I finished writing Chapter Five of Mathematicians in Love and now I’m mulling over the best way to wrap the book up. Third act. I think I can do it in two chapters and be outta there in just under a hundred thousand words. The tentative chapter titles would be as follows:

Chapter One: Bela, Paul and Alma

Chapter Two: Cone Shell Aliens

Chapter Three: Rocking With Washer Drop

Chapter Four: Hypertunnel at the Tang Fat Hotel

Chapter Five: Mathematicians from Galaxy Z

Chapter Six: The Oracles and the Hierophant

Chapter Seven: Love on Earth-3

Sometimes when I’m uneasy about what to do next, it’s nice to get off into the visual part of my brain. Sunday I started trying to turn a photo of me in Jellyfish Lake into a painting, partly to get inspiration for Bela’s meeting with the Nataraja jellyfish controlling our world, a. k. a. God. I think it’ll be helpful to divide the photo into a grid and then make a similar set of gridlines on the canvas to use as a guide. Like billboard painters used to do.

In the Photorealist vein, I was up in SF again yesterday and saw this great show at SF MOMA by Robert Bechtle. The link goes to an amazing interactive “book” about him that the museum made. [You have to click on the upper left image or “Start Program” text in the start window to see the show.] I snarfed an image of a 1974 Robert Bechtle painting called “Alameda Gran Torino”. Recall that just recently I was writing a scene about driving one of these suckers off a cliff at Bixby Bridge! Squinty whale. Yes, COOP, the GT is hip, even if it is the “mullet of cars.”

On the wall, this particular painting has a very eerie effect, in that if you move off the left and view the picture edge on, your eye still thinks its seeing an actual car, and the only way your brain can account for the unchanging ratio of the tailgate to the side is to assume that the car is very short. It turns into a Pinto, and then into a Big Daddy Roth Gto-Ktart! Actually you can even get this effect by looking at the screen image from the left, although the effect is much stronger in the gallery.

You don’t realize how great an artist Bechtle is until you actually see the canvases. Because in reproduction they just look like photos! He’s, like, Edward Hopper to the n-th degree. Cars as still-life objects akin to baskets, bottles, and boots. Great art always changes the way you see the world when you come out, and I found SF was full of Bechtles. I snapped this and corrected the perspective with the PhotoShop Crop tool. It needs a car, doesn't it? And an umber underpainting to warm it up.

Saw this graffito in an alley off Sixth St. in the Tenderloin. Ah, doomed poete maudit who wrote this, where are you now? This, too, could of course be a painting, but never forget Beavis and Butthead’s dictum r.e. visual art: “Words Suck.”

I rode home to San Ho on the fast “Baby Bullet” CalTrain. It was indeed fast, as fast as driving, which was great. But it was so full they didn’t have any seats at all and I sat till the first stop on the floor of the bike car. That was okay, I could, like, do yoga, but something that really bugged me was that some asshole has decided it’s okay to “train wrap” or “bus wrap” the trains in ads that fucking cover the windows. You’ve seen those things, with the grids like cheese-graters over the bus or train windows, the grids are in fact glued-on plastic or rubber. And for the yuppies and polluters not on transit, it’s cute, it’s colorful, but for the poor zhlubbs and environmentalists on the inside its — yuuuugh. No line is straight, no edge is sharp, no color is true, looking out the window through the commercial cheese-grid actually gives you a headache, you can’t stand to look out for more than a short quick glance. Maybe the Pig actually knows that and is glad, glad the commuters can't look out, better they you should be staring down at work-papers or your laptop, or listening eyes-closed to music, producing or consuming, and not wasting time idly gazing at Gaia. One of the pleasures of public transportation is, duh, looking at the view. We’re supposed to think covering windows it’s a good idea because it “brings in money” to sell the windows of people’s busses and train? Brings in money for who? The assholes who wrap busses, the assholes who advertise at the expense of the people. How about the cost in lost ridership? How about the fact that bus and window wrap breaks an implicit compact with the taxpayers who support the public transportation in the first place! Down with window-covering bus and train wrap!

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