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 . . .

r.i.p prabuddha dasgupta

Goodbye legendary Indian photographer, Prabuddha Dasgupta. Your haunting images, either saturated in bold hued pigments or cast black and white conrasted textures, will be sadly missed.

“We are in the realm of dreams and memories—­exactly whose is never clear.”
-Geoff Dyer, on Dasgupta's work in The Paris Review, issue 200, Spring 2012

joan on joan

"Joan Baez was a personality before she was entirely a person, and, like anyone to whom that happens, she is in a sense the hapless victim of what others have seen in her, written about her, wanted her to be and not be. The roles assigned to her are various, but variations on a single theme. She is the Madonna of the disaffected. She is the pawn of the protest movement. She is the unhappy analysand. She is the singer who would not train her voice, the rebel who drives the Jaguar too fast, the Rima who hides with the birds and the deer. Above all, she is the girl who 'feels' things, who has hung on to the freshness and pain of adolescence, the girl ever wounded, ever young. Now, at an age when the wounds begin to heal whether one wants them to or not, Joan Baez rarely leaves the Carmel Valley."

-Joan Didion, "Where the Kissing Never Stops", Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1968

When thumbing a dog-eared copy of Slouching Towards Bethlehem, I re-read one of my favorite essays, "Where the Kissing Never Stops", a little treatise on Joan Baez. Imagine: two of my favorite Joans, lounging in the kitchen, eating hot dogs while the slow California sun looms at lunch. A perfect trinity: Joan, Joan and Joan's sister, the loveliest lady to grace the planet, Mimi Baez Farina. Knockout.

let's do the twist

st. joan

A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.

-Joan Didion

How can anyone not fall completely in love with Joan Didion at any age, any decade, any time, any place, any piece?

I want to spend the rest of this week curled up in a hammock with The White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

locally grown and true blue: britt browne

*all images courtesy of www.brittbrowne.com

Sorry for the lack of way more west posts ... I've been moving and as always, packing all my stuff into 7,000 boxes only to unpack the same 7,000 boxes has taken way more time and energy that I expected.

So, after a grueling day of unloading say a library of books, or my beloved's tattoo supplies, I've been stoking the flames of my mind by imagining the garden at my new place. Succulents! Grey Water System! Indigo Plants! Oh yes, Indigo plants.

Inspired by some lovely fauna and foliage I spied at my friend Kristin Dickson's Iko Iko, local L.A. artist Britt Browne is bringing plants plus knowledge to the people with her workshops on growing and harvesting Indigo plants for dye and pigment purposes. Inspired by the Bauhaus philosophy that modern art can be a functional as well aesthetic exercise, Browne is often spotted about town teaching Angeleno's all the how-to's on this prehistoric pigment, in addition to crafting prints for Stampa and crafting her own fine art paintings and pieces.

Next up: Macramé plant holders for all my new blue plants ...