{"id":2685,"date":"2010-10-22T13:13:35","date_gmt":"2010-10-22T21:13:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=2685"},"modified":"2010-10-22T13:14:59","modified_gmt":"2010-10-22T21:14:59","slug":"post-impressionist-sf","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2010\/10\/22\/post-impressionist-sf\/","title":{"rendered":"Post-Impressionist SF"},"content":{"rendered":"

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 \u201cPost-Impressionist Masterpieces from the Mus\u00c3\u00a9e d\u2019Orsay\u201d\u009d at the de Young museum in Golden Gate Park.<\/p>\n


\n[Paul Mavrides outside the Post-Impressionist art show\u2026he selected this pose.]<\/em><\/p>\n

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<\/em>, but also in a 1954 Mickey Rooney comedy called The Atomic Kid<\/em>, and in the last episode of the first season of a 1986 TV series called Crime Story<\/em>. I don\u2019t think I\u2019ll look at either of those, but the fact that the idea\u2019s been used three times makes me feel a little more free about using it again. It\u2019s kind of a standard trope by now.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I loved Paul Signac, Women at the Well, <\/a>of 1893. Some really great gnarly shapes at the bottom. And Beach at Heist <\/a>by Paul Lemmen, 1892.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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).<\/p>\n


\n[A guy cleaning the copper trim at Balazo.]<\/em><\/p>\n

I checked out some big cartoon books at Booksmith, one of which included \u201cDeath Sentence,\u201d\u009d a comic from Tales of Terror <\/em>#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 \u201cforced rapid evolution of 1,000,000 years,\u201d\u009d effectively becoming a creature typical of the far future. Some of the goo gets into a cut on the scientist\u2019s finger and then, \u201cHe was a changing, shapeless mass of ulcerative protoplasm.\u201d\u009d The goo splits and redivides, eating everyone in sight. Perfect.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

While at Paul\u2019s I glimsed Doctor Hal Robbins in his laboratory. He\u2019s gearing up for a new round of his \u201cAsk Dr. Hal<\/a>\u201d\u009d performances.<\/p>\n

It was great being in San Francisco at night in the fog. Such a sense of promise and excitement. I hadn\u2019t been on Haight Street for about a year, and it looked a little better than I\u2019d remembered\u2014usually I always just go to Valencia Street these days. There really are some good clothes stores on the Haight, the restaurants aren\u2019t bad, and there weren\u2019t as many gutterpunk panhandlers as usual.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

And while I was in town, I checked out the wall space at Borderlands Caf\u00c3\u00a9 on Valencia, planning the arrangement for my art show there in November\u2026next month.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 \u201cPost-Impressionist Masterpieces from the Mus\u00c3\u00a9e d\u2019Orsay\u201d\u009d at the de Young museum in Golden Gate Park. [Paul Mavrides outside the Post-Impressionist art show\u2026he selected this pose.] […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2685","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2685","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2685"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2685\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2687,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2685\/revisions\/2687"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}