On February 9th Sam and I had the pleasure of joining a new/old friend for a casual birthday gathering in Los Feliz.  I met M back in college when we had dinner together at Byron’s parents’ house.  M was one of Byron’s roommates at Ohio University.  After that dinner we never really had the opportunity to meet again. I knew that M had recently moved to Los Angeles so Byron introduced us (again) and M invited Sam and I to his birthday gathering.   M and his girlfriend were very welcoming and facilitated conversation with them and many of their friends we’d never met before.  M and his girlfriend share a love of Thai food and happen to live around the corner from us in Hollywood.  I have a feeling we’ll be eating Thai food with them together soon.  We plan on showing them more places to hike, and they’ll show us more places to eat since they are food bloggers.

After hanging out there for a few hours we headed to Little Tokyo to check out the art show at the Japanese American History Museum.  As it turns out, there was a photographer there for one of the art blogs that I read, Daily Dujour.  We didn’t notice anyone taking photos at the time, but I saw myself in the photos as I read their review of the show.  Apparently our ears are prettier than our faces, though, as every shot is from the side.  See if you can pick us out.

Need help?  Okay…  (I’m reposting pictures from DailyDujour, hopefully they will not mind)

here I am walking out of the shot…waaaay in the back there…

Here is a great shot of my ear and Sam’s elbow (to the left)….

And here is Sam in complete profile while I have turned my head completely away from the camera…

They managed to capture every second during the night when we actually weren’t standing next to each other.

The Edwin Ushiro pieces in the show were great, but we were disappointed that Audrey Kawasaki only  had one (?) actual piece while the rest were prints.  Since the majority of her work is painted on wood with the grain showing through, prints really don’t do it justice.

We also walked through the upper level, which contained the actual museum.  Although we knew about the Japanese internment (and the little-known German American internment) during WWII, it was all the much sadder to see the personal effects of the camp inhabitants.  After looking at a scale model of one of the camps we had to wonder how in the world the US government could afford to build and maintain (such as they were)  the camps on such a huge scale.  Keep in mind this was all before the post-war economy boom.

Some of the features in the museum talked about the court cases we studied in grad school.  In my business law class we spent a few days going over the supreme court cases brought against the US government on behalf of the interned Japanese American citizens.