Time for another blog post. I have a lot of photos that have piled up. Today I want to make it easy on myself, so I’ll just post the photos, recent ones first, older ones last, with some comments.

Today’s theme? ART!

Sylvia and I got into the newly renovated SF MOMA yesterday. They got a ton of modern works from the Gap owner, who also paid for the new galleries. A little bit of a vanity self-publishing aspect to this. “My collection is perfect, and I don’t want no stinkin’ curator messing with it!” Some good stuff in there, with a certain number of misfires. I mean, the guy was buying art every year, no matter what…and some things don’t hold up so well.

Here’s a couple of my fellow culture vultures with an Ellsworth Kelly painting. A bunch of paintings by him…they’re kind of satisfying. I don’t think they’d work at all if they weren’t so big.

I guess it goes without saying SF MOMA isn’t on a level with the treasure house that is the NY MOMA — despite some local boosters’ efforts to say otherwise. Floor area isn’t everything. But, hey, don’t ask too much, after all, SF is only a tenth as large of a city as NYC. And, make no mistake, the new SF MOMA really is a fun place to visit, and I don’t mean to dis it. More stuff than you can see in one day. I look forward to many trips there.

Saw a great Stella called “The Hunt: the Third Day,” … see the horse hooves on the lower right. Stella has done a million of the wall assemblages, but this a particularly nice one.

I really liked John Chamberlain sculpture made from a squashed washing machine biting a car bumper. I told my brother-in-law I’d pay $100K for it, if I were richer, and he said that to buy that sculpture he’d need to have $60M in the bank…and be drunk. But I feel he’s mistaken. It’s not so easy to bend and crumple a washing machine so that it looks like art. The frozen torque, mon ami.

When Sylvia and I wandered down the 2nd floor galleries wondering what was there, we were surprised to find the museum’s old collection…I had forgotten about that in the hullaballoo of the new Gap-load. Good to see some old pals here. Fabulous surreal painting by Diego Rivera, called “Symbolic Landscape,” inspired by a woman’s murder in Taxco — suggested by the woman’s glove, and the bloody dagger with a ring at the bottom — and dig how the peeled log “is” the woman. Such lush painting. Diego is king. Not enough of that in contemporary works, in my geezerly opinion.

I was happy to see they have Arneson’s “California Artist” on display, wearing shades whose lenses are holes revealing, oho, that he has an empty head, California artist that he is. I first saw this sculpture when we moved to California in 1986, and I was, like, yeah, I’m a California artist too. I just didn’t realize that before. It’s high time I got here. Solidarität!

“Riding the Flat Cow” acrylic and oil on canvas, April, 2016, 24” x 20”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

I’ve been painting a lot myself lately. Here’s “Riding the Flat Cow,” with my character Villy atop the back of a seemingly flat, or flattish cow, who is in fact a flying saucer and, more than that, is the general of the flying saucer rebel army and, more than that, is capable of travel into the four-dimensional “unspace” that separates our universe from the saucer-filled parallel universe in which it is in fact possible to do a Million Mile Road Trip in your car, assuming you have some really good tires and shocks.

I love the bagpipe in Hieronymus Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights.” With what you might call a “Yay Bagpipes” flag near it. Cropping the image, I see a possible Boschian commentary, to the effect: “The sound of that frikkin bag is like a knife through my ears.”

The super boss villain in Million Mile Road Trip is a bagpipe the size of Mt. Everest. He’s about to touch down on the high-school building during graduation ceremony. Fortunately everyone is sitting on the lawn outside, just like at Los Gatos High every spring. Unfortunately giant jellyfish-like saucers will be dragging their edges across the lawn, eating people. Fortunately, Villy and the Flat Cow are going to get rid of the giant bagpipe. Unfortunately the book is almost done. Fortunately I’ll be able to stop writing.

Thinking about a device in a container, I noticed this little tableau near Aldo’s restaurant in the Santa Cruz Harbor. Love how lively that ensemble of red fire pipes looks.

I always get some good photos when I’m at my son Rudy Jr.’s house or with him and his friends. What is more beautiful than a faded yellow plastic ball with the sun shining on it?

The legendary Marc Pauline and his machine art group SRL (Survival Research Lab) were putting on a surprise show in San Francisco when we were up there a couple of weeks ago. And Rudy’s rabid bicycle art group Cyclecide, a.k.a. Bike Rodeo where helping to set the show up. Here we see some of the Cycleciders assembling an SRL Tesla coil for creating giant sparks.

All sorts of great photos to be found in the Bike Rodeo’s workspace/living space down near the bay. A bag of hammers saying “HAMMERS”…so great.

Jericho, one of the main forces behind Cyclecide, has never seen a bike he didn’t like, not a bike that he didn’t wish to liberate and to reform to revolutionary standards.

Of course you have a steering wheel on the floor.

And a meaty noose with a poster of a Pullman porter.

A tin roof with chains and block and tackle.

A head-mask monster and a hipster.

“Funland,” a word to conjure with. Fading memories of amusement park arcades…

If it’s green enough, a bulb horn doesn’t even need to honk.

Such a great assemblage on this wall. Like…why do I go into museums?

Across the street, a whole Corvette incorporated into a body shop’s sign. Wonderful.

Here’s me, still on my effing crutches for the cracked femur, with some of the Bike Rodeo characters: Big Daddy, Violet Blue, Katie Bell, and John Law.

And that night we saw SRL in action. Some robots here attacking innocent dummies.

For the last twenty years or so the San Francisco fire marshal refused to give SRL another license for a show. This might have had something to do with an epic 1988 or so show with a stack of three burning grand pianos being attacked by a back-hoe under an elevated freeway leading to the Bay Bridge. With chunks of “front line demolition” explosive cubes with fuses scattered about. In any case, the old fire marshal has retired, and the new one was like, “SRL? Who? An art show? Sure.”

And here’s a “claw” that Marc Pauline’s been working on of late. Facing down that sparking Tesla coil.

What does “Bob” Dobbs have to do with anything anymore? Well, I did run into a fellow SubGenius named Philo Drummond at the show. This is a processed image I made of “Bob” using the software CA Lab about thirty years ago. You can get that ware free online. (And good luck getting it to run.) We had to change it’s name to CelLab because some humorless greedy pinheads at a company called Computer Associates claimed they “own” the initials “CA.”

Anyway, back at Rudy Jr.’s now-former apartment, here’s a nice touch of California spring. I like the weathered peeling San Francisco paint, in a pastel shade of course, and the untended garden.

These are the bad ass wheels of my grandson Calder.

I don’t remember where I took this photo. Who do I know who has a stack of four snow tires in their kitchen? Obviously I don’t go there often enough. Reminds me of our old days in upstate New York.

As my leg/hip gets better, I’m going out more. I went to Santa Cruz with my professor pal Jon Pearce. Classic picnic table on wharf here. Blustery spring day.

Look at these three seals. Part of a whole “raft” of them floating off the wharf, on their backs holding up flippers to warm them in the air. I like how these three are in a triangular pattern. The graces, the muses, singing out to me the ending for my novel:

“Have a giant bagpipe attacking from the fourth dimension with a big cloud of flying saucers.”

Oh, of course. Duh!

I’m still recuperating from a series of operations to replace my left hip. But at this point I think the end is in sight. Meanwhile I’ve gotten very good at using my fancy forearm style Sidestix crutches. I’m 70 years old. And I often wear a fedora hat. A picture’s worth a thousand words:

During this ordeal it’s been good for me to have my novel Million Mile Road Trip to work on. Like, I need to go into my fictive world to escape boredom, anxiety, and pain. To forget my ragged, worn self.

Recently I got some encouraging pokes from the Muse.

Poke 1: Dali in a Bosch Painting.

John Shirley, my old partner in literary crimes and misdemeanors, sent me a link to a super detailed online image of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. And while panning and zooming around in there I found an image of Salvador Dali!

I maintain that the great Surrealists Bosch and Dali synchronistically conspired to place this image here and now for me to find! William Gibson sometimes speaks of SF as a type of “street surrealism,” like in his Introduction to my Wares series.

Encountering first the fiction and then its author, I took it instantly for granted that in Rudy Rucker I found an exemplar of a natural-born American street surrealist, bordering at times on a practitioner of Art Brut. Rudy’s fiction has a much higher percentage of surrealism molecules than most fiction, science or otherwise. It has, as moonshiners say when they swirl whiskey in a glass, in order to closely observe how it settles back down the sides of the glass, “good legs”. Rudy’s fiction is probably a bit too strong, in that regard, for some readers, but even the hard stuff, let me assure you, is an enjoyably acquired taste.

So my brahs Jeroon Bosch and Sally Dali are in the house to help.

Poke 2: Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego

Recently I was gearing up for my characters Zoe, Villy, and Scud to encounter this kind-of god called Goob-goob. Out of the blue, I started thinking about the Bible story of Shadrach, Meshach & Abednego. They walked through a fiery furnace? I got the idea that my trio should walk through Goob-goob. Much more interesting than to stand there talking to her like she’s a face on a wall-monitor. God is a door. So, yeah, going through Goob-goob should be like Shadrach, Meshach & Abednego in the fiery furnace. I looked up the story in the Book of Daniel, and learned that an angelic or god-like fourth figure appears in the furnace with the trio.

While deepening my research I found a Beastie Boys 1989 cut, “Shadrach,” great words, very wild, and a video hand-colored by, Adam “MCA” Yauch. The video has an ad on top of it that you have to close.

Anyway, I have my characters go inside the “furnace” of Goob-goob, and there’s a fourth figure (a virtual fourth Beastie Boy?) who’s maybe a little hard to see. Is this new being a quantum mix of the three kids? A quantum superposition? But I need to know what he or she looks like.

Poke 3: The Flat Cow.

I suddenly had the idea that the extra fourth character should be what I’ll call a flat cow. Shaped kind of like a saucer, but smoother, more discus-like, and covered with nappy, brindle-pattern calfskin cow hair. And her side unzips like a coin purse so the kids can hide inside.

I still need to make up a logical explanation for the flat cow. Not worried about that. I believe in the Surreal hard SF approach: Vision first, Logic later.

Here’s an esoteric notion that I probably won’t use. In the higher physics of mappyworld, a “flat cow” is a term that literally means “quantum superposition of any set of objects, producing a new superposed object.” And—for reasons so erudite that I haven’t invented them yet—the flat cow sum of any set of objects does happen to indeed resemble a bulging disk covered with calfskin and which moos. The number of spots on the cow indicate how many objects it’s based on. Computing the flat cow of some objects is a routine mathematico-physical operation.
Imagine a divorce counselor. Who gets the house, hubby or wife? Generate a flat cow based on the man, the woman, and the house. And then listen to this flat cow’s moos.

I have a mental image of one of the saucers attacking or molesting the flat cow that hides the kids. Either the saucer takes a jagged shark-bite out of the flat cow or it extrudes a tube that it tries to insert into the flat cow. Not clear to the kids if this is a mating or a feeding tube. But highly unwelcome in either case. Scud shoos it off with a dark energy zap from his wand.

I’ve always liked drawing and painting blobby animals with spots on their coats. Brindle cows. Here’s something that I called a gub in my novel The Big Aha. A gub is a little like a knobby giraffe, and a little like a flat cow.

Vintage Poke: The Knobby Giraffe

Liz Argall posted a nice interview with me in Lightspeed magazine today, to accompany my story “The Knobby Giraffe,” which is also online.

Let me quote a Q & A pair from the interview, as it relates to the Surrealist Hard SF theme of today’s post.

Q (Liz). A couple of questions about your story “Knobby Giraffe.” Why a giraffe? And why the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz’s cryptic essay, The Monadology?

A (Rudy). For many years, I kept journals, where I’d write about my thoughts and moods, and about things I’d read or see. One particular entry, from 2004, was about me being alone in a motel in the North Beach area of San Francisco, and how I’d woken up early, and I’d read the whole of Leibniz’s short book, The Monadology, while lying in bed.

The Monadology is pretty close to being incomprehensible. It’s way out there. Leibniz seems to say that our universe is an assemblage of “monads” which reflect each other, and each monad has the whole world inside it. And, naturally, it struck me that an idea this crazy ought to be used in an SF story. And—here’s the pro surrealist-in-action part—as soon as I thought of that, I immediately thought that each monad should resemble a knobby giraffe. With brindle patches on it. A zap from the muse. Those little black antlers on a giraffe, they’re like joysticks, see, and you could wiggle them to control the appearance of the world. The knobby giraffe! Very clear in my mind.

So, okay, I’d written this journal entry in 2004, and I came across it again in 2014, and a year later I found a way to put that image and the Monadology rap into the heart of an SF story. I often start with a cool image or situation, and I grow a story outwards from there, filling in the gaps with transreal story cubes.

Cubist Transrealism ?!?!

Oh, one other Q & A pair from Liz Argall’s interview that I want to highlight. I got a chanced to coin and define a new label for a type of SF writing. Cubist transrealism!

Q (Liz).You wrote a pretty passionate manifesto for transrealism in the early 80s. How has your relationship to transrealism evolved over time?

A (Rudy). In short, transrealism means writing fantasy or SF that is in some way based on your actual life. You’re steering clear of received media ideas and trying to write about your daily reality in a warped way. SF tropes become objective correlatives for your psychic drives. At times, I’ve based transreal novels on specific swatches of my personal history—such as college, say, or my experiences working at a software company. But these days I’m more likely to write what I call cubist transrealism. That is, I don’t go for a full reality-encrypted roman a clef. Instead I shatter my daily experiences into surreal frags and tessellate them into a tale. The juxtapositions generate the story and plot.

I’ve done a lot of interviews over the last quarter century, and the collection is up to 400 accumulated Q & A pairs—all of which appear in my “All the Interviews” document online. Any further questions?