I woke up Saturday and was supposed to do something, but puttered. Puttered long enough to be told not to do it. To wait until tomorrow. AWESOME. And so, after making my way through disc 1 of El Cid, decided that the thing to do was head to the Museum of Contemporary Art to finally check out the the Murakami exhibit.
Those in the know would suggest that it was at the Geffen, but I’m ignant. In the sense that I’ve been in Los Angeles for three years, and I still find myself afraid of getting lost (thank god for the iPhone), so I went to the MOCA I had been to before for the Rauschenberg exhibit. I waited in an impressive line, and was told I had to walk fifteen blocks before I even got to the checker. I told the checker that I heard her rap with the people before, and paid cash, all of which endeared me to her. Huzzah.
I found the walk to be illuminating. I passed a homeless man who had his pants around his ankles and looked like he just took a triumphant shit. I had texted a girl earlier about going out dancing and going to the MOCA and she was into the dancing, Huzzah x2. The walk was through Chinatown, which made me deeply hungry.
Being in the Murakami exhibit, I remember that Mark “SJR” Wheaton had started a thread about it, but it has since been obliterated. There were two thoughts that came to me whilst there. The first was of Devin’s comment about Evil Dead 2. Having sat next to him, I saw what he was going through, and it was as important to me as the thing itself. He said “Great art isn’t watched, it’s experienced” and there is a truth to that. Like David Lynch bemoaning people watching films on their phones, it’s true. My second thought was of Mark Wahlberg justifying poetry in I Heart Huckabees, where he says a poem is good for the soul. He’s right. Being in the rooms surrounded by Murakami art you find that it touches part of your brain. You wonder if it’s an intellectual process or if you think you are responding to something and it becomes psychosomatic. I doubt that. The truth seemed to be that being in a room that was surrounded by Murakami’s flower people, being in a room where everything was geared toward being an extension of the thing itself really did hit me like an intellectual orgasm.
Waiting to see the video portion of the program, there was a bit that had a CGI altered creature getting a boner. It was great to see parents freak out over this.
After spending two hours with Murakami, returning to the rooms of sensory overload a number of times, and taking illicit pictures with my iPhone – which are now my screen-saver – I headed back over to the the proper MOCA where my car was nearby, and took advantage of my leftover time to peruse the main museum. Art is to be experienced, and being around the Raushcenberg’s, and Barney’s and Pollack’s and Sherman’s, etc. I realized how privileged I was to live in Los Angeles, which does not have the culture or history of New York, but sure as shit has some money. And so I experienced awe. I experienced awe like you wouldn’t believe for $8.
The MJ vs. Prince party got canceled because (if I got this correctly) someone got killed at the club. Boo. Hiss. Whatever. LA wins!
And so I took my femme friend to The Short Stop. The great thing about that is that I’m a known entity there. The bouncers repsect me, let me pass the line, the DJ’s will play my songs. Tonight someone wanted a photo of me. Straight up, which happened last night with a group of Latinos who tod me I was hotter than Jim Gaffigan. This time, I was told to put on glasses and look a certain way. I wasn’t told it was for a photo, so I wasn’t sure if I was about to get treated like Joe Pesci in Goodfellas or whatever until the flash went off. My date tells me after the fact that at three other people took my picture. There, not a lot of MJ (some J5) but a ton of tangential Prince. The bouncer at the end of the night, being my boy, tells my date that any time she wants in the club, she can come to the front and mention my name. It’s great when bouncers want to help you seal the deal. One of the dudes who wanted my picture told my friend that she should freak me just cause I was so there. And people question my loyalty to The Short Stop.