An interview with artist/pyromaniac Cai Guo-Qiang.
I’ve reached another Twitter milestone: Pico Union Pawn is now following my work account. Word is you can score a Gucci watch there for a song.
Please have this on the shelves, Los Angeles Public Library. I really want to read it now, thanks to Elisabeth Donnelly.
I woke up hungover the other Saturday. It was just a mild headache, a low-level pain easily vanquished with a cup of coffee and a few glasses of water. But the hangover was special to me all the same, because I’d made it myself. The night before, a few months after buying five gallons of unpasteurized apple cider from an orchard east of Los Angeles, I got drunk for the first time off of my homemade booze.
I wrote about my failures and successes in making booze over at The Awl.
The Story of the Creepy Old Public Storage High Rise on Beverly and Virgil
The roof contained two speakeasies, both of which were raided by Prohibition officers.
Oh how I love when the internet answers the questions that keep me up at night! I”ve been consistently wondering about this building, which I live a few blocks away from, for nearly two years.
Not Taken with Instahiptamaticgram
I need a Hipstamatic photo of myself for work, but I don’t have an iPhone. This need led me to Google Photoshop guides and other “hacks” for recreating Hipstamatic filters, which is when I re-realized how far up it’s own ass the internet and digital culture is. Light leaks, blown-out color, rugged black frames on photos—shit, even Polaroids!—they all used to be real things, and not even that long ago.
When I used to print photos in high school and collage, I wished I had my own negative holder that I could file down to create those same irregular, rugged black frames, or experimented with transparent overlays I stomped on and scratched and scored to give the prints a worn look. Those were analog means of stylizing wear or mistakes or age, but they were still tactile. Mimicking mimicry in Photoshop instead of using an app on an iPhone? That’s just absurd.
Still, I think I figured out how to do it, to take that Hipstamatic photo I need without Hipstamatic.
