Here’s a cloud seen in Los Gatos near my house. And the next picture shows a pair of donkeys up on the hill. Christmas donkeys.

I got a little more info on Ta Moko from Ray Quah: There’s a book of photos by Hans Neleman Moko-Maori Tattoo. Also there’s some modern ta moko in the movie Once Were Warriors.

Robert Anton Wilson is still alive and, if not kicking, at least blogging. Great to see he’s still at it.

The other day, as an Xmas treat, I went into SF and met up with John Shirley, my son Rudy, and hacker Marc Powell. First we went to a show of Croatian electronic art at the Tenderloin RX Gallery. It’s so funny how the totally scuzzy Tenderloin is wedged in on the same side of Market Street as the big tourist hotels and Union Square.

Marc is into “food hacking” now. Check out his site and figure it out. He said if you blog something before someone else, you got the “blog drop” on them. So maybe I have the blog drop on Marc right now.

We four went to see Rancid at the Warfield. It was so great to see Rancid. I love those guys, especially Tim Armstrong and Lars Frederiksen (Tim in the middle, Lars on the left). I think they’re both from Campbell, California, a suburb of San Jose near where I live.

It’s always nice seeing a concert in the Warfield, with its plaster moldings and painting on the ceiling. Using the old SF analogy machine: the people who painted this mural in the early 1900s are in the same relation to Rancid’s music as the designers of the contermporary Metreon Center are to ——- (fill in blank with some type of performance in the year 2106.)

I’ve only seen Rancid live once before, and that was when they did a free lunch-time concert outside the student center at San Jose State, more than ten years ago. At the time I was so happy and surprised to see that punk was still alive and, indeed, as good as ever. John S was happily beating time to the Rancid music. He says the latest popular punk band out the gate is The Horrors.

Rancid's first song: “When I've got the music, I've got a place to go.” That says it all.

When I got home, I found three new volumes by me out! Just in time for Christmas shopping, so here’s some Amazon links.

The Hollow Earth on the left, a new edition of my historical SF novel. (The Amazon link showed the wrong graphic for the cover lately.)

A collection of my recent stories, Mad Professor.

And, on the right, my latest SF novel, Mathematicians in Love, which I wrote so much about on this blog last year.

It’s bittersweet to be back from New Zealand. I miss the friendly people and the informal vibe.

Thanks, by the way, to all the kiwis who sent in comments on my recent New Zealand blog entries. There's still so much I want to see there: Coromandel, Nelson, the Southern Alps, Dunedin and Invercargill. I hope we get back there again one of these days. Like I say, I already miss it.

The weirdness of the ferny jungle, complete with mysterioso shrines!

The uncrowded, pristine coast.

My friend Trim Pork the pig.

The giant tree-ferns.

You look forward to something for a long time, and then you do it, and then it’s over. Somehow the transition always feels a bit surprising.

We do have some nature here, of course. It’s just that, at least in the Bay Area, there’s usually a six-lane freeway somewhere within earshot. I went walking with my friend Jon Pearce in Santa Cruz soon after coming back.

Out of habit, I was seeing our plant through tourist eyes, and indeed our oaks and redwoods are pretty gnarly. Only nature picture I seem to have brought back from this particular walk, though is a hole in the ground showing a subterranean stream which possibly leads through the Hollow Earth back , sob, to New Zealand.

Downtown in Santa Cruz was some weirdness. People were waiting in a line three blocks long so that their children could spend ten minutes per group in a fenced-in enclosure of — snow. Obviously the thing to do with the snow is to make little snowballs, but in our customary US hypocritical cover-your-butt-from-liability fashion, the sponsors of the event had to have a sign saying NO SNOWBALL THROWING ALLOWED.

Back in the USSR, where everyone is a criminal, all of the time…

We had dinner in a Nepalese restaurant, Jewel of Nepal, in Wellington with three ex-pat Americans (two of them graphics programmers at Peter Jackson’s Weta Workshop, whose Weta Digital unit did the FX for Lord of the Rings and for King Kong). Joe Ardent (second from right) and his friends Francisco and Vanessa. Joe made some of the rocks in King Kong.

Big Myke Halstead also joined us, a true Kiwi; I picked up these contacts via answers to my blog note that I was visiting NZ. Great to meet some locals. The waiter seemed like a sherpa, Tibetan.

In Christchurch now (though most of these photos are from Wellington, like this is a sculpture over a square in Wellie), a third of the way down the southern island of NZ. It’s a bringdown to be back in a city. I was so relaxed among those tree ferns at Lochmara Lodge. Not eating so well in this town. I’m tired of heavy restaurant meals. NZ does have this tendency to load on rich sauces.

[UFO spotted in Wellington.]

On the train to Christchurch it was brilliantly sunny on the sea, the color is called New Zealand teal. The rear car of the train was open, like a flat car with railings and a sun shade, leaning there watching the sea my heart leapt up. “I’m on vacation! And I never have to go back to work at all…” The open car so carefree and unsafe and (therefore) un-American.

[Krazy Kiwis playing kayak ball in the Wellington harbor during lunch hour.]

Saw a nice little modern art show in the Christchurch gallery, Out of Erewhon as Samuel Butler’s novel of that title was inspired by this part of the world.

[The forbidding, cold, murky waters off the Poor Knights Islands. “Subtropical,” means cold as Monterey Bay, I found out.]

Thinking about the Polynesian rats destroying fantail birds (they hover like helicopters), or possums killing kiwis. Invasive species. Kudzu. Something like this is happening worldwide on the level of memes. Even in New Zealand, the papers have gossip about Britney’s “inelegant expanse of bare bosom.” I see a chapter in PS2 called “Meme Wars.”

[Photo by SR, in the Civic Center Square in Wellington.]

Before the Polynesians arrived on New Zealand — only about 700 years ago — bringing their pigs, dogs and so on, NZ was a kingdom of birds. There were lots of large, flightless birds like the kiwi and he moa. The giant moa birds were like ostriches, about 12 feet tall. Destroyed by the Maori. The Europeans, starting with whalers and sealers, then convicts, displaced many of the Maori. At some point rats arrived, perhaps in a Polynesian boat or, for sure, on James Cook’s ship.

More Asians are moving to NZ now, though I don’t think they can fully displace the Europeans. Are there some races or species which settle in and never get displaced at all? I think of kudzu, of roaches and rats, of biological or memetic stasis forces that somehow are very hard to oust, of invasions that quell any further novelty. But eventually even Republicans can lose an election.

[On a long beach of the Tasman Sea near Raglan.]

Imagine in PS2 some aliens who are very dull and hard to get rid of. A lowest-common-denominator kind of race. Though it’s dull to read about dull aliens. I’d need some competitors. Maybe have the bad, dull aliens look cute, like kiwi birds, and call them the Kang. And have some novelty-enhancing good aliens who are misleadingly ugly, like stingrays, say, and call them the Rull. I did something like that in Spaceland. The Kluppers look nice, but they’re bad, and the Dronners look like devils, but they’re good.

I feel like I keep having the same dream, or rather, extensions of a single on-going dream. Like reporting to work every night. The dream work. This often happens on vacation, the planning of the day sloshes over into travel dreams at night. Looking for a room, a restaurant, a train.

Looking at stylized fern designs painted on a Maori waka (canoe). The fern is really the dominant shape in the undisturbed original New Zeeland bush (as they call the forest). The fiddle heads, the scrolls, and the arching fronds. Zhabotinsky scrolls. They’re everywhere in Maori art.

The Kiwis love dangerous things, I think it’s very hard to sue anyone there. On the way out of the country we stopped in the immensely tall Sky Tower in Auckland, where you can walk around on a Plexiglass floor off, if you like, jump off the damn thing and be lowered to ground, decelerating from 85 km per hour.

Several museums we visit (in Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch) have installed Maori meeting houses (marae), and we visit one near Pahaia as well. They chisel faces on the wooden posts, usually the faces are asymmetric, heads to one side, with their tongues sticking out in a gesture that’s often part of a kind of battle dance called a haka. Every part of the inside of a marae is covered with the faces, its like a realization of the panpsychic notion that everything is alive.

[Photo by SR, Wedding party in Russell]

I see a scene in PS2 where Bixie is freaking out over everything looking like a face. This harks back to the scary peyote hallucinations I had in 1966, in which everything became a face, even a blank wall. I was 20.

Went to a service at the Christchurch cathedral; I was thinking about PS2. Maybe PS2 has Jayjay and Thuy on a colony world like New Zealand, and in PS3 they go back to Earth. I finally “get” the idea of colony worlds, now that I’m Down Under.

Looked at differently, Earth itself is like a remote little country relative to the big Galactic civilization. We humans and mammals are like moas and kiwis maybe. And the invading destructive “Polynesian rats” are meme eaters. In some way all of us Earthlings are as innocent and defenseless as flightless birds.

If aliens show up we should do like the Polynesians (or the moas) should have: eradicate the visitors as quickly as they arrive.

I think of Business 2.0 in Accelerando. I saw an article in the paper that offshore venture capital companies are buying up New Zealand companies, they expand their debt, restructure them, and then sell them when their stock valuation is high. Easy to imagine aliens doing that to Earth. But in some other kind of way than just with finance

After visiting with fellow Cellular Automata-enthusiast Crile Droscher in Lyttleton near Christchurch, I’m trying to think of a CA to emulate water running in wavy pulses down a window pane. Crile wants to model braided rivers, which are common in the flat Canterbury plains near Christchurch. And once I get flowing water I could add a sediment variable to supplement he water variable and maybe get a braided river, though Crile thinks a particle system is likelier to work; he’s using the Santa Fe software package Swarm — nice to know that ware is out there doing stuff for people, just as Chris Langton had dreamed.

In Russell, a former whaling-crew hangout in the Bay of Islands, I saw a whale boat that set me to wanting to write another book about the Hollow Earth, Or at least a story about a runaway crew member who gets ta moko-ed. Also I picked up more Antarctica info in Christchurch and from an Antarctic fiction anthology called The Wide White Page, edited by the poet Bill Manhire, and printed by Victoria University Press, Wellington, NZ, 2004.

By the way, the Victoria press just published a collection of essays on Confronting Climate Change: Issues for New Zealand co-edited by my hacker friend Nick Chapman’s father Ralph Chapman. Maybe I can figure out a way to spend a semester in Wellington; I’d love to see more NZ, and to be closer to the entrance to the Hollow Earth.

The Wide White Page includes a good story by Ursula LeGuin called “Sur” about some women who clandestinely trek to the South Pole before any men. But, being women, they don’t bother registering their priority. Ursula’s writing always makes me feel like a diseased, cringing rat baring his fangs in an alley. A cockroach. I’m so unlike her utterly noble and well-balanced characters. That doesn’t mean I have to feel “less than.” It means I think Ursula’s characters aren’t true to life. It’s good being a rat. We’re hard to dislodge. We’re adaptable. And never forget, where there’s filth, there’s life.

Mur.

I saw a lot of Charles F. Goldie’s paintings in Auckland and another Goldie painting in Wellington and another in Christchurch; Goldie (1870-1947) painted Maori with full facial tattoos, these tattoos are called moko or ta moko. This particular image shows a tinted cast made of a chief's face after his death; it's in the Te Papa museum in Wellington. I asked the Maroi woman guard if anyone had ta moko anymore, and she said she knew a lot of guys who had it, and they'd all been at a “Power” concert together the night before. I bet those are some heavy dudes. Like Hells Angels so scary they don't even need motorcycles.

Amazing designs, rich with the arching branches of fern fronds and the curled up spirals of fern fiddleheads. Goldie’s pictures show that the tattoos were in fact carved into the skin. Dig the Tiki necklace he's wearing, you see that litlte man with the crooked head everywhere in Maori art.

Note that this second painting shows the same man as the first painting, a chief named Patara te Tuhi. This picture is called “A Hot Day.” The Maori posed for Goldie for a daily fee.

Ina Te Papatahi was one of the first Maori he got to know. The women generally had their moko only on their chins. Also it was only the higher ranking members of the tribes who had moko. Goldie painted Ina many times. In the gallery I heard a guide talking about her, she seems to have been quite a character, involved in intrigues with more than one tribal chieftan.

I bought a very interesting book at the Auckland Gallery, Roger Blackley, Goldie, (Auckland art Gallery, 1997). Goldie is a great old-school academic painter.

Note that the moko tattoos were around for many years, but the idea of accompanying them with scarification “moko whakairo” became widespread only in the 1820s, according to Pita Graham, Maori Moko or Tattoo (Bush Press, Auckland, 1994). Perhaps the carved moko took hold because at this time the the Maori had metal knives from the Europeans, meaning that they could carve the moko in a little better than with the bone and stone tools they'd used before. This picture is called “All ‘e Same t’e Pakeha” which means, I think, “All Europeans look the same,” or maybe it means “Don't I look European?” — pakeha being the Maori word for European. (Actually some of my commenters say it probably means “All Maori look the same to Europeans.”) It is perhaps a somewhat condescending title, as Goldie had a colonialist kind of attitude toward the Maori. But obviously he was deeply fascinated with them as well. It's a great picture, it would be so cool to hang out with this model (the chief Te Aho-o-te-Rangi Wharepu of the Ngati Mahuta tribe.) Certainly Goldie’s models liked his portraits of them very much; a few letters from the Maori models survive — Goldie would give photos of the paintings to the models.

The flowering of ta moko after European arrival reminds me of how totem poles got big after the natives of the Pacific northwest got steel axes from the traders. In both cases a native art form that had this big flowering right after First Contact — right before the collapse of local culture.

I see this pattern as underlying the metanovel form in Postsingular. It’s a case of extreme Baroque new-technology-mediated form that is fated to collapse due to side-effects of the very tech that makes it possible.

There’s a bit of a renaissance in moko these days, some tough-looking Maori have them now. High street fashion. I don’t think a European could get away with wearing one, at least not in New Zealand. If anyone has links to photos of contemporary moko, let me know.

[Irrelevant photo of an Irish Elk skeleton in a jumble room at the Chirschurch museum.]

An interesting grisly sidelight. When someone with a really great moko dies, you hate to throw out that beautifully decorated head. So the Maori sometimes mummified tattooed heads. And then of course traders began wanting to buy them. It’s said that some Maori tribes began deliberately hunting heads off neighboring tribes or even taking a slave, tattooing him, and then the cutting the slave’s head for sale. I want to write a short story which is a nice first-person account of a crew member of a whaling ship who jumps ship in the Bay of Islands near Russell. He has an affair with a Maori woman and is then kidnapped by her tribe. They tattoo him and at first he thinks its an honor, and then he realizes they plan to sell his head. “All 'e same t'e pakeha.” He escapes in a small boat, a storm blows up and he’s swept into higher and higher southern latitudes, towards the mouth of the Hollow Earth! Mocking moko skulls dance around him. [These drawings are from the Bush Press book mentioned above.]