Just to show I’m almost as glacial as LA Metro…
Back in October ’25, they finally made a web post giving me credit for the photograph I made of the Atomic Cafe, used as the main image in the mural commemorating the place, as part of the Little Tokyo/Arts District station for the A and E lines.
When we visited Vienna/Wien in 2015, it coincided with diplomatic talks about Syria, at the Hotel Imperial. These were the first talks Iran deigned to attend, so the atmosphere was quite hopeful that progress could be made.
We were in the hotel’s Café Imperial when I overheard that line from the distinguished gentleman above, presumably in one delegation or another. If you recognize the image, it’s because yes, this is the source for one of my banners.
August Sander’s 1928 photo of a pastry chef (Konditor in Deutsch, which, given the business name konditori in Swedish, makes sense). This was maybe 12 feet high in sepia at… was it Old Town Bakery? in Pasadena.
Our favorite dish was their zuccotto, orange cream with a chocolate bombe-like cake around it, sprinkled with fine cocoa.
Lexicon. Pretty simple. If the concept of heteronormative exists — and it clearly does — then the idea of placing the agenda of what great apes want also exists. Thus, primatonormative.
Here we have our cat Boots, obviously thinking our primatonormative agenda doesn’t interest him:
This is a nighttime photograph, by Nancy Matoba, of the soon-to-open Little Tokyo subway station in LA. It’s of the above-ground plaza used by the station at 1st & Alameda, the approximate location of where the Atomic Cafe was, and shows the very large mural commemorating it on a stainless steel building that has a staircase and an elevator. (Compare the mural to the elevator doors for size.) The image of the Cafe at night used for the top two-thirds of the mural was made by me; the bottom third is explanatory text. You won’t even need to go underground to the rest of the station to see it. I’m proud to join the landscape of LA, and humbled to pay tribute to the place and the Matoba family this way.
(All praise and thanks to Nancy’s daughter, Zen Sekizawa, for finding my photo online in the first place, and her tireless efforts seeing this project through with Metro. Zen first mentioned this idea to me in March, 2018, showing how the wheels of government grind slowly, and exceedingly fine.)
And the original image, from my photo portfolio site:
Rummaging through my old photos is this, a bust in the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna. I have no other notes, other than I made the photo in October, 2015. I’d say it’s Roman, but what do I know?
Made by our friend Moshe Feder in New York.
Made by leaning out our top-story mansard window. The middle of the 5e arrondissement in Paris, looking northwest up the Boulevard Saint-Germain. The thing about making black and white photos in Paris is, so many older buildings are still extant your image can be compared to classic images from the past.
Just in case it’s not obvious, all the header images are either by me, or of me. The woman shown across multiple headers is my beautiful, smart, and forbearing wife Ulrika (who also made many of the images of me).
At a pub called The Lincolnshire Poacher, in Nottingham, back in 2016.
