The museum has closed now, the contents auctioned off. Today I received some of the family photos as well as the personal diaries of my great-great grandmother.
We aren't really sure what to do with them, but my extended family agreed Burbank seems a good spot to keep these items for a while.
I’m working on a little tray to hold dish soap in JC. It sometimes drips onto the counter.
Surely one of these will find their way to the finish line.
Like all creative endeavors—or like, you know, life—pottery begins with optimism and hope. You have only to try, and your genius will take shape.
Tonight I couldn’t center the clay, but I kept trying, and finally it just kind of collapsed.
A late flight out of Newark turned into a 23 minute connection in Denver.
A quick sprint later, grabbed some trail mix for dinner, now sitting on the plane for Burbank…with a 20 minute delay. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Here's a mildly interesting challenge. My flight tomorrow leaves around 3 from Newark Airport. The Jersey City Marathon has the streets closed until 3.
Hmm.
I will probably walk out of the range of the marathon.
Cap was just thinking of those soy burgers from that fancy restaurant, courtesy of the Austin Chronicle.
The restaurant was Mother's, and it wasn't particularly fancy, unless you were a wide-eyed kid from West Virginia, making a living off working at McDonald's and selling hand-copied cassettes. I knew Daniel Johnston from a day he showed up at the free weekly newspaper in Austin, where I was a college intern in early 1986 (!).
Daniel was obsessed with Jack Kirby and John Lennon, among other things, and I'm not likely to speak in public about the Beatles, but I can hold my own on the topic of comics and Daniel Johnston.
Here is your reminder if you live in NYC--tonight, Friday night, if you're a Daniel fan, come by and see us talk about Daniel at Jung Kim's photo exhibit. The exhibit is up until close of day Sunday and admission is free.
I swear I wasn't pulling Jay's tail. I don't know what was going on here.
I'm going to have to abandon catching the tuxedo feral this go-round. He won't go all the way in the trap because the less-feral cats are always glaring at him, ready to chase him off to protect their personal property (my patio, but don't tell them it's mine). I might have to invest in a drop trap.
And in second tuxedo cat news, I got a better look at him yesterday. If I give him a Flash name, we've already used Barry, Wally, Bart, and Jay. Maybe it's a she and she's Jesse.
It will surprise no one to learn there is a SECOND tuxedo cat frequenting the nun's yard. I think his ear is clipped though, so I don't have to catch him.
Hello, NYC-based friends!
Friday evening, I'll be joining Louis Black (SXSW, Austin Chronicle) and Lee Foster (Electric Lady Studios) in a conversation about Daniel Johnston, in honor of Jung Kim's newest book of Daniel Johnston photos, IS ALWAYS.
A number of Jung Kim's photos will be on display from Thursday to Sunday. There's no fee to get in, so everyone is on the guest list.
Bernie likes to show up when I'm unprepared, but I've convinced him that I am the person with the canned mackerel. He's gotten his nose inside the trap a few times, but has yet to go in it.
We're getting closer.
The plan is to wait for the tuxedo cat to go in the trap after smelling the canned mackerel bait, then wham.
But I have to first feed the other cats and then hope the tux cat shows up looking for their scraps. And hope I’m there watching. If I use the auto trigger, I’ll catch the wrong cat or possibly a raccoon.
I'm trying to trap a feral tuxedo cat who keeps spraying on the insulated kitty house.
I have a pretty good plan for how to catch the right cat (and not a neutered good boy, raccoon, or opossum), but I'm gonna need some stinky canned fish and a paper plate.
Advice overheard on the train:
“I’m 48 years old. My kid, he’s 19. Ha. I told him he needs 5 years in the military and a lifetime in the hood.”
Maybe that's true. Maybe it's just that I'm predisposed to overhearing this sort of thing, a writer in search of a line.
Saturday night, I drove my rented Sentra from Dante's Peak in Death Valley to the small town of Pahrump, Nevada, where I stopped for a coffee and some cell service.
Then I headed back to Vegas. After stopping by my hotel for a quick shower, I went to something called Meow Wolf, which I don't even know what that was. Not sure I'd recommend it, but the highlight was a type of installation that was basically off-brand Wacky Packages merchandise for sale in a fake 7-11. Like if you took stuff from Archie McPhee, Think Geek, and Brooklyn Superhero Supply Company and put it into a convenience store and called it an art installation.
The highlight of the evening was a guided nighttime tour of the Neon Museum. My first trip to Las Vegas was in 1990, I think. Maybe '89. Maybe '91, with fellow assistants at Marvel and one who'd moved to LA ahead of the rest of us. Our Dollar rental car three-cylinder Geo Metro gasped its way over the mountains from LA to the desert. I was working on a Conan letters page from the passenger seat on someone's borrowed laptop. Maybe Marc Siry's. (This was the same trip where he bought a green Karmann Ghia from a lot on LaBrea and drove it back East with David G. Wohl. They hit a vulture partway and the VW was never the same after that. I think Marc's boss Ralph loaned him the three grand to buy the car.)
I remember stopping by Vegas a few years later with Marie alice, and then it's a blur of short visits over decades, with the pirate and volcano installations being clues of changes to come. I'm vintage, apparently. (Last week involved a colleague telling me "There's no way you're 56, you seem so much younger" followed by a park ranger asking if I wanted a senior discount, so who the fuck knows anymore. More importantly, who cares. Every day is a good day, except the shitty ones. Those aren't good days.)
The Neon Museum features a bunch of classic signs, some working, mostly not, and a bit of Vegas history. I was uncomfortable passing so many signs I'd seen in action on my first trips to this living city monument to graft and consumerism. It's wild to think of how quickly the city evolved from when I'd first seen these signs on the Strip to now, when they are ancient history in a heap. Vegas is a good place to fly into in order to leave it, to go out into the desert or to national parks, but its overall aesthetic is a baffling combination of "that's awesome" and "bring on the comet already."
I loved the Neon Museum and recommend it--just go at night so you can see the signs in action.
Death Valley National Park on April 1, no foolin’.
Last time I went was 1999 and involved a bicycle. Driving a rental car was way easier.
Here’s how the whole tent thing works for me when I’m traveling solo. It's a lot like when I used to travel with Turbo, just he liked doing the work part, which sure made it easier on me.
