Greetings from Slab City

Here are a few music videos from Slab City. First is Jimi James (on the right) on guitar and vocals with Carlos (at left) on guitar and Radio Mike (deep in the shadows) on the cajon. There's a drunk guy somewhere in there providing backup vocals.

This is Sandi on mandolin. I look like a giant next to her.

I love this one. It's at the Range. It has Peter, which is great in itself. Peter's a ubiquitous and colorful (literally) Slabber. Here he's being interviewed for yet another video documentary of Slab City. I think these guys were from Google. They had the Klieg lights and the 5DMarkIIs, all of which you can see here. So this is roughly what they were getting plus them. I love the gloves and the punk girl onstage playing the ukelele.

This is classic: Mike Bright singing the Slab City song at the Range.

The reporter and video guy who were here when I was produced this really nice short film about the Slabs.

Click here to see Time Magazine's Slab City video

Eastward 2012

As I write this I'm at my house in Maryland. I got here on the 20th, the first day of Spring as was my aim. I did all the things I intended to do plus a couple extras. I left Slab City on March 6th so my trip east was 2 weeks of driving every day. I went to.... But I'm getting ahead of myself. I'll pick up the thread...

...after Death Valley. I went back to Slab City. It's the most entertaining, unexpected place I think I've ever been. Every day there is Anything Can Happen Day. Most mornings I'd play golf. 2 balls simultaneously on nine holes, so I could play 18 in about the same time as 9. Gopher Flats is the only free golf course I've ever played so naturally I played every day. It's not the fanciest golf course but value-wise it's off the charts. The only thing that's asked of you is to drag the "greens" when you're done. It's all par-3, the longest hole is 154 yards and the shortest hole is 80, every pin is straight ahead, every green is dead level, every hole is in the center of the green, every hole is about 10 inches in diameter. Anybody with some skill should be able to par this thing. The best I got was 66 (par is 54 (Par 54 Where Are You?)) which is better than bogey, but my worst score was 88, which is worse than double bogey (oof!)

Here's a rough cut of the video I'm working on:

And some stills:

The ground is too hard to use a proper tee, so we use an inch or so of garden hose with a piece of ribbon tied on to it. The ribbon is to keep the tee from flying too far and to make it easy to see.

A New Format

As you may or may not know, Apple's for-fee, dot-me services are going away to be replaced with iCloud, a free service for Mac owners. It's actually a good deal. It does everything dot-me does except the two features I use the most: the iDisk public folder and the gallery. So my large(ish) file transfers will have to go by FTP or as email attachments. And so it's also time to move to blogger for sending you my thoughts and images. I think this will be an improvement.


It's been a while since I've sent anything so there are a few things to tell. In January my dear, kind, once mother-in-law died. So I drove from Slab City to Las Vegas where I left my camper at my friends Joel and Deann's house. From there I flew (urk!) back to Maryland to go to the funeral in Willow Grove, PA. I'm really glad I went, for my kids, and for me too. I stayed in Silver Spring for 10 days so I got to spend time with my kids, see some friends and I even got to play some music. There was also an Occupy event at the Supreme Court decrying the Citizens United decision. So I went. 

I went back to Las Vegas and stayed for a couple of weeks. LV has some good thrift shops and wide, relatively flat streets, many with bike lanes so I rode my bike a lot there. For me the best things about Vegas are the landscape around it: Red Rock Canyon, Valley of Fire, Lake Mead, Mt. Charleston, etc. The best Vegas-y thing is Freemont Street on a Saturday night. Free live bands, tacky souvenir shops, zip lines, buskers and lots of crazy people. 

After leaving Vegas, I headed north through Pahrump (is a speed bump there a Pahrump-bump?) to the north end of Death Valley. 

Death Valley is kind of like what Las Vegas would be like without Las Vegas. Here's Badwater Basin, The lowest elevation in the United States, 282 feet below sea level. In the picture of cars parked at the bottom of the rock wall you can see a sign near the top marking sea level. 

Zabriskie Point is beautiful and accessible to hike around in.

A few random shots from Mojave National Preserve: