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One of my favourite Flickr contacts is Olivios Lakon, who goes by the nom de internet Hoplitesmores.  As his pseudonym might suggest he’s an ancient Greek military buff. Since I’m a sucker for all things military, and all things diagram, his recent upload of a variety of scans showing the evolution of Greek helmets is something I really dig. Lakon’s stream is just chock full of hoplite oriented goodies for those of us who just can’t get enough of military science and history related stuff - most of his photos have some kind of exposition and description as well, which is great.

This find goes hand in hand with another awesome Flickr user, Maps of the Ancient World, who as you might suspect uploads nothing but images of maps, specifically of or related to ancient Greece.  These maps are really comprehensive - there are maps of periods of conflict, language group maps, maps of natural resources, etc… Given the similarity between the user names of the two accounts, I’m pretty sure the Maps of the Ancient World account might also be Lakon, especially given that all of the maps are of ancient Greece.  I digress. Don’t miss the Maps of the Illiad set (above - War Heroes of the Illiad map - best seen as big as he’s got it).

Technorati Tags: hoplite, helmets, history, ancient greece, greek history, Flickr, diagram, maps, map, Olivios Lakon, military history, armor, history

I’m not just proclaiming Henson’s greatness because as a child I was subliminally implanted during The Count’s hypnotic numerical chanting. Nor because I have a bit of an obsession with cubes. I’m a believer now. I was introduced to the above media by Bill Ginder, who initially started talking about something called “Man Eating Cube.” Phill did some Googling, and discovered The Cube, a television experiment conceived and directed

The above was part of some mysterious entity, hosted by Alastair Cooke, known as the NBC Experiment in Television, that apparently aired in 1969 & 1970. Beyond that all I know is that an episode of Star Trek was pre-empted by it on April 11, 1969, and that two pieces, Dream on Monkey Mountain (adapted from the play by Derek Wolcott) and another Henson project, the documentary Youth ‘68, are archived in the Library of Congress. So there might be other pieces of interesting media out there, I just don’t know about them.

Anyways, The Cube is an hour-long teleplay wherein “The Man in the Cube” finds himself in a tiny cube, obviously the subject of either some kind of experiment or some kind of torture. Others can enter and exit the cube, but he cannot leave unless he “finds his own door.” It’s a carefully constructed examination of the nature of perception, reality and of one’s sense of self. I really don’t want to describe it further - just set aside some time and watch it. If an hour of video on your computer is too much for you, just leave the audio on in the background - the audio alone is astounding.

Technorati Tags: Jim Henson, The Cube, NBC, experimental telivision, teleplay, video

I’ve gone and uploaded medium resolution versions of all of the punk flyers that I have on file from when I curated History of San Pedro Punk.  I was doing some archiving, making sure that all of my stuff was in one place, and I figured it was pretty easy to just upload them all to Flickr, as well.  Each one is titled and dated as best as is possible.  There’s a pretty good chronology of 25 years of punk activity there.  There are flyers designed by Raymond Pettibon, Scott Aicher, Aaron White, Chet Zar, Craig Ibarra, Victor Gastelum, Brad Frost and a host of unknowns.

Here’s the link to the whole set.  Enjoy.

Every one of these flyers is either from a show that took place in San Pedro, or a show involving a Pedro based band outside of Pedro.  The earliest one is probably this Reactionaries, Suburban Lawns and Alley Cats flyer, and the newest one might be this Toys That Kill flyer from a show at The Smell (warning - Flash site).  There are also some other fun things in there, like a scan of a News-Pilot article on the 1984 San Pedro High School controversy surrounding Pat Wilder’s mohawk (Page 1, Page 2), and George Hurley’s fIREHOSE baseball card/tour schedule (Side 1, Side 2).

I was lucky that when I was getting ready for the exhibition I had a really great intern who did a decent job scanning most of these files, as well as meticulously color matching original flyers to the duplicates that we used in the exhibition.  So Celina, big thanks for the scanning and all the copying.  And big thanks to Craig Ibarra for being the source of so many of the flyers - he designed a ton of the flyers in this set.

I may have a backup of many of the flyers not uploaded, so if I turn that up, I’ll make a date with the scanner and bake up some more. 

Oh, and for those in LA Saturday night, there’s a show at LA Conga in Pedro - it never stops, here punk is alive and well.  Underground Railroad to Candyland, 400 Blows, Saccharine Trust, Dios Malos and Mike Watt + The Missingmen.  465 West 7th Street, San Pedro, CA 90731 - 18 and up $5.00.  It’s also the release party for The Rise and The Fall Issue 11 (put out by the untiring Craig Ibarra).

at top: possibly my favourite flyer from the whole set.  A Scott Aicher drawn flyer for DOS, one of my favourite bands of all time, a bass duo of just Minuteman Mike Watt and Kira Roessler of Black Flag.  I just love the big beaming smiles and the corny drawings as letters.  Scott has a real eye for attention to detail that comes through in every flyer he’s drawn over the years.

Technorati Tags: punk, punk rock, flyers, punk flyers, San Pedro, History of San Pedro Punk, Chet Zar, Aaron White, Scott Aicher, Victor Gastelum, Raymond Pettibon, fIREHOSE, Reactionaries, Toys that Kill, La Conga, San Pedro, punk history, art, flyer art

What is art if not an opportunity to explore themes best advanced in black metal? The above is part of the California Palace of the Legion of Honor’s expansive Rodin collection. I’m not particularly moved by this type of sculpture, in general, so what I’m looking for is historical context or subject matter when I view this kind of object. So they’ve suckered me in with this particularly elegant severed head.

Maybe I’m a cruel and base conceptualist, too used to a novelty oriented art world to know better, but I think this piece really isn’t complete until someone goes and has the good sense to fill that attractive basin with either blood or water. Given that he’s John the Baptist, either would be appropriate. I don’t know, but as it is, it kind of looks a lot like John’s poor head has fallen into a rather fancy ashtray.

I think I prefer my severed head art on canvas. I suppose here we’re supposed to look closely at the sculpture, seeing the way Rodin has captured the silent peach of John’s death, with his face all smooth and soft lines, but that’s not the John I grew up with - it’s too far away, and being Jewish, I’m not in possession of the Christian charity that my mind would need to carry the distance between myself and this piece. It’s beautiful, elegant, and far too quiet for me to appreciate fully. I like my mythology & history (what’s the difference, really?) all filled with tension and cartoonish gore.

Technorati Tags: sculpture, Auguste Rodin, Rodin, French, French art, marble, severed head, Christian, John, Saint John, Saint John the Baptist, The Severed Head of Saint John the Baptist, head, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, art

That’s how the above piece of art was advertised to me, and I believe it.  Last weekend I went up to San Francisco with the El Camino College IDEAS Club, and we made a pit stop at Studio Channel Islands Art Center in Ventura, where Tom McMillin, father of ECC I.D.E.A.S. Club Faculty Advisor Russ McMillin, has the above piece on display.

Climactic Extremes consists of a pool of water, in which a 800 degree metal disk sits, below a an inverted cone of ice, which is suspended from the ceiling.  The understructure of the cone is a spiraling copper tube, which is cooled to freezing and accumulates ice.  When the piece is new, you can clearly see the coils, and it looks like a bit of an upside-down, cylindrical ziggurut.  The rim around the pool of water also is made of cooled copper tubing, so it builds up a nice body of ice, as well.  The whole apparatus is in a custom build refrigerated room.  It’s too small in the room to see the whole thing at once, at least not with the lens I had on hand.

Tom had never left the piece up as long as it has been, so the ice has grown way beyond the ziggurut phase, which I think takes the piece from a geometric composition to one much, much more organic.  I don’t know if I would have liked the piece so much had it not obviously been the subject to so much environmental change and evolution.  The piece isn’t static - as people gather in the room, and it heats up, it begins to melt, and the droplets fall right onto that hot disk of steel, and become steam.  So all three ordinary states of water are represented in this piece, which is right in line with Tom’s work as an environmental artist.

I like this piece because of the ice and the viewer interaction.  The cone of ice is filled with details, all veiny and crevassed, running your hands over it is just amazing.  It’s smooth and feels kind of like styrofoam.  It’s a truly novel aesthetic experience, and one that isn’t easily reproduced.  It just invites viewer contact.

As a group of viewers, we easily spent a half hour in the room, waiting to see the ice melt.  The ice has grown so massive that it just doesn’t melt   So imagine a tiny, refrigerated room, with eight people inside, breathing heavily, hoping to see a single drop of water fall that short distance from the tip of the cone to the heated steel disk, for 30 minutes.  Everyone sat around touching, talking and taking pictures of a single piece of art.  People would get impatient.  There were times when we were all on our knees, just waiting.  By the time we had to go the tip had become clear, it was obviously transitioning to liquid, but it just would not drip.

I liked the experience of being unable to affect the piece.  Given the piece’s obvious environmental metaphor, and the current reality that we are in unintended and possibly uncontrollable ways affecting the cycle on Earth, this piece seems to represent an ice age - an environmental power and shift too massive for us to affect - as viewers we are left cold and confronted with the limits of our power.  We are reduced from actors to observers of our own fate.

Technorati Tags: Tom McMillin, Studio Channel Islands Art Center, sculpture, installation art, frozen, cone, conical, ice, environmental art, IDEAS Club,

I attended the Press Preview and Opening Reception for both The Goat’s Dance: Photographs by Graciela Iturbide and André Kertész: Seven Decades last night. I figured it’s best that I separate my review (short version - they’re both excellent, really everything the Getty Center is doing right now is excellent, and if you live in or near LA you should see everything they do, even if it’s just casually) from my foodblogging, so that the whole thing doesn’t run on way, way too long. I really like writing about the more trivial aspects of the Getty, an organization that I’ve become increasingly fascinated by. I’d love to devote a whole year to just creeping around the place with my camera, constructing an extended portrait of the organization and the physical place itself.

The one thing I can say is this - arriving at the press table to before proceeding into the exhibition, the first thing that was said to me was how much they liked my reviews of the Getty food from their press luncheon. So I guess I’ve found what I’m good at.

Reviewing food at the Getty is so much fun because the institution is both so open and accessible to everyone (despite being on a hill and only accessible by tram or shuttle) and at the same time such a posh place. I never manage to not feel out of place there - even the lowliest Getty employee seems to spend more on clothing than I make. Maybe they’re just snappier dressers and smarter shoppers than I am. So there’s this interesting divide between an organization that seems unflinchingly devoted to delivering arts content of the highest quality to the broadest possible audience, and one that serves big heaping bowls of faux-Devonshire cream (I’m considering starting a campaign to make them start serving the real deal - just so I can taste it) to people attending small meetings, and it just fascinates me.

Above - I ate a lot of good food last night, and this was the start of it. I’m immediately suspicious of any tamale that isn’t sold out of an insulated cooler, carried about on a man’s shoulder. I had the chicken tamale, seen above, and Michele had the sweet corn tamale. They were both shockingly moist, and really blew my expectations out of the water. The sweet corn tamale was the better of the two, in my opinion, as I tend to prefer my chicken tamales more on the doused in hot sauce side. The only thing missing was a guy walking around and yelling “Tamales!”

Above - The condiment bar between the tamales and the soup. Again, the Getty really surprised me. That little bowl at the bottom of the table is my bowl of pork and pozole soup. Just excellent, with a little avocado, sour cream and a few dashes of Tapatio. The pozole was cooked to just the right texture so that it has enough body to resist a little when you bite down on it. The only thing missing was the hangover. They also served a vegetarian tortilla soup.” Tortilla soupse in parts of Mexico, tortilla soup is something you might feed to the stray dog that lives in your yard, not that there’s anything wrong with eating dog food, especially when it’s delicious.

Above - The Cheese and Bread Table. I guess this is mandatory, but it seemed sort of unnessecary after the excellent soup and tortillas that were being served. The cheese selection looked excellent, but my lactose intolerance made me shy away. I think that habitual opening-goers develop some kind of dependence on cheese. Watching the almost relentless procession of wait staff continually replenishing this table was intense. A lot of juggling and employees in vests making tight, stressed faces as they struggled to shuffle around the crowd and each other without being intrusive.

Although it’s not seen in any of these photographs, the booze selection was really excellent. The Getty’s Mexican beers were Bohemia and Negro Modelo, which are, in my opinion, the only Mexican beers worth drinking. I was also relieved to see that the lemons they were slicing were going into glasses of water and/or Coca-Cola, rather being used to abuse the flavour of anyone’s beer.

The food at the Getty was so good that I think both Michele and I were tempted to just pig out and abandon our plans to go to Tommy’s on Foothill in Sunland afterwards, but the temptation of that chili dog and fries was just too powerful. Getty chow makes an appropriately LA appetizer to one of our city’s finest meals, though.

Technorati Tags: food, food porn, Getty, Getty Center, opening reception, foodblogging, tamale, pozole, soup, Mexican food, cheese

I was just in SF, but I actually visited the California Palace of the Legion of Honor (where the above painting lives) about a year ago and shot the whole place, but I never processed the images.  I guess I should get around to that, since I love their collection so much (except for the weird impressionist and pre-modern tail end of the collection, which always seems totally out of place).

Judith and paintings related to the Story of Judith remains one of my favourite subjects.  Now that apparently painting is acceptable again, I think all graduate students in painting should have to spend six months just touching on biblical subjects - to fill my belly with new stimulations, at least, and at most, to get them to actually learn the craft of painting.

The painting above is by Hans Cranach, and it’s titled Portrait of a Lady of the Saxon Court as Judith with the Head of Holofernes (full label is here).  So it falls into one of my favourite art historical areas - paintings and sculptures interpreting their commissioner as a mythological or historical figure.  I’m fascinated with this kind of role-play, where the subject is portrayed in terms that immediately become hyperbolic in nature.  It’s one thing to have oneself painted in armour or to play dress up, but it’s another thing entirely to wear the mantle of a whole other person.

What I like the most about this particular interpretation is that there’s such a huge disparity between the figure of the woman and the severed head of Holofernes. I like to think that the painter was not particularly interested in his subject, but that he was interested and fascinated by the severed head instead.  She seems bored, staring off into space - the eyes of the head are more filled with feeling.  My other thought is that the client was so picky that the portrait of the woman was reduced to mediocrity by some kind of editing by committee.

Technorati Tags: Judith, Holofernes, severed head, painting, Hans Cranach, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, Legion of Honor, biblical, portrait, 16th Century, museum collection

The LA Times devotes ink to the fashion scene at a Shepard Fairey opening at Merry Karnowsky. It’s the “image” section, not the art section, so it’s not like they’ve got Chris Knight pestering gallery goers about their wearables. Apparently the exhibition includes a recreation of Fairey’s studio, seen above.

UPDATE:  It has come to my attention that my reference was a bit obscure for some folks.  Here’s a direct link to the Bacon-y side of this post’s title.

Technorati Tags: Shepard Fairey, Merry Karnowsky, art gallery, LA Times, fashion, artist studio, studio

Now graff has credibility again!

Saw this at Boing Boing Gadgets (via Core77, via Wooster Collective), too good not to bandwagonize. Finally someone made good use of LEGO trains - I’ve been scrapping them for spare parts and selling off the train bits to rail geeks for years.  Does it say something very, very sad about graffiti that I’m way more interested in a YouTube video of a two car burner than a real life two car burner?   Or is it just my LEGO fetish at work?

Technorati Tags: grafitti, burner, traincar, LEGO, video

Artist, friend and my current role model Yong Sin has put together a small works show that opens at Sabina Lee Gallery opening this Thursday.  I’m hoping that I can even make it to the opening, as I have two finals and a ton of stuff to do Thursday before I leave for San Francisco on Friday (anyone who knows about any good nighttime stuff I should check out, let me know - my days are tied up).  I know that other artists in the show definitely include Edith Abeyta, Rob Abeyta Jr., Marshall Astor, Amy Caterina, davidmichaellee, Chris Elliott, Carol Es, Christopher Grinnell, Betsy Lohrer Hall, Roy Mafune, Kimiko Miyoshi, Lynne Mori, Jon Nakamura, Michael Shaw, Yong Sin, S. Ian Song, Deborah Thomas, Matthew Thomas, and Hoang Vu. And why didn’t someone tell me that Micol Hebron had a show up at Sabina Lee?  We showed her work at Angels Gate in 110%, the Art Center Photo Department Faculty show, and I loved the photographs.  I can’t believe I missed her installation.

Anyways, I’m in the show, I’m showing a small trio of “eating in progress food in my hand snapshots”.  So if you like staring down the artery stiffening, double barrel of a Gene and Jude’s Red Hot with Fries (shown above), then you’ll like what I’ve got.

The show opens this Thursday, December 13, reception is 6-9 PM.  The Gallery is at 5365 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90036.  Show runs until December 29.

Technorati Tags: Sabina Lee Gallery, art, art opening, small works show