In late September, 2024, Barb and I went to Lowlands for two and half weeks. This means Amsterdam, Brussels, and Antwerp. All are places I know fairly well.

Beyond the Lowlands trip, I’m covering this fall and winter, including the death of my brother Embry, and another Christmas.

Our first stop was Amsterdam, and the first place I wanted to go was their Van Gogh museum. Here’s a nice shot of Barb with one of the man’s self-portraits.

Most of his really well-known paintings are elsewhere, but on the top floor, there are some amazing works from the last weeks of van Gogh’s life. To be painting that well, and to want to die anyway…unfathomable.

We stayed in old, plush Art Nouveau district near the museums. Each house’s door was more spectacular than the next. I’ve always felt that Art Nouveau didn’t last long enough. Why not continue making houses and furniture look like this! Less isn’t more—it’s less. Photo by Barb.

Well, there’s always Art Deco. Saw this wall in a kind of lamp and furniture historical art gallery plus store by an utterly cozy and peaceful canal.

I didn’t happen to get many photos in Brussels. But here’s the supernal master Peter Bruegel’s painting, “The Fall of the Rebel Angels.” This appears on the cover of my novel of Bruegel’s life, As Above. So Below. The painting is in the Brussels museum, and I used to go look at it a lot when I as living in Brussels for a few months at one point.

I was thinking about that painting again while writing Sqinks last month when I described a collection of sqinks being like “a teeming horde of flying grotesques and chimeras derived from fish, birds, kitchen implements, plants, knives, and fungi.”

And here’s some Bruegel photos from Antwerp, details of a lesser-known Bruegel painting “Mad Meg” or “Dulle Griet.” It happens to have belonged to an Antwerp worthy, whose former house is now a kind of museum in Antwerp, with this marvel in it.

The painting is quite large, and the room is dim, presumably to save the colors from fading. The last time I’d seen the painting it had been very dirty, and hard to see. But now it’s clean but, as I say the room is dim. This is where my little phone camera was a great aid. I used it like a viewer, moving it back and forth near the canvas, while watching the screen  to see the details: not only magnified, but clarified by the camera’s AI.

And look at that big eye up there! So craftsman-like, such detail. And for some reason known only to Peter Bruegel, we have a row of three little birds (or demons) perched above the eye.

Barb and I spent at least an hour in “Dlolle Griet” room in Antwerp,  going every square inch of the masterpiece. Paradise! No way of knowing if I’ll ever get there again, so I took my time. This little detail above: my god! It’s practially a novel! A fractal! No stinting here, no short weight, no rough draft. Seems like Bruegel might well have spent a year on Dulle Griet.

We stayed in a retrofitted mansion in downtown Antwerp, with a rooftop patio and a view of the tile roofs and the cathedral. No problem, baby! The lighting on the cathedral is so striking because the sun was rising from behind me. Unless it was setting…

As always in search for the cool part of town, we found an Antwerp street with artistic shops. This was an avant garde furniture store or gallery with nobody in it except for this friendly guy, Wout Bemelmans. His goal in life is to design this type of furniture, and he had a few pieces to show us.

And then it was back home, flying out of Amsterdam. The airports so modern and slick there. Souls getting sorted to leave this world.

And back to my deck in good old Los Gatos. As I always say, if clouds were for some reason rare—like if there was only one spot on Earth where you could see them—how we’d flock to view them!

I introduced Barb Ash to Teri Hope, curator of the Los Gatos Coffee Roasting cafe—and Barb hung a show of seventeen photos that she took in Cuba last year. A beautiful show and a big success.

Barb has this skill that somehow I still haven’t mastered—even after sexy-five years of shooting. It’s called focus. Barb’s photos are totally sharp. Great compositions and subjects too.

One day I was showing Barb the Haight, where I don’t go very often. Always fun to see the new stores and the old ones. Borderlands Books is there these days, moved from Valencia Street, a great place. This shot shows the sign of … a music store. Cute.

We hit the insanely gnarly Fluevog shoe store. One of a kind creations, year after year. Me wondering which shoe will go best with my outfits.

This is more or less a Halloween painting, although at the time I was also trying to visualize some of the aliens in Sqinks. They’re called Mu9ers from the world Mu 9. Like the San Francisco 49ers, in a way, although these critters are known for huffing human brains. Not that, as it turns out, it actually kills you have a Mu9er huff your brain. More like it clears you up. But too many repeats, and your brain’s a little too clear, or maybe it’s wet, gooshy, and collapsed like an old pumpkin, and there you are on the Santa Cruz sidewalk. Spare change?

But while it lasts, we can have fun. Here I am in food-coma at Rudy’s Can’t Fail Cafe in Emeryville, down near the lower end of Berzerkistan. I worship the Clash song, “Rudy Can’t Fail.” Along with Dandy Livingtone and his “Message to You Rudy,” these rude boys redeemed by first name, which lived so long in the shadow of that cutesy-poo, didactic, ad-jingle-type reindeer.

Rudy can’t fail! Yes! Rudy Jr. had told me of this Valhalla, and, while spending a night in Berkeley, Barb and I sought it out for the most bodacious breakfast imaginable. Spinach, salmon, grease…we got! Unpretentious as a used car lot, but hip and mellow within.

For this image, I pasted a sample from from one of my paintings onto an AI image of a writer and a robot. It’s me writing my novel Software in 1980, right? And my muse is Ralph Numbers, or Cobb Anderson, or my father, Embry Rucker, Sr.

As I compose this post, to be dated as August, 2024, it is in reality eight months later, that is, March, 2025. I’m catching up on my blog. Why did I neglect my blog for so long? Well, mainly it’s because I was intensely focused on my novel Sqinks. So there’s a “layered time” element to this post.

As my programmer friend Michael Beeson once said, “Writing a long program is like being a drug addict. All you want is that one thing, and you never have any time for all the other things.” Same deal with writing a novel.

A couple of weeks ago, I finished the first draft and the first round of corrections on Sqinks, and now it’s with my agent, and I’m free. Dutiful sort that I am, I like to have something to do, and I enjoy sharing my photos and anecdotes. So here  goes my blog again.

But why not just microblog? As you probably know, I post pretty often on Bluesky, Mastodon, and, yes, even  X/Twitter. I  like the microblog format. Over the years I’ve gotten used to it. In some ways it’s like composing haiku, what with the strict limit on length. Generally I’ll attach one of my recent photos to each microblog post, under the Surrealist principle that any image goes with any text.

But the long blog post format still appeals to me. I do shoot a lot of photos and I love to put them out there. And when I’m posting a lot of photos at once, I get a rolling flow of commentary going, and I can develop my thoughts at greater length and, I hope, entertain you guys. So welcome back.

 

After my trip to London with Barb Ash, we did a mandatory visit to Seabright beach in Santa Cruz. The lighthouse on the spit next to the harbor. Love walking up and down this beach, it’s been a touchstone ever since we moved here in 1986, which was, my god, nearly forty years ago. I guess you could say I’m a Californian by now.

The classic Greens restaurant in the Fort Mason area of San Francisco. Fab views and the food is always startling. Barb and I were here very much at an uncrowded time, near afternoon closing time. Epic view.

I like walking the path along the coast between Fort Mason and towards the Land’s End area. Dig the lovely curves of the sea walls.

Spotted this nice art ball in an art alley behind SF MOMA. In place for some coming evening’s fest. The sphere is truly one of most perfect possible shapes. And when it’s a mirror—well, it contains the entire outer world within.

Rude Dog the author at home. I painted a “face” onto the case of my phone to make it easier to find.

Speaking of spheres, how about this mossy being at low tide on Four Mile Beach, north of Santa Cruz? Exquisite. All is one, baby.

My painting “White Holes.” I smeared the paints from my previous palette on the canvas, then added the white holes. It took quite a while to decide the colors around the holes. As always you can purchase my paintings at my Paintings page

Daughter Isabel Rucker and I walking in Los Gatos Creek on a warm day. The water level kind of low, but certainly deep enough to be beautiful. My kids all get it about Nature being holy. Holy in a fun, relaxing kind of way—no sermons or blaring organ music involved. To comfortably walk on the underwater stones I myself wear Keene’s sandals with cotton socks, and use two walking sticks.

Lovely inside-out 4D portal magic door. In the “cube” overlooking silicon valley. It’s an old structure on Mount Umunhum, originally the mounting for a big radar dish to look for incoming ICBM missiles from Russia. Now painted over with varnish and left in place. Nice drive and a nice view.

Another sacred spot, with its own magic door. This one at Panther Beach between Santa Cruz and Davenport. It used to be undiscovered, but now you see more people there. Even so, you can often have it to yourself.

Barb Ash at Panther Beach with me. Interesting flows of blue rock amid the buff.

Another shot of that amazing stone at Panther. Gnarl is the best, and chaos is health.

Magical crack in my basement door with the light burning in. Sober though I am, I am in fact “high” a lot of the time. It’s just a matter of paying attention.

Holding forth on my theories about the all-important gnarl. At Pfeiffer Beach in Big Sur.

Great shot of the setting sun from the entrance to Pfeiffer Beach. Really strong wind at this time, almost like you’re being sand-blasted. If you want to sit down, you need to sit in the lee of a log or rock. I got this shot with my Pixel phone camera… sometimes these little phone cameras can catch something that a “real” camera might not.

This was shot with my Leica Q 2. Just love that sunbeam. Graphic designers and photographers sometimes call these “God rays,” especially if the rays they’re emanating from a setting sun or cloudy sky. I didn’t really even see this ray when I took this picture, but it showed up when I was processing the RAW file in Adobe Lightroom Classic, which my go-to “dark room,” where I “develop” my photos.

For this photo, it’s crucial to have those two people in it. Humanizes it, let’s you project yourself into it.

This shot and the one before were shot at Andrew Molera State Park just north of Big Sur. It has a nice trail from the parking area to the beach, although you have to cross a brook (well, actually it’s the Big Sur River)…you might wade, or sometimes there’s some boards or even a bridge to walk on, it varies.

“Farewell,” a sad painting about me saying goodbye to my dear wife Sylvia. She’s walking toward the afterworld and I’m standing there. The creepy building on the right is, like, a crypt where you might buy a slot for storing your departed one’s ashes. We did not in fact use a crypt, as it felt better to bury Sylvia’s box of ashes in a regular cemetery grave with a headstone. What are those four lonely little cakes by the crypt? I guess they might stand for me and the three kids, on our own now.

Sutro Tower in San Francisco, emerging from the fog. I didn’t use a telephoto lens here, it was just my regular Q2 lens, but with the image cropped way down. At first you might think Sutro Tower is ugly — a robotic fondu fork — but over time you get used to it. It’s part of SF.

The classic bar at Zuni Cafe on Market Street in SF. Been there since 1979. On daughter Isabel’s fiftieth birthday, all the kids gathered here, flanked by Rudy’s wife Penny, and Isabel’s husband Gus. Rudy Jr. treated us to dinner; he and I split a house specialty: an entire roast chicken. And what a chicken. It was lovely to share the big birthday with Isabel.

Rudy the Elder.

Early in 2024 I started spending time with Barb Ash, who I met in the Los Gatos Coffee Roasting. Being with Barb makes me a lot happier than I’ve been for the last year and a half. I’m glad I met her.

In May, we went ahead and did a trip to England together, spending ten days at a BnB in London, and a couple of days near Stonehenge, and in Bath. As it happens Barb is a photographer, and some of the time we went around with our cameras, advising each other on shots. I still have my Leica Q2, and she uses a Nikon 7, selling her photos through stock photography sites, and having occasional shows around San Jose.

And of course I often resort to my Pixel 7 phone. “The best camera is the one you have with you.” And all the photos of me are by Barb.

By a humongous monument in front of Buckingham Palace. Can’t remember who it’s in honor of. Probably not Keith Richards

This is a really excellent guitarist we spotted in a tube station. I told him he played like Jimi Hendrix. He said, “Jim Morrison too. All the Jimmies.”

This is what I call a “Rudy picture.” My eye is always picking out abstract patterns. This is an especially rich one. In the downstairs of the V&A, or Victoria and Albert Museum of…everything a Victorian might ever be interested in, one of each.

The cafe at the V&A is outrageous. Amazing baroque ornamentation. Makes you regret that modern times happened.

With my niece Siofra Rucker at a high-end fish and chips place she took us to. Not far from our B&B in the Marylebone neighborhood. Siofra works for an American school in London, and is currently working on an MBA at Oxford, no less.

Barb and me!

Wandering around London is an endless treat. This is near St. Paul’s Cathedral. Love that green.

I think we saw this view from the Tower of London grounds. Some amazing postmodern architecture in London…like two steps beyond. So why NOT have a building shaped like a cartoon toaster. We’ve got the modern materials, and software that can generate utterly strange blueprints.

Cool tiling of the floor of the New West End Synagogue in London.

The New West End Synagogue. Love the Hebrew writing. Barb was particularly interested in photographing the place. We went on a weekday, when no service was taking place, and it was exceedingly hard to get in. Locked up tight, for obvious reasons. But they had a buzzer with a speaker, and I told the guy that were two Jewish American photographers, shooting images for shows and our websites, which is more or less true, except the part about me being Jewish, although I do have a Jewish ancestor or two, a few steps up the family tree.

Inspiring, sacred, other-worldly place.

Staircase at the old Tate art museum, the stairs go up to a coffee shop. Dizzying spiral.

Peter Bruegel, “Adoration of the Kings,” 1564, at the National Gallery, off Trafalgar Square. I saw this painting some years before I wrote my novel As Above So Below, an imagined account of Brugel’s life. My only historical novel. It was this painting which inspired me to write my novel. As noted in my Journals, I saw it with Sylvia on September 12, 1998. Here’s what I wrote.

How clear and fresh the canvas is. The three kings are in a triangle of gaze, each looking at a gift held by one of the other kings. Balthazar looks like Jimi Hendrix at the Monterey Pop festival. He has a beautiful pointed-toe red boot. Fringed chamois leather cape. His gift is a gold ship called a “nef.” It holds a green enameled shell, and within the shell is a tiny live monkey.

The gallery note by the picture says that Bruegel put soldiers in his pictures because for most of his life the Netherlands were occupied by Spanish soldiers. This touch makes it seem so real. Makes me want to write Bruegel’s life. The rainy Flemish day, right here in front of me. I want to go there.

Mary is a hot cutie with full lips. A guy whispers in Joseph’s ear. He’s saying “You’re a cuckold. Mary had a lover.” Joseph looks undisturbed.

In the background are a bunch of interesting characters. A guy with glasses, maybe a money-lender. Also a classic Bruegel fool. And a fat guy like you’d see at the farmers’ market.

Great to re-visit the painting after twenty-six years. And good to show this talisman to Barb.

Here I am with my first cousin Gabriela von Bitter, known as Ela or Mauni in the family. Barb and I had lunch with here in the Charing Cross hotel across from the National Gallery. I’ve only seen her once since I was a boy. Her main memory of me is wat a terrible, spoiled, American child I was, this would have been when I was perhaps eight. Apparently the whole family still remembers that visit. The key story is that my aunt and uncle has us over to their well-worn manor on their estate (a farm). And they offered me some summer sausage salami. But I only wanted to eat the peppercorns in it. So I ate the peppercorns, and put the meat under my couch cushion. Barb listened attentively.

When we went outside again, it was raining even harder. We took a break in a church with a very cool window over the altar. Like a warp in Hilbert space instead of the usual Holy Family with Grandpa God.

A nice photo of Barb when we had high tea at The Parlour in the Great Scotland Yard Hotel off Trafalgar Square. It was pouring rain, and I was stumbling around in watery gutters, staring at my phone map, and thank god I found this spot. Incomparable. Joyous.

Here’s St Margaret’s church at Westminster Abby. near the Houses of Parliament. I like the knobbly look. Like an appetizer tray. We had trouble getting inside at first.

Sun-touched Big Ben with House of Parliament (?) mighty chariot chariot and a tube sign.

We had fun walking along the Thames looking over at the London Eye Ferris wheel. It turns very slowly, like the minute hand on a clock, you get a one-hour ride. But we didn’t get around to it.

Interesting shops in the Marylebone neighborhood where we stayed. These folks were selling…scents.

We got together with yet another of my relatives in London: my cousin Mauni’s son Edward Marr. He’s always been a reader of my SF novels, and I’ve corresponded with him over the years. Recently he was working for companies who distribute magazines. Was fun to hang out with him and hear that wonderful British=style speech.

Definitely a Rudy picture. Love the blobby slug that’s made of twigs and leaves.

We spent most of a day at Portobello Market, full of booths and shops. Liked these veggies in a van.

The sign on this Ukai cafe really appealed to us. We spent some time sitting there…twice, after walking the market up and down.

Some fellow Ukai patrons. To me they seemed like hip Londoners, but who knows.

A Rudy picture of the loos.

Terrific graffiti, and the bloke striding by, and the electric scooter. Perfect.

Cool “stepped” painting in a Portobello underpass. Looks totally different from the two ends.

We finally got into Westminster Abbeyby taking a walking tour. This lady was our tour guide. She had a lot of personality and a British accent and lots of informative asides. I loved her.

Here out guide is pointing out the tomb of ISAAC NEWTON. We calculus teachers like to think of him as mathematician first, and a physicist second. Our hero. Great to see one of our own getting the full treatment here.

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Architectural bric-a-brac. But I’d rather see this than a blank wall!

Outside Westminster Abbey, a plinth and a tree embrace. Adam and Eve.

And now were off to see Stonehenge. It’s near the town of Salisbury, which has some quaint old zones. This was the view from our window.

A gate into the “keep” or park around the Salisbury cathedral. Love this ancient stuff.

Rudy picture.

Getting to Stonehenge was kind of hard. You get a taxi from Salisbury, and it drive ten miles to the Stonehenge center which is itself a mile or two from the rocks, and wait in line half an hour for a bus, which takes you to the site, which becomes very crowded over the day. A low rope barrier blocks you from going in and touching the stones which is, on the whole thing, a good thing, as otherwise this photo would have about fifty or a hundred people crawling around. You’re not allowed to touch them. So–in a way it’s a letdown, and the stones are smaller than you might expect—but even so, it’s awesome. Maybe four thousand years old.

Barb on the scene. She herself was up for darting in to touch the stone. “It’s not like the guards have guns.” How we Americans think…

You can’t take just one photo. Love the clouds.

Picnic supply shop. Vape supplies?!?

I seem to be a Druid.

This man drove us back into Salisbury in his taxi. It was raining once again, and it was sort of hard to call a cab. For some reason, as soon as I got in the cab, they guy exclaims, “You’re an author!” And it wasn’t like he’d ever hears of me or seen a photo of me, it was just a random shot. Maybe it was my long white hair. And then he tells me this kind of great story how he’d written a novel, and the authorities had seen it, and they’d called him into the back room and and had forbidden him to ever write a book again. “I can relate,” I tell him. “I get rejection letters like that all the time.” What was wrong with his novel? Well, he’d described how his mates in the army actually talked, and the manuscript accidentally fell into the hands of the police, who’d been searching his house for some other reason, and they passed it up the chain of authority, and that was that. In the US a book like this might conceivably do well.

The floor of a little gallery off the Salisbury Cathedral where we saw an actual copy of the Magna Carta. Seems there are several copies. It’s pretty long and I couldn’t quite get the drift.

Another photo of that same quaint window view.

I think the English call this a barrow.

Our last stop was at a pricey inn named, of all things, The Pig, near Bath. Siofra suggested it to me. Siofra knows of course that I am of course fond of pigs, and that I fact think of them as my totem animal. Barb was dubious, but the place was great.

Bath is a lovely town with tons of ancient-looking Roman architecture, although I understand that a lot of it was rebuilt after WWII. Plenty of cute shops, like this stained glass place.

Excellent “ceiling” a High Gothic church there.

And Barb in an arcade. We’d just been dancing in a square to the tunes of some street musicians. Vacation

This kid was incredible. A juggler on a roller board holding forth on what he was doing, with elements of comedy thrown in.

Pope Rudy.

Last sight we saw was a little pay-as-you-enter riverside park in bath, featuring, among other things, a large carved-wood slug.

That’s all, folks.

And, oh, here’s a painting I made the other day. It has nothing whatsoever to do with our trip.