Downtown LA Art and Architecture Tour
Saturday night we went to check out NocTOURnals, a tour that includes MOCA Night Vision and a walkthrough of Disney Concert Hall in the gentrified part of downtown LA, on Grand Avenue and Second Street. I had changed my original plans for the tour at the last minute and moved it up a week so that Lefty could go, but he ended up bailing. ShopGirl wanted to go, but she had to go home for the weekend. Save for two people, none of the people that went to Getty bothered to respond. So I headed out with my usual crew, GuitarHero, LazyBoy, WorkoutHound, and then ObligatedGirl decided to join us too.
All in all, it was a very low-key night. At MOCA, we took a tour of the Rauschenberg Combines exhibit. I'm glad we went on the tour because that crazy modern art stuff actually started to make sense after the tour guide explained it. Then we sat through a screening of the best music videos from the LA Film Festival, half of which sucked. There were two people behind us who couldn't stop laughing at everything. They didn't seem high, but if they were I want the crack they were smoking, it would probably make life seem fucking hilarious. I left before it ended and walked around to check out the scene. The DJ was playing his music really loud, and the outdoor lounge buzzed with conversation and drinking. Upstairs, they set up a bunch of tables with some artmaking materials, where grown adults wearing fancy night clothes tore into construction paper and newspapers with blissful abandon.
After we got some food at a Korean BBQ restaurant down the street in Little Tokyo (yeah I dunno), ObligatedGirl took off to meet her other friends and just us guys went back to check out the famous Walt Disney Concert Hall, designed by Frank Gehry. I've wanted to check it out ever since it opened in 2003, especially since I used to volunteer in Little Tokyo and I drove by it everyday. Our tour guide gave a nice personal touch to all of her stories about the design of the hall. The outdoor, one-acre sized garden was really nice, but I thought overly excessive in that they had to use massive cranes to lift up for fifty stories the trees gathered from random houses across Southern California. As for the design of the building itself, everything was curves. I’m not an architect, but I could appreciate the ridiculous complexity in designing and constructing the place. Inside the lobby, I made mention about the ugly carpet, and then our tour guide said that Gehry designed the carpet to look like the pattern of a rose garden in tribute to Walt Disney's dead daughter. That was God telling me that I'm an asshole. The concert hall itself was stunningly beautiful. There was an array of giant wood planks jutting out in different directions from where the organ was. The ceiling and the walls had an organic, flowing design made with specific types of wood that Gehry chose himself, which is supposedly why the Concert Hall's acoustics are the best in the world. The ugly rose patterned carpet was on the seats as well, and supposedly having the fabric on the bottom of the seats as well helped simulate a full audience for the philharmonic practices. Then the tour was over, but we were allowed to walk on the aerial pathway that overlooked Grand Avenue. When we were all in college, we would spend many a drunken night climbing onto some rooftop and taking pictures of the street. This night was no exception, except for the drunken part and the fact that the rooftop we were climbing was the $274 million architectural crown jewel of LA.
Then we all went home cuz we’re old and can’t stay out past 12 on Saturday nights anymore.