FROM TO MARS TO SHANGRI-LA IN ZION NATIONAL PARK

I may never make it to Mars, but I can always visit Utah. Zion National Park gets Martian right away, then takes you to unexpected places. Science fiction turns to fantasy, then to mythic reality. When you return home, everything is different.

Past the stone stairway, before the Zion Tunnel, I washed my hands in pink sand that melted away to nothing. This trail twisted through rock castles and cathedrals, and arches where invisible gods sat and observed like New World Buddhas.

In the park a quiet trail led to The Grotto -- then it became the Great Wall of China, twisting up Max Ernst mountains, up a Himalayan wind-tunnel, around a sharp, rocky corner that cut off the wind. There was an oasis in the sky, full of desert flowers, and a bridge built for adventurers.

Suddenly, we’re in a lost world, a landscape painted centuries ago by a Chinese master. Did we find a magic portal to Asia? Was that a yeti screaming? Or a teenager? Or a teenage yeti?

Is that the perfume of Shangri-La I smell? Is Shangri-La somewhere off the trail? But the trail is challenging. Going off it could prove deadly.

Somehow, all the switchbacks, up, down, and around these dancing mountains that we just have to do again when we reach the top do not do us in. We are energized by this place. Hearts pound, spirits rise as we return to America, and Planet Earth.

Back in Kanab, Utah’s Little Hollywood, we ate again at Huston’s Trail’s End.

This time we sat next to a half-sized statue of the famous “Trail’s End” image -- the sad Indian on horse, slumping with his spear, mourning the fate of his land and people. His braids stuck out, blown by a non-existent wind, which made them look like antennae. The Indian was taking on the aspect of a Martian. The process was happening long before Pixar started filming John Carter of Mars in Utah.

These antediluvian rocks cry out for transformation, which is still going on, only too slow for us mortals to notice.

On the way out I saw that they also sell toy six-guns with pretty, pink, plastic holsters. You too can be a postmodern cowgirl. Yippee-ay-yo-tai-yay, mijitas!

And I only saw one, lone, flowering datura plant beside the road today. They’re not really necessary in this mind-bending landscape.

ESCAPE FROM KAFKAZONA

Arizona is bizarre by nature. It’s why I love living here.

Lately it’s gotten downright dystopian. New laws are beyond Orwell, more paranoid than Philip K. Dick, pushing into Kafka country. Beside the immigration and ethnic studies absurdities, there’s the ban on human/animal hybrids.

I keep imagining some poor guy finding a mermaid in his backyard after a freakish thunderstorm. She gasps for salt water. He offers to drive her to Rocky Point and the Sea of Cortez. A neighbor sees him helping her into his car. Soon an incredible array of government agencies are closing in . . .

And soon we won’t need permits to carry concealed firearms. Wyatt Earp wouldn’t like it, but Emiliano Zapata would approve. I'll feel nostalgic for the days when I could see the holstered pistols of my fellow shoppers.

Sometimes you have to get away from your everyday environment. The road gives you new perspectives.

Soon we were out from under the smog of the Metro Phoenix Area, and passing the Bassass BBQ Steakhouse. Ah, sweet, weird Americana! The Centipede God shed his grace on thee.

I had trouble negotiating the diabolical traffic circle at the turn off to Montezuma Castle. It kept trying to redirect us to a Yavapai-Apache-owned casino. Franz, did you hitch a ride?

Montezuma Castle isn’t really a castle and probably didn’t belong to Montezuma. It’s a sophisticated, five-story cliff-dwelling built by the people who have come to be known as the Sinagua. It was built in the early 1300s and abandoned in the 1400s. It’s young for a Southwestern ruin. Volcanic eruptions and climate change may be the reason the people left, but there’s no way to be sure. This was the same centuries that the people who would later be called the Aztecs went to the Valley of Mexico on the advice of a talking idol.

People of the Southwest (AKA Aztlán) tend to migrate, hit the road, move.

The next day we visited the older Sinaguan ruins in Walnut Canyon. We had visited them before, but I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of these cliff-dwellings in a vertical forest. They weren’t frosted with snow, and still seemed like an earthly paradise.

Did the Sinaguans leave here for Montezuma Castle, or Mexico? Do our highways follow the paths of their migration trails? Only the petroglyphs know for sure.

At the Anasazi Restaurant in Gray Mountain we indulged in Navajo tacos. Then the landscape got psychedelic. Rocks and mountains jumbled by cosmic forces had stories to tell. Was that the ghost of Max Ernst on the ancient motorcycle?

Finally, in Kanab, Utah we ate next to a neon cowboy boot at Houston’s Trail’s End. They also sold synthetic coonskin caps and wooden rubber-band rifles: Postmodern relics of later migrations, other road trips, younger myths. There are myths all over the Wild West, old ones haunting the landscape, new ones being born, according to a tradition over twelve thousand years old.

ERNESTO INTERVIEWED

Check out this interview with me on Elinor Mavor's blog.

I'm on a crazy road trip right now. I'll blog about it soon.

“HINDENBURG’S VIMANA JOYRIDE” ONLINE! FREE!

You can read it at DayBreak Magazine. It’s another adventure of Victor Theremin. Like “Human Sacrifice for Fun and Profit” I practically pulled it out of thin air.

This was another story that grew out an e-mail request from an editor. This time from Jetse de Vries. He asked for an optimistic near-future story for his anthology Shine.

I didn’t know what do, but got to work. Even though I’m a skeptic and a trickster, I essentially an optimist. I had to do something.

Once again I gathered some weird stuff from my brain: The idea of an science fiction writer from the old days being suicidal over how the twenty-first century turned out, some visions of Moab, Utah, and then there was Victor Theremin and his universe. It cooked an popped in record time.

It wasn’t quite a slam-dunk: Jetse didn’t accept it for Shine (which is out, and I highly recommend -- I’m reading it slowly -- it’s making me think, and rethink -- watch for some postings here soon), but wanted it for DayBreak. Which is okay, I think that Victor Theremin works better in an online medium.

And suddenly, the writer biz is buzzing again, going electronic, giving me all kinds of things to do. Victor, is that you? I seem to have stumbled into a new kind of voodoo when I crossed this frontier.

VICTOR THEREMIN AND/OR ME

Victor Theremin is a fictional character I created. I’m pretty sure I created him. Pretty sure. I think.

It started with an e-mail from someone doing an anthology. That’s the way I usually sell things these days -- I have a reputation. In this case it was James Palmer. His anthology was Voices for the Cure, it was to be released via Lulu at DragonCon, and all proceeds would go to the American Diabetes Association.

There would be no pay, but pay for short fiction is hard to come by these days. Besides, it was for charity, and was a chance for me to check how print-on-demand worked without shelling out any money of my own. All I had to do was come up with a story.

The problem was I didn’t have one. And the deadline was in few weeks.

Luckily, I’m me. The way I’ve lived for the last five decades, I’m in the habit of accumulating all kinds of weird stuff in my brain. I could say that’s from my extensive training to be a professional writer and artist, but it’s the just the way I amuse myself. And it does come in handy.

If I need a story, I grab some of this weird stuff, stitch it together, and hopefully (when zapped with enough energy), the monster comes to life. Then all I have to do is take notes on the havoc it wreaks upon the landscape.

I didn’t have much. There was a phrase, “Human sacrifice for fun and profit,” that I thought would make a good title. I also thought that Victor Theremin, the first commercially produced electronic musical instrument, would make a good character name. And I had just read Rudy Rucker’s collection Mad Professor, which had me thinking about the state of the art of science fiction and the Singularity issue.

And it worked. After coming up with an opening line, I started writing without any real idea of where it would go. The monsters from my id came out to play. In a few days I had a story.

As I’ve often told Em, “Short stories are like a bout of the flu -- novels are like demonic possession.”

I felt good, like I had pulled off what I had heard Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison brag about decades ago.

James liked the story and put it in the anthology. You can still buy it and read it.

The bizarre thing is, Victor Theremin had taken on a life of his own. I first envisioned him as being like Kilgore Trout, but he’s turned out to be more like Raoul Duke, saying dangerous things that should be said, but that are too out there to really be anybody’s opinion.

I’ve written more about him. I can’t seem to help it. I even sold another story about him.

I’m not sure who’s in control here. Maybe, in an alternate universe, Victor Theremin is writing about Ernest Hogan.

THE GUN-TOTING, BLACKFACED TRANSVESTITES OF CINCO DE MAYO

Lots of Norteamericos don’t know what Cinco de Mayo is about. Some of them started celebrating (and drinking) on May 1st. And the way things are going in 2010, I don’t blame them -- and Xochipilli would approve. But this bizarre cultural anomaly has a lot more to it than nachos and Margaritas.

First, it’s not Mexican Independence Day. That’s the 16th of September. Cinco got the North-of-the-Border recognition because it’s easier for Anglos to say than “Dieciséis de Septiembre.”

What really happened on the 5th of May in 1862 was the Battle of Puebla, one of the few military actions in Mexican history that didn’t involve Mexicans on both sides. And beating Napoleon’s army was no small feat.

A big part of the celebration in Mexico are reenactments of the battle. Last year the one near Mexico City was canceled due to fears about the H1N1. Fortunately, other towns did not succumb to the cowardice.

These reenactments are spectacular. There are costumes, makeup, guns, and machetes. And lots of action and excitement.

The guys who look like alternate-universe Arabs are supposed to be Napoleon’s troops. The ones painted black in the colorful peasant outfits represent the Zacapoaxtlas: Mestizos and Zapotecs led by General Ignacio Zaragoza.

Yeah, I know, Americanos find the black paint disturbing. The alternative would have been to have the French paint themselves white, which would not have been any less strange. Imagine Uncle Tom’s Cabin with an all-Latino cast in either black or whiteface. There is an undeniable racial angle to this ritual: It is the fantasy of defeating the white invaders, a different American dream.

Some of the Zacapoaxtlas are wearing low-cut blouses and dresses. These represent women, soldaderas -- like Ignacia Reacy, who was a commander of the Lancers of Jalisco until she was killed in action in 1866. They are played by men because of a local tribal tradition.

This is a twisted expression of Mexican macho: “Ey! Gabachos! I’m gonna paint myself black, put on a dress, and kick your butts!”

There is also something of ritual cross-dressing that evokes supernatural power in cultures around the planet. The way they swagger in those dresses, mustachios bristling, chicken feet in their teeth . . . there’s a bit of voodoo there.

The voodoo grows and mutates, like the monster-filled Cinco de Mayo parade from the town of Zacapoaxtla. Creatures of the past live again, creating a lively future.

I’d like to see these reenactments added to the drinking, eating, mariachis music, Aztec dancers, and political statements of our Norteamericano celebrations. It would be fun, and would help to enlighten people in the wake of Arizona Immigration Law SB1070 as to what’s really been happening on this continent all these glorious centuries.

THEME & VARIATIONS NOMINATED FOR AN AWARD!

This just in: Theme & Variations, the podcast anthology where I read "The Rise and Fall of Paco Cohen and the Mariachis of Mars," has been nominated for the Parsec Award.

SYMPATHY FOR THE APACHE DEVIL

People whose only knowledge of his work are faded memories of Tarzan movies think Edgar Rice Burroughs was a racist and an imperialist.

Before becoming a writer, he was a cowboy who had “gone as long as three weeks on a round up without taking off my boots and stetson,” and was in the 7th U.S. Cavalry in Fort Grant, Arizona, “where I chased Apaches, but never caught up with them.”

He wrote two Apache novels. They are about Shoz-Dijiji, an Arizona Tarzan. His real name, that he never learns, is Andy MacDuff. His parents are attacked and killed by the Apaches, he is taken and raised as one of them.

In the opening line of The War Chief, Burroughs points out that the Scots and the Apaches have things in common:

“Naked but for a G-string, rough sandals, a bit of hide and a buffalo headdress, a savage warrior leaped and danced to the beating of drums.”

This is a Scottish warrior. His lifestyle is praised, “the refining influences of imperial conquest” are condemned.

Shoz-Dijiji takes to being an Apache like a fish to water. Cochise himself forbids anyone to mention the young warrior’s alien origin. He becomes a War Chief, romances an Apache girl, his assimilation seems complete.

The Cavalry is trying to put the Apaches in reservations. Shoz-Dijiji and the young warriors want to fight on. Geronimo sees an unhappy future. Our hero’s Apache sweetheart is killed, he recieves mercy from a Mexican, and meets a white girl, Witchita Billings, who causes conflicted feelings and sympathy for those unlike himself.

Shoz-Dijiji also has non-Apache ideas. He doesn’t like to torture, or mutilate the dead. After seeing Geronimo tricked by translators during some negotiations, he decides that: “The language of the white-eyes can be turned into a weapon against them if we understand it.” Like Burroughs’ other heroes, he has an affinity for learning languages.

Like Tarzan of the Apes, The War Chief ends with a rejection of white civilization. Shoz-Dijiji tells Witchita, “White girl could not love Apache,” and rides off into desert.

In Apache Devil, the defeat of the Apaches is combined with the tragic identity crisis of Shoz-Dijiji. This inverted American immigrant dream of assimilation comes undone. His whiteness is revealed as Geronimo and his people are put on the reservation.

“Once more a Christian nation had exterminated a primitive people who had dared defend their homeland against a greedy and ruthless invader.”

Shoz-Dijiji is forced to create a new identity for himself as a renegade. And with the racial barrier eliminated (“He tried to argue with himself that it was no disgrace to be white.”) he pursues Witchita Billings.

Here Burroughs switches to classic melodrama. Witchita is kidnapped by the villainous rancher “Dirty” Cheetim, who was going to force her to marry him. There is a last minute rescue, and “Dirty” is scalped, staked out, and left to die.

And according to the formula, the audience should be cheering.

People should think twice before calling Burroughs a racist or imperialist.

LEO CARRILLO’S LOST WORLDS OF CALIFORNIA

“The vaqueros would drink the blood of the steer to impress the señoritas, and supposedly to add to their manhood.”

Not exactly the sort of things you’d expect from the man who played The Cisco Kid’s sidekick, Pancho.

When I found Leo Carrillo’s The California I Love in the Brass Armadillo antique mall, I knew I’d find it interesting, but I didn’t know that I would love it. But then it’s an intimate, personal account of the state where I was born, that recreated forgotten eras in all their glory.

It has all changed, as Carrillo’s uncle, Don Juan Dana said when asked about Santa Barbara: “No so much fun now, no more bull and bear fights.”

The book is more in the tradition of oral story telling than the Hollywood memoir or the academic history text. “In my family, I never needed the Arabian Nights. We had our own.” And the stories are a California Night’s Entertainment. You can imagine them told over the years at family gatherings over tacos and tamales. They have been polished into legend. “Always I lived amid legends. They were my welcome companions. They formed my finest heritage.”

Carrillo’s family was part of California history. They include a Governor, and a Los Angeles Police Chief, and the author of Two Years Before the Mast.

And the supporting cast includes vaqueros, pirates, “blue-black” Indians, Chinese opium smokers, and the bandits Tiburcio Vasquez, Joaquín Murrieta, and Three-Fingered Jack.

Some of these stories could be take, and expanded into novels and screenplays. Adventure, romance -- Cisco would be proud.

There’s an epic sweep going from Spanish California, through the invasion by the Americans, into the Twentieth Century, the creation of Hollywood, and finally television and The Cisco Kid. Which was where I came in, a child of Atomic Age and the Wild West.

This is quite different from the California history that most people, even a lot who have come to live in the state, perceive. This is not the plastic paradise, lined with palm trees, populated by blonde, blue-eyed English-speakers who like to surf and meditate. This is the reality, where English wasn’t the dominate language until after World War Two:

“It was perfectly natural for me to pick up the sing-song, sibilant language of the Cantonese and I would find myself at home switching from Spanish to Chinese to English without any conscious effort.”

Later he tells that “When I arrived back in California I discovered that we had been taken over by the gringos.” And he defines “gringos” as “those alleged Californians who make no effort to understand the background or history of the state and who either distrust or are ignorant of Spanish-Mexican culture and tradition.”

To fight against this ignorance, this book needs to be made available again. In a sane world, it would required reading in California schools.

Meanwhile, I imagine Cisco and Pancho patrolling what is now cooking under the smog.

SATURNIAN HEXAGON UPDATE

They say that the mystery is solved. It’s just the way fluid mechanics work. Spin stuff around and it starts making geometric forms. You can do it in a cylinder of water.

Funny that no one noticed this before. Funny that the media doesn’t think this is big news. Clouds swirling around the North pole of Saturn and creating a permanent hexagon still seems, and looks . . . strange.

Too bad about all the fanciful speculations. They were fun, as usual, while they lasted.

Still, it just goes to show that our "common" knowledge has not prepared us for what we will find on other planets. We actually need to know a little science to figure it out. And figuring it out will force us to see the universe in which we live in new ways. Which is okay, be cause this is one crazy universe, and we need to be ready for those freaky surprises.

I’m also looking forward to the imaginative science projects and art this should inspire.

And if you’re not inspired, shame on you.