I performed my Psipunk talk at the Dorkbot SF gathering on May 2, 2007.

In the afternoon I spent some time with my favorite person in SF, the co-owner of Monkeybrains, Inc. We visited the data center where his cabinets of servers live, checking on a machine that’s sending out a 128 Meg movie of Ludacris several times a second—a.o.k. Speaking of video, there’s a funny video interview of Monkeybrain moguls Rudy, Jr., and Alex Menendez online.

Rudy Jr.’s foodhacking friend Marc Powell made ant and raspberry gum-drops for the event!

The dedicated rabble-rouser and Dorkbot impresario Karen Marcelo posted a slideshow’s worth of DorkbotSF #34 images on Flickr. We didn’t manage to tape or video it, but Rudy, Jr., pointed out that the telepathic bricks in Chicken John’s wall have the event stored in their lazy eight memories so no prob.

In Amsterdam I was uptight about my presentation because of culture shock and the language barrier, so when I was there I actually read my speech from a print-out of it I’d prepared in advance—like liberal arts types often do. I’d thought I might just read the same speech again at Dorkbot, make it a no-brainer, but—seeing all those hip, lively kids there, I didn’t want to come on all stiff and fuddy-duddy.

So I didn’t use the text or, for that matter, any computer projection—a good call, that last decision, as the Dorkbot projector was a balky device dangling from a swaying rope above the crowd of maybe two hundred, who were seated in church pews. I just stood up there and taught the lecture like a class and it went over well, lots of laughs.

I stayed till then end, then caught a train home. There were a bunch of other good presentations, one that particularly caught my attention was by a crew representing the Osaka incarnation of Dorkbot spoke, describing a vibby installation they called Openpool; they showed some Youtube videos of it. The speaker’s English was borderline incomprehensible, but, hey, how well do we speak Japanese? The images were lovely; turns out these Japanese dorks like the same kinds of things that we West coast dorks like: chaotic things. Big undulating domes of fabric. Dangling electronic mobiles twisting in the air currents.

I was listening to NOFX song “The Cause” this week to psych myself up for the talk. It perfectly expresses why I’m still out there doing things like Dorkbot and Flurb for free, not that I’m anywhere near as punk as Fat Mike. I can’t find a video of the song online, but here’s a video of their vibby song “Punk Guy,” mismatched with the lyrics for “The Cause.”

It isn’t for the money
Nor is it for the fun
It’s a plan, a scam, a diagram
It’s for the benefit of everyone
You gotta have a little respect
Subterranean ideals
Traditional of neglect
Reflect on how it would make you feel
The cause—we’re just doing it for the cause

No it isn’t for the fortune, it isn’t for the fame
It’s a scheme, a dream, a barterine[?]
We want everyone to think the same
Because you know what you know is right
And you feel what you can’t ignore
And you try so hard to point the blame
A shame—what are we doin’ this for?

The cause—we’re just doing it for the cause
The cause—we’re just doing it for the cause

Open, your eyes, don’t trust, these lies
What are we doin’ this for?
The cause—we’re just doing it for the cause
The cause—we’re just doing it for the cause.

Stoner humor is a way of giving the finger to consensus reality. That’s what I always liked in Burroughs’s Yage Letters or in Phil Dick’s Scanner Darkly, or William J. Craddock’s Be Not Content. Turning your back on received ideas. Participatory surrealism.

Looking ahead, in I’m proud to announce that June 15, 2012, my Transreal Books publishing company  scored the coup of bringing William J. Craddock’s classic psychedelic novel back into availability. I reached an agreement with Craddock’s widow, Theresa, and Be Not Content became available both as an ebook and as a quality paperback, via my Transreal Books page.

Go here to read my intro to my print  edition. Many thanks to all the readers of this blog for your support and encouragement.

Sadly, as of June, 2020, my contract to publish the novel expired.  Happily, as of June, 2021, the book is back in print from Jay Shore of Backtrack Publishing.

Back to the memories—here’s two old journal excerpts of mine about the book.

(1) Oct 5, 2003. I bought a used book on the web, William J. Craddock, Be Not Content, a book I worshipped in the 1970s, and then lost. I paid too much for this used copy, $140, and it’s not in very good shape, but I just had to own it again. It was pure joy rereading it, I recognized so very many bits that I’ve totally integrated into my worldview, so many kicks and tricks that I used in my own transreal work. What I hadn’t remembered/understood in reading the book in the Seventies is that it’s set in San Jose. It’s a Bildungsroman transreal novel about Craddock’s experiences as an acid-head while a student at San Jose State, 1963-1967.

[4D Painting by David Povilaitis.]

He was born in 1946 like me, and went to college the same years! I wish I could find him and give him a copy of my mirror-world right-coast work in the same vein, on the same period, The Secret of Life. Looking for him on the web reveals only one hit, a reprint of something he had in one of those Authors Lives reference sets back when Be Not Content came out. [Note, I can’t find this link anymore.] He was born in Los Gatos. Was living in the Santa Cruz mountains. Right when I moved here in 1986, I remember seeing a column by him the Santa Cruz free newspaper Good Times. I hope he’s still alive. Maybe I could help get Be Not Content back into print.

I’m always worrying about wasting time, right, and I saw a great line in Be Not Content, the author-narrator Abel Egregore expresses this fear to one of his stoner friends, who guffaws, “Time? How can you waste time?” And I get a little enlightenment there. Time and space, the all-pervasive ineluctable modalities. What’s to waste? You use one second per second no matter what you’re doing. A wonderful teaching.

(2) September 25, 2005. A fan emailed me that Craddock is dead, so today I went to the SJSU library to look up Craddock’s obit. It was on microfilm, San Jose Mercury News, March 20, 2004, a tiny obit written by, I think, his wife Teresa. How little recognition he died with. It was eerie, the microfilms are down in the basement in this new and graphically uncluttered room with an art piece that makes the room look like a mausoleum — the two facing side walls are covered with mirrors set into tiny arched openings like the doors to crypt boxes. Like being in Citizen Kane. I pull open the huge flat metal drawer with ranks and ranks of microfilm boxes, my hand reaches in, plucks out the box with Billy’s obit. Go to the microfilm reader, the same old big clunky kind of machine as ever, grind forward to his the obits on 3/20/04, I’m looking for a big article, but it’s just a little tiny thing, with a picture him looking tired and sad, his eyes hidden in dark sockets.

How bum, how alien, how weird it would be for him to see this microfilm room in a flash-forward, him walking careless and high around the campus forty years ago and suddenly, whoah, he sees the hand pulling out the box of microfilm with its image of his weary, suffering face.

When I go outside, the bell on Tower Hall is ringing an hour, tolling deep and reverberant, the sounds overlapping and forming beats. “It tolls for thee.” I really am going to die, and someone will walk around this campus marveling that Rudy Rucker once trod here, and now is no more, that really and truly is gonna happen. Nobody escapes. William Craddock knew this his whole life long, I think he wrote something like “there is only the one trip, the true trip of life itself.”

It’s not quite accurate to call the book “stoner humor,” by the way. Better to post what Billy said about it on the back cover of his book:

See also his entry in Gale Contemporary Authors in one of the comments below…

In 2009, my friend Nick H., who lives near Boulder Creek, came across Billy’s grave in Soquel and sent me two pictures.

RIP, man.

The weary wayfarer is back in his California heaven. Immortal in cyberspace. Rather than making new posts, this week I keep revising this particular post.

Hooray! Today (Wednesday, April 18, 2997) Menso Heus of the Dutch ISP XS4ALL managed to post a nice version of my twenty minute Amsterdam Psipunk lecture onto Google video. Click the little arrow to play it or, to see a larger version, click this link: Google Psipunk Video. I have the full written text of the Psipunk talk online as well. The sound quality is very good, although the synch to video is just a bit off.

Thanks to XS4ALL, the Cyberspace Salvations group, and the Waag Society for organizing the talk. By the way I’ll be giving a similar talk at Dorkbot in San Francisco on Wednesday, May 2–in about two weeks.

Culture hero R. U. Sirius was on the stage with me that night; we should have video of his talk and our shared Q&A up soon.

My new Dutch impresario friend Luc Sala posted a ten-minute video of the first half of my talk on Youtube as well. The sound quality isn’t as good, but the synch and image a little better. Good work, Luc! Guerilla journalism. Luc has made a zillion interview and talk videos, you can find them tagged by mindlift on Youtube.

There’s also a high-quality, but somewhat hard to access (because of 500 Meg size) version of the video at the Waag site .

My Rochester interview about Mathematicians in Love with Bob Smith will air as broadcast and online from AM 1370 in Rochester, Tuesday, May 1, 2007, Noon-1 EDT. It’s supposed to be available soon from WXXI as an MP3 file as well.

More Rochester documentation: My lecture at RIT on “Gnarly Computation,” is up as a Flash video. The freshest part—that is, the part I never said before—is last five minutes when I’m giving my history of how I got involved with cyberpunk—scroll ahead to around minute 65 of the 70 minute talk. If you figure out a way to clip out this bit, Youtube it and send me the link.

And the very enjoyable four-person colloquium on my work is up as in video form as well.

My very last night in Amsterdam was fun. I had dinner outside a trattoria on cobblestones by a pair of intersecting canals with Ken Goffman [a.ka. R. U. Sirius]. Just the two of us, no Q & A, no psychodrama, it was relaxing. All the water and cobblestones and the crenellated stair-step gables. So perfectly European, like a theme park almost, but with some actual dirt and with relaxed locals puttering by in little boats drinking wine and beer. We had dessert before dinner: pancakes in the cool pleasant courtyard of the Amsterdam Historical Museum, another of Amsterdam’s intensely perfected urban spaces. I think the government has a lot of money to really buff things up.. After dinner we walked along the canals, ending up at De Melkweg (the Milky Way), a night club I’ve always wanted to check out.

Last time I was in Amsterdam, in 1994, I bought pot at the “R. Crumb Coffeeshop,” and their business card bore, on one side, Crumb’s classic “Stoned Agin” drawing of a man with a melting face, and on the other side, a little map of how to get back and forth between the Melkweg and the R. Crumb Coffeeshop. And parts of the great live Rolling Stones album Stripped was recorded at the Melkweg, as was Michel Gondry’s “Like a Rolling Stone” video for it. So I think of the Melkweg as being a very cool place.

R. U. and I came upon the Melkweg in the dusk; and it’s not such a big building at all. It holds a cinema, a theater space and small rock club, nothing like the cavernous Fillmore hall I’d expected. Maybe they use the big theater for big rock shows, but last night they had ballet in there. We went into the small room and saw a couple of ska bands; it was Ska Night, a mini-festival called Dutchska. We stayed about an hour. In a way, ska is perfect for Europeans. It gives them an excuse to sing “Ya, ya, ya,” to a band featuring an accordion—which is what they like to do in the first place. The band Mala Vita had guitars, and they rocked, one song’s chorus was good: “Nobody knows, nobody knows.” R. U. and I could relate to that, we were shouting along. Dancing to the music felt good. My hips and back get sore after a few days of walking around cities, also I was sore from the stress surrounding our show. When I dance, I let my backbone slip and work it on out. Yubba.

Between bands, Ken and I sat on the ground outside. We weren’t getting high, and neither were most of the kids there for the concert, which seemed incongruous. In the U. S., pot is illegal, and everyone is smoking it at concerts. In Holland it’s effectively legal, and they don’t bother to smoke it. Ken and I don’t need it anymore, we’re mutants for good.