happy new year

*via the Los Angeles Times, Jan 27, 1928

I don't know what shenanigans you'll be tucking into this weekend, but I'll be ringing in the New Year. The Chinese New Year that is. If you're a sucker for a parade or have a penchant for the deliciousness that Chung King cuisine as well as the requisite Angeleno gourmet gut trucks promise to provide (yes, including the Kogi truck, duh), you just might want to head downtown Saturday and Sunday to say goodbye to the Year of the Dragon and welcome in The Year of the Snake. In case you're harboring any serpentine fears, worry not. The snake, in the Chinese lunar calendar, is associated with both wisdom and beauty, making the upcoming year appear pretty sweet indeed.

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)