
Lots of photographable funkiness and tourists, and weird vibes.
Emily bought some clothes.
Then she suggested we check out Aspen. Driving there was an adventure, as was finding parking. We finally put Zsa Zsa in front of a chi-chi supermarket with a homeless guy talking to himself, near a smashed and graffiti’d van.
The thrift store she found online turned out be too chi-chi, but I took a selfie in front of the Fat City Art Gallery.
I wonder what Hunter S. Thompson would think of the town now, where the only black woman on the street avoided looking at me, as if acknowledging my existence would harm her hard fought for status? Before we left we used the restroom down the kafkaesque hallway of the Chi-Chi Mart.
We eventually discovered that the window of our motel room looked out to a weird wall.
Then it was westward on Highway 70 through the -- haze? Smoke? Whatever it was, it wasn't as bad as it was before, and the landscape was getting pre-Grand Canyon-ish.
We took the 191 back to Moab. It seems that all roads lead to Moab.
We couldn’t resist the Dinosaur Museum in Blanding. Another place we keep coming back to. There’s so much in that one building.
Then we cruised over to Bluff, and the Kokopelli Inn that was empty when we got there, but more guests showed up overnight. Of course, we had Navajo Tacos.
Then we were homeward bound, through the Big Rez and Monument Valley, with the cinematic landscapes, abandoned structures, guerrilla murals, roadside shrines, people selling stuff.
And masks and social distancing were being enforced. After all, there was still a pandemic going on.
Then Emily said, “Quite a few deer sacrifices on this trip.”
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October 8, 2021
CHICANONAUTICA ASKS ¿WHATCHACALLUS?
Chicanonautica discusses words, at La Bloga.
Starting with Chicano:
Then to Latino:
And Latinx:
And back to Chicano:
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September 30, 2021
ROAD TRIP FOR MAGGIE: PART TWO
We didn’t have to go looking for a place to have breakfast. By the time we got up, a trailer had pulled up in front of the Silver Sage Motel. It was Bitsy’s Brew, Bitsy being a very friendly bulldog who insisted on greeting all the customers. The breakfast burritos were bizarre pre-packaged things, but the coffee lived up to the best-in-Moab hype the woman at the desk had given us the night before.
The smoke had cleared a bit, allowing us to take off to Ogden without much trouble. We cruised Barsoomian Utah, a place to let your dreams run amok and morph into new myths. The sky was actually blue.
For a while, then suddenly it was like hitting a wall of smoke. The rampaging dreams got nightmarish.
In Ogden, we ate at the Prairie Schooner Steakhouse.
A picturesque joint with booths that looked like covered wagons.
Stuffed creatures, and wooden Indians were all over. Good, classic Country western music played. There was even a jackalope.
The food was good too.
The next morning wasn’t as smoky thanks to a cool wind from the east.
While listening to Em and Mike talk, I got an idea for a character for a surreal space opera: a human hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy who flies around selling stuff, who knows all the back roads and weird worlds.
We had mochas and muffins at Coffee Links. There was a FUCK RACISM sticker on a car in the parking lot, Aztec-inspired art and calaveras on the walls, and a T-shirt with a skeleton barista was sold out.
The air got clearer as we got into Idaho. We passed a sign: RATTLESNAKE PASS, NO SERVICES. My black T-shirt and ball cap had me blending in with the locals as the ambient music went from neo-hippie tunes at Coffee Links to “Redneck Yacht Club” at a gas station.
A billboard had a woman holding a mask at arm’s length, with a look of disgust on her face, and was captioned FREEDOM IS THE CURE.
This was in the wide open spaces, farm land . . .
We found a place called La Fiesta with good Mexican food and Mexican employees. This was outside of Aztlán, Saquatchlandia, a new frontier.
Hardly saw any masks in Idaho. Meanwhile, COVID cases were surging. The governor declared an indoor mask mandate.
The next morning, thanks to TV news in the motel, I found out that we were in the Gem State and the Magic Valley. Also, Cuomo had resigned and the Taliban was taking Afghanistan. I wondered if masks would come back into vogue, and wondered if my Americano from Dutch Bros. was decaf.
Mike’s van broke down so he had to rent one in Twin Falls, in a place next to a Stinker Station, from a guy who got a call, making his phone chirp, “IT’S YOUR DRUG DEALER!”
I’m also happy to report that there are taco trucks in Idaho. Later, we checked into the Hailey Airport Inn that’s next to a cemetery.
Next day we helped Mike put his booth together for the Sun Valley Arts and Crafts Festival. Writers should also be good all-purpose stooges. Being able to help out with things helps get you into places where you can get insider information, and observe people behaving naturally.
Afterward, Emily and I took a walk around Ketchum, which is famous for being the place where Hemingway blew his brains out. Now it's a place where rich people go to get away from it all, with an artistic bent.
When the festival ended for the day, Mike took us up to the Sawtooth Mountains, and the very different town of Stanley.
The next day was Friday the Thirteenth.
We picked up Barbara, the daughter of one of Mike’s friends, and a geology geek. I hope young people like her soon take over the world.
We went to the Craters of the Moon National Monument. Kind of like being on another planet, with the lava crunching under our feet.
We did most of the North Crater Trail and drove the car loop. We’ll have to go back there sometime.
It was smoky the next morning at the Airport Inn. We tried Black Owl Coffee in Hailey. They had nice cinnamon mochas and the egg bacon gruyere was pretty good.
There was also a weird artistic statement on mental health in someone’s front yard. Looks like Hemingway wasn’t the only one feeling suicidal in these parts.
The smoke was worse. We wandered around checking out thrift stores.
Back in Ketchum, Siri led us on a twisted walk in search of a place called Shangri-La. When we got there it was an empty store front.
That evening, Mike took us to the incredible abandoned mining town of Custer City. Rusted metal monsters and other relics from the past. Beyond steampunk. We didn’t get back until after dark.
Sun Valley was full of smoke the next morning. The Taliban was taking Kabul.
Mike told us about some of his weird dreams while we searched for the house of some people who wanted him to make them a $12,000 kitchen table/drum. It was a big house on a forest/golf course. When we got there, they weren’t home.
Emily and I spent the rest of the day resting at the motel, in anticipation for an epic travel day.
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September 24, 2021
CHICANONAUTICA CHICXULUBS INTO AN OLD/NEW WORLD
Chicanonautica reviews R. Ch. Garcia’s Death Song of the Dragón Chicxulub at La Bloga.
Complains about fantasy being too Anglo:
Cries out for more Mexicanidad:
Praises questing through Aztlán:
Says some stuff about Carlos Casaneda:
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September 16, 2021
ROAD TRIP FOR MAGGIE: PART ONE
We left Phoenix on the hottest day of the year, straining the abilities of our aged Hundai Elantra’s air-conditioner. This trip up north had become very familiar to us over the last few years. It was cooler when we checked into the Matterhorn Inn in Sedona. We were escaping the brain-melting inferno, taking along what Emily called, “two cups of Mom.”
My phone plinged while we were waiting for tacos at the Oaxaca. It was a Gmail from Scott Duncan of Somos en escrito. Their Extra-Fiction contest, that I had agreed to judge again, was on. My career follows me, even on a memorial trek in honor of Maggie, my mother-in-law, who had died a few months earlier at age 99.
Scott had attached a PDF of their flyer for the contest. I figured out how to take a screenshot so I could start doing some social media publicity, because the deadline for entries was September 30 and it couldn’t wait.
They also wanted me to make a video. I told them I was on vacation and would have to do it on my phone in a motel room.
When the going gets tough, the tough get creative.
That night I dreamed I was working at a combination store/warehouse and got trapped in a cramped, industrial elevator. After I escaped, Jodie Foster (who, along with the Very Large Array and the Movie Contact became obsessions for Maggie near the end) was lecturing my wife Emily and the other employees.
The next morning the famous red mountains were misted-over. The distant forest fires filled the skies and violated state lines. After breakfast at the Coffee Pot, we hit the road that was lined with robust datura from the rain.
In Flagstaff, we swapped the Elantra for Mike’s Prius Hybrid, which Emily had decided to name Zsa Zsa because of her peculiar license number. From a broken down relic of the past millennium, to a gateway drug to the transportation systems of the future, we hummed into the reservations, where a Trump sign, partly torn away from a billboard, revealed ONE NATION UNDER GOD.
The landscape seemed post-Apocalyptic, peppered with abandoned, graffiti-covered tourists traps and geodesic domes.
An empty building sported a sign announcing that it was for hire. Another sign said DISCOUNTED AERIAL FIREWORKS.
The next day we spent in Grants, another post-Apocalyptic town with lots of empty buildings.
We had to visit El Malpais, the Badlands. We had the road to ourselves, as if the world really had come to an end. The lava fields were choked with greenery, a side-effect of the year's abnormally heavy rainfall. We braved a ROAD IMPASSABLE WHILE WET sign to the Sandstone Bluffs, another otherworldly environment. Then we hit El Morro with its ruins and ancient graffiti.
On the way back to Grants we saw a DISCOUNT TOBACCO AND VARIOUS ACCESSORIES sign.
The next day we drove to Santa Fe and once again stood at the fabulous Silver Saddle Motel. I managed to do the video for the Extra-Fiction contest, on my phone, in the Cowgirls room. Somehow I got through without Emily crashing in, naked from her shower.
After scones and coffee at the Dulce Central, and some so-so thrift storing, we headed for Taos via the High Road/El Camino Real.
Taos is trying for a comeback. Masks are no longer required on the streets. The reservation is no longer blocked off and guarded by the tribal police. Streets are torn up, buildings are being worked on.
At the Kachina Lodge we had trouble with the key-cards, but there were shiny, new murals on the exterior walls, one still in progress; airbrushes and compressors stood ready, awaiting the artist. With careful examination, I noticed that figures I first thought were warriors because they seemed to be facing off, had no weapons, so they were probably dancers or magicians.
In the morning we grabbed coffee and bear claws at Michael’s Kitchen, which featured a “life-sized” Betty Boop (just how tall would she be?). Couldn’t get decaf, but I could use an extra boost.
We had smelled smoke during the night, were the other guests smoking? By the time we hit the road we realized that it was in the air, creating a thick haze, turning the mountains into giant ghosts.
Highway 64 was eerily empty.
“Hokey smokes, Ernie, we may not have the best view of things on this trip. I’m also kind of enjoying having this apocalyptic landscape to ourselves,” Emily said.
To my shame, I missed a chance to photograph the Earthships--futuristic, eco-friendly, semi-subterranean, self-sustaining structures--under the smoke-filled sky as a balloon waited to be launched. I just gawked at the steampunk-ish scene.
Or should that be smokepunk?
Smokapalypse?
There were no other signs of life for a while; then we saw flecks of yellow under the haze.
“At least we’ve got the wildflowers,” Emily said.
As we got into the hills, an effigy of Trump hung from a noose by the roadside.
Emily swerved to miss something, and said, “I don’t want to run over adorable little ground squirrels.”
We had also seen dead deer.
That got me imagining the Beatles' Why Don’t We Do It In the Road? as a travelogue theme song.
We topped off the tank. It only needed five gallons. It had been a couple of days since we last bought gas. Zsa Zsa just kept going, making her sci-fi noises. When she slows down, it briefly sounds like a police siren.
By this time I was trying to get pictures of the smoke, which isn’t easy. “Stupid trees!” I said. “They’re getting in the way of the smoke.”
At a scenic view, I almost got an accidental shot of a guy pissing off the ledge.
Soon we were in Colorado.
In the City of Monte Vista, there was no view of the mountains.
It kept looking like we were driving to the edge of the Earth.
We saw a WE BUY ANTLERS sign.
I made a note that the symmetrical, green cross is replacing the marijuana leaf.
After zigzagging through New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah, we never got out from under the smoke. A thick shroud covered Moab when we arrived.
It looked like a Mars colony. Maybe I had the Mars Colony Syndrome: Everything looks like a Mars colony . . . Or maybe I’m really on Mars, hallucinating about the Southwest of a place called the United States of America, back in the 21st century.
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September 10, 2021
CHICANONAUTICA CON SPEC FIC, DREAMERS, CANNIBALISM, Y HUMAN SACRIFICE
Chicanonautica, over at La Bloga, goes wild over the release of Speculative Fiction for Dreamers(that has a new story by me in it).
There’s an official video:
And what about them dreamers?
And cannibals?
Didn’t a guy named Pablo Cortez once say something about every society practicing some form of human sacrifice?
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September 2, 2021
FLASHES OF A ROAD TRIP
Here I am again, back from a road trip, and the world is transformed. All the yards in the neighborhood have become jungles, kids walking to school wear masks, and I won’t bother to mention Afghanistan.
My body would like for me to crash into some serious R&R, but my career is running amok and demanding my attention. It kept calling during the trip.
I made a video with my phone in the Cowgirl room of the Silver Saddle Motel in Santa Fe for Somos en escrito’s Extra-Fiction contest. And Speculative Fiction for Dreamers—that will have a new story by me, so order yours now—will be coming out next month. And I worked on my insane Victor Theremin novel, on my phone, every day of the trip.
We helped Emily’s brother, Michael Thiele of Hardwood Music, at the Sun Valley Arts and Crafts Festival.
A lot of the time we were under the smoky haze from the forest fires.
Now Emily is looking for a job. And I’m getting back to business.
Still in searching-for-America mode.
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August 27, 2021
CHICANONAUTICA EMERGES WITH THE EXTRA-FICTION CONTEST IN 2021
Once again, I'm judging Somos en escritos' Extra-Fiction contest.
I even made a video with my phone in a motel room:
Here' a screen shot of the flyer:
Yeah, it's hard to read, but links to all the information is in Chicanonautica, over at La Bloga.
Hurry, the deadline is September 30, 2021!
When in doubt, break format . . .
August 19, 2021
FINDING AZTLÁN ALONG OAK CREEK
The previous day I spent slaving away at the computer. When Emily and I had breakfast at Kiss the Cook (where they have a bas relief version of the classic Wild West “End of the Trail” Indian in the men’s room), and she suggested we play hooky and go somewhere, my reaction was, “What the hell!”
So, we headed up to Sedona, with the maskless summer tourist season taking off in full force. As we got into the town, it got crowded, spilling out into the road along Oak Creek. Our hopes of finding a place to hike were soon dashed. All the big hiking places were full, or had long lines to get in, or parked cars strung out at the roadside for about a mile.
Finally, we decided to park at a place by the river that wasn’t full of cars, and near a rustic stairway leading down to the water. Oh, yeah, there was some interesting graffiti--especially a drippy smiley face, on some of the signs.
Turns out it wasn’t a bad hike. All nature-y and quiet enough.
There were other people, but they weren’t many, and were not making too much noise.
Especially some kids, balancing on rocks across the river. They were quiet. Too quiet for kids on an outing. They were all looking in the same direction. One of them looked our way and pointed.
There was something near the riverbank. At first, I thought it was a statue of a dinosaur. Then it moved. It was a bird. A large bird. A heron.
In case you didn’t know. Aztlán is Nahuatl for “Place of the Heron.” Kinda mystical, huh?
On the way home we ate at the Lone Spur Cafe in Prescott, where Festus from the antediluvian TV show Gunsmoke smiled down on us.
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