Some Things I Bought and A Really Bad Wedding

Obviously, I started writing this this past Tuesday and it's a late posting:

Yesterday morning Chris and I got back from our extended weekend trip to Los Angeles. The initial excuse for making the trip was to attend my cousin's wedding in Pasadena. Well, it turned out that everything but the wedding was great. I guess I've always been kind of a poopy, stinky-faced, bubble burster when it comes to things like weddings and child-bearing. Maybe I was determined to hate the entire thing the minute I found out that the bride's (my cousin was the groom) career goal was to become a wedding planner or perhaps I am envious of someone who lives in such a Disney wonderland that they see this as a legitimate life goal. Anyway, I will continue on this topic some other time...

The one thing that I was very pleased about was being able to finally visit Chinatown. There were a small number of cool little shops tucked away between souvenir shops and live chicken butchers. One I was particularly glad that I went to was Welcome Hunters, which I had found out about a while back while poking around on the web. It was a tiny store but had a worthwhile selection of what seemed to be mainly international designers. Among the pieces was an awesomely weird sweater by an Icelandic brand named Mundi. It was sort of a simplified medieval armor suit knitted up as a hoodie. Too bad I am not wealthy, I would've bought it right then and there. I did get to purchase a little something for myself - a golden rabbit head with fake diamond eyes by a Thai designer called Kloset. I wondered if rabbits were too cliche as squirrels and owls are becoming but somehow decided on it anyway.

The other highlight of my trip was going to MOCA and seeing the Cosima von Bonin show. I guess this was her first solo museum show in the U.S. and I really didn't know anything about her until I got there - in a way, that made it even better since it got me so much more excited than seeing an artist that I knew. Anyway, she is based in Germany any does quite a bit of her work with fabric including paintings and sculpture. They brought the room that she used to do a video/performance and visitors could peer into it by climbing some stairs and looking over the tops of the walls. I am not going to attempt to go into detail about her work because it is quite complicated (that is why I bought the catalog). Even with its conceptual nature, I admired the fact that it was also so aesthetically appealing and fun. On a side note, I also realized that I had been looking at one of her fabric paintings for many years now as it is the image on the cover of one of my favorite albums, The Spectrum Between by David Grubbs.

So I came back from L.A. quite satisfied (apart from the family business) and the whole weekend reconfirmed my belief that what makes it such a great art city is its kind of naive optimism and acceptance of any and all trends. It also makes me think of how depressing the "art scene" (if you can even call it that) in the Bay Area is. No place is perfect though, so perhaps its all just a bunch of trade offs.