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I got invited to submit some pictures of my Cube to a new Flickr group, Geometric Sculpture. It’s full of really terrific images, like Isamu Noguchi’s Red Cube, above, shot by Wally Gobetz.

Technorati Tags: cube, Red Cube, Isamu Noguchi, Wally Gobetz, Geometric Scuplture, sculpture, art, Flickr, photography

If so, or if you should happen to see this ball and the person rolling it, take a picture. Click through the image for more details.

Technorati Tags: art, performance art, art action, ball, giant ball

I’m nerdy about LEGO, but the guys over at BrikWars are far, far nerdier, as they use LEGO as a platform to wage turn based wargames. That’s nerdcore. I was cruising their site the other day and noticed they uploaded the above desktop wallpaper image. Everybody loves Wagnerian LEGO bosoms! Download this and other wallpapers here.

Technorati Tags: LEGO, valkyrie, desktop wallpaper, illustration, BrikWars

Last night some folks came over and I got to eat the astoundingly kitschy cake seen above from J.J. Bakery in Torrance, which also makes the best pork buns and curry buns I know of, sells bagels shaped like crabs and other shellfish, stuffs hot dogs into rolls and generally finds ways to combine baked goods and various foodstuffs into “things that should not be” which are almost universally astounding.  I’ve been eating there for a couple of years now, and I have no idea why I haven’t been documenting their food before.  Especially those adorable crab bagels.

The cake above is like six super thin layers of alternating chocolate and vanilla.  Light and fluffy, it’s stupid good, and super simple.  I’ve been eyeing this cake for a while, but never had the right opportunity to eat one.  Behind the 3 in the 30 is a little edible house.

Above - Party Chow.  Salvadoran chorizo from the supermercado on my block.  This stuff is addictive, and it contains the pleasure of eating link sausage.  All it needs is a little cast iron loving and it’s ready to go. It kind of reminds me of Oaxacan chorizo, but the flavour is complex and hard to pin down.

Technorati Tags: food, food porn, JJ Bakery, cake, sausage, chorizo, Salvadoran food, cast iron, cooking, link sausage, pork

I’m a bit to overworked to have any idea about what’s up for this weekend, although I do know that it’s your last chance to see Systems Theory at the Torrance Art Museum, and they’re having a closing reception from 2-4 PM this Sunday.  It’s an awesome show - I haven’t processed or posted pictures from it yet, but it’s on my to do list (with a hundred other things).  So if you haven’t seen it…

On to the greatest night of your life.  Darktown Strutters at the Silent Movie Theatre, being shown by the Cinefamily, as part of their Holyfuckingshit: Funkadelic Fairy Tales series. Jamaa Fanaka’s Emma Mae is my favourite Blaxspoitation film, but Darktown Strutters transcends the genre to be one of the finest films ever made.  Trike riding, pimp dressed bikers fight a fried chicken mogul/Colonel Sanders stand in who’s oppressing the black community.  It’s also a musical, has the Klan in it as a rival biker gang and in no way responds to any respectable continuum of that mid-90’s demon, political correctness. Oh, and that poster above was designed by Coop, so you know it has the seal of approval of a man of taste and distinction.

I’ve only seen Strutters on a beat up, VHS copy, and according to the website for the event, they’re showing it on 35mm.  March 8, at 10:30 PM.  Who knows when it will be on the big screen again, so if you miss this, consider entering a monastery or nunnery spending the remainder of your life in serious repentance.

Technorati Tags: art, torrance art museum, Systems Theory, Darktown Strutters, Silent Movie Theatre, Cinefamily, Emma Mae, Blaxsploitation, film, Coop, biker movie, Holyfuckingshit, movie

So happy birthday to me.  I’m 30.  If 40 is the new 20, then that makes me hot teenage jailbait, my veins coursing with the pleasure/poison of sinful juvenile delinquency.

I was at a meeting at LACMA yesterday afternoon, which is close enough to Apple Pan territory for me to make a pit stop. Christ, I love the Apple Pan. I love the feeling of going in and confidently securing a seat, and knowing that the staff only asks what I’m ordering, because someday, I might want something different. We got the best seats in the house yesterday, right up against the bakery window, where we were just in time to marvel at the super-efficient pie crust baking technique they use. Anyways, on to the food porn.

Above - The Combination, a ham and swiss on rye to die for.  I think this sandwich appears no less than three or four times in my Flickr stream.  It’s so good looking that I can’t stop taking pictures of it.  As a Jew, I know the temptation of traif, and this is, in my opinion, the finest ham on rye in the world.  It’s the only thing I ever order at Apple Pan, in fact, I’ve never seen anyone else order it, in a decade of eating there.  It’s my rock and my savior.

Above - The Combination comes with a couple of olives and some sweet pickles.  I always ask for some extra.  The sweet pickles at Apple Pan are insane!  Over the years, the amount of extra they’ve been giving me has increased to the point where they just hand me a plate of goodies when I order my sandwich.  I haven’t crossed the line of putting olives on all my fingers and goofing off yet, but I want to.  Oh how I want to.

above - Mustard, the king of condiments.  Eating ham without mustard should be a capital crime.

About that visit to LACMA. I had about 45 minutes to kill before my meeting, and I spent them ogling the new displays of German Expressionist works in the Ahmanson building (The prints in the Rifkin Gallery are staggering and wonderful, pictures coming soon.) and my favourite LACMA haunt, the Netsuke gallery in the Japanese Pavillion (a ton of new netsuke were on display! Pictures coming soon!). I got to walk under Tony Smith’s Smoke, which is extremely well installed, fitting right into the gorgeous “1970’s bank” architecture of the Ahamanson. Pictures don’t do its scale justice. My take on BCAM thus far, as a brief passer by: 1) I’m more interested in LACMA’s already solid permanent collection than a peek into BCAM. 2) If what’s on display now is a monument to the 80’s blue chip market, then the design of the building is appropriately 80’s. From the outside, it kind of reminds me of mid-80’s Galleria architecture - glass elevator from the parking lot, pseudo-neo-brutalist exterior stairs, the outdoor lighting that has the “studio light cans with hinged hoods” thing going on. And of course the presence of Burden and Koons right in the middle of everything just caps it off. And 3) How much money did it cost to sink that huge palm tree several stories deep into the underground parking?

Technorati Tags: food, food porn, Apple Pan, Ham on Rye, Ham Sandwich, The Combination, LACMA, BCAM museum art, pickles, olives, mustard, condiment

In January I attended a brief portion of the Object in Transition conference at The Getty.  Videos from the whole conference are now online.  Day One is here, and Day Two is here.

The public program, Conservation Matters: Object in Transition, Contemporary Voices, was fascinating, with Paul McCarthy dominating the talk with his Angeleno casualness and candor regarding his process and his works.  Maybe it’s coincidental, but since hearing him talk I keep running into references to his various butt plug works.  It also made me care about Doris Salcedo’s work for the first time, and make me more impressed with the intensity of her assistant-heavy production process.  There was a heavy mix of serious curatorial weight and young curatorial energy in the room for this one.

I wasn’t able to attend much of the conference proper, but Eva Hesse seemed to be mentioned in every corner.  Her name seemed to be on everyone’s lips.  What is it about her work and process that seems to elevate her out of the ordinary continuum of artists?

One thing not online are images of the special mini exhibition of reference works.  After attending the Hesse lecture, I wandered halfway across the museum, showing my badge to a stern looking guard and rounding a corner into a small room where three pieces by David Novros a discarded, unfinished painting by Barnett Newman, the maquette for Lichtenstein’s Three Brushstrokes (the final version of which is permanently installed at the Getty, and which the Getty is considering restoring to the original colours as indicated on the maquette) and a section of Eva Hesse’s Expanded Expansion, accompanied by a material mock-up made in December of 2007.  It was kind of marvelous to be in a special room with these works, especially Expanded Expansion.  It was awesome.

Oh, and my opinion of the whole problem of preserving modern materials?  Let the works rot and die.  Let them live their lives - art is increasingly one of the only areas of contemporary life where ephemerality is tolerated.  An unrelenting desire to hold on to things who’s time has past is societally unhealthy, just as it is in our personal lives.  Learn to let go, folks.

The conference suffered from one glaring omission, a lack of a panel on the relationship between museum economics and decisions to preserve or display works.  I don’t know or pretend to understand the complex economics that govern the actions of major collecting institutions, but one really has to wonder what happens to them when the death of works starts removing tens of millions from their net worth.  If I recall only one audience member during the final panel tried to address this, and of course there wasn’t any time for the panel to say anything meaningful. Oh, and on a side note, related to the final panel - the Getty’s David Bomford is brilliant.  Every time I hear him talk he brings a massive knowledge of history to bear on the discussion at hand.

Oh, and either great minds think alike or the universe operates with coincidence as a primary motive - Tyler Green has written on this same topic today, noting the current focus on the preservation of contemporary works.

Technorati Tags: art, Getty Center, Object in Transition, conference, conservation, art conservation, art history, Getty, Eva Hesse,

This is admitting more than I might like to about the my certifiable level of nerdiness, but I’ll be damned if I don’t give a shout out to Gary Gygax, the creator of Dungeons and Dragons, now dead at 69. Gary was one of the first people to re-legitimize active fantasy as a part of what sometimes seems like an increasingly un-fantastic world, and at least two generations of creative works stem from the floodgates he opened in the 1970’s. From the bottom of my Crown Royale bag of polyhedral dice to yours, thanks, man.

Technorati Tags: Dungeons & Dragons, Gary Gygax, Role Playing Games, RIP, Obituary, gaming

It’s been so long since I heard about this project that I had totally forgot about it.  Way, way back in the day, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen were commissioned to create a 65 foot tall sculpture for the Walt Disney Concert Hall, making the already osten-tastic building even more so.  Well, said project is now idling and incomplete at a warehouse in Irvine. Oh, and the Music Center is now suing Oldenburg and Bruggen, as well as their fabricators, for $6 million.  The LA Times has the story.  The article is a bit strange on the timeline front, since according to itself, it claims the suit was made in February of 2007, a year ago, and other than a brief quote from Music Center attorney David Lira, it’s really hard to tell exactly what’s happening now, if the case has gone to trial as of October of 2007, or will be going to trial in October of 2008.

Technorati Tags: art, Disney Hall, Music Center, Downtown LA, Claes Oldenburg, Coosje van Bruggen, lawsuit, sculpture, site specific, collar, bow tie, Collar and Bow