weekends

Last weekend was a little crazy, I was tired so I didn't write about it. We went to Kiel Johnson and Christian Tedeschi's show at A+D Museum in LA entitled "Atmospheric Conditions." It was a cool show, there was some sound art thing at the end that we left during cause it was taking just way too long, but Kiel and Christian's work was good. We then headed off to a chill party in West LA, and Saturday we went to the Hammer, MOCA, and La Mano Press. I had a print at the La Mano thing, but unfortunately the event was poorly attended....ah well. Sunday we went to the student galleries at school and then hit up The Walkmen show at the Troubadour, they were amazing (buy all their albums, except for the PussyCat Dolls thing, a cover album, phtth).


This weekend I didn't end up doing as much crazy stuff. I watched Midnight Cowboy. It was kind of tamer than I thought it was going to be. From what I heard, I thought it was going to be a disturbing look into the underbelly of a seedy Pre-911 New York. I had visions of drugs, violence, and uncomfortable scenes. Not so much. The plot is this, Jon Voight (a southern rube)quits his job, dons a cowboy outfit and goes to NY to become a "huslter," i.e. sleep with women for money. He fails at his first few attempts, and looking like a sucker, runs across Ratso (Dustin Hofman), who con's him out of $20. After this the cowboy goes broke and gets desperate, then he ends up tracking down Ratso but doesn't have the balls to beat him up. After this, they become friends and for the rest of the movie try to steal and scavenge their way into a career in "hustling." It doesn't work out too well. Interspersed throughout the movie are flashbacks of the cowboy's past and Ratso's visions of the future.


Apparently, the brief boob and butt shots in the movie were supposed to be shocking back in 1969. Not so much now. The movie ends up being more or less a "rube in the city" story where Jon Voight's character learns the ropes pretty slow, but eventually does figure them out. Good acting and good direction though

Then yesterday, I went to the CSULB faculty show in downtown Long Beach. All the faculty was showing here and I was surprised to see Jay Kavapil (our past Graduate Advisor) to be showing some pretty nice ceramics peices as well. The show was so-so, most of the fine art professor's work was really nice, the new head of Sculpture had a chiselled marble work I thought was impressive. The people who I expected to have good work did have good work, but some of the other work, like graphic design, was pretty terrible. I guess I just don't understand graphic design, but the graphic design work in the show to me was pretty lousy looking.

Anyway, after the faculty show we went up to the unadvertised M. Ward show at CSULA. Again, a pretty amazing show. Buy all of his cds.