![[>>]](../../../images/next.gif)
Friday morning, I woke up with an itchy throat. I opened up my hotel room curtains and looked out upon a sprawl amidst orange air. I stopped by the correct Tourist Information Center to study up on harbor attractions so that I'd have something to do on Saturday.
I ducked into a little food place that had a breakfast special. There was a guy ahead of me in line. He asked for a bagel with cream cheese, tomato, and cucumber. And yet, when it was served to him, he seemed angry. He wanted the lady behind the counter to chop up the tomato and the cucumber. I didn't know what to think: did he have bad teeth? Was he loudly making an absurd demand in hopes of being mistaken for a movie star? The lady behind the counter chopped up the veggies, started to put them on the bagel, but he stopped her. He wanted them mixed into the cream cheese. He didn't seem to know what a smear was. He just seemed clueless.
Then I went to the Museum of Contemporary Art. I was there at opening time, as was a class of elementary school students. In the museum, docents were showing the students around. I looked at one painting as a docent pointed it out to a cluster of students. She asked, "Now, who can tell me who did this painting?" This was, of course, the cue for all of the students to hem and haw. They were just little kids, after all. I was surprised when the students piped up "Rothko!" Not that this painting was atypical of Rothko's work. Was this the result of Los Angeles' huge trove of modern art?
Apparently not. Other groups of students were just as ignorant as I'd been in my day. Tailing the "smart" group for a bit, I got the impression that there were one or two kids therein who'd had some art classes, who knew what was up; the other kids were just parroting those two. And all was right with the universe.
There was a special exhibit of works by Liz Larner. I looked at a 1m sphere and thought of Sam and Max encountering the World's Largest Ball of Twine, but this turned out to be a ball of surgical gauze, 16 miles' worth. Impressive, but not so interesting to look at. The exhibit was made possible in part by Susan Bay Nimoy and Leonard Nimoy, so maybe I would have enjoyed it more if I hadn't been swayed by my illogical human emotions and stuff.
As I exited the MOCA, rain bucketed down. I had cleverly gone out without my rain jacket, and so hopped a taxi back to my hotel, and then set out for the Geffen/MOCA suitably suited up. I walked through some kind of fabric/garment district, past a tent city, through a flower district.
The Geffen/MOCA is a big warehouse space for rotating exhibits. When I was there, there were a bunch of photos and other things by some guy named Douglas Gordon. Some of his stuff is supposed to be controversial; I'm not exactly sure how people could think about his work and maintain the wakefulness necessary for a proper controversy.
There were a couple of architecture exhibits which caught my attention, mostly because they confirmed the theory that Los Angeles will continue to be a sprawling mess for at least the next generation of real estate development:
The Japanese American National Museum was right down the street from the Geffen/MOCA and much more interesting. Upstairs was a history display, including a bunch of things from well before WWII, which were a pleasant surprise. I saw a picture of lots of fishing boats (owned by Japanese-Americans) tied up at Terminal Island. I talked with a docent--he knew about conditions of Japanese workers in pre-admission Hawai'i; I knew that Hawai'ian importing of foreign labor had stymied early attempts at statehood. We astounded each other with knowledge of useless facts. The museum had most of a cabin from a concentration camp in Wyoming. The walls were thin. Holes in the floor had let in dirt and weeds.
There was a poster in which some guy named Phelan declared the necessity to "Keep California White." And we named a street after that jerk. There was a box of Morinaga Milk Caramels from the early 1900s. The company was older than I'd realized. There was a newspaper article telling readers how to tell Chinese people from Japanese people (at some point when Whites were hating Japanese more than they were hating Chinese): Chinese peoples' cheeks never get rosy. Maybe the next time one of my Chinese friends gets drunk, I should tell him that I think he's turning Japanese. Or maybe not.
I learned about the WWII deportation of 1800 Japanese-Peruvians to USA camps. After the war, the USA shipped these people to--not Peru--we shipped them to Japan. We shipped them to starving, bombed-out Japan.
Downstairs were rotating exhibits. During my visit, one of these was by Flo Oy Wong. (She's Chinese-American, not Japanese-American, but since her work deals with America's immigrant exclusion policies, it seemed appropriate.) Many of her works came with stories of "paper" relatives. The stories were spooky and worth repeating, but I didn't write them down because I found out that the show had a web site, so I could alway read them later. As it turns out, the web site doesn't provide the stories. Too bad, eh?
Afterwards, I expressed my appreciation for the presence of Japanese culture in America by going to Mister Ramen for dinner. It was tasty and warm.