Emchap’s Shit from the Internet 10/17/18 🍠
When I lived in New York, a friend who appears to be Very Good With Money shared that one of his strategies was listing all the free things he could think of to do (in New York, there are of course many) and then when he needed something to do, going to do those things. When he ran out, he'd consider paid events. I've been trying to do the same thing in LA, which of course also has many free things to do, and that was how I wound up at the Marciano Art Foundation this last weekend.
I had been once before, on a mediocre first date early on in my time in LA (with an avid cyclist who found my lack of interest in bikes to be a person failing, as best as I could tell), so I knew the general deal. It's a free contemporary art museum in an old Masonic temple, with ticket reservations required in advance.
(This is, by the way, one of many free art museums in the city: the Broad is the same, the Hammer has the bonus of not requiring reservations, and the Municipal Art Gallery is small but lovely. With those and my annual membership at LACMA, I could have a solid schedule of free museum access on the weekends even if I didn't go out during the week to see their film screenings.)
Currently, the largest space at the museum is devoted to an Ai Weiwei exhibit, featuring the largest staging of his sunflower seed piece (millions and millions of handcrafted porcelain sunflower seeds, made by hand, set in a large square pile) ever done in the US. It was conceptually interesting, but not nearly as much fun as the back part, showcasing work Ai produced in collaboration with people who are master kite crafters; there were these giant beautiful kite frames of mythical creatures (fish with four heads, a woman with legs but no torso, a large blobby thing), and a monumental piece made with the same bent wood and showing a refugee boat full of people and gods, and huge two dimensional pieces made of wood frames overlapping each other and casting these shadows on the wall. There are some examples here, from where they originally started as department store pieces.
Upstairs, there was an obligatory Kusama room (no mirrors, but every surface was white with red polka dots; it was vaguely hallucinatory). I took photos, because I'm not a MONSTER, and wandered downstairs.
The whole floor below was taken up by a piece called Inattention. The artist is a year older than me, and has almost the same adolescent culture pedigree: Neopets and Invader Zim are both namechecked in her artist's statement. I wandered into it right after a group of high schoolers had entered. The piece consists of three rooms next to each other, with the middle room containing a big school cafeteria table and the plastic chairs schools have. The room on the right has a 3D animation of a character playing Elliot Smith songs on a piano and drinking; the room on the right has a similar video of characters in a school auditorium (namechecked as Columbine's in the name of the piece) singing "Memory" from Cats. The whole set of rooms are dark, and throughout it is raining remainder pieces from a hole punch.
The kids, who were well behaved but sort of exhuberant in the way of school groups, spent most of the time wadding up the paper pieces and throwing them at each other like snow. I was laughing at a pair of them doing this in the Elliot Smith room when I heard one ask the other what Columbine was. The other said that it was "one of the really famous school shootings."
Which of course isn't wrong, and the children were not! even! alive! when it happened (Christ), but after hearing that conversation while an animated high schooler played sad music from when I was in high school, I noped the entire fuck out to go stare at a wall in the museum cafeteria.
There's not a moral to this. I've just been thinking about it all week, because it made me feel both old as the sea and very sad.
Shit to read
Janet is the best character (not a robot) on the Good Place.
I had no idea Bratz was part of a years-long intellectual property suit!
How the fuck are we still arguing about whether child marriage should be legal in the US?
Beto is a) hot b) so sweaty.
There are better goals than to be likable.
Global warming is bad but it is throwing up mysterious corpses from glaciers so that's cool.
CVS receipts are too long.
This is a good review of the Pixel 3 and also the concept of phones.
I did not expect a longform article about trade secrets and whether Uber stole some of Google's to be compelling, but it very much was.
Dumb emoji bagel comedy is basically algorithmically generated to appeal to me.
As someone who spends all her work day explaining to people that my employer's data lives in Northern Virginia, this exploration of where the fuck AWS's data centers are was very interesting.
Shit to eat
Go to Porto's at 4:30 on a weekday.
There will be what by Porto's standards is no line (so, like, 10 people).
Stand in line. Scan the seasonal baked goods.
See the tiramisu cup that you so loved once. Consider it, but reject it in favor of novelty.
A masa real? A quesadilla?
(No, because you are still 6 years old and trying to get the most ridiculous multi-textured thing you can even though you know you love the little cheesecakes.)
Order a tres leches cup and a potato ball.
Take them outside, where you can sit comfortably, eat your food, and watch the DARE canvassers fail to get anyone to talk to them.
The tres leches will turn out to have a homemade marshmallow dome on the top (amazing) rather than the expected whipped cream.
Take 10 minutes, eat the whole thing with a fork even though you ought to have grabbed a spoon, and carefully time your exit to avoid eye contact with the DARE folks.
(They'll still try to talk to you. Just walk away.)
Only after throwing everything away will you realize that there was somehow bright red frosting on your tres leches cup that got on your hand, causing a brief moment where you think you might be dying from the fingers before realizing, and deciding to treat it as Extra Bonus Frosting because you are, like, slightly gross.
Shit to listen to
Though I am from the same city as Killer Mike, I hadn't really seen video of him until watching this Run the Jewels Tiny Desk Concert. He's very charming! Go watch the concert!
Shit to buy
I'm not going to buy this candle because it's $60 but someone should because it looks amazing.
Have you bought a slice of carrot cake yet? You should!
I think I linked this jumpsuit in a previous newsletter but it arrived and I look good as hell in it and everyone should come out to LA and buy me a drink.
I love this bananas kindergarten teacher dress.
This wraparound Boden jumpsuit is super cute.