Last week I did a telephone interview with Thomas Gideon, who runs a podcast blog called The Command Line. To hear the talk, you can also click the button below to go to Rudy Rucker Podcasts.

Today I’ll continue in my trip-photos mode, with more on Monument Valley.

Our room looked out over the valley, and we happened to wake up at dawn, like around 5 am. Unreal. It’s amazing how the whole spectrum gets spread out in the sky.

It’s possible but maybe a little nerve-wracking to drive your own car into the valley on a fairly whipped gravel road. Instead we signed on for a jeep tour with a young guy called Parker Johnson, whose family runs Majestic Tours. Arranging the tour was fairly casual—there was a booth and a number of guides in the parking lot by the View hotel.

Parker was a good guide. He turned out to be a college student and a big reader, and we talked about books, as well as about the sights. Being with a guide, we were allowed to go deeper into the back corners of the land than we could have gone in our own car. The peace and quiet out there was kind of intoxicating.

We saw a nice petroglyph of a sheep.

The “Eye of the Sun” is a natural formation that takes on the look of a Picasso profile. Parker said the Navahos have gatherings and concerts there, with singing and drums.

It’s partner, the “Ear of the Wind” is great too. A really magical vibe out there.

We came to a formation called the Totem Pole, highly iconic. Amazing how perfectly Nature designs things on her own.

You’ve seen a lot of these shapes in Hollywood movies. John Ford used to come to Monument Valley for filming. The “Mittens,” for instance appear in his movies She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Fort Apache. And the Totem Pole is in the Clint Eastwood movie, The Eiger Sanction—apparently Clint got the Navahos to let him put some climbing pegs into the tower so he could climb atop it for some shoot-out scene.

So as to have some evening entertainment, the View hotel shows one of those old John Ford movies projected on the wall of the patio every night, and we could see them from our room’s window. It was kind of cool to see the landscape in these old black and white films. But after awhile, the movies got a little tiresome with their unenlightened attitudes towards the Native Americans. Those horse-soldiers whom Ford celebrates were, after all, in the business of stealing the land from the locals. And when John Wayne and Henry Fonda start prating on and on about “honor,” and calling each other “Mister,” it’s hard to take.

On our last day at Monument Valley, I got up really early and hiked a trail out to the West Mitten. I started in the dark, as I didn’t want to be in the desert once the midday sun came up. Later I YouTubed a video from my pocket camera.

It was about a three hour walk, and I saw no other sign of humans—except for a little complex of sheds, shacks and trailers where a family of Navaho herders lived. Their attitudes about the land seem very cool.

As I mention in the video, To keep me company, I had this cool “fetish” that I bought in the Navaho gift shop, a little pig or, more properly speaking, a javelina. Perfect for me given that, as I’ve often said, I think of the Pig as my totem animal. “The pig is the most intelligent animal,” as I like to say.

I got a some great views of the Krazy Kat landscape out there, and being behind the mitten felt like I was in a secret and sacred space.

And then I’d finished the hike and was back on the sandy road where the cars and jeeps drive.

I want to go there again!

Back to the Wild West today!

The “Three Gossips” are enormous towers in the Arches park near Moab.

We hiked in and saw the longest arch of all, the Landscape Arch, it’s actually debatable how exactly to measure its size, but roughly speaking it’s a hundred yards across.

Over the day, Arches gets pretty crowded. On the last morning, we went out early and looked at Double Arch.

And then we drove south from Moab to Monument Valley, which lies at the border of Utah and Arizona, near the “Four Corners” area. One the way we passed Newspaper Rock. It’s hard to date petroglyph markings like this—some say they’re a thousand years old, others think it’s more like a century. Several of the Native American guides we ran into had the idea that the petroglyphs depicted visiting aliens.

We passed through a few Mormon towns in Southern Utah, ending with Bluff, which has a couple of older Victorian houses that might have been built by Mormon settlers.

Monument Valley itself lies within a Navaho reservation, and the very last town before the rez is called Mexican Hat, after a stone formation nearby. The reservation is dry; there are a couple of bars in Indian Hat, a gas station, two motels and not much else.

We drove in towards Monument Valley in the late afternoon, it felt epic, like going to Oz.

Monument Valley itself is an expanse some dozen or so miles across, with immense rock formations. Two of them are called the “mittens,” as each has a main part and a smaller “thumb.”

Monument Valley at dusk. The View hotel is on the left.Click for larger version.

The Navahos recently built a really great hotel called The View on the lip of Monument Valley, and we were able to find a room there—we hadn’t been able to reserve, but someone had cancelled. If we hadn’t found a room we would have camped in what was basically a red dirt parking lot.

I walked up onto the slopes of a bluff next to the hotel and took a few pictures. Moments like this, I want time to stop.

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 “Post-Impressionist Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay” at the de Young museum in Golden Gate Park.

[Paul Mavrides outside the Post-Impressionist art show…he selected this pose.]

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, but also in a 1954 Mickey Rooney comedy called The Atomic Kid, and in the last episode of the first season of a 1986 TV series called Crime Story. I don’t think I’ll look at either of those, but the fact that the idea’s been used three times makes me feel a little more free about using it again. It’s kind of a standard trope by now.

I loved Paul Signac, Women at the Well, of 1893. Some really great gnarly shapes at the bottom. And Beach at Heist by Paul Lemmen, 1892.

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).

[A guy cleaning the copper trim at Balazo.]

I checked out some big cartoon books at Booksmith, one of which included “Death Sentence,” a comic from Tales of Terror #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 “forced rapid evolution of 1,000,000 years,” effectively becoming a creature typical of the far future. Some of the goo gets into a cut on the scientist’s finger and then, “He was a changing, shapeless mass of ulcerative protoplasm.” The goo splits and redivides, eating everyone in sight. Perfect.

While at Paul’s I glimsed Doctor Hal Robbins in his laboratory. He’s gearing up for a new round of his “Ask Dr. Hal” performances.

It was great being in San Francisco at night in the fog. Such a sense of promise and excitement. I hadn’t been on Haight Street for about a year, and it looked a little better than I’d remembered—usually I always just go to Valencia Street these days. There really are some good clothes stores on the Haight, the restaurants aren’t bad, and there weren’t as many gutterpunk panhandlers as usual.

And while I was in town, I checked out the wall space at Borderlands Café on Valencia, planning the arrangement for my art show there in November…next month.

I want my character Alan Turing in Turing & Burroughs to make friends with a woman. What if he meets up with an early electronic composer, as he has some facility in that direction thanks to his Delilah analog voice encryption project.

[Today’s photos are mostly from around Moab, Utah, and particularly from the Arches National Park, although the photo above is of an aspen near the Flaming Gorge.]

They barely had the phrase electronic music in 1955. They called it musique concrète, see Wikipedia history of electronic music. Some called it acousmatic art, where that weird word means you can’t see the source of the sound. They used Ampex tape recorders, sampling natural and manmade sounds (like factory noises and ship sirens and motors) collaging them, speeding them up, slowing them down, echoing and looping. Sometimes playing a tape track with live instruments.

I’ve been reading the cool book of interviews, Pink Noises for inspiration. One woman in there, Annea Lockwood, taped a burning piano, the mike wrapped in asbestos. And she went the length of the Danube, taping it’s various sounds.

[Coming into Moab in driving rain. High plains drifters.]

Burroughs himself was really into tape recordings for a time, come to think of it. Edgard Varèse and Karlheinz Stockhausen were active in the late 40s and early 50s. They had the idea of synthesizing music via electronically produced signals. In the U.S., John Cage was involved with the Music for Magnetic Tape Project. Turing’s friend Christopher Strachey wrote a music program for a computer based on an early Manchester computer.

[Earlier: long portico shadow at Yosemite Lake Hotel.]

My fictional character named Judy Green is the woman composer. I’m thinking she’s gay, and Turing, who sometimes skug-shapeshifts into a woman named Abby, is pursued by her. The “imitation game” to the second power.

I see Alan Turing (mostly shapeshifted into a simulacrum of William Burroughs, but sometimes looking like Abby) driving from Palm Beach to SF with someone like Neal Cassady. Certainly Neal himself could fit into the story, given that we have Burroughs already. But I feel some uneasiness about writing about Neal. It might be gauche, derivative, dull. I don’t want to come across as a Beat fanboy. It would be better to invent my own madman. Make it fresher. Yes, I enjoyed writing the Burroughs chapter, “Tangier Routines,” and Burroughs might even come back. But that doesn’t mean I have to put in pop-up cameos for every single Beat.

[Gotta love those “hoodoo” formations.]

So okay, the cross-country driver isn’t Neal. I recall the name of a character who was just about to make an entrance when I broke off work on a never-finished novel in, I think, 1982. I think his name was Vassar Fogarty. Vassar could be Alan’s driver instead of Neal. A (fictional) lesser-known friend of Burroughs’s.

And Vassar could be into some soul-sleeping jive along the lines of Neal’s Edgar Cayce stuff. Only it’s sort of true, and Alan is picking up telepathic or chthonic vibes.

Maybe Turing doesn’t like Vassar at first. Vassar’s a bumptious blue-collar stoner, and it seems like Alan would have to be sexually attracted to him. But at a personal level, Turing dislikes him initially. He’s won over into some intricate mind analysis game. Maybe Vassar gets Turing to be stealing gas and food. And Judy is making music out of it. And using her tape recorder to rob people.

[Pure Wile E. Coyote territory.]

While in Abby form, Alan tells Judy that his friend is getting a ride to SF with another friend, Vassar Fogarty, and Abby can ride along. When Judy gets in the car, it’s just Alan and Vassar, and she’s uneasy. Vassar wants to have sex with Judy and she’s putting him off. Alan calms Judy, and at the edge of town he shapeshifts into Abby. Vassar is impressed. Suppose they go for a sexual three-way that night or the next. Alan/Abby is happy to be getting Vassar’s embraces, and Judy’s happy to be making it with Abby as well.

It might be interesting, after they get to San Francisco, to have Alan use skug power to swap genitalia with Judy Green. The couple would be a metaphor for a certain kind of man-woman pair. “She wears the pants.” Oh, I don’t think I’ll do that, the readers might not like it. And Alan wants men, not women. He’ll get a real boyfriend.

[Ambient gnarl.]

Re. Alan’s boyfriend in SF, I figure he’s not Allen Ginsberg, for the same reasons why I don’t want to use Neal Cassady as a character. But the boyfriend is, I think, an experimental film maker along the lines of Bruce Conner. And the film maker and Alan do go to the famous Gallery Six reading where Ginsberg read “Howl.”

[Stalking the giant ants along the Colorado River.]

I’m thinking I’d like to work some giant ants into the novel. The first SF movie I really really wanted to see (and my parents wouldn’t let me go) was Them, a giant ants movie. Giant ants are very 1950s, after all. I just watched the movie again last night on Netflix instant watch, it was awesome, even if the ants are just ten-foot stuffed toys being waved by grips off camera. The ants resulted from the radiation mutations from an A-test of 1945, and the movie is set in 1954. Perfect.

Possibly Turing causes the giant ants with his tinkering? Perhaps the pursuit of the giant ants leads him into the A-blast? I’m tempted to reprise the scene in that otherwise weak 2008 movie, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, where Indy wanders into a fake suburban town set up to test the effects of the blast, and the houses are full of mannequins. Alan could have Burroughs along with him for this, heaping scorn on the ”˜burbs.