I’ll be at Get Lost Travel with my roadshow slideshow of our recent book tonight. It’s at 1825 Market Street, 7:00 PM. Get Lost is a great travel book, gear, and info store — way beyond Lonely Planet. Their informative website here.
Taggers are a lot like skateboarders. They’re on their own. No parental support. No art school. No grant money. No academic or organized support. Peer-encouraged excellence.
Shot this morning. Powerful stuff. Real art.
A film crew from Stanford is doing a short (6-min.) documentary on shelter and coming out to film me this week. On the occasion of which, Lew sent me the below youtube link of Buck Owens, Dwight Yoakum and Patty Loveless doing “Act Naturally,” first performed by Buck in ’63, then made famous by Ringo in ’65.
Drawing of Buck Owens by artist Mark Stivers, who has a witty and unusual website Click here (and a book I just ordered: There Is Only Unibrow and Other Cartoons).
•In Friday’s NY Times, in a review of State of Play (Russell Crowe et al), critic A. O. Scott referred to Ben Affleck “…wielding a Philadelphia accent as thick and inauthentic as low-fat cream cheese.” NYT, 17 April 09
•Dashiell Hammett:
“Smoke Stink. Heat. Noise….” -Red Harvest
“Beginning night had reduced night to a thin smokiness when Spade sat up….” -The Maltese Falson
“A bullet kissed a hole in the door-frame close to my noodle….” Red Harvest
•California license plate the other day: OBVS
•Jonathan Greene just wrote to say that the quote I attributed to Mark Twain (“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”), was in fact by Blaise Pascal, and research turned up the following:
“Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.”
Translation:” I have made this [letter] longer, because I have not had the time to make it shorter.”
Blaise Pascal, Lettres provinciales, letter 16, 1657:
•Words I dislike: veggie/yummy/goody/munchies/impact (as a verb)/”have a good day”
•Mel has a sign on his studio door saying Don’t Tell Me What Kind of Day to Have!
•Just leverageing some content here…
Happy house out by the beach in San Francisco
I like the looks of this bike. Parked outside The Great American Music Hall last Friday night. Sherm, Nicole and I saw Beausoleil, the Cajun band from Louisiana. Great American is a fabulous club, it originated in 1907, after the big SF earthquake, was Sally Rand’s burlesque club, designed by a French architect, very rococo. Good vibes, good fung shui, and a great staff. They cleared an aisle so we could get Sherm in his wheelchair right up to the front. Great band. Opener was David Lindley, gunslinger guitar player extraordinaire.
Yoga retreat under construction at Encanto la Vida hotel, Costa Rica
I send out a newsletter to about 600 people every month or so, covering our publishing activities, and my travels. The latest is a bit on my recent trip to the Pacific coast of Costa Rica and islands in Panama + other stuff. Click here.
After shooting a bunch of photos I went into a nearby schoolyard to ride my skateboard. There were a few kids with skateboards, but they’d never seen anything like my Loaded bamboo longboard, or my Big Kahuna pavement paddle. It didn’t take much encouragement for them to get rolling on the longboard. They were a little tentative at first, but soon got into it. I got another board out of the truck and soon they were whizzing around the yard. I showed them how to carve, and they picked it up fast. Pretty soon kids from the block were trickling into the yards, waiting to try it out. They were having fun and so was I.
Friday night I went with my friend Sherman to see the Cajun band Beausoleil at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. I had an hour or so to kill in Oakland before going to Sherm’s, so I drove around in the Bella Vista neighborhood shooting photos of some of. Oakland’s great old houses:
