i bought a wayne thiebaud children’s book today. thiebaud is one of my top artists next ed ruscha and bill viola. he makes dessert look so good!

incidentally the last kid’s book i bought (in adulthood) was Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs food theme a coincidence? hardly.

i think my attention span is shortening cause i’m buying books faster than i can read them. it’s frustrating and i don’t know what’s wrong with me. it doesn’t help that friends recommend me books they think i’ll really like and i buy them right away. i’ve been on this peter biskind book forever. i got it because i loved his book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls on 70s american cinema which was hysterical and i got to picture Robert Evans green-lighting big movies while on a massage table. it’s not like it’s boring- his writing is sharp and funny as hell, but i’m still slow. alexis recommended this cormac mccarthy book this past weekend called The Road that sounds amazing, so i bought that too. the last time she recommended me a book was a Harry Crews one and i read it in one sitting… back when i had a better attention span. if that’s not enough, i have 2 books i borrowed from friends months ago that I haven’t even started. and one of those books i borrowed from young and it’s the 2nd time i’ve borrowed it from him in the last 5 years. i also got this Emmanuel Todd book that James Wolcott hyped on his blog three damn years ago…3 out of the 5 bush administration officials he mentioned in that piece have resigned since! it kills me when i hear about people reading a book a week. i really think the internet screwed me up bookwise. somebody needs to lock up my computer for a month.

brain injuries from a fall…. jesus that’s sad. but he did lived longer than most expected.

when i was 19 or 20 i burned many of those hilarious drawings out of breakfast of champions onto a small wood box and gave it to a boyfriend who was a kurt vonnegut fanatic (and a champion stoner). i wish i still had that. i still laugh when i think of the phrase ‘wide open beavers’ including his illustrated interpretation of that. also in high school i made a puppet movie inspired by his writing for my english final project. i think vonnegut was probably one of the first ever authors that i got into seriously and made me actually want to read during a period where a majority of my idle time was spent either watching tv or- watching tv. my attention span was short as hell, more than your average teenager i think. vonnegut taught me how to read… for fun? the concept was so foreign to me as a person who was (and mostly still is) visually stimulated.

anyway, rest in peace to a damn funny pessimist. (and so on.)

Some more scanned HQ pages. this is another one from Albert Cullum published in 1978 titled Blackboard, Blackboard on the Wall, Who is the Fairest One of All?

i decided to start a Harlin Quist category because i have enough of these books to scan. this entry is from “You Think That Just Because You’re Big, You’re Right” by Albert Cullum. this is an insanely dark HQ book and really depressing. the girl’s mom is an alcoholic, she has no friends blah blah blah. but the illustrations are seriously mindblowing:

cover

too many rules

bourgeous broad being hit in the head with a pie

mum letting loose

and one i don’t know how to explain

I scanned some pictures i thought were cute from The Endless Party by Etienne Delessert, one of my Harlin Quist books. Basically the story goes “One day all the animals got an invitation to a boat party. It was from some guy named Noah…”

I’ll probably scan more in the next coming weeks to show you how cool these children’s books are.

the sun doing a nixon impression?

four-eyed snake

animals playing dominoes at the party with ladybugs

worm eating ice cream

Aside from public enemy and movies like boyz in the hood having an influence on me in my early years, books published by Harlin Quist were a big part of my childhood as well. My oldest sister Lily went abroad to europe when she was 19 for a summer and brought me back a bunch of these awesomely strange and psychedelic childrens books.

From a fan site:

Harlin Quist was an American book publisher who set a new standard of excellence in children’s book publishing during the late 1960’s.
From 1966-1984, Quist published over sixty children’s books, featuring some of the finest European and American authors and illustrators. Quist’s books helped establish the careers of many young artists, and brought a quirky and original look to childrens’ book publishing.

The stories were about everything from a girl who climbs through her television into a disturbing world to a wooden doll adopting a human child to a caterpillar who believes he’s a mustache. they were so bizarre and imaginative and the illustrations were brilliantly surreal and bordering on nightmarish (if you were a kid). looking at them now, it’s hard to believe that children were its intended audience because they are so druggy and fear and loathing-like. but they are awesome and i wish that they were easier to find these days. check out the whole list of books here.

I bought a used copy of The Barbary Coast recently (the lame reprint that has Gangs of New York on it) recently and realized that the book is public domain and available online here. I highly recommend it. It was written in 1933 and although the style of writing is a bit dated and very un-P.C. at times, it is a VERY fascinating and entertaining read about the scandalous San Francisco underworld around the gold rush.

one of my favorite excerpts involves Samuel Brannan (as in Brannan St), Brigham Young’s main rep in NY. Brannan voyaged out to the West with a bunch of Mormon peeps hoping to settle a big Mormon camp out in SF, but Young wasn’t having it and was firm on Utah. Brannan continued pursuing his goals in SF anyway, and Young would try to shake him down:

He declined to recognize the authority of Brigham Young, although he continued for several years to collect tithes regularly from the members of his flock. During the gold rush, when many California Mormons became wealthy, these amounted to considerable sums. None of this money was ever remitted to the Church at Salt Lake City, and when Brigham Young made formal demand for “the Lord’s share,” and also for a share of Brannan’s personal earnings, Brannan retorted that he would pay upon a written order signed by the Lord, and not otherwise. According to Asbury Harpending, an associate of Brannan’s in various business enterprises, Brigham Young several times dispatched his holy gunmen, better known as Destroying Angels, to San Francisco to deal with Brannan and collect the money by force. But the Angels were invariably met in the desert, and their wings clipped, by Brannan’s “exterminators,” fighting men whom he is said to have employed as a bodyguard for half a dozen years.

the idea of “holy gunmen” being sent out to extort money on God’s behalf is so funny to me. there are tons of juicy (and probably sexed up) anecdotes like this in the book. check it out

crips and bloods

in 6th grade one of my assignments was to write and illustrate my very own book. i decided to write about a spoiled affluent girl named Mary whose mom sends her to Compton to learn about the “real world” after she throws her escargot plate at the wall. during this journey of personal epiphanies, she witnesses gang violence, crack being dealt to kids her age, corrupt & lazy cops, and prostitution. Needless to say, concerned Mrs. Celedon brought this up to my mom at the PTA meeting.

Here are a few excerpts:

hooker and john

inside title page (that’s a knife)

teaser page
confrontation
good night, mary
escargot page
lazy cops page
the waldorf astoria?
about the author