My First Rodeo

“Dr. Winkie” was the nom de guerre of Bay Area entrepreneur and wannabe Warhol Lawrence Lin. Lin’s notoriety came from his ownership of the San Francisco discotheque Club DV8—pronounced “deviate”—remembered for its avant-garde music programming, as well as for the large Keith Haring murals in the eponymous “Keith Haring Room.”9 Before Lin/Dr. Winkie opened his club, he produced an inch-square computer chip with two flashing LEDs, one red and one green, which, perhaps due to its blinking face, he named “Winkie.

To sell the Winkie (and by extension promote Dr. Winkie himself), Lin in 1984 founded Xtronx Inc., a company that quickly threw together a plan for a publicity stunt in Los Angeles: a “living billboard” contest on Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood’s primary advertisement artery. This scheme was an endurance competition wherein a select group of individuals would compete to remain on the billboard the longest, surviving on its four-by-fifty-two-foot catwalk around the clock.

—ArtForum

In 1990, [two] brothers were arrested, and later convicted, for a foiled plot to kidnap and rob Lawrence Lin, also known as Dr. Winkie, the eccentric owner of the San Francisco nightclub DV8. (Wearing body armor and carrying semi-automatic rifles at the time of their arrest, the two improbably told cops they were on the way to protect Lin.)

—NY Magazine

A podcast episode about Winkie.

The promotional novelty song.

The Keith Harring wedding invitation:

One of the most intentional ways to get that surreal feelings like you're awake inside of a dream, I've found, is to visit the sites of films, recordings, and photos that mean a lot to you and also, themselves, feel dreamlike.

So, of course, today, on my first day in Los Angeles, I visited the house where Maya Deren filmed Meshes of the Afternoon in 1943. Well, I tried to visit. It's gated off, but you can still see lots of the filming scenes from the public road. Just a few hundred yards above the cheesy Saddle Ranch bar on Sunset Blvd is ground zero for the creation of the avant-garde short art film, which created a visual shorthand for interior states of being that remain commonplace in films and television shows to this day.

Attention UK Hills fans: The DIAMONDS LP (which contains access to the entire DECK) is now available in 3 record shops in London!

From a recent post on The Honest Broker blog about pushing back on big tech, and specifically AI:

The referenced video here:

I love this concept.

And then I realized I had already thought of the same idea nearly two decades earlier.

Today, Richie Unterberger's remarkable, comprehensive, narrative history of the Velvet Underground hits bookstores. Here's the blurb I wrote for it:

"The legend has been told in scraps and patchwork for decades but now, finally, the story of the Velvet Underground is delivered to us in a way that feels very much complete. Unterberger's story treats the band with reverence without ever fawning and considers the legends alongside the facts with great expertise. It's a highly entertaining, informative creation worthy of one of the greatest bands of all time." — Ryan H. Walsh, author of Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968

In addition to this being a great book, it also begins to reveal a secret I've had to keep for many years. Here's the relevant sections from the acknowledgement section and the text of the book itself:

What if I told you, that during the pandemic, Phil Milstein, founder of the Velvet Underground Appreciation Society, reached out to me to see if I wanted to work with him on a VU mystery he had stumbled upon, and that this led to the discovery of an unheard Velvet Underground recording, and, most astonishing of all, a "new" VU song no has ever heard before that is pretty darn fantastic? Phil and I were calling it "I Don't Really Care About You." Richie's going with "I Don't Much Care for the Things That You Do."

Phil and I shepherded the recording along to a party that aims to get it officially released. I still have high hopes that's going to happen sooner than later. But that's all I can say about it for now.

One year ago today, DECK's cards were laid on the table! 365 days later, have you listened to all 54?

"Album of the Year" — Boston Magazine "A magnum opus" — Discologist Wilco's Favorite Records of 2025 "Album of the Year" — Matt Besser, founder of the Upright Citizens Brigade Alt/Indie Artist of the Year — Boston Music Awards

"For the first few years, they spent hours underground, watching the flow of passengers getting on and off trains and moving through stations. They studied their habits. Where did they go? Where did they look for information?" — How graphic design legend Massimo Vignelli cracked the NYC subway system