Ernest Hogan's Blog, page 76

RIDING WILD DOWN HIGHWAY 60

“She was such a pretty corpse that I kept her around for a while.”
Em was talking about a praying mantis she once saved from a black widow. After that, the mantis would ride around on her shoulder when she worked in the garden.  Eventually she died, and Em kept her body until it disintegrated.
We were zooming down Highway 60.
We passed a place that was freshly painted white with huge, bright red letters that said JESUS SALVA. “Jesus Saves” in Spanish. Or was it somebody's name? A religious retreat? A cult headquarters? Or the location for a horror movie?

When we arrived at the Nature Conservancy's Hassayampa River Preserve, I noticed a head stone with MURDERED on it. It was the final resting place of the Barney Martin, his wife, and two sons who were killed in 1886. A bit of bloody Wild West history.
In the preserve's visitor's center Em said,“What a pretty tarantula!”
We had to wait for a pair of cows to move on before we hit the trails. “It'll be okay, as long as you stay out of their line of sight,” a volunteer said. It got me thinking about the mechanics of bullfighting, as we passed the RATTLESNAKE ALERT sign.
I wasn't expecting to find datura here, but it was all over. At one point, it was a jungle with the devil's trumpet as far as the eye cold see. This is what the plant does in its natural habitat. Some of the flowers were as big as four inches across. Black insects crawled on the white petals.

There was also a marijuana-like scent in the air. And spectacular fungal colonization of certain trees. And lots of large ants, black and red, scrambling around the trails where a lot of the footprints were non-human.
There was place full of giant, rust-covered dinosaurs as we entered Wickenburg.
“We better not stop there,” said Em.
“Yeah, we may find something we want,” I agreed.
We were also greeted by an abandoned motel with a RE-ELECT SHERIFF JOE ARPIO sign, and a tire place with an inflatable Bigfoot.

In town, we kept mistaking painted statues in of Old West characters for real people. One was chained to Wickenburg's Jail Tree, where outlaws were chained “for lack of a hoosegow” from 1863 to 1890. They say no one ever escaped.
After chicken-fried steak sandwiches at the Golden Nugget Restaurant, we got back on Highway 60, and discovered that a section of it was adopted by The Doom Family. Could it be the Doctor Doom? We looked carefully, but there was no sign of Doctor, the Missus, and the little Doomies picking up roadside litter.
We had trouble finding Vulture Mine Road, and Vulture Peak Road, but eventually found the trailhead near the volcanic neck, were we got our tramping-through-the-desert fix before zigzagging our way back to Phoenix.
It was a pretty day.

CHICANONAUTICA MEETS FEDERICO SCHAFFLER

The latest Chicanonautica, over at La Bloga, documents my meeting with Mexican science fiction writer Federico Schaffler, and how we're going to write a story that exploits the weirdness generating from the U.S. Mexico border, and Arizona. In celebration of our quixotic project, here's some variations on the theme:
Down in Mexico, the street does find it's own uses for technology, and art, and gets stark, raving sci-fi:

Up norte, Chicano mad scientists do the same:

And to a lot of gringos, Mexico is just a whole lot of monster movie stuff:

They also see Borderlandia as an expansion of a Brave New Third World:

Meanwhile, others are trying to cook up their own transborder utopias:

Yes, amigos, crossing borders is easy – and fun! You should try it sometime:

THE DAY I WAS A POLITICAL PROP

Back in the now mythic Nineteen-Seventies, after the Watergate scandal broke and they brought the troops back from Vietnam, America was in a peculiar kind of turmoil, and I was attending Mt. San Antonio College where the L.A. smog pools up against the San Gabriel Mountains. To quote one of my teachers: “I keep expecting to see people wearing crossed ammunition belts.” Still, they kept trying to get us involved with the community . . . and politics.
A history teacher recommended that we go to hear a political candidate at the Free Speech Area. I wasn't doing anything that afternoon, and had never been to a political event before, so I hung around, cruising for a place where I could quietly sneak off if it got boring.
The Candidate was a white man who glowed in the SoCal afternoon sun. He looked at me and leered like hungry predator. He zoomed over, grabbed my hand, and said, “Hello! Glad to meet you!”
Like a gang boss signaling his goons, he communicated with his People. Suddenly, I was surrounded. They grabbed me like I was a potted-plant, took me over, and smacked me down behind and a little to the right of the Candidate.
Guess they thought my Jimi Hendrix/Abbie Hoffman hair and golden brown skin would help sell the Candidate to the students.
This was all without a word to me. They didn't ask if I wanted to be there. I kept thinking that this would make an escape difficult.

The Candidate had brought his teenaged son and daughter. They were more clean-cut looking than your average Mt. SAC student in those days. They were passing out flyers for a Christian Rock Concert.
“You really ought to come,” she said.
“It's really great music,” he said.
“Christian rock sucks,” said a student.
This was in the early days of the genre. Most Christian Rock back then was made by Jesus Freaks – ex-hippies who found Jesus, as one explained to me:
“I was up in the mountains dropping acid when Jesus himself came down from the sky and ended my acid trip, and told me to go forth and devote my music to spreading his message.”
His songs were mostly popular tunes that he had reworded so that Jesus replaces the intended object of affection, like, “Jesus loves you – yeah, yeah, yeah!”
Most of their flyers ended up on the ground.

Then the Candidate started speaking. He was an early Christian conservative.
Most of the students were tangled up in the post-hippie/pre-punk counterculture of the times. They liked long hair, sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll that blasted the joys of that lifestyle. A lot of them didn't believe that there was going to be future, and acted accordingly.
The Candidate said that even though he was a conservative, he was willing to reach out to and represent them.
He didn't mention minorities, but then I was standing there making it look like he was popular in the local barrios and ghettos.
The audience wasn't impressed.
A few weeks earlier, from the same microphone, a young woman had warned: “Like, ya watch out, cuz, there's a lotta people around, like, you don't know them, and, like, they're gonna wanna smoke it with ya, but, y'know, they're narcs!”
If he wanted to win over this crowd, he should have said that he was willing to work his ass off to legalize marijuana. That would have chanted his name and carried him around campus on their shoulders.
Then, to show how honest he was, the Candidate said that he was against abortion.
He was booed.
And a predictable argument started.

I had seen enough. I wanted out of there. Unfortunately, I was standing right behind the Candidate.
I had also been treated like prop in this lame attempt at political drama. Somehow I didn't feel obliged to be polite. So I mimed a big, theatrical yawn, and walked away.
Later, the history teacher frowned with disapproval as he told me, “I saw your 'commentary' at the event!”
Since then, I've watched the people standing behind candidates when politicians speak. Most stand there looking like they are receiving a great honor. Others look bored. Others – the reluctant, rebellious ones commit acts of defiance like mine: funny faces, eye-scratching, nose-picking, and – the champ, in my opinion – a black man who juggled a Lifesaver on his tongue.
So, if a politician has his (or her) people grab you and put you into the dehumanizing role of a political prop, do something silly. These days it'll end up on YouTube – heh-heh!
It will also force them to act human . . . if they can.
And if they can't, well, we need to take that into consideration when we vote.

CHICANONAUTICA REVEALS MY WRITER'S LIFE

This tie-in to my latest Chicanonautica over at La Bloga is a problem. It's about what's going in my writing life. Unfortunately, there aren't any videos of that, and I don't have the time to make any. So instead, here's some advice from other writers.
I don't like to go around giving advice on how to become a writer. It's kind of like giving advice on how to become a drug addict. What if somebody actually succeeds?
Ray Bradbury is always good for getting you fired up:

Here's Kurt Vonnegut on the art of the short story:

Does anybody read short stories anymore?
As for attitude, here's Henry Miller:

And Hunter Thompson:

COPPERCON THOUGHTS AND VISIONS

The illustrations for this post were drawn at CopperCon.
It was a small convention. And it was the same weekend as WorldCon and DragonCon. The attendees were mostly local. I got to talk to writers, writer wannabes, and – lo and behold! – there were actual readers there.
Some of them were even the old-fashioned quirky individual fans rather than postmodern entertainment consumers who wear off-the-rack nerd identities and are delighted to see what their favorite multinational corporations have created for them.
I miss science fiction that was a hot rod for the imagination, created and customized by renegade mad scientist-types. These days, genre fiction tends to be like mass produced commuter vehicles that safely take you in and out of your dull life. I prefer mine to send my brain soaring off with the risk of crashing and burning.
Who needs a dull life anyway?
It was a lot like small conventions from thirty years ago, only smaller. And books are becoming a rare commodity. Sigh.

For long time at conventions, what the writers talked about was what new trend was hot and how you damned well better jump on it if “they” were going to publish your books and make you rich. The hottest books right now are Fifty Shades of Greyand its sequels, and there weren't any seminars on how to add sadomasochism to your genre stories as the way to bestsellerdom. No bandwagons to jump on, just advice on how to survive – or, bizarre as it seems, get started in the disintegrating world of publishing.
Writers who are experiencing success in traditional publishing – most of them admit to having day jobs – are still pushing the old ways. If I had a deal with some New York outfit, I'd probably be doing the same. Why not? The dream of being a bestselling, millionaire author is powerful, and it's not dying even though in reality bestselling authors work ten hour days, seven days a week churning out what the publishers tell them will sell.
Yeah, they get paid big bucks, but what good is it if you can't enjoy it? And if a job demanded those kind of hours – who in their right mind would take it?

Then there's the science crowd. Scientists are fans, writers, often both, and have interesting things to say. David Lee Summers writes, edits, and works as an astronomer at Kitt Peak Observatory – his presentation on the hunt for extrasolar planets was inspiring and mind-blowing.
I always hope to get my mind blown at a con.
So the New Media Bookacalypse has put us back into another hunter/gather era. Readers and writers are hunting each other. I hope we can establish the right kind of communication.
After all, there are so many worlds to explore.

CHICANONAUTICA REMEMBERS A BULLET FOR A GENERAL

Chicanonautica over at La Bloga recalls the spaghetti western that changed my life, A Bullet for the General, in which – among other mayhem – an English actress does her version of revolutionary Mexican womanhood:

From an American production of the same year, here's two Italian-American actors and a couple of scorpions in one of Hollywood's most outrageous Wild West scenes:

And just in case you were wondering why the El Chuncho attitude is still necessary:

So let's hear Charro Avitia sing a cheerful love song to a gun:

THROUGH TIME AND TIMBUCTOO WITH TAHIR SHAH

I love Tahir Shah's books. They are travelogues that read like fantastic novels. He is a master storyteller. I wondered what it would be like if he wrote fiction. His latest book, Timbuctoo – I'm happy to say, proves him to be an excellent novelist.
It shouldn't be a surprise -- storytelling is storytelling, be it true or make-believe.
But then, this is a true story, that of Robert Adams, “an illiterate American Sailor, taken as a slave in the Great Zahara and, after trials and tribulations aplenty, reaching London where he narrated his tale,” to quote the cover that, in words, does the book more justice than any image could.
Shah admits: “I am no historian, and have massaged facts and fictions into place, re-conjuring history.” Which, of course, in how great fiction is made.
And Timbuctoo is great fiction, a masterpiece of adventure. Tahir Shah deserves a place beside H. Rider Haggard, Jules Verne, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Ernest Hemingway
Though set in 1815, this novel will sweep 21stcentury readers along with its smooth style and an ingenious, interweaving, Arabian Nights storyteller style that zigzags from Timbuctoo to London.
And this London is just as strange and exotic as Timbuctoo:
With Caldecott at its helm, the African Committee was, in Adam's mind, little better than King Woolo's regime. Both men were repressive in their own way, champions of avarice and perversion.
It does for time travel what Tahir Shah's nonfiction books do for global travel. And even though it takes place early in the steam era, fans of steampunk will find their universes rocked when they read it. It makes the alien planets of most space operas look dull.
Having just returned from wandering the supposed location of North America's Seven Cities of Gold, Timbuctoohas the sci-fi trickster in me fantasizing about rumors of cities of gold on Mars . . .

CHICANONAUTICA READS THROUGH NEW MEXICO

I write about what I read, and found, in New Mexico, in my latest Chicanonautica over at La Bloga.

Here's an interesting interpretation of the beginning of Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony:



I re-read Bless Me, Ultima in Rudolfo Anaya territory:



Buffalo's kept appearing, as images, and I even encountered the real thing, and a reprint of a Buffalo Bill dime novel:



And Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show is alive and well . . . at Disneyland Paris:



What will casino-rich New Mexico be like in the near future?

WEIRD ROADS THROUGH NEW MEXICO

At 6 A.M. we were still in Sheriff Joe Arpaio's jurisdiction. A guy was walking down a street carrying a case of Tecate, ready to face a blazing Wednesday in Phoenix.
Soon I spotted datura growing alongside Highway 17. Plaster dinosaurs, concrete teepees, and abandoned structures decorated with colorful graffiti – the new ruins – informed us that we were on our way to the Petrified Forest, the Painted Desert, and the Big Rez. At a rest stop, a sign warned: POISIONOUS SNAKES AND INSECTS INHABIT THIS AREA.
We were still in Arizona.
Then the road signs started to read like Zen koans: ZERO VISIBILITY POSSIBLE . . . GUSTY WINDS MAY EXIST . . . We had crossed over into New Mexico.
Sky City Casino sounded like something out of a reboot of Flash Gordon to me. Even here, infernal corporations are messing with our mythologies.
Los Lobos were playing at the Buffalo Thunder Casino.
Oddly, casinos blend into the eclectic/Native/Spanish colonial/Wild West/UFO New Mexico environment with its mountains that look like surrealistic sculpture gardens with pretty little graveyards.
These have to be the prettiest graveyards in the world. And they're everywhere.
I couldn't help imagining vampires and zombies rising from those colorful graves.
When the sun set, it made the storms clouds look like they were raining fire.

The neighborhood rooster was time-warped. He crowed late, and at various times during the day.
A cow mooed at dawn, though.
At least the rooster isn't crowing in the middle of the night – that would be scary . . .
But then this is the homeland of La Llorona and El Cucuy. There is even a local version of bigfoot. And that Internet Age media-upstart El Chupacabra keeps showing up in the mysterious New Mexico night.
Coyotes visited us after midnight. They made different sounds than Arizona coyotes – I wasn't sure what they were at first. They seemed to be talking, and they had a lot to say.
Later, the cow mooed at the rising sun, again.

We saw the tiniest roadkill ever on the road to Española: some kind of rodent, in perfect condition. The vehicle must have just missed it, causing it to die of fright.
Graffiti told us that a twisty, tree-lined stretch of mountain neighborhood was the home of WILD BOYS! The exclamation point was part of the name.
Not far away, a sign warned: YOU ARE BEING VIDEOTAPED BY NIGHT VISION DIGITAL CAMERAS.
Later in Española, another sign proudly announced that Blake's Lotaburger was NOW UNDER 24 HOUR SURVEILLANCE.
There's so much in New Mexico, you could spend several lifetimes exploring it. Something like cryptids, extraterrestrial visitors, paranormal phenomena, or strange rituals could go unnoticed, blending into the complicated landscape like the casinos.
A mad scientist could set up a shop here and avoid publicity. These rural neighborhoods that look more like enchanted forests than small towns. Huge dogs cut you off in on a dead-end street and bark into your windshield. They know how to keep secrets here.
If you're lucky you'll escape around the next blind curve into national park-ish panoramic vistas . . . where there are life-sized crosses on some of the gnarled hills.
This was close to Chimayó, which was the center of activity – including flagellation and crucifixion – for Los Hermanos Penitentes back in the 19th century.
We also visited cliff dwellings in volcanic tuff that looked like a swiss cheese of carvable rock. Could Cappadocia-like subterranean cities be possible? And what about those rumors of underground UFO bases around Dulce? And the fantastic tunnels that David Hatcher Childress is so fond of?

Maybe a conquistador looking for the Seven Cities of Gold could have gotten lost in this tangled knot of spacetime, and find himself in a modern Indian casino. He'd just be another Spanish-speaking homeless guy. And there actually is a Cities of Gold casino, with an offramp, near Los Alamos, where you can get around via Atomic City Transit.
This really is the Land of Enchantment, as the license plates say. And the Land of the Weird as others say.
The Virgin of Guadalupe, the secret identity of the pagan Earth Goddess, is everywhere. I saw more shrines and statues in her honor here than in the Metro Phoenix's West Side.
Ravens were everywhere, too. We saw a lot of them sitting on poles as we went up to Taos to get coffee in the Zen Gardens of the Wired Cafe.
As we returned to our guest house, we found large, dead flies on the bed, and a dead bird by the front door.
I'm not able to decode whatever it means, but there is something going on in New Mexico, something that has been going on for a long time, way back to the to time of the Earth Mother, and the Ancient Coyote, and even before the forgotten reign of the Centipede God – that may be restarted any day now.
A millipede did greet us as we entered the Petroglyph National Monument . . .
And we encountered buffalo (okay, technically bison) on a nearby ranch where they are being bred in a kind of newfangled Ghost Dance.

Too soon, it was time to go home, switching from traveling up and down El Camino Real – that goes south all the way to La Capital Azteca – to crisscrossing Route 66.
We saw the future as we passed the Petroglyphs Trails Subdivision, and signs for a CURANDERA – ESPIRITISTA and the NEW MEXICO GLADIATOR DASH. And ¡Traditions! “A Festival Marketplace” had flying saucers painted on the walls of its diner.
Back in Arizona, on the Navajo reservation, in the middle of an empty field, a chipped and faded sign read: METEORITES 50% OFF.

CHICANONAUTICA ROAD TRIPS THROUGH AZTLÁN

I'm road tripping across Arizona, into New Mexico, and singing the praises of the roads of Aztlán in my latest Chicanonautica over at La Bloga. So while I'm decompressing and readjusting to by routine, here are some New Mexico videos:
Here's an official promotion of New Mexico tourism:

Of course, when I go I'm hoping to find things more like this:


There's also a local version of Bigfoot:


And the UFOs keep appearing:

Also, New Mexico was one of America's atomic testing sites:

So who know's what I'll come back with?