Hi Lloyd and Lew,
Hi Lloyd,
I ran into Randy in Folsom, CA. I figured for sure he’d heard of Shelter and Tiny Homes on The Move, but he had not. Randy’s in his late 50’s and found himself in the middle of a late in life divorce and didn’t want tot have to work to own a house. He’s a metal worker by trade and modified an old utility trailer with the camper shell from his old Dodge pick up into his new home. It’s pretty cool. I shared with him your website information too.
Dan Varvais
Highly recommended breakfast, lunch, in Elk, south of Mendocino on Highway One. That’s Louie and me last week.
On the road again
Heard about a 2-story driftwood shack at Navarro beach, road to beach closed because Navarro River has not broken thru to ocean, making big flooded Estero. Tried to walk thru yesterday afternoon, but water soon up over knees, so had to settle for this long shot. I’m heading south today to another long sandy beach with a bunch of shacks. Glad I got this iPhone 8 plus, way improved camera. BUT am so pissed off I forgot to bring my grown-up camera (Olympus OM-D) with telephoto lens. Damn! Still, you get the idea. Watch for my new book, Driftwood Shacks: Anonymous Architecture Along the California Coast. As a result of this trip, the book has grown by at least a dozen pages. This is the first in a field of small print-on-demand books we’re going to try. I have a ton of things that I’d like to make small books out of. Barns, motorcycles, New York City, L.A., Baja California Sur…
Meanwhile, finishing 2nd draft of my book on the ’60s, present working title: “Something’s Happening…
Haven’t got subtitle, maybe “My Life and the ’60s”
“…The wildness is a deception. Scattered in nearly every vista of Mongolia are the round white tents of nomads. We know these tent houses as yurts; they call them ger (pronounced gair). They are the primary home to about 1 million nomads. Today’s nomads retain a lifestyle relatively unchanged from that of their forebears in important ways. Living as I do—in a world teeming with smartphones and Wi-Fi, smart TVs and self-driving cars—it is a remarkable thing to travel among them.
The nomads are herders and typically own about 1,000 animals—mostly sheep and goats, but cows, horses, dogs, camels, and yaks as well. You could think of them as ranchers who move their ranch seasonally. They set up their ger in spring for maximum summer pastures, then they move it again for winter feeding. This movement is not north to south as might be expected, but from lowlands to highlands, or even from open valley in summer to hidden hilly nook in winter to escape the wind, which is more punishing than the cold.…”
-Kevin Kelly
I started writing GIMME SHELTER email newsletters about 15 years ago, maybe one every month or two. They were originally intended for sales reps (first at Random House, then Publishers Group West), to keep them apprised of our publishing activities, and then later, I added friends to the mailing list. As I got into blogging, the frequency of the newsletters dropped off.
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| Water tower near Prineville, Oregon, on my trip last week to see the eclipse |
I’ve written less and less of these newsletters recently, as I’ve been blogging and now doing Instagram regularly. Made me think about all the different forms of communication I’ve employed over the years. My high school year book, running an Air Force newspaper in Germany for 2 years, then working the Whole Earth Catalog, and then — books.
Followed by, over the years: booklets, pamphlets, flyers, posters, 20-30 handmade books, mini-books, magazine and newspaper articles, videos, interviews … I’m a compulsive communicator.
These days I put up posts on my blog, but not as often, or as in-depth as a few years ago. I do Instagram almost daily and all these photos automatically go onto my blog, and to my Twitter and Facebook pages. You can check my Instagram account here; it’s a summary of posts: www.instagram.com/lloyd.kahn
I decided to do a book on the ‘60s, since there’s been so much attention given to the “Summer of Love” lately, and because as a person who grew up in San Francisco, went to high school in the Haight-Ashbury, and watched the ‘60s unfold first-hand, I don’t agree with what’s being presented all over the media; these accounts don’t coincide with what I saw happening at all.
“The Haight-Ashbury was a district. The ‘60s was a movement.” –Ken Kesey
I started the book tentatively, to see if it was going to fly. I thought I’d give my background, what San Francisco was like in the ‘40s and ‘50s, and track my life — a kid growing up in San Francisco, college, Santa Cruz, Big Sur, the Monterey Pop Festival, building domes at Pacific High School, the Whole Earth Catalog — so readers would know where I was coming from. Rather than starting in 1960.
I started getting into it, recalling things that had been buried in my semi-consciousness. This was fun! And I realized that the ‘60s completely changed my life. In 1965, I quit my job as an insurance broker in San Francisco and went to work as a carpenter.
I’m going to illustrate it with black and white photos I took doing those years.
I’ll start posting parts of the book on my blog as I go, to get some feedback.
Colliding Rivers near Glide, Oregon, where Little River and the North Umpqua River meet head-on. There’s a photo on the bridge where I was standing showing the confluence looking like a maelstrom in the winter, with water up over the bridge (covering all the rocks you see here!). I went swimming a little downriver, it was co-o-ld, but refreshing on a hot day.
Birdhouse at Bellknap Hot Springs, on the Mckenzie River in central Oregon.
Cost $8 for an hour to use the facilities, mainly a large pool with temperature of 95-100F. A lovely place. The temp. of water coming from the springs is about 190F.
I’m trying to contact the guy who makes these, to get a few for our collection of mini houses.
Ricky B, who does antique and vintage car restorations in Prineville, Oregon, has created a miniature ghost town. as shown in these 3 photos.
It’s a uniquely delightful place. Everything Ricky does, both autos and vintage building, is remarkable.
Norman’s Mom “…wouldn’t even harm a fly.”
Ricky has at least 30 cars, all immaculately detailed. Most are standard models, but this is a wicked hot rod, I believe a 1951 Mercury, chopped and channelled to perfection.
On the road southeast, from Burns to Jordan Valley, Oregon
I’m frustrated by having such a dorky layout, due to Blogger.com parameters. I don’t have the skills (coding) or time to make these posts look other than awkward. So, for a while (until I can get my layouts together), it’ll have to be the singer, not the song…
Got back at 3 AM Thursday morning, having left Elko 15 hours earlier. Not straight-thru driving, by any means (I dawdle), but a long day nevertheless. A great trip, rich in adventure and new territory. Once again, I have the problem of too much “content.” I could do a small book on each trip, but each time I return home, I get immersed in the details of running a publishing house, and having to work on a more standard sized book.
For example, I could do some really nice small books on travels to SE Asia, to Scotland, and this latest cruise through California’s two sister states.
My blog is bit of a hodgepodge these days, what with doing Instagram (because of its immediacy and ease), and other time constraints. If you haven’t figured it out, all the posts with the captions written up as headlines are automatic posts from Instagram to the blog. Not elegant, but it’s the best I can do right now.
You can view my Instagram posts at www.instagram.com/lloyd.kahn. This way you can see the videos, which don’t get transferred to the blog.
I’ll put up some photos (I shot about 450, between the iPhone (6S Plus) and Olympus OM-D) from the trip on the next post.
Alongside road coming in to Cottage Grove, Oregon
