Rudy’s Blog

I rode the CalTrain commuter train up to San Francisco alone, with bicycle, there to cycle over to Richard Kadrey’s house for a pot-luck afternoon party thrown by him and his wife Nicola Ginzler.

Lately the achievements I strive and scheme towards haven’t felt so rewarding. Sometimes I begin to wonder why I get so worked up about my little events, my small victories, my incessant machinations for fame. Sometimes I wish I could stop trying to accomplish something and frikkin’ relax. So…I headed off to Kadrey’s.

It was fun to ride my bike in the city, although I was at times worried about getting lost, or about being flattened by the traffic. Cycling through the empty quarters of the “knee” in SoMa where the city grid turns, I saw a bum with two stolen bicycles, one (with no wheels) on his shoulders, the other being rolled along.

Riding up towards Market, I was side to side with a motorcycle ridden by a Hells Angel, and then, another block further, we came to a gathering of a hundred of Hells Angels and their ilk outside some kind of motorcycle store. A few of them good-humoredly jeered at me, the retired professor riding by with sensible yellow bands on his trouser bottoms and his yellow safety windbreaker flapping.

I found my way to Rudy, Jr.’s old neighborhood on lower Haight St. between Webster and Steinhardt. I was a little too early for Richard’s party, and I had some time to kill. I walked the bicycle along the sidewalk looking things over. One of the stores had posters for Lazertits, images of women with rays of light shooting out of their breasts. They have a website, I think these are women that dance on stage with literal lasers in their bras. I have no idea what it really means, but the posters are cool.

The Horseshoe café where I used to hang with Rudy Jr. was gone. I was tempted to eat a platter of food at Memphis Minnie’s, a great BBQ place, but I wanted to save some stomach-room for Richard and Nicola’s spread. So I had a light snack at the International Café, not too bad a place—I like any café that has couches. Going inside, I felt great concern about bicycle thieves, and I chained my whipped old yellow Rockhopper beater to a lamp-post right outside the café window, running the chain through the frame and the two wheels.

[I shot a few photos from the moving train yesterday, they're a little blurry, but kind of interesting, like images from the subconsciousness of the hive mind.]

When I got to the party, I initially thought I couldn’t talk to anyone—this is part of the reason why I used to immediately get drunk at parties. But, as it happened, I ended up in a series of interesting conversations. I’ve slowly, slowly learned that it helps to walk up to people and introduce yourself…as opposed to just staring fishily their way.

I met a gilder, that is, a man who hammers thin sheets of gold onto things like picture frame or cornices. The sheets are very then, a folder with fifty sheets weighs only about an eighth of an ounce. But, the gilder told me, the price of gold has never been so high.

I met an electronic musician who uses some newer ware than the Max/MSP that my friends at the Iannis Xenakis lab in Paris were using, I forget the name of the new ware, some funny name. He agreed with me that it’s criminal to use a repetitive wallpaper rhythm loop, when it’s really so easy to put in a little procedural randomness and texture with something as simple as a logistic map feedback loop. I like to think of that word as feebdack.

I met a leather-clad pair of women who said they’d been partying for two days, first at the Drag King party, and then at the Drag Queen party. One of them said, with a laugh, “There were even some bio women competing to be the big Drag Queen.” It took me a second to grasp that she meant regular, non-transgendered women. Richard took us inside and showed us some of the erotic and fetish photos that he takes for his online Kaos Beauty Klinik site.

Richard is such a trip, so San Francisco, so wholesome and matter-of-fact about his esoteric preoccupations—things like tattoos, the naïve artist Henry Darger, serial killers, obscure films and erotic photography. His two novels about Sandman Slim are doing really well, and he has a third in the works. I’m glad to see him getting some rewards from the publishing world.

Shortly before I left, a big guy was talking to Richard about publishing and then it turned out the guy was Jason Williams of Night Shade Books. As it happens, my latest novel, Jim and the Flims, is under consideration at Night Shade right now—Tor isn’t taking it, as they’re already publishing my memoir, Nested Scrolls, next year, and didn’t want to load up with two of my books. The Night Shade guys seem receptive. I could be due for a new start.

It was good day. I got away from it all, and ate a huge amount of food at Richard and Nicola’s, and then, in the end, the business side of things came back at me, in its own way, on its own schedule and in an encouraging way.

And on the train up, I did a little work on the still-embryonic The Turing Chronicles novel—I left my computer at home, but brought some scraps of print-out along. Mr. Day Off. I’m visualizing aliens that resemble large slugs and are called skugs.

I finished my painting today, “Nude Nabs UFO”. You can click on the image below to see a larger version.

I started this one last week during an en plein air painting session on a pocket beach near Davenport with my painter pal Vernon Head. I had the rocks and the water, and I added the UFO, modeling its shape on the lid of my water bottle. And at home I put in the two nudes, to liven things up.

The scale of the flying saucer didn’t look quite right, and it wasn unclear how far away it was, so I had the guy take hold of it, thereby shrinking it and bringing it into the foreground. I have it casting a shadow like a beach umbrella onto the California woman to further anchor its position. And finally I had the idea that the guy is shaking the UFO, and two of the little aliens inside are falling out.

Here’s what the beach “really” looked like, by the way. But, I submit to you, what is reality? I far prefer a world where a nudist nabs a UFO!

I washed my painting clothes and I’m going out again today.

As always, you can find info about aquiring prints and originals of my paintings at my Paintings Page.

[Relatively cheerful street preacher at the Jazz Fest in San Jose.]

This week for whatever reason I’ve been listening to Al Jourgensen and Ministry’s 1991 song “Jesus Built my Hotrod”. The audio “Red Line/White Line? is the longest, but the video version is quite substantial. The sound of a passing race car is in some ways like a industrial-metal riff. The vocals are performed by Gibby Haynes of the Butthole Surfers. “Where you’re goin’ don’t matter because it weren’t never there.”

I’m still working on the beach picture that I started near Davenport with Vernon last week. I posted draft 1 of the picture a few days ago, and today I finished to draft 2. It’ll take two more layers, I think. to nail it. For one thing, I want some little aliens hanging onto the saucer for dear life. And I might change the color of the rock behind the guy yet again so that he pops out better, or maybe I’ll put a halo around him. Not sure of the the title. “Roman UFO” “Nudists Capture Flying Saucer” “Classical Painting with UFO.”

I like how the figures are coming out, they remind me a little of the figures in the paintings of M. Louise Stanley, a really great SF Bay Area artist.

We went to the Jazz Fest in San Jose yesterday, it was fun to see people downtown. They had a lot of stages, with one of the stages actually inside the Fairmont Hotel, where I was at the World Fantasy Con last Halloween. We saw the Pete Yellin quintet, they played great, some Thelonius Monk and Charlie Parker songs as well as originals.

Another standout was Mia Borders up from New Orleans with her band. If you go to her site, you can hear her great songs off her new album Magnolia Blue. And here’s my picture of her above with, I think, her bassist Pablo Gonzalez.

It’s always nice to get into the street outside the AC hotel, into the August city street. Rock on, Mia, tear it up!

I had a friendly crowd at the Borderlands reading on Saturday, and we sold some books and prints. Thanks to Jude Feldman for organizing it.

[Some of my fans.]

I talked a bit about the origins of the Ware Tetralogy, read the brain-eating scene from Software, a cheeseball vs. moldie scene from Freeware, and a juggling moldies scene from Realware. And then we had some Q & A. To hear the talk, click the button below to go to my podcast station.

It was nice to spend the day in SF. We hit one of my favorite restaurants, Esperpento, a tapas place on 22nd near Valencia St. We’ve been going there for years, the place even appears, come to think of it, in my novel Freeware, where Sta Hi Mooney is abducted right outside by a giant flying pterodactyl made of flickercladding piezoplastic. Those were the days!

I’m nearing the end of a streak of five short stories that I’ve worked on this summer. I’m still mulling over what to write next. Today I’m back to thinking a sequel to Frek and the Elixir might be a good idea. Questions of what’s marketable play a role in these decisions too.

Sooner or later the Muse is going to show up and tell me what to do. I just ordered a Philip Jose Farmer book with some stuff that I need in it: Venus on the Half-Shell and Others. The book has Farmer’s fake Vonnegut novel, Venus On the Half-Shell, originally marketed as being by one Kilgore Trout. Plus it has “The Jungle-Rot Kid on the Nod,” a pastiche of Edgar Rice Burroughs in the style of William Seward Burroughs, obviously something I need to read.

A read a several year’s old book by Bruce Wagner last week, Still Holding, and I just got The Chrysanthemum Palaceout of the library. I kind of like Wagner, he writes these very dark and hip stories about Hollywood characters. He’s a master of California dialect. And now and then he unleashes these really poetic streaks.

This said, you need to be careful to to read some Bruce Wagner books while eating a meal—I do often read while eating lunch, and several times the Wag-Man spiked my appetite with some truly gross scene. “Rude Chuckles with a Negative Charge,” as Robert Williams wrote as motto on the cover of Cocaine Comix a few years back.

I can’t quite figure out what kind of guy Wagner is. In Still Holding he goes off on these really intense riffs about Buddhism, maybe in a kind of overdone Hollywood maven kind of way. He kind of makes Buddhism square, like interior decorating magazine article, or a Lives Of The Saints schtick, or a Neimann-Marcus catalog. Maybe he’s doing this on purpose to make fun of Hollywood. Or maybe he just over-researched the topic.

There’s also something a little cruel in his attitude towards his characters. In Still Holding a couple of the characters die fairly horrible deaths, and if feels…unkind. I’m thinking there’s this Hollywood thing of “going for the tough ending” that some people think is artistic and avant-garde. My feeling on this is that we all know that life is full of hideous pain, so why harp on that in a work of fiction that many readers are likely to be using for escape and entertainment.

Wagner seems to have befriended the aging sixties drug-shaman Carlos Castaneda during the nineties, see this 1994 interview with Carlos that Bruce did.

It seems like his novels should have been made into big movies, but I think there’s only some indie releases. Whatever gripes I have about him, Bruce Wagner’s novels are tasty page-turners. [And, see my Aug 17, 2010, comment at the end of this post, The Chrysanthemum Palace is incredible, rising above any criticisms I ever had.]

I finished reading Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma, a long and good biography. I relate to Turing in many ways. I went ahead and wrote another story about Alan, “Undifferentiated Tissue.” I’ll be running this in the next issue of Flurb. I’m lining up some good stuff for the coming issue, which is #10.

I went out painting en plein air on a beach near Davenport with my friend Vernon Head again today. Vernon just got a portable oil kit, and I have a kit cobbled together with a collapsible aluminum easel and a lot of stuff in a knapsack. Vernon is a really skilled painter, he gets the colors right, and his pictures look like Corots. He likes my approach, although he always laughs and says “Why do you even go out for en plein air painting, when you’re going to make a picture like that?” Vernon has some of his images up in an album on his Facebook page…the album is public, so you should be able to see it, although you will need to log into Facebook first. Vernon paints really well, it’s kind of humbling.

This is a rough first layer of a new painting “Beach Saucer” that I got done today. I think I’ll add some figures on the beach, maybe fleeing or waving humans or maybe aliens. Maybe some birds in the sky.

I’m working on two more SF stories as well, a couple of collaborations with writer friends, one with Paul Di Filippo, one with Eileen Gunn. I really enjoy writing, although it’s also stressful and hard. As I always say, I like the craft of it, and the dreaming.

Writing stories is kind of weird, it’s like painting a miniature. You keep having to prune back avenues of investigation and get to the point. If you think in terms of getting “high” on your art, then doing a story is like smoking a roach of seeweed that you found in your car ashtray. And writing a novel is like, say, having a kilo of merge to polish off. I’m a glutton for the “narcotic moment of creative bliss,” as the John Malkovitch artist-prof character says in Art School Confidential. But I’ll settle for the ashtray roaches for awhile, that’s cool too.