This is a water color and ink picture that I made a long time ago, but I only just wrote the words on it today. I had it hanging above my computer for months while I was trying to figure out what she was saying. Then I finally heard her. I guess I hadn't been listening hard enough.
The same thing happened before with this dog.
I hung him up above my bed for 6 months before I heard him. I finally noticed him.
He was purchased by art collector Susan Hancock at my show at Billy Shire Fine Arts. I miss him very much. Although he is a two dimensional dog, we got to be very close. Sometimes I would pet him, and his oil pastel fur would come of on my fingers. I miss those days.
Last night I walked into the driveway of my apartment in Los Angeles to see this giant mouse sitting on a brick fence. He was the size of a cat and he was just sitting there looking at me. His tail was thick and long. He didn't move at all. I thought maybe he had come to tell me something very important. I wasn't sure what to do. I had never seen such a giant mouse. Was he a kind of monster mouse? What had he been eating?
I had a mix of feelings. He was quite handsome and I wanted to pet him, but I was also very afraid that he might have come to take over the human world and turn it into a kind of monster mouse paradise.
I called the police and firetrucks but none of them came. I thought maybe I was just imagining the monster mouse, or hallucinating. Maybe someone had put a kind of special drug in the Sea Chicken Onigiri that I had eaten for dinner.
I videotaped him to make sure it was reality. When I woke up this morning, I checked the video to see if I had just had a dream.
October 6th is the new Earthworks show at Shojin with art by me, Remi February, David Neptune and more. Hopefully Remi-chan will also be at the opening, so anyone who wants to come can meet both of us:)
David Neptune will be back home in Japan but his very nice photos will be hanging up to make you happy.
The theme of this show is "Collaboration". All pieces must be made by more than one person.
My piece is this water color that I made a few weeks ago with my friend BPPB. I put it in the blog a while ago already. BPPB drew the body of the octopus and I filled in words and face. The above is the framed version with a black pastel matte that I made. It is $38.
When I moved from Shimane to Los Angeles to start searching for Jonathan and Linda Smith, I did not think it would be hard to find coffee. In bigger Japanese cities you can find all kinds of high quality coffee. A lot of times you can find a small shop run by a person who only cares about coffee. Usually a Japanese coffee shop will have different country's coffees that you can choose...Ethiopian, Guatemalan, Costa Rica, Kona etc. In America, I noticed that you can usually only get one kind of coffee and sometimes they don't tell you what coffee it is...or it is a blend. I had a very hard time to find good coffee in Los Angeles. Most of the coffee in a LA coffee shop is watery or tastes old, like the beans have been sent to live in an old-age rest home. Those beans have forgotten how to be delicious. Finally I have found two good coffee shops in Los Angeles. These pictures are from Intelligentsia. It's a funny coffee shop in Venice beach, on Abbot Kinney Blvd. It doesn't look like a coffee shop so much. It looks like a kind of futuristic robot beverage factory. This is the kind of factory where robots go to get their oil or robot fluid refilled. The seats are set up so that you look down on the shop, or you can sit at the entrance so you are watching people walk in. My friend did not like it because she felt like she is in a zoo and everyone is watching her. I did not feel bad about it, because I like going to the zoo, and if the zoo also has good coffee then I am okay. When you walk in, you can tell that they care about coffee. They have three country's coffees on the menu. El Salvador, Guatemala and Costa Rica. These are favorites of mine :)
This is my cappuchino. I only wish they would have made a nice kitty kat face in the foam. But it was still good.
My other favorite coffee place is The Conservatory in Culver City. They roast beans their everyday. That is where I buy mine. They also have really yummy coffee for sale. It is located next to Sony, so maybe you can have coffee with Adam Sandler. Today he is celebrating Yom Kippur though, so he might not be there.
Last year, I wrote a song about coffee and showed lots of coffee shop signs in Japan and made a video. I hope you will watch it if you haven't seen it yet.
This morning while I was surfing I was thinking about monsters again. I think about monsters a lot. I was thinking mostly about King Kong and also a little bit about Godzilla. I was wondering what their hobbies are. Usually you can only see them running around stomping on things with their big monster feet. That is their job, but after work, maybe they play baseball, or surf, or look at their stamp collection. The waves today were only 2-3 ft (1 meter). They would be too small for Godzilla and King Kong. They would only come up to King Kong's monkey toe. Kong and Godzilla would need 60 foot waves just to surf head high. There are only a few places in the world with waves that big, and they only break a few times each year. So, King Kong and Godzilla would have to travel all over the world and neither of them can fly, and they are too big to fit in a 747 and too poor to buy a ticket anyway. They would have to swim and by the time they got to the spot, the waves might have gotten smaller, or they might be too tired and cold. They would also need a 60 foot surfboard, or maybe 90 feet if they wanted a longboard. It would take a lot of trees or fiberglass to make it. They would have to hire a lot of people to build it, and neither of them have a job because of the recession.
Sometime I make a list with two columns "why I want to be a monster"and "why I don't want to be one". This is one of the reasons why I would not want to be a monster.
