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Los Angeles, California
So don't go to sleep, don't rest your head, I'll be the pillow, I'll be the bed
After not traveling at all by plane in most of 2020 and all of 2021, I suddenly found myself in the middle of three trips in the summer of 2022, and unlike other years, all were for a reason other than just wanting to travel. One trip was for a work (or rather professional) related reason (see “I got the headlights off and the radio on, every window is down here comes that song,” Slide 1 of 3, 2022), while a second trip was also work (or rather professional) related (see “I've been punching through the walls, I've been living on the edge, I've been fighting with my demons so long they've become my friends,” Slide 1 of 2, 2022). As for this trip, it was a promise to visit my niece who was interning out in Los Angeles (Burbank, actually), although any reason to go back out to Los Angeles (usually) sounds good to me.
I had an early flight on a Boeing 787 out of Newark and all sorts of plans before I was going to crash (and by crash I mean nap) at my hotel and then meet my niece for dinner high above Burbank at Castaway. Those plans were somewhat changed after a lengthy delay at LAX getting both to the Hertz facility (every other rental car company bus must have passed the stop three times) and then a massive delay getting out past the rental car booths. This is why people hate LAX, which I can say I actually don’t. It’s certainly no Burbank Airport (I love Burbank Airport) but as long as you really, really lower your expectations, it’s not that bad.
Anyway, even though my initial plans might have been crushed, I did have enough time to visit the Getty in Brentwood, one of the great museums, despite the fact that most of the times I go there I tend to skip the galleries and instead just wander the courtyards and gardens.
Keeping with an all-art-museum-all-the-time start to the slideshow, let’s head downtown to the Broad and see what’s happening. If the Getty is one of the great museums for what’s outside of it, then the Broad is quickly becoming one of the great museums for what’s inside of it, even though the building (by Diller, Scofidio + Renfro) is pretty nice too.
Up inside the galleries is where all of the action is at the Broad. Architecturally when you approach the museum, you’re not really sure what you’re in for. The lobby has a carved, cave like feel with a lone up only escalator piercing right through. As you ride that escalator up, the galleries reveal themselves as this wonderful open, light filled room with an absolutely terrific, fun and colorful selection of modern and contemporary art.
We’re only halfway down the first page of the slideshow and we’re already at our third museum. This is Urban Light by Chris Burden, which sits in front of the entrance pavilion to LACMA, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. I visited with some time to kill and waited along a seating wall until dusk got close enough for the lights to turn on, which is just moments before I took this picture.
Meanwhile at LACMA, the most interesting news is that construction crane and sign on the left side of the picture. Somehow in just two years (let’s just say three instead) the Metro Purple Line (or I guess the D Line) will stop right here and connect LACMA to downtown and (through a whole lot of transfers) to most of the city. And you won’t even have to cross the street at a traffic light on Wilshire to get there. Somehow in just two years (let’s just say three instead) a brand new main LACMA building designed by Peter Zumthor will bridge over Wilshire Boulevard with galleries that float (I’m using a rather generous definition of the word “float” here) and show all those other nearby cultural institutions who the biggest and baddest museum on the Miracle Mile really is.
Meanwhile inside LACMA they have their own Broad Contemporary Art Museum, and it’s just about the only thing you can see now since they tore down most of the rest of the place to build a new building. Luckily on the ground floor it still houses some worthwhile art, including a great room for some of my favorite walk through Richard Serra sculptures, which look way better here than the first time I walked through these exact same sculptures in New York way, way back in 2007.
We’re still at LACMA, even though there’s not much there and the ticket price kind of feels a bit like a ripoff considering what’s left to see.
I am interested in seeing the new building and campus when it is complete, but I already have real concerns about it. The buildings that remain include the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, along with its exterior red escalators, a matching one story temporary exhibitions building and its entrance plaza. These were all designed by Renzo Piano, who also designed the Academy Awards Museum next door, which is a different institution but it feels architecturally part of the same campus. Meanwhile the new, massive Peter Zumthor building (if you believe the renderings) feels like its own thing, and something that relates closer to the adjacent tar pits than the Renzo Piano buildings. Maybe the schism won’t be as bad as I fear, and maybe when it’s all somehow completed in just two years (let’s just say three instead), it will all be fine. Yes. Fine.
Near LACMA are two other museums I visited, the Petersen Automotive Museum (interesting but not pictured) and the new Academy Museum of Motion Pictures (which was simultaneously great and disappointing). There were some wondrous artifacts (like the painted North by Northwest Mount Rushmore backdrop below) but somehow, considering the depth of things that could have been there, the museum seemed as if there were not nearly enough things on display, or that it was half empty, or even half finished. It almost seems unfair to knock a place for not displaying what it doesn’t have, especially when what it does have is pretty impressive, but no one ever said life was fair.
While there may be an order to this slideshow, it most certainly is not a chronological one. That’s why after all that museum talk its now time to take a look at the new location for Amoeba Music. It’s a great location and has a wonderful vibe, but honestly being there just makes me sad for what we lost in the pandemic. No, I’m not talking about hundreds of thousands of my fellow citizens (seriously, how as a society are we ok with just ignoring that?) but instead I’m talking about the old Amoeba store and Arclight Hollywood, which was located just across the street. Whenever I visited one, I visited both, and now with the new Amoeba it’s hard not to be sad about what we had and what we lost.
