Last Saturday January 13, artists Hoshi Hana, Andy Robinson and I attended an art opening at a storefront gallery at Sunset Junction in the boho Silverlake district of Los Angeles. The gallery didn’t have a name, but it was next door and connected to a boutique named Pull My Daisy after a poem written in the late 1940s by Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady, from which a 1959 film was made. Hoshi Hana took all of these pictures, as my digital camera is on the fritz. Thank you, my dear!

S. Lee Robinson has hung many a show in her 22 year career as a painter, and this retrospective contains one or two paintings from each of her shows.

Meet S. Lee Robinson, as wonderfully warm as she is talented. Hoshi Hana and Andy know her from Gallery at the End of the World, a cooperative gallery of which they are all members.

Hoshi Hana and Andy at the opening.

Me, drinking a Pellegrino and cranberry juice and admiring “Big Boat.”

The DJ played danceable retro music, Bo Diddley, Michael Jackson, the Bee Gees. Only Hoshi Hana and I danced. I’m a baby boomer and can’t help it. Hoshi Hana’s just loose for a Gen X.

A merry throng, admiring the art, nibbling on olives and tomato pesto on baguette slices, sipping wine and soft drinks, laughing and chatting under the icicle lights.

Hoshi Hana’s friend since high school, Sheri Ozeki (in the hat), and a friend of Sheri’s.

The big yellow face got sold in the first hour of the opening! The bull was from an entire show of nothing but bulls, just as the big boat was from a show of all boats.

“Three Kings – Mars,” Andy’s favorite of the paintings in the show.

A drawing titled “Woman.”

The gallery opens into the Pull My Daisy store, offering a tantalizing view of its cloth monster. The shop is famous for its dachshund, Bingo, who cruises Sunset Junction begging for bacon. The photos on the dressing room door are of people in exotic locations around the world wearing Bingo the Dachshund t-shirts.

Alice Coltrane, a jazz performer and composer and wife of the late saxophone legend John Coltrane, has died. She was 69. Coltrane died Friday [January 12 2007] of respiratory failure at West Hills Hospital and Medical Center near Los Angeles, said her sister, Marilyn McLeod.

For nearly 40 years, Coltrane managed the archive and estate of her husband, a pivotal figure in the history of jazz. He died of liver disease in 1967 at age 40.

A pianist and organist, Alice Coltrane was noted for her astral compositions and for bringing the harp onto the jazz bandstand. Born Alice McLeod in Detroit on Aug. 27, 1937, she began learning classical piano at age 7. She studied jazz piano briefly in Paris before moving to New York, where she met her future husband in 1963.

At that time, she was playing with bandleader Terry Gibbs, who has often taken credit for introducing the two. John Coltrane “saw something in her that was beautiful,” Gibbs told the Los Angeles Times.

She left Gibbs’ band to marry Coltrane and began performing with his band in the mid-1960s. “John not only taught me how to explore but to play thoroughly and completely,” Alice Coltrane said in comments published in “The Black Giants.”

Please enjoy this vintage 16 mm film of Alice Coltrane.

On December 30, I had dinner with Shari Elf and Randy Palumbo in Joshua Tree, California, and afterwards visited their newly opened gallery, Art Queen.

Randy and Shari humored my request for a posed photo in one of the two gallery spaces they’ve created, next to one of Shari’s wryly witty folk-art-from-found-objects pieces.

Today they hung a show in one of the two gallery spaces by the late Raymond Thunder Sky.

Here’s the postcard they created to announce the show…

…with a photo of the artist in his clown collar and hard hat on the front.

A closeup of Raymond Thunder Sky’s costumes…

…and a closeup of one of his drawings.

On permanent display, in an old foto-mat building they hauled in from the desert and refurbished, is the Crochet Museum…

…housing Shari’s vast collection of crocheted animals and dolls. She doesn’t crochet herself; she just loves the “grandmother energy” of these creations. She finds them at thrift stores and garage sales, although, once her huge fan base realized she was collecting, crocheted gifts have poured in from everywhere.

Next to the Crochet Museum, an installation of garden sculptures by a desert folk artist who calls himself Moby Dick, who moved away to Phoenix. Shari and Randy had heard that his home was being sold, and they were concerned that the folk art environment Moby had created would get destroyed or thrown out by whoever bought the property, if they didn’t like it, so they went out, bought the whole collection, and set it up at Art Queen.

They’ve also set up a biodiesel filling station in back of the gallery (they both drive bio-diesel powered vehicles), and they have a band called Fairy Elf that performs locally. Here is one of Randy’s art pieces, titled “Condom Blossoms.” Randy owns 3D Laboratory, a construction company in New York City, plus a natural foods restaurant called Dodo Cafe in the South Street Seaport neighborhood of downtown New York City, and his art work has been shown in galleries and exhibitions around the country.

Shari enjoys an enormous following for her work, which she built up originally by selling her pieces at swap meets around Los Angeles, but which continues to grow as an online community forms around her wonderful website. When she posts her finished pieces on her site, there is a rapid scramble among the faithful and all are sold in a matter of hours.

Above is the sign she used at her table at the Santa Monica Airport Swapmeet back in the 1990’s, when she was escaping her former career as a seamstress.

This piece, photographed and printed on a postcard, announced Shari’s gallery show, “95% Trash,” in Kansas City at the Light Box Gallery a few years back.

Here are some of Shari’s pieces hanging in her studio, a separate small building at the Art Queen complex. Randy commented that he’d seen many art studios around New York City, but none as fun as Shari’s.

The All Star Seamstress Dogs (framed in spools of thread) commemorate Shari’s All Star Seamstress Band, in which she sings, plays guitar and omnichord, and is accompanied by percussionists playing sewing machines, scissors and pin boxes. You can hear her amazing songs on her CD (or download) I’m Forcing Goodness Upon You.

Says Shari about her choice of media: “It was, at first, for economy, but mostly because trash is more interesting. Searching for the stuff is like a treasure hunt.”

I hadn’t seen Karin Lease in a couple of years, but I love to visit her. She was my dear friend when we lived at Wheeler’s Ranch commune in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. She’s really something. As Anitash Designs, she makes fabulous costume jewelry and clothing. As Wyldflower Revolution, she’s renowned as an environmental activist.

The first morning I awoke at her house near Sebastopol, California, dawned bright and balmy, and I had no trouble convincing Karin to come with me to Wheeler’s Ranch for a walk in the forest. Once the only commune in the area, Wheeler’s Ranch is bordered on two sides by large communes, Oceansong and Star Mountain, and a third large communal land, Bodega Pastures, lies a few miles away to the south. This view is from the top of the land at Oceansong, looking south. Mount Tamalpais in Marin County is on the horizon.

We walked along the familiar forest road through Wheeler’s Ranch. Today the commune consists of a dozen households that pay rent to Bill Wheeler, who lives on the land and enjoys a considerable reputation in the San Francisco Bay Area as a plein air painter.

We stopped at Bill’s wonderful homebuilt cottage, built of his own hand-milled timber, and complete with stone fireplace and antiques from his Connecticut ancestors.

Bill Wheeler was surprised and happy to see us again. He said that a film crew was due any minute to interview him for a documentary, and that, no doubt, they would want to interview me as well.

Karl Ferris and his wife Melanie have a grant from the Canadian Film Board to make a documentary on bohemian life, and, yes, they knew about my book and were delighted to interview me. Happily, I had some of my books and CDs in my car, so that they would be able to use images from Living on the Earth and songs from Music From Living on the Earth in the film.

Karl took this famous photograph of The Jimi Hendrix Experience, and it’s on the business card he gave me.

Birgitta Bjerke, an Swedish fiber artist who lived at Wheeler Ranch a few years after I did, knows Karl and Melanie from their hippie days on Ibiza in the 1970’s. She introduced them to Bill Wheeler, and is accompanying the film crew making connections for other interviews as well. She remembered the scene in Ibiza. “It was all about the clothes. We didn’t know anything, but we were gorgeous.”

Birgitta gave me this photo of one of her amazing crocheted wall hangings, bought my book and CD, and regaled me with wonderful stories. I’m invited to visit her in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Below, she dances in one of her crocheted costumes in front of another crocheted wall hanging.  Her work makes me think of the mosaic art of Simon Rodia and of Antoni Gaudi.

I had fun doing the interview, and I’m told the film will be released next summer. Karin and I walked back up to my car at Oceansong in the waning light, happily illuminated by a fat full moon over the forest.