Ernest Hogan's Blog, page 74

CHICANONAUTICA GOES TO THE WORLD WIDE WILD WEST SHOW

Chicanonautica, over at La Bloga, gets chased by the ghost of Buffalo Bill to the World Wide Wild West Show. And look at the video extras I found:
Who would have thought that there was a song about Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, written by Ernest Hogan, Father of Ragtime, for his 1907 Broadway play, The Oyster Man?

The Indian attack leapt from the Wild West show to the western movie. We haven't seen a lot of it in recent decades, but here's a 21stcentury variation from England:

Shades of Vargas Llosa's The Storyteller, there are still uncontacted tribes out there, though governments don't want to believe in them:

Be careful when seeking spiritual enlightenment in places like Sedona, Arizona:

And of course, these days, even cowboy culture has been translated into native languages:

ERNESTO INTERVIEW AT LATINOPIA

Cuallioso news, namiquetzime! And some nigrománticoa, too – heh-heh!
There's a video interview of me at Latinopia.com. It was shot in the Venusian Jungle Garden, here at the Hogan hacienca. I shoot my mouth off about High Aztechand Chicano science fiction.

So, I better get to work, and hurry up and get that ebook ready . . .
And, there may be some othercuallioso High Aztechnews soon, so stay tuned, namiquetzime!
¡Ticmotraspasarhuililis!

SMOKING MIRROR BLUES ONLY 99 CENTS!

Yes, I've lowered the price of the Kindle Smoking Mirror Blues to 99 cents! Like Cortez on Jupiter ! Less than a buck! Just to see if more of you will buy it!
Better do it now! I may change my mind again . . .
And you know how my mind can be.

CHICANONAUTICA, 2013 A.D., AND BEYOND

This time, Chicanonautica, over at La Bloga, is a post-apocalyptic Happy New Year concerning what I'm going do as a Chicano writer living in Arizona in 2013.
For our video extras, I'm presenting the work of some other Latino artists, with suitable surreal and sci-fi overtones.
First, let me recommend Misterio en las Bermudas, one of the most incredible end-of-the-world movies ever. It also has Mil Máscaras, Santo, Blue Demon, Atlantis, alien forces, and the Bermuda triangle. The plot is so convoluted that I'll have to see it again, and write about it later . . .

Meanwhile, in post-Katrina New Orleans, José Torres-Tama creates performance art out of a new Latino experience that's stanger than a lot of fantasies of disaster-ridden futures:


Here in Arizona, El Moises is creating fantastic murals that appear in a commercial for the state lottery:

And for some brain-slamming reading, here's Guillermo Gómez-Peña On illness, the human body, performance & quantum physics :
“People tell me this storyline is no longer science fiction; it’s the way most people relate to the world nowadays.”
Hang onto your somberos, it's gonna be a wild ride!

HURTLING INTO 2013

Whenever someone asks me what I'm doing, I immediately think, Uh-oh, better check my blog . . . I'm usually focused on what I'm doing at the moment, and can't remember all of the projects that I'm juggling. If I scroll down the blog, I'm reminded. What did we do before such things?
Looking back through Mondo Ernesto of 2012, I'm rather amazed. Damn. I actually got a few things done!
My biggest accomplishments have been putting out my novels Cortez on Jupiter , and Smoking Mirror Blues as self-published ebooks. It was an adventure with a steep learning curve. I feel somewhat prepared for whateverthehell I'm going to have to deal with as a writer in the near future.
And yes, High Aztech is in the diabolical works . . .
Also in the ebook arena, my infamous story “The Frankenstein Penis” is available in M. Christian's weird erotica collection The Love That Never Dies .
Who knows? Maybe its even more outrageous sequel, “The Dracula Vagina” will be remanifesting soon.

I also made contact with Latinopia, The Future Fire, and Federico Schaffler. We're all conspiring to do some serious cultural decolonialization, to chew a few holes into the Tortilla Curtain, and to otherwise make life on this planet more interesting.
Barriers are breaking down. A translation of my story “Guerrilla Mural of a Siren's Song” just appeared in the Polish science fiction magazine Nowa Fantastyka . The global barrio is becoming a reality.
And of course there's all that unfinished business. I'm not ashamed of not having done it all. I'm proud of it. If you don't have unfinished business, you aren't working hard enough. Where's your ambition?
So in 2013 I plan to publish High Aztech as an ebook and also do a collection of my short fiction. Then there's that futuristic bullfighting novel, and the fantasy about the pre-Columbian ball game. And I have these short story ideas. To further complicate things, Paco Cohen and Victor Thermin have been demanding my attention.
There's even more, but over the years of bashing myself bloody as a writer, I've become superstitious about these things until they've achieved a certain amount of solidity.
I'm gonna be busy. At the very least, I'll have me some fun!

PABLO CORTEZ IN POLAND

Yup, that's my name on the Hobbit-festooned cover of the January 2013 issue of Nowa Fantastyka – you can see if you squint hard enough. Inside you'll be able to find “Partyzancki Mural Syreniej Pieśni” – “Guerrilla Mural of a Siren's Song” translated into Polish!
Thanks to the story's appearence in Marty Halpern's Alien Contact , Marcin Zwierzchowski got in touch and asked for permission. I like it when they do that.
So Pablo Cortez has been turned loose on Eastern Europe. Maybe it will result in more copies of my science fiction novel/street art manual Cortez on Jupiter selling. Or there could even be interesting images mysteriously appearing on walls over there.
Let the art, life, and madness go on!
Just in time for the Great 2012 Holiday Crunch!

CHICHANONAUTICA CELEBRATES THE NEW BAKTÚN

At 6:12 A.M. Eastern Standard Time it happened – the Winter Solstice, and the end of the Mayan calendar. Some thought it would be the End of the World. It was actually the end of Baktún 13 and the beginning of Baktún 14, and the Long Count started over again. It is a new era – the Sixth Sun.
That's what my latest Chicanonautica over at La Bloga is all about. Here are some videos to watch as the world keeps going on:
A lot of folks were as hot for the End of the World as Major Kong was for the Bomb:

They're probably feeling like Skeeter Davis today:



Arthur Brown also blew relationship troubles up to apocalyptic proportions:



And Barry McGuire thought it was the Eve of Destruction:


But that was a long time ago and, of course, he was wrong.
As for the Maya:

So have a great Baktún14! Welcome to the Sixth Sun!

MAKING THE COATLICUE/GUADALUPE CONNETION BEFORE THE NEW BAKTUN

The Holiday Season is upon us. Or as I like to call it – the Holidaze.

It's a little crazier this year, since the end of the Mayan Calendar has a lot of misinformed people thinking that it means asteroid collisions and the zombie apocalypse, when it's just the beginning of a new baktun.
But there are a lot of other holidays in this season (not to offend some Christians who dream of world domination). I seem to discover a few new ones each year.

A young, upstart holiday that deserves some attention is December 12, Virgin of Guadalupe Day.
In my novel High Aztech(manifesting as an ebook soon!) I pointed out that the Virgin seems to be standing in for the Aztec Goddess Coatlicue.

Lately, I've been pleased to see that others have been pointing out the Mother Goddess connection.

My wife said that that the Virgin seems to be a user-friendly version. At least, more so to our culture.
It's like the Virgin was an updating of the software for a changing world. Software that updated itself. I wonder what kind of technology we're dealing with here?
And the world is changing. Again. As usual.
I wonder if what kind of updating we'll see in Baktun 14?

CHICANONAUTICA LOOKS BACK AT THE DARK AGES OF LATINO WRITING

In response to the question “Is this a Golden Age for Latino writers?” Chicaonautica, over at La Bloga looks back at my adventures as a young Latino writer back in the 20th century.
This was a time when most Americanos thought of Chicano culture in terms of Cheech and Chong:

And the ol' Brown Buffalo, Oscar Zeta Acosta, AKA “Dr. Gonzo” was stomping the terra:

South of the Border, René Cardona was commitng some of the most outrageous acts of cinema ever. This one has nudity, fake gore, and real heart transplant footage:

And let's take the opportunity to pay tribute to the great Spain Rodriguez, who died recently:

SECRETS OF MY AMAZON AUTHOR PAGE

I finally got my Amazon Author Page done. It's a good guide for those of you who are collecting my work, or planning on giving the gift of Ernesto this Christmas/Atemoztli/New Baktun Season.


Most obvious are my novels Cortez on Jupiter , and Smoking Mirror Blues now available in Kindle Editions. Yeah, High Aztechis coming soon – I'm working on it, proofreading that Españáhuatl until my eyes are bloodshot. Stay tuned for details and updates!

The other items on the page are anthologies and magazines I have contributed to, so some explanation is required.

Alien Contact , edited by Marty Halpern included my story “Guerrilla Mural of a Siren's Song” – the story that I later exploded into Cortez on Jupiter.

My most infamous story, “The Frankenstein Penis” once again available in Love that Never Dies edited by M. Christain, an anthology of paranormal erotica on Kindle. And if you'd rather have it in hardcopy, the original Semiotext(e) SF edited by Rudy Rucker, Robert Anton Wilson, and Peter Lanborn Wilson is still available.

“Plan 9 in Outer Space,” a collaboration with my wife, Emily, is in Space Horrors: Full-Throttle Space Tales #4 , edited by David Lee Summers. It's a tribute to Edward D. Wood, Jr. with zombies on a spaceship. Need I say more?

2020 Visions , edited by Rick Novy not only has my wild romp about radioactive marijuana, “Radiation is Groovy, Kill the Pigs,” but also my wife's speculative weight-loss drama, “If the Sun's at Five O'Clock, It Must be Yellow Daisies.”

Angel Body and Other Magic for the Soul , edited by Chris Reed and David Memmott, has an ahead-of-its-time satire of Arizona and border hysteria called “Burrito Meltdown.”

“Coyote Goes Hollywood” that plugs Native American mythology into Hollywood cartoonery is in Witpunk , edited by Claude Lalumière and Marty Halpern.

Tales of the Talisman , Volume 6, Issue 3, is where you can find “The Great Mars-A-Go-GoMexican Standoff,” where I introduce Spike Gerswhin, interplanetary gumshoe.

In Voices for the Cure: A Speculative Fiction Anthology to Benefit the American Diabetes Association , edited by James Palmer, I introduced another character, Victor Theremin, the science fiction who writer who can no longer tell his life from sci-fi. He was also in the abovementioned “Radiation is Groovy, Kill the Pigs.”

All these stories have that special Ernesto madness, so consume away! Keep the Americano potlatch flowing!