I’m on the road with author/illustrator/philanthropist/magic-maker Dallas Clayton, and I keep mulling over this question: Has there ever been a kids book tour more fun than this? Maybe some Shel Silverstein tour, maybe. Really, this has to be in the top 3 2 craziest kids book tours of all time.

From L.A. to Phoenix and Tuscon and now El Paso, we’ve been sharing moments of sheer jubilation with the most extraordinary elementary school kids. Dallas is kind of a whiz at his job: rolling into a room full of kids and stoking them out with just his imagination. Our friend Micky Adams has true knack for compelling everyone to dance with the power of his bubbly folk tunes, as I jog around the room, documenting the madness from all angles.

Best of all, we’ve been getting into the randomest side adventures along the way: night frisbee in a truck stop parking lot, karaoke at a friendly bear bar, and the Arizona goth club we stumbled upon and somehow managed to demolish the dance floor with our wicked shadow-dancing. With 10 more days on the tour, I couldn’t be more excited to see what happens next. I shall return to Future Shipwreck in full force this April, and until then, peruse the pages of the Future Shipwreck Tumblr for your fix of rad art!

2010: it was rad. Super rad, even!

It started off with a totally blank slate: fresh out of a four-year relationship, I found a studio apartment in Silver Lake and began living alone for the first time in my life. Before I really had time to process the sheer terror and excitement of total personal autonomy, I was swept up in the blinding momentum of co-curating an art gallery with my dear friend, Mya Stark. Both of us were total virgins to the gallery world, but more than thrilled to make it up as we went along. Meanwhile, I was made ends meet by working night shifts as an extra in cell phone commercials and writing about art for Spike Jonze’s blog, We Love You So.

Springtime brought a full time gig with the world’s raddest children’s book author, Dallas Clayton, and the opening of a utopian pop-up shop in Tribeca with Family. We Love You So came to an end in April, so I started concentrating on Future Shipwreck in earnest, with the help of one of my favorite writerly voices: the divine Dan Rosplock. Since then, we’ve cooked up more than 200 posts (and more than 1000 posts on our tumblr, Future Shipwreck Lite).

Our goal has been to share as much awesome artwork as possible, while providing useful context and some entertaining ramblings to ponder along the way. We’ve interviewed some amazing people, covered L.A. art shows, shot documentaries, and evengiven away original artwork to our awesome readers! Along with contributions from Oregonian genius Grace Pettygrove and the impeccable Katie Vonderheide, Future Shipwreck has evolved into something splendiferous in 2010, and I’m beyond stoked to see where this site goes in 2011!

I’m proud to be a part of Dallas Clayton‘s life. His ideas are awe-inspiring and revolutionary, but he has a real knack for wording them in a way that everyone can understand. And then he illustrates them with a subtle sense of humor and grace that seems seriously scarce in children’s books these days. I’m proud to have been a part of the journey his sophomore book, An Awesome Book of Thanks, has taken two pages of text to a painstakingly detailed series of drawings, to an endless series of TIFFs and PDFs, to an actual book that you can touch and smell and put in a child’s hand and see their face light up.

Watch out the video that I made with Dallas to announce the new book, and then read An Awesome Book of Thanks for free! If you’re in L.A., don’t miss Dallas’ book launch party at Family this weekend. There will be cupcakes!

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Dallas Clayton has a new website that houses his poems for grown-ups. It’s filled with incredible illustrations, photos from his wild adventures on the road (touring elementary schools with An Awesome Book), videos and some of his best writing from the past and the present. It is rad and I can say that with confidence, as I helped him design it. Add it to your bookmarks ASAP, and if you’re on Tumblr, follow him! Take a look at some particularly excellent Dallas Clayton drawings and writings, after the jump.

Previously:
+ Video: Dallas Clayton on Opportunities
+ An Awesome Dallas Clayton Interview

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Satoshi Kon was not just an incredible director, he was a man who understood the inner workings of our collective fantasies. Dreams, no matter how strange or wonderful, aren’t just magically conjured from the ether—they are built very carefully, sometimes deliberately from the people, objects, and ideas we encounter every day. Even our most intimate, personal desires which seem to stem from a deep-seated, primal urge can only reveal themselves to the mind’s eye in the guise of things we have found in the world around us: love appears as a celebrity’s face, truth sounds like an advertising slogan, happiness feels weirdly similar to your old Power Rangers pajamas. Whatever mundane symbolic vocabulary you might need to converse with your subconscious, Satoshi Kon knew it and he was fucking fluent.

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FACT: the year after Indiana University faculty member Alfred Kinsey published his famous Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, future cult leader and mass murderer, Jim Jones, began his undergraduate studies here. The way I figure, weird historical overlaps like that must be happening all the time, so why not explore a little and see what kinds of hidden treasure the Hoosier State has to offer?

So far I’ve discovered a combination haunted train/railway museum, two gas stations–one abandoned and one active–frequented by juggalos, and the secret lakeside retreat of none other than John “Cougar” Mellencamp. They will be presented here for your amusement… whenever I get around to it. Until then, enjoy this delicious pun brought to you by one of our many local churches.

I usually try to CC Satan, Shiva, and Osiris on those, just to cover my bases.

Spike Jonze designed some awesome air dancers for Opening Ceremony. Head over to We Love You So to see more photos of these glorious balloon beasts in action!

Dallas Clayton is a bottomless well of good vibes. I had the pleasure of tagging along to a handful of local readings to shoot the video below, and while each reading is totally different, they all seemed to lead to ubridled fun and infinite smiles at the end of the day.

Dallas will be giving away copies of An Awesome Book, spurring impromptu arm wrestling matches and encouraging wild, untamed dreaming all across the west coast late next month on a brand new Awesome World tour, and I’ll be documenting the trip. So if you know of any schools or libraries or youth groups or Chuck E. Cheese’s we should stop at between San Francisco and Seattle, and maybe even in Montana, Utah and Nevada, let us know!

Photo via Andrew Tonkery.

Through pure happenstance, I recently found myself in an obscure, tucked-away corner of Los Angeles at the mystifying abode of Albert Reyes. “Tucked away” is no exaggeration: the Google Maps directions are a fractal of increasingly bizarre lefts and rights through the quiet residential neighborhood of El Sereno, leading you to an inconspicuous looking home flanked by gleaming, spotless hot rods (Albert’s dad is a member of the Eagle Rock Trompers).

Michelle from Giant Robot had taken us there on an art drop-off detour after we’d chowed down on some delicious cheese steaks at Orean’s. Within moments of our arrival, I was drooling in excitement over the life-size, unbelievably complex maze. Reveling in its sheer complexity, the first questions I had were “how?” “what?” “how long did it take?” “what is it made of?” and then, pretty quickly, “How can we get this into Mastodon Mesa?” Luckily, Albert was just as stoked as I was about the prospect of showing the maze in a gallery context, and plans were quickly set into motion.

By the time I made this video, he had already taken half of it down. He’s been uprooting brackets from the maze’s hundreds of pallets (all repurposed from trash on the streets of L.A.) and carefully removing the many dazzling dark accouterments that will soon be refastened to this astonishing labyrinth. Stay tuned for more video throughout the installation process, and get the full experience by seeing it in person at the Pacific Design Center on May 20th!