March 25th 2011: Santa Monica, LACMA, and Good Food

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Click on images below to enlarge:
A 180 degree panoramic movie looking west, north, and east from the upper balcony entrance to the Contemporary Art building.	Ibid, the Hollywood Sign on distant hills.	Ibid, I like the bushiness of the palms by the north entrance to the LACMA complex. They feel somehow earnest and energetic.
LACMA: Inside
I like the feel of Pissarro's work, especially this one: Peasant House at Eragny.	Alberto Giacometti statues. At right is Large Standing Woman 4; in the foreground center is Woman of Venice 8. I took this picture to add to my collection of photographs of statues of tall thin figures (see these for example).	Jacques Villon's Portrait of Mlle. Y. D. has nice texture.	I like these impressionists, especially Boats on the Beach by Georges Braque (in the bottom-right).
Jay DeFeo's The Jewel has ridges of paint several inches thick.	Jackson Pollock's No. 15 looks like a binocular depth even though it has no thickness.	Josef Albers's series Homage to the Square.	These textiles woven by the Kuba people from the Democratic Republic of Congo are `mazing (pun intended).
Ren Magritte's famous comment on representational images: The Treachery of Images (This Is Not a Pipe).	Claes Oldenburg's Giant Pool Balls.	The shadow of a fancy cross.	Domenico Moglia's The Collseum and the Forum show sites that I saw mere months before. Plus, they're rendered with an architectural flair. Those alone would be reason enough to photograph these pieces of art. But, there's another reason I took this picture: these aren't paintings! Rather, they're micromosaic, made of countless pieces of glass. Even in the full-sized image, you can't make out the individual pieces (though I could see them in person).
Details.	Royal Peacock Barge, a detailed Indian ivory sculpture.	A close-up of the center of the barge.	Funky sculptures in the Japanese pavilion (but I don't think these are Japanese). These look soft but they're actually stoneware.
An interesting sign describing how the Japanese pavilion's layout. I like the building's architecture/design (see the first section) and lighting (see the last section).	Granville Redmon's California Poppy Field feels like a Seurat.	Look at the clarity in Fitz Henry Lane's Boston Harbor, Sunset.	I like the lamps in the Ancient American art section.
I like the sculptures in this soon-to-open exhibit on David Smith.	Jeff Koons's Balloon Dog.	There are large constructions by Richard Serra that one could walk in. What's the point? They're kind of fun like a maze. One is named Sequence.	I only photographed this piece of art because I wanted to photograph its accompanying label.
This label shows how extreme and preposterous some artists and art commentators can be: "real, thing, and nothing ... are subjective [concepts], beyond empirical verification." Criminy! If it's physical, it's real, and it's pretty easy to verify (touch it).	Carlee Fernandez composed some thought-provoking photographs in which she contrasted a much earlier picture of someone (often decades earlier) with a modern portrait of same person in the same place wearing the same clothes in the same stance. The paired photographs invite thoughts about how people change and how they stay the same. I found her portrait of her father online.	A working miniature elevator (the doors opened and closed, the call button worked, it dinged). There's just something incredibly amusing about it. Beforehand, I wouldn't have thought an elevator instantly becomes amusing simply because it was shrunk.
Dinner #1 at Kogi Korean Taco Truck
Dinner #1 was from Kogi's Korean Taco Truck.	Our three tacos: (no I don't know which is which from this picture) calamari taco - spicy and sweet, an explosion of flavor, possibly too much so. short rib taco - beefy. really tasted like meat. more intense than a bite of steak with kimchi. spicy pork taco - somewhat crispy like pulled bbq pork. By this point, there was such a party of tastes in my mouth that it was hard to tell everything apart. All were very good. :)
Dinner #2 at KyoChon Korean Fried Chicken
Dinner #2 was at KyoChon Korean Fried Chicken.	The signature chicken wings with soy garlic coating. Very good. Each piece steamed when bitten! Sweet and very crispy.	The signature drumsticks (also with soy garlic coating) were even better! They're like the wings but more--taken up a notch--and fattier.	Potato wedges. Fresh and good. Steam emerged when I bought them. Greasy enough that I felt the need to press the grease out with a napkin.