Pictures in an Exhibition

I’ve been paying a lot of extra attention to the LA art scene lately. All signs are beginning to point towards an increasingly unified scene, which is weird because that’s exactly what I’ve been complaining about ever since I got back from London. And just last week the topic of LA’s art scene being “broken” came up in conversation.

But according to a bunch of articles I’ve been reading recently, like this little ditty featured in The Huffington Post, it all seems to be changing. It’s not a bad thing at all – if anything, it’s perfect timing (due to some specific art-related ventures that I’m not at liberty to discuss quite yet).

On that note, I wanted to take this opportunity to link to a few valuable LA art scene resources – ones that I’ve been keeping tabs on for a variety of reasons, from news, to basic information, to events, to new artist discovery, etc. If you’re interested in art – you should check them out:

Fecal Face- This site features mostly San Francisco-based art, but it does have a few links to things happening in LA. It also has some great interviews. My brother told me about it a few months ago, and now it’s become one of my daily-visited sites. I like it a lot because the artists they feature tend to be just in line with my taste. That, and it’s called Fecal Face – what’s not to like?

For Your Art – A Los Angeles- based site that highlights current exhibitions & events, galleries, news, and other art-related information. This is a great resource if you’re looking for an exhibition to see over the weekend or near future.

Downtown Los Angeles Artwalk – The downtown LA artwalk happens on the second Thursday of every month. It’s a great opportunity to visit all the contemporary galleries in downtown, plus it all takes place a few blocks from MOCA. If memory serves me correctly, MOCA has a discounted entry fee on this night as well. Last time I went to this, a performance artist asked me on the street if he could use my hair as a medium for his piece. (I didn’t do it because of time constraints, but under normal circumstances, I totally would have!) The site also has news, events, gallery listings, etc.

These are just a few for now. I want to put up links to some noteworthy galleries & events also, but it’s getting late and I need to catch last night’s episode of Glee before I go to bed. I’ll save those for next time.

By the way, if you don’t have the time or patience to go through these sites, but are still interested, then they’re all on twitter too!! (Did I mention I LOVE Twitter?)

Dr. Goober

I went to the doctor’s office this morning for some seasonal preventive care and this is what I encountered: a 2.5-hour wait time, a plethora of family oriented magazines (Baby Health and the like) and an impossible stack of paperwork asking for all the same information to be repeated in triplicate. All the necessary evils thrown into my lap just so I can see a certain Dr. Gruber for a piece of paper that lets me go to the pharmacy and pick up a preventive inhaler. (Curse you, allergy season). I don’t know about you, but this isn’t exactly my idea of a productive Friday morning.

I know, who am I to complain? I am but one of 305 million people in the United States with the right to receive healthcare – but come on! Two and a half hours? If there’s one thing I’ve learned about growing up in capitalist America it’s that Time = Money. I hate wasting my time. I especially hate wasting my time in a room full of whiny children and suburban-minded mothers who like to discipline using the word “we”. As in, “What do we say?” or “We don’t hit, do we.” Kill me now.

What’s the point in making an appointment when you still have to wait for two and a half hours? Why wasn’t my appointment at 11:30 a.m. instead of 9:00 a.m.?

In the end, all I actually got was just under five minutes of face time with my new doctor who, I should mention, seems to be about my age if not a year or two younger. It’s weird- I’m finally getting to that age where there are professionals around me that are younger than I am. When did this happen exactly? To top it off, his slight attractiveness made for a very awkward visit. I found myself making giggly small talk with him, and I swear that he gave me a little squeeze as he leaned over me to check my breathing with his stethoscope. He said I was fine, as I already knew. I just said I wanted some preventive care before things got really bad. So, he wrote me a prescription and said to check back in with him in a month. What for? So I could wait another two and a half hours for a five-minute flirt session?

I have to admit though, the idea of being romantically involved with a doctor is kind of exhilirating. Imagine the role playing possibilities… hmmm, food for thought. Not that I actually expect anything to advance with this doctor. I have bigger problems. The real lesson here is that there’s something to be said about out-of-the-ordinary flirtatious encounters. It makes people feel good, doesn’t it? It doesn’t even have to mean anything besides “hey, I just felt like talking to you.” Flirting is good. It throws people off their routines and makes for more interesting and quite possbily, more healthy, days.

It’s like that saying, “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.” Well, maybe in my case, a flirty encounter a day will also keep the doctor away. How ironic. Then I wouldn’t have to consider making an appointment to wait two and a half hours for a temporary ego boost and some medication I don’t really need.

Beatles Studies

From today’s Guardian (I wonder what Paul and Ringo have to say about this):

The long and winding road to an MA in Beatles songs
Liverpool Hope University launches UK’s first master’s course in fab four studies
Sam Jones
Wednesday March 4 2009
The Guardian

Their thirst for reinvention saw the elegantly quiffed Hamburg rockers become the mop-topped fab four, hippy harbingers of sexual liberation and, eventually, druggy psychedelic visionaries.

Forty years on, the Beatles and their songs are to be hauled into the halls of academia and dissected by postgraduate students at a Merseyside university.

The masters degree in The Beatles, Popular Music and Society is being billed by Liverpool Hope University as the first such course in the UK and “probably the world”.

Among the topics covered on the course, which comprises four 12-week modules and a dissertation, are the postwar music industry, subcultures, and the importance of authenticity and locality.

Mike Brocken, senior lecturer in popular music at the university, said it was time the band were put under an academic microscope.

“There have been over 8,000 books about the Beatles but there has never been serious academic study and that is what we are going to address,” he said.

“The Beatles influenced so much of society, not just with their music, but also with fashion, from their collar-less jackets to their psychedelic clothes.”

As well as investigating different ways of studying popular music, the MA will look at the studio sound and compositions of the Beatles and examine Liverpudlian life from the 1930s to see how events helped to shape the music emerging in the city.

Brocken said that the size of the MA course, which begins this September, would depend on the number of applicants, but would not exceed a “possible” maximum of 30 places.

He added that he had already received inquiries about the full- or part-time course from people in the UK and the US.

Asked what employment benefits a course scrutinising songs such as Octopus’s Garden, While My Guitar Gently Weeps and I Want to Hold Your Hand might yield in the current economic climate, Brocken said: “I think any MA equips people with extra study and research skills. MAs of any description are vital for the workplace. You will find that once you have done a master’s degree it separates you from the pack.”

Similar arts and humanities MAs at the university cost around £3,445 for full-time students from the UK. Brocken said that although there might be some bursaries, “people will have to self-fund unless they have some backing from an institution”.

Students on the full-time course will attend two evening sessions a week and cover all four modules in one academic year. Part-time students, meanwhile, will attend one evening session a week for two years. In both cases a dissertation will be due towards the end of the following August.

The songs and social significance of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr have been picked over countless times since Philip Larkin observed that “sexual intercourse began/In nineteen sixty-three/(which was rather late for me)/Between the end of the Chatterley ban/And the Beatles’ first LP”.

But in recent years, the band and its output have been the subject of academic studies and polemics.

Last year, a Cambridge University historian attacked the view that the Beatles were counter-cultural heroes, claiming they were instead capitalists who milked the booming youth culture for their own financial gain.

“They did about as much to represent the interests of the nation’s young people as the Spice Girls did in the 1990s,” said David Fowler, who argued that the band provided family entertainment rather than an authentic youth perspective. “They were young capitalists who, far from developing a youth culture, were exploiting youth culture by promoting fan worship, mindless screaming and nothing more than a passive teenage consumer,” said the author of Youth Culture in Modern Britain.