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I attended the Los Angeles Arts Town Hall this morning, just the opening session, as I had to sacrifice my afternoon to assist my mother pick someone up from the airport (where, weirdly enough, I ran into Bob Tower, making his escape from the Netherlands as Edith’s besieged Something’s Brewing project winds down). It was well worth attending for two reasons 1) to see Mayor Villaraigosa speak about arts in Los Angeles, and 2) to get a peek at Olga Garay (pronounced Ga-rai, FYI), the mayor’s newly appointed head of the long suffering Department of Cultural Affairs. They’re really the same reason - a twofer of “what’s going on with the City and the DCA?”

The two hour moderated discussion that began the day was fascinating. I’m a very low man on the Los Angeles arts totem pole, so any opportunity I get of the macro-view of the arts in Southern California is great. I’ll limit my observations to El Mayor and appointed DCA head Olga Garay, for the sake of brevity.

Mayor Villaraigosa - Man, this guy is slick. I can’t recall seeing him speak in person before, and he’s got all the smooth talk and looks that other politicians would sell their souls for. Much water was made about his opposition to the previous Mayor’s aborted plan to dissolve the Cultural Affairs Department (as the DCA was known until recently), which has served him well since his election, buying him a fair amount of credibility in the arts community. His speech was largely focused around a rather astute analogizing of Los Angeles to Venice, which I can definitely see. Both cities have almost no business being as great as they are, based upon their geography, and it was innovations in trade and creativity that made them more relevant than other rival cities, both cities have also been “Gateways to Asia.” He talked at length about the value of Los Angeles’ cultural institutions, noting that the Getty Center has more annual visitors than Universal Studios - not bad considering the national advertising campaigns that drag people to Universal Studios.

The most important words in his speech were in reference to the funding of the DCA. The DCA has many challenges and flaws, and the greatest one is its lack of proper funding. The mayor announced, but gave no real details, an effort to increase the funding of the DCA, through an undescribed public-private partnership. The key words of his speech were “I’m gonna be raising money.” The key part of that sentence being “I’m.” One of the questions regarding his appointment of Olga was “is she expected to raise the money to do her job?” Because there’s no way she or any other DCA head can exercise any kind of vision within the current budget situation.  So without giving any real details, the Mayor has put it out there that he intends to do something about the DCA budget - but not from within the general City Budget.

Olga Garay - The switch from Margie Reese to Olga is like night and day. Margie wasn’t just seemingly unapproachable, she was directly unapproachable, even to her own staff. Olga doesn’t start rocking her desk on Spring Street until August, but after seeing her talk, The meat of her talk, and what I hope is her primary mission in her new job can be summed up in this quote from her introduction where she attempted to articulate “Why I’m here” - “to assist you in placing Los Angeles in a national and international context.” That’s what needs to be done.  I’d argue that the bulk and mass of Los Angeles artists and institutions are currently doing a great job at asserting themselves nationally and internationally, it would be nice to have some “official” support in that area.  I really can’t imagine the DCA turning from a “barely above water” department to really providing leadership on the national and international stage, at least not immediately, but it certainly is capable of getting back in the game.

Later in the moderated portion of the session, Olga pointed out that the City of Los Angeles spends less per capita on cultural services than post-Katrina New Orleans.  That comes as  no surprise, and our city’s massive geographic size and the fact that most of the big institutions are either private (Getty, MOCA) or county (LACMA) facilities certainly skews the math and fogs the equation when one assesses the amount of money the City spends on art, but the conclusion rings true - LA has historically underfunded the arts, and that’s just not acceptable anymore.

I’m totally addicted to Flickr as a means for looking at and learning about art. Being able to search by tag, to view multiple views of an object and especially reading individual reactions and anecdotes regarding an object can really expand upon the viewing experience. One of the most attractive things about Flickr is that it is a community built not only of individuals, groups or companies, like Myspace is, but there are definite practical uses for Flickr - we use our flickr account at Angels Gate to maintain an easily searchable database of print quality images of artworks, people, our facilities and events. Personally I use Flickr to communicate, to act as a repository of my better images and to serve images to this and other websites. In a moment, I’ll be uploading some screenshots from the demo of Photosynth to Flickr, for use here, for the purpose of writing this post.

Flickr is getting kind of bloated, though, and technology marches ever on. I’m hungry for new tools with which to look at things that both are and aren’t near me.

This morning, I was reading Slashdot, when I came across this post about Photosynth, what looks like an incredibly novel and powerful tool for manipulating both visual data and the metadata associated with it.

So what is Photosynth? Essentially it’s an interface for dealing with large quantities of images, either related or unrelated, and puts them into an easily and quickly manipulatable information space, not in a file tree, but in a relational manner. Once you start thinking about it, there’s a huge wealth of possibility there. But keeping this art-relevant, it takes a mountain of images of a place or object and then links them together to create a model of that object.

In the demo video at the bottom, the presenter shows us what looks like a convincing 3-D model of Notre Dame composed of thousands of images gathered on Flickr. Generating the faux-3D model isn’t what’s interesting, though, it’s what you can do with it. You can zoom in on any photo, or group of photos, and explore the model in amazing detail. It’s as close to traveling to a place you’ve never been as I’ve ever seen, and it doesn’t involve any silly “virtual reality” details, just a flying, roving eye that puts your field of vision right into the object. You could take this further (although this capability isn’t displayed in either the video or the hands on demo), and then look at the metadata associated with the photo. In other words, you could be flying around Notre Dame, zoom in on an image of a statue of a saint, and then learn the name of the saint, or read the photographer’s text about the photo. I’m aware of some very “in line with the aesthetics of cyberpunk” visualization technologies that are out there for specialized purposes, but with the notable exception of Google Earth, this is the first technology that I can think of that has the potential for real public usage and appeal.

The best way to get a feel for how cool Photosynth is would be to install the Tech Demo in your browser. I’m in Firefox, and it worked great - go here to try it out. It’s definitely a contained experience, so you don’t get to see how it would work in the wild, and since it’s running on their hardware, you don’t get to see how it would work either over the web in a general way (say if you were sourcing images yourself from Flickr) or if you were running it from your home computer.

Above - This is the “galaxy of photos” view, seen as the image set for the Piazza San Pietro zooms in. Each dot represents an image source. You can see the outline of the plaza in this view.

Above - The Piazza San Pietro viewed from on high. Notice the angled, white outlined box on the right? Let’s go take a look at that particular architectural detail.

Above - One click and we’re there. You can zoom in on this and see detail on both the status and the heraldry on the shield detail. We could go left or right from here and pretty much view the whole facade of the building. One of the weirder effects/features of Photosynth is being able to see around corners. It’s kind of like when Deckard is examining the photo found in Leon’s apartment in Bladerunner, where he’s panning around inside the photograph - slightly disconcerting, but awesomely revealing.

Above - This is a capture from the Photosynth Tech Preview of Seattle artist Gary Faigin’s studio. The set of images from this preview were obviously captured intentionally for the demo, as it’s unlikely that the public would be able to take enough images accidentally to make the system work, and since his studio isn’t a static environment, a series of photos taken over a period of time might simply yield chaos, at least in the 3D view.

It’s easy for me to imagine this technology used to duplicate an exhibition online, or to do a seemingly complete tour of an artists’ studio, as was done here. Imagine being able to view every object in the Getty collection from any conceivable angle, and in unthinkably high resolution, paired with all of the textual data you can put your hands on, including research data, collection information and visitor impressions and opinions.

Above - Here’s a selection of images from the Tech Preview of Gary Faigin’s studio seen in a non-3D view. If I want to zoom in on any individual image, say a closeup of one of his pieces that was shot in high resolution, I can just fly around and do it. I can tap on any image and bring it dead center. The zooming capabilities of this are amazing, and make one immediately question - what kind of hardware is driving this thing? The 2D view is nice, and has great potential simply for viewing and sifting large quantities of images, even unrelated ones.

Demo Video on YouTube - view Blaise Aguera y Arcas (founder of Seadragon Software, which as been acquired by Microsoft), doing a demo of Photosynth at TED, including some interesting chatter behind the goals of Seadragon and where they’re interested in taking the software. My favourite goal of Seadragon is “Transitions as smooth as butter.” How can any technology that aspires to the unholy power of butter not be amazing. He does a fantastic demo of an issue of The Guardian as perceived with Photosynth, and displays some truly amazing scaling techonology, which runs incredibly fast and at an insanely high resolution. It’s cool.

I eat food everyday. I eat a lot of food, and I’m really passionate about the food that I eat. In some ways, it’s the one area of my life where I truly engage my hedonistic intentions. So I’ve added a food category, and I’m going to be posting more images and words about food. In honor of that here’s yesterday’s dinner!

photo by Choctopus

That’s plate #3, a.k.a. my dessert plate, at the Grand China Buffet (Yelp - apparently no one there likes it)on Hawthorne in Torrance, where the lamp store used to be, adjacent to the Cost Plus. It’s also in the plaza where my childhood Mecca, Egghead Software, once existed. I used to buy tons of software at Eggheads, all around LA, and then return the games after I had copied them to disk, or to my hard drive. I would then return to the store and claim that something was incompatible with the game, and that it didn’t work, and get my cash back. It was a father/son activity - my dad would take the manuals to work with him and copy anything copy protection related. I was a bad kid, what can I say.

Anyways - Why is it that Chinese restaurants always have the best, firmest Jello? I don’t know. The reason the crab claw is on my dessert plate is that I have a personal rule for eating at seafood buffets - every plate must have a seafood component. If you really like to eat “anything and everything that comes in a shell” and “anything with tentacles”, this place is a nice comfort food joint that you can pig out at, when you can’t decide what you want to eat, and don’t want to do anything fancy. They also have really good frog legs here, for some mysterious reason.

What you’re about to see is the finest meal I’ve ever eaten. It consisted of little more than a yard wandering chicken (I may have a picture of the guy alive somewhere), some basic spices, and a pot. It was cooked and eaten on the floor by amateur cooks. It was insanely good and I’ll never forget it. I tried to take pretty good notes on the prep, as I’m hoping to reproduce the meal back in the States sometime.

The day that I ate this was a strange day.  My host’s mother had gone to the hospital in the main town, and I had been left alone for some time.  I wasn’t sure what was going on, and after a long afternoon reading and writing, I went out for a walk after it got dark.  I made it about a block away before I was confronted by a pack of neighborhood dogs (I’ve really got to write a whole post on Thai dogs).  In a village like the one I was in, the night belongs to the dogs - they block roads with their bodies, and do other clever things to control and patrol their areas.  There are so many dogs in Thailand, that I really should address it in another post.  After encountering the dogs, I retreated to the house, as I didn’t want to wake the entire neighborhood up, as I had no one who could possibly translate for me - my ability to communicate was less than useles, as most people in this part of Thailand speak Laotian or a hodge-podge of Laotian and Thai, and all I was armed with was a Lonely Planet phrasebook.

Luckily, Ole heard the dogs, and being a smart guy figured it must be me making such a ruckus.   He came to Jessada’s house and we walked up the street to his place, where the cooking had already begun.  Jessada re-joined us right before the meal was served - good timing.

above - I wasn’t present for the killing of the chicken, so some stuff happened before this was taken.  Here Danoi is burning the last of the tiniest feathers off of the chicken, over the single burner at Ole’s house.  I presume they killed the chicken by breaking its neck, as I didn’t see any evidence of it having its throat cut.  The chicken was cleaned and de-feathered before I arrived, but I did notice that Lek was off to the side, cleaning out the intestines with water, and that all of the organs had been set aside in a separate tray.  Also a bowl contained the chicken’s blood which was congealing.   I saw a lot more than I photographed, as it was incredibly dark much of the time, and most of my images were coming out blurry.

above - the chicken was chopped with a knife, and placed into that green plastic dish.  The adjacent plate contains the entrails and organ meats.  Here Danoi slivers lemongrass stalks on the block, and Ole peels and cuts garlic. Sugar was also mixed in with the spices.  I noticed one element to Thai cooking that seemed novel - sugar was often used the way we would use salt or another spice.

I’d like to remark about sanitation issues.  Despite the fact that all of the work was done on the floor, the various cooks were really meticulous about sanitation.  newsprint was used to protect the chicken from coming into contact with anything, and it was repeatedly thrown out and replaced.  A huge amount of water was used to clean the chicken or other ingredients, at appropriate times.  A few years back the village got “company water” and although all of the houses have cisterns and rain catch systems, that water is no longer used for cooking or drinking.  Almost all of the cooking was done in low light. What was done outside was done in almost no light.

above - Danoi empties the chicken into the pot.  at the bottom of the pot a small quantity of water and a thick, coiled padding of lemongrass. After the chicken was placed into the pot, the mass of congealed blood was placed on top of it.

above - sealing the pot with wet cotton.  This was particularily meticulous to watch.  Danoi sealed, tested and re-sealed the pot several times until it was just right.  The dish on top of the pot is filled with water.

above - this is the chicken cooking, on the single cooktop that makes up the indoor cooking area of Ole’s house. The water on top of the pot had to be checked and completely changed (by draining it off with a cup) four times.  When the water was changed five times, the dinner was ready.  It took maybe 30-45 minutes.  The water was never allowed to boil.

above - the unsealed pot full of chicken.  The mass of blood was still solid after the cooking process and was removed and put aside.

above - the chicken was emptied onto a platter.  Danoi is making the gravy for the dish, by mixing garlic, sugar and spices into the blood from the chicken.   After mixing the ingredients, he crushed them together in the mortar.

above - mid meal.  I’m not sure if it was one of those “let’s see what he’ll eat” moments, or if it was a “guest of honor” moment, but at the start of the meal I was offered the heart, liver and lungs.  That’s great, since I love chicken hearts, chicken livers, and lungs.  I managed to eat parts from all over the chicken, including the head, feet and intestines.  The brain was especially good, and although the feet were tasty, there’s really too much work involved in eating chicken feet.  This meal was also served with sticky rice, of course.

I’m not sure what made this meal so good.  The chicken’s meat had a gamey texture, and although it was amazingly tender, it still retained some structure, giving it amazing mouth feel.  My notes describe the flavour as “incredibly savory”, and moist, but not greasy.  Also, the gravy was delicious.  I was a little wary of the gravy, as I’ve had blood and liver based gravies in the past, and they can be so rich as to be distracting and overpowering, but I could not get enough of the gravy here.

In my notes I took notice of the difference between “men’s cooking” and the cooking that I was eating at the house.  Many of the meals that the guys cooked up were farmer’s meals or hunter’s meals - simple, single dish meals that could be cooked and made simply, using 2-3 tools, at most, while a house meal might consist of 4-5 different plates, with garnishes, and a soup.

I’m really not sure what to say about this object, For the Love of God, a cast platinum skull, covered in diamonds, with real teeth, by Damien Hirst. It fits right in line with my personal philosophy of “the need to create things that need to exist.” It also frightens me on an art historical level that I cannot articulate. It goes on display at White Cube in London this Sunday, and it’s for sale at an even £50,000,000.