Und so weiter...

And so on.

The crush of theater work here has slowed a bit (I'm only behind on one, well two, shows at present) and I'm back from a quick flit to the seaside (shrimp!) and settling into my annual cool weather highly efficient work-mode.  Or so I tell myself, in a effort to become, you know, highly efficient.

So what's going on?

I'm off to Kitchen Dog in an hour to help strike Detroit.  I'm not exactly sure what we're going to do with all that sod!  On my board are final details for The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told at Uptown Players, which starts building soon, and designs for The Great American Trailer Park Musical for OMG Productions in [the greater] San Francisco [area].  

I'm presently reading a newish book by Michael Chabon called Telegraph Avenue... which I'm enjoying, but so far at least it hasn't bumped his Summerland off my "Chabon Favorites" shelf.  If you happen to be hot on jazz or Berkeley, however, it may become your fav.  Always a good writer.  I saw the movie Gravity recently - liked it.  A great sense of Spaaaaaaaaaaaaace as an unimaginable huge and hostile environment.  The admirable reliability of the Space Shuttles (a marvel of engineering, though, tragically, only mostly reliable) sorta let us earthbound onlookers forget just how inhospitable space IS.  This film reminds me.  i want to see the new pirates-meet-Tom-Hanks film but haven't gotten to yet.

But the thrill of my recent little beach trip was getting to see a poor quality photocopy of a map of Galveston Bay.  Unsigned... but then would he dare sign it? At the time he was both secretly working for the Spanish and against them.  Simultaneously he was working both-ends-against-the-middle with the Americans and the French.  And the Mexicans.  Plus Texan filibusters and Louisianans and who knows who else?  Pirating is complicated.

HERE's an earlier post on Lafon with a link to his most famous map.

Catch-Up

Okay, okay, I've been slow about posting lately - blame the IRS.  The tax deadline is breathing down my neck.  Day after day - or so it feels - I sit at my board sorting receipts from the whole past year.  (To sketch for yesterday's production meeting, I had to total yet more receipts just to free my drawing board.)  I find taxes stressful.

Any one else?  Raise your hand.

Anyway.  More posts will be forthcoming eventually.

Meanwhile, I can heartily recommend other reading: the historical mysteries of Barbara Hambly set in the New Orleans of 1833 and later, with hero Benjamin January.  Start with Free Man of Color.  Good reads!  I happened across these because I'm researching a slightly younger New Orleans (1790-1820).

I haven't written too much here about my trip there last fall (afraid to dissipate my head of steam), but I can say that it's fun to take a vacation with a research goal.  It adds more interest to sightseeing when you're always mentally editing your surroundings: was this here then?  Would historic character X or Y have stood here like this?  Would character Z have smelled this?  Tasted that?  Been cold and muddy or sun-baked?  Surroundings become populated with ghosts you bring along with you - DIY haunting!  Of course, New Orleans is an especially easy place to do this because history just oozes out of the brick, but if you do your homework most places have more history than you'd think.  For instance, there's a mundane-looking hardware store just blocks away where I'd never work - never shop - because I remember the ex-employee of the ex-sporting goods store who slit the throats of several ex-coworkers for the sake of the weekend till and boxes of expensive sneakers.  Digging through old newspapers would turn up those facts... if you looked.  (The place has gotta be haunted.  Not that I'm superstitious - ha!)

Lately I've been dabbling in history.  The Journal of Benjamin Henry Latrobe, one of America's earliest and most distinguished architects is a fascinating read.  He visited New Orleans in about 1818 - died there too.  As did his son, also an architect, and yet another Greek Revival architect, Barthelemy Lafon.  All of yellow fever.  We forget how lucky we are to live in a time and place when epidemics are not the scourges they were.

This period of the War of 1812 - which we hardly remember - turns out to be an important turning point in the U.S. and Europe, laying foundations for later events: the industrial revolution, both the plantation system and slavery's abolition, the Trail of Tears and western expansion...  History is more interesting than I'd guessed.  But then fifth grade Texas History left out all: pirates; cannibals; slave smuggling; slave-smuggling, knife-wielding not-so-heroic heroes of the Alamo; and beautiful quadroon slaves offered up to Mexican generals as a military strategy.

The battle of the Alamo - public domain image

All the interesting stuff!

HERE's a link to what I did write about New Orleans - a bit about Plaza d'Italia, that post-modern fountain.

The Sugar Trade

In the course of some research I've been doing lately into that rascally architect/pirate Barthelemy Lafon, I've been slowly learning the extent and (economic, historic, social) importance of the sugar (and allied slave) trade at the end of the 1700s until the Civil War.

It turns out that sugar - and slaves - built the new world to an even greater extent than I'd imagined.

believed public domain image

In the course of learning all this, I've found a couple fascinating things: the book Orders from France by Roger G. Kennedy, which is the beautifully written, entertaining story of French architects bringing neoclassicism to this side of the Atlantic (including a chapter on Lafon) and the sugar-mural Cargo by the artist Shelly Miller, which you can see HERE or on her blog HERE.

Avast! Readers!

This be Talk Like a Pirate Day maties!

In honor of this world-wide Piratical Celebration, here's a little image from one of my very most favorite architect/pirates, a detail from the historically important map of the Mississippi river delta and adjacent coastline drawn by Barthelemy Lafon in 1805:

Excerpt of Lafon's map:  CARTE Ge’ne’rale du TERRITOIRE D’ORLE’ANS

in the public domain

And here's a great website, Big Map Blog, where you can see the whole map and zoom in on it and everything.

Set sail for Barrataria me hearties!