Lesley’s been weaving shawls, blankets, scarves, and knitting hats for her Open Studio event on Thanksgiving weekend. I’ll post a reminder a week or so before.

• From @lloyd.kahn’s Instagram

Oh man, this is so good! The rawness of the sport, the crudeness of the boards, the sunny (1975) SoCal spirit, the moves, the dream skating scene starting at 30:17. These guys had something that today’s hot skaters don’t have.

I think this belongs in the same category as The Endless Summer. Pure unabashed LA, in its still glory days of the ’70s.

“Amazing old skateboard documentary mainly based in California in the mid-70s. Shows the early days of skateboarding and show cases some of the main skaters of the day like Stacy Peralta, Tony Alva and many of the original Zepha Surf Shop team.”

From Leo Hetzel

Wood engraving, Flammarion, 1898

-Ned Riley

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lughnasadh

I didn’t know much about Joni back in the day. My loss.

I was knocked out by her “Coyote” in what is one of my most favorite movies of all time. Just playing it now and want to “share.”

Get lyrics on screen alongside video if you can. Sheesh! jonimitchell.com/music/song.cfm?id=100

I played the above after stumbling on to the one below performed a year earlier. (You know, YouTube algorithms are fine by me, they’ve turned me on to a lot of things tailored to what I’ve watched.

See below this second video for interesting story on the “Coyote” lyrics:

Coyote, the first song on the album, describes her brief relationship with Sam Shepard, whom she met at the Rolling Thunder Revue, the concert tour that Bob Dylan assembled with a traveling caravan of musicians. Shepard was hired by Dylan to write a script for a movie based on the events in the Rolling Thunder Revue. That did not materialize, but Shepard did write a tour log that was later released as a book. Joni Mitchell joined the tour for a number of shows in late 1975 and it remained with her as a lingering memory of ego clashes infused by pharmaceuticals and cocaine. Not only as a spectator, mind you, for she started a cocaine habit during that tour.

The road trip that gave birth to the songs on Hejira also led to an acquaintance with Chögyam Trungpa, a teacher of Tibetan Buddhism. He snapped her out of her cocaine habit and she wrote the song Refugee of the Roads about him. In Coyote she references her memory of the sex, drugs and folk ‘n’ roll experience that was the Rolling Thunder Revue…

musicaficionado.blog/2016/05/30/coyote-by-joni-mitchell

When I first met Louie, in the mid-1980s, I was stunned by the beauty of this little building, and even more stunned when he told me that his design was based on the painting of a Mandan earth lodge on page 4 of our book Shelter. Moreover, his cabin across the river was based on the drawing of a small Japanese cabin (bottom right, page 21) in Shelter.

At that point, I had published Shelter II in 1978, but hadn’t really planned on any new books on building.

If Shelter had inspired buildings like this, it occurred to me that it was time for a sequel, and therefore I started working on Home Work, featuring Louie’s creations as the first part of the book. It turned out that a lot of buildings had been inspired by Shelter, as you can see if you leaf through Home Work.*

Since then, we’ve become the best of friends, and I visit him whenever I can. I stay in the little circular room (at right in the exterior photo), and it’s always a wonderful experience — looking up at the radial framing of the roof (with a Ford truck wheel at the apex), looking out at the grapevines, enjoying the design and quality of the building.

I always consult him on projects underway, and on this trip I took along the 30 or so pages of rough layout of our next book, Rolling Homes, and got his feedback.

Now that I’ve returned home, I’m back to work on this book, and it looks really exciting — what with the huge interest in nomadic living these days.*

Stay tuned.

P.S.: I highly recommend the film Nomadland; it’s real (a rarity these days).