Juicy Ghosts is live.  I sent all the reward copies out to my Kickstarter backers.  It was a lot of work, but well worth it, to know the books are the hands of those who love them.

You, of course, can get your own copies in any format you like at the Juicy Ghosts page.

I celebrated by buying myself a new camera, a Leica Q2, and it kicks ass.  Some non-camera-nut friends were asking me why I’d even use a heavy old camera when I have such a great camera in my cell phone.

“More photons,” I tell them.  “All that glass. It brings in more photons.”

One of my first shots with the Q2. My stash of toys and icons and mementoes on my desk beside my screen. Pig’s Hoard.

And I can grab a pretty good phto right out of the window of my car.  The lens is kind of wide-angle, so I’m free to crop down to an image that I like.

I was in North Beach walking around…we were up there to see the Blue Angels air show, something Sylvia loves.  There’s a cool sculpture of hovering books right near City Lights Books.

And here’s the holy source itself.  I’m proud that a bunch of my SF novels are in there, downstairs.  I always wanted to be a Beat SF writer, and that’s what I am. Juicy Ghosts is maybe my heaviest countercultural statement yet.  I hope people read it.

Something so Forties about big display clocks. And that now-small TransAmerica tower.  I’ve always wondered about the pyramid room at the top…like is there one?  Does anyone ever get to go in there?

I have a great fondness for gnarly knots of wires and fuses and connectors and insulators.  Images of my mind?

And the lovely warm shades of paint in the sun.

I like this image because it looks like the sign is warped or distorted or crushed by sliding space.  Always loved that notion of warped space.  And infinite dimesional Hilbert space, which comes into play in Juicy Ghosts, where I call it teepspace.

Managed to catch a shot of a Blue Angel with a street light behind it, which is good, as it sets the plane into space and gives it scale.  Right before this shot, a similar plane few right over us, banking a turn, not more than 200 feet in the air above us, a moving wall of roaring machinery.  What a trip. You wouldn’t really stand a chance if those planes were after you.

But for the show, theyr’e demure and playful.  Dig the furrow of sky smoke next to the Vic cornice.

“Birth” acrylic on canvas, October, 2021, 40” x 30”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

With the books printed and mailed out, I’ve gone back to painting. For this one, called simply Birth, I started with a group of more or less grotesque heads, like in a James Ensor painting. And I put in a cartoon baby, who’s an icon I’ve been drawing for fifty years. Another factor is that we’d just been to see a big Judy Chicago show in the De Young museum in San Francisco, and she had a whole room of very dramatic birth paintings. So I put in a woman who’s given birth, although I didn’t go as far as Judy does. Who are the other people? I’d say the little guy at the bottom is Dad, and on the left, that’s Sis, and at the top we have Aunt Bea, Grandma, and a 50s Grandpa. Love his hairdo.

When we came out of the De Young, we noticed that a statue was missing…I’d forgetten who it was of, but someone told me it had been Francis Scott Key, author of The Star-Spangled Banner, and he’d been a slave owner, so last year a crowd of demonstrators tore the statue down. Kind of like with Robert E. Lee in Richmond, VA. And then the city put up a ring of “slave” statues around where Key had been. Weird, the changes you see over a long lifetime.

We rode on a big ferris wheel right there. I like the ideogram of the kid’s legs.

I dig this spider-like bench in a meeting room in the De Young.

Colorful feet!

I mentioned that I like photographing wires and meters. Here’s some in Santa Cruz. I tend to crop all the cars out of my photos whenver I can, even if it means tilting the image. Something about generic cars so so boring.

Nice when object look alive. Mop face!

We also hit the good old Rosicrucian World Headquarters in San Jose once again. Always a good place to take a guest. This item here is a classic trop of fantasy fiction: The Door In The Wall. Usually leads to somewhere very cool…and when you back, the door disappears.

I call this photo, “I read the news today, oh boy.

Home-grown heiroglyph of railing-shadows on a hose.

What, another hose picture?  Well, we’ve got the contrast with that lounge-chair wheel, so it’s different.

Awesome shadow on the De Young museum wall.

We went to a game at the SF Giants’ stadium in SF.  I was shooting a lot, and cropping images down later for a zoom effect.  I like these three people.

The huge stadium a titled bowl of fellow humans.

Shooting photos with the Giants’ mascot! I forget what he is.  A rat? A seal?

This cotton candy hawker in back is kind of classic.  Working hard.

“High Five” acrylic on canvas, September, 2021, 30” x 24”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

This was one of those paintings I started by smearing leftover paint onto the canvas and looking for patterns. I saw the woman, and a caveman-like guy. Maybe he’s a lifeguard. The woman like him; they’re exchanging a high five. What about the crocodile? Well, I needed something on that side of the canvas. The croc the woman’s ally.

As you know, if you follow my blog, I love gnarly roots. I’ve photographed these guys before, but the Q2 pops them out really well.

Philodendron with a little sculpture we got from Sylvia’s father.  Made of alabaster and marble.

The endless fascination of mirrors.  I’ve been thinking about how the sea surface looks like a mirror from underneath…like to a fish, it’s an unduating mirror.  And then sometimes … a pelican bursts through! Snappy beak.  This is kind of a SF/fantasty trope.  The monsters from higher dimensions who enter your room through a mirror.

Another shot I’ve done before, but once more with feeling.  Sunrise shadoes on the wall.  Domestic Stonehenge.  That’s a silhouette of a Deco sculpture by my friend Vernon Head on the left.

And I’ve photographed this birch for before.  This shot is acutally not with the new Q2 but with an old R-series Leica lens adapted to sit on my Canon 5D.  In case you care.  It’s a very kludge setup, though that Leica glass is gorgeous…and this experiment in fact drove me to the Q2.

Broomsticks? Happy Halloween.

And don’t forget to read Juicy Ghosts!  Universal ebook buy link.

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