Art and People-Watching: The Broad Museum

Recently I visited L.A's newest museum, "The Broad." It was just completed, and it houses modern and contemporary art collected by Edythe and Eli Broad over the last half-century.

The Broad is an amazing-looking building. Here's "The Oculus," which looks like a giant thumb pushed into a part of the mesh-like outer surface of the building:

But what's inside is even more fun. I loved the balloon-like pieces by Jeff Koons:

His "Balloon Dog" is a gigantic 12 feet high:

Jeff Koons again. This is "Party Hat," and it's also huge--like 9 feet by 10 feet:

Other pieces I loved include El Anatsui's "Red Block," made of thousands of metallic liquor labels, hitched together like a woven Kente cloth. It was so hard not to reach out and touch it:

This is Jasper Johns' "Untitled." Too bad the Broads nabbed it; I would be so happy to hang it in my family room. Hah!:

Here's a detail of the same piece:

I also enjoyed Bernd and Hilla Becher's photography. They used a large-format camera to capture dozens of water towers in their native Germany. They grouped the objects according to their overall shape. This was what I'd call the "ball on stilts" water towers, and it reminded me of the ones that dotted the prairie in Kansas when I was a little girl:

  
I had fun capturing people in the same frame as the art. Somehow these pieces become more alive when somebody is interacting with them, even if it's just sitting in front of them and twiddling on a cell phone:

This painting, above, is a small part of the largest piece in The Broad. It's by Takashi Murakami, a mural 82 feet long, called "Land of the Dead, Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow." It blew me away. So detailed, so colorful, so drop-dead crazy.

In front of his piece was his amazing sterling-silver Buddha statue, maybe three or four feet high. It was a mind-bending mashup of traditional Japanese iconography and cartoonish anime:

The Broad itself is quite a work of art. The escalator from the ground floor to the next floor reminded me of blood cells coursing through an artery. The walls are Venetian rubbed plaster, and they are wonderfully smooth and touch-able:

The interior "skin" of The Broad is largely made of glass walls. The outer, mesh-like "veil" that forms the outer skin of the museum leans out from the glass, on the left. The rainbow colors on the glass panels are reflections from a colorful, large piece of art off-camera to the right. I have no doubt that the curators knew what they were doing when they hung the piece where it did. The effect is fun and unexpected:

Sometimes the line between art and people is blurred at The Broad. These look like they might be the museum's visitors, right?:

But really, they are huge, hyper-realistic panels done by Thomas Struth--enormously blown-up photographs he took of tourists at the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence:

Struth captured these folks as they stood in the rotunda dominated by Michelangelo's monumental "David," which is off camera. 

But you get that they are affected by something--something big and awe-inspiring:

They look the way I felt when I toured The Broad. 

Reclaiming a Roadside Offering

Recently I cleaned out our outside storage room and put a lot of castoffs on the curb, hoping folks would take them away. There were broken patio chairs, an old stroller--that sort of stuff.

Everything got carted off. All but this one thing:

It's a sort of a glorified hurricane lamp, I guess. I used to put a pillar candle inside it and use it outdoors on summer nights. It was pretty once, but then the plastic panels got all yellowed and one of them just died. But it did have a sweet bird on top:

I realized the ugly plastic panels were the problem.

And maybe a little overall grubbiness:

So I hauled it back from off the curb, pulled off (and tossed) all the plastic panels, and gave the thing a good cleanup:

Then I set it on the front porch next to a new fern in an old pot, on top of a cute old sideboard I bought for very little cash and painted a couple shades of periwinkle blue:

The hurricane lamp-turned-decorative-object looks so much better now!

And I think that little bird on the top is smiling.

Hot-Weather Window Shopping

It's SO hot here, guys! August and September traditionally are L.A.'s hottest months of the year. Sometimes when I can't get all three dogs walked before the morning heat sets in, I head to Macy's with the last one.

Inside the department store, it's nice and cool, and they have a standing policy of welcoming dogs. Pao came with me this time; he had such fun, and I got in some great window-shopping.

Pao posed in front of this poster:

He and I found these great Oxfords by Tahari. I need something like these to replace a pair falling apart after three seasons of almost constant wear:

I also found that my favorite flats comes in this adorable black-and-white version:

(I ended up going back two days later to get these--on sale, too!)

I never was swayed by Kate Spade purses, but Kate Spade china? Love!

That apron with the sweetheart neckline and the little ruffle is just calling my name.

These beauties stopped me in my tracks:

The blue one reminds me so much of a powder box my Nana got from a sale at the estate of Jeanette MacDonald:

We're months away from sweater weather, but of course the stores are filled with them. These ladies literally seem to have yarn on the brain:

Because Pao was such a good shopping buddy, when we got home, I spelled out his name in kibble for lunch and let him go at it:

He sat beautifully and waited until I said, "Okay!"

Good boy, Pao. We'll go window-shopping again soon.

Africa Blues

Whenever I travel, I look for blue things to photograph. This was a challenge in the African bush, where the colors are mostly tawny golds, dusty greens, mudbank browns, and elephant grays. But that made the challenge to photograph blue things all the more fun.

Here's what I found:

Cell phones and blue-green nails on the Zambezi River:

Victoria Falls, or "Mosi-oa-Tunya," in the local language:

Visitors to the falls can get quite wet from all the mist, so these lightweight plastic raincoats abound:

GO BLUE! I saw this gentleman waiting in line to cross from the Zambia side of the falls into Zimbabwe side. He didn't speak a word of English, and I didn't speak his tongue, but I managed to use a lot of charades-style gestures to indicate my kid went to the University of Michigan. His face lit up, and he shook my hand--twice!

A maintenance worker near the falls using an old-school broom and rocking brilliant blue slacks:

Zambia has many of the same flowers I see around Los Angeles. Lobelia was everywhere:

The Luangwa River hippos basking in its blue waters:

One day we took a bamboo-bicycle tour through the tiny village of Siankaba, about an hour outside of Livingstone:

I saw this totemic-looking thing in the village. Don't know what it was, but it looks like those huge stone heads on Easter Island:

The village has no running water, so the villagers use whatever they can to lug water from the well to their homes:

This cutie-patootie was in the preschool class for four- and five-year-olds in the village. Preschool classes are a relatively new thing for Zambian villages, and they're already making a big difference:

The village agreed to allow a cell phone tower on their land, which provides them some income now and may help them some day get phone service. The turquoise box is part of the equipment that maintains the tower:

In the bush, I saw many birds I'd never seen before. Our guide's birding book helped me get a picture of the bird when the one in the wild wasn't cooperating:

I snapped this one, though. This gorgeous creature is the Lilac-Breasted Roller:

In flight, it flashes lots of turquoise and navy blue:

License plate detail:

Jugs of powdered milk and instant coffee for a mid-morning coffee break while out in the Land Rover:

The oddball Babobab tree (showing signs of elephant damage) against a blue Zambian sky:

 Luke, one of the bush camp staff, showing how to work the outdoors shower:

Early-morning game drives begin with a light breakfast served around the campfire. One of the offerings is hot cooked oatmeal, kept warm in this snug pumpkin-shaped thingie:

Lanterns flickering in the twilight:

A cotton cloth called a "Kikoy" is standard equipment in the bush camps. Dampened and placed on a sleeper, it helps keep folks cool on the hottest nights:

A beautifully set table and some hand-thrown pottery:

Glass dish with laundry powder for washing things out in the sink at a bush camp:

An outdoors breakfast on the riverbank begins with eggs cooked over a campfire:

A rope draped over the support posts of our treehouse-like tent on stilts:

Lamps waiting for use at nightfall:

A hugely important part of each camp: the place where all the guests' electronic devices are recharged via solar power:

We had a tour of a bush camp kitchen. The quality and quantity of food they produce is astounding--everything from hearty stews to delicate mousses:

Not used much any more, but charming nonetheless, a milk jug and matching bowl decorated with giraffes sat in a corner of the kitchen:

And finally, I couldn't resist one last image of those blue lanterns: