The Los Angeles Visionary Association, founded and directed by art historians Kim Cooper and Richard Schave (who are also the owners and operators of the amazing Esotouric), has been holding monthly salons for nearly two years at historic Clifton’s Cafeteria in downtown Los Angeles. I’ve been a member since the beginning, but this was the first time I’ve managed to attend a salon. It was wonderful fun.

The opening event was a set of original songs performed by the Ukulady, Thessaly Lerner, and her band (on mandolin and electric autoharp). The Ukulady evolved her act during her years as a student and then a teacher at Wavy Gravy’s Camp Winnarainbow Circus and Performing Arts Camp in Northern California.

Next up was a slide show lecture by the gorgeously attired Dr. Paul Koudounaris, professor of art history at California State University Dominguez Hills, to introduce his book The Empire of Death, a lavish collection of his photos and research on the world’s forgotten charnel houses, ossuaries, and reliquaries.

After the salon, we all trooped out after Richard Schave and Nathan Marsak, who gave us a rousing walking tour and lecture on Victorian Los Angeles.

I particularly loved this wonderful old building and our guides’ tale of how it was saved from destruction by fire by a brave and dedicated elevator operator.

Kim pointed out that the building's elevator grills had little demon’s heads in the filigree.

Even the view out the side door of this building offered a dream scene.

Downtown Los Angeles fascinates with unapologetic Victorian grandeur, …

…ambitious, passionate murals,…

…and unexpected entertainers (that’s a banjo player on a bicycle trailer).

On December 15, 2010, FM YOKOHAMA’s beloved radio personality Mitsumi aired her interview of me on her show “Ine! Good for You!” She translates my answers to the interview into Japanese, but you can still hear some of what I said in English. If you speak Japanese, you will have even more fun listening to the show. It’s 17 minutes and 14 seconds long.  You can listen to it here.

May 13, 2011. Today the t-shirt and towel that I illustrated (both designed by Aiko Shiratori of environmentalist non-for-profit arts organization Artist Power Bank in Shibuya, Tokyo) were posted for sale on their Kurkku shop website. Both items are fundraisers for the survivors of the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disasters, and will be sold at the annual music festival Artist Power Bank produces each summer to raise money for its projects.

On each of the webpages, if you scroll down, you’ll find my statements of intention, in both English and Japanese, which I wrote in response to a request from Artist Power Bank.

Here’s the t-shirt web page.

Here’s the towel web page.

OK, birthday candles are in order. The 40th anniversary of the first edition of Living on the Earth (The Bookworks, Berkeley CA) was in September 2010. The 40th anniversary of the bestselling second edition of Living on the Earth (Vintage Books, Random House, NYC) was in April 2011. It’s still in print as a hardbound library edition. The 40th anniversary of  Mariko Fukamachi's translation of Living on the Earth (Soshisha Ltd., Tokyo) was in April 2012. It’s still in print as a paperback book.

It sold somewhere in excess of 350,000 copies, and it’s still selling in English and Japanese, and maybe still in Korean. I heard a rumor that the Provos in Amsterdam made a bootleg translation back in the 1970s (I’ve never seen one of those either, but I would LOVE to have one if it exists!!)

LOTE’s illustration and design style was so revolutionary when it first came out that Publishers Weekly devoted two pages to acknowledging this with an article in handwriting, illustrated with drawings selected from LOTE. I scanned and posted the PW piece here.

LOTE’s illustration and book design begat The Massage Book (and the Random House/Bookworks series), The Moosewood Cookbook series, The Vegetarian Epicure series, Handbook for Survival into the 21st Century, and numerous others. More recently, motivational writer/speaker SARK told me that Living on the Earth’s illustration and design had helped launch her graphic style as well.

Soshisha, Ltd, in Tokyo released a Japanese translation in 1972, with a blurb on the cover from Japan’s poet laureate, Shuntaro Tanikawa. It says, “I want to do everything in this book. If I can’t do everything in this book, then I want to dream about it, because I know that if I do, I will be a better person to the marrow of my bones.”

Tokyo fashion designer Aya Noguchi (her company is Balcony & Bed) and I have been collaborating for five years now, so, when the Tohoku triple disaster struck, we agreed to collaborate on a garment to raise money for the people stranded in the shelters, both of us donating all of whatever we would have made from this project.

I asked Aya to send me a few of the resulting shirts to sell in the USA, so that my friends could both donate to help the survivors and enjoy one of our collaborative pieces.

The jersey shirts are half cotton, half lyocell, an environmentally friendly and nontoxic wood pulp fabric, also known as tencel. Aya intentionally made a diagonal hem at the bottom, and blended illustrations and text from Being of the Sun with a newer drawing of a bird from a notebook of drawings she commissioned from me in 2009. She added appliqué daisies to the finished shirts after silk-screening on the art.

The t-shirt size would be a men’s medium or a woman’s large. I have both gray and black shirts.

Aya’s price tag says 10,000 yen (about $123). Shipping within the USA is $5, $7 to Canada, $11 elsewhere. You can send me payment via Paypal or by postal money order. Please send me an email or a Facebook message, and I’ll send you the information you need to complete your purchase and donation.

Upon receipt of your payment of $123 plus postage, I will make a $123 donation in your name to United Earth, and enclose a copy of the international bank wire transfer when I mail your shirt. United Earth is a Japanese social action collective that formed in response to the 1994 Kobe earthquake, and offers long-term support for rebuilding, in addition to donations of supplies to survivors and aid workers, in Japanese communities destroyed by earthquakes. Donations to United Earth are not tax deductible in the USA.

The hot weather is coming back, and it’s time for another cool vegan protein recipe.

Kim cheese was inspired by a spread I tasted at the Maui Four Seasons Hotel’s restaurant about 20 years ago. Theirs was a spread served with thin slices of a dense, dark bread with walnuts in it, and it was made from cream cheese, mayonnaise and kim chee, Korea’s fiery pickled Napa cabbage. Pacific fusion cuisine, I guess. I liked it.

I already knew I could make a vegan sour cream or cottage cheese by blending tofu, Veganaise and ume vinegar in the food processor. So I added kim chee to this, and liked the result.

I realized, though, with the sour and salty ume vinegar and the pungent kim chee, I didn’t need the extra flavor of the Veganaise, and I substituted olive oil, and liked it even better.

I use this spread on baked potatoes, steamed cauliflower, puffed brown rice cakes, cucumber slices, or whole grain pasta.

I vary the consistency from dense to runny by the type of tofu I use. Extra firm tofu makes a thick spread, better for crackers or cucumber slices. Silken tofu makes a runny sauce to pour over pasta or vegetables.

Here are the ingredients:

One 8 ounce block of tofu (from organic, non-GMO soybeans. SprouTofu’s my fave.)
One 8 ounce jar of spicy kim chee (preferably organic, certainly without MSG)
2 tablespoons of organic extra virgin olive oil
2 teaspoons of ume vinegar (Japanese plum vinegar, made from the pickling of unripe plums. It is salty. You can skip it if you are avoiding salt. You can certainly add more if you prefer a saltier taste to your kim cheese.)

Place them all in a food processor and blend until smooth. Chill until serving.

I’ve done a lot of art collaborating in Japan via internet this year, thanks in great part to my art agent, Keisuke Era, who is also the director of Kurkku, an arts and environmental action center in the Harajuku district of Tokyo. Kurkku is funded by Artist Power Bank, a not-for-profit with impressive environmental protection projects like Pre Organic Cotton.

POC is an organization that approaches cotton farmers in India and offers to support them for the three years it takes to transition from petro-chemical agriculture to organic agriculture, inspect their farms to be sure the soil and plants are chemical-free and healthy, and then buy all the cotton they grow from that time onward. POC then approaches major clothing manufacturers and sells them organic cotton. Lee Jeans Japan made a line of women's jeans from POC’s organic cotton this past year, and when they did, I was hired to illustrate a booklet that was attached to each pair of jeans. (Major advantage: some villages in India no longer have carcinogens in their water supply and in the air surrounding their cotton fields.) Here's the cover of the booklet:

When Artist Power Bank (aka ap bank) held their annual summer rock festival in 2009, I was hired to design a jacquard towel and a t-shirt drawing as festival merchandise, and, of course, both were made of organic cotton.

Here is the 2010 festival towel, designed by Aiko Shiratori of Artist Power Bank, using a drawing she requested from me of a large flower (I made an Echinacea blossom).  Keisuke said the festival looked like a field of yellow and blue flowers, so many of the attendees had them wrapped around their shoulders.

Kurkku’s merchandise designers, Miyumi Ichikawa and Yoshiko Takeuchi decided to have a traditional tenugui maker in Kyoto print some tenugui for them on Pre Organic Cotton’s fabric, and commissioned a design from me for it. They requested an image of a little girl playing in the woods. Here it is:

Here are my collaborators. The gentleman on the left is Keisuke Era. On the right side, in the red shawl is Kurkku's Miyumi Ichikawa and, to her left, Yoshiko Takeuchi. Next to them, in very dark blue, is Aiko Shiratori, who designed the merchandise for Artist Power Bank’s festival this year.

This is an information sheet on the tenugui. It explains that the image was printed in four different traditional colors: pine green, the brown of bamboo shoot, the yellow of “silver grass” and pink of a flower called “Sakichiku.”

A few blog posts ago, I promised that when the shawl and pouch I illustrated for Sony artist Yuki’s 2010 tour were available for viewing on line, I would share them with you. So I am happy to say, here they are!

This is the artist herself holding on her head a pouch shaped like one of my birds, printed with part of the illustration I made for the shawl that she described and I drew. It’s lined with lavender satin, and embroidered with metallic gold thread.

Here she is, wrapped in her own poetry and the images she suggested to me, in a long and lovely natural gauze shawl. The images on the shawl are from the poem (actually a song lyric) which she wrote in English, and which I wrote in my handwriting into the images on the shawl.  As of today, October 26, 2010, the shawl has completely sold out.

Here’s the whole webpage, for closer inspection.

Here's a Youtube of Yuki singing in a set right out of The Little Prince.

I realized tonight that this is the second time I've seen my drawings adorn a Japanese pop star.  The first time was in 2007, when the duo Puffy Amiyumi was photographed for a teen fashion magazine, and one of them wore a Living on the Earth print dress by Aya Noguchi.

The autobiographical patchwork crazy quilt that I made between 1967 and 1974 will be on display in the lobby of the historic Mills Building in downtown San Francisco from October 18, 2010 to January 15, 2011 as part of a show called “Still Crazy,” which includes Victorian and 20th century crazy quilts, loaned by the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles. Deborah Corsini, curator at SJMQT, created the show. If you are in San Francisco, please come see it!

The piece is 8 feet high and 5 feet wide, and contains "guest embroideries" by author Ray Mungo and composer/author Ramon Sender, as well as a small piece by Santa Cruz quilter Charlotte Lyons, who lived at Wheeler Ranch commune when I was writing and illustrating Living on the Earth.

Curator Deborah Corsini wrote:

"Alicia Bay Laurel's crazy quilt is an excellent example of a 20th century crazy quilt from the decades of the 1960s - 1970s.  It is composed of a multitude of irregularly shaped fabrics, many typical of the time period.  There are large scale printed florals and smaller ditsy prints as well as embroidered and woven lace.  Many of the blocks contain unique and personal appliqued and embroidered scenes.  Some examples that clearly reflect on the universal (and astrological) themes that were of interest at the time are a God's eye and embroidered solar system, a bull (her sun sign), and a flying lion (for Leo rising in her natal chart.)  Other blocks charmingly depict the Sausalito houseboat where she lived in 1967 and her guitar with "real" strings.  Like the crazy quilts of the 19th century, the one is filled with symbolic and personal references, and clearly references the cultural influences that were surrounding her.  Most importantly, this quilt has an embroidered date, 1967 - 1974, and an embroidered signature, Alicia bay laurel, which gives it true authenticity.

"...it is especially compelling because it is the authentic handiwork of a well-known woman, artist, author and creative spirit from that extraordinary 'hippie' time.  Alicia Bay Laurel's crazy quilt is an excellent example of the continuum of the crazy quilt's evolution and is a singular artifact by a multi-talented artist as a part of her early creative output and rich legacy."

Here I am on the last day of the show, January 14, 2011 with my quilt.  You might find a few differences between this one and the one at the photo at the top, which was taken in 2002.  That's because the quilt suffered some damage in 2008 and has since been expertly restored by Karen Stern at her quilt and textile restoration studio in Berkeley.