Skateboarding, the Whole Earth Catalog at MOMA, bread and sushi in Manhattan

Photo by Walt Denson

A blast from the west coast: today I’m sitting on the bus after a long (and productive) day at Book Expo America, and I check my email on the iPad, and there’s a message from my friend Hans with a link to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, showing me skateboarding in a weekly column called “Healthy Obsession.” https://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/05/24/DDM31JHPOO.DTL

Yesterday I went to see an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art Library on the Whole Earth Catalog and other books from the cultural revolution of the 60s and 70s, including our Domebook 2. It’s a nice exhibit, with maybe 50-60 books, and it’s a blast to look back at those days and see the newsprint books we were producing about what was going on. 1st photo below is an early WEC; 2nd photo is Domebook 2 at top and Steve Baer’s Dome Cookbook (which actually preceded the WEC) at lower right.

(See Wikipedia on the WEC.)

One thing about all my years’ running is, I can navigate city streets pretty well. I’ve always told my kids, “Watch the cars, not the lights. New Yorkers cross against red lights en masse when there’s a break in traffic. I saw a mother with a kid in a stroller crossing on a red light. (Kind of reminds of a time years ago when I heard a mother in a park playground here tell her kid, “If you don’t get over heah I’m gonna break yer ahm!”)

I love this chain of restaurants here called Le Pain Quotidien. A great bakery, and breakfast and lunch. A lot of the food is organic, everything is freshly baked, and tables are broad-planked pine with one 35-foot long community table, and motif of a French farmhouse kitchen.

Had fabulous sushi last night across from the Beacon Theater at Fusha. Four sushi chefs dressed in all black were putting sushi together with lightning hand speed. I said to the guy next to me at the counter, “They could make a movie of these guys,” and he said, “It’s better live.”