FLASHBACKS TO APOCALYPSES OF MY YOUTH

2017 is coming to an end, and things are looking apocalyptic. Politics is like a surrealistic dystopian fantasy. News reports seem like deranged hallucinations. Some people are actually saying that the world is coming to an end.

Sigh. Kind of reminds me of the days of my youth.

By coincidence (yeah, I know, some folks say that there is no such thing as coincidence) I happened to read two books more or less at the same time (I usually read several books at once, don’t you?) that bring back those thrilling days of yesteryear . . .

The first is Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost its Mind and Found its Soul by Clara Bingham, a fascinating multi-viewpoint, multi-dimensional oral history, with occasional quotes and excerpts from the dead. It concentrates on the year between the summers of 1969 and 1970,but there’s some spillover, because history tends to be messy. And this was a messy time. A time I remember well.

The first moon landing had happened, and I had entered high school. The future had arrived. I was looking around, wondering what kind of world I was going to be living in, and expecting change. And, boy oh boy, did it ever happen.

It wasn’t what I was expecting, but the future never goes according to plan, which is probably a good thing.

Witness to the Revolution isn’t a hippie-dippie Fabulous Sixties nostalgia trip. Voices of the Establishment, cops, Feds, even Nixon himself, are heard from. The Weathermen admit they were crazy. The witnesses, who are often major participants, are delightfully frank the way victims of politically correct educations never are.

And checked against my own memories, they ring true.

They also provided the perfect state of mind for reading David Memmott’s new novel, Canned Tuna, in which we swing from the lives of two young American men, one in Vietnam and Boise, Idaho in 1969, the other in Oregon in 1963. Do you find that twisting of time sequence disturbing? Well, it’s typical of this novel.

Don’t worry, it also has a sense of humor.

Apocalyptic happenings mesh with fantastic, gritty realities, in the war, working class America, and the counterculture without any sci-fi explanation. One of the best novels about the period I’ve ever read. It does for the Vietnam era what Slaughterhouse Five did for World War Two.

Maybe now and then we all come unstuck in time. Or time gets sticky. Spacetime. Timespace. Whatever.

Again, it rings true.

They are unprocessed history, before it’s stereotyped, made into classroom propaganda, and ultimately forgotten.

Both books take me back to when I was coming of age in a world that seemed to coming to an end. Seemed. I got mad when people--smart people--kept saying that it was all over. It wasn’t what I wanted to hear, being young, and now that I’m old I see that they were wrong. Life, time, goes on. It gets strange, but it doesn’t stop.

These books give perspective on our current troubled times. I recommend them, not just to us old farts, but to the younger generation, too. Things getting weird and crazy aren’t anything new. It’s the future; get used to it, kids.

Like Criswell said at the beginning of Plan 9 From Outer Space: “We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives.”

CHICANONAUTICA PRESENTS HIGH AZTECH NEWS

There's High Aztech News from Chicanonautica, over at La Bloga.

The world is going stark, raving High Aztech! So, speak the words:

Drink the drinks:

Eat the food:

And hear the music:

NOTES ON MY ART IN “MARIPOSAS” AT THE BEMIS CENTER

In case you haven't heard, some of my artwork (and my novels, and a magazine article I wrote and illustrated about the PreColumbian ball game) are on display in Omaha, Nebraska. They're in an exhibition called Mariposas: Brown and Native Contemporary Artists in the Path of the Butterfly at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. This is because Josh Rios and Anthony Romero included them in a project they call Is Our Future a Thing of the Past?

Thanks guys. I appreciate the support.

I'd also like to thank Josh for recently introducing me to the term Xicanxfuturisma. I like the alien look of it. It will be useful.

Meanwhile, here's some background on the pieces displayed:

Evening Spirits is a drawing in Crayola crayon (they suit my drawing style, and I like the idea of using non-fine art materials with a childish reputation). There's a calaca, or calavera if you want to be more formal, in Native-style, shamanistic clothing, sitting before a bowl of something possibly edible. He raises a bottle of an alcoholic or otherwise mind-altering beverage to a goddess who is manifesting in the smoke spewing from a volcano. The calaca looks like my fabled Calacanaut, and maybe a relative, or more earthly/spiritual incarnation.

Señor América (the accent is in the wrong place in the drawing--I do that, dyslexic mestizo that I am) rendered in red Crayola with a yellow grease pencil for the blazing sky. This sombrero-wearing calaca looks like the one from Evening Spirits, but was drawn years later. We are all skeletons under the skin. He stands at the border, kind of like one of Frida Kahlo's famous paintings. One side is cosmic with a meteor/comet thing, and a flame-crowned pyramid, the other is a factory that is mostly smoke-stack. He has fangs and sticks out his tongue.

 

High Aztech Scene was drawn when I was writing High Aztech. It was first sketched in yellow grease pencil, then finished in black grease pencil. Xolotl Zapata clutches his zumbador and is watched over by skull-faced disease-spirit who is armed with a flaming test-tube, while rioters attack a tank. Coatlicue oversees like a an intellectual kaiju. The mood and some of the ideas from the novel are suggested, like a postmodern cartoon/hieroglyph.

Galactic Aboriginie Journal is one of my battle-scared sketchbook covers from back in the days when I was struggling, and not sure if my efforts would ever amount to anything. I was trying to merge the primitive with the modern. We are the aboriginies of the galaxy. The lettering and drawing were done with the stopper top of an India ink bottle. I collaged an idol by drawing crude designs on a fashion model's hair and giving her an animal mouth, mounting her on machinery, with a car loaded with a typical American family for a body. Instead of breasts there is a fortune cookie prediction: “Unexpected gain. A new friend in the near future.”

High-Tech Voodootoons is another decaying sketchbook cover. The title is a good description of what I do, whether I'm writing or drawing. The snake head was made from the logo of a package of typewriter paper. (Uh-oh, do I have to explain what a typewriter was?) Once again I was drawing with the stopper from an India ink bottle. The sailing ship was part of the original sketchbook cover. The barcode was from typewriter paper. I like the way these things have gotten so bashed-up, looking like artifacts from some strange, ancient, lost civilization, and how any explanation can never convey to whole truth.

Everybody's future becomes a thing of past, eventually. All our cultures are tomorrow's archaeology.

¡Viva Xicanxfuturisma!

CHICANONAUTICA FLIES WITH THE PAPALOMEH AT THE BEMIS

We're flying at Chicanonautica, over at La Bloga.

Intruding into the hallowed world of Art:

Celebrating my career:

Transforming like the papalomeh:

Creating Latinoid visions of the future:

MODEST PROPOSALS FOR CYBER MONDAY

 The futuristic pre-holiday is upon us. Once again, I'm shooting the idea at you that you should buy my books, and books with my stuff in them.

There are even some new 2017 products!

Like Altermundos: Latin@ Speculative Literature, Film, and Popular Culture, an important collection of essays and examples of how La Cultura is alive and well in the 21^st century. It includes my Chicanonautica Manifesto and some of my drawings. My work gets mentioned by the other authors, and I come off like some kind of chingón.

Then there's Latin@ Rising: An Anthology of Latin@ Science Fiction and Fantasy. It makes an excellent companion to Altermundos, and features Flying Under the Texas Radar with Paco and Los Freetails--wherein I show how Paco Cohen, Mariachi of Mars, left the Lone Star State for the Red Planet.

And Five to the Future: All New Novelettes of tomorrow and Beyond has Uno! . . . Dos! One-Two! Tres! Cuatro! a wild speculative romp inspired by recent EE.UU. political developments. There's also a story by my wife, the fabulous Emily Devenport.

Also out of 2017, and in the spirit of giving, here's a couple of things that you can read online for free: Lunch in the Ruins, a call to rebellion in The Jewish Mexican Literary Review;

and in Mithila Review, there's Gringos, an excerpt from High Aztech.

While you're in consumer-mode, pre-order my wife's new novel, Medusa Uploaded, and help make it a roaring success, because a rich wife could come in handy.

CHICANONAUTICA CELEBRATES GUAJOLOTE DAY IN TRUMPTOPIA

Chicanonautica did it's own kind of Thanksgiving, over at La Bloga.

Some people dance with guajolotes at weddings:

Some have other ideas of what to do with them:

Yes, grasshopper tacos are a thing, even in Nueva York:

And Tezcatlipoca was evoked again:

WARNING: ARTIFACTS BECOMING ART!

While shuffling through the stuff here at Hacienda Hogan, I ran across the above Brainpan Fallout flyer (I used to do that sort of thing, maybe I will again). It looked pretty good; I decided to include it in an art thing that I'll be announcing soon. I have plenty of copies, but decided to autograph them and scan it.

Once it was scanned, it got the itch to use GIMP to fool around with it, like the way I do with my drawings.

First, I came up with this one. Kinda neon Halloweenie. A little late, but Dead Daze does come every year.

After the black light fantasy, I wanted to do something lighter, so I came up with this one, with lots of white. It's also—quite by accident—red, white, and blue. Nice and patriotic. Just the thing for Fourth of July.

Since I seemed to be heading in that direction, I decided to do one that was full-out psychedelic. Assaults the optic nerve all the way down to the hypothalamus, don't it? Damnear impossible to read, but ain't it pretty?

Who knows, maybe these things will come in handy. There may be folks out there that would like to use them decorate their living spaces, not knowing that these flyers may be part of a conspiracy to jangle their sensoria and warp their world views . . .

CHICANONATICA RIP-SNORTS IN THE WILD WEST

 

Once again, Chicanonautica, over at La Bloga, looks at the works of Luis Senarens.

A Cuban from Brooklyn, he was touted as the American Jules Verne:

And wrote the Frank Reade Jr. books:

Some of his books took place in the Wild West:

And featured unconventional vehicles:

HALLOWEEN HORROR PICTURE SHOWS

Here's a few suggestions Halloween viewing:

Nobody does fear of what may lurk in Third World jungles like the British, as in The Woman Eater:

In Santo vs Las Lobas a cult of sexy female werewolves who only grow fur on their faces show up in Mexico:

Filipino horror also deals with vampiric cults in The Thirsty Dead and Blood Thirst:

In a classier vein, Jigoku (AKA The Sinners of Hell) goes to Buddhist Hell, after romp with yakuza, strippers, and manic jazz:

CHICANONAUTICA AIN'T READY FOR DEAD DAZE

It's almost Dead Daze, and Chicanonautica, over at La Bloga, ain't ready.

What the hell's Dead Daze? It's Dia de los Muertos:

And Halloween:

Homage is paid to Tezcatlipoca:

And the futures that are being built are considered:

YES, THERE REALLY WAS A RED DOG JOURNAL

 

I know, I should have found this months ago, but I also shouldn't have to remind you that this has been one of the most batshit crazy years ever.

Besides, it's like what an anthropologist says in the story I'm working on:

“You find an interesting phenomenon, then when someone goes to back to verify it—it's vanished without a trace.”

I was starting to feel that way about The Red Dog Journal. Everything about it had disappeared from the Web. How was I supposed to tell people out Brainpan Fallout, when it looks like the weird magazine it originally appeared in never existed. Was I perpetrating some kind of hoax? And what kind sicko would bother to do such a thing?

Fortunately, Stephen Michael Barnes, the publisher of The Red Dog Journal, posted on his blog about it, giving his side of the bizarre story, and images, not only of the FAXmo flyer , but pages from the fax version the magazine itself—and they aren't all my work!

I feel vindicated.

So, kids, be sure to document your shenanigans. Unless, of course, they're the sort of thing that could get you arrested. In that case, change the names, and other things, to protect the “innocent.”

And if you're not up to any shenanigans, isn't it about time you got started?

CHICANONAUTICA CATCHES A SPANISH NEW WAVE

 

Chicanonautica checks out movies from Spain, over at La Bloga.

A Hispanic cinematic tradition going back a century, to Segundo de Chomón:

Now there's an invisible guardian lurking about:

And an guest, also invisible:

And excitement at a local bar:

ALIEN CONTACT ON SALE AGAIN!

This just in! The ebook of Alien Contact, edited by Marty Halpern is on sale again! Only $1.99! For both the mobi (Kindle) and the epub (Nook) versions! 

It has my story "Guerrilla Mural of a Siren's Song" that I exploded into Cortez on Jupiter!

And great stories by those wonderful folks whose names are on the cover, and more!

For a limited time only! Do it now!

ANIMATION FOR A TROUBLED PLANET

When the world becomes awash in turmoil (like now) I like tickle my visual cortex with some far-out animation.

Like Vince Collins' classic psychedelia, Euphoria:

Or Sally Cruikshank's phantasmagorical Quasi at the Quackadero:

We could always go back to School with Ivan Maximov:

Or visit Mirai Mizue's Lost Utopia:

How about Felix Colegrave's latest, Double King?

CHICANONAUTICA WATCHES SOCAL ART GET SCI-FIIZED

Once again, Chicanonatica, over at La Bloga, is all about art:

And the art is getting sci-fiized:

In good ol' Southern California:

Who knows what kind of future this could bring?

THROUGH INDIAN/HOLLYWOOD/MORMON COWBOY COUNTRY

As we were leaving Truchas, Emily's mom mentioned that she would like to look at the old mission, Nuestra Señora del Sagrado Rosario, built in 1764, and recently restored. So we parked in front of an abandoned bar in a space labeled HARLEY PARKING. I took a picture—what the hell, let folks think we spend our vacation drinking and discussing politics with bikers . . .

Highway 84 goes through Northern New Mexico, cutting through Arizona into Utah. There are outback pizzarias, and mix-bag fantastic Aztlán geology all the way. A sign announced MONASTARY 13 MILES. Dead skunks were deodorized by the high levels of ultraviolet radiation. Trees on a mountain turned out to be microwave towers in disguise. John Wayne and Jesus watched over us in a Cheveron. We passed the skeletal ruins of a drive-in movie theater, and turned onto Highway 64, where a sign said VAYA CON DIOS.

"We are in Tony Hillerman Territory,” said Emily's mom.

On the reservation, there are practically no signs telling you what road you're on. Guess they must figure that if you don't know where you are, you shouldn't be there.

Also on the Rez, the Red Mesa High school team is the Redskins.

Back in Bluff, Utah, we couldn't resist the Navajo tacos at the Twin Rocks Cafe. Our server was blue-haired native girl.

Highway 95 is a spectacular eye fry. “Kind of like being on Mars,” said Emily.

Next to the Colorado is a smaller river called the Dirty Devil.

Our favorite spot was Hog Springs. It's the home turf of the Moqui Queen.

In Hanksville we couldn't resist stopping at Carl's Critter Garden, though Emily's mom thought the Frankenmechanoid creatures were ugly.

We kept seeing llamas along Highway 12.

At Rustler's Restaurant in Tropic, the pulled pork sandwiches were great, but the western décor was bland. I didn't bother to take any pictures. After a while, the people at the next table started talked about Obama, socialism, and how they messed up everything.

Things were different at Bryce Pioneer Village. Em's mom's room had a photo of Siting Bull and a demented-looking portrait of John Wayne, who's becoming a secular saint in these parts.

Our room had a print of Frederic Remington's Apache Ambush, with the warrior taking aim at a covered wagon, and a copy of The Book of Mormon in German.

 

That night, the live country music next door didn't keep us up. Utah shitkickers must be a mellower breed.

In the morning, a lot of German was being spoken at the breakfast bar.

A Bryce Canyon we ogled the hoodoo rock castles below where sea monsters once swam.

Zion National park is a geological phantasmagoria, with lots of datura in bloom.

We stayed in Kanab, the cowboy gateway to Bryce/Zion. In memory of the days when Hollywood would come over to use Utah for its mythic Texas, the place bristles with TV/movie Wild West décor.

The Lone Ranger lives here—a poster was in both the rooms we rented, and a cutout guarded an intersection

I enjoyed chicken-fried steak at Houston's Trail's End Restaurant near a replica of the iconic Trail's End statue.

Finally, it was a banzai run down 89A, back across the Rez, down to Flagstaff where we heard the Grateful Dead--“What a long, strange trip it's been”-- in a Shell station that was attended by young Indian man.

Back in Phoenix, on the 101, a car was flying a full-size Confederate flag.