Museum Visiting and Participating

For Mother's Day we went with my parents to the San Jose MOMA. There was a great Wayne Thiebaud exhibit that I really enjoyed and it was a free Community Day.

This is a picture of a vase that was in the gift shop. It is covered in small slices of rolled paper tubes. What a cool effect!
It really stood out from all the rest of the things for sale in the shop.

I think the vase itself may be made from paper also. Unfortunately I didn't look to see who made it, so I can't post a link. The museum had a great set up right in the middle of the Thiebaud exhibit where you could sit down and draw a dessert from really realistic models. That's my dad in the blue shirt, he did an awesome cake slice with lots of details.

Album Cover Art

Have you ever bought a cd just because you really dug the cover art? Usually I resist, but I kinda already liked the band and it was on sale, so why not? (gee maybe this is why we have hundreds of cd's??). Anyhoo...

Turns out to be a really great cd, and I keep looking at that cover art and dreaming up all kinds of quilts inspired by it.

The cd in question is by Death Cab for Cutie, their new one called Narrow Stairs

Here is the cover art which is by the totally amazing ee storey (go check her stuff out, really cool).

My favorite song off the cd is I Will Possess Your Heart, it is 8:31 long, and about 5 minutes of that is the instrumental intro, really hypnotic. Here's the video which is pretty spiffy:

A Day at the Museum

Last weekend we went to the San Jose Museum of Art to see the M.C. Escher exhibit. It was one of the last weeks of the exhibit, and also happened to be Community Free day, so it was pretty crowded (at least for San Jose!). But the art was impressive and I was thrilled to finally see it up close and in person.

There was also an exhibit of Op-Art and massive (I would say obsessive!) ballpoint pen works by Il Lee.

The favorite of the day was a digital exhibit called Listening Post. It was a large room with couches against one wall, and the opposite wall covered in rows of small screens. Data compiled from real-time chat rooms powers the exhibit. The question answered in this exhibit is "What would 10,000 people chatting on the internet sound and look like?"


Don't you love this sculpture? It really stands out next to all the kinda boring buildings, and helps you find the museum. The old building to the left is now the museum cafe, where we had a great (and cheap!) lunch.

Here is an entertwined S and J with an eagle pearching on top. I liked the swirly leaves. We don't usually see too much detail like this on California buildings, since they are all so new and "modern". So I take the pics when I spot something!

This is a small enclosed porch off the side of the museum, it has these three strange metal sculptures, they look like goat monsters being tortured. The boys were quite taken with them.

I liked all the reflections and building components/architecture styles in this photo.

A closeup of the photo below.

A grid laid over the San Jose skyline. Along with the jet contrails in the sky, as the downtown is directly in the takeoff path of the SJ airport. This has meant that they can't expand service to bigger jets to Pacific destinations, because the smaller ones barely clear the buildings as it is. San Jose will thus always be a short, limited city.

Finally on a movie note, you must go see Hot Fuzz. Especially if you have always either liked or just endured buddy cop action movies. Set in England ,with the terrific stars of Shaun of the Dead. Oi!