I’ve got a photo in the Nob Hill Gazette today right next to a recipe for Nepenthe’s Chocolate Fudge Cake! SCORE!
#winning

The Tree Had Better Shit to Do: Sesame Street's Accidental Beckett and the Puppets Who Made Existentialism Sing Sesame Street's Waiting for Elmo: Monsterpiece Theater's brilliant Waiting for Godot parody. How Muppets brought existentialism to children's television, and the tree quit.

Sesame Street once made a Waiting for Godot sketch with Muppets. Telly and Grover waiting for Elmo. Existential dread in felt form.

And then the tree got up and left to sing show tunes.
The furniture tapped out. That tree is all of us.
🔗 jamescharleslyons.com/muppets-wait...

#SamuelBeckett #Sesame

and what crawled out is stranger and more honest than anything Hollywood ever had the guts to attempt
#CriterionCollection #DeadMan #JimJarmusch #RobbyMuller #NeilYoung

Neil Young's guitar doesn't score this film, it ATTACKS it, howling at the void like a wounded animal that refuses to die. Jarmusch and Müller took the Western out back and put a bullet in it...

Robby Müller burns this world down in black and white because color was always too polite for the truth... Dead Man is a shot of mescal and a knife in the ribs, Blake lurching through a fever dream America that was ALWAYS already a rotting corpse.

Sophocles Nausicaä at Pillar Point Site-specific performance of Sophocles Nausicaa fragments at Pillar Point, exploring the mythic encounter between Nausicaa and Odysseus on the beach overlooking Mavericks. Pillar Point history from Oh...

Two lines. All that survived of Sophocles' Nausicaä. So we took those fragments to Pillar Point at Mavericks and performed them on a beach that's been Ohlone sacred ground, a shipwreck graveyard, and a bootlegger's paradise. You don't just use a location. You let it talk back.
tinyurl.com/bdeh5stu

Death Proof is trash cinema elevated to liturgy, exploitation as opera. Proof you can make art from exhaust fumes and shattered glass if you love it hard enough. Excessive, problematic, indulgent as hell—and completely, unapologetically alive. 🚗💥
#Criterion #DeathProof #Tarantino #GrindHouse

The Actress Who Disappeared Twice

The truth here doesn't redeem anything. It just is: messy, heartbreaking, and more alive than most people manage in their sanest moments.
#theater #performance #liveart #documentation
www.nytimes.com/2026/02/04/t...

The Actress Who Disappeared Twice

Helen Shaw's piece on Libby Howes hits that same nerve: a woman who burned impossibly bright in the Wooster Group's foundational work, then disappeared twice, first into psychosis, then into a Vermont life nobody from her theater days knew about.

The Actress Who Disappeared Twice

I had the privilege of studying with Spalding Gray for two quarters, learning to excavate truth from the wreckage of experience.

On Necessary Abandonment On the brutal choice between creative necessity and a six-month-old left behind: what it means to travel for work that demands everything, the fear that follows you to a volcano, and whether any image...

Raw, uncut chaos. Everything eating everything in perfectly balanced horror. Divine rage without soft edges. What real looks like when it's not comfortable.
#LINESBallet #AlonzoKing #DancePhotography #ReunionIsland #ContemporaryDance
jamescharleslyons.com/on-necessary...

The Beautiful Failure of Forever Père Lachaise Cemetery: Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs among the tombs and rubble of Cimetière du Père Lachaise.

Père Lachaise: where immortality projects fail spectacularly and trees push through marble. Real story isn't Morrison or Wilde, it's the forgotten nobodies whose monuments are now just moss farms. Something honest about that failure.
#Paris #Grave #tombstones
jamescharleslyons.com/pere-lachais...

The Creamery That Wouldn't Blink The Peninsula Creamery, Palo Alto, CA: "This was the way the night had cashed in. Choices had been made and things happened, and here we were."

Peninsula Creamery in Palo Alto: a fuck you to disruption culture, standing firm while everything around it optimizes itself to death. Some places deserve to survive because they remember what they are.
jamescharleslyons.com/peninsula-cr...
#PaloAlto #SiliconValley #Authenticity #disruptiontown

I'm trying to trap something real, nail this moment to the wall like a desperate insect. If I get it right, it keeps moving, keeps living long after I'm gone. That's the only immortality that isn't total bullshit.

#ArtIsLife #CaptureTheMoment #ImmortalityThroughArt

Rusted out car in a yard full of litter in front of a dilapidated house with a telephone pole that has no wires coming or going. In Hawaii.

Someone believed this car would take them somewhere.
Believed the house would hold. The island's promise would sustain them. It didn't. The clouds press down like a bruise.

The monster isn't the wreckage, it's the delusion that paradise operates on faith instead of physics.
#rust #entropy

Bay Area 'Death to Spotify' event sells out within 24 hours The event's success might signal a small but lasting shift in public opinion.

Stuff like this gives me hope.
#future #artist.

www.sfgate.com/sf-culture/a...

The sky darkens. Blue on blue, stroke by stroke. I tell you this not because it matters, but because I’m watching it happen. One shade replacing another, deeper and deeper, until sky and night become the same. By the time I look away I cannot say what I’m waiting for, or why I’m watching at all.

Kay Metz A tribute to painter and printmaker Kay Metz (1932-2018), who established UC Santa Cruz's printmaking department, chased light across California's wetlands, and proved that loving a landscape means fi...

Kay Metz didn’t fuck around.
#artist #art #santacruz #ucsc

jamescharleslyons.com/kay-metz/

Joe Stevens, Photographer of Rock’s Intimate Moments, Dies at 87

This guy with no training captured rock and roll growing fangs—documenting beautiful chaos as it happened. He understood the best shots happen between poses, when people stop performing. 87… proving authenticity beats technique

The secret: show up and pay attention
www.nytimes.com/2025/09/23/a...

Other than my brief communion with inanimate stonework, it was just another forgettable sunrise in paradise.

#santacruz #sunrise #surfing #steamers #statues #goodmorning #paradise

One of California's most famous surf towns is headed for a major financial hit The coastal community could lose up to $34.5 million annually without an action plan.

Surfanomics” isn’t well studied — this is a first-of-its-kind study attempting to estimate the impacts of the surfing economy on a region — but the study’s authors said this data is important to better inform policy changes in the future.
#surfing #santacruz

www.sfgate.com/centralcoast...

Salvia clevelandii is the Jackson Pollock of CA natives. Chaotic, uncompromising, and absolutely gorgeous when it decides to bloom-the smell-provokes wild thoughts.
#nativeplants #californianative #landscapedesign #garden #WestSideSantaCruz #AuthenticLandscaping #westsidegarden #santacruzgardens

I’m playing the long game.
Italian style.
#CraftsmanCharacter #100YearsOfStories #WestSideSantaCruz #AuthenticLandscaping #NoFakePlants #RealDirtRealWork #CraftsmanSoul #SantaCruzVibes

“In a way, the more techniques you apply, the less important the ingredients are. It shouldn’t be that way, but you can get away with it. But if you’re highlighting this astounding artichoke, it’s got to be an astounding artichoke.”

Michael Pollan
#vegetables #artichoke #gardening #santacruzgardens

“One day he decided that his liking for poetry could not be fully expressed in just reading poetry or listening to poets reading on phonograph records. He decided to take the plumbing out of his house and completely replace it with poetry, and so he did.”
Richard Brautigan
#frenchdrain #sumppump

“I suddenly realized I was in California.
Warm, palmy air
- air you can kiss -
and palms.”
Jack Kerouac, On the Road
#palmtree #california #cafelights

“when I become death.
Death is the seed from which I grow.”
William S. Burroughs
#garden #seedlings #fincafiasco

“Well, as you can plainly see, the possibilities are endless like meandering paths in a great big beautiful garden.”
William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
#garden #inmygardentoday #artichoke #fincafiasco