I had quite an entertaining weekend, but let's start with Thursday night. I met up with Marlon, Fong, Jack and Carol to attend a party at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, or LACMA. They were opening two new exhibits and to celebrate, they were having drinks and music, including a DJ. DJ Diabetic, to be exact. Marlon wanted to eat twinkees in front of his set to mess with his mind. Marlon just wouldn't accept that he probably wasn't diabetic; then again, he probably thinks Dr. Dre is a pediatrician. I'm sure Dr. Dre considers himself a gynecologist...but I digress. We had dinner that night beforehand and tried to show up fashionably late, but ended up in a huge line instead. So much for RSVPing; the line for those on the list was as long as the rest of the rabble showing up on a whim. On the way to the line, we witnessed this really bizarre act out front. There was what appeared to be an asian woman dressed in white spandex with a huge blonde wig singing some weird disembodied vocals which seemed to have nothing to do with her background dance music. We all wanted to stop and see where she was going with this, except for Jack. He seemed rather frightened by her act; of course, I'm not even sure it was totally a she. But hey, what with the lack of facial hair and delicate features, it's often hard to tell asian men from women anyways. Either way, I teased Jack all the way to the line that he wanted us to leave this independent performer because it was, in fact, his mother moonlighting and trying to jump start a singing career and he didn't want us to see her. He wasn't amused, but everyone else was. It really did kind of look like his mother...

After waiting around in line for a while and witnessing a street performer who bore a striking resemblance to the singer from Jamiroquai(Hey, have you seen him anywhere lately? I'm not ruling it out)we finally made it into the museum and were met with a huge crowd of trendy looking people hanging out and drinking...well, it was the liveliest I've ever seen a museum, anyways. We ended up getting a couple of drinks; or I should say Jack and Marlon had a couple of drinks. They managed to get nice and drunk. I'm always entertained by Marlon when he's drunk as he ignores that little voice in the back of his head that regulates his speech and just says what's on his mind; let's just say what's on his mind would get him beat up on a daily basis. our first choice on the evening was to go into the exhibit titled Geometry: Art from the 40s-70s.

When modern art gets brought up, I usually go on a rant about what a bunch of useless crap it is. Lo and behold! This Geometry exhibit is a perfect illustration of what I'm talking about. This is the usual art deco garbage that's all about perceptions and lines as opposed to skill or beauty. I like to think of art as made up of two parts, skill and innovation. While you can get by completely on skill, your work generally seems derivative and somewhat boring. Most of the great artists were able to do things that were inventive and original with their incredible skills; this is generally what separates the wheat from the chaff. If you go in the other direction, you have modern art. The concept of total originality is what powers modern art today. If you take a look at any of this junk, you can tell that your kid brother probably has about as much skill. The historian Paul Johnson compared pop art with the fashion industry and I think that's a perfect analogy; both are quickly outdated and have to be updated every "season" which perpetuates the industry as a whole. You won't ever not have customers if what you made last year is suddenly "out." Let me just bring up a couple of pieces of shi...er...art. My personal favorite was a steel box painted black titled, "Black Box." I'm sure there are layers upon layers of complexity with this piece that I can't ever fathom, but I suspect it's actually just a black box. Another winner was a piece of tape ran along a wall with blue crayon surrounding it with random numbers written upon it. How this qualifies as art when done by an adult but as rampant vandalism when done by a child, I dunno...age discrimination I suppose. Either way, if this qualifies as high art, my little brother Jackson is a genius. Look out Da Vinci!

The next exhibit actually consisted of art. Titled "Inventing Race: Casta Painting and Eighteenth Century Mexico," it was made up of paintings that used to decorate the walls of the upper crust of Spanish artistocracy in the new world. It seems that with the influx of black slaves and a mix of the native population, they were having a really hard time classifying all the different racial categories. The Spaniards thought of themselves as superior to the cultures around them, no surprise really, since they dominated so easily with better technology. The way they separated the cultures, however was based on the color of the skin. Casta refers to caste, or your ranking in society. It was quite popular with the Indian culture, but it hardly was confined there. They would come up with different classifications of race due to the combinations of Spaniards and indians, Spaniards and blacks, blacks and indians, etc...From that they came up with various new ways to title them such as mulatto, mestizo, you know the drill. An interesting new category was "Held up in the air" to define someone you couldn't tell what the hell their race was. Although the art wasn't anything special, it's an interesting glimpse into the minds of the people of 300 years ago. Eh...what do you expect from the Spaniards, anyhow?