California and the Getty

Spent a few days in LA with my sister Jenn, and had an absolutely great time. We had the chance to go and do a couple of different things, but the highlight of the trip (aside from just getting to see & spend time with her) was the trip we took to the Getty Center.
The Getty Center/Getty Museum is one of the best known, if not the best known museum in LA.

It was founded by J. Paul Getty, a wealthy oilman who bought an extraordinary piece of real estate in the hills above LA and set up a trust to fund it. The museum’s ‘mission’ is to expand exposure to the visual arts, so that includes things like photography and sketch work in addition to the usual things like paintings & sculpture.
Having been to both the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC and to the Louvre in Paris, I wasn’t expecting I would be impressed, but once again, I was surprised. The museum had a very respectable collection of arts and sculpture, thought not very large. (In fairness, most of the sculpture exhibit was offsite that day). And they had some art deco stuff from the French period of Louis the XIV, also known as the Sun King, that reminded me very much of some of the stuff I saw in France.
But the impressive thing about this place was actually the museum itself. It was designed by an architect named Richard Meier, and the place really is a work of art. It’s a number of interconnected buildings built out of this nice whitish stone called travertine. The museum is designed as several smaller buildings around an outdoor courtyard and a number of other open air spaces, like the food court which you see in the picture. So walking around outside the museum and in between the buildings was in many ways as good as seeing the art inside. In addition, there are a couple of rather impressively designed gardens on the grounds, and they’ve done some very cool things with water and with fountains, giving the entire place a manicured yet somehow natural feel.
One of the exhibits that particular struck me was one on Rubens and Brueghel. These two artists who worked in Antwerp actually created paintings together, as a collaborative effort. (Generally what would happen was that one of them would paint the backgrounds & settings, the other would paint the primary figures, then the first guy would come back and touch things up to make sure the figures fit in properly with the backgrounds.) It was fascinating to see, as I had no idea such collaboration even existed.
The weather was beautiful, the time was relaxing, and it was great to see Jenn again for a few days. I’m in Seattle now, and I’ll be here until I return to NYC over Labor Day. I imagine there may be a few noteworthy experiences here too, but given that I’m vacationing, I may just decide not to post again until September …

J. Paul Getty Museum

http://www.getty.edu/museum/

Shakespeare in the Park(ing) Lot

Went and did something really fun this evening. (Technically it was last Friday evening, by the time I get around to posting this). A friend from my community group made a list of things she was interested in doing in NYC this summer on the cheap, or fairly cheap, and one of them was this thing called Shakespeare in the Parking Lot.

A lot of people have heard of Shakespeare in the Park, which I believe is done in Central Park and is of course what this thing was taking its name from. This wasn’t anything nearly so grand, but it was still a ton of fun.
It was a free performance of Shakespeare’s ‘As You Like It’, performed (as I understand it) by actors from a couple of different venues & production companies; the organizing production group is called the drilling company (linked at the bottom). They took out space in a parking lot at the corner of Ludlow & Broome on the edge of Chinatown. I think there were a total of about a dozen different actors (a few of them played multiple smaller parts), and there were I’m guessing 60 or 70 people attending; those who got there early got the thirty or so chairs brought by the drilling company, and everyone else either brought their own or sat on mats.
I’d never seen this play before, and I decided against reading the Cliff Notes before the show, which I ended up being glad for. I won’t spoil the plot for anyone who hasn’t seen it, but the show really was very entertaining; it’s a lighter piece, similar in feel I think to ‘Much Ado About Nothing’.
The great thing about this performance is that even though the dialog was classic Shakespeare, the costume design was a little unorthodox. Orlando, the male protagonist, was dressed like John Travolta from Grease; the Duke and his men were dressed like Prohibition-era gangsters, and Rosalind (the female protagonist who might really in truth be accurately called the ‘main character’) wore a button-up sweater and a poodle skirt. There was also a character dressed like a cheerleader. It reminded me of some ways of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ with Leonardo DiCaprio, which had the original language in a very unorthodox setting. It sounds strange, but these actors were both very enthusiastic as well as very talented, and they made it work. It helped that it was clear they were having a good time with it as well.
To be honest, if I were still going to be in town (I’m leaving on Thursday to go back to Seattle for the rest of the summer until Labor Day), I’d go see the performance again.
One of the really interesting things was that the audience was very respectful; the only real disturbance we had was the garbage truck across the street being so loud that we couldn’t hear part of the dialog. (But I guess that is a risk you take with a street performance). I was honestly a bit surprised; the crowd was very mixed, you had the entire range from people who looked like they were regular attendees of professional Shakespeare productions to homeless people right off the streets. I felt sure that there would be at least one person who would disrupt things in some way, shout out some silly remark at the actors or something. But it never happened; the entire audience was very respectful of both the performers and each other. In a strange kind of way, as I looked around over the crowd at various times, I’d almost say it was like a bonding experience. Everyone, and I do mean everyone, was really into the performance, and I saw people afterwards having conversations with people they would probably never otherwise have talked to. It brought people together in a really neat kind of way.
And it reminded me again how good the Bard really is.

the drilling compaNY
www.drillingcompany.org