Awesome Lady,
I am home, on a short break before taking Pearl to her Golden Agers meeting at 11am. Then, I think I will stop by Hooper Camera in Chatsworth, to see if they have any Pan-X Kodak B&W film. Chances are probably slim, but I wanna see, cause I want to shoot some black and white film up in the hills. So, I will be in and out from 11 until 2, then I pick Pearl up from Golden Agers, then I'll be back home from about 2:30 until 4:15. Have a wonderful day, and I'll see you in a while!
I Love You! :):) xoxoxoxo
7:15pm : Just getting home. I haven't heard Mammifer yet, so I will have to check them out. It's gonna be an awesome show, and I am really looking forward to the difference in sound between The Troubadour, a tiny club made for folksingers, and the much larger El Rey, which used to be a movie theater. My show starts at 8pm, so I should get there in time for Mammifer, traffic permitting.
I saw your friend's picture of the car with the extended wheels, and I had to laugh. You guys probably don't have many (if any) lowriders in Wisconsin, and that isn't really an official "lowrider" style car, but it's a version of the type of custom car that some Mexicans think looks cool. Some Asian gangbangers might drive something like that, too. So that's what it is, lol.
Well, I will go for my walk in a little bit, and then be back at my usual time. I trust your day was awesome!
I Love You! xoxoxoxo
10:05pm : Your aerial picture of the midwestern feed lot reminds me of a really interesting art exhibit I saw about 15 years ago, called "The Powers Of Ten". That's why I posted it on FB. The Eames were famous in the 50s and 60s mostly for their functional yet aesthetically pleasing furniture, but they were also kind of uncategorizable "scientific artists", very creative people. You have probably heard of them, or at least heard of an Eames chair.........I wanna go to art shows with you, and museums! That's where we saw "The Powers Of Ten", at LA County Museum Of Art. I like it even better than the Getty.
But the main point is...........I wanna go with you!
(back in a couple minutes......)
I never did get out to Hooper Camera. I want to make a trip up to Brown's Canyon tomorrow morning, while Pearl is in her Reseda Women's Club meeting, and that canyon is near the camera store anyway, so I'll just do both at once. Brown's Canyon is the one I've been wanting to see for a long time, because it leads up to the top of Oat Mountain, where there was a Nike Missile Base in the 1960s. I mentioned it before. It was made into a park about 20 years ago, and I don't know how much of the missile site is left, but since I've been driving up canyons and to the top of local mountains, I figured I'd finally check it out. I say "finally" because there is a huge, billboard-sized orange sign at the bottom of the canyon road that says, "Residents Only", which has always scared me off in the past. But when I looked at the park website (Antonovitch Park), it says it's a public park, part of the LA City park system, so I'm gonna give it a shot.
Back to art, I never really thought about going to museums or galleries until I was in my mid-30s. I always thought of it as something I did as a kid, on school field trips. I saw it as something scholastic, and perhaps dry. But my Dad had been into abstract artists like Jackson Pollack, and then he started taking a painting class at the local VA hospital. Then he got into pottery, too, and I thought, "okay, this looks like it's fun, so maybe there is more to art than just music". In my childhood, I was open to anything I heard, but being a child I had little control over the situation. At four or five years old, I did not have the facilities to explore new avenues of music. So I relied on my sisters and the radio for rock and pop music, but I loved all the different forms I heard, most of it anyway. Then when I was 13 I discovered progressive music, and the 1970s (until 1977) were an explosion of creativity, and I ate it all up.
But in the 80s, I kind of narrowed my focus to metal, and it was pretty much all I listened to. Metal at that time had reached it's peak, and it was so powerful. Besides the music, it was an adrenaline thing and I couldn't get enough.
But then in my 30s, as many things changed in my life, I went back to the spirit of discovery I'd had in my early teens, and I got into art, mainly because of my Dad and my friend Dave. We would also go to the Museum Of Contemporary Art (MOCA), and I will never forget the first exhibit I saw there, by a guy named Cy Twombly. He was an abstract artist, a famous one who made a lot of money, and the exhibit we saw was made up of very large canvases that looked like someone had taken a pencil and literally scribbled spiralling patterns all over them. I didn't know if it was good or not! But I knew it was art, and I also knew - instictively - that if anyone else had tried to scribble on a large canvas, that it wouldn't have had the same effect. So, even though the drawings themselves didn't blow me away, the idea did.
And it opened up a new world for me, and I began to incorporate all kinds of art into my life, and to rediscover classical music, and basically to just overcome all the barriers of what was supposed to be "cool" or not. I mean, I never in my life cared what was cool, or at least what other people thought was cool. But I cared what I thought was cool, and I found that to be just as big a trap as what other people thought.
We started going to the museums in the mid-1990s. Most of my friends are not Art People, or inclined towards Weird Stuff, spiritual questing, whatever you want to call it. So in the 1990s, I was hanging out mostly with my parents and Mr. D. The four of us went all kinds of places and had a blast.
I digress now, but one of the coolest exhibits I ever saw was by a guy named Gary Simmons. I have never seen him do anything since then (1995), but what he did was to fill a large rectangular blackboard with chalk, completely chalk over the entire surface...........and then erase bits and pieces until he had a chalk painting, a work of art. He called these works "erasure drawings", and I suppose it was a bit like sculpting, where you start out with a block of marble or a chunk of clay, and work your way down by removing material, whereas in painting or drawing you add material to a blank surface.
At any rate, from the moment I walked into this exhibit, at a small gallery called Lannai, I had goosebumps. His erasure drawings looked like ghostly recreations of a half-remembered world, or a dream. The imagery was part abstract, part realism, but again, just like Cy Twombly's scribbled canvases, it was the idea that blew me away. The difference with Gary Simmons was that his chalk drawings gave you goosebumps, because - as weird as they were - there was also something familiar about them. Something you couldn't put your finger on, but that you understood regardless.
So, my Artist, my Darling, there are a few thoughts and remarks about art, in different forms, brought about by a trip down Memory Lane, inspired by your post from earlier this eve, of the feed lot.
Thanks for being so intelligent and interesting (among other things!), and sleep well, and I will see you in the morn. I will check in before I go to Brown's Canyon, which is only a short drive in any case.
Sweet Dreams. I Love You! xoxoxoxo :):)
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