Varanasi. I don't know....in this context....I think it's hard to look macho.

This is a list of books that were allegedly written by one Kilgore Trout as compiled (with a plot synopsis for each) in the books Breakfast of Champions and Godbless You, Mr. Rosewater, which were definitely written by one Kurt Vonnegut. I place them here now because at one point, the wanton display of story ideas, dreamt up, attributed and then tossed away by Mr. Vonnegut was the primary reason I believed I would never be a writer. I may have had the ability to turn a phrase or two but without the ideas that apparently overflowed from a true writer's brain, I would never be more than an editor.

• This Means You
• Barring-gaffner of Bagnialto or This Year's Masterpiece
• The Dancing Fool
• Hail to the Chief
• How You Doin'?
• Now It Can Be Told
• The Pan-Galactic Straw Boss; Alternate titles: Pan-Galactic Memory Bank, Mouth Crazy
• Plague on Wheels
• The Smart Bunny
• The Son of Jimmy Valentine
• 2BR02B
• The First District Court of Thankyou
• Oh Say Can You Smell?
• The Pan-Galactic Three-Day Pass
• Venus on the Half-shell

This information was culled from The Invisible Library, the link to which was culled from Textism.

After all this link copying and getting excited I can't remember why I started searching for this stuff. Oh, wait, I have browser history. Ok, I was looking for pictures of juniper tree sculptures in the Sunset district and I came across a painting of the Sunset and boom, I thought of Robert Bechtle. He's my favorite painter. I used to have about 30 postcards of his Alameda Gran Torino, in my house arranged so that no matter where your eyes landed while you were in my house, there would be a station wagon somewhere in your visual field. People used to come out of the bathroom after staring at it while they pissed and say, "Did you know that you have pictures of a station wagon all over your house?" Then immediately, they'd go, "Oh, I guess you do since you live here." I had that postcard before I had an apartment here in SF. I used to go to the art museum to spend the afternoon looking at it. I loved watching other people enjoy it. There are two great paintings in SFO near boarding gate 72 (United Airlines). Check those out when you're waiting for a flight.

I've compiled a bunch of links. Hey! It's my Robert Bechtle FAN PAGE!

OK Harris has a good page on photorealists and the painting Marin Avenue-Late Afternoon.

This is a sweet big one of '58 Rambler

'61 Pontiac, 1968-69, oil on canvas, 59 3/4 x 84 1/4 inches (151.8 x 214 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, NY.

Karlsruhe University has two nice early ones: '60s Chevies, 1971

26 of his paintings all available through Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco using GridPix. Click anywhere within the image to zoom. The zoom function works up to a maximum of 16x the original image size. It's sooo rad. I love "Santa Barbara Patio" and "Albany Monte Carlo". Too bad there's no "Alameda Gran Tourino"

Oakland Museum exhibit last year. Can't believe I missed it.

Another story on the Oakland show with examples.

This one has Sunset Intersection, 1984. A gorgeous 3 panel streetscape.

You can actually buy these limited edition prints.

A portfolio at CSU Long Beach

Six paintings at artnet.com

WHEW!

I whipped out the chunk of paper in my front pocket tonight and it was my bus pass. It said OCT31 on it. Good till approx 6pm. October thirty first. I thought, isn't this date significant to me? It seemed like it should be but I couldn't remember. Then I looked at Marcie and said, "Today was the day I came to San Francisco. It's my tenth anniversary." Ten years ago today I went to the Nirvana Mudhoney show at the Paramount in Seattle and stayed up all night at Eben's house and walked with my backpack and guitar down to the bus stop in downtown Seattle to get on the Green Tortoise. I stood in line with a man in a light blue windbreaker (it was about 40 degrees outside) who would turn out to be my "buddy" for the trip. They use the buddy system. Turned out that the guy in the windbreaker was the first of many crazy people I would meet in the next ten years. Everybody on the bus pitied me because my buddy was fresh out of Western State Mental Hospital. Ten fuckin years. That's it. No need for estimating. Right on the money.

This is the Om Flambe Mothership in action. I've said it before, this was the most beautiful shelter at Burning Man. I'm going to do some other nice videos where you can see the canopy better. This one's just for arty effect.

The Mothership in the Evening :2 seconds or download 260 kb

Juniper trees. Florida street.

This is a stupid little rant about dressing up in costumes. The gist of it is: costumes bore me. The fascination that my city and my peers have with dressing up in costumes is inordinate. It wasn't very intriguing before coming here in my early twenties but living in San Francisco has aggravated my disinterest into rebelliousness. The Number One Holiday in San Francisco is Halloween. Nothing else comes close. They make a big deal about Christmas on TV but that's only for the advertising. Halloween is the explosion of all the extrovert tendencies that plague most of the citizens here.

Oh sure, I reap the benefits from it -- freakwatching is one of my favorite sports and there's a pretty reliable supply of street fashion to be had. You could say that any of the other 364 days in San Francisco would rival the One Hallowed Eve of many other towns in America for weirdness. I love the diversity. But nobody seems to notice the point where our diversity turns into orthodoxy.

I think I finally witnessed my share of costumery at Burning Man. I went for the first time this year and was surprised at the focus being so much on putting on funny clothes and taking X and going dancing in the dirt. A costume rave? This was what was supposed to change your life? It seemed especially ironic to me when I realized that the people who where there were already so weird and the situation was so extreme. I mean, goddamn it, we were doin' it. It's enough to be out there. Dressing up was just providing a little extra eye candy for the folks. No need to feel selfish if you weren't doing it. You didn't build a gigantic sectional bus that looked like a dragon and had a DJ in the tail either. And besides, who you tryin to impress by wearing a feather boa in the desert?

Was the dress-up just following? I couldn't tell but I had a hunch that some of the old-school "core" BM people had indirectly, coercively, in a high-schoolish kind of way, imposed their specific brand of freakiness on the whole thing. I think I know who they are and I can see their trademark. This is getting off the subject of costumes a little bit, but I took issue with the whole "burning man aesthetic". (I later found out from a woman I met named Maya (a bitchin graffiti artist) that her art (big donuts with pink paint-icing dripping down) had been censored by the curators committee because it didn't conform to this aesthetic.)

I was an instant critic. It wasn't a whole new unique world to me. It was a transplant of every art-futuro-punk party I've ever been to in SF. I've been to a lot of those because I like them. I like the spectacle, I like the cybergeek smashup derby carnival a lot. But at Burning Man, the whole "there are no spectators" nazi crap makes everyone nervously strap on a dildo or put on a cowboy hat so they won't look like spectators. "Oh no, we're not RV spectator trash tryin to peep some titties, we're real burners, dude." Ok, so it started to look conformist instead of expressive to me. That's what bugged me. Burning Man is essentially the same thing as Halloween: both big parties with San Francisco-style dress codes.

So with so many people dressing up for Halloween (and the adults here only get dressed up to go to parties) I feel like saying "Fuck that. I'm wearing what I usually wear to parties. If I feel like dressing up, I'll have plenty of chances to do it at one of the other 50 parties I go to in a year." Better to wait till you have a real costume idea and some real spunk to make it work than force yourself to half-ass some "well, at least I didn't come in my street clothes" excuse for a costume. I mean, come on.

Sounds like sour grapes, right? Like I'd be telling all the little kiddies about Santa Clause if I had the chance, right? Like I'm just complaining because I didn't have any good (realizable) costume ideas this year. Fuckit. I like Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July. Halloween is just on the other side of the calendar from St. Patrick's day. It's amateur night. Get on the fake trolley, get belligerent, try to get laid with your (cat suit if you're a girl) (vampire getup if you're a guy) boring costume and go back to your office job. I hate you.