If you’re in San Francisco, please come to my talk at the Cartoon Art Museum on March 11. You can buy advance tickets here, which I encourage you to do, because it will give them some sense of how many books they need to have on hand. (I’ll also be up in Santa Rosa at the Schulz Museum on the following Saturday.)
1966 Batman valentines
The Saga of Bob and Vlad, by John Scalzi and Tom Tomorrow
That time I wrote slashfic with a Hugo winner, here.
Foam core bookstore
In the early nineties, I used to do window displays for The Booksmith, on Haight St. in San Francisco. Recently ran across a couple shots of my late, lamented cat Kato exploring a foam core model of the store I was making for one display.
Somewhere around here I also have a shot of a Twin Peaks-themed window I did for them, because the nineties. (If you were a customer of the store in those days, and remember the giant, hand-painted recreation of the cover of Matilda that was displayed in back for a long time, that was another one of mine.)
Save the doggies!
There are four days left on the Doggie Diner head kickstarter:
These funny pups are leftover signage from the Doggie Diner, a now defunct local restaurant chain in the SF Bay Area. I and a handful of friends have been bringing these local darlings to charity events, parades, and art happenings for the last couple of decades at our own expense and for the sheer joy of it. I have been doing this because these local icons are the only things I know of that brighten the day of EVERYONE who sees them—every time—and for me, that is worth all the labor and expenses that I have poured into them over the years.
But, twenty years of hauling them around the Bay Area on a rickety trailer and 50 years in the sun has taken its toll, and restoring a vintage, 10-foot-tall, 300lb fiberglass and metal sculpture is complicated, labor intensive, and expensive—and we have three of them! Please help us restore the Doggie Diner heads back to their former glory, so we can continue to bring these mobile Bay Area mascots to civic, community, and art events for free for another 50 years!
They’re a roving landmark, a symbol of the vanishing San Francisco of artists and pranksters. They’ve even shown up in This Modern World a couple of times!
..adding: if they make the Kickstarter, there is a possibility the doggies will show up at my Cartoon Art Museum gig in March.
…update 2: Kickstarter funded! Hopefully we’ll see one or two of the doggies outside the Cartoon Art Museum on March 11!