Baby mural, framed by fence bars.
Friday, July 31, 2020
NoHo Arts District photos- July 2020- #1
NoHo Arts District photos- July 2020- #2
Lankershim Blvd. in the morning light and shadow. Steve Emig Adventuring blog, NoHo Arts District, North Hollywood, CA. #steveemigphoto.
Wednesday, July 29, 2020
Creative Life: 7/28/2020- Things never go as planned...
Here's my little art booth set-up, on Hollywood Boulevard, near Highland, last December. The skateboard decks are my Sharpie drawings mounted on skate decks, which turned out to be the best form of art to catch people's attention, and to actually sell there. The big white tent on the left is on Hollywood Blvd. itself, that was part of the set-up for the Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker movie premiere.
So the plan was...
When you're homeless, like I am right now, the main priority is just surviving day to day. When not doing that, over the last year, I've worked to draw my unique Sharpie "scribble style" drawings, and promote and sell them online, and in person on Hollywood Boulevard. As I struggled through the chilly and rainy winter, I looked forward to this spring. The general plan was to simply survive the rainy season, then focus on selling my artwork mounted on skateboard decks on Hollywood Boulevard during afternoons and evenings during the spring and summer. Then I'd do my blogging, social media, and promotion in the mornings at McDonald's or the library, to sell what I could online. As I did that, I'd start spending one day every week taking my art around to galleries and other art happenings in L.A., to show off my work, and see what opportunities that might lead to. Between all of those, I was pretty optimistic that I could be making enough money to rent a weekly room by mid summer this year. That was the general plan. But, as we all know, things never go as planned.
And then the Covid-19 pandemic hit American shores. A couple weeks of rainy weather in March, and confusion about the virus, led to the business shutdown. That killed the tourist industry in Hollywood, for good reason. The thousands of tourists on Hollywood blvd. that I planned to sell a few art skate decks to, were gone. So selling art in person went out the window.
At the same time, all the art galleries were shut down, and art shows are not happening now. Obviously, this affects artists at all levels, not just me. Visual artists, musicians, and the whole TV/film industry in this area shut down, along with most businesses nationwide. This hit everyone hard, as we all know.
In my case, this whole pandemic mess happened right at the time period I was looking forward to good weather, and a chance to finally promote my art here in the L.A. area, and likely make enough money to finally get a room, and start getting back to making a "real" living again. So that was a bummer.
Instead, most of the bathrooms I use (restaurants, the library) closed down overnight. Yeah, that becomes a serious issue real quick. The places I did most of my drawing (fast food restaurants) closed. As I mentioned, the place I could set-up a "booth" and sell art in person, Hollywood Boulevard, near Highland, lost all the thousands of daily tourists, shutting that source of income down. The place I charged my laptop and phone, the local library, and did most of my blogging, social media, and other art promotion, the local library, it closed, too. Pretty much everything I relied on day to day, to survive and work, as a homeless small business guy, shut down. That hit like a baseball bat to the gut.
While the majority of people, including all of you readers, I imagine, were "sheltering at home," I was wandering the streets, searching to basic necessities to simply survive. Bathrooms. Places to clean up. Places to get out of the rain and cold. Places to charge my laptop and phone. Places to draw, blog, and work. Like everyone else, I was adapting to a new, crazy set of circumstances, REAL QUICK. I honestly didn't think could survive a month of business and public building shutdowns. I'd lived nearly 12 years in various forms of homelessness up until then, nearly 4 years fully on the streets, and I'm pretty damn good at survival at this point. It seemed that crazy, at first. I honestly thought I would not survive March and April. It looked that bad when the Covid shutdown hit.
Luckily for me, a couple of people asked me to do drawings, which helped tide me over. I signed up for food stamps, which helped me eat and survive. And some friends, and blog readers, have sent me a bit of money now and then, which has helped me survive. So thank you to everyone who has helped me. It made a huge difference. Obviously, I'm still here.
After those first couple of orders, the orders for art dropped to almost nothing, and my already limited income dropped to almost nothing. As tens of millions of people have been laid off, and tens of millions struggle to simply pay rent and everyday bills, it's obvious art sales won't be a major source of income for quite a while. I started focusing on selling my artwork 4 1/2 years ago, because I couldn't find ANY job, where I was living in North Carolina. I was never trying to become a famous artist, my Sharpie art was simply the only thing that made me any money. So I doubled down on it, and it's kept me alive since. But not much more than that.
So I'm looking for other options, thinking up some more practical ideas to earn money in the future. I have a writing project I'm working on. I'm still drawing, I'll keep doing it, I love doing it. But I'm adapting as best as I can since art sales are lagging, like most everything else these days. But I'll keep plugging away and being creative... Onward!
Tuesday, July 28, 2020
Opossum in the daylight
Monday, July 27, 2020
Living with uncertainty
The young mountain lions is this video are really close to the size of the one I write about in this post. This is a great little video, and a good reminder not to let your chihuahua out alone if you're in cougar country.
The thing that really struck me, as it ran by, was how much different the shape of a cat was from the shape of a dog. This was all cat, no doubt about it. A big cat. A mountain lion.
I was lying in my sleeping bag, on my side, falling asleep. I was a homeless man, in the summer of 2008, in a patch small trees and brush along the side of the Back Bay, on the very inland part of Newport Beach, California. The well known car dealership, Fletcher Jones Motorcars, was caddy-corner, across the road, 100 yards away.
I heard a little rustle of brush, as I stared off into the small area, maybe fifteen feet across, that was fairly open. One of the larger trees formed a dome over me, I was completely hidden form the path about 15 feet from my head, by a several feet of thick brush. But there was another trail, tramped down months earlier, most likely by another homeless man, straight in front of me.
My eyes opened and I saw three big bounds of a large animal run by, like I said, it was all cat. Definitely a mountain lion, I'd seen them before in Newport. In fact, I probably saw this same mountain lion, about two months earlier, on on Avocado Street, near Fashion Island Mall, and at the Newport Transportation Center bus stop, where I often slept as a homeless man. The young wild cat was about the size of a Labrador retriever in those first two sightings, maybe 35 or 40 pounds. But the one that ran through my camp was bigger, maybe 70 or 80 pounds, about the size of a full grown German shepherd. It may have been a bit smaller than the three young ones in the video above. The distance in front of me was close to the distance in this video when they're drinking, maybe 15 feet away. But there were no glass doors that night, like in the video. Just me, a 360 pound homeless man, in a sleeping bag, lying on a bed of thick leaves. No tent. No fire. I did have a knife, a Leatherman Wave multi-tool, with two quick release thumb blades. I slept with it in case of attack. But it didn't seem much use if that big feline wanted me for dinner.
The mountain lion ran past me, apparently trying to catch a duck at the edge of the Back Bay, about ten feet from my feet. There was a clump of thick brush there, with a little hollow inside, made by an illegal fisherman, or maybe another homeless person. The big feline holed up in there, after it realized I was nearby. It had basically cornered itself, its back against the water. The brush was too thick to creep through on its right, so the way out was the way it had run in, to it's left, past me. I wanted nothing more than to just fall asleep, homeless people weren't allowed to sleep in anywhere in public at that time, during the day, and I was just exhausted.
But I now had a fairly well grown, but young, mountain lion, ten feet away. I was alone. It may have been alone, or there may have been a mama mountain lion nearby. I didn't know. When you're homeless, you know pretty much any kind of attack can happen at any time, especially at night. Police, thugs, other bums, stray dogs, rattlesnakes, raccoons, opossums, bobcats, coyotes, and now... a mountain lion.
Uncertainty. I honestly had no idea if I was going to live to see the next dawn. That mountain lion was definitely big enough to kill me, if it wanted to. But I knew humans are standard prey items for mountain lions. And it was young, the wild version of a big, maybe 12-13 week old kitten. Curious, but still not certain of new things. More than likely, it just wanted to sneak off, after seeing the big, odd animal nearby, me. But all that was speculation on my part. I had no fucking idea what it would do. Again... uncertainty.
As humans, we like certainty, we like things that don't change. But, we all live with many things we are not sure about. But I wasn't sure if I was going to be killed by a large predator that night. That's a far different level of uncertainty from, "I can't remember where I put my car keys," or other questions that happen to all of us.
The world's getting crazier and crazier these days, on many different levels. Over the past several months, as the Covid-19 pandemic shutdown freaked out my friends online, and nearly everyone else, I've seen more and more people stressing out over the many uncertainties in their lives. Will I catch the virus? Are my kids safe? Can I let them play with other kids? Will I get laid off? Will I be able to pay the mortgage or rent? Will this end soon? Will I be able to make back what I lost in the stock market? Will my grandma or grandpa get the virus in their nursing home? Will I go insane staying at home for two or three months? Will there be another shutdown?
Suddenly, people whose lives seemed quite stable six months ago are now living with a wide array of uncertainties. How does each of us cope with this?
As luck would have it, I happen to have a lot of experience in dealing with uncertainty, like that night with the mountain lion, above. Between years as a taxi driver, struggling to pay $550 lease every week, while living in my cab, and then as a full blown homeless guy, I've had to practice dealing with uncertainty more than most people. Here's what I've learned.
Uncertainty is usually anxiety about something that might happen. That's something that's happening in your head, not out in the physical world. Most of our troubles as humans are when we let our imagination run wild, in a bad way. This can be reliving something that happened in the past that really bothers you. You just replay that old memory, beating yourself up, wishing something better had happened. Or, you worry about something the might happen in the future. In today's world, worrying about how to pay next month's rent or mortgage is a big one right now, for millions of people. So how do you deal with that.
Since it's really a mental thing, the best action I know is to bring yourself back to the present moment. Stop for a minute. What's happening right now, this moment, you read this? Do you have a place to live right now? Where are you? Sitting in a chair, the car (watch the road!), a bus, a train, the office? Reach out and touch something in your immediate environment. This is right now. Are you comfortable? Can you stand or sit in another position, if you're uncomfortable. How is the temperature? Can you warm up or cool down if you're too cold or too hot? Are you hungry? Is there food available? Can you get something to eat or drink if you need to? If you answered "yes" to most or all of those questions, then your "right now" isn't really that bad. Maybe not great, but not that bad. And that's the point. Your present moment, your "right here, right now" is usually not that bad.
What's freaking you out, the uncertainty is about something that hasn't happened yet. It may never happen. It probably won't happen the way you think it will. Now take a slow, deep breath. Exhale S-L-O-W-L-Y. Now, can you cope with what's happening right this second? You probably can. That's a good starting point. A lot of crazy stuff may be in your future, but it's not here YET.
Once you break the spell of the negative thoughts for a second, you bring yourself back to the present moment, for the most part. You may not be fully engaged, but you realize you can stop the thoughts that are bugging you, at least for a few seconds. This is a practice, it's something you get better at if you practice it consistently, over time. You can do it any time that you can catch yourself freaking out.
Once you get yourself into the present, paying attention to what's happening, "right now," you can step back and take a better look at what you're worried about. Do you have a big decision to make soon? Do you have to make that decision RIGHT THIS SECOND? Probably not. So don't make it right now. Is there some information somewhere that could help you make a better decision? Then go find that information, if possible. Think it through. THEN make the decision, when it actually needs to be made.
Are you worried about paying rent, for example? Do you have to pay it right this second? Probably not. So step back, get out a pen or pencil and paper. Old school. Make a hand written list. What are the possible things you can do if you can't pay rent on time? Can you make a partial payment? Can you talk to the landlord and get an extension? Can you borrow money from someone or some place? Can you do a side gig to make extra money in time? Can you sell something you own to get by (not a child, you may need them later on)? Is there a program that could help you make the payment? List 20 (not 10... 20!) things you could do to make that payment, or work out some kind of plan. List crazy ideas, whatever comes to mind. Then go back over that list. There will probably be some kind of answer that you didn't think about when you were so busy just worrying. Get to work on what seems the best overall option.
We live in crazy times, crazier than most eras in history. There's a 100 year pandemic that's changed our daily lives in many ways. There's a serious economic downturn, which was happening anyhow, and the pandemic made it worse. The remaining parts of the old, Industrial Age society is breaking down, and a new, Information Age is emerging. But that means there's always new technology to have to learn. There are a lot of long festering social issues coming to a head, or about to. There really is a lot going on, from a historical sense. That won't change for a long time. But how you deal with it CAN change. When you're freaking out, try to remember to bring yourself back to this moment, right now. Can you cope with the next ten seconds? The next minute? Probably. Good. Work from there on a better solution for things that MIGHT happen down the road.
That's what I did that night, about 12 years ago, lying in my sleeping bag, with a real, live mountain lion, ten feet away. I could hear it move around in that clump of brush. Neither of us knew what to do. So I brought myself back to the present moment. The young mountain lion was there, but it wasn't attacking me... yet. I grew up watching wildlife TV shows and documentaries. I knew mountain lions don't eat humans as a general rule, we're not standard prey items of them. The rare attacks were usually when people were moving fast, jogging our mountain biking on trails, which triggered the animal's prey response. I was much bigger than the mountain lion, and we both knew that. I was in my sleeping bag, a big, black, lump. It was probably more confused and curious than hungry.
I was pretty sure it was the same young mountain lion I saw a couple months earlier. Those two times, it was afraid of me. That memory might have still been in its brain, tied to my scent. Maybe. So I started talking to it, pretty calmly. I named it Media (pronounced MAY-dee-uh, the Spanish pronunciation), the second time I saw it. It had still had a white ring in the middle of its tail, and "media" in Spanish kind of means half, or middle. For some reason, that popped in my head, so I started talking to Media, the mountain lion, that night. "Hey, Media, I know you're probably freaked out there in the bushes. Me too. I'm kind of freaked out, too. Hey, I've lived a pretty good life, done lots of crazy stuff. So if you want to kill me and eat me, I get it. Hell, I weigh about 360 pounds, you'll be eating for a month..." I rambled on for about ten minutes. Then I was so freakin' exhausted, I laid my head down, pulled the sleeping bag over my head, and fell asleep. Sometimes all you can do is let things play out.
I woke up the next morning, like always, pretty surprised I was still alive. But I was more surprised than usual. I packed up, hid my sleeping bag in the bushes, and crawled out the little hole in the brush that led to my sleeping spot. I walked up the trail, to the little trail the mountain lion had charged in the night before. I saw its tracks in the dirt up to the edge of the brush, and then a much later set, heading out a few hours later. Like I hoped, it waited for me to go to sleep, hung out a while, then snuck out past me. Even the craziest situations usually wind up working out, somehow.
We're in crazy times, no doubt about it. There will be a lot of things we're all going to be uncertain about, over the next several years. The more you get used to dealing with uncertainty, the more you learn to get back to the present moment, the better you'll be able to cope with all the uncertainty ahead.
Thursday, July 9, 2020
Bob Osborn's famous quote at the beginning of BMX
Here's Bob Osborn, best known to us old school racers and freestylers as Oz, the longtime editor and publisher of BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines. While it was Andy Jenkins picked me as a potential worker at Wizard Publications in 1986, Oz was the guy who actually hired me, and signed the paychecks. This clip goes back to the very beginnings of BMX racing in Southern California in 1969-1970.
One thing about working at Wizard Publications in the 1980's, even for a short period, was the cool conversations that would happen in and around work. I was roommates with Gork, the editor of BMX Action, and Lew the assistant editor of FREESTYLIN', and we either rode in Gork's van to work, or rode our bikes about 4 miles, across Redondo Beach and Torrance. We didn't walk into the front office in the mornings, we went into the small door, next to the warehouse door, on the side of the building. The place was an industrial property, a small warehouse, about 5,000 square feet, I think, with offices in the front. You can see that door we walked in, next to the open warehouse door, in this clip, at 1:48. R.L. Osborn and RonWilton come racing out of the large warehouse door, next to it, in the 1985 Rippin' video. You can also see them walk into the front offices of Wizard in the beginning of the clip.
Dian Harlan, the receptionist you see, was seriously the most amazing receptionist of all time. You'd ask her some little favor or something, totally forget about it, and three days later she'd have done it, and twice as much work as you needed her to do. She'd hand you the information you asked for, or some random photo you asked about, or whatever, with three times the info or background you asked for. She never forgot anything. She was dating photographer Steve "Gibey or "Guy-B" Giberson then, and later married him.
Anyhow, when we walked into the warehouse, Wizard's white Chevy Astro van was backed in its spot to the left. The there were about 4 rows of big warehouse shelving units beside it, the back part of the warehouse. There was an empty area straight in front of the warehouse door, about two car lengths. Oz would pull his 4 wheel drive van in there, when he was in town.
While I worked at Wizard, Oz was off shooting Ansel Adams-style black and white photos 2-3 weeks each month. Along the whole wall, across from the big warehouse door, was a row of small offices, with a larger conference room at the left, in the corner. Then the offices turned the corner, forming a big, "L,"coming up the far left wall. That's where Lew's office, my office, and the photo room were.
To the right of Oz's parking space was the copy machine, where the early Club Homeboy stickers were first made by Lew, along with several Mel Bend (aka Andy Jenkins) zines. Next to the copy machine was a standard picnic bench, and a little open area. On the wall there was the office kitchen area, with a sink, counter, and microwave, and refrigerator. That was our lunch and break time hang out area, along with a picnic table outside in the parking lot, by the T.O.L. ramp.
A door in the kitchen area led to Oz's darkroom. Right above that, was Windy's dark room, with a wooden staircase coming down on the right side of the kitchen area. The last corner of the warehouse, to the right as we walked in human door, or the big warehouse door, was a photo backdrop area. There was a rack that had huge rolls of paper that Windy could pull down,, different colors, to shoot studio photos. If you're a freestyler, and you remember Ceppie Mae's Dance of Doom cover shot, on the September 1986 cover of FREESTYLIN', that was shot in that corner, along with all the bike "beauty shots" for bike tests.
So, like any office, various people would gather around the inside picnic table, drinking coffee or sipping a Coke or something, on breaks, or at lunch, and talk about one thing or another. One day, Oz and R.L. both happened to be there, and Oz got talking. I think all of us editorial guys, Andy, Gork, Lew, and myself were hanging out, munching on lunch, as were Oz and R.L.. I can't remember if Windy was out there that time. In most offices, that would be a typical lunch conversation. But I was a kid who was riding in NorCal months earlier, and a freestyler in Boise, Idaho , the middle of freakin' nowhere, just over a year before, I never thought I'd ever meet R.L. Osborn, or Oz, or any of other guys from "The Magazines." There weren't really any videos then, BMX and freestyler were all about the magazines. I was still getting used to the idea that many of my heroes from only months earlier, were now my friends and co-workers. Fanboy moments came often at Wizard.
Somehow the conversation got back to the earliest days of BMX racing, and none of us really knew that history then. YouTube was 19 years away, no documentaries had been made, or even thought of. Gork was working on the 10th anniversary edition of BMX Action, but that only went back to 1985-86. So the only way we learned about the really early days of BMX racing was from some rider or industry person who was there. That's what we were talking about that particular day. Sudden;y Oz chuckled, and looked over at R.L.. "Remember what I said when you first wanted to race BMX?" R.L. nodded and said, "I remember." Oz went on, "R.L. told me he wanted to try this BMX racing, and I said, 'Shorty, you know this isn't going to go anywhere, right?'" R.L. chuckled and nodded as Oz said it. That story had been told before, and I think it was being retold fo rmy benefit that day, as the new guy of the bunch. Oz saw BMX in 1969-70 as some weird little fad. But R.L. was into it, and they could take Windy along to hang out, and it'd be a cool family thing on a Saturday afternoon. So Bob Osborn, a fireman at the time, with an interest in photography, got R.L. a bike, and they went to his first race. And then they went to another. And another.
Oz laughed again. At that point, Oz had been publishing BMX Action magazine for ten years, and FREESTYLIN' magazine for nearly two years. "I was wrong about that one," Bob Osborn chuckled, "I never thought it would turn into all this." At that point, the fall of 1986, Oz was able to let the crew run the magazines, for the most part. He still made the big decisions, and kept close tabs on everything. But he would go off into the wild, to places like Yosemite, to shoot the photos he'd been dreaming of shooting for many years. His daughter, and R.L.'s big sister, Windy, was the staff photographer for both magazines. She was legendary to us slightly younger guys already, as an epic photographer. R.L. was riding for Redline (though talking to General about a new deal at the time), and running the legendary BMX Action Trick Team, with Todd Anderson as a vert rider. Oz had plucked young BMX guys, Andy from Wyoming, Gork from Sacramento, Lew from Michigan, and me from NorCal and Idaho, to write, edit, and proofread the magazines. Roughtly 16 years after that first BMX race, BMX was the Osborn family's lives and livelihoods, and ours as well.
Now, another 34 years later, I'm sitting behind a boutique shop in the San Fernando Valley, during a pandemic, pirating free power and wifi, to write a blog post about a moment that happened in the Wizard offices, at 3162 Kashiwa Street, in Torrance, California, back then. Oz is in Montana, shooting incredible portraits of real cowboys and Indians. Windy is living in San Diego, last I heard, still shooting great photos. And R.L. Osborn is getting back into the scene after nearly 30 years away. With his son Dylan and friend Pat, they're doing Facebook broadcasts for viewers all around the world, and working on some new products.
The point to all of this? When something, no matter how weird it seems, really draws you in, really gets a hold of you for a while, like BMX bike riding did for us, you never know what it will lead to.
Here's BMX industry guy in today's world, Brian Tunney, with a look back at the building where so much hope and so many dreams, for so many weird kids, was born in the late 1970's, and through the 1980's, into the beginning of the1990's.
I honestly forgot about Brian's shoutout at the beginning of this clip. But I know no one will believe that. Just for the record, I started my Freestylin Mag Tales blog (200+ posts, deleted in 2012, when I got real depressed), in early December 2008. I'd just gone to visit my family in North Carolina, and wound up getting trapped in NC, financially. I lost all my magazines (full set of FREESTYLIN', + 100 or so more magazines), all my raw video footage I shot from 1990 to 2008, and all my video master tapes. I was depressed, and was not mentioned in the FREESTYLIN' book that Andy, Lew, and Spike did.
At that point, I was left out of the history. OK, I played a very tiny bit part in it. But in 2008, I had nothing left but memories of years of BMX freestyle, and my Tech 2 brake lever key chain. So I started blogging, telling weird little stories of moments of BMX freestyle, from my perspective. I planned to write 20 or 30 posts, that's all. I think I've written well over 1,000 BMX memoir posts since, across 5 different blogs now. I kind of became an unofficial history of BMX freestyle for a few years. People started using my posts as source material for Wikipedia pages and online articles. I was really the main guy telling stories from the early days, for a while. Now we have whole bunch of podcasts adding lots more stories to the mix, and a few more written ones, plus a few documentaries online, which is awesome. I wish I had time to listen to more of them. Again, you never know where things will lead when you start some weird little idea, and then back it up with hard, consistent work. No go ride... Or write.
Saturday, July 4, 2020
A trip to the The Iliad Book Shop
I like big books... and I cannot lie...
Selfie outside The Iliad.
As a dorky kid in Ohio, most of my greatest adventures began by opening up a book. With Jack London's help, I drove a dogsled and panned for gold in the Yukon gold rush. Thanks to Tolkien, I traveled out of The Shire, met elves, partied with dwarves, and fought a dragon. Later I traveled with Frodo much farther, to rid Middle Earth of Bilbo's ring. You get the idea. Every avid reader knows that adventures in the mind can be nearly as fulfilling as real life adventures.
When I first moved to North Hollywood in 1991, because I got a job at a small video duplicating business, I soon found this amazing used book store on the corner of Vineland and Lankershim. It was right next to Odyssey Video, a huge, mom and pop video store. So it was a one stop spot for pre-internet media. I loved those places.
My dad was an avid reader when I was a kid, mostly diving into spy novels and westerns. I took more to non-fiction, myself, but became a serious bookworm as well.
The "new" Iliad book shop, 5400 Cahuenga, North Hollywood, CA.
My dad was one of those guys who would stay in the bathroom for a long time, reading. If you had to go, and you knocked on the door, he'd always say, "I'll be out in a chapter." While I didn't spend that much time reading the bathroom, I did spend a lot of time reading. In a family that was more dysfunctional than most, reading was a great escape. In that environment, escape was necessary. I kept reading voluminously as a young adult, turning my attention to business, personal development, religion, philosophy, and any book I thought might help me work through my personal issues. In a lot of ways, books were a huge part of me ultimately becoming a person who now reads less, is much less shy, and has more real life adventures, than written, mental ones. OK, they're often not adventures I planned on taking, but adventures none-the-less. Now I write more than I read. Full circle.
When I landed back up here in this corner of the San Fernando Valley last Fall, I took a bus past the former site of The Iliad and Odyssey Video, to see they had closed down. I was bummed. I spent some great hours wandering in those stores, nearly 30 years ago.
I don't have the infantile vision of heaven and hell they taught us in Sunday school as a kid, these days. But if there really was a location called heaven, I'd imagine it something like this. Aisles and aisles of tall shelves, packed somewhat haphazardly with books of all kinds, where I could wander endlessly, read, and hang out, for all eternity.
A couple of months ago, I was talking with someone, I think it was another homeless guy at McDonald's. I mentioned something about The Iliad Book shop closing down. He said, "They didn't close, they moved." I was stoked. By the time I remembered to look the shop up, the Covid-19 shutdown was in full effect. So I found their location, and made a pact to go find the shop when I could. A couple of days ago, I finally made the trip.
I took the 237 bus up to Vineland and Magnolia, then walked up to the bike path a bit north. I walked a half mile or so east on the path. During that walk, I passed a whole bunch of murals I didn't know existed, which were cool. When I hit Cahuenga, I could see The Iliad, caddy-corner across the street.
I spent a good two hours or so wandering the shop. In a weird twist, I had two or three business oriented books in mind to find. The public library doesn't have the business books I most want to read, and new books are so expensive to buy. But The Iliad doesn't have a business book section. What they do have is super high shelves of paperbacks, thousands of novels of all kinds. They also have a completely insane amount of books on everything creative. This end of The Valley, the Burbank, North Hollywood, Studio City area, is the "real Hollywood," where TV shows, movies, and music get made, more than anywhere in the world. So there are art books, photo books, design books, TV books, Film books, music books. The collection is simply astounding. The huge, coffee table books are the best bargains, many dollars off their original price. I will be back at The Iliad at a regular basis, from now on. If you are a bookworm as well, and live in, or visit this area, check out The Iliad book shop, it's an epic used book store. The website link is in a caption above.
Iliad Book Shop Murals- #1
Iliad Book Shop murals- #2
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