“Consistently vibrant”: Kirkus Reviews on The Skyscraper and the City

A nice advance review came the other day for The Skyscraper and the City from Kirkus Reviews, a leading book review service that many librarians and booksellers rely on. Kirkus publishes reviews of a vast number of books, but most of them simply appear with little fanfare online. Someone from Kirkus phoned this morning to let me know that this review will appear in the 15 November issue of Kirkus Reviews Magazine, which goes out every two weeks to about 15,000 libraries, bookstores and other subscribers.

The reviewer isn’t keen on much of the content of the long captions I wrote to accompany many of the images. (I steer clear almost entirely of theorizing the paintings, and instead tend to say something about the subject matter, or about my own life when I was creating the work.) But the book’s main focus is the paintings themselves, and the reviewer likes those very much. The full review can be found online (https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/don-lepan-2/the-skyscraper-and-the-city/). Here’s an excerpt:

LePan presents a collection of charming watercolor cityscapes accompanied by commentary, in this retrospective of his three-decade career. … [The book] features dynamic urban scenes in which light operates without conventional logic: “Broad swaths of light sweep and swoop down and across and up and away,” lending skyscrapers, bridges, and monuments a “friendly but fierce and almost otherworldly energy.” The artist’s loose, gestural approach offers a refreshing departure from the rigid linear representations that typically characterize urban landscapes. LePan’s “mind’s-eye painting” … approach yields consistently vibrant results; outstanding examples include his breakthrough Chicago (1994), in which the Sears Tower and Merchandise Mart pulse with raw metropolitan energy, and New Orleans (2007), which captures both post-Katrina devastation and the city’s irrepressible vitality through bold color contrasts and flowing forms.

PS I will paste in below details from the two paintings the reviewer singles out--Chicago (1994) and New Orleans (2007)

The Horrific Attack on Bourbon Street

Relatively little is known about the horrific attack last night in New Orleans, but it seems that the attacker was a US Army veteran inspired by the ideology of the Islamic State.

It’s not hard to guess why someone adhering to a viciously puritanical ideology might focus on those particular blocks of that particular street. I can’t think of any other place in all of America that has more of a reputation for giving full expression to American decadence than do the first six or eight blocks along Bourbon Street as you enter the French Quarter from Canal Street.

As I remembered this stretch from the two times I've lived in New Orleans (in 2007 and then again in 2011), the bars along this stretch were of the seediest sort, blaring canned music out onto the street and advertising “Big Ass Beers” in huge letters. And (with the notable exception of two classic restaurants--Galatoire's and Arnaud's) there was very little along the stretch except seedy bars, tacky tourist souvenir shops, and strip clubs. Further into the French Quarter, Bourbon Street becomes very pleasant—and New Orleans as a whole (very much including its bars) is wonderful in an almost infinite variety of ways. But as I remembered them, those few blocks of Bourbon Street were deeply unpleasant; it was not by coincidence that there were often been fundamentalist Christian demonstrators along that same stretch, carrying large signs accusing the Bourbon Street bars and strip clubs of being dens of iniquity.

I've often visited new Orleans over the past 15 years, but I've avoided that stretch of Bourbon Street. I just now used Google street view to get a more recent sense of those blocks. Much seems to have changed. There are still some seedy bars, to be sure, but they seem to be far less dominant--and considerably less seedy--than was the case 15 years ago. There is still a "Kama Sutra Cabaret" but there seem to be far fewer strip clubs than there used to be. All in all, very little evidence of iniquity. But perceptions linger, of course, and perceptions, however outdated, often seem to have more of an impact on cruelly deranged minds than does reality.

The Christian fundamentalists used to harangue the tourist throngs through megaphones. But I don’t think anyone before the past 24 hours imagined that rage against sinful behavior in Bourbon Street’s real or perceived dens of iniquity—rage of any religious stripe—would find expression in mass murder.

Update, 4 January: It's striking that, overwhelmingly, media coverage of the attack has portrayed the tourist strip on Bourbon Street in a purely positive light. The Assoctaed Press report that's printed in today's Globe and Mail (and no doubt in many other newspapers) is in this respect typical; it describes Bourbon Street as "famous world-wide for its festive vibes." True, but a fuller and more honest accounting would also mention its long-standing reputation for seedy bars and sleazy strip joints.

Painting New Orleans, and Painting the Interior of America: The Art of Mitchell Long

The first time I saw Mitchell Long’s paintings displayed was at an exhibition held in a private home in 2008. I was immediately struck by the quality of his brushwork—by the way in which he could suggest so much with so few strokes of color. I was struck as well by his sense of line, and of depth; again and again he is able to configure the streets and the buildings of New Orleans in ways that I find my eye can’t help but keep coming back to. I was struck by the subtlety with which his layered oils capture the soft light of New Orleans. And I was struck by the utter absence of that touristy showiness that characterizes so many paintings of New Orleans by less distinguished artists.

In the years since then I’ve kept up with Long’s work—with the many paintings he’s done of the old industrial building that for many years provided studio space for him and for a dozen or more other artists; with the many luminous paintings he’s done of the French Quarter; with the paintings he’s done of churches; with the great series of paintings he’s done from the roof of a hotel in the Quarter, looking down and out over the roofs of Marigny and Bywater. Commercially, Long has had his ups and downs over that time—including more than a few lean years when he was able to get by only by selling small works for $50 to the tourists at Jackson Square. But to my mind he has always remained the finest living painter of New Orleans—and one of America’s finest living painters of city life.

Long has been enjoying greater success in recent years, but it’s been as much the result of new themes in his painting as it has been of people recognizing the talent he brings to his paintings of street scenes on Royal or Chartres or Decatur; a new Mitchell Long painting these days is as likely to be of a checkout counter at Costco or Walmart or IKEA as it is of a scene in the French Quarter or Bywater.

What’s behind these Mitchell Long paintings of the interiors of big box stores? In one sense, what’s behind them is thirty years of painting experience—the years in which Long developed his extraordinary techniques of brushwork and of building color and of painting light in depicting New Orleans street scenes. But New Orleans (and Miami) street scenes were never the entirety of what Long’s work was about. For years Long has also occasionally painted interiors with other foci—most frequently, kitchen scenes. It was during the pandemic that Long turned his gaze in a further direction and began to paint interior scenes in some of America’s largest big box retail stores—Walmart, IKEA, and, especially, Costco.

Long’s images of these ‘landscapes’ are arresting visually, and have to them a strange and quite original beauty. To some viewers they also hint at deeper themes—indeed, at some of the deepest themes of modern American life. They can be read as depicting worlds in which humans are dwarfed by their surroundings; worlds in which all light is artificial light; worlds in which little stands out against the steel gray except a few bright splashes of color. They can be read as worlds in which the wide aisles of capitalism and the ‘checking-out’ conveyor belts of consumerism are at the center of the life experience. Row upon row, the lines and the colors Long has chosen can be taken to suggest the shine and the blur of consumerism, and of capitalism itself. And, regardless of how much much one reads into them, Long’s Costco paintings give us a sense of reflected light—light reflected off the Costco floors, light reflected off the ceilings, light reflected off the COVID plastic barriers at the checkout counters. In these reflections it’s possible to read as well the suggestion that these are worlds from which we can never completely emerge; it’s possible to read into them worlds in which America itself is reflected, and (perhaps less comfortably) a part of the viewer is reflected too.

I’ll accompany this post with images of a few of the Mitchell Long works that Maureen and I have purchased over the years. You can check out many more Mitchell Long works on his website— https://www.mitchell-long.com/cityscapes .

Rhyme of New Orleans

Maureen and I were thinking the other night that there are too few poems written that have something to them of joy. As you may have experienced recently, there's been a move in some circles to circulate poems--poems that people have found engaging and affecting, particularly in a joyous or uplifting sort of way. There is of course no shortage of engaging and affecting poetry in the world, but E.E. Cummings and a few others excepted, there has been a dirth of poets who frequently write poetry expressive of joy--whether in some pure form or admixed with other emotions.

One such poem that comes to mind is Alice Oswald's "Wedding"; another is Carol Ann Duffy's "John Barleycorn." The latter is a poem very largely composed of the names of English pubs; re-reading it the other day (before I passed it along as a reading recommendation to one of these "Poem Exchange" groups) made me think that one could perhaps do something of the same sort with the names of bars in New Orleans. The poem below is the result of my effort to do just that (drawing on some of the material I'd included a few years back in a poem for Maureen). It didn't end up with as many bar-names as I'd thought it would, and the joy is certainly admixed with a few other emotions, but joy there is. For what it's worth:

Rhyme of New Orleans



New Orleans don’t rhyme with beans, or with means—

That’s what they’ll tell you, uptown or downstream:

New Orleans don’t rhyme with beans.

But Satchmo did it—you know what it means...:

When it’s music it all becomes different, it seems,

The notes and the words flow like water, like dreams—

Like the dark and the deep of the river’s wide dreams

As it curls in the sparkle of night through New Orleans.



Rhyme New Orleans. Rhyme New Orleans and the music begins,

With full rhymes, fat rhymes, light rhymes, slant rhymes,

With high notes, low notes, bank notes. Light sins.

Rhyme thick air. Rhyme black and white and good times,

Rhyme Abita and amber, and rhyme good health,

Rhyme night and stomping, rhyme black and blue,

Rhyme like the river, turned back on itself

And stretching, aching, thrusting round, surging through,

And once or twice a lifetime, swamping

The city that once was the place where they sold the enslaved,

City of graves, city of cotton,

Time stretched, time lost, but nothing forgotten,

'Cept some days let’s pretend last night never happened.



The night is warm, the beer is cool,

There’s jazz, there’s blues, there’s someone rappin,

DBA, Hi Ho, they’re passing the hat,

Vaughan’s, the Mother-in-Law, Spotted Cat,

Blue Nile, Maple Leaf, the Candlelight Lounge,

Spare a dollar? I tell ya, I just gotta scrounge

A few bucks, buy a coffee, a meal;

I can tell ya, noone here really wants to steal.

Tipitina’s, Lost Love, the Friendly Bar--

All open late, and the door’s ajar:



That’s Chris Kohl’s clarinet, smooth as a knife;

Eight to the bar, hold a note like forever. Like life.

That tune? You can’t lose it; Time? You can’t choose it.

It’s time like the always and never of music,

Of everything music, of mockingbird music,

Like the always and never of

Living, of loving. Of love.

The Case for Individual Reparations

Until I read Ta Nahesi Coates’ now-classic article “The Case for Reparations” (published in the June 2014 issue of The Atlantic), I hadn’t given much thought to the idea that the beneficiaries of slavery—and of the decades of Jim Crow exploitation as well—should pay reparations to the victims and their descendants. It was tucked it away on that top shelf of the mental closet we reserve for ideas we class as unrealistic, impractical. We acknowledge they might have something to be said for them as a matter of moral principle, but we feel instinctively that, realistically, practically, nothing could possibly be done for the foreseeable future.

Ending slavery was once an idea like that. So was giving women the vote.

When I read Coates’ article I was immediately persuaded that reparations were justified. But as I discovered, raising the topic of government-sponsored reparations tends to be a conversation-stopper. Many prefer to discuss not whether or not reparations are justified, but whether or not people should be forced to pay reparations; that second question is one they feel confident answering no to. And there the matter rests.

Plainly, government-funded reparations will not be politically possible for the foreseeable future. One might as well imagine the American government ending all its subsidies to the factory-farming of animals and encouraging us all to go vegan. Perhaps it should happen, but we all know it’s not going to happen any time soon.

Does that mean that, as individuals, we’re helpless? Far from it. Why wait for governmental action when we can act now, as individuals, to make reparations?

I’m not the only one to have had this idea. Michael Eric Dyson, for one, in Tears We Cannot Stop, suggests that individual white Americans keep their own “individual reparations” accounts by making appropriate donations.

This past year I put the idea into practice. In the spring of 2008 I had bought a small house in the Bywater area of New Orleans, with the thought of one day being able to live in the little back unit, at least for part of the year. I rented both units out, and the years went by. By 2017 it was clear my idea of living there for much of the year would never happen. My partner and I were quite happy in a different little house—on Vancouver Island, a very long way from New Orleans. I sold the property last December. I’d owned it for nearly ten years, and the house had of course appreciated. On reflection it seemed to me that about one quarter of the capital gain was an amount I felt comfortable in paying in reparations, and I sent a check for $7,500 to a worthy non-profit dedicated to increasing opportunities for African Americans. Is a quarter of the capital gain in fact the most appropriate amount? Probably a higher percentage would be more appropriate. But at least it’s a start—and I’m absolutely persuaded that this sort of contribution is the right thing to do.

It’s the right sort of thing to do in terms of my own past history. I’m Canadian, but my great grandfather lived in New Orleans from 1838-1849; it’s impossible to imagine that, as a white person living in New Orleans at that time, he did not benefit significantly from slavery.

It’s also the right thing to do in the context of a large transaction involving a transfer of assets. Even more striking than how disadvantaged African Americans have been in terms of wage levels are the disparities in wealth. Whereas white North Americans have typically been able to pass on wealth generation after generation, and thereby start small businesses and buy houses, African Americans have been heavily and consistently disadvantaged in terms of wealth. For that reason I think it’s particularly appropriate to think of reparations at times when those of us who have been privileged are receiving the proceeds of a capital gain. (I should emphasize here that, much as whites as a whole have been advantaged in North America, there are of course some whites who have never been and will never be privileged recipients of a capital gain, from a real estate transaction or from any other source; the argument I am making here about making voluntary reparations should apply only to those with the means to consider that course of action.)

Again, individual reparations shouldn't preclude a more general plan of reparations through government action--far from it. But unless and until governments can be persuaded to act, individual reparations (and reparations payments made voluntarily by companies and other organizations) are a lot better than nothing--and white folks like me who have the means to take such action shouldn't hesitate. If you're in any doubt as to why, I urge you to read Coates’ extraordinary article.