pair of aces: robert mapplethorpe & patti smith

I was thinking about all my loved ones in my hometown New York City who are homebound due to the current hurricane sweeping the East Coast. After reading news update after update, I found myself scrolling through the www looking at pictures of the Big Apple and I stumbled across these photos of Patti Smith & Robert Mapplethorpe. 

They remind me of my magical childhood in 1970's NYC, where even as a wee youngster, I too had a few pants suits that I paired with silver and feather necklaces. Mini mapplethorpe at the age of 4. I see a worn tee, blazer and wild child necklace in my near future. You can never go back but you can dig through your storage boxes and break out your feather and leather jewelry.

slim pickens

Style with a bang, not a whimper.

What can we say? Slim Keith always held her own, combined grace with elegance and could consider amongst bangles and baubles worth their weight in pretty pennies, a shotgun as an accessory. I'm not a fan of violence, but there's something about this picture that captures the hallmark of California style, a true pioneer spirit.

joy to the world

I am not a focused blogger. The posts in this blog have absolutely no relation to one another, other than they happened to drift through my mind on some day and I decided to write them down. Which is why I guess, you'll find posts on Amiri Baraka or Nudists or Basquiat or the Chelsea Hotel.

That said, I would say I have a bent for digging into the golden age of California, considering that I named my blog after a book by Ed Dorn that reminds of pushing towards the eroded cliffs of PCH and of course, the azure surfaced ocean spotted with kelp's brown slimmered pods. I suppose this blog is my collected field notes.

And as for this post, it has nothing to do with California or pretty much anything else. I just happen to like Jean Patou's ad for his sportswear store, Le Coin des Sports. And the font Patou used is bangin'. For real. Of course, if you can't unearth a piece of vintage Patou, you could always pick up a bottle of his infamous perfume, Joy.

the gift of common sense courtesy of frank o'hara

As a graduate writing student, I had to read Frank O'Hara's manifesto Personism, which was fine by me as I liked his magnum opus, Lunch Poems and Personism turned out to be quite good too, funny, name-drops LeRoi Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka) and Alain Robbe-Grillet and is to date, the best piece of literature to cite the act referred to in the contemporary quotidian as the Lucky Pierre.

That said, I took to heart most seriously from Personism, not a discourse the nostalgia of negative capability or the benefits of abstraction versus precision, but the following piece of conventional wisdom i.e. common sense: "You just go on your nerve. If someone's chasing you down the street with a knife, you just run, you don't turn around and shout, 'Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep.'"

Go on your nerve.
Don't brag about high school athletics when being chased.
Honestly, the applications are endless. . .

under the sea

"Were this world an endless plain, and by sailing eastward we could for ever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange than any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise in the voyage. But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in tormented chase of the demon phantom that, some time or other, swims before all human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed."
-Herman Melville, Moby Dick, 1851

sea sketch. figure 1. quill pen and ink. yours truly.

don't just sit there. osculate.

sky rockets in flight. afternoon delight . . .

(and get your minds out of the gutter. osculate means kiss, snog, smooch, plant one on someone, french (if you're frisky). but that's as riské as this post gets, my friends.

shame, shame, shame. (wink)

new 50c word: arcology

Arcology: defined and created by Italian Architect Paolo Soleri, ARCOSANTI is an intentional city and urban dwelling whose design principles are guided by arcology, a fusion of architecture and ecology. ARCOSANTI is:

• part futuristic dwellings a la Uncle Owen and Aunt Veru's whitewashed geodesic domes built into the mountains on Tatooine

• part eco-structure that addresses urban mobility with innovative solutions that do not require an automobile 

• part Mad Max pottery barn, complete with bronze and ceramic bells that hang throughout the Arcosanti complex 

• part urban laboratory, part HQ for silt-casting workshops, (Hey! You made you first tile! Batchelder would love it.) 

• part intentional community, part one-stop-living-and-shopping - the Arcosanti environs are meant to address both the labor and leisure activities of it's residents 

• part time-warp back to nostalgic futurism 

• part community design that bases its structural output and construction with the design principals of of lean, frugal elegance and architecture 

• part camp for grown-ups (forget architecture and tennis and get ready to participate in construction skill shares.)

*all photos courtesy of arcosanti

jeep beats

 

It's Labor Day weekend, which means it's time to take it easy. By dancing your tush off. 

If you live in the city of angels and are looking for something to do tonight, here's, as the kids say, the 411: as a performance/tribute/elegy to the late artist Mike Kelley, local Angelenos Scott Benzel and Mark Hagen are tripping out a 1970's pinto with a custom pyramidal bass cabinet and pumping Booty Bass and early Detroit Techno alongside a live performance piece. 

Get cultured and show off your best pop-and-lock? Take that, Pimp My Ride.

BASS ELEGY/DEVIL'S NIGHT: Saturday, Sept. 1, 8pm @ LA><ART, 2460 La Cienega btw. Venice and Washington

*photo courtesy of Bass Elegy/Devil's Night

endless summer

Effluvia Magazine recently posted a pretty select plethora of 50s/60s surf legend Mickey "Da Cat" Dora. Don't know Da Cat? Here's biographer, journalist and archivist James Brisick's lowdown:

"...If you took James Dean's cool, Muhammed Ali's poetics, Harry Houdini's slipperiness, James Bond's jet-setting, George Carlin's irony and Kwai Chang Caine's’s Zen, and rolled them into one man with a longboard under his arm, you’d come up with something like Miki Dora, surfing’s mythical antihero, otherwise known as the Black Knight of Malibu... His surfboard was his magic carpet and his wits were his wings, and from the late ’60s up until his death in 2002, excepting a couple brief prison stints, Dora lived the Endless Summer lifestyle, defining what it means to be a surfer... "

-from Requiem for Surfing's Black Knight - The Sanctioned Mickey Dora, "LA Weekly", published March 2, 2006

Check out the haunting and humorous photographs of Malibu's personal Poseidon at Effluvia Magazine, now . . .

california dreaming

Ah, to live deep in Venice, off the canals, with nothing but your beloved, a jalopy, 45's that made you cry, late night beer blasts and 1st Beach bon fires, a wooden Alaia long board, a conga drum or two, maybe a pair of roller skates, big hair, good vibrations and sea salt skin.

Hail Teena Marie, full of grace, full of sand and the spirit of the sea. You are in my dreams Winward Circle and Ocean Avenue. Hear my cries. These are my prayers to Pacific, my old and not forgotten home.

cheap thrills

free to be you and me . . .