Ramones by Rock and Roll Radio on Grooveshark

…baby.

I went to the Broadway musical “After Midnight” last night and was it good! Music of Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, the ’20s – ’30s era of great music at The Cotton Club in Harlem. The play opened with a guy stepping on to the stage and talking…and it struck me that this was so REAL…no special effects, nothing digital, just real human beings. Not a YouTube video. Rare in this electronic age.

   It’s just a spectacular show, old school all the way. If you could time-transport it to the ’30s, the audience of those times would love it. Wonderful singing and dancing, non-stop, it’s hard to believe the collection of talent here, the great songs. “Stormy Weather,” “It Don’t Mean A Thing, “Come Fly Away.” There were times during the dance numbers when the collective audience would gasp.

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My cousin Mike and I were a year apart and we hung out together whenever we could as kids. We were the same size and looked a lot alike. He went to college at UC Santa Barbara and threw the javelin on the track team. He always painted, from a young age. After college, he moved to New Orleans, then NYC, where he sold paintings on the street. Next he settled down in Provincetown, working as a waiter to support his art habit.

   In Fall, 1965, I hitchhiked across the country, on I guess what you’d call a vision quest. The counterculture was rocking then.

   This photo is when we went clamming in P-Town. Mike’s wearing the John-Lennon-style hat I’d bought in NYC.

   Mike then went on to build a phantasmagorical sculptural village in Arizona, which he called Eliphante. He told me he was inspired by the work of Bob De Buck and Jerry Thorman in Placitas, New Mexico, which was depicted in our book Shelter. Eliphante is featured in our book Home Work, pages shown here.

Mike passed away 4 years ago. His wife, Leda Livant, has just put up a website of some of Mike’s paintings here. The Eliphante website is here. (Lotta links.)

   BTW, when I left P-Town hitchhiking on a Saturday afternoon, I got picked up by some kids from The Rhode Island School of Design. They were going to a Bob Dylan concert that night, well all right! It was one of the first Dylan performances where he did folk music the 1st half, then brought out Robbie Robertson et al for rock ‘n roll. Things were so loose then that I was right up at the stage with my camera and got some memorable black and white shots.

    After a month on the road, I came back to San Francisco, quit my job as an insurance broker, and went to work as a carpenter.

 Took off early Friday morning/driving along the coast, The Hives punkin it up with “Go Right Ahead” on radio:

“Our god is a sinner, our king is a con

The room’s about to crumble as I burst into song…”

…Then The Dave Clark Five in a surprising rocker, “Wild Weekend,” part of great selection by British DJ Michael Des Barres’ rock n roll program on Little Steve’s Underground Garage on Sirius Radio…the new span on the Bay Bridge is such a disaster, a horse’s ass of a design; the towers look like bad special effects (compare to Golden Gate Bridge towers)…The western span of the Bay Bridge (the old one, at left) is elegant by comparison…

Graffiti at Ocean Beach, San Francisco

On my way to The Maker Faire in San Mateo…