This post responds to a friendly comment made the other day by a regular reader called Womansvoice, suggesting I make my photos available as prints. Alex and Neatmouse, among others, have suggested this in the past as well.

For illos today, I’ll just use a few golden oldies.

I tried marketing prints of my photos a year or two ago, but then I dropped it. But now I’m giving it another shot, this time with a little more organization and push. What I’m doing is to amass a Photos gallery of my favorites at the online art site Imagekind. My Imagekind page is rudy.imagekind.com, and you can see the Photos and Paintings print galleries there.

For now I have the markup set very low on the photos—call it a Grand Opening Sale. That mushrooms picture that Womansvoice liked, for instance, is available in a 16″ by 19″ print for about $15.

While I’m at it, I’m also posting the majority of these same favorite photos (most of them seen on this blog in a 600 pixel resolution) into a photostream on Flickr. The link for my Flickr photostream is www.flickr.com/rudytheelder.

I like using the Slide Show view to look at Flickr photostreams, as the images are bigger.

I realize, of course, that one can (a) do a screen capture of a large-seeming Flickr slide show image, then (b) create a file in, say, Photoshop, and paste the screen capture into the new file, and then (c) print the file on one’s home color printer.

And who am I to say no to that! Go ahead and brighten up your office or refrigerator for free!

I would, however, point out that, ahem, if you want a really nice print, the pixel count of the Imagekind-printed image is generally going to be five to twenty times that of the photostream slide show screen captures. And of course Imagekind is going to be using a better printer and paper combination than most of us have at home.

Womansvoice and the others have also suggested I make a coffee-table book of my photos. Eventually I might do this, probably self-publishing it via Lulu. One slight snag is that the most on-line photo-book-making programs will brutally crop all photos to fit certain arbitrary standard aspect rations, such as the sacred (to some) 4 by 3 rectangle.

The only way I presently know for designing a photobook with no robo-crops is to make the book myself in Microsoft Word…and then to save the file off as a high-resolution Acrobat PDF file which I upload to the electronic publisher.

Some of you will remember that I used this technique to make a book of my paintings, Better Worlds, which currently sells for $32 via Lulu —and you can also find it listed for the same price on Amazon. From time to time I add more images and rebuild the book at a longer length, and the price goes up a bit.

Really, it’s more like you self-publish an art or a photo book for yourself—and as a gift for friends, or possibly as a promo tool to give gallery owners when you want to get a show. I guess I don’t currently feel a pressing need for the photo book. As it stands, I haven’t sold more than a couple dozen copies of Better Worlds to people other than myself.

One final remark: it is possible to buy my original paintings no matter where you live—last year I sold one to a person in Virginia, and another to someone in Germany. I pack ‘em up and give ‘em to Fed Ex. More info about buying original paintings is on my personal paintings site.

I saw Avatar in 3D last night. What a thrill. It made me think of the early days of cinema, back in the early 1900s, when they showed a movie of a train speeding towards the audience and everyone jumped to their feet. The 3D and the computer graphics really come together in Avatar, and you get the feeling that a new medium is being born.

One of the effects I liked especially were these little critters like thistledown, who were beating their fronds like jellyfish. Air-jellies. And the native characters were so soulful and beautiful—it was kind of thrill to be identifying with beings so strange. In this respect, Avatar is slightly like this summer’s District 9, which is also a film where we’re encouraged to root for the aliens in the course of their encounter with the human race.

When I attended Swarthmore College in the 1960s, my roommate for the first three years was Kenneth Turan, now a film critic at the L. A. Times. Nobody could tell the story of a movie like Kenny.

Back in 1997, Turan had the temerity to write a negative review of Titanic, which was the director James Cameron’s movie previous to Avatar. Turan’s point was that the script of Titanic was weak and corny, and that Cameron should have hired a professional writer instead of writing the script himself.

So now, twelve years later, in a 2009 profile of Cameron in the New Yorker, Cameron reveals that he’s still angry about this. Speaking of Kenneth Turan (and any other critics), Cameron, said, “So, f*ck them. F*ck ’em all.” Turan’s bemused reaction in an email to me: “Talk about a slow burn!”

Naturally I was curious to hear if my old pal would like the new film. Turan’s favorable review of Avatar makes the point I mentioned above, that Avatar represents a new kind of film making—Turan compares it to advent of sound in the movies.

What about the script for Avatar ? It’s fairly strong. Cameron does have a solid sense of how to tell a dramatic story—after all, this is the man who wrote and directed the classic Terminator movie.

There were many things I liked about Avatar. The rebellious woman pilot was great, with her classic line yelled at a male antagonist: “I’ve got guns too, bitch!” Having the hero be wheelchair-bound in real life worked for me, it got me into the mindspace of being disabled, but without feeling like I was being lectured to.

And how about the shot of the evil coffee-sipping colonel ordering a missile attack against—a giant redwood-like tree! Wonderfully iconic. Attacking a tree! How insane. And yet…it’s happening all the time.

The SF in the film is comfortably professional. The notion of a literal planetary mind is a classic theme. The notion of a soul tree also feels comfortable, as does the idea of cross-loading a dying person’s “software” to a new wetware platform. And using avatars for exploration is vintage SF as well.

I suppose one might quibble about the time-latency problem of running a remote body over a network—I mean, it’s hard enough to leap onto the back of a giant flying bird even when your vision isn’t a hundredth of a second out of synch with your movements! But, hey, this is SF, so we might as well assume they have a zero-temporal-lag quantum-entanglement hook-up between the avatars and their controllers in the plastic coffins.

The whole image of the avatar controllers in their boxes has a nice meta quality to it. We, the viewers, with our tech trappings of heavy 3D glasses, are invited to become the remote minds immersing themselves into the lithe blue figures on-screen. It’s a more pleasant trope than the Matrix conceit that there isn’t any actual world out there at all.

The guy sitting next to us at the screening told me the film’s also out on IMAX 3D. Hmmm. Maybe I need to see that.

Easy prediction: there’s gonna be a lot of blue people with putty on their noses at the next few SF Worldcons!

So happy 2010. I like the pulpy quality of a cell-phone for this kind of picture. Sylvia and I went to a masked ball at the San Francisco Symphony, thanks to my friend Jack Vad, who engineered the sound for a CD, “Like a Passing River,” that I made with Roy Whelden years ago.

Whither now?

On the other side of the photographic spectrum, I’m happy to be home with my heavy-duty Canon 5D (Mark 1, alas,) rather than the lighter Canon G10 that I took to Australia. With a large format single-lens reflex camera, you have more of a chance of actually shooting the picture I want to shoot. Using those smaller point-and-shoot cameras is kind of like buying lottery tickets.

My old Mondo pal R. U. Sirius is editing a webzine/printzine called H+ these days. They put together a years best and worst list with a small contribution by me.

People sometimes say spring in California starts in January. A red-hot poker plant is blooming on the slope behind my house.

[I like these out-buildings with the rusty roofs. That’s pressed grape-seeds and skins in the mound.]

I still sell prints of my paintings, or try to—and my online dealer, Imagekind, featured me as an Artist of the Day one day this week. I sold about 60 prints during the years 2007 to 2008, but I did not, however, sell one single print in the year 2009. Help make this a banner year for Rucktronics, Inc., and get a print or even a greeting card so I feel like painting some more.

This one of the rare photos that I didn’t Photoshop at all. I saw this and, yeah, it was perfect. I like the color inside the pipe.

I’ve been thinking I’ll get myself a good photo printer so I can make nice big prints of my favorite pix. I’m leaning towards the Canon PIXMA Pro9500 Mark II.

[View of Silicon Valley from St. Joseph’s Hill in the South Bay.]

Am I the only one who didn’t like the new movie Up in the Air ? It was set almost totally in the three kinds of places I least like to be: plastic offices of companies, airports/airplanes, and generic motels. Is this reality for that many people? And what about the business the main character is in: shoveling BS onto people getting fired…and not doing anything at all to keep them from killing themselves? This is a hero? Plus, the movie felt like world’s longest commercial for American Airlines. Dude!

Well, next on my list is Avatar, there’s a place near here that has the 3D tech.

In any case, reality is much better. Like playing with toy trains on an oriental rug with my grandchildren!

These days I’m going over the printouts of the current state of my novel-in-progress Jim and the Flims, correcting and revising. There really are quite a few spots I need to smooth over and rework to make the newly layered-on plot elements fit.

I’m enjoying this work a lot more than I’d expected. It’s nice to be digging into it, getting my hands on the verbiage, crafting and polishing. I’m getting the characters’ personalities straightened out. After writing so many novels, this is something I actually know how to do, like a cobbler making a shoe or a potter making a bowl. It’s soothing to do the work.

[This is my last post about our Australia journey.]

After the dive trip, they dropped us on Lizard Island, a largely deserted spot that has an airstrip, a small and posh $1000-a-night resort, and a $10-a-night campground. The first European to live on Lizard Island was a guy called Watson who was trying to make a living by harvesting “beche de mer” or sea cucumbers, to be sold in the Far East. Any edible thing that’s shaped at all like a penis has always been culinary gold—consider also the stiff quills within shark fins and the horns of rhinos. Not that you’d really want your penis to look like a sea cucumber…

[The totality of the airport control equipment on Lizard Island is a windsock.]

We hiked through some bush to get to the deserted asphalt airstrip. The hike was nice, a touch of the real Australia, all weird plants and red rocks, with the sun implacably beating down and our bodies bathed in sweat.

I saw a three or four foot long lizard amid the scrubby rocks. The lizard was shy, and went to hide beneath a rock. Trying to make conversation with a Japanese diver woman who spoke no English, I pointed to the lizard. “Godzilla eat Tokyo!” She brightened up at the name of the city, understanding only that. She pointed to herself. “Kyoto!”

And then we flew back to Cairns in a tiny plane, low above the water. After all the intensive diving, I felt a little dizzy and off-kilter, it would be several days until my ears really felt clear and normal again. I didn’t sleep very well on the boat, perhaps because of the overeating. And I think I caught a bit of a cold from a Perky-Pat-like woman who’d cough across the table all during breakfast.

[A “curtain fig tree” in Cairns.]

And we spent the last two nights in Cairns, just killing time and soaking up some more Australian vibes. We considered making another excursion from there, but we were too tired and, as it turned out, just hanging around Cairns was fairly interesting.

One night we walked into a random live performance in an art center near our hotel, and they were doing a freak show, kind of like they do in San Francisco—eating razor blades, putting their elbows into bear traps, shocking themselves with a car battery, standing on the belly of a dwarf woman who’d arched herself into a bow above a bed of nails. But it came across more like a high-school talent show than like something really edgy.

It was gray, drizzly, and over 100 degrees each day. I rented a bike and rode along the waterfront both days. It was so hot that it didn’t matter if it rained on me.

[Me with a young crocodile, much warmer and softer than expected.]

Cairns is on a mud flat that’s in fact inhabited by crocodiles, so they don’t really have a beach. Instead they have a nice strip of park by the water, about a mile long, and a giant wading pool for kids to play in, the biggest shallow pool you ever saw, at least an acre in size.

At the north end of the waterfront, the mangroves start up, totally dense, and full of birds. I saw a kind of white pelican with a long sharp beak, a nice-looking bird. At the south end, there’s a yacht harbor and then some docks for heavy-duty ships that included an oil tankers. I liked riding around that part, it felt, once again, like I was closer to the “real Australia.”

[Burger stand by a big open market in Cairns. That flag on the right is the Aboriginal flag.]

I bought a nice Aboriginal-made boomerang. I’ve had a thing for boomerangs ever since I sent in my savings to buy one from an ad in Boy’s Life magazine fifty years ago. We saw a great fruit and vegetable market with lichees, durians, star fruit, multiple varieties of mango, and a tusk-like ten-pound vegetable that turned out to be a single bamboo shoot.

A fair number of Aboriginal people live around Cairns—I didn’t really see any of them at all in Melbourne or in Sydney, other than the guys selling didgeridoos on the Circular Quay in Sidney. I sat for awhile in the Cairns town square near the bus station, digging the Aboriginals. The ones who noticed me were quite friendly, although it was more common that I was pretty much invisible to them.

[Cairns security guards.]

One couple was having a prolonged argument, a man and a woman, a yelling match, the woman saying, “You don’t know me.” As if by prearranged signal, they stopped quarrelling and walked off just before a couple of security guards appeared. Down near the water I saw a number of Aboriginal families having picnics.

The heat was killing me, a really shocking temperature, maybe 105 by noon. The outdoor cafes have rows of fans swirling beneath their awnings. I went back to the hotel and sat in the lukewarm water of the pool reading Henry Miller’s collection, The Cosmological Eye—an old edition I happened to pick up during my travels.

There was a holiday vibe in the air, and the town’s slogan was “SumMerry Christmas.” They had a big Christmas tree decorated with images of kangaroos—I showed a close-up image of it in an earlier post. Speaking of roos, I never did get to see a big mob of kangaroos in person like I’d hoped. I think I mentioned that the ones we saw in the zoo near Melbourne were rolling on their backs and scratching like dogs. I did see, on the TV in the hotel room, a kangaroo hopping across the fairway of the Australian Open golf tournament.

[Menagerie man in Cairns.]

One the very last evening we saw a guy—either he was a park ranger or an eccentric street performer—doing a kind of show down by the water. He showed us a quoll, which is one of three carnivorous marsupials native to Australian continent, the other two being the Tasmanian devil and the Tasmanian tiger.

[A quoll.]

The quoll is a little bit like a cat—but not much like a cat—it has a triangular head with a prominent snout. Note that a quoll is not at all similar to the teddy-bear-like koala, even though the name sounds somewhat the same. The quoll’s fur was dark brown with big white spots, and, as we watched, the keeper fed this guy a rat, a piece of chicken, and the tip of a kangaroo tail. The quoll was all business, very self-possessed, he paid little attention to us gawkers.

For a final treat, the animal impresario produced a two-foot-long baby crocodile for us to hold and pose with (photo appears earlier in this post). The poor little guy’s mouth was taped shut. But I was happy to touch him—he was smooth and slightly warm, soft and supple. Maybe I can put a crocodile into that novel I was working on before I left—Jim and the Flims .

Farewell, antipodes!