My Long Beach Symphony Orchestra Rehearsal Sketches

Long Beach Symphony Orchestra rehearsal 15 November 1993, ink on paper

When I used to live in downtown Long Beach, I got season tickets to the concerts of the Long Beach Symphony Orchestra. LBSO, under conductor JoAnn Falletta, was excellent; they probably still are. Back in the early 1990s, in my opinion, they had a great balance between more familiar traditional classical music, plus contemporary and premier pieces – sometimes Latin American and other overlooked composers whom I hadn’t been familiar with.

One day I received, in the mail, one of those donor letters that asks if I have overpriced stocks or vacation homes that I would like to donate to LBSO. I wrote that, even though I don’t have extra homes lying around, I am an artist, and I think tossed in a photocopy of a drawing I’d done of a string quartet, and mailed it back. I’d done this with this type of solicitation before and hadn’t heard back… and didn’t really expect to hear back.

But, this time, I did. 

Some Recommended 2011 Pieces

I got inspired by Alissa Walker’s recent piece highlighting her top ten stories from 2011… so I figured I’d curate some of my 2011 output. Drive up some web hits here and there! Here are ten pieces from 2011 that I am proud of… and they’re so all over the board that I can’t imagine anyone out there reading this would actually like all this stuff.

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.