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Some friends had a baby, I drew some ice cream cones for them.

Angelica Kitchen

In the mid-90's, Angelica Kitchen was basically Ellis Island for me and so many other hardcore kids, artists, dreamers, and assorted hungry young strivers: move to the city, get a job in the juice bar at AK, and suddenly the city became yours. I know that storyline has been repeated for years since and for years before. Working there taught me tons about life, and more importantly, Angelica remains at the forefront of teaching people to eat and consume with care and consideration for the world. Go get a dragon bowl now--it's still a bargain.

As with so many other places in the city, AK is struggling with outrageous rent increases. Read more directly from AK here.

Lincoln Memorial on the Chronicle blog...

Back in April, Chronicle Books asked me to write a few words for their blog about my most recent book, Lincoln Memorial: The Story and Design of an American Monument. This request happily coincided with a celebratory trip to D.C. -- Chronicle posted my piece yesterday, you can check it out by clicking here.

The book, by the way, is widely available, and features great illustrations by Chad Gowey.

A Better Beast: In which monsters tell stories.

“I used to live in New York City. And in that town, in the course of my day-to-day business, one of my greatest joys was when I’d witness one quite obviously crazy person ask another quite obviously crazy person for directions. Like once this woman in a t-shirt that had an illustration of two Mickey Mouse gloves giving the ‘hang loose’ sign on it was sitting on a curb trying to light a cigarette, and another woman came up to her, started talking in a calculated whisper about how she had to short-sell some estate documents, and did she know how to get to Union Square, and yes it’s very hot, very hot, but she did need to get to Union Square because there really was only a limited time with these documents, you understand. People were waiting. To get to Union Square from where they stood, you quite literally just had to point north and say, ‘that way.’ Ten minutes later, I come out of the deli, they’re still at it. Hang Loose was insisting that an abscess tooth was nothing to fool over, life was too goddamned short.”