The vivid scoring in "Chicago" reflected bustling, animated street scenes.
Mr. Jordan roots his version in the lapsed tradition of soapbox speakers who once animated Harlem street corners.
But now it is on the verge of another transformation: to a decidedly un-Californian urban enclave pierced by skyscrapers, clustered around public transportation and animated pedestrian street life.
They're learned people who know that it is many individuals, going about their daily lives, who animate the streets and create the vitality that cities like New York exude.
By some standards, a developer's plan to transform the defunct Domino Sugar refinery north of the Williamsburg Bridge in Brooklyn is a good deal, offering 660 of its planned 2,200 apartments to poor and working-class New Yorkers, shops to animate the streets and a public esplanade along the East River.
I liked, too, and lapped up, the way in which the tight, regular grid of what remained of Georgian Bloomsbury – streets animated by uniform parades of red double-decker buses and ranks of gleaming black cabs – gave way, all of a sudden, to an enormous courtyard set behind glossy black iron railings.
Over the past week, scores of volunteers from across the country have been flocking to the space to glue, paint and stitch together props that will animate the street protests accompanying the World Economic Forum.
A CLASSIC Sesame Street animated short instructs that the letter Q "looks like a funny looking thing".
Among the scenes and portraits shown here, the most arresting is "The Red Brick School Building, Willesden" (1985), a gloomy, anonymous Victorian pile conjured up in extra-thick impasto and animated by the street life in front of it.
At the time of writing, the clips chosen for the app are heavy on the cats and dogs, with singing eggs, Elmo from Sesame Street, animated aliens and a piano-playing hedgehog also making an appearance.
