Jeremy Lin

So… I have to, up front, confess that I don’t really follow basketball. For most of my life, my refrain has been that I’d rather play sports than watch them.

In high school and college, I swam and played water polo… and, of course, I ride a bicycle all the time. A bit of a knee injury almost two years ago now has made just a bit less active. I still play some ultimate frisbee, but I’ve been becoming more of a spectator, following soccer a bit (a bit more than I’d like to admit.)

About a week ago, I started seeing some facebook stories about Jeremy Lin. As the week went on more and more folks were posting about him. It was coming from all quarters – folks I went to high school with, my brother-in-law, African-american friends, political friends, Asian friends, and others. I gave in to the hype and decided to watch some videos on youtube… and I am really impressed.  

Jeremy Lin is sometimes called J-Lin, which makes him a sort of tocayo for me… though that’s pretty much where similarities end (though he’s also 6’3″ – same as me.) He’s been a professional basketball player for a little over a year, but I’d never heard of him until this week. He’s a 23-year old guard currently having the week of his life scoring massive points for the New York Knicks. He’s Taiwanese-American the first American-born Chinese or Tawianese in the NBA.

Though he won a California state championship with Palo Alto High School, he was not recruited by colleges. He went to Harvard, where he played basketball to great success, but he was not drafted at all by any NBA teams.

He played for a season with the Golden State Warriors, where he saw little play time. He was cut from them, played during the summer with Mavericks, then cut from their squad. The NY Knicks brought him on, but he sat on their bench and was sent down to their “D-team” in Erie where he played briefly brilliantly, and was then brought back up to the first team due to other players’ injuries.

About a week ago, Lin came off the bench and played longer and scored more (25 points) than he ever had in his professional career. He started his first NBA game a day or two later, and now he’s breaking records with the most points scored by any other player in his first starting games. The Knicks are on 5-game winning streak, first time in the season. Lots of folks are excited about his story and coming up with silly plays with his name, including: “Lin-Sanity” and “all he does is Lin, Lin, Lin.”

I like stories about athletes that don’t fit the racial molds we might have for them (see my earlier post about Mesut Özil – the German-born Turkish-heritage  soccer player), especially stories where sports meet politics and culture and grace. It’s pretty clear that Lin was consistently overlooked due to his race. Lin persevered and worked really hard and and ultimately shined when the opportunity he had created finally presented itself. Though folks have been saying that he “just came out of nowhere,” it’s clear that he’s been honing his skills and playing really well for some time. It seems like his time paying some dues, mostly away from the limelight has allowed him to develop as a player.

What’s also impressive is his humility. In interviews, he credits the great work of the entire team. You can tell he has some confidence in himself, which he should have, but he’s not cocky or carried away with his own importance. His playing style reflects this; his assists are wonderful (a tiny bit like Özil) so he makes his teammates play better.

There are lots of great easy-to-find videos of his great run this week (maybe watch this.) I really enjoyed watching the video below, which is mostly in Taiwanese (?) though Lin responds in English. I kind of like listening to languages I don’t understand – especially when there’s a tiny bit of English tossed in (like “Xxxxx-xxxx-xxx-xxxxx-Stanford-scholarship?”) It’s a bit long, but worth watching if you’ve caught Lin-mania. Jeremy Lin appears with his mother. He’s very humble. He gives credit to God, and demonstrates a very Christ-like Christian faith. He clearly believes, and it makes him bigger, stronger and more loving… but he shows this by example, by conscience, by generosity of spirit… not in any kind of pushy way.

I think he’ll be around for a while, though his current streak (averaging something like 28 points a game for 5 games) may not continue at such a phenomenal level… though… who knows? maybe he’ll keep surprising us! He’s exceeded expectations before. I suspect that teams are still underestimating him and they’ll kind of figure him out, at least some.

Even if somehow he goes on to do nothing else, this week will go down in history. Wishing you well, J-Lin!

Some other interesting links (from my Facebook friends) with worthwhile political takes on the Jeremy Lin story:
The Subtle Bigotry That Made Jeremy Lin the NBA’s Most Surprising Star (Colorlines)
What We Talk About When We Talk About “This Jeremy Lin Nigga” (Deadspin) 

Detail of Barbara Mendes artwork, including depiction of a cityscape

My friend Aubrey has been telling me for a few months that I should drop by his building and check out the new art gallery there. He mentioned that the artist showing her work at the gallery was a comic book artist who knew Robert Crumb. He told me her name, but I didn’t recognize it.

Yesterday I finally made it down to Barbara Mendes‘ art gallery – called the SoRo Art Center Gallery and located at 2709 S. Robertson Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90034 – on the west side of Robertson between Pico and Venice. It’s easy to spot because there are great mural paintings all over the outside of the building, and even a public art installation hanging from the adjacent street trees. 

In the 1960s-1970s, Mendes did early underground comic books under the pen name Willy Mendes.  Some of her comic book work is collected in a recent book called Art in Time by Dan Nadel. I confess that I had been unfamiliar with her comic books.

Mendes moved from comix to painting, but interestingly, her paintings do a lot of sequential story-telling. Mendes’ fine art utilizes quite a bit of comic books’ visual vocabulary. For example, there’s a lot of strong drawings with dark outlines and somewhat flat colors (the limits of describing art – that sounds wrong – the color is great, but it’s expressive, not photo-realistic.) Many works even incorporate panels telling sequential stories. Often there’s lettering/wording, too, much of it Hebrew.

Many are sort of massive elaborate story-telling paneled murals – including some that tell, verse by verse, the entire books of the Bible – ie: Leviticus. A lot of it includes stories drawn from early Judaism.

There’s a lot to see there – plenty of Mendes’ works, and some other artists pieces. Lots of big intricately-detailed mural pieces, many small works too.

Detail of one of Mendes' paintings: A dog-shaped panel depicting an urban landscape (the detail is much better in person than in my photo)

Nearly all of what I saw was engaging, beautiful and vibrant, but what I most enjoyed were her depictions of cities. A number of her large murals include some depictions of  neighborhoods. There’s a lot of place detail, often very identifiable, but also great invented color that makes it pop, too.

A lot of Barbara Mendes’ work is posted on her website… but it’s better in person, so go check out Mendes’ gallery at 2709 South Robertson!

At the Gallery - Barbara Mendes with our friends Melba and Aubrey Provost

These are from various places where I blog – here, L.A. Creek Freak, CicLAvia, Eco-Village, L.A. Streetsblog, and my art blog Handmade Ransom Notes. Yah – a lot of it is insider rants that only a hard-ass bicycling urban creek freak like me would really want to read.

Drawing of my mom - 1987

1. Remembering my mom, Margaret Gerhardt Linton, who died on July 31st 2011. I wrote about her in a few different places… but perhaps most memorable are the following: a three part piece about her home and my sketches of her in the hospital.

For a broader biographic sketch of mom, read this and/or follow the links here. I miss her a lot… especially around the holidays and the turning of the new year. She made me who I am in myriad ways. I am glad that I’ve been writing about her and posting others recollections… so I can keep her memory fresh.

2. Some of my best pieces are really long complaining indignant rants… one of my favorite rants was about the city of Los Angeles’ unnecessary project to tear out the historic 1929 North Spring Street Bridge. The project as initially proposed was, in my opinion hugely awful… then, through a many-year community activism campaign the project has been trimmed back to just awful.

3. Here and then I do celebrate – I really enjoyed last summer’s awesome  boating excursions on the L.A. River.

Photo of the year - click to embignify

4. I am not a great photographer, but I do a take a few cell phone photos that tell some of the stories that I think are worthwhile. My favorite photo this year was of the new green-colored bikes lanes on First Street in Boyle Heights.

5. I was really happy to provide L.A. Streetsblog’s coverage of the awesome new protected bike lanes in downtown Long Beach. They opened in April 2011. If you haven’t ridden them yet, resolve to do so in 2012.

6. I’ve been tracking the bicycle facility mileage that the city of Los Angeles implements over time. I think that city bike efforts have gone from dismal to decent, and still have a long way to go. These are all wonky insider tldr stuff… but I am happy that these stories got some attention, held the city to some accountability, and may have shifted some of the debate toward just a bit better facility implementation.

• how the city is doing on pledged bikeway implementation
• city’s actual bikeway mileage is less than what’s reported
• city implementing sharrows doesn’t meet pledged mileage

7. I’ve written quite a bit about CicLAvia all year (and if you’re not familiar with CicLAvia – a.k.a. the most wonderful thing that ever happens in L.A. - watch this) but my favorite CicLAvia piece was Is a Snerl Human? (For more of my writing about comic books, see here.)

8. It’s still standing right now, but it appears that 2012 will indeed bring the demolition of the Riverside-Figueroa Bridge over the L.A. River. I was glad that this piece got me to finally sit down and document the history of that historic bridge… and happy that it proved to be a popular post.

L.A. River sketch from Sketchbook No. 58

9. I’ve done a fair amount of artwork, the best stuff I think has been in my sketchbooks. See selections from Sketchbook No.58 and No. 59 both completed in 2011. I like these sketches of Occupy Los Angeles, too.

10. A handful of other semi-notable output of mine (ok, so I totally cheated on the top ten thing by tossing another ten links into the last item. Hypographia meets Narcissism!)

• San Francisco in sketches, bikeways, ciclovía, and public space
• Some 2011 completed art pieces I like here, here and here
• Read and re-read the Martin Beck detective novel series
• How comic books work – especially the multi-panel pan or polyptych

Thanks for reading!

Art Spiegelman's One Row - cleverly self-conscious comic about how comics work and don't - in Raw No.5, printed in Comix, Essays, Graphics and Scraps

One post isn’t enough to cover Art Spiegelman’s entire oevre… so I am going to try to touch on a few things and call it a post. Easier said (written) than done.

Over the past month, I re-read pretty much everything I own that Spiegelman has done (see list below.) I scanned a few things for my mutli-panel pan inventory.  Then I walked into a bookstore and saw MetaMaus – Spiegelman’s new 300-page book that explores what makes Maus Maus. I bought it immediately, and spent a lazy day reading it… and then dove back in and read most of Maus again, seeing all kinds of wonderful things that Spiegelman had hidden in plain sight. 

I find Spiegelman’s Maus‘ primary subjects deep and fascinating. I’d say that the subjects are a) the Holocaust and b) the relationships between parents and their offspring. My favorite author (whose work this blog’s title refers to) is Primo Levi: a holocaust survivor writer who writes mostly memoirs. But I am not going to write about Spiegelman’s subject, but instead about the medium he’s working in: comics.

I’ve written some about comics here at this blog – mostly about my interest in how comics use of their uniquely-comic polyptych. Spiegelman is huge student of the language of comics. He deploys uniquely-comic vocabulary with a crazy-wonderful self-consciousness that’s deeply immersed in the history of the comics medium.

Take for example these panels from Spiegelman’s 1987 review of a history of Winsor McCay:

Art vs. the word balloons, detail from a 1987 comic review of a Winsor McCay bio - by Art Spiegelman, printed in Comix, Essays, Graphics and Scraps

Speigelman is using the comic medium to review a biography of Winsor McCay, an early 20th Century cartoonist (some of his work I’ve posted here.) First off, I think it’s great just to use the comics form to review comics subject matter. What’s hugely clever and self-conscious and unique to comics though is that Spiegelman portrays himself struggling against the word balloons. This in a critque of a biography that he’s frustrated with because it dedicated too much space to writing and not enough to printing the actual McCay visuals. This is a fundamental balancing act in comics – how much is said in words and how much in images. Spiegelman reproduces this struggle graphically by having his mouse-self-portrait using hands to push against word balloons that have become nearly too long for the space allotted. It’s such an intelligent way of making this point… and, again it’s unique to comics. (The final bottom-right panel is, of course, a homage to McCay’s comic formula, too.)

Spiegelman has long lectured on the history of comics. Various written works covering this are collected in Comix, Essays, Graphics and Scraps. There’s a lot of great material, especially including his essay “Comix: An Idiosyncratic Historical and Aesthetic Overview.” It’s just really clear that Spiegelman has devoured a lot of comics and found what makes them tick (parallel to, but differently than Scott McCloud.) He consciously draws from the wealth of a hundred-plus years of comics vocabulary – employing it, playing with it, homaging to it – to enrich his enduring works, especially including Maus.

MetaMaus is great… but so much of Spiegelman’s work is already so “meta”! It’s fun to get lost in the fascinating technique behind it all.

I’ve posted a few of Spiegelman’s polyptychs in my inventory of multi-panel pan sequences – see 1960s (witzend) and 1990s (Maus.) I found it interesting that quite a few of Spiegelman’s polyptych pages receive significant attention in MetaMaus. The polyptych is one great comics tool that Spiegelman uses sparingly but very effectively.

Listing of Spiegelman’s books I’ve been reading, re-reading and enjoying – listed in the order that I read them, which I think works well.

• Maus
• Comix, Essays, Graphics and Scraps
• Breakdowns:
• In the Shadow of No Towers
• MetaMaus

Enjoy, and I’ll probably dip back into these and write more about them later.

A little over a year ago, I wrote a short blog post about Mehmet Sander. I just came across a few more videos of his work on-line, so I got inspired to write a bit more about him now. Mehmet is a choreographer-dance who taught me a lot. Above is a video documenting his piece Obtuse Space – performed by six dancers, including Mehmet, on a set that includes a flat and a sloped area.

I met him when I was living in Long Beach in the 1990s. He ran the Mehmet Sander Dance Company, which I ended up volunteering and helping out with administratively for a couple years, mostly schlepping around sets, designing and selling T-shirts, and sitting in on rehearsals… sometime sketching, sometimes just being inspired.

As I wrote before “he showed me how vital and real and precious it is to find and hone one’s own unique artistic voice. And assisting with managing the company showed me that, with a lot of work and focus and passion, people can do world-class things on a shoe-string budget with seat-of-the-pants operations.”

Here’s a short documentary about Mehmet Sander, including some of his wonderfully strong convictions about dance (and how it doesn’t need music.) I still hear his voice when I see dance performances… his critiques made a lasting impression on me.

A lot of this video was filmed at a fundraiser concert that I helped produce – at the Warner Grand Theater in San Pedro. I drew a flier for this, and I did a lot of the work helping promote and schlepping stuff… and I remember it went really well.

I actually appear briefly in this video (starting at about 6:32.) My stuff was filmed during a workshop that I participated in. I remember being very inspired by these workshops (as well as feeling sore) – but they definitely got me going on exploring my art (visual art – drawing and painting – which I now post here) … encouraging me to play with it and to find things that were pushy and true.

My friendship with Mehmet Sander was one of the best things to ever happen to my art.

Mehmet Sander

Cities and the Wealth of Nations by Jane Jacobs, 1984

I’ve been reading Jane Jacobs book Cities and the Weath of Nations: Principles of Economic Life (1984.) I’m not quite finished yet, but, so far, it’s good but I can’t highly recommend it – at least not so very highly as I recommend Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961.) Death and Life is really one of the very best books for folks interested in cities – what makes them work and what screws them up. I really enjoyed Death and Life and it shaped some of my thinking about cities,  so I figured I’d pick up another book by Jacobs.

I am not through Cities and the Weath of Nations, but I just read and want to share this passage which felt very Los Angeles… the story of a Mexican bullring named “The North Hollywood.”

Consider [...] a village named Napizaro in a poor region of central Mexico, several hundred miles to the northwest of Mexico City. For about forty years Napizaro has been heavily subsidized by migrant workers. Almost everyone in the region containing Napizaro used to live by farming, and many still do – mostly subsistence farming, although some practice a bit of cash cropping. The families who depend only on subsistence farming are known locally, for good reasons as the morosos, those without hope. Their lives are inconceivably grim. But a couple of generations ago a new factor entered the lives of some of these people: the pull of jobs in the United States, distant jobs that, as it happens, were illegal as well because it is hard to crack the American immigration barriers. Some took seasonal agricultural jobs but others found year-round work in such cities as Houston and Los Angeles. It is on jobs in Los Angeles that Napizaro has come to depend. 

Today Napizaro is as prosperous a settlement as can be found in the entire region. The village’s twelve hundred people live, for the most part, in comfortable brick houses with pretty patios and tv antennas. The community has street lights, a modern infirmary, and a new bull ring names The North Hollywood in honor of the industrial section of Los Angeles, some fifteen hundred miles away, from which this prosperity comes.

At any given time, more than three quarters of the men are away, working in North Hollywood. For all its amenities, Napizaro is described by an observer as a sad settlement where leave-takings are sorrowful and absences long, and where where women lead dreary, lonely lives. Because the men can seldom afford time off from the factories of North Hollywood and because trips home are expensive, they are often gone for years at a stretch. The money they send back home buys more than it would in Los Angeles. For example, a new brick house in Napizaro in 1980 cost only $6000, most of that accounted for by its imported components, because do-it-yourself construction, barter of labor and extremely low local wages keep the rest of the cost low. An equivalent house in Los Angeles would be many times as expensive, quite apart from the price of Los Angeles land. The street lighting, infirmary and other improvements were financed one at a time over the years by the men’s self-imposed taxes on their wages. After the bull ring was finished, the men put their money into a fund to buy imported pipes, pumps, and other equipment for a water-supply system.

When the young men of Napizaro reach working age they are given an orientation course in what lies in store for them in the factories. The teacher is an elderly man, retired after decades of work in North Hollywood. The men currently work at there arrange jobs for the newcomers. One of the enterprizes receiving them is a clothing factory founded by a Napizaro migrant himself who has run it successfully for many years.

Naturally, the men of Napizaro have considered founding a factory right at home, a plausible notion at first thought because, among them, they already have the skills and experience to set up a clothing factory, manage it, operate it, train new workers and find wholesale buyers. But reluctantly they have abandoned the idea. A factory in Napizaro could not pay a living wage if, indeed, it could be started at all. The skills and experience the men have acquired in Los Angeles are usable only in the context of a city economy with its symbiotic nests of suppliers and its markets, not in this economically barren region. One and the same lack – a vigorous city right in the region – forces the men to find work far away and also makes it impossible for them to start an industrial plant of their own, at home.

Mexico City is no help. Mexico is a big country and Napizaro lies far outside the region Mexico City embraces, so far outside that the economy of Mexico City hardly touches upon this region at all. For economic purposes, Mexico City is more remote than Los Angeles, which at least supplies steady work.

After forty years of remittances, then, remittances used responsibly, thriftily and cooperatively, the fact remains that if the remittances were to stop, Napizaro would swiftly sink back into the grim poverty it knew before the migrations and remittances began. Or more likely, its people would have to abandon the region entirely. For the fact is that despite the money sent back from Los Angeles and the television sets and other imports it buys, economic life in the region – was of making a living right there – remain [...] unchanged.

I was curious, so I mapped Napizaro and North Hollywood:

Lastly, here’s a worthwhile Jane Jacobs video, which I first saw on Price Tags.

Artistic envelope that I mailed to mom in 2004

I’ve started scanning and posting some of the letters that I wrote to my mother, who passed away earlier this year. I post these at my art blog Handmade Ransom Notes – under older work pages – see here, here, here, and here. I’ve been trying to mainly post new artwork there, because I want to use the blog to motivate me to work on and finish new artwork. 

I’ve got dozens of these letters, and not all of them are masterpieces… or even notable. Going through them makes me think of mom… but I think that posting these is more my pride and vanity in showing off the artwork I’ve done. There’s not a great deal of internet traffic that finds my art blog… and even less finds its way down into the pages – featuring old art (as opposed to the posts – featuring new art.)

The majority of the artistic letters I’ve created and mailed aren’t in my possession. They’re probably mostly thrown away… but, hopefully many are still in the possession of folks I’ve mailed them to. I have some… and one woman scanned her collection for me, which I posted here.

Sketch from the bottom of a 1999 letter I wrote to mom - posted from my brother and his wife's Peace Corps stay in Bolivia

Multi-panel pan or polyptych from Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics

I recently re-read Scott McCloud‘s awesome 1993 treatise on comics Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. This book, along with McCloud’s subsequent comics volumes, is really the best resource for exploring comic book vocabulary – ie: how comics do what comics do.

McCloud’s chapter 4, on Time Frames, touches on what I’ve been calling a “multi-panel pan sequence” (though I’ve been thinking of trimming this to a “multi-pan”) and he calls this sequence a “polyptych.”

McCloud does this great demonstration where he shows a single panel taking place over a duration of time, not a single discrete moment:

Single comic panel depicting action taking place over a duration of time - written and drawn by Scott McCloud

Then he breaks it out into a multi-pan:

The same sequence drawn as a polyptych - written and drawn by Scott McCloud

I wasn’t sure what to call these sequences, but McCloud has succintly labeled them polyptychs!

So I’ve been thinking… should I go back and re-label all the stuff I’ve been calling multi-pans? McCloud is the trusted, perhaps definitive, expert in the field. I wrote about these polyptychs here and here, and collected examples of from the 1900s to the present day in this multi-decade index. I won’t retroactively modify all those, but I think I’ll use polyptych and multi-pan interchangably.

Also, I’d like to explore where each of these terms comes from.

Polyptych is a term from the visual arts world, meaning “a work consisting of four or more painted or carved panels that are hinged together.” (definition grabbed from here.) It’s “four or more,” because fewer than four would be a diptych or triptych – two and three pieces, respectively.  Interestingly, “ptych” comes from a greek word for “fold,” so polyptych more or less means “many folds.”

Departure, a triptych painting by Max Beckmann - click to go to MoMA website to view larger version

Artists now and then paint multiple distinct pieces that go together, generally mostly diptychs and triptychs. Triptychs were fairly common as medieval altarpiece paintings that fold-up when not in use, for example follow this link to one by Hans Memling.

I am a big fan of Max Beckmann’s triptych paintings, especially one entitled Departure, which belongs to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

McCloud makes a lot of sense in using polyptych to describe a comic book sequence that spreads across multiple panels with a common background. McCloud has lifted the term from visual art and applied it to comics.

In describing the same thing, I coined the term multi-panel pan sequence -which is quite bulky, no? McCloud only used one word, just nine letters. I used four words, centered on a word from film: the “pan” – as in “a shot in which a stationary camera turns horizontally, revealing new areas.” (Definition grabbed from here.)

Given that comics are sort of a hybrid (or, not as nicely, a bastard) art form that shares characteristics with visual arts and with film (plus writing, music, and more.) McCloud even states “before it’s projected, film is just a very very very very slow comic.”  It makes sense that comic book vocabulary would be lifted from painting and from film… though both my and McCloud’s wording choices have slight flaws, because comics aren’t exactly film or painting.

A polyptych painting generally includes images spread over a shared background/landscape, for example: Memling’s altarpiece. It can, however, include images that are linked thematically, with no shared background, for example: Beckmann’s Departure (above.)

A cinematic pan, as far as I can imagine, always unfolds over time. Though generally a comic polyptych unfolds over time, it’s possible (though uncommon) for them to depict simultaneous occurances – especially wordless polyptychs. Below is an example from Frank Miller’s Ronin – there’s no real pan unfolding in this sequence.

Four-panel pan sequence, from Ronin, No. 4, page 1, January 1984, by Frank Miller

Sometimes this can seem pretty unnecessary. Miller’s image would work well as one panel without the gutters. But sometimes… it just looks cool! It kind of reminds the reader that this is a comic book… On stage, it might be described as “theatrical.”

Comics, though actually older than cinema, are still in a sort of in their infancy. This is because, as an art form, comics haven’t really been taken seriously by most critics, academics, and by the general public. I think that the reason for this is that, for the most part, comics haven’t taken themselves all that seriously either. They’ve been mostly throw-away stories cranked-out under deadline. There are occasional moments of genius (and even the cranked-out stuff is often interesting in what it has to say about popular culture) but most comic books don’t hold my adult interest they way they held my adolescent attention. Thanks to quite a few creators, including Craig Thompson, Alison Bechdel, Mike Mignola, Alan Moore, Art Spiegelman and others, this is changing.

Given the comics medium’s infancy, the vocabulary for describing and critiquing comics hasn’t quite fully developed. Pioneers, including Scott McCloud, Will Eisner, and a few others, have laid some excellent foundations for these discussions. In describing comics, they’ve used terms from painting, theater, and film… but they’re sometimes describing things that are unique to comics.  The comics polyptych is wonderfully unique. It has imperfect analogs in painting and film… but it doesn’t really exist in painting or in film… it’s pure comics.

Someday maybe, a hundred years from now, a young writer will see a medieval triptych for the first time and say “wow – that’s kinda like those comic book polyptych things!”

Nicely crowded tunnel at L.A. Union Station

I took this photo last Saturday, on my way down to Orange County to see the greatest Sondheim appearance that never happened. It’s a shot of the main hallway connecting to the rail platforms at Los Angeles’ Union Station, which is one of my favoite people-watching places. It’s also one of L.A.’s great architectural historical monuments… and the site of historic racist removal of L.A.’s Chinatown, which was forcibly evicted/displaced to make way for the station. I was really happy to see such crowds, on a Saturday afternoon.

Union Station, and some surrounding land, was recently acquired by L.A.’s Metro, for new Transit Oriented Development. For more Union Station reading, check out these two L.A. Streetsblog articles: Dan Koeppel’s A Bitter Ode to Union Station and my New Twist Enlivens Old Station.

Stephen Sondheim not getting conversant tonight

Last night, I made a trip down to Orange County. Dined with my sister, her husband, our (and mom’s) close friend Michael. And went to see Stephen Sondheim in Conversation… well… almost.

Stephen Sondheim was scheduled to appear live at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa… but, due to massive snowstorms blanketing New York City, he wasn’t able to fly to California.

And, sans Sondheim, it all turned out really well. 

That day I’d been humming and singing to myself this lyric from the song Finishing the Hat in the musical Sunday in the Park with George:

And how you’re always turning back too late
From the grass or the stick
Or the dog or the light,
How the kind of woman willing to wait’s
Not the kind that you want to find waiting

While on Amtrak southbound, I read through the book Sondheim’s Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes. Then, at the door, an usher urged us to “make sure to read the sign” which read… no Sondheim tonight.

The evening opened with a couple minutes of live phone call with Sondheim. The host, Michael A. Kerker, among a couple questions, asked Sondheim if he was every happy with his writing. Sondheim replied in the negative and said that he wasn’t aware of any writer who was entirely satisfied with their work… then added at least not any good writer. It was fun to hear Sondheim’s voice live… even he was only stage in the presence of an empty chair.

Nonetheless, it was a fantastic evening all in all: an apparently hastily assembled revue of Sondheim songs, performed masterfully by Christine Ebersole and Brian Stokes Mitchell, accompanied wonderfully on piano by Tedd Firth. A sort of mini-Side by Side by Sondheim. At various points, Kerker told back stories and anecdotes, and briefly interviewed the singers about what makes Sondheim’s work so appealing.

It was a treat to hear renditions of Everybody Says Don’t, Anyone Can Whistle, Sorry Grateful, Send in the Clowns, I’m Still Here, Pretty Women, The Ladies Who Lunch, Barcelona, and others, with a rousing conclusion of A Little Priest.

And, hopefully, I will get a chance to hear Sondheim in conversation when it gets rescheduled.

Thanks, Michael, for making the arrangements for getting me to yesterday’s performance, and thanks, mom, for introducing me to and inundating me with Sondheim’s great works.