May 2 at the Spectacle Theater in Brooklyn – a joint appearance with Lazar Kunstmann and Jon Lackman, who will show a short film on their guerrilla restoration of the Pantheon clock. More details here.

On May 4, I will be at Back Pages Books in Waltham, MA, joined by Bryan Papciak who wrote the book’s preface. Here is their event listing – hope to see some of you there!

Some wonderful responses to the book from the outside world: nice notices on Flavorwire, Architizer, Curbed, Architecture Atlas and even Business Insider – with extra special thanks to my friends John Law and Scott Beale from Laughing Squid! John has accompanied me on many of these explorations and is also coming out with a book – please check out Tales of the San Francisco Cacophony Society for more stories of unusual urban playgrounds, including an installation we built of found materials on an abandoned state hospital stage in 2002.

Exciting times! The book has finally arrived and I couldn’t be happier with how the photos came out. The staff at Prestel has been wonderful to work with, really taking care to reproduce the images with excellent quality. Thank you Prestel!!

It’s already in European bookstores and a few publications have picked it up, such as the German national weekly Die Zeit, which published a large-format slide show. There are plans for book presentations in New York, Detroit, Boston and Paris – more information soon!

Cream and purple stage curtains making their way across the floor in a Midwestern auditorium.

An atmospheric-style theater from 1929, the Ramova Theater is slowly crumbling to pieces in Chicago’s Bridgeport area. At least it is getting a lot of love from neighbors who would like to see it preserved. Really all you would need are some generators and dusk masks and you won’t even care what’s playing on the screen. To follow its progress, check out the Ramova Theater facebook page.

More photos here.

The book Stages of Decay has a new publication date, April 23, 2013. Here are more details from the publisher.

The long abandoned Golden Gate Theater in East Los Angeles, a few months before its conversion into a CVS. The amazing clam shell in the lobby has apparently been put into storage. I’m guessing the mattresses and other junk have been cleared out as well. As we explored the theater late one night, we were startled to hear a woman shout at us in Spanish from one of the opera boxes. It turned out she was pregnant and living inside the box, and our presence was severely freaking her out. I should add that entering the space involved some moves that wouldn’t necessarily be advisable when carrying a child, which made her presence all the more baffling – but she wasn’t in the mood to chat. I wonder where she ended up and if she still returns to her opera box above the new drugstore now and then, perhaps flinging plastic razors at the shoppers below.