I got an iPhone for Xmas, and I’ve been playing with it a lot.

My first photo with the iPhone, heavily Lightroom-treated to “fix” it. Me and my skug. (But which is which?)

I put about 10 Gigs of music on the iPhone, and am now dreaming of ripping all my old vinyl records, which would take days. I converted a bunch of my photos to the native iPhone image size of 900 pixels wide or high, at 326 pixels per inch (!?) and used iTunes to put them on the iPhone. I even found a site explaining how to put my manuscripts on it in E-Pub format, not that I’ll ever look at them, I don’t think.

And I got some apps. I’d been to an “augmented reality” conference in 2010, so I was especially interested in augmented reality apps, that is, apps in which a live video image of the world is overlaid with information or with game elements.

[UFO disguised as a princess cake.]

My favorite among these is AR Invaders. You see UFOs flying across your sky, or, for that matter, around your living-room. And you shoot them, twisting wildly back and forth to see them all through your iPhone screen. My son Rudy was really into it. “There are so many UFOs in here,” he said. “And nobody else can see them.”

My family and I were in the SF MOMA for about twenty minutes the other day—no longer than that, as we had four young children in the party. On the top floor they had a show of recent art. It’s rather rare to see any real paintings at all in an art show anymore, but there was a good one by Amy Sillman, “US of Alice the Goon.” I found a lot more of her paintings online with a Google image search.

I also saw a weird video by Ryan Trecartin. You can find a lot of his work online at this great avant garde art site, UbuWeb.

[This is the only other iPhone photo I’m posting today, all the others are from my Canon S90. This is just a picture of a folded blanket, and should not be confused with the story line in Duane Michal’s ribald photo series, “Take One And See Mt. Fujiyama.”]

The iPhone camera is, as my nephew Embry puts it, “a nasty little camera.” I am getting better at using it—learning to tap on the screen to focus, and to zoom in a little bit to reduce the fisheye effect. I tried some photo apps, including Hipstamatic and Camera+, but neither of them really seems to improve such basic weaknesses as speckling and distortion. You can fix a little of that in Lightroom, but, really, that’s kind of a waste of time—if you want a nicer looking picture, you want to use a nicer camera. The iPhone camera is handy, though, and it’s fun for making videos to be viewed basically only on the phone.

Speaking of cameras, I read an interesting article about digital camera sensors in the New York Times the other day. I like this article because it speaks favorably of the Canon S95 that I’m using as a pocket camera these days (well, actually I have last year’s model, the S90). These guys have larger sensors than generic digicams, although not as large as the high-end SLR digital ones.

What else? My article “Lifebox Immortality” is on the h+ Magazine site.

Now for New Year’s Eve and Day.

Have a great holiday! This is a long post, with some stuff to read, it may have to last you till 2011…

This month I made some imaginative efforts and finished the next chapter “Dispatches From Interzone” of my novel in progress, Turing & Burroughs. As I mentioned before, I wrote this chapter is in the form of letters from my Beat hero William Burroughs, some samples of which I put in my post, “Burroughs Letters, Tangier 1954-1956.”

Molding an SF action-novel out of William Burroughs letters is like collaging a landscape out of frames from the Sunday funnies. And I had to draw all those wacky little frames too. Or it’s like building an epic out of haikus. But I like the way the chapter came out. It’s funny, I think, and deep as well. You can read an excerpt down below, at the end of this post.

Right now I’m unsure of the upcoming story arc. To some extent I’m back where I was a month ago, when I wrote my blog post, “Skuggers”

It’s daunting how many scenes and ideas a novel needs. But I don’t have to write the whole novel at once. All I need now is to write the next chapter. So now what I need is to outline Chapter 8 fairly well, and also get some clear idea of what happens in Chapter 9. And the chapters after that will take care of themselves.

It’s a long process, after all. And there’s no rush. But that’s not exactly true. My sense is that I don’t feel as if there is a rush, then I might not drive myself hard enough to actually finish the book. Onward!

No, wait, Christmas comes first.

Anyway, in my “Dispatches from the Interzone,” chapter I did indeed get Burroughs to organize a trans-Atlantic skugger-star teep antenna, as I’d planned to. By the end of the chapter the construct falls apart and the individual skuggers go their own ways. And this is as it should be, because it would be too much of an onus for Turing to have a skugger-star tracking him on his road trip to Los Alamos.

It’ll just be regular cops chasing Alan, although, for a while, there will be more and more of them. We’ll see an ongoing attrition in the forces of control, as more and more of them will be converted into being skugs.

I realized today, it’s as if I’m telling the story of The Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, but I’m telling it from the p.o.v. of the pod people, and I’m viewing these alienated mutants as a positive force. Which is, after all, precisely what happened culturally as the 1950s segued into the 1960s.

If near the end of the book, I have Turing pulling the skugs up into a higher reality, it vaguely correlates with Tim Leary lifting the hippies out of politics and into Lotus Land.

And what happened then in the real world in terms of the culture wars. What aspect of reality might I transrealize into Turing’s final move?

I’m thinking of the internet as being the thing that resurrected political action. And it could be that Turing starts manifesting himself via the web. I could even go transreal for the last couple of chapters, and insert myself as an authorial character, getting messages from Turing in “real time.” Like there’s an astral blog site that only I and a few privileged others (such as the readers of this blog), can see. Maybe I’ll give you the URL in 2011…

Meanwhile, here’s an excerpt from the latest chapter. Burroughs is a skugger now, that is, a shapeshifting, mildly telepathic host for a symbiotic skug. And the British Embassy has engaged him to turn a basement filled with 64 captive Arab skuggers in Tangier into a telepathic antenna for tracking Alan Turing, who’s escaped to America. He knows one of the skuggers already, a youth named Driss.

The second day, Driss and the fellahs tell me they’re edgy at being in police custody. Only a few of them speak English or Spanish, but our short-range teep is working. The skuggers don’t wanna play ball. So I get the Embassy stooges to haul down a fifty-pound bag of refined white sugar. Everyone in the pit start feeling friendly.

The third day I double the sugar ration, and slime out some tentacles from my fingertips, plugging every navel in the room. Puppetmaster Bill. “Let’s all get soft,” I propose, teeping sexy images of mollusk reproduction. I chant whatever gone strophes come to mind, also feeding the skuggers’ real-time reactions into the mix. Feebdack feedback. The locals are easy-going people, if you give them a chance.

On the fourth day, even more sugar, also a carboy of olive oil. Everyone feeling festive—we shining and sticky with the sweet slick. I push my face against Driss’s so our heads merge. Plup! Feel real wiggy. I use my squiddy arms to gather ye rosebuds. And then we’re a starfish with a shared yubbaflop head on the Embassy basement floor, like the center of a wagon wheel.

I grow out a feeler with a lobster-eye to admire what we done. Our group face look like a gangland hit on President Eisenhower, a bald baby with slit-mouth scars and eye-puckers like bullet holes. Hopper and his boss upstairs are abreast of our session, they very pleased.

On day five, I engage three footmen to haul in hods of wobbly British pastries, barrows of dates, heaped trays of kumquats. The skugger fellahs are increasingly glad to see me. Great cheers. “Booo-rows! Booo-rows! Booo-rows!”

Driss and I plup our heads together, the rest of the gang piles on. We make a parabolic monster face, a dish-shaped teep antenna pointing towards the floor. We vibe our mind-rays through the watery gut of Ma Earth. You wave, we wave. Hopper is run a droopy tentacle down the basement stairs into my spine.

And then—lo! We pick up on Turing in Florida.

Happy X and a Great Y!!!!!!

Raining here this week. I love the rain. Everything gets green, including the moss on the trunks of the oak trees.

My son Rudy put a skylight in his living-room. It doesn’t leak!

I’m playing with Lightroom all the time. Used a blue filter on this color picture to kill the overbrightness of the light fixture.

I’d like to be reborn as a crow. People used to imagine that animals work really hard to get enough food each day. Turns out, they can fill up with about an hour or hour-and-a-half of pecking. The rest of the day is for hanging out. Cawing and flapping. And no computers.

We took two of our grand-daughters to this funny old place in Oakland called Fairyland this week. It’s very much a home-brew folk-art construct. When I was a boy in Kentucky, there were lots of places like this. Disneyland didn’t exist yet.

We even saw a puppet-show of Cinderella. I always wondered about the glass slipper. Would it be comfortable?

We hit a science museum the week before. “How many bones?” This sign made me laugh, remembering an Underground comic strip years ago that started off, “I’d just smoked two big bones of the good old green and…”

The year’s dwindling down. Around this time it gets to be hard to remember what day of the week it is. The calendar breaks and falls apart. And we take a little rest among the ruins of the decaying year, making merry with our relatives and friends.

The other day, I posted a lot of photos on my Flickr, I put the best shots of the last ten months or so into a collection, “2010 March-Nov”. In a sharing or deluded mood, I uploaded most of them at rather high resolutions—and I don’t feel like going back and changing this, so feel free to sample and print from there for private use, although I am still maintaining copyright over the pictures. If you want to buy a ready-made print, I have a lot of my photos on Imagekind as well.

I’m going to try and keep my Flickr photostream and my Imagekind gallery a little more closely in synch with the photos I put on the blog, so in general, you might find larger forms of the images there. Adobe Lightroom is making my photo-juggling a lot easier—with the downside that I’m spending more and more time doing it, even running outside and takiing more photos just so I have more raw material to work with. “Like a picture of a water fountain? You kidding me?”

I’ve been frittering away increasing amounts of time on delusional web activities like Twitter, Flickr, Imagekind, my blog, my email, Wikipedia research, my paintings website, free ebook releases, my book websites—it’s a little alarming, really. At some point I’ll cut back. “Only not today.”

Really, I get much more pleasure out of actually writing, but by now there are so many ways to avoid writing when I have my computer on.

When I remember to be an author, these days, I’m into writing my second chapter of fake William Burroughs letters. It’s an odd mind-set, to be using such a particular and quirky format to create text that advances the plot of a science-fiction novel. Like making a portrait out of collage snippets.

But certainly Burroughs himself did often think in terms of having his novel Naked Lunch or Interzone (as he called it) be SF. The juxtaposition seems odd in 2010, because, over the years, SF has ossified into a somewhat rigid genre, and the more literary or experimental kinds of work get classified as something else. Speculative fiction. But I generally still see publishing my novels as SF in a positive light. It gives access to a certain level of distribution and readership.

[Some cellular automata “Nested Scrolls” made my Capow software.]

We went and saw John McLaughlin and his group The Fourth Dimension at the Rio Theater is Santa Cruz last night. It was lovely music, sweet, rocking, and somehow spiritual. Sylvia noted a large number of men with gray ponytails in the audience. We first saw McLaughlin with a double-neck guitar and the Mahavishnu Orchestra about 40 years ago, in Princeton, here’s a video from that time.

Speaking of earlier times, here’s a photo from 1992, right before the appearance of The Mondo User’s Guide edited by me, R. U. Sirius, and Queen Mu, and designed by Bart Nagel, who’s wearing the flashy “sperm jacket”. The photo was taken either by Bart using a timer or, I think more likely, by Mondo staffer Heidi Foley during a photo shoot by Time magazine. Thanks to Bart for sending me this photo.

Coming back to my concerns about wasting time on the web, a good benchmark of where I’m at is the kinds of things that I think about while I’m at a concert. It’s an ideal chance to space out and the mind roam. Sometimes, more commonly with rock, I manage to get so deeply inside the music that there’s nothing else. With McLaughlin, there’s some chance of a meditative state—for me, he often evokes the mental image of being in outer space free-falling into a giant star. But I noticed that last night, I was spending more time than I wanted in thinking about how to promote my writing and images on the web.

Once again it’s time for a walk in the woods.