My annoyance at all the lame krap floating around now about 1967 in the Haight-Ashbury district, “The Summer of Love,”just about turned to repulsion of late. Yeah, strong word, but man is it bad! We went to the deYoung Museum in San Francisco (an architectural catastrophe) Friday for their exhibit. $25 entrance fee! Most of the exhibit consisted of posters and yes, the posters were magnificent, but the exhibit was mostly ’60s drivel.
The “hippie clothing” was awful. No elegance, no simplicity. People with bad taste and too much time on their hands; bad colors, mishmashes of design. A truly awful crocheted bedspread commissioned by Bob Weir. Two rooms of flashing video montages of blurry dancers — senseless, dumb; not trippy — sloppy.
And the clincher: when you leave the exhibit, they funnel you into The Summer of Love Gift Shop. I kid you not. T-shirts, hats, trinkets, a poster of lame buttons — all made in China.
These curators are giving the ’60s a bad name.
The “Hippie Modernism” exhibit at the Berkeley Museum was way better.
As is the exhibit at the California Historical Society. Really good b&w photos, tracing the ’60s from the Beats-on. $5 entrance fee.
There was a conference this weekend, some 45 presentations on the era, mostly by college professors.
Sorry, I’ve been brooding over all the distortions, all the weren’t-there, don’t-get-it pontificators.
“The Haight-Ashbury was a neighborhood. The ’60s was a movement.” -Ken Kesey
PS The “Summer of Love” (1967) was in actuality a disaster in San Francisco.
Our new book Small Homes: The Right Size is now available at independent bookstores, and Amazon — as well as from us: www.shelterpub.com/building/small-homes
Shameless Commerce Dept. This is, I think, the best building book we’ve ever done. (Yes, I’m sure I’ve said this before, but it keeps reoccurring to me.) Shelter is everyone’s favorite; it captured the times, it inspired thousands of homes. Builders of the Pacific Coast is in some ways, my best book. It’s an odyssey of discovery where the reader rides shotgun with me over a 2-year period. Cohesive and focused.
BUT Small Homes is so useful to so many people in this era of astronomical home prices and rents, that I think it’s hugely important. It offers alternatives to people looking for rentals on Craigslist or homes on Zillow. Here are 65 very different homes, of different materials, in different parts of the world. The idea, as with all our building books is to use your hands to create your own shelter.
Two things I’ve discovered about this book (after seeing the finished product):
There are a lot of homes out in middle America – Minnesota, Indiana, Missouri, Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, more so than in any of our other books.
It sparkles. Largely due to Rick’s considerable Photoshop skills, a motley assortment of photos from contributors have been rendered in colorful detail. I was stunned when I saw the first book off the press. The photos draw you in.
I’ve been contacted 3-4 times by TV producers regarding tiny homes. Each time I’ve felt that they weren’t searching for the reality of the subject, but trying to shoehorn something into a phony story line. Reality shows are bad enough, but pre-determined phony reality is worse. Here’s a good article on the subject: http://rockymountaintinyhouses.com/the-truth-about-tiny-house-tv-shows/
“…The crew shows up to tiny house build in progress. The customers are in over their heads. They need the house finished in two weeks. They need these super cool expensive features in order to meet their needs. Their budget is a completely unattainable, $30,000. Trucks get stuck, storms roll in, vendors miss deliveries, old wood bridges threaten to fall into the river, the house tries to roll off a cliff…Somehow in the end it all comes together and the people are left with their dream tiny house. Folks, this just isn’t how it works.…”
Three to four years ago, I did a lot more writing of posts than I do now. These days I’m working on other digital forms of communication (takes time) as well as our old school hold-in-your-hands treasures called books, and in the midst of writing, photographing, editing, and laying out our next major book, Small Homes.
Once in a while I like to slip in a post as of the old days. Can we talk?
It’s been raining like mad. Marin county reservoirs are spilling over. Shasta Lake, NorCal’s big one, is at 81% now—a welcome relief after all the sad years of bare banks. Went out a few days ago with friends to see cascading waterfalls; power of our magic mountain. Toots: “Love the Rain”:
Small Homes, Our Next Book
The book is growing daily. It’s a lot like gardening. I am having a lot of back-and-forth emails with builder/contributors, often in search of large enough photo files. (What works on a monitor won’t work in high-quality printing.) I’m over half-way through, doing layout with a 5-year-old Brother color copy machine, scissors and scotch tape before they go to Rick for InDesign/Photoshop precision, enhancement, and preparation for our printers in Hong Kong. You can see 17 sneak previews here: https://www.theshelterblog.com/?s=preview
Scotland Shelter Exhibition
There is a festival of architecture in Scotland now, sponsored by the Fife Contemporary Arts Center. It’s called “Shelters,” and features an entire room exhibiting our work, with photo and page blowups, and our building books on tables (below). It’s open now at the Kircaldy Galleries (Kircaldy is about 12 miles north of Edinburgh, on the east coast of Scotland) and runs through June 5, 2016.
I’ll be doing a slide show presentation on May 10th, at Kircaldy Galleries, titled “50 Years of Natural Building,” chronicling our building books from Shelter in 1973 up to the present.
The Shelter Blog
We have finally increased the amount of original material on our blog (as opposed to mostly references to material already posted elsewhere). Check it out: https://www.theshelterblog.com/. Note: when you go looking for it, you need to type in the “the” to get the correct URL. If you type in “shelterblog,” it will go to the wrong place.
Driftwood Shacks: Anonymous Architecture Along the California Coast
My first ever art exhibit; I’m pretty excited to be doing this. On display will be about 24 of my photos, shot on various northern California beaches over the last 15 years. At the Bolinas Museum, opening reception April 2, 2016, 3-5 PM, 38 Wharf Road, Bolinas, Calif
(Of interest only to people with injuries.) My broken wrist (skateboarding) is maybe 80% healed (hmm, Shasta 81%, wrist 80%—all to the good!). I explored a lot of modalities, including comfrey (also called “knitbone”), calcium citrate, bone broth, prunes and bananas (yes!), marijuana patches and salves, stretching, and wrist braces. Info on my previous posts (including over 30 comments here: https://www.lloydkahn.com/2015/12/20/did-i-say-i-was-going-to-give-up/ and I’ll soon be doing a special post updating the methods for hastening healing. (I did a lot of research.)
45 Years of Publishing
I can’t believe it. I’m 80, and have never been busier or more productive in my life—and in an extraordinary profession full of wonderful, intelligent people. I don’t even mind all the email and business stuff, but I love shooting photos, doing layout, and especially having the chance to do an exhibit of my photos.
The big news around here regarding our next book, Small Homes, now in production, is that we decided to postpone the publication date until spring, 2017.
It takes us an enormous amount of time to put a book like this together.
Also, this book is looking so good, and will be so relevant to so many people, that we want to take our time and do it well.
Here (today) I’m working on the most complicated two pages so far in the book. When I started I had no idea how it was going to come together (or if it would).
But starting did the trick; in over two days it worked itself out. 22 photos with fact-filled captions.
Will Syria’s President Assad still be in power at the end of next year? Will Russia and China hold joint naval exercises in the Mediterranean in the next six months? Will the Oil Volatility Index fall below 25 in 2016? Will the Arctic sea ice mass be lower next summer than it was last summer?
Five hundred such questions of geopolitical import were posed in tournament mode to thousands of amateur forecasters by IARPA—the Inatelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity–between 2011 and 2015. (Tetlock mentioned that senior US intelligence officials opposed the project, but younger-generation staff were able to push it through.) Extremely careful score was kept, and before long the most adept amateur “superforecasters” were doing 30 percent better than professional intelligence officers with access to classified information. They were also better than prediction markets and drastically better than famous pundits and politicians, who Tetlock described as engaging in deliberately vague “ideological kabuki dance.”
This is the most vital, vibrant time of my life. A lot of things are falling in to place, or about to.
I look around these days, at the garden, or the book production process, or attempts to gather, hunt, or fish for food, or my workshop—and think, this is pretty good. A lot of it a long time in the making.
The book SMALL HOMES continues to unfold before my eyes. I’m in daily touch with, typically 4-5 contributors (as many as 25 emails in some of the folders), getting large enough photo files, editing text, doing pasteup. Not in any special order — well actually, in the order in which it comes in.
I’m really excited about getting a new iPhone 6 (s Plus) (hoping tyo make my way through the AT&T maze so as not to pay full price — I have another year to go on my present contract). I think Instagram will be perfect for my daily photos, I may be wrong, but it seems Instagram is replacing blogs — at least with the millennials. BTW, there’s a good article on this age group (11-33-year-olds)by James Wolcott (an excellent writer) in this month’s Vanity Fair. I think I can get a journalistic flow going this way, and use blog for the writing impulse– like here (and link them together).
We’re revamping our website (being built in SquareSpace as we speak by Sean Hellfritsch) and it’s lookin elegant. By the end of the year, we’ll have a completely different looking internet “presence.” It’s important for us because we have so much”content” — maybe 15,000 photos, a good portion of these on homes and building. We’re also going to redesign theshelterblog and make good on my promise of getting mostly original stuff there, rather than recycled material that’s already been posted (much of which, however, is great and worth sharing).We’re going to build it, with the hope they will come.
I’m negotiating with publishers in Russia,China, and Brazil about foreign translation rights for our book Stretching (now in 24 languages).
Got my (12′ Klamath aluminum) boat with15 HP 2-stroke recently rebuilt Evinrude motor working well and improving my lame backing-up-of-trailer technique.
Going to build a sleeping platform. I got really excited yesterday laying it out — 10’x10′, — just putting 4×4’s on pier blocks, 2×6 joists on top of them made me realize that I miss building. This is gonna be fun!
The Monarch butterflies are back in greater number than years, there are big flocks of quail patrolling every corner of the garden, a beautiful young fox appeared this morning, scaring the chickens, and them scaring him too. At the beach yesterday, windy, high tide, I got 3 weathered 2x4s, 3 bird skulls — each a different bird — a lot of dead birds the last month, big bag of seaweed for garden, and check out this bit of avian skeletal artistry, what is I believe the sternum with cortacoid/clavicle still attached by one remaining tendon.
When I wrote about ending this blog 2 days ago, I was in what you might call a state of mild confused desperation. These (warm summer) days, I’m:
• (joyfully) working on a new book
• trying to figure out how to get more of our books out in bookstores (where people can see them, and pick them up…)
• revamping our digital communications
• shuffling a ton of other things I want to do right now.
Life is rich.
Thank you guys for the comments. I mean, really! Stephanie gets it. I love ya too, Stephanie. So good to hear I’m connecting.
With the process of iteration, here’s where I’m at this morning:
I’ll keep the blog going. Thanks, George, Rick, Sharkey, etc.
I won’t keep trying to do a post a day. Too stressful, and causing me to sometimes put up less-than-great stuff just to fill in daily gaps. I’ll do a lot less posting stuff from other websites, but put up original material, stuff I’ve done or witnessed, photos new to the internet world. If you were checking it daily, now check it weekly.
Blogs aren’t going to be eliminated by social media, any more than radio was eliminated by TV, or TV eliminated by the internet. They all have their function.
Other digital stuff In discussions yesterday with my two 30-something-year-old consultants, Sean Hellfritsch and my son Evan, we roughed out a plan: I’m going to do Instagram posts from an iPhone 6 (mostly when I’m out and around in the world). I’ll also start tweeting again (fun!). We’ll figure out how to coordinate our extensive home/shelter/building content on my blog, theshelterblog, Instagram, Tumbl’r, Twitter, linking back and forth. Facebook too. Sean’s going to come up with a plan, Evan’s going to do much of the posting. We’ll get the plan together when Rick and Lew are back.
In the ’60s I had a friend is Santa Barbara, a highly-skilled gardener, tell me this about the growth of his pot plants: they’d not grow much for a week or so, then suddenly in 24 hours they’d grow like crazy. We talked about how knowledge was like that. You’ll take in information and ponder something over a period of time and suddenly—eureka!—you’ll get it. You get the whole picture. You see the way forward.
Well here’s my growth spurt of the last few days. It may be premature to write this, but I think I see a new way to get out our “content*”) out to (more) people.
I’ve been pondering mostly Instagram and Twitter, but also Facebook (ugh!), Pinterest, maybe Tumblr as a better way than blogging. I’ve done almost 5,000 posts now, some 7 million page views, I think it’s time to hang it up, or at least quit trying to do a post a day. I’ve been running it like a mini-newspaper, and I love doing it, but it’s taking too much time. Maybe I’ll just do my own material on this blog and not keep posting interesting stuff from other websites.
Small Homes
I’m laying out about 2 pages of this new book each day. Once I get the photos and text on the design table, it seems to assemble itself. Oh this fits here…I’ll put the pull quote here…Line this up both up and across…I love doing it—watching the birth of a book. A lot of material came in today—photos and stories.
I need to put more time into the book now, less on the blog.
Plus it’s occurring to me that blogs may be less significant these days, what with these super-sized phone screens and the fact that people are checking Instagram and Facebook daily whereas one has to go to a blog. I only look at blogs occasionally.
Lloyd’s Change of Direction
The iPhone 6 Plus! Holy shit! What a tool. I’ve run across 3 of them in the last 5 days. Yesterday my friend Jeff said, “Have you seen the billboards with photos shot on the iPhone 6?” I’ve kept saying I’d rather shoot quick photos with my many-featured Sony Cybershot RX100 II—raw files, tons of options not on any phone. But the camera seems v. good on the new iPhone and it’ll allow me to post stuff immediately, without having to shoot pix, load them on computer, use wi-fi, blah blah blah…Just zap from the phone. Immediate communication.
It’s gonna be fun, because I run across so much interesting stuff out in the world.
Looking forward to doing Twitter again. Forced to edit self.
*I have probably 15,000 (film and digital ) photos from 50+years—maybe half of them on homes, builders, building, architecture, most of it never used.
Live Broadcast of Small Homes
We’re going to try publishing excerpts from this book as we lay it out. Need to figure how to do so efficiently…hey, what about publishing quick photos of rough layout like this, along with a paragraph about the builder/homeowners? Would that work? The above layout:
“Jes Nelee’, musician and world traveler, designed and built her own small home in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with the help of her 80-year-old grandfather and friends.”
We could do that real simply. Get out on theshelterblog plus other social media.
My annoyance at all the lame krap floating around now about 1967 in the Haight-Ashbury district, “The Summer of Love,”just about turned to repulsion of late. Yeah, strong word, but man is it bad! We went to the deYoung Museum in San Francisco (an architectural catastrophe) Friday for their exhibit. $25 entrance fee! Most of the exhibit consisted of posters and yes, the posters were magnificent, but the exhibit was mostly ’60s drivel.
