Autographed copies of Adventures with the Mojave Phone Booth are now available!



In the 1960s, everybody's father owned a copy of Herb Alpert's Whipped Cream & Other Delights. (Everybody's father except mine, for some reason. Inexplicable, given that he owned nearly every other Tijuana Brass album.)

No album better typifies...I'm not sure what. But one thing's for sure, when people walk into your place and see a hundred copies of this album, there's always a shock of recognition. Nearly everyone knows this album. Nearly everyone has a place in their heart for this album. And in the 1960s everyone bought this album, apparently. There must be a billion of these things floating around. You can scarcely walk into a thrift store without tripping over one.

Over the past 32 years the influence of Whipped Cream & Other Delights has been felt almost everywhere.

I took it upon myself to extend that influence.

In this space there was supposed to be a photo of Jim Butler's "Whipped Cream" painting, surreptitiously snapped at the Phoenix Art Museum's "It's Only Rock and Roll: Rock and Roll Currents in Contemporary Art" show by Agent Audra as I decoyed the museum guard—who kept following me around—to another area. Somehow the photo didn't come out.


UPDATE, 13 years later:

Audra's & my failure at the museum in 1997 took place before digital cameras and camera phones. The camera I'd slipped to Audra was a miniature spy camera that malfunctioned in some way. (How they managed to conduct the Cold War for seventy years with such janky equipment I do not know.)

Last night in Culver City (11feb2010) as we walked into Rush we somehow failed to notice the most obvious single object in the place. Then I sat and ate dinner experiencing the thing only as a vague, green object in my left peripheral vision that I continued to fail to notice (as did my lawyer, who was facing the damned thing). It wasn't until after dinner that I managed to tilt my skull to the left (at the same time as my lawyer lifted his eyes to the wall in front of him) and realize what we'd been sitting barely ten feet away from:

(Photo by Putch)

Here's the painting as it appears on Butler's site:

It took thirteen years but: mission accomplished, Agent Audra.

[We now return you to my 1997 idea of HTML (which is nowhere near as different from my current ideas as it should be).]


Whipped Cream spreads to Sweden:

Here's a CD called ...& Other Delights, by a Swedish band called Whipped Cream

(It's pretty good, too)

Update, 2006:

Never knew that MTV's Karen Duffy had donned the cream until I read her book, Model Patient: My Life As an Incurable Wise-Ass




Main | Before | Transformation | Art Car Caravan | Art Car Ball | Art Car Parade | Aftermath