Filed under: art
The REDCAT gallery downtown (next to the Disney Concert Hall) has an awesome show up right now of Barry Mcgee’s work.
Went to check it out last weekend and I was very impressed. Seeing really prolific graphic/street art/grafitti inspired artists always makes me a bit jealous. I sometimes wish I worked in a way that could be quicker and cheaper, like Mcgee. Seeing a huge room full of colorful drawings, quick paintings, grafitti and simple mechanical gags was really impressive. I especially love how he created these artificial bulges in the wall and hung the drawings/paintings edge to edge, salon style over the bulges.
My favorite piece in the whole show is a simple mechanical sculpture of a wooden head knocking itself against a wall repeatedly…..thud……thud……thud…..thud. Quick, cheap and clever; I’d like to maybe make some stuff like that next. Who knows?
Graduate orientation was yesterday…FINALLY. I must say, after two months of hyper-vacation, I feel about as artistic as a hot bowl of soup. I’m pretty exciting to start class tomorrow, and yet, I do feel predictably anxious. I’m not really worried about forming relationships or being a good student… I suppose i’m just feeling anxious about discovering what i’m all about; or perhaps about filling the role of how I used to view graduate students as an undergrad: all knowing and wise…constantly motivated. The shroud is falling!
Excited about: Experimenting, taking risks, 24-hour access to everything, our department’s private research library, cheap student software deals, having studio space again (albeit, limited), making friends and playing nice.
Not excited about: Bros on Strathmore inviting me to frat parties because they think i’m a freshman, saying goodbye to healthy eating and sleeping schedule, having to cunningly balance school with non-school relationships, Internet Explorer butchering my CSS, my bike is broken and the shop is so far away.
That’s right folks, mkontopoulos.com is the new michaelkontopoulos.com
In the process of switching hosting services, I lost my old domain name! The silly thing is, it wasn’t bought by an individual, but instead, it looks like there are companies out there that buy recently expired domain names and sell them back for outrageous amounts. Long story short: I had to pick a new domain name. I suppose it’s not that big of a loss, aside from the hassle of having to report the change to everybody who is linked to me, etc. . .
My new website is very close to being finished! I am aiming to have it uploaded by tonight, and then I can finally go outside again. You would have found out eventually; really, I just wanted to show off the funny hipster picture.
This update will cover several unrelated things because, as you can see, i’m already beginning to slip in terms of update-consistency.
Most recently, I took a mini-road trip to San Fransisco. The opportunity presented itself in the form of a ride. I got dropped of in San Jose, where my friend Nate lives, and we ventured there Saturday morning, stopping for a small tour of the Stanford campus on the way. In the end, I only spent about 24 hours in San Fran, but it was still really fun and I got to hang out with two of my best friends from college and their friends/significant others. I mostly hung around the Mission area and played catchup while getting exposed to a bit of local flavor.
The Mission district — an area of town that is quickly getting more popular — contains a ton of really interesting antique stores and specialty shops. It’s also full of beautiful murals. Most importantly though, it contains Philz Coffee, which made my weekend. Plus Dolores park is there, and there are enough beautiful hipsters around to feed a small country. I’ve got to say, it was a real breath of fresh air to visit a city where people actually walk around. Don’t take pedestrians for granted: They have a way of making a neighborhood feel loved that is often missing in LA.
On the way home, my friend and I found the most remote In-N-Out Burger in the world. It felt a bit like perching on the edge of the earth and eating your last meal. And that meal is a double-double, animal style (no spread).
In other news:
+ I bought a Nintendo DS. I’ve never owned a video game system in my entire life until now. Why did I make the jump? Most likely because a) I’m so impressed with Nintendo’s embrace of gesture based interfaces as the new direction of gameplay and b) It’s cheaper than a Wii. Plus, you can get wireless on it, and if you buy this guy you can load mp3’s, videos, home-made applications, (etc) onto your DS. I think that’s pretty rad.
+ I got a work study position in my department as a Masters Student Assistant to the Head of our dep’t, who is now Casey Reas. I’ll start when school begins, later next week.
+ LA Greekfest? Slightly unimpressive. There wasn’t too much to do for a couple of 20something males. And while the food was, in fact, delicious, something about having to pay to get in, only to pay again for food tasted a bit sour. It was great to hear to some Greek being spoken, however. And, I scored some Greek coffee, which I was out of and looking for!
That’s all for now kids. For interesting website links, check my del.icio.us and for more San Fran photos, check my flickr (on the left menu).
If you are interested in interactive art and digital music, you’ve probably watched this video on youtube about 1,200 times already, or have seen other works by Toshio Iwai. Now, if you had decided to set aside $1 each time you watched that video, you’d have enough to actually purchase one.
Last Tuesday, there was a UK launch of Iwai’s Tenori-On, which is now being made by Yamaha. It’s pretty amazing to see a piece of digital interactive art being manufactured as a high-end product. But then again, for Iwai, that concept is not completely foreign, as one can see by the success of other endeavors like ElectroPlankton for Nintendo DS. Still, for me it is interesting to consider the strange space between commercial product and art object that Tenori-On occupies: Even though the price is outrageous by ordinary commercial standards, it does tend to foster a sense of art-object “preciousness”. Plus, the “launch party” photos look more like an art gallery opening. How much could it seriously cost to manufacture one of these? It reminds me of Jacob Ciocci from PaperRad talking about the fishiness between selling a DVD in an art gallery for hundreds of dollars vs. burning one free for his friends.
Check out this website for a more detailed account of the launch party
Sorry about the brief hiatus everyone. After Tammy’s departure, I decided to busy myself with bureaucratic and domestic type busy-work, in an attempt to ease the inevitable boredom and loneliness that trails the end of highly anticipated events. Now that a few productive days have gone by, it’s time to get back on the saddle.
I’ll focus on some of the more interesting things that happened and try not to get too mushy or overly-personal. For one thing, having a car made life much easier, and yet the experience of being an LA driver for one week really opened my eyes to just how enervating car-ownership can be. It made me relieved, in a small way, that it’s not something I have to deal with at the moment. You know what I’m talking about: “I’ve got to get in that lane in about 10 seconds or I’ll miss the exit! Oh, but this guy’s not letting me go! Holy crap, somebody’s merging in front of me! GYAAH!!” Days often felt long and full but then we realized we had only really done 2 or 3 things. We just spent so much time driving around or looking for parking!
In terms of local interests, we checked out the Santa Monica Farmers market (the wednesday one on 2nd and Arizona), which was very nice, went to the pier and walked along the beach. Ate some good food in Little Tokyo, Silver Lake, and in Arcadia/Alhambra where Tammy’s relatives live (I’m talking real Chinese restaurants, where you open up the menu and see duck beaks and other crazy stuff. Oh yeah, baby). We did quite a bit of karaoke, saw some jazz at LACMA, and also got to catch up with a good handful of college friends from Tammy’s department.
In terms of cultural interests, we visited the house and studio of Charles and Ray Eames. The tours are self guided and exterior only. The place is not that large, so it didn’t take long. It was a really pleasant experience, but semi creepy how the counter arrangements and furniture in the house are basically left unmoved since when the last one died. Still, the house itself is really neat looking and full of Eames furniture. And the area it’s in (around Santa Monica, off the Pacific Coast Highway), is quiet and secluded.
We visited many of the galleries in Culver City along Washington/La Cienega, but a good bunch of them were on vacation or in between shows. There are several big openings tomorrow night and next week (9/15) in that area. We took another trip back to the Museum of Jurassic Technology, also.
I’ve got some photos up on my flickr page, but Tammy camera saw most of that action, so if you are thirsting for documentation, you may be able to quench said thirst on her facebook page eventually.
