90013, Downtown Los Angeles

Photos of NYC subway cars

Dear ——–,

I’m wondering why it took so long for an exhibit like Art in the Streets to happen. I guess the people who finance shows at marquee museums for a long time didn’t think of something done for free — and illegally — on walls and tunnels as art. It’s hard to collect. Maybe the tide started turning in the 1980s with Haring and Basquiat. The thing I love about street art is that it makes you laugh (though usually ironically); art has for so long been serious. Banksy, in particular, made some pretty pointed commentaries that were painfully funny — including a recreated frame of the Rodney King beating video with a colorful pinata instead of King. Neck Face‘s piece featured an alleyway full of trash and a fake homeless man. Erika pointed out that this was probably the first time MOCA had trash in the galleries. Some online forums have criticized the museum and the artists featured in it as sell-outs. But I’m guessing these artists are laughing all the way to the bank — they’re getting paid to thumb their nose at authority. The exhibit — definitely worth seeing — runs through Aug. 8.

90272, Pacific Palisades

The outer peristyle garden at the Getty Villa

Dear ——–,

Jen happened to be traveling through L.A., so I took Monday off to hang out. I rarely venture over to the westside, so I thought we could spend the day over there. We had breakfast and a Spanish latte at Urth Caffe in Santa Monica, which Jen had heard of because the mom in the “Teenage Paparazzo” documentary talked about going there. Then we drove up Pacific Coast Highway for a visit to the Getty Villa, which I’d never been to. The galleries were stuffed with elaborate Grecian urns, Roman busts and Cypriot fertility figures. The strangest items were plates and drinking vessels from the original Greek frat parties: there were literally scenes of guys vomiting. The villa also had a rare mummy from Roman Egypt that had an ibis tucked into its midsection. Under a foggy marine layer, we wandered among the pomegranate and olive trees in the outer peristyle. We could barely make out the ocean as we sat on a deck at the villa, so I was surprised when Bryan told me over the phone that it was 10 degrees warmer in Eagle Rock. So the sun was shining, just 20 miles away from us.

90036, Los Angeles

Kissing Series by Baldessari at LACMA

Dear ——–,

On Friday, Bryan and I went to see the John Baldessari show at LACMA. I love Baldessari because he’s funny and he isn’t too stuck up to let the audience in on the joke. His “California Map Project” is a stroke of genius: he started with a map of the state and then visited the physical location of each of the C-A-L-I-F-O-R-N-I-A letters printed on the map. At those places, he laid out the letters with red ribbon, rocks or non-toxic dye. The resulting photos were a playful sweep across the varied landscape of our state. We wanted to visit LACMA on a weekday because our neighbor Christal works in the conservation department. She took us to the paintings lab, where one of the conservators talked about how they restore paintings missing flecks of paint or browned by age. Morning, northern light is apparently the best for mixing colors to match the painting. If they are stumped, they ask scientists to analyze the composition of pigments on the original. The conservator talked about a difficult case with an Albert Bierstadt painting, where someone in the 80s decided to shellack it with a particularly thick varnish. When she pressed on it, an air bubble showed up like a badly laminated placemat. Eventually, by rolling a bone over the painting, she was able to pull off the whole layer with a spatula. She was able in this way to preserve the underlying original artist’s varnish, which turned out to be flecked with gold. As if the dramatic colors and composition of his lush, Romantic landscapes of the West didn’t already inspire a sense of wonder, I guess Bierstadt wanted a little extra shimmer!

90038, Hollywood

Lunch at Street

Dear ——–,

Bryan and I spent one of the most perfect Saturdays ever. We started off with a leisurely lunch at Street, where we enjoyed sweet-salty Kaya toast, a succulent pulled pork banh mi and Vietnamese corn with a kick of spice. The iced chrysanthemum tea was so tasty it made me think, “Why hasn’t anyone else done this?” (We had to try Susan Feniger’s restaurant after she charmed us on Top Chef Masters.) We headed over to Exposition Park afterward and took a stroll through the rose garden, where we saw an older couple taking wedding pictures and lots of signs saying “no soccer.” We took a moment to smell the proverbial roses. Then we filed inside to see “Hubble 3D” at the California Science Center. It was really amazing to fly inside the nest stars and gas making up Orion’s belt and watch astronauts making repairs on the space telescope. I wish there were some more shots of the galaxy in 3-D, but I guess you can’t go back and make famous Hubble shots (like the Eagle Nebula) into true 3-D after the fact. In a happy daze, we made our way home.

80538, Munich

Valier's rocket-powered car at the Deutsches Museum

Dear ——–,

The Deutsches Museum, a science museum focusing on air and space, hosted the main events of the conference I was attending in Munich. We spent most of our time in a stately salon room next to sextants and other early scientific instruments and sweated through the 80-plus-degree heat. (Apparently few places in Munich have air conditioning and the weather was unseasonably warm.)  After the presentations Tuesday, we got a tour of the museum: tiny German cars, an original Wright Brothers plane, an exhibit on dark matter. At one point, the guide showed us some experimental rocket-propelled cars made by Max Valier, the godfather of Germany’s rocket scientists. Hitler himself had heard some of Valier’s lectures, the guide said. And when Valier died in a rocket-related accident, Valier’s widow convinced Hitler to take an interest in the rocket cars. Der Fuhrer himself donated them to the Deutsches Museum. Is it weird that the museum has special holdings given directly by Hitler? Clearly you can’t erase Hitler from German history or the technology development in the mid-20th century. I guess you could argue that whatever political figure in power would have probably supported the rocket program, but I have to admit it was an unsettling reminder that Hitler’s Germany had a huge impact on America’s space exploration development. Valier inspired Wernher von Braun, who was probably the pre-eminent rocket scientist of the 20th century and jumpstarted the American space program after the war.

IV63 6SJ, Loch Ness

Urquhart Castle, on the banks of Loch Ness

Dear ——–,

No, we didn’t see the Loch Ness Monster. But we did get to an unrestored, ruined castle: Urquhart Castle. It changed hands many times through its several-hundred-year history and English soldiers finally firebombed it to pieces in 1692 so it couldn’t be used by the Jacobites (loyal to the Scottish king James VII). I liked imagining what it would be like to live in a bedroom in the tower overlooking Loch Ness and what it would be like to bake in the stone oven. This was so much better than listening to the recorded sizzling and clanking sounds piped into the kitchen of Eilean Donan Castle. We arrived at Urquhart (pronounced ERK-ert) right after it opened, so we had the castle almost to ourselves for an hour. Then the swarm began, with sounds of Mandarin, Italian and some Eastern European language echoing through the stone corridors. Sometimes it was hard to get up the spiral stairs because tourists carrying enormous backpacks were blocking the narrow path. Touring Scotland = touring castles, so I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. At least we limited ourselves to only two castle visits.

IV40 8DX, Dornie

Eilean Donan castle in the Scottish Highlands

Dear ——–,

We reached the Highlands Tuesday, passing hills covered in downy grass and moss, threaded with innumerable streams. Scotland has more water than it knows what to do with. It’s as if Mother Nature left the faucet on. (We also passed the lake with my favorite name: Loch Lochy.) On the drive, I got to thinking about the symmetry of nature. The red-orange color of some of the grasses and ferns matches the hair of many Scots. The thick clouds obscuring the peaks of mountains resembled the wool of sheep grazing in the valleys. In the early afternoon, we reached the impressive, severe Eilean Donan Castle. Apparently, one of its inhabitants in the 14th century was warmed by the sight of 50 severed heads decorating its walls. That was a sign of discipline. The castle was badly damaged in the 1700s and remained exposed to the elements until around 1930, when the McRae-Gilstrap family restored it. Given its brutal history, I think I would have preferred to see it in ruins.

EH1 2NG, Edinburgh

Walking groggily through the old part of Edinburgh

Dear ——–,

We arrived in Edinburgh after 11 hours in the air (five of it with Scarlett Johansson, who was on the flight from L.A. to Newark). Mostly we’re happy it’s not raining. While it wasn’t ever exactly sunny today, we were happy that we could wander the city at will. First, we walked up the Royal Mile to Edinburgh Castle, a fortress built on an old volcano that’s been built and sieged since 600 A.D. The most interesting part was the jail, which housed prisoners captured by the British navy during the Revolutionary War. I’d always thought of the Revolutionary War being fought on ground in the U.S. and never before wondered what happened to those caught at sea. These men carved their names and the shapes of their ships into the wooden doors of their cells. Apparently, they also chiseled stamps out of their mutton bones to manufacture counterfeit currency. After wandering up and down many random streets, we checked into our modern-but-cozy bed and breakfast, 94DR. I can’t wait to lie down flat for the first time in 28 hours.

90036, Los Angeles

HappyHappy installation near the Broad Contemporary wing

Dear ——–,

I went to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art yesterday to get a birthday present at the gift shop. This art installion, HappyHappy by Choi Jeong-Hwa , stopped me in my tracks. From far away, I thought I saw a bunch of long, colorful lanterns, but as I got closer, I realized the lanterns were actually plastic cups, tupperware containers and colanders. Kids were running between these plastic streamers and the security guards weren’t stopping them. It reminded me of swimming through Chuck E. Cheese ballpits. I smiled instantly. Here were things you don’t usually pay attention to, presented as pure, joyful colors and shapes. HappyHappy was part of an exhibit on contemporary Korean art called Your Bright Future, but wasn’t our immersion in brightly-colored plastics practically universal? If nothing else links us to everyone else in the world, our common infatuation with cheap, throwaway items does!

94117, San Francisco

A glittery hula hoop meet-up at the Embarcadero

Dear ——–,

We spent a lovely weekend among nude bicyclists and (clothed) hula-hoopers. San Francisco just can’t help being itself. On Saturday, Geoff and Steven took us to browse modern art at the De Young Museum. I wondered whether anyone outside of the 1990s could appreciate those brash Dale Chihuly explosions of glass, but the Andy Goldsworthy faultlines to the front door were pretty inspired. After a lot of walking, we treated ourselves to salted caramel ice cream at Bi-Rite Creamery, which was worth standing in line for. On Sunday, we were disappointed to find grandpa’s favorite Lichee Garden had stopped serving dimsum. So we got our xiao long bao at the very satisfactory City View instead. Carla showed us the art of hooping to dance music at the Embarcadero and we finished off the trip with the most perfect latte I’ve ever had at Blue Bottle Coffee in the Ferry Building.