Return of The Ev-I

Actually the Big Ev never stopped I just forgot to tell you guys about it. My darling Blogosphere, how I've neglected you. Apologies to my fans, in particular Kym who has not had a reason to get out of bed since the introduction of Super Diva.

I think maybe I've been in a bit of a non-blogity funk after leaving the fabulous people of LA to be all alone in the wilds of San Francisky.  Actually I'm not alone at all. I'm staying with my Mum's Half Brother's Wife's Twin Sister. She is mothering me as best she can, cooking for me more than my own does and warning me of the wiles of being a single gal in North America. It's all very sweet if not a tad unnecessary.

So the question is, what, o what have I've been getting myself into since we last met. Well, there has been much sitting on couches but that hardly amounts to news. Also there was this:

The happiest, most lovely work place in the world.

I went to Grauman's Chinese Theatre and saw the concrete. Here's me, (auto) straddling Susan Sarandon's teeny tiny feet:

Then saw Terminator Salvation inside Grauman's Chinese Theatre. Now, I'll admit I wasn't paying all that much attention but this film actually isn't even that very good. This is my summation: 

Christen Bale is all serious and using his Batman voice. Lots of really loud explosions go off and bullets fly. Then a man appears covered in chocolate pudding. Turns out pudding man is a robot which is obvious about 2 minutes after the pudding is gone but is not actually revealed for another hour. Then someone says" come with me if you want to live" followed by more loud, ear shattering, explosions.  I don't know how kids these days can stand it. I had to turn the hearing aid down. 

Christen Bale is still all super serious and says "I'll be back". Suddenly Helena Bonham Carter appears as a super smart robot and a complete waste of her talents. Pudding man is tackled by by a Computer generated, porn star days, Arnie. I assume it was CG because the Governator certainly does not look like that anymore. Explosions, bullets, Christen Bale gets impaled and robot pudding man donates his heart so that Christan Bale can continue his super serious bat voiced tirade. Aaaaaaand Scene.

After several more infuriating days on LA public transport it was farewell City of Angels hello San Francisco! And its many flavoured burrows. I've been to Fisherman's Wharf for clam chowder, seen murals in Mission, rainbows in The Castro, drug addicts in the Tenderloin, Chinatown, Downtown, and! and! Alcatraz!

At Fisherman's Wharf they have a place dedicated to old school arcade games. We're not talking Pacman and Pog, I'm talking REAL old school. For 5c this house told me my fortune was to marry four times: 

and this wizard dude told me my job will be this:

Anyone know what a taxi dancer is? Is that like Shirley Maclaine in Sweet Charity? Is that like a whore? Fair enough.

Then on Saturday I went to The Maker's Faire in San Mateo. Oh Lordy, geeks everywhere! And the really incredibly encouraging thing was that most people there were young. They were my age and really interested in creating stuff. Yay the world! Yay Gen Y! Yay the future!

I particularly liked this:

You can purchase it here.

It seems the kids these days are into Steampunk and LEDs. See, I'm hip.

Then there was art at SFMOMA and De Young Museum, most notably the R. Mutt Urinal, and exploratoring and the Exploratorium. Alas it was freeby day so all the kiddies were getting in the way of my play time. Brats! Every one of them!

That sounds bout it. Except for the Prop 8 rally I saw. I have a lot of feelings about the validity of rallies. I'm not entirely sure they do much actual furthering of the cause. But that's a conversation for another time.

On Monday I fly to BON-A-ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! I'm totally going to meet Snoop Dogg. You know you're jealous.

 

 

Stop. Hammer time.

The Museum not the happy-panted, white-collared big guy. This blog post would be more aptly titled Get Some Culture Up Ya as I wish to share with the world some wonderful artists I've seen here in LA. 

For those of you who don't follow art, suck it up and get some culture up ya.

Firstly, I saw a lovely exhibition of local contemporary LA artists at The Hammer.

Llyn Foulkes - Does some lovely 3D collages.

Charles Irvin - His work feel like it was made by an inmate of a mental deviancy institution. I like a bit of crazy in my artists though

Victoria Reynolds - Paints meat!! And titles her works things like Reindeer in the Snow. 

Lisa Anne Auerbach - Lots of feminisey knitted dresses and photography.

I also went to MOCA last Thursday before having dinner with the boy genius that is Tathom. Microsoft was paying for him to be in LA for a tech conference and subsequently was paying for us to drink at the hotel bar.

MOCA has a wonderful permanent collection but the Dan Graham works that are just passing through were the most wonderful. Very architectural. We all know this excites me.

Then there was LACMA. Oh LACMA, how you pleasantly surprised me. The Los Angeles County Museum has a varied collection, as you would expect, but where every city in this country has Warhol, Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns (whom I have concluded is the art world's Jack Kerouac - American, patriotic, slightly chauvinistic, incredibly and unfoundedly well loved) on show, here, they actually show rare pieces. How many times have I seen Warhol's Elvis? Quite a few, but at least at LACMA it was presented in conjunction with a bunch of his other crazy shit.

There was a wonderful collection of German Expressionist. I like these guys. They're really dark aesthetically and thematically. You know, animals eating people and stuff. 

There was this:

Work by Frank West

Which reminded me of one of my own works:

I call this piece Mould of the Large Intestine

And this:

It's hard to tell from the piccy but this installation was giant iron curves that created long winding corridors for you to walk through. Walking through these structures reminded me of that one time in High School when a bunch of us dropped some acid and walked to Richmondo KFC. The footpath seemed to go on FOREVER. Sorry Mum. Only happened that once. Promise.

Also! Also! There was no video art! Not one little itty bitty piece. Nosferatu was being screened but that is most certainly not video art. Thank you LACMA for having standards. 

I am going to go out on a limb and say this; I am so over Rietveld's Red/Blue Chair. You see one of these in Australia and its super exciting. It's a historically significant item. Here, though, Every. Single. Gallery. Has. One. Come on, Rietveld, give us something new already. 

Next to LACMA is the La Brea Tar Pits. The only reason I wanted to see them was because they are featured in a comic I read. Unfortunately I couldn't get underneath them to see if there really is a secret lair. 

My understanding of the pits real, actual significance is this. Way back in the ice age, animals and stuff used to get trapped in the tar and die (as demonstrated above by the struggling mammoth), so, heaps (that's Australian for "a lot") of fossils were recovered from the pits. And thus The Pits have been kept on display in all their smelly glory.

 

Sunny Sanny D

 Haven't yet shared San Diego. I was all Swine fluey so it got a bit jumbled. I enjoyed myself. I did. And I know I had things to share but some of it feels a little like a dreamed it because of the foggy swineness.

NB: I did not actually have Swine Flu. Chillax Mum.

Soooooo I spent lots of time hanging about on my cousins veranda and lots of time sleeping but I also went to many of Sanny D's Museums. Luckily for lazy folk like me, most of them are in the one park. And a lovely park it is too:

Balboa Park

I remember being impressed with the Museum of the Living Artist. Largely due to being "so over" (that's So Cal speak) seeing art work by dead guys. I like that this museum is dedicated to showing contemporary pieces by contemporary people. I did go to the MCASD but it was showing works from the MCA's (Sydney) collection and it was all video art. Have I mentioned how I feel about video art? No? Well that's a rant for another time. Remind me after I've had a few and I'll tell you aaaaall about it. Amazingly they did not have any Tracy Moffat on show though.

The same day I went to the Reuben H. Fleet Science Center and saw an IMAX film about the Great Barrier Reef. Then, I come back to LA and the hostel is full of Aussies. The sneaky bastards are following me. Finally the awesomeness that is me has filtered back to mainstream Australia. I'll be signing autographs soon.

Back on point, the Reuben H. was rad. It was so hands on. There was edutainment bouncing off the walls! I didn't get to see it all though because spent a way-too-long on this:

Marvel of Modern Engineering

It works though! Roll a marble down it. Go on, it totally works. I'm that good.

Also, finally! Finally! I saw the body worlds exhibition by every one's favourite Creepy German, Gunther Von Hagen. 

Now, I'll be the first to admit that our mate Gunther has revolutionised anatomical display and education. The dude invented plastination Which is basically the process of replacing the fluid in organs with  plastic or rubber polymers so they are preserved and can hold their own structure. Incredible, however there is something ethically icky about this guy not to mention he makes some odd artistic choices and gets way to excited about things he shouldn't.

I'm always wary of where he finds his subjects. Supposedly, people donate their bodies to him, which may well be true and I admire anyone that donates their posthumous bits to science or medicine. But where did he find bits and bodies before he was world renowned Gunther, the Creepy German?

Let me go on record as saying I would like to donate my organs for people who need those organs to survive. BUT, if my bits end up in the hands of that man I will come back from the afterlife to wreak my bloody revenge on whoever made that happen. Hmmm, horror film anyone? So going to write that.

Hey Gunther, we know what you're Junk looks like.

Back to San D. Emmanuelle , my cus who lives in the barrio, took me to see a local Sanny D band. The B Side Players were superb and the lead singer had the most incredulous hair I've ever seen!  

Also oodles of noodles of Murals. Love a good mural. Have been inspired to do some muraling of my own. Watch this space...

Tennessee is not a bad place to be.

Thursday night I watched the sun go down over the fields of Virginia and woke Friday to watch it rise over the train tracks of Knoxville. I'm in Sunny Tennessee. And boy, is Knoxville pulling out all the stops to impress me. I've seen art, I've seen sun,I've seen tiny puppies make friends with other tiny puppies, I've seen Cheesecake on a stick AND I've seen Julia Nunes. You incorrigible little flirt Knoxville, wooing me this way. Julia Nunes is someone that was already on my US Mission list but I had know idea that she would be HERE and NOW and for FREE or that Knoxville was having their annual Dogwood arts festival. 

Julia Nunes: World's Most Infectious Smile.

Before we continue with Tennessee though, I feel I should back up and wrap up DC.

So i went to Big Dog Obama's House. On the way there I saw an awesome white building and taking photos of it I thought to myself "They must make a lot of the buildings white around here, like its the fashionable thing to do". No Sascha, that isn't a white house, it's THE White House. No sighting of BD Obama or his new dog Bo. There was a protest starting in the park across the street though. Something to do with Tax according to Mr security guard. He didn't seem to know or care much about it. Dude seen it all before. There wasn't much protesting happening when I went and had a look see, just rotations of the Forrest Gump soundtrack playing while people milled about (seriously guys get some new protest songs already). I then realised I was wearing my newly acquired Bloomsburg Hoodie and figured they might not appreciate being represented at a protest so I left to do a lap of Barrack's place.

By the time my circuit brings me back, the protest has grown. It seems every redneck with an agenda has come out to play. I still don't hear anything about taxes but I see this: 

And hear a lot of pledging of allegiance and star spangled bannering. I start to get a little scared and figure its time to run away just as this arrives:

I scampered away to the safety of the nearest art gallery.

This whole day was wet and miserable and couple that with the endless amount of Neo-Greek Monuments I got a little over it. It's no wonder the Vietnam War Memorial was so controversial. It's the polar opposite to all the white stone pillars. Speaking of the Vietnam War Memorial, The chick that designed it, Maya Lin, had an exhibition on at the Corcoran Gallery while I was there. She's no 90 year old french woman but definitely does some nice work. 

The following day the sun came out so I went in search of Japanese Cherry blossoms. Alas they had flowered the week before.

Tomorrow I move on to Nashville and after that I've been convinced to go to Memphis as well. We shall see. Unfortunately all this slothing about in the sun has given me the sniffles so I'll see where the mood takes me.

The best things in life are free.

...and by that I mean the Smithsonian Museums. They may be in desperate need of funding but they're keeping it free if it kills them. Hopefully with the current economic climate they will have a chance to catch up. Is that how these things work? Money confuses me.

My day started by being befriend by the most pretenious man I ever hope to meet. He's doing a PHD in Shakespeare and is from Toronto. If the rest of Toronto's population is like him, I'm crossing it off my list. He decided to sit with me at breakfast and tell me that I had an attractive neck. Apparently it's unusually long. I think the toss-pot wanted an invitation to go sight seeing with me.  Also today I was given a flower by a homeless man. He wanted to tell me it was a pansy. It was beautiful  and fresh picked and I would have prefered to have had breakfast with him.

Later in the day I feel in love with a 90 year old french woman. Her name is Louise Bourgeois. I saw her exhibition at the Hirshhorn gallery and her sculptures were A-Mazing. 

DC is very pretty. It was built to be photogenic. The only problem I see with it is all the Americans. I don't mean the native DCians, I mean all the others. Americans don't travel much except, it seems, to their nations capital to soak up the patriotism and democracy. They didn't get in the way too much. I saw this: 

And for those of you that forget why this is important to America, let me remind you.

Funny thing is, I'd already formulated that comment when I heard a women say to her child "Forest Gump". Sometimes I wish I wasn't always right.