It's Art, Stupid!

This weekend we went to the J Paul Getty Center. It's a museum/art gallery/architectural chef d'oeuvre that houses works that span from the Mesopotamians (whose ancestors we now call "insurgents", little known fact) right up to contemporary photographers. Some call them insurgents as well. The neat thing is that the whole project is privately funded by the late Mr J Paul Getty. There's no entrance fee and I didn't even see a donation jar anywhere. That's awesome. I hate it when people ask for donations. It's so stupid.

It's actually quite amazing and in my opinion important when someone with money takes it upon themselves to create something beautiful like this for the betterment of their city and society in general instead of leaving it for family to squabble over. (Although apparently they still do).

At the base of the Santa Monica mountain range a tram takes you toward the top, where the center sits overlooking the entire city. It was was one of those eerie smog-free days in LA, which put a nice touch on the afternoon. The exhibits were great. Dayna and I went to quite a few large museums and art galleries in Europe this past summer so we went as fast as we could through most of the ancient and historical exibits, trying to feel as little guilt as possible. You can tell when people really don't want to see certain works of art but they walk just slow enough so the other people don't catch them being unappreciative. We've all been there. Every 5 minutes you lean in closer to a 16th century masterpiece, point at it a bit, whisper something like "Hmmmm, yes. This is definitly a painting of some sort." But really you're just trying to get out of there because you're sure they're about to run out of those hot pretzels they were selling in the foyer.

Our hands-down favorite was the Julius Shulman 'Modernica and the Metropolis' architectural photography exhibit. Most of his pictures where of buildings done by two of most awesomist architects of the 20th century: Richard Neutra and Pierre Koenig. It's pretty obvious that half of the draw of the Getty Center is the architecture of the center itself.

All in all a must-see if you're ever unfortunate enought to find yourself in Los Angeles. It's exactly like the Museum of Man and Nature except...who am I kidding, it's exactly the same!

The election just finished before I posted this. I quizzed a few people at work and asked them to guess what's going on in Canada today. I'd say about than half of them knew, which is actually more than I thought. Our new PM's name is Stephen or Steve for short. I think his only weakness is that he always looks like he's giving you what Kramer would refer to as the "stink eye". Wow his eyes are weird. It will be interesting to follow the Canadian and (lack of) US media coverage as Canada comes to grips with a leader whose eyes are just super super weird.

" Hello, Hello, My name's Terry and I'm a law-abider" - the streets