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.

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 . . .

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

originally titled new york beat

you go with me my gentle boy?
-Downtown 81

I remember when New York looked like this. I remember a New York without yarn shops and baby boutiques. I remember when an anonymous band of poets raided the marquees of long abandoned showgirl theaters on 42nd Street with plastic letter lyrics. I remember the greatest noise.

oh, new york

Even amidst your chaos, there are city havens such as this farm in Queens.

I was so much younger then, wore a pleated silver floor length gown to a farm.

That; however, black tie to a waterfall style, is an ace way to get out of town and still stay.

Especially if rains a bit.

mind the gap

While stumbling across the internets, I came across these gap-toothed gals on Terry Richardson's tumblr. Makes me wish I never had braces.

your teeming shores

What do the sum of an affinity for and obsession with: signage, typography, Americana, the 1970s, stretches of amber waves of grain, muscle cars, swimming pools, found objects, pornography, pancakes, formica, the entire spectrum of the color blue and outdated technology equal?

A love of Stephen Shore's photography. That's what.

love to love you and you

part 1

part 2

*Window Water Baby Moving by Stan Brakhage

The best film about love. My favorite part: it's silent.

forget the green tomatoes

We now have to be on the watch for . . . algae. Go figure.

rest in peace lucien freud

"Now that I know what I want, I don't have to hold onto it quite so much."

-Lucien Freud  (1922 - 2011)



i love mickey dora

But then again, what's not to love?

nothing to alter

Love Emmanuelle Alt's dreamy retro take on LA in the upcoming issue of Vogue Paris. Perfectly fitting in a city that romances 70's apartment building signs, imports palm trees and has a restaurant devoted to avocado bugers. Not to mention Randy's gigantic doughnut, visable from space.

shotgun car

*between the Intergratron / Giant Rock / Crystal Mountain