Granville Island is a public market across a narrow stretch of water from downtown Vancouver. Lots of tourists, yes, but it’s solid. Everything there seems to be of high quality, not the usual krap you see at street fairs. The food market is the best I’ve ever seen. Here are some photos from last month.That’s Victor Pollan standing by his artistically designed fish display.

Read More …

I’m printing contact sheets (ooops — thumbnails) of recent photos and running across some interesting things like this, from my trip to British Columbia last month.

The book on Godfrey’s art is just about out. I’ll post details when it’s available.

https://www.godfreysart.com/

I’m easing up on the one-a-day posts on this blog. Change of course in my life.

Finishing Tiny Homes on the Move was sort of a punctuation point in my work. And now, having finished a couple of months of promo (I love being out there, meeting tons of like-minded people, seeing old friends, exploring new territory, but getting there and back is the problem — air travel and too many hours of driving/sitting).

I knew an artisan dope grower years back in Santa Barbara and he said that his plants would be almost dormant for a while and then, in a burst, would grow. Ideas are like that: you’ll think about something on and off, now and then, and suddenly—Eureka!—breakthrough. You’ve put it all together, a new level of, um, consciousness.

Likewise I was in the Gasser photo store in San Francisco once and a hip tattooed bike messenger was telling the counter guy that he’d just had his first kid. “It’s a whole new octave, man.”

Body and Soul Plato had it right: balance intellect/mind with the physical. I’ve gotten too far away from the body of late. Now that I’m back home, I’m swimming a little, running a little, about to cycle and kayak. I have 15 lb Reebok dumbbells at the computer, by the TV, and you can do a lot of light weight training this way. (I’m going to do a short video of office workout equipment soon.)

Read More …

In the early ’70s, John van der Zee, a San Francisco writer, got himself a job at the Bohemian Grove, posing as a waiter. He then wrote the book, The Greatest Men’s Party on Earth, about the Grove and its wierd right-wing shenanigans. Now he has written this article, comparing it to Burning Man:

Why Burning Man is like the Bohemian Grove

 It is a kind of annual human migration from opposite poles.

     Each year, in midsummer, significant numbers of people abandon their homes, jobs, partners and families and travel, sometimes hundreds or thousands of miles, to take up residence in a distant, intentionally remote corner of the American West, where they reconstitute a self-contained society, a retreat from, and in many ways a critique of the larger society they have fled.

      One destination is wooded, arboreal, druidic, the other desertine, hermitic.  Yet both involve at their core, the shedding like an outer skin one’s routine response to the outside world’s demands and constraints.  Both involve the celebratory cremation in a fiery spectacle of a totemic figure. Both form communities, divided into tribal camps,  under a nominal devotion to the arts that are as brief, fleeting and ephemeral as frontier boomtowns, yet have had profound influence on the society at large.

     Both have influenced our lives, whether we choose to admit it or not.

Read More …