Trip #3. My YouTube Channel. Giant Ants. Paris.

What this episode covers

Here’s my third and final post of pictures from Geneva and Paris today—but first a few announcements before our scheduled show. I’m into resurrecting my archives these days, and I’ve been moving a number of my old videos onto my YouTube channel . Recent additions include a “Brain Food” playlist: six videos of me talking about books and art, on public access TV in 1986 Lynchburg, VA…which was then the home of the right-wing Moral Majority religious movement. Seeds of transrealism, computer culture, and cyberpunk—all are here. Another new video upload is “James Gleick’s CHAOS: the Software.” I made this video in 1990 to demonstrate the 1990 Autodesk program of the same name. The program was written by me, Josh Gordon, and John Walker. Topics include dynamical systems, strange attractors, Mandelbrot set fractals (including a 4D cubic version), cellular automata, and fractal landscapes. The software is available as a free download , although you need to screw with a free helper program called DOSBox in order to get it to run on today’s machines (Unix, Mac, or Windows all can be made to work). One more scrap of hype: my story “ Attack of the Giant Ants ” went online at the Motherboard site today, as part of their SF-oriented ezine section called Terraform, which is edited by Claire Evans. The story has a wonderful illo by Koren Shadmi. If you want, you can hear me reading the story online as well: My story was inspired by two things: Blondie’s song, “The Attack of the Giant Ants,” and the primeval SF movie Them. There’s exists an amateur YouTube video combining these two—although the sound’s not all that great, so listen to the Blondie song elsewhere as well. The roaring of the ants at the end of the Blondie song is particularly great. And now let’s move back into the higher real of Parisian art and architecture. Here’s three of the insanely large columns within the Pantheon. I like how the lighting happened to put different shades onto them. The crowds were such that Sylvia and I didn’t try going inside the Louvre, but we wandered around the nearby section of the Tuileries gardens. Love these receding box hedges. Like scrims on a stage set. On a little plot of grass we found two men boxing. It made me think of Hemingway trying to get his friends to box with him back in his 1920s Paris days. Who would want a friend like that? He was so crazy. But even so a lovely writer. The stories of In Our Time and the first pages of A Farewell to Arms still live in my memory. The size of the buildings they used to undertake. I mean, we think we build big stuff now. But… I think this one is the Grand Palais, which is a museum now as well. Here, too, the lines were such that we couldn’t get in. And newly renovated Picasso Museum was out of the question. Even in late October. Thing is, there’s twice as many people on Earth as there were when I was younger. Our friend Leon Marvell from Melbourne, Australia, turned out to be in Paris, leading a group of college kids on a trip—Sylvia noticed this fact on Facebook. So we spent a day with Leon, a lot of fun. He and I once published a paper together, called “ Lifebox Immortality—and How We Got There .” We made our way over to the Beaubourg art museum, passing this cool ad on the way. What a concept, calling your couture company Acne. There’s this thing with using words from a language that’s foreign to you—the words don’t carr...

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