So I keep on meaning to write a billion blogs on lots of topics with my usual acerbic wit and charm. But then I can't face turning on the computer to do fun stuff after being on the computer all day long.
However, I did mean to use this blog to write about the shows and stuff that I have seen so that I could remember what it was I saw. So instead of talking about Egypt or the fascinating article on how Texas has the worst schools and the highest teen pregnancy rate and how they only do abstinence sex education so there are just going to be more and more kids in Texas getting bad educations and pregnant which you know, won't help the fiscal problems of Texas. But no, I need to talk about Hair.
Hair Hair Hair Hair Hair Hair Hair Hair long beautiful Hair.
We saw Hair at the Pantages in Hollywood and it was a very, very fun show. The beloved C and the sister-out-law had seen Hair about 7 or 8 times when they were 6 and 7 so it was sort of a family nostalgia event that the sister-out-law organized.
Very fun show, very anti-war, lots of good tunes. Lots of very athletic dancing and at the end there is a "love in" of audience participation dancing and you would think the actors would be tired and want to stop dancing but there's another 20 minutes of applause audience participation dancing at the end. I suppose to make up for the fact that Claude dies. Yes, Claude gets killed in Vietnam. And we see the body. Unlike today's wars where we weren't allowed to. You barely know that people, our troops are dying and getting blown up. Hmmm. Hair was rather topical.
And much better than the Music Man, a show that the father-out-law once was nice enough to take me to which I thought was a misogynist piece of crap with some okay tunes. I've been humming Carbon Monoxide ever since. And very moving at the end.
We also, like a gazillion years ago in November saw Dengue Fever perform live during a screening of the classic "Lost World." Lost World really sets up the classic narrative arc of the white (British) folks exploring the unknown (Africa, Asia, South America) finding some strange beast (Tarzan, Dinosaurs, King Kong) and bringing them back to civilization and bad things happen. For example in this film they bring back a poor brontosaurus to jolly old London and it is hungry and confused and wants to find some greenery and so it just trashes London (this is a silent film obviously and it's before King Kong and Godzilla, but it is a very good large animal trashes city sequence) trying to find something to eat. The animation is so incredible you really felt the pathos of the brontosaurus and when it finally went off of London Bridge you hoped it would be able to swim back to South America.
Dengue Fever of course was totally awesome. They're one of my favorite bands.
Finally we went to LACMA and did not get stuck in the BCAM Barbara Krueger elevator.
We saw the exhibit "India's Fabled City: The Art of Courtly Lucknow" and since I know squat about the subject I actually read the signs. It was really fascinating. One thing I've always wondered about some Persian and Indian paintings, is about the buildings. The paintings have the flatness common to paintings that are not using 3 point perspective (or Renaissance Perspective) so things stack up in these novel ways and I could never quite tell what the buildings were like. They seemed to be endless, with patios and courtyards and arched walkways and second and third stories with large balconies. And I couldn't figure it out. Well there is an entire room where they have reproduced a large panorama of the city taken in the 19th Century of the palace (or the ruins of the palace) and holy cow! There are courtyards and colonnades and arches and open air patios and gazebos and it is endless. The palace goes on forever. So that answered that question.
The other thing this exhibit had was a painting from 1860 or so, and I guess I should say that Lucknow was primarily an Islamic city, but there was a painting of Mohamed lying on a bed with the Angel Gabriel. Which you know, sort of blew my mind in a whole bunch of ways.
Cheers!
