Real Not Real

My latest post is up on visadiaries.com …

A few months ago, a friend told me that if he heard the phrase “In this economy” one more time, he might explode. Little did we know, then, how many more times we’d get to hear it, and, frankly, how much more we’d care about hearing it. How we’d probably come to hang on the words of stories that began that way, and how we’d pray to move beyond it.

This is a story that begins “In this economy.” It’s a story about the joy that consumables can bring us, and the ability to find that joy for under $20. It’s a story about a showerhead that has changed my life, or at the very least, my mornings … (more after the jump)

SFMoMA, Otl’s Olympic paraphernalia from Munich ’72, through July 7, 2009.

A great gift delivered by my brother.

It was a lovely, lovely Valentine’s. Friends and champagne-and-fixins and a big gold heart on my big bay window.

There has been a new addition to the SF skyline, at least from my window… a nice little MetLife blimp. I adore it. It’s like a big, man-made fluffy cloud.

I saw this sign in Brooklyn over the holidays. Not only was the “brown rice” disturbing, but everything else is incorrect on this sign…

Today I went to the Brooklyn Museum to see the Takashi Murakami show. Surely, it was entertaining on a high-level for an hour or so. But the show was literally SuperFlat. Nothing had any real depth for me. After seeing the LV bags for years, the art just seemed almost bland. Oddly, almost childishly naive, yes. But not deep. Had there been some element of craft, or of the hand, it would’ve seemed more intimate. In the end, it just felt flat, superficial, plastic. There was no contrast, no conflict. I’d recommend it… it was worth the admission. But I have to say, the most entertaining part was listening to an LV employee speak French at the LV store in the middle of the exhibition.

I’ve been away from writing for quite some time. I treat this space more like a bulletin board for myself than a blog, per se, so I don’t have a dedication to posting on a regular basis. I just post when something hits me that I want to remember.

Recently I’ve taken on some design-related projects that aren’t graphic design, including a trip to Virginia where I worked on landscaping half of my parents’ yard and redoing one of the guest rooms. I heart this stuff.

The flight from SF to VA looked something like this, somewhere along the way:

I thought the circular pattern in the clouds looked like we were flying over a radar screen for a hurricane. Instead, the flight was pretty smooth sailing.

When I left VA, I took a flight back through bad weather to New York. The flight from Richmond to NYC was one of the most amazing cloud displays I’ve ever seen. Our lowly 17,000′ altitude seemed vast, as these clouds provided unbelievable depth to the sky (that tall center one must’ve been 300′ tall):

A few months ago, here in San Francisco, I went to see the Olafur Eliasson show, “Take Your Time”, at SFMOMA. It is the best show I’ve ever seen in San Francisco, and probably the best one-man show I’ve ever seen, period. Maybe that’s because I’ve seen more review-type shows than one-man shows, especially of contemporary artists, but this thing made me feel so, so good about living in the art world and it gave me hope for art as we know it currently.

This show was so well-designed, so thoughtfully responded to the space of the museum and to the flow of the viewer’s parade through the works, it made me feel like I was being welcomed openly into Eliasson’s process and his state of mind. The show was free of pretense, free of the self-awareness and sarcasm that has pervaded hipster art in the last five-ten years. I’m surely guilty of creating work that’s sarcastic, but I’m trying to move away from that and embrace an open-source philosophy about my work and the world at-large. Eliasson’s show seemed to embody a mentality of openness and interaction (though perhaps controlled, single-channel interaction) without relying solely on technology-based pieces to provoke a viewer-response or interaction.

I highly recommend this show to anyone, now that it’s open again, this time in New York. It’s a playground of serious thought about serious work that is anything but serious.