FREE! MY LATEST STORY!

 

 Yup. I have a new story out, and it's free.

It's called "Doula." And it's part of Sound Systems: The Future of the Orchestra.

Just click in the above link and download it as PDF, EPUB, Apple Books, or MOBI (for Kindle).

It a production of the Center for Science and the Imagination. I'd go into all the details of how and why it came to be later, but meanwhile, I just got home from a wild and wonderful vacation, and stumbling my way back into my usual routine.

Meanwhile, I'm really proud of this story, and being part of this book, and want it to get the widest possible audience.

And here's Shachi Kale's art created for "Doula."

 

CHICANONAUTICA ON DÍAS DE LOS MUERTOS, HALLOWEEN, DEAD DAZE . . .

Chicanonatica is riffs on the October/November holiday traffic jam, at La Bloga.

Of course, some politics get in . . . 

 Some explaining needs to be done . . .

 

Gotta pay our respects to la Catrina:

And get some sugar:

HAVE YOU SEEM ME?

I’ll be deep into road tripping by the time you read this. Moving through a transmogrified world. And of course, I’ll be going through changes of my own. When I get home, I’ll be different, my day-to-day world will be different.

Or is it all a delusion?

Who am I, anyway? The maniac who writes the books and makes that art? Or the nice guy with a job, a wife, a house . . .

I am not now, nor have I ever been, a card-carrying cyberpunk (does anybody know about the McCarthy Era now that it’s happening again, only worse?). But look me up online and there I am, THE Chicano Cyberpunk!

We don’t get to decide how others perceive us. People keep throwing labels at me, and none of them stick.

Frank Zappa, “Who Are the Brain Police?” (1966): “What do you do when the label comes off / and the plastic’s all melted / and the chrome is too soft?”

I don’t blame them. I’m a rasquache mess of random selections of my unstable environment. Your handful of popular stereotypes just distort me.

 

I was in an Afrofuturist anthology. Now I’m going to a Xicanxfuturist one. It’s something new, yet I’ve been doing it all my life.

And I’ll be seventy years old soon.

I’m also a Chicanonaut and the Father of Chicano Science Fiction.

I like the science fiction label because it’s often used to describe what people don’t understand, which is accurate for me. Imagine if I went around calling myself a surrealist aesthetic terrorist creative blasphemer . . .

But who am I really? That guy in the mirror is always surprising me. What did people do before selfies? All those temporary identities melting and evaporating with documentation.

And where am I? In the breakroom of a library, typing this on my phone? Or on the road as you read this? 

If I need to, I can become a space vato or a ciberbandido.  Maybe I’ll discover a new identity somewhere soon . . .

CHICANONAUTICA GOES TRAVELING WHILE CHICANO IN TRUMPTOPIA 2.0

Getting ready for a road trip in Chicanonautica, over at La Bloga.

Triggering another Chicano identity crisis:

Which gets complicated:

Who is that vato in the mirror?

And wanna talk about complicated?

JAMES JOYCE’S ULYSSES THROUGH NEW WAVE BABY EYES

I heard that to read Joyce's Ulysses on a phone was blasphemous, so I had to do it. 

I get it now--the Irish are the Chicanos of Britain. All them linguistic shenanigans. I probably wouldn’t have dreamed of the stuff I pulled in High Aztech and Cortez on Jupiter if it wasn’t for good old James Joyce. Civilization ain't nothing but colliding, fighting, fucking streams of consciousness. Inverting Homer’s Odyssey–inverting the space from outer to inner–is a good way to demonstrate it.

And the obscenity gets shattered with one hot lick for man, one giant, nasty slurp for literature, as it broke the legal obscenity barrier with help of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. 

Why aren’t they included in our celebrations of banned books? Dare I mention the Marquis de Sade? Imagine cute teen hipsters wearing FREE DE SADE T-shirts . .  .

Ah, my kind of fun.

I finished it in the waiting room while my wife was getting a wisdom tooth yanked. While I drove her home she was still high on the drugs and grilled me like a stoned lit professor. That was fun too.

Would it also be blasphemous to say that I got into Joyce by way of science fiction? Some of you are picking their jaws off the floor, but I’m probably not the only one, being a New Wave baby, coming of age in the early Seventies, reading things like Philip José Farmer’s Riders of the Purple Sage and Richard Lupoff’s With the Bentfin Boomer Boys in Little Old New Alabama in the first two Dangerous Visions volumes. There was also Brain W. Aldiss’ Barefoot in the Head, Samuel R. Delaney’s Dhalgren, Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea’s Illuminatus! trilogy, and probably others that I don’t remember. A whole fricking lost subgenre waiting to be unearthed and explored. 

And in a Feliniesque sequence written before Federico was born, Ulysses actually does get kinda sci-fi:

All you students and academics in need of ideas feel free to plunder. I’m probably not going to do anything with it. I don’t need it. I’m a fountain of ideas.

Fountain of ideas. Stream of consciousness . . .  Slurp . . . Hmm . . . 

Are we blasphemous enough yet?

Back when I was a wage slave for Borders Book Music & Cafe (for you younger folks, it was a big box bookstore, kinda like Barnes & Noble, but more pretension), the phone rang. I answered like a proper corporate android, and a gentleman inquired, “Are you doing anything for Bloomsday?”

“Uh . . . not really,” I answered, knocked back into human mode.

“Harumph. Well, do you know perhaps of a local literary guild that would be doing something?”

Did he know that we were in Phoenix, Arizona? He might as well be asking for a society dedicated to hunting penguins, mermaids, and/or unicorns. 

Poor fellow. I wonder what happened to him? 

What might he think of these musings?

CHICANONAUTICA REPORTS CIBERBANDID@JE IN PARIS

Chicanonautica art manifests in Paris. Read about it at La Bloga.

It triggered a Oaxaqueño flashback:

Ah, Paris:

 

Art:

And protest:

FLASHES OF A DISINTERGRATING SEASON

Another climate change summer coming to an apocalyptic end. I never thought it could outdo the last one, but it does. Isn't it against some law of physics?

Somehow, in the middle of it all, my wife and I manage to find things that are strange and wonderful and worthwhile, to navigate the horror and madness.

Creativity seems to be the key. Always have something squirming around in your brain. Put your own spin in the universe. After all, you are the universe experiencing itself. Do something back when it does things to you.

Pay attention. Keep your sensory array scanning. Move around. Go places. Cherchez le weird, cabrones!

Life is interactive. Like a bullfight. Tauromaquia is the mother of all artforms, from the Neanderthal rodeo to the spaghetti western to the existential shootout between democracy and fascism in the early 21st century. Yeah, you never know if you're the matador or the bull . . .

It’s all mysterious artifacts, out of context, in unlikely locations in the end. Revel in the rasquache scramble. The landfill is archaeology is a treasure trove. All over. All the time.

Weird shit. Weird creatures and beings. Weirder than the stereotypes that society simplifies it all into. 

 

Culture is not what you think. Art is war. Is this not the dystopia you ordered? Would you like to speak to the manager?

And just who is piloting this vehicle? Look around. You are.

CHICANONAUTICA SEZ XICANXFUTURISM IS HERE!

 Because Xicanxfuturism: Gritos for Tomorrow / Codex I is out. Read about it in Chicanonautica, over at La Bloga.

Grito as in: 

But this year is going to be different:

Our futurism has been brewing:

And representation isn't enough:

XICANXFUTURIST SUMMER AND MY OWN PERSONAL AZTLÁN

It’s almost over, this Xicanxfuturist summer, and it’s another different world. I expect to hear about an invasion of Antarctica any day now. Is it martial law yet? Fascism? 

I’m so sick of complaining about it. You can only sing the dystopia/apocalyptic homesick blues for so long.

You can also only sit holed up in an air-conditioned environment for so long.(Phoenix is like a Mars colony, only on Mars it would be cold, but who knows, once the anthropogenic side-effects start kicking in . . .) My wife and I have our wild imaginations, and we also have been able to manage some overnight, out-of-town getaways to cooler climes that aren’t as far away as you’d imagine.

Sedona, Flagstaff, Cottonwood, Jerome. All very different from the Phoenix Metro area.

Different worlds. They're all over, if you have the right kind of eyes hooked to the right kind of brain.

I don’t see “the Southwest” as the creature the Eastern-oriented dominant culture tries to enforce. I see Aztlán.

I don’t mean any kind of separatist/secessionist fantasy that scared the racists into building walls and sending in troops. They shouldn’t worry—when I set my sci-fi worldbuilding mind contemplating plausible scenarios they all collapse under the pesky details. Like the zombie apocalypse, it ain’t gonna happen.

My Aztlán is an alternate reality conjured up when I see through a glorious rasquache scramble into the Wild West mythology, down to its pre-Columbian roots.

My imagination takes off. I want to rearrange it all into locations, props, and concepts for the surrealistic spaghetti western of my dreams. No, I haven’t even begun working on a screenplay. I’m too busy being the Father of Chicano Science Fiction. Besides, who’s going give me the money for such an insane project? I’m going to have to settle for living it.

And what a life it is!

When I look through the photos I take on these trips, I’m delighted. Did it all really happen?

Sometimes we don’t have to go that far. There’s a lot of great places in Downtown Glendale, not far from Hacienda Hogan.

All over Metro Phoenix, and metastasizing into the surrounding deserts, every available lot is being filled with apartment buildings that look like dystopian backdrops. There doesn’t seem to be any thought to where the people will work. Yeah, there’s some talk about tech industries, but I don’t see any sign of them. Maybe the flying saucers full of middle managers will arrive tomorrow. Hopefully they won't be from South Korea.

Worse yet, there’s no thought of where these people will live, as in have FUN.

The Aztlán I dream of is a human environment, full of places like the towns Emily and I like to visit. Not quite utopia, but something to work towards.

Meanwhile, at work, I look out the window and see excavators chewing up the remains of one of last of the malls. We are told that a “walkable village” will be built there. Meanwhile, they're on the verge of declaring martial law in Washington DC. 

The celebrations of Mexican Independence Day in Chicago has been canceled due to the arrival of the National Guard. No grito there, but on 16 de septiembre, Xicanxfuturism: Gritos for Tomorrow is launching as scheduled. Let the cultural revolution begin . . .

CHICANONAUTICA SELLS MY GONZO AGAIN

Chicanonautica, and La Bloga announces me teaching "Gonzo Science Fiction, Chicano Style" again during the Fall Palabras del Pueblo Writing Workshop. 

 

Secrets of ancient Chicano sci-fi widsom from the dark recesses of my brain can be yours:

 

More ancient than you think:

I stop short of Ernesto brain tacos and monkey brain sushi:

Not to be confused with chicken tacos: