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!

(I’m still finishing my series of posts about a trip my wife and I took to Australia last month. This is the second-to-last of the Australia posts.)

We made our way into downtown Cairns, returned our rental car, and hooked up with our live-aboard dive boat, the Spirit of Freedom. It’s nice and big, we have a room with a private bathroom, a double bed, and four portholes. Good stuff.

[Our boat.]

We tooled out about thirty miles to the Saxon Reef and did two dives. It turns out the Great Barrier Reef isn’t the one big monolithic thing, it’s more like a series of medium-sized reefs (like Saxon Reef) lined up along a curve that’s a couple of hundred miles long.

On Saxon Reef, we saw sharks, a turtle and some giant clams—I mean giant as in four feet across. I worship these creatures, they’re like yonic gods, embodiments of the female creative force, each of their cracks veiled by mantle bearing an elegant one-of-a-kind leopard-spot Turing pattern, and with fringed holes in the mantle displaying the clam-goddesses secret innards—disks and fringes of a creamy white.

And then we steamed all night to the vicinity of Ribbon Reef #10 (another feature of the Great Barrier Reef), maybe a hundred miles from Cairns. It was raining most of the time.

[More or less irrelevant picture of wash-up water running down a Sydney sidewalk.]

The rocking of the boat got to me over the evening, and when they set a plate of roast beef and mashed potatoes in front of me for supper, I went up to our room and filled two sickbags with puke. They told us the bags are of rice-paper, which disintegrates quickly in the water, and what we should throw them overboard after filling them. “The fish all come. For them, it’s Christmas.”

I slept badly, waking every hour on the hour like a cuckoo clock. Outside the portholes, the clouds had cleared up, and the moon was laying down a wrinkled highway of light upon the waters. The boat wallowed along, rocking us, with my stomach empty it felt okay.

I’d been anxious about diving again, it had been over two years. Sylvia was just snorkeling, and for the few dives I buddied up with a guy named Mike, about my age, and with a comparable amount of dive experience—something like sixty dives—and it worked out fine. The only difficulties were that I’m slightly stopped up, so I had to work hard at clearing my ears by pinching my nose and blowing.

There are a variety of thoughts that I usually have while diving.

[Gull on a spar aboard the Spirit of Freedom.]

Often, at the start, I’ll be rushing, swimming fast, as if I was going to find something different around the next coral head. Really, everything is pretty much everywhere, the reefs and the undersea environment are a fractal, and if you look twice as hard at a given spot, you see three times as much.

Another common thought is, after about ten minutes, I’ll think, “Okay, I’ve seen it all, I’m done, can I get out now?” But really, you want to empty out your tank and stay in about forty minutes. So you relax and absorb more. It’s more like listening to a long symphony than like having sex. It’s not that you reach a peak and are done.

I always worry about my air supply a little bit, but over the years, I’ve gotten pretty good and stretching it out.

[Partioning the space of all possibilities.]

One of the really discombobulating things about diving is that you can’t just—stop. On land, if I really want to stare at something, I hunker down and stare for as long as I like. But in the water, I’m always drifting—propelled by currents, the motions of my limbs, and the varying buoyancy of my body as I breathe in and out. I can’t sit still. Sometimes, I do in fact make myself heavy and sit or kneel on the sandy bottom, just to have a moment of rest.

On the second morning at 7 a.m. we dived a so-called bommie, by the name of Pixie Peak. “Bommie” is from an Aboriginal word “bomara” that means underwater mountain. I’d thought I might not be up that early, but I was all too glad to leave my uneasy bed at 6:30 a.m. Pixie Peak is a ninety-foot high tower of coral, about thirty feet across, kind of a butte. We dropped down to the bottom, and wound our way up around it, our path like a barber-pole stripe.

[My 2001 painting “Under My Bed” of a cuttlefish. See my paintings page for more info.]

My dive buddy and I got down to ninety feet before the others, and the first very first thing I saw was a giant cuttlefish—be still my heart. He was easily two feet long, maybe three, just like one I painted in Under the Bed as a preliminary to imagining my space-cuttlefish character Professor Bumby in Frek and the Elixir.

The cuttlefish had his facial squid-bunch of tentacles demurely gathered into a cone pointing my way. His (or her) eyes had an unfathomable expression, due to the pupils being shaped like the letter W. The hula-skirt frill-fin that circles the bulk of his body was in constant motion, easing him backwards away from me, his eldritch eyes tracking my movements. I noticed that his skin flickered very rapidly, changing its shade as rapidly as jump-cuts in a video.

Looking at some of the bright little damsel fish along the wall of the bommie, I was stuck by how really awkward they are. Their only tools for delicate maneuvers are these two little paddle fins on their sides by their gills. And at any time, random tendrils of current are canting them to one side or the other. I feel an affinity for the damsel fish—I imagine that I’m in control of my life, but really all I have are a pair of awkward paddle fins, flailing away at the sea of reality, which is so richly braided with intricate currents I can neither anticipate nor control.

I skipped the second SCUBA dive that day, at Challenger Bay (still part of the Great Barrier Reef), and took Sylvia snorkeling instead. This was in fact a really good spot for it, as the reef rose up to acres of shallows. We swam along in waters ten feet deep, feasting our eyes on the wack corals: staghorn heads filled with clans of damsel fish, shelf corals with flowery cod hiding in their shade, dozens of giant clams, thick pimply sea hares—like sea cucumbers, but bigger and creamy white with brown spots. Since Sylvia and I were doing most of our swimming with our big flipper fins, we held hands or linked arms, it was nice to be together with her, flying over this alien, jumbled paradise.

In the evening I went for a night dive—this was the first really good night dive I ever had. We came back to the same relatively shallow reef where Sylvia and I had snorkeled. Each diver had a flashlight in hand and a glowstick mounted on his or her tank. The guides had mentioned that the coral might be spawning—they usually do it a few days after the full moon in November or December, and we’d just had a full moon the other day. We did indeed find some spawning coral.

[Two of my dive buddies, Mark (left) and Mike (right).]

Keep in mind that a coral reef is a colony of individual polyps, each in its own little stony niche. When they spawn, some of the polyps send out clouds of sperm, and others push out little pink eggs the size of a BB, or a bit smaller. Worms, fairy shrimp, small fry, and sea lice crowd around the spawning reef, eating as much of the bounty as the can. Each little spot on the reef becomes a scene of great activity, reminding me of Times Square at New Years Eve, albeit on a very small scale. Some of the sea lice were nipping my scalp and my hands.

There were dozens of big trevalley fish around us, each of them two or three feet long, maybe twenty pounds—they were fascinated by our flashlight beams, and hoping to eat any smaller fish that we highlighted.

In the coral I saw bright red beads shining in the light, looking close I could see these were the eyes of tiny little red shrimp nestled in nooks. Some large purple nudibranchs (or sea slugs) were on the crawl, out to mate with each other. They were like big velvety washrags or dishtowels, with a soft pair of feelers at one end. A night of sex on the reef.

[After our dive, a nurse shark came up to the back of the boat wanting food. That’s my third dive buddy, Daniel from Italy, there. He did the night dive with me.]

After the night dive we got brownies with chocolate syrup and whipped cream. There’s a sense that you can eat any amount of food if your diving. This said, I didn’t sleep very well. I got with insomnia and did yoga on the deck for awhile. It feels extraterrestrial to have all different constellations in the sky. I think I saw the Southern Cross.

We dived another cylindrical bommie-tower the next day. A great sea turtle perched on a ledge of this bommie, like an eagle in his aerie. But, unlike an eagle, he was unperturbed by seeing a dozen divers wallow by.

The last dive was kind of exciting, as we were trying to complete a fairly long route around three or four bommies—and we swam rather deep. I was kicking overly hard, and I ran out of air before we could finish our plan. I surfaced with my current dive buddy, a young guy called Marc, and we saw we were a couple of hundred yards from the ship. Marc still had plenty of air, so we wallowed along just under the surface. But the closer we got to the ship, the stronger the currents got. I didn’t have the strength for the last fifty yards. An inflatable lighter from the ship was buzzing around, and I got him to pick us up, which was exciting. By now the surf was so high that the lighter couldn’t really dock to the ship, we had to jump out as the waves sent the little boat hurtling by.

[Rescued from the current by a lighter.]

I did eight dives in three days, and one snorkel session. Actually I would have liked to snorkel more—I tend to see more when I’m snorkeling, and there’s less time pressure, and less of a need to stay close to your buddy.

The Great Barrier Reef is certainly better than any of the sites I’ve visited in Mexico, Hawaii, or the Turks and Caicos Islands. In general, South Pacific sites like the Great Barrier Reef have, I think, brighter fish and more interesting coral—including the so-called soft coral, which is floppy and leathery.

[A land tree with a strangler-fig growing down it.]

In terms of the South Pacific sites, I think Fiji, Tonga, Micronesia, and Palau are certainly as good or maybe even a little better than the Great Barrier Reef. I’d still have to say Palau has the best boat dives, and more awesome walls. And Fiji, Tonga, and Pohnpei have the virtue of having good snorkeling areas that you can swim to right off shore—it really takes a boat to get out to the Great Barrier Reef from the mainland of Australia.

But it was totally worth going to see the Barrier Reef, and good to be in the water again. Diving’s really pretty easy, I remembered—as I always do.