At the tail end of my trip to the East I stopped by Louisville, Kentucky, to visit my brother Embry and his wife. I was born and raised in Louisville, and lived there till I was 17. While I was at college, my parents moved away from Louisville, so now I hardly ever get back.

It’s been fourteen years since the last time I was here. The downtown isn’t especially lively—I guess this building’s windows are boarded up—but Louisville’s not dead either.

Sylvia and I happened to have lunch in an impressively hip hotel/museum called 21c. They have a mural of famous Louisvillians. I should be on it, but I didn’t have the energy/chutzpah to agitate for admission. I’m on vacation. And, after all, I don’t live here anymore.

They have some interesting art in the bar at 21c. I bet this devil is a self-portrait by the artist.

There’s a cool old waterworks at the foot of Zorn Avenue in Louisville. When I see Zorn Ave, I always recall that, when I was in high school, a kid was speeding up Zorn Ave in a convertible, trying to outrun the cops, and when he wouldn’t pull over, they shot him in the head. That was the first time I realized that the police might do things like that in real life.

My brother lives on a farm outside of town in Skylight, Kentucky. It’s nice to be out in the real country. Growing up, we lived closer in, more in the suburbs—or rather, the suburbs had engulfed us by the time I was ten. This dog is called Ziggy. He’s a good boy. But you have to watch him around this pasture. Some valuable thoroughbreds live there.

It was just as cold as NYC here, with ice on the creek. I feel nostalgic in Kentucky, and amazed at the distance that life’s currents have carried me.

I walked along a frozen stream in a gully behind Embry’s farm, marveling at the ice shelves crystals and the water bubbles under the glaze—which is exactly what I used to do fifty years ago.

The woods are calm and mysterious, the same as ever. Nothing changes in the woods.

I’m wearing this hat I got for $15 on the street in NYC, from a vendor on Fifth Ave. Lots of people in NYC are wearing this kind of hat this winter. The ears have some real personality.

I like how, when it’s really cold, ice gets to be like a mineral.

Back in Louisville, I can hardly remember what I usually do. My fiction seems like a remote dream.

I sit by the fire most of the day, and sometimes I go out and look for patterns. Like this nice wall I saw downtown.

New York is so great. What an anthill. After a couple of days there, I could feel two spectral thoracic legs waving from my abdomen.

An artist was commissioned to erect a bunch of treehouses in Madison Square, the little park at Broadway and 23rd by the Flatiron Building. They’re very high up, on trees with smooth trunks—and the homeless people can’t climb up to them.

I always visit the Flatiron Building because my publisher, Tor Books, has their offices there. I first saw the building fifty years ago, when I was twelve. My father and I went to New York together, and he showed it to me, along with the Empire State Building. Odd to think that now I’m doing business there.

I love the big NYC buildings against the sky, and how they reflect each other. It’s a wonderland, a giant hall of mirrors.

It’s not accurate to view New Yorkers as uniformly gruff. Many of them are very friendly and talkative. And it takes very little to get a conversation going. As a result of seeing millions of people a year, the locals are anything but shy. They’re smooth, and they converse easily.

Our daughter Georgia happened to be in NYC as well, and she got us to go with her to see Camper van Beethoven play at the Bowery Ballroom, which is a little like the Fillmore, but about half as big, and somewhat seedier.

I’ve always loved Camper Van. They were big when we moved to California 25 years ago; Marc Laidlaw introduced me to their music. By now, the lead singer, David Lowry, reminds me of an eccentric old professor—fit, dedicated, and prepared to speak out. My twin. They sang their big hit, “Take the Skinheads Bowling.” [Click to see it on YouTube.] What a masterpiece.
“Last night I had a dream—it was about nothing.”

We saw a new play called Becky Shaw that was fun. Not a musical, you understand— more of a Noel Coward piece, but up-to-date. Tight, witty repartee for the dialog—the kinds of things you’d say if you had a week to ponder each line. The actors were attractive and professional. The Big Apple. We hit a couple of ballets and museums too. Vulturing the culture.

We saw our old friend Eddie Marritz. He’s a cinematographer who shoots still pictures when there’s spare time. He’s very old school in this regard—he uses a Leica M6 rangefinder camera with black and white film. He was telling me it’s important to take lots of pictures of a given scene to make sure you got the right one. And he comes up with great shots, so for sure this approach works for him.

I myself prefer the school of “think, watch, get ready, and just take the one or two perfect shots.” Like going squirrel-hunting with only two bullets in your pocket (not that I’ve ever gone squirrel-hunting, but I like the Kentucky metaphor). Or—better analogy—it’s like making each pop count when you have only twelve firecrackers to set off, as was often the case when I was a boy.

I suppose I imprinted on a conservative photo-shooting approach when I was an impecunious young man making pictures on film. And now I like to imagine that if get deeply enough into the process, merging with the camera and with the view, I can feel the right picture without actually having to shoot the wrong ones. Alternately, I sometimes think that one picture is as good as another anyway—each has its own magic.

[Tribal paintings that are massed to make a ceiling near New Guinea.]

This said, now that I’m using digital now, I do go for a “do-over” sometimes. That is, I look at my shot on the camera’s little screen, and then I reshoot right away if the image seems badly lit, or poorly framed, or out of focus in the wrong spot. And it’s also the case, that I Photoshop nearly every one of my pictures, tweaking the lighting and framing—and this is another reason why I don’t necessarily need a “perfect” shot.

In NYC, I also saw a young writer I know from publishing two of his excellent stories in Flurb, Brendan Byrne. Brendan’s taking a little time off from work (most recently he was a bartender at McSorley’s) to focus on writing. He’s hoping to write a couple of novels during his personal sabbatical. Go for it, Brendan!

I advised Brendan to be sure and try writing an SF novel as well. In my (possibly mistaken) opinion, it’s easier to get a novel published as SF than as mainstream literature. Not that the lit-biz is booming on any front. My editor, David Hartwell, says nobody’s sure what’s going to happen next.

But I never worry too much when I hear bad news about publishing. I’ve been writing and publishing for about thirty years now, and I think that during each one of those 30 years, someone has told me that times have never been worse in publishing. Especially in SF publishing!

In any case, writing SF is something I like to do.
“I know it’s only rock and roll—but I like it.”

In this connection, I like to imagine being this sculpture of Herakles, I can relate to how he’s evolved into our present time.
“Wal, I’ve still got my torso—and some of my toes.”
The guy sitting beside Herakles is sketching him on a pad. It must be great to be an NYC artist and go sketching and painting things in the Met.

Today it’s 75 degrees in San Jose, California, and 3 degrees in New York. Like two different planets, almost.

I was in the good old Museum of Modern Art in New York last week, the real MOMA. On the fifth floor they have modern art from 1880 – 1940, on the fourth floor the art from 1940- 1970, and on the second floor the contemporary art.

I prefer the fifth floor, that is, the early modernist stuff. The thing is, I prefer paintings, with colors, and without words written on them.

Pop Art does have colors, but as the decades go by, most of the work looks increasingly thin—although, to my eye, Rosenquist still holds up. The post-Pop artist Basquiat still looks pretty good, although, again, at least for me, any painting with words written on it is less interesting that it would have been without the words. And Philip Guston is still great, and even Rothko holds up, if you give him time to sink in.

There are some great contemporary artists as well, but none of seemed to be on display in the MOMA last week. All they had was the middle range of contemporary art. In the future, I can’t imagine that anyone at all will be looking at these beige, white, and gray works. There’s no eye candy, no thought or too much thought, and little evidence of craft or sustained effort.

[Detail of Vincent van Gogh, “L’Arlesienne”]

Why has Western art gone in this direction? One factor is our capitalist conception that last year’s model is obsolete, and this year’s model has to seem new and different. We take this for granted. But keep in mind that other cultures are comfortable with having artists and craftsmen stick to certain standard forms, continually refining and improving on what’s gone before. Would it be so bad to try and paint like Picasso or van Gogh or Thiebaud? Or maybe some people are doing that, and the fire just isn’t there?

The down side of the traditionalist slow refinement model is that you end up with, like, a museum filled with paintings of the Crucifixion, or with endless calligraphic scroll paintings of mountain trees in fog.

But, as I was saying, the down side of innovation for innovation’s sake is that you end up discarding too many valid modes of artistic expression. And somehow—I’m not sure why—you end up with beige, brown, and black paintings with words on them. And little piles of garbage here and there. “Sculptures.”

Of course Tom Wolfe said all this years ago in his 1975 book The Painted Word. Nobody listened to the old fuddy-duddy.

Is there another path for new art other than discarding everything that was good about painting? Well, sure, you can use entirely new media. And this is where video art, or interactive computer art comes to the fore.

Generally I don’t like video art—it takes a long time to look at it, and it makes noise that spills over into the other parts of the museum, unfairly weakening the effects of the other works of art on display.

But at the MOMA I did see a very impressive video piece by Pipilotti Rist at the MOMA—I’ve seen her work before. She’s cool.

[Detail of a Metropolitan Museum of Art painting by Vincent van Gogh]

But nobody touches Vincent.

Another picture story today—I have a lot of photos on hand to use up…

A striped space capsule appeared at the end of my dining table.

And a little lady stepped out.

She led me to a Magic Door.

And she opened the lock.

Her husband was inside, with a stony head like hers.

The enemy robots were attacking.

So I hid inside a sidewalk crack.

I found a floating piece of thistledown there.

And I rode it all the way home.