We — that is, my family of four — split a nice spring break between heatwaved Los Angeles and more temperate Santa Barbara last week. I managed to squeeze in a visit to The Last Bookstore, which I hadn’t visited since 2017.
I keep a little list of books and authors to search for; one of these is the long-out-of-print 1987 cult novel Xman by Michael Brodsky. I found it about two minutes in, under “B” (duh) in gen fic for the steep steep price of five U.S. dollars. I also picked up another James Crumely novel, part of the Vintage Contemporaries series.
We — that is my son and I — also visited Skylight Books (after an unexpected pilgrimage to the Figure 8 wall on Sunset — the mural from the cover of that Elliott Smith record — we were just walking by it and my son who is a Fan lost his shit). Skylight Books is very very cool, with a great selection of comix, art books, zines, &c., but I failed to pick anything up, mostly because I was hungry and cranky.
We also visited LACMA, where I was disappointed that the many of the paintings I had seen on my previous visit were not currently on display (including Georges de la Tour’s Magdalen with Smoking Flame which knocked my socks off when I saw it up close all those years ago).
There was a cool exhibit by the contemporary artist Tavares Strachan. One of the segment of the exhibit is a series of painted plates, several of which depict extinct species. I couldn’t help think of Thomas Pynchon’s riff on the poor dodo in Gravity’s Rainbow when I saw this plate:
Biblioklept 