I’m in kind of a communications muddle right now.

Background:

• Worked on high school newspaper 1952

• Ran US Air Force base newspaper in Germany 1958-60

• Shelter editor of Whole Earth Catalog 1969-73

• Published Domebook One in 1970, Domebook 2 in 1971

• Published Shelter in 1973

• 1973-present day, published series of various books, mostly on building and fitness

• Interspersed between: a series of magazine articles, pamphlets, brochures, flyers, posters, hand-crafted, hand-lettered scrapbooks (print runs of two (2), panoramic photo collages, a few videos, and stretching software (StretchWare). All extracurricular.

•Started a blog in 2010. Why not? I gave it a whirl and liked it. (Thanks, Eszter!) Some 5,000 posts later, I realized it was taking a lot of time, and no income. I backed off and so did my readers (see graph):

•At that point I started with Instagram. Photo-oriented, whereas my blog was word-oriented. I liked being able to record something (iPhone photo) and get it up there right away. I liked the age group using it. All my Instagram posts automatically go up on my Twitter account and blog, but it’s not a great solution. The formats don’t transfer very well. Hmmm…

So here I am.

Read More …

Never fails/checked in to my little hotel in G. Village, stressed out from Byzantine check points at Toronto airport, slept an hour, hit streets. Man! It’s like plugging into another planet with double the chi flow. Ate at Chinese noodle shop, ended up talking to (and sharing dishes) with people sitting next to me AND it turns out one of them is Nancy Bass Wyden, proprietor (and descendent of founders) of none other than the.venerable Strand bookshop, the 5-story ages-old NYC landmark; we exchanged cards.

Then out into the streets to Washington Square, then random street walking, talked to this guy delivering food for Caviar (Elmer). Then to McDougal St., Cafe Dante now slick, but Cafe Reggio is same dark soulful noisy Renaissance good-vibes place it was when I first came to NYC in 1957 (and rented a room on Morton St. for $60 a week while working the night shift at the Durkee shredded coconut factory in Queens, waiting to take a ship to Europe for a 3-month motor scooter (Lambretta)/youth hostel tour of Europe.

I love it here, the city so energetically inspiring.

I don’t spend nearly as much time on this blog as I used to, because:

-I need to devote time to books

-I’m doing Instagram, which I like a lot, and each Instagram post gets put on the blog (and Twitter) automatically. The trouble is they look a bit weird, with hash tags, and too-large type. For which I apologize.

-I wish I had the time to do blog posts like I did a few years ago, but I need to focus on projects that bring in income. I told Stewart Brand a few months ago that I’d done over 5,000 posts, with no corresponding income and he said, what took you so long to figure that out?

Guess what just came on the radio (playing at this moment)? “I’m so tired, Lord, of bein broke all the time,” by Canned Heat. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xU209vIy0KI

  Cosmic timing, eh?

My “Tour” I’m writing this from Courtenay, a (real) town I like a lot on Vancouver Island. I’m in the early stages of a tour of bookstore appearances with my new book. I just did the Community Hall on Hornby Island; the place was packed — young and old kindred spirits. Before I left, I did Mollusk Surf Shop in San Francisco and started by showing a few old scratchy B&W photos from surfing in Santa Cruz in the’50s, before wet suits and polyurethane foam, it was so much fun! Beer, cider, great music. Standing room only, some people couldn’t get in. A couple of angels made it possible.

Dates:

-Thursday (tomorrow): Russell Books, 734 Fort St, Victoria, 7 PM

-Tuesday, May 23, 7PM, Vancouver Public Library, Main Branch, 350 West Georgia St, Vancouver

-Thursday, May 25, 7:30 PM, McNally Robinson Books, 1120 Grant Ave, Winnipeg

-Saturday, May 27, Toronto: 11 AM, the Public Library at Parkdale; 2 PM, The Public Library, Danforth/Coxwell

-Thursday,June 1, Spoonbill and Sugartown in Brooklyn, 7PM

I’ve booked 6 flights for this sojourn. Sheesh! Booked into AirBnB places in Vancouver and Toronto to avoid high hotel bills.

New book: I’m working on a book on the ’60s. Someone told me a few weeks ago that it’s been 50 years since the “Summer of Love,” and there are a bunch of exhibits, articles, a lot of attention on the era, and most all that I read or see about it doesn’t correlate with what I saw happen. So I’m writing about  it from my own perspective, with my own photos. I grew up in San Francisco, went to high school in the Haight Ashbury district, and was 10 years older than the group (baby boomers) that caused it all to happen. I dropped out of the insurance business in 1965, partly because I felt I had more in common with young people than I did with my own generation. I’m not sure if it will come together as a book, but I’m following my modus operandi of: If you don’t know what to do — start. We’ll see.

Other books “The Half Acre Homestead,” a scrapbook on barns, a book on Baja, possibly a wild book on building by a French friend of mine…

Print-on-demand or short run books  A lot of things that don’t require a major book. The first one will be a 48-page book: Driftwood Shacks: Anonymous Architecture of the California Coast. In past years I  put together a bunch of handmade, hand-lettered sort of scrapbooks on trips: roaming through the southwest deserts, LA, NYC (both visually rich), Southeast Asia, the Greek island Lesbos (on a motor scooter)…I’ll see if it makes sense to do limited editions.

I feel like’ I’m just getting rolling.

I love it here in Canada. So many wonderful people + a bunch of true and lifelong friends. I told Michael the other day it feels like a “separated at birth” situation, it’s all so familiar and friendly and tuned into my sensibilities.

7 PM, Tuesday April 11th at City Lights, 261 Columbus at Broadway, North Beach, San Francisco

Details: https://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=87286100085830