{"id":91,"date":"2006-05-01T07:15:54","date_gmt":"2006-05-01T15:15:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/wordpress\/?p=91"},"modified":"2006-05-01T07:15:54","modified_gmt":"2006-05-01T15:15:54","slug":"visit-to-la","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2006\/05\/01\/visit-to-la\/","title":{"rendered":"Visit to LA"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Sylvia and I were in LA this weekend. Big billboards. Big city. Coming back home, San Jose felt like a tiny country town.<\/p>\n

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We stayed with our friends Kenneth Turan and his wife Patty Williams. Ken and I were roommates back at Swarthmore, 44 years ago, and now he’s a film critic at the L. A. Times. Internally you don’t change all that much after your twenties.<\/p>\n

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Kenny came to hear my panel at the LA Times Book Festival — only one other panelist showed up, (Sandra Blakeslee<\/a>, who also got her son Matt to be on the panel), so I got to talk a lot.<\/p>\n

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I said the missing panelists had snorted nanomachines at a party in Venice Beach and were present in the form of one nanomachine every square millimeter on the room’s walls.<\/p>\n

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We visited Coop<\/a> a hotrod\/Juxtapoz artist friend whom I met via this blog. He made me happy by saying that my Bruegel novel As Above, So Below<\/a> resonates with him as a practicing artist. Note the alien orange orb that appeared in this picture of Coop in front of his latest big painting.<\/p>\n

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Coop is twins, and he’s married (I think) to twins, Ruth Waytz and Ruth* Waytz. Ruth has a knitting blog<\/a> and Ruth* blogs photos<\/a> of her daily life, kind of an interesting accumulation.<\/p>\n

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Coop* made his own hotrod, which I find really impressive. This used to be a Model A Ford.<\/p>\n

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He also has a large collection of Japanese science fiction action figures, including a number from the Ultraman (?) series. Readers of my book Frek and the Elixir<\/i><\/a> may recognize these as figures of Unipuskers. My son Rudy gave me one of these figures before I started Frek<\/i>, and when I was casting about for how some particular aliens might look, I used the figure. Coop says that the shape of this figure is in fact designed to represent a boy who was very greedy about hoarding his money that his head turned into a coin purse! I’d always thought of it as a clam-shell.<\/p>\n

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Sylvia and I drove around LA a bit, we came across an interesting block or two on Vermont Street just south of Hollywood Boulevard. I loved that this store was called SquaresVille.<\/p>\n

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A mural worthy of the Haight, or, hey, even better, it’s LA, it’s the big time. I love that chrome stellated dodecahedron head. Coop was talking about painting chrome too, which reminded me of a ray tracer program by Nick Chapman<\/a> that I used the last semester I taught at ” target=”_blank”>graphics at SJSU<\/a>. I think I’ll do a chrome scene in Postsingular<\/i> when Thuy Nguyen “figures it out.”<\/p>\n

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I walked on the beach in Santa Monica near the pier, ants in the grid, proud to be Californian.<\/p>\n

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Bye, LA.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sylvia and I were in LA this weekend. Big billboards. Big city. Coming back home, San Jose felt like a tiny country town. We stayed with our friends Kenneth Turan and his wife Patty Williams. Ken and I were roommates back at Swarthmore, 44 years ago, and now he’s a film critic at the L. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-91","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\/91","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=91"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}