Spring is here at last, and taxes are due. What better time to focus on other neglected work, and go through the archive… And clean up the house. I swear it’s about 2/3 of an f-stop brighter in here now that I washed the windows! So, as an ode to the gods of procrastination, I present my Lunar New Year’s series.

A big thank-you and shout-out to the Chinatown Community Young Lions, and the Toms / Lees / Lews, for letting me stick around and shoot during the crazy, pumped up, charged-on-drumming marathon that is New Year’s. I swear the last time I had been they still had fireworks, so that was a looong time ago.

No idea why I thought I could keep up with a bunch of younguns on a 8-hour sprint through the neighborhood, but hey, it was great! And I know I’m not the only one who felt old here. (Thanks to the unnamed original Young Lion who gracefully posed for one last portrait when totally cross-eyed with exhaustion.)

Note to self: next year, bring a fixed 24 mm. Note to Lions: next year I want to borrow a CCYL jacket, if you keep switching out the guys on crowd control duty! But seriously, this was a beautiful experience, and I couldn’t have spent it with a better group of young AND vintage Lion Dancers…..

Mea culpa: a sincere apology to the ladies for having been all but edited out of this sequence. I hope I can make up for it by linking to a great piece that Wendy Junru Huang did last year, specifically focusing on the female lineage of CCYL, here?

And, finally: for a better look at how crazy fast paced and full of energy New Year’s lion dancing feels, you’d really need video and sound. It’s an experience that just can’t be adequately captured in stills, no matter how much you want to drag the shutter, or work with flare… As always, I appreciate how still images can freeze a certain mood or theme, but, do check out this amazing clip by Liam Lee!
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Ok, admittedly, no original reporting was harmed in the making of this purely visual, visceral presentation. So for some background on CCYL let’s cut to another one of Liam’s videos – which has some fantastic archival footage to boot.