Atomic Cafe mural, in Little Tokyo



I asked my friend Michael Noble, and he was kind enough to send this picture of a commemorative mural at the ground level of the newly opened Little Tokyo MetroLA subway station. It’s celebrating the Atomic Cafe, after-hours hangout of song and story. The top two-thirds is based on a photo I made in 1988. If it looks familiar, that’s because I’ve previously posted the original. The mural is big — compare to the elevator doors for scale.

I am humbled and excited to join the landscape of Los Angeles this way.

Jerry and Pat



So there I was, at a campaign rally in UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion, the night before the US presidential election — Monday, 7 Nov 1988. We were all there to support (or cover) Mike Dukakis, the Democratic candidate for president. And I hear a voice behind me, “Oh, my god! Jerry (Brown, the then-former Governor of California) is talking to Pat! (Also Brown, also a former Governor of California, and Jerry’s father.) He hasn’t done that for years!”

I turned right around, and made this picture. Because I knew, first names by themselves or not, just who was being spoken about.

Sometimes the value of a picture is in the caption, not the picture itself. So here it is — a quasi-estranged son talking to his father. A little blurry, and definitely artless.

But they hadn’t talked to each other for years.