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Have a Nice Day Café
Title: Have a Nice Day Cafe
Photographer: Glenn W. Baggley
Date photographed: July 2002
Place: Penn Avenue, Strip District, Pittsburgh
Why this sign?
Before its demise, the Have a Nice Day Café’s mobile sign brightened the scenery in the Strip.
Latitude: 40.4498
Longitude: -79.9859
Posted by Mark at August 4, 2004 07:59 PM
Comments
Layer upon layer of ironies here. The bus is a take off on the Partridge Family bus, which is a take off on '60s hippie sensibility. Makes me feel like the young person on The Simpson's says when asked whether he's being sarcastic, "I don't even know anymore."
Posted by: Mark Stroup at August 5, 2004 03:37 PM
Just a little bit more lineage on the Magic Bus thing. This from Robert Stone article in June 14 & 21, 2004 New Yorker:
Somehow, he (Ken Kesey) and his friend the sportscar driver George Walker and the photographer Mike Hagen managed to buy a 1939 International Harvester school bus and refashion it into a kind of disarmed personnel carrier, with welded compartments inside and an observation platform that looked like a U-boat's conning tower on top. It was wired to play and record tapes, capable of belching forth a cacophony of psychic disconnects and registering the reactions at the same time. There were movie cameras everywhere. Everyone had a hand in the painting of the bus, principally the San Francisco artist Roy Sebern. A sign above the windshield, where the destination would normally be announced, proclaimed, "FURTHUR."
See also, The Muppet Movie: http://imdb.com/title/tt0079588/
and
The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert: http://imdb.com/title/tt0109045/
Posted by: Mark Stroup at August 17, 2004 04:21 PM