A collaborative proposal between myself and classmate Nova Jiang has been accepted to the GLOW festival in Santa Monica, which will be happening this summer.
The event is a dusk-till-dawn party on Santa Monica Pier and Beach, inspired by events like Nuit Blanche in Paris. From the website:
With the historic Santa Monica Pier and adjacent world-famous Santa Monica Beach as their space, artists will be commissioned to create unique and inviting works of art that welcome the public to be both audience and actor for twelve celebratory hours.
Our proposal is a simple installation that we’re calling “Moon Theater” which will involve a small stage set in the sand where people perform shadow puppets and hand puppets. The hand shadows will be beamed up to a gigantic moon sculpture on the beach, by the water.
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).
This weekend also marked the beginning of Nisei Week, Little Tokyo’s annual summer festival as well as the LA Tofu Festival (self explanatory).
The tofu festival was pretty fun; full of food tasting and tofu related events. We missed some of the main events like the tofu eating contest, but to be honest, I was mostly in it for the food anyway! And food I did achieve. The area was lined with local vendors peddling their tofu delicacies: everything from traditional dishes to tofu margaritas (not the best idea). There were tofu t-shirts, tofu cookbooks, somebody in a tofu suit… And there was a beer garden outdoors, which was an unexpected surprise!
So after an afternoon of tofu gorging and beer drinking, there was an official Nisei Week parade. People were camped out on the sidewalks in traditional parade-watching fashion. And what ensued was a proper Japanese summer festival: drumming, singing, dancing, yukata, veterans and officials, beauty queens and a big spectacular float at the end. It was really enjoyable but boy were we pooped from all that standing around! It was really worthwhile and wonderful, however, to see how happy everybody was when the float went by. I could really feel the positive energy amongst the whole crowd.
I was thinking about something my friend Ko reminded me of: Around here, a lot of the older Japanese people are first generation American; raised here, maybe even born here. At my age i’m used thinking of older people as having emigrated in their younger years, having accents, etc. But many Asians have been on the west coast for much longer than that. Because of that, these kinds of festivals have a bit of a unique flavor. They’re not trying too hard to exactly emulate a traditional Japanese festival, but rather, it’s kind of its own thing and much nicer because of it.
After the parade died down, we had some excellent sushi at a nice sushi bar in the Little Tokyo plaza. How could we resist?
Among the many things happening in LA this weekend was the Sunset Junction: A big outdoor music festival that occupies a stretch of Sunset Blvd. in SilverLake. Me and some friends went on Saturday evening in particular, to see Blonde Redhead. We were hoping to catch Autolux and Seawolf too, but the parking situation was outrageous (we should have guessed…). It was complicated by all the blocked off streets, as well. The interesting thing about Silver Lake’s residential area is that its surprisingly hilly. Much like Polish Hill in Pgh. there is an area full of steep rolling hills and really cute houses/neighborhoods. Some of the streets got extremely narrow. We found parking up in such a neighborhood and thanks to the help of some locals, located a long staircase that went all the way down the side of the hill, cutting through the neighborhoods. It was quite interesting.
The festival was very diverse in the crowd it attracted, which I was happy about. It was really crowded though, and a bit stressful to navigate and find people (as these types of events usually are). Blonde Redhead’s performance was excellent. So charismatic and professional, and they sounded great. It was a bit like drinking Baily’s. Smooooth. They were just as good as the recordings with just enough variation to keep things interesting. After them, Ben Harper played. They’re a good band, but not my favorite kind of music; good outdoor festival music, though.
Earlier in the day, I finally got to see Culver City, which is a nice area of town to walk around in. There’s a lot of galleries around Washington Blvd. but we didn’t make it down that far. The main draw to Culver on Saturday, was to check out The Museum of Jurassic Technology, a local gem. This place is fascinating; a bit like a crazy person’s mansion. Really, after just writing that I’ve been sitting for several blank minutes trying to figure out how to describe it. My conclusion is that you have to see it for yourself. It’s a dimly lit house where each room is choc full of oddball exhibits ranging from failed attempts at manufacturing dice, to dogs of the Soviet Space program, to microscopic mosaics, to various collections of eccentric scientific research. There’s a tea room upstairs where you can have a tea and relax while enjoying the holographic religious icons on the wall. And despite how weird I’m making it sound, it’s actually quite classy. Really.
