Friday morning we went to see the gardens at Filoli, an estate between San Jose and San Franciso near Woodside, CA. The first view of the gardens, shown above, is perhaps the most impressive. You step through an arched door in a brick wall and there lies—arcadia. Another world. The square-trimmed trees in the background give it an especially magical look.

I reflexively tend to think of viewing gardens as being boring, but it was definitely worth the trip—although it’s good to get there early before the people overwhelm the nature. I’ll be using some more Filoli pictures in coming posts.

We spent a couple of nights in San Francisco, for the Easter weekend, staying on Nob Hill, atop extremely steep streets coming up from Union Square. I saw this great woman giving her dog a treat on the way up.

I picked up a fresh copy of Wm. Burroughs, The Soft Machine, at City Lights Books, with a nice pink cover, and reread some of it. Long time no see. Its chapters seem fairly independent of each other. Some aren’t too badly cut-up. One chapter I read, like dada pulp SF, “The Mayan Caper,” gives me some ideas for how things might be in Flimsy. A few quotes.

Setting up for time travel to Mayan times. “Then he injected a blue fluid of heavy cold silence as word dust fell from demagnetized patterns—from a remote Polar distance I could see the doctor…”

After the transition. “Suddenly he sat up talking in Mayan—The word curled out his mouth and hung visible in the air like vine tendrils—I felt a strange vertigo which I recognized as the motion sickness of time travel…” Note that Burroughs uses that same phrase, “the motion sickness of time travel” in Yage Letters, to describe the nausea prouduced by the psychedelic yage vine drug.

[A rubbed-out Mickey Mouse logo on the sidewalk outside the now-defunct Disney store. Sign of the times.]

“I lay down in the hammock and immediately felt the stabbing probes of telepathic interrogation.” That’s a classic SF phrase, takes me back to the Andre Norton books I read as a boy.

At the frequent celebrations, “…the priests appeared in elaborate costumes, often disguised as centipedes or lobsters…”

“I made recordings of the festivals and the continuous music like a shrill insect frequency that followed the workers all day in the fields.”

[An ivory cougar in the Filoli mansion.]

Burroughs loved the idea of altering reality with cut-up sound and music. As it happens, while I was in SF, I had a chance to talk to an old friend, Jack Vad, who is a sound tech for the SF Symphony Orchestra.

Jack said, “Being a sound tech can be like being a dental hygienist or like being a sculptor.” Sometimes he’s just tweaking and cleaning, sometimes he’s molding sounds. He has really good software, it got a lot better in the last two years. He used the word “detune” to mean change the pitch. For fixing a sour note, you used to have to detune all the instruments, and had trade-offs where fixing one was messing up the others. But now the soundware lets you isolate a particular line of music, an individual instrument, and detune that alone.

Not all that great a step from this to Burroughsian reality control with your sound chip…

[My recent painting, “The Flims,” showing a jiva on the left and a yuel on the right.]

I’d been hung-up trying to figure out what things are like in this world Flimsy where my character Jim goes in my novel-in-progress Jim and the Flims.

So now, under the aleatory influence of The Soft Machine, I’m thinking of Flimsy as a slave society. And that it’s those seemingly pleasant jivas running things—even though they look like fairly benevolent flying turnips. The jivas are the controllers in Flimsy.

So the nice-seeming jivas are bad. Conversely, the scapegoat yuels are in fact rather neutral about us, and even at times goodhearted. And at some point our hero Jim finds this out.

I think of this kind of plot-twist as a flip. I did a flip in Spaceland, with the Kluppers and Dronners. At some point Jim will be captured by the yuels and learn how to talk with them, and then he’ll learn the truth—this moment is the reveal. Joe Cube got his reveal in Spaceland when he finally talked to a Dronner.

I see the bad jivas as objective correlative for a pocket computer, like an iPod or Blackberry—they glom onto you and give you power and link you in, but they control you.

The yuels don’t talk like we do, they use exclusively telepathic glyphs. Jim’s dog befriends a yuel. A yuel is an objective correlative for an emergent hive behavior.

Last weekend we went to see a bout between two teams of the Santa Cruz Rollergirls at the Santa Cruz Civic Center. What I totally couldn’t believe was that the place was SOLD OUT, and we could barely get tix to get in! People are so frikkin’ organized anymore.

The bout we saw was the Beach Flats Betties vs. the Lost Girls. I might pedantically mention that in Santa Cruz, the Beach Flats is a somewhat low-rent area, and of course “betty” is an old surfer slang term for “woman.” Everyone involved seemed kind of punk, in a 21st Century way.

I had a little trouble figuring out the rules for roller derby, but a friendly young woman explained it to me, and back home I looked it up in Wikipedia. Basically each team has a “jammer” who scores points by lapping the pack.

The women wore impressive shiny pants, and looked awesome on their old-school four-wheeled skates. I think that’s Raven von Kaos of the Lost Girls in the middle.

And I think this is Lulu Lockjaw of the Beach Flat Betties jammin’ through the pack.

The MC was a rather stout middle-aged woman in tiny jeans shorts and a miniature red cowboy hat. When some heavy metal music came on, she started capering around on the stage doing knee-bend dancing—what a hoot.

Even the intermission was great, they had unicyclists, mini cyclers, jugglers on stilts, and hula hoopers in wild costumes—everyone parading round and round the rink slowly to music, including the Ramones—just local amateurs of all ages having fun. It was like a Fellini movie.

It takes a relaxed Cruz-type vibe to carry off this kind of thing—some communities would be all SERIOUS about it. A wonderful evening.

A couple of weeks ago, I did a one and a half hour long phone interview with my favorite computer scientist, Stephen Wolfram. He’s about to launch a new web product called Wolfram|Alpha. It’s a little like a search engine, but unlike an old-style search engine, it does deep background computations in order to calculate the answers that you might actually be looking for.

My written article based on our interview went live today in a cool new webzine called H+ Magazine . H+ is edited my no less a cultural hero than my old pal R. U. Sirius of Mondo 2000 fame. Nuff said!

Go read the article online: “Wolfram|Alpha: Searching for Truth.”

To further sweeten the infodump, Stephen taped our phone conversation and edited it down to a 65 minute podcast which H+ Magazine has posted as well. You can click on the icon below to access this podcast via .

I finished a new painting today, “Pig Surprise,” 40 inches by 30, acrylic on canvas. Or maybe the title should be Tax Time!

I started out with random blotches of paints, and then I started seeing some images. At first I had the picture rotated 180 degrees from this, and the yellow stuff was fire, and the red disk was a setting sun. But that looked dull. So I turned it the other way, got a claw…and added pig snout and ears. Pig Surprise! Poor pig.

Actually I got the title for this picture because when I went to Big Sur last week, my daughter Isabel was teasing me, and said I was going to Pig Sur. A real pig sur prize…

As always you can find more info about my paintings at my Paintings page…prints, note cards, originals, and a book of the paintings are all for sale.

As I mentioned in a post the other day, I’m thinking about having a little green goblin in Header’s skull in Chapter Four. I want to have a creature living in his head and controlling him, but a green goblin seems too much of a default choice, that is, too much like a golden age Kelly Freas image of a Martian. Not that I don’t love those images…

But I had some ideas for making it a little new.

First of all, don’t call it a goblin, call it a voor. Somehow I’ll need a way for the voor to take physical residence inside people’s heads. I’ll mention that the body of the voor’s previous host has no brain at all. He’s not exploded or anything, but his skull is empty.

Second , suppose that I do want a little green man with a gnome look—this makes sense, as a gnome resembles a bald old person, and old age is one of the subtextual themes of this novel. I have a vision of my voors in armies and in underground cities like in, yes, Lord of the Rings. But just to warp it a little, suppose I give each voor an extra pair of arms to suggest a six-legged ant-like quality.

Third of all, I’ll give the voors a superpower that’s along the lines of the implicit biotech in my existing menagerie of space-bending jivas and colony-organism shapeshifting yuels.

To wit, I’ll suppose that a voor is like the Plastic Man cartoon character, who can change his body shape. Unlike the yuels, who are colony organisms, the voors can’t completely change their shape and color, it’s more that they can change the sizes of their parts. They do this via a jiva-like technique of space manipulation. Note that, by the way, jivas can change their own size via space manipulation, so the skills of the voors and the jivas are similar. Perhaps voors are dark-side jivas—comparable to how devils are sometimes regarded as fallen angels.

I’m thinking of the 1940s comic Plastic Man by Jack Cole, by the way. Art Spiegelman and Chip Kidd co-edited an interesting art book about this strip, Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits .

And the character is mentioned (as Plasticman) in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow:

“Four-color Plasticman goes oozing out of a keyhole, around a corner and up through piping that leads to a sink in the mad Nazi scientist’s lab, out of whose faucet Plas’ head now, blank carapaced eyes and unplastic jaw, is just emerging. ‘Yeah. Who’re you, Ace?’” (p.206)

And later in Pynchon’s novel, in the gloomy twilight of the tale, “Plasticman will lose his way among the Imipolex [plastic]chains, and topologists all over the Zone will run out and stop payments on his honorarium checks” (p.752)

The topologists are upset, you understand, if Plastic Man becomes no longer “perfectly deformable.”