Back it up...

Hmmm... Sideways? but you get the idea...

Let's pretend I'm still in L.A. for a second (even though that was so 3 days ago). It's a glorious sunny day after a rainy one, so visibility is fantastic. And I decide to walk down (straight down) Lakeshore Ave, then Baxter where I find a porch full of parrot cages complete with talking parrots (HI YA! HIYAYAYAYAYA! HEY! PRETTY! PRETTYPRETTY! HI YA!), down Echo Park, down Sunset Blvd, then over to Grand and then down to the MOCA to see the Weegee show "Naked in Hollywood." Nearly the whole time this vodka blimp is following me. I first noticed it way back by the Echo Park Time Travel Mart (Wherever you go we're already there!), and it stayed right with me the rest of the way. I thought to myself, "Funny..."

Anyway, Weegee show- Excellent. I especially liked his assertion that if you put "naked" in front of any word people will pay attention. But what was especially exciting to me was the way that Weegee played with images of sexuality and debauchery with satyrical depth. Some of my favorite images were from the Hollywood drunk tanks, where men were just piled up, as if they had opened the door and just dropped them in. "Drunks provide endless material for me," the caption read. Though I thought the modified images of women and movie stars were interesting, the more documentary and casual pictures of crowds and off-duty strippers made me think that these were the anti-heroes to the photographs of Dorthea Lange. And I love anti-heroes. Especially ones with nice legs and feathered headdresses.

Weegee kept a complete darkroom in the trunk of his car. This is a lifelong dream of mine. Even though I now realize you can have all those capabilities with a cell-phone, there's something a lot more romantic about a trunk full of chemicals. I also am very fond of his stamp...

But back to the blimp. Even without trick photography there is a lot of magic in the world. Certainly in L.A., anyway.

Non- Art day, L.A.

I really don't like doing the residency summaries. I just never know if I've written enough. I converted my scramble-scribble notes into some sort of coherent form, and I guess that's all I need to do? Now I just need to come up with 3 research topics...

While my procrastination juices were flowing (a useful visual metaphor I'm stealing from my friend here), I decided that much more important than writing up my notes was to fix and clean Daniel's 50's era stove. It had some broken handles (which still aren't attached in the picture as their J.B. weld is curing). So I trundled off to the hardware store and even lolly-gagged looking into plant foods for his hibiscus, picked out a couple of kinds of caulking... And eventually made it back to the house to start the scrub fest. I think I spent about 2 hours on the stove and maybe an hour and a half re-caulking part of his bath tub and the joists in his 1914-era ceiling. And things are gratifyingly better. Why can't this be art?

Well, maybe it can be, if I could just use my camera a little better and more consistently (so good about the after shots, so bad about the befores). After all, J.Morgan Puett gets written up in Food and Wine magazine for her installation fridge ideas...

Anyway, paper is done to the point of just needing page numbers. Pimm's cup is still not mastered as a cocktail choice. Looking forward to sushi, caulk under my fingernails.

Hard Edge (bringing sexy back?)

Today was Getty/Hammer day here in smoggy/sunny (&sorta cold) Los Angeles. I ventured forth and paid for parking to go see the first of many "PST- Pacific Standard Time" shows. In particular "Crosscurrents in L.A. painting and sculpture, 1950-1970." And after the MET, the ICA, the MFA and the MOMA, this was the first show I was honestly gobsmacked at. I've always had the love for L.A. and the west coast art scene, but suddenly, after 4 collections of the great and the well-known/loved art anchors, I got to see 1 show of virtually unknown and completely lust-worthy art objects. These were the kind of art objects that remind a weary artist why they want to make things with a capital "T". I wanted to lick the glass pieces that were elegantly suspended, or set on the ground so precariously. Things were fragile, things were crafted. Sure, there were baby heads and house shapes and big, ugly ceramic eyesores (what mid-century California-based show could claim its cred without something huge and ugly, made out of clay?), but for everything predictable there was something gracefully sublime. I even appreciated Judy Chicago's car hood. When Diebenkorn's look sloppy by comparison to everything else in a room, I suddenly feel at home. The only thing that would've made me happier was if they had included some printmakers and a Wayne Thiebaud or 3.

But by far my favorite was this incredible Helen Lundeberg, which no reproduction could ever do justice. The quality of the exceptionally flat, perfectly mixed and muted acrylic made it feel as luminous as glass, and yet there was positively no reflective quality to the paint whatsoever. It had all the magic of a glass marble,all the grace of the ocean. According to Wikipedia, Hard Edge painting, a style original to California in the 50's (which I had never heard of) was a direct correspondent to the flingy AbEx crap happening on the east coast. Several other painters of this genre were also featured in the room, but this image (is it an island? A cave?)took my breath right away. I could have been with it for hours. Each time I got close to it (and I came back to it, over and over) there was a new layer of color that I hadn't discerned before, and completely lost myself in. So incredibly sexy.
I set the postcard in amoungst the mineolas and tree-ripened grapefruits on my friend's counter in his sea blue kitchen, and loved it all the more for it being a memory, now, of this beautiful house, set back in a beautiful hill. So content. Smelling citrus, listening to Willie Nelsen.