We were at the Los Gatos Christmas parade once again on Saturday. We’ve been attending it off and on for twenty-four years.

The Stanford band is always a highlight, playing like crazy, dressed to kill. What energy! They’re probably all A students, crazy though they look. The saxes were playing with one hand behind their back…

We always have a platoon of squash-growing Italians, as if airlifted in from the East Coast or Chicago, rough and tough, phallically thrusting their vegetables. A beauty queen rides in their Cadillac, chauffeured by a presumably venal official in a top hat.

The high-school drill teams are universal, lovely to see. I can vaguely remember being that age. The marching isn’t the center of your life, it’s just something you do.

I like this kid, he looks so cool. A horn man.

Back to the parade, there’s these three or four older men who show up every year in a giant self-powered shiny metal duck. They’re fans of the University of Oregon, who’s mascot is the most famous duck of all, Donald D. I bet they work on refining the duck-car all year. It’s great.

The tumblers are awesome. My autofocus has a slight delay, so I caught this young woman further into her flip than I’d expected, but this is in fact pretty cool. Gravity-defying.

There’s this corner-store market on Los Gatos Boulevard, the Jiffy Mart, with a full line of liquor as well. Every year they sponsor a crew of freestyle bicyclists; they drive a pickup along the parade route with curved ramps on the front and back of the pickup, and every few dozen yards they stop, and the eager biker-boys do insane high-air flips. Very California.

And now I’m back at my desk, pecking away at Turing & Burroughs—I’m going to write a riff off a Charlie Parker reverie I saw, I’ll use it for the stream of thought for Alan Turing who’s disguised as a black woman inside the Sunset Lounge in 1955 West Palm Springs, Florida. I’ve been reading the lives of some jazz players, recently Miles Davis, and last year Charlie Parker. And here’s the quote I’m eyeing, from Bird Lives, The Life of Charlie Parker, by Ross Russell (Charterhouse 1973), pl 55.

If he looked across the beams of the spotlights that shone toward the bandstand, he could see a lavender haze, shimmering like air over a street on a hot summer day. He watched the heavy smoke that curled and wreathed, floating lazily upward, borne along by the waves of music. It had a sharp, pungent, odor and made a biting sensation in the nose. It was smoke from sticks of tea that were being passed from one man to another on the bandstand below. After twenty minutes of the set Charlie would feel himself borne along in the pleasant lavender haze. Then the long narrow interior of the Reno Club would grow deeper. The bar, the polished glassware in front of the mirror, the waitresses poised like blackbirds, ready to fly to their customers—the tables, booths, dancers, musicians, orchestra, everything in the Reno Club seemed to be exactly where it belonged, as if it had been there forever and would never change, fixed in time and space, and time itself stopped. He was getting high. Now he could hear the things that he had missed, the miniature sound—Basie’s little blue comments, a silvery skein of notes played by Prof as a counter line to Herschel, muted chortling of screened brass under the saxophone choir, a light scurrying of sticks across the head of the snare drum as Jesse marked off a bar section, wispy little phrases that entered somebody’s mind because of something just played.

Love those sounds, Ross.

Get a painting for the holidays! I’ve slashed the prices by across the board at my Paintings Site.

The sale runs through December 31, 2010.

You can see the sale prices here.

We were in San Francisco today, taking down the paintings from my show at Borderlands Café. They still have some high-quality signed prints of my paintings on sale at Borderlands Books next door. In the photo below, note “Turing and the Skugs” on the wall.

It was nice to be in the city for the day, on the loose. We went to see a great print show at the Legion of Honor Art Museum out on the cliffs near the Golden Gate Bridge. The show was called Japanesque—it’s about Japanese prints in the time of French Impressionism. (The French used the word “Japonisme.”)

The big show-stopper is a nearly complete set of Katsushika Hokusai’s series of woodcuts, each in about eight colors, 36 Views of Mount Fuji , completed in the 1830s. The most famous of these is The Great Wave, but I’ve posted a picture of Asakusa Temple in Edo. Actually you can see rather good images of all 36 prints on Wikipedia! The show also has an “answer” series by French artist Henri Riviere, 36 Views of the Eiffel Tower.

I wandered into the porcelain gallery and saw this plate with Adam and Eve. Eve looks like the Headless Horseman carrying her head. Porcelain galleries are kind of interesting, so brittle and polychrome, quite unlike painting galleries.

Outside the wintry sky looked like…a Japanese woodcut, with printed areas of pink among the blues, framed by the the Art Nouveau curves of the Monterey pines.

Naturally, Sylvia and I pondered creating a series, 36 Views of the Golden Gate Bridge. In this vein I should mention the wonderful California artist Tom Killion, and his series of prints, 28 Views of Mount Tamalpais, views of and on a mountain just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. Killion’s also published a related book with the poet Gary Snyder.

On the writing front, I keep rewriting a long journal note called, “What’s the Plot Again?” about my plans for Turing & Burroughs. This material is a little too detailed and preliminary to put up in a blog post—I’ll only quote the start:

I’m getting close to being a third of the way through Turing & Burroughs, and I need to think about the plot some more. Once again I’ve reached what the writer Robert Sheckley used to call a “black point.” I’m not at all sure where to go.

So, okay, fall back on craft. Around the end of the first third, a book needs a conflict, a bump, an unforeseen development. So far it’s been pretty straight-ahead. Turing learns to tweak biocomputations, he creates a skug, the skug can convert humans into shapeshifting skuggers. Now the plot thickens. Somehow.

I have picked out a car for Alan and his companions to drive, heading from Palm Beach to Los Alamos, New Mexico. It’s a 1955 Pontiac Catalina that I found for sale online.

It goes almost without saying that the skugs are, being 1950s mutants, really into nukes, and therefore into visiting the Los Alamos National Laboratories. They plan to get some kind of boost from nuclear power or from a nuclear bomb. Alan takes advantage of his new friend Ned Strunk’s Los Alamos connections—Ned underwent training there to be a nuclear-reactor tech for the Nautilus submarine.

I think Alan, posing as a woman, gets hired to work at Los Alamos as, get this, a programmer. Stanislaw Ulam, mathematician and co-inventor of the hydrogen bomb, had a woman assistant who coded up his nonlinear wave equation simulation for him. “We wish to thank Miss Mary Tsingou for efficient coding of the problems and for running the computations on the Los Alamos MANIAC machine,” reads a footnote in E. Fermi, J. Pasta, and S. Ulam, “Studies of Nonlinear Problems”, published in 1955, and based on work done in 1952.

This paper is dear to my heart, I spent a number of years creating the cellular automata package Capow (still free online for Windows), for viewing Ulam’s creations. See also my own paper on this topic, “Continuous Valued Cellular Automata for Nonlinear Wave Equations,” co-authored with the mathematician Daniel N. Ostrov.

Alan becomes Ulam’s programmer, and works on nonlinear wave equations for use in creating, I dunno, small hydrogen bombs that fit inside lightbulbs for illuminating the home? Perhaps, along the way, Alan so improves his skug technology that skugs can be inhabited not only by human minds but by aethereal, invisible beings. And maybe in a Pied Piper ending, Alan creates some bomb-that’s-not-a-bomb that lures all the skugs to their demise like moths to aflame, like the children of Hameln into the cave beneath the mountain.

“Getting a little skuggy in here, isn’t it?”

I’m still working on my novel, Turing & Burroughs, one scene at a time.

I need a word for the people who’ve been taken over by skugs. They aren’t exactly skugs themselves; I think of a pure skug as being one of those globs that doesn’t necessarily have any human personalities inside it. When a skug eats you, you are a skug, yes, but you’re also to some extent yourself, in that you can look like yourself and act like yourself.

“Turing and the Skugs”, 40″ x 30″ inches, Oct 2010, Oil on canvas.” Click for larger version. The painting itself will be on display as part of my show at Borderlands Cafe on Valencia St. in SF, CA, until December 1. More info on my paintings site.]

I’ll go with skugger. “He’s a skugger,” sounds right. “She’s a skugger, too.” There’s an echo of slugger, which suggests a heavy hitter. I do like the er ending, which suggests an on-going activity. Like “bopper” in the Wares. Bopping it up. Skugging it up.

Speaking of nomenclature, I think I’ll use skug as a verb to describe the act of turning someone into a skugger. “They skugged her.” “I got skugged, too, man. It’s great.” I think of the lyrics to Bob Dylan’s song, “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35”. Here’s a verse with “skug” instead of “stone,” and with the second to last line changed for the sake of the rhyme.

Well, they’ll skug ya when you’re walkin long the street
They’ll skug ya when you’re tryin to keep your seat
They’ll skug ya when you’re walkin on the floor
They’ll skug ya when you’re walkin to the door
But I would not feel like such a grub
Everybody must get skugged

We can suppose that the skuggers like to band together. They’re an endangered minority, at least for now. And I think that it’ll soon be clear that they’re bent on world domination, as befits their role as objective correlatives for the 50s bogeymen: intellectuals, artists, racial minorities, communists, dope-fiends and homosexuals. “Everybody must get skugged.”

As the book goes on, I want Alan to realize that the skugs have very powerful minds, more so than he anticipated. Their high intelligence is due to (i) parallelism, that is, they’re using each organic cell as a computing unit and (ii) connectivity, that is, via radio waves, they’re in touch with each other, and with as much of the human data-base as is being broadcast on radio, TV and telephone.

When imagining the skug experience of hearing all the radio stations at once, I think of Patti Smith’s album, Radio Ethiopia…