February 8, 2014
The kids are in town for a picture. It's Grandma Betty's 90th birthday and she wants a photo of all the Radinas, so Deena, Mike and Weston flew in from Pasadena at 10:30 yesterday and I met them at El Encanto for lunch, then Kathy and I cruised into the Beast at seven last night to pick up Thomas Charles and Pattarapa coming in from Baltimore. We then motored over to share some mohcajete with Bill Glenn:
L-R: Bill Glenn, T Charles, Pattarapan and Kathy in the back room of Mariscos Playa Hermosa on 16th Street and Garfield, I think it is. The mohcajete is the stone dish in center full of steamy meats and fish. Really pretty spectacular. From there we stopped at La Frontera, a taco truck T Bell is fond of and loaded up with extras for the ride home and for his sis Deena who was at the house.
Sig 6 In The Can
We handed in Sig 6 of "The 66 Kid" yesterday which means half the book is in the can. Here's Command Central at six this morning as I strategize on the last half of the book.
The yellow pages are the first six signatures of the book and as you can see, they are marked done, even though we will probably make another dozen passes at them, tweaking and adding and subtracting. Checking out Sigs 7 thru 12 (bottom sheet with notes in red): that's LA artist Ed Ruscha peeking out from behind my current sketchbook. He's the "faux-naif funny man of American art," and he's the dude who published the tongue-in-cheek book "Twenty Six Gasoline Stations" and one of them, shot randomly on a trip from LA to OK was the Flying A truckstop my father ran for a time in the mid-sixties. Want to get that detail in the book.
I realized yesterday, this whole project is a giant jigsaw puzzle.
"I wanted to be out of Oklahoma."
—Ed Ruscha, answering the question of what his goals were when he was growing up