Last week I did a telephone interview with Thomas Gideon, who runs a podcast blog called The Command Line. To hear the talk, you can also click the button below to go to Rudy Rucker Podcasts.

Today I’ll continue in my trip-photos mode, with more on Monument Valley.

Our room looked out over the valley, and we happened to wake up at dawn, like around 5 am. Unreal. It’s amazing how the whole spectrum gets spread out in the sky.

It’s possible but maybe a little nerve-wracking to drive your own car into the valley on a fairly whipped gravel road. Instead we signed on for a jeep tour with a young guy called Parker Johnson, whose family runs Majestic Tours. Arranging the tour was fairly casual—there was a booth and a number of guides in the parking lot by the View hotel.

Parker was a good guide. He turned out to be a college student and a big reader, and we talked about books, as well as about the sights. Being with a guide, we were allowed to go deeper into the back corners of the land than we could have gone in our own car. The peace and quiet out there was kind of intoxicating.

We saw a nice petroglyph of a sheep.

The “Eye of the Sun” is a natural formation that takes on the look of a Picasso profile. Parker said the Navahos have gatherings and concerts there, with singing and drums.

It’s partner, the “Ear of the Wind” is great too. A really magical vibe out there.

We came to a formation called the Totem Pole, highly iconic. Amazing how perfectly Nature designs things on her own.

You’ve seen a lot of these shapes in Hollywood movies. John Ford used to come to Monument Valley for filming. The “Mittens,” for instance appear in his movies She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Fort Apache. And the Totem Pole is in the Clint Eastwood movie, The Eiger Sanction—apparently Clint got the Navahos to let him put some climbing pegs into the tower so he could climb atop it for some shoot-out scene.

So as to have some evening entertainment, the View hotel shows one of those old John Ford movies projected on the wall of the patio every night, and we could see them from our room’s window. It was kind of cool to see the landscape in these old black and white films. But after awhile, the movies got a little tiresome with their unenlightened attitudes towards the Native Americans. Those horse-soldiers whom Ford celebrates were, after all, in the business of stealing the land from the locals. And when John Wayne and Henry Fonda start prating on and on about “honor,” and calling each other “Mister,” it’s hard to take.

On our last day at Monument Valley, I got up really early and hiked a trail out to the West Mitten. I started in the dark, as I didn’t want to be in the desert once the midday sun came up. Later I YouTubed a video from my pocket camera.

It was about a three hour walk, and I saw no other sign of humans—except for a little complex of sheds, shacks and trailers where a family of Navaho herders lived. Their attitudes about the land seem very cool.

As I mention in the video, To keep me company, I had this cool “fetish” that I bought in the Navaho gift shop, a little pig or, more properly speaking, a javelina. Perfect for me given that, as I’ve often said, I think of the Pig as my totem animal. “The pig is the most intelligent animal,” as I like to say.

I got a some great views of the Krazy Kat landscape out there, and being behind the mitten felt like I was in a secret and sacred space.

And then I’d finished the hike and was back on the sandy road where the cars and jeeps drive.

I want to go there again!

Back to the Wild West today!

The “Three Gossips” are enormous towers in the Arches park near Moab.

We hiked in and saw the longest arch of all, the Landscape Arch, it’s actually debatable how exactly to measure its size, but roughly speaking it’s a hundred yards across.

Over the day, Arches gets pretty crowded. On the last morning, we went out early and looked at Double Arch.

And then we drove south from Moab to Monument Valley, which lies at the border of Utah and Arizona, near the “Four Corners” area. One the way we passed Newspaper Rock. It’s hard to date petroglyph markings like this—some say they’re a thousand years old, others think it’s more like a century. Several of the Native American guides we ran into had the idea that the petroglyphs depicted visiting aliens.

We passed through a few Mormon towns in Southern Utah, ending with Bluff, which has a couple of older Victorian houses that might have been built by Mormon settlers.

Monument Valley itself lies within a Navaho reservation, and the very last town before the rez is called Mexican Hat, after a stone formation nearby. The reservation is dry; there are a couple of bars in Indian Hat, a gas station, two motels and not much else.

We drove in towards Monument Valley in the late afternoon, it felt epic, like going to Oz.

Monument Valley itself is an expanse some dozen or so miles across, with immense rock formations. Two of them are called the “mittens,” as each has a main part and a smaller “thumb.”

Monument Valley at dusk. The View hotel is on the left.Click for larger version.

The Navahos recently built a really great hotel called The View on the lip of Monument Valley, and we were able to find a room there—we hadn’t been able to reserve, but someone had cancelled. If we hadn’t found a room we would have camped in what was basically a red dirt parking lot.

I walked up onto the slopes of a bluff next to the hotel and took a few pictures. Moments like this, I want time to stop.

Sylvia and I were up in San Francisco two days ago. I visited with my artist friend Paul Mavrides, and then the three of us went to see the show “Post-Impressionist Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay” at the de Young museum in Golden Gate Park.

[Paul Mavrides outside the Post-Impressionist art show…he selected this pose.]

I mentioned to Paul my idea of having Turing blunder into the fake town set up by an A-bomb test-site, and Paul said this had been used not only in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, but also in a 1954 Mickey Rooney comedy called The Atomic Kid, and in the last episode of the first season of a 1986 TV series called Crime Story. I don’t think I’ll look at either of those, but the fact that the idea’s been used three times makes me feel a little more free about using it again. It’s kind of a standard trope by now.

I loved Paul Signac, Women at the Well, of 1893. Some really great gnarly shapes at the bottom. And Beach at Heist by Paul Lemmen, 1892.

In the evening Sylvia and I went to a reading at Booksmith on Haight Street, and had supper at one of my favorite Mexican restaurants right next door, Balazo (which means pistol in Spanish).

[A guy cleaning the copper trim at Balazo.]

I checked out some big cartoon books at Booksmith, one of which included “Death Sentence,” a comic from Tales of Terror #14, March, 1954, with art by Sid Check. A scientist grows some protoplasmic slime in a glass bottle, much like Alan Turing culturing his skug in my novel. By tweaking his culture with I think radiation, the scientist gets the stuff to undergo “forced rapid evolution of 1,000,000 years,” effectively becoming a creature typical of the far future. Some of the goo gets into a cut on the scientist’s finger and then, “He was a changing, shapeless mass of ulcerative protoplasm.” The goo splits and redivides, eating everyone in sight. Perfect.

While at Paul’s I glimsed Doctor Hal Robbins in his laboratory. He’s gearing up for a new round of his “Ask Dr. Hal” performances.

It was great being in San Francisco at night in the fog. Such a sense of promise and excitement. I hadn’t been on Haight Street for about a year, and it looked a little better than I’d remembered—usually I always just go to Valencia Street these days. There really are some good clothes stores on the Haight, the restaurants aren’t bad, and there weren’t as many gutterpunk panhandlers as usual.

And while I was in town, I checked out the wall space at Borderlands Café on Valencia, planning the arrangement for my art show there in November…next month.