Los Angeles – Page 6 – thosecoolkims

Museums and Fossils and Canters … oh, my!

This weekend, our 3 nieces and nephew get to spend some quality time with us. Last night, our oldest nieces Kendall & Jordan got to spend the night at our house, and then we had an action-packed day planned for them. We have been waiting for such a long time to take the big girls to an art museum … and then we decided to hit up the La Brea Tar Pits, too!

However, no time spent at Uncle Ed and Auntie Carrie’s house can go without a little Guitar Hero. Check out these rocker-girls in action!

After a fair amount of rocking ensued, we headed off to LACMA for an introduction to some modern art!

We were particularly excited for the girls to see the “Happy Happy” installation in the Your Bright Future exhibit. Basically, Happy Happy is bunch of brightly colored kitchen items from the 99 Cent Store, all hung from up high. It’s huge! You can walk through it, play in it – its fascinating for both adults and kids alike. I think the girls were really surprised to see how art isn’t just a painting on a wall or a drawing in a sketchbook.

We bought the girls sketchbooks and colored pencils so they could draw at the museum if they were inspired, or they could simply write how they felt about a piece that they saw. I was excited that they really got into it:

Kendall and Jordan also got introduced to some of our favorite artists – Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons and Wassily Kandinsky!
Learning about Warhol …

Intrigued by Jeff Koons’ “Balloon Dog” …
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Inspired by Kandinsky!

After exploring the museum, we walked around to the back, and noticed that the Happy Happy artist also had another similar exhibition that allowed the public to participate in!

The girls were really impressed by this, and we checked out all the random objects people incorporated into the piece:

All that art worked up our appetites, so we decided to hit up Canter’s to show Kendall & Jordan how all the cool kids do lunch in L.A.!

Matzo Ball Soup, Pickles and Bagel Chips … yep, we’re at one of the best Jewish Delis ever!

We were feeling good after lunch, so it was finally time to check out some fossils and Ice Age skeletons at the La Brea Tar Pits …

Once inside, there was lots of cool stuff to see – including lots of bones! Just a few of the monsters we saw …

They even have real volunteers in the Paleontology Lab cleaning up the bones and fossils right in front of you! The museum said that after all this time, they finally found a Woolly Mammoth with tusks intact. This is the very first time they have been able to salvage a full Mammoth! Inside the lab, they are calling him “Zed”. Here is part of Zed’s tusks:

Pretty cool stuff:

Everyone enjoyed the visit, but the girls were surprised at how strong the smell was. Here is Kendall’s summary:

And finally, the perfect end to a perfect day – we made a stop at Sprinkles for Kendall & Jordan’s first “original” gourmet cupcake. Only the best for our girls!

Check out the album for more awesome pics!

Kendall and Jordan visit
August 2009

Tomorrow’s agenda: Another big day out with Mikayla & Ethan!

Foodies in Training

Canter’s is a hit on the Facey Girls’ 1st visit!

LACMA Day!

Last Sunday, Ed & I finally made it up to LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) to see two exhibits we were both really excited about. I wanted to catch the Vanity Fair Portrait exhibition, and Ed was really excited about the Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures exhibit.

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The Two Germanys exhibit was really great. Basically, it compared and contrasted East & West German art & culture from after WWII up until the wall came down. You know how obsessed Ed is with all things German and history related, so you know this was right up his alley! I thought the exhibition was incredible. To look back and have this visual documentation of how different these two parts of the same country were, both emotionally & culturally, was just mind-blowing. Big kudos to the curator on this one.

lacma_elevator

The other really neat thing about this exhibit was that it is inside the new Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM). That’s right folks, LACMA’s got a “contemporary” building now – watch out! This is great news, because we love us some Contemporary art. We are very happy about the new direction LACMA is going in and can’t wait to see what they have next! The above photo is a picture of the giant elevator inside the building. The elevator was done by Barbara Kruger, who is one of the most intriguing artists to me as of late. Of course, she does have a graphic design background and her work is done in red, black and white … so I suppose it all makes sense! At any rate, the new BCAM building houses a ton of 3-D works, including a bunch by Jeff Koons, some Warhol, Ruscha, Lichtenstein and other modern art heavy-hitters.

Outside BCAM is a really cool installation of a ton of different lampposts! It looks awesome in person, and it is tough to really capture it, but we tried:

(Be sure to check out our album to see all of the photos!)

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On to the Vanity Fair exhibit … so exciting! I could look at photos all day – and when you add photos that appeared in magazines to the mix, I am all over it! For those of you familiar with Vanity Fair, you know about all of the artistic, editorial and culturally significant work that has graced their pages. We saw everything – a photo of Frieda Kahlo & Diego Rivera way back in the ’30s, to Demi Moore’s controversial naked-preggo shot in the ’90s! There were many more photos of course, the exhibit spanned from 1913-present. Did you know that Vanity Fair existed from 1913-1936 and then merged with Vogue? It came back in 1983 separate from Vogue again. I didn’t know that! Anyway, the exhibit was fascinating!

Finally, an added bonus was that LACMA is temporarily housing 4 BMW Art Cars. Basically, over the years, BMW has given cars to various artists to do with what they wish. The 4 cars on display were done by Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, and Andy Warhol. Of course, we had to see them! They were only in town for two weeks, and they have been traveling the world showing in Korea, India and Russia. Even though the two of us are huge Warhol fans, we actually were the least impressed by his car:

We actually thought Rauschenberg’s car was the most interesting, and it was cool to see how his collage-style translated in paint all over a vehicle!

All in all, it was a fantastic day. Do yourself a favor and get out to LACMA soon! We can’t wait to see what they have in store for us over the next year! Click on the thumbnail below to check out the album. More fun pics of art cars & lampposts! :)

LACMA – Vanity Fair/Two Germanys

Korean BBQ + Tacos = Kogi!

Tonight we finally made it to Kogi, which is a taco truck that travels around various neighborhoods in Los Angeles. The thing that makes Kogi special is that it is run by 2 young Korean chefs + 1 Hispanic chef, and the tacos are the most yummy fusion of Korean BBQ style meat, ginger and kimchi (!) and your standard taco fare!

The other thing that makes Kogi different from any other taco truck is that you have to do a little homework to track them down! Basically, they Twitter their location, and that’s how you find out where they are and/or where they’re going to be! This is a crappy picture, but here we are on the hunt:

We found them tonight in Venice Beach, on Abbott-Kinney at The Brig. What can we say, chasing them down this way adds that extra bit of satisfaction once you bite into your taco!

Ed had found out about Kogi first, and we have been dying to check ’em out. We were in L.A. tonight for the First Fridays event at the Natural History Museum – The Bird and The Bee played there tonight, and they are one of my most favorite bands as of late! They were awesome. Anyhow, the crew we were with were all game to chase Kogi down! We bought a ton of tacos, and sampled a little of each. We had the Korean Short Rib Taco, the Spicy Pork Taco and the Spicy BBQ Chicken Taco!

Who’s in for another chase?

Walking in LA – for real!

So yesterday, Ed had to take the car in for its service in Fullerton which meant he’d be carless for the day. So what to do? How about something really novel for us Southern Californians – take the train and use our feet! On top of that, Ed would be walking in a place where walking happens so seldomly that there’s even a song about it – that’s right, LA! Downtown LA, to be exact.

Fortunately, the shop was really close to the Fullerton train station.

And here’s Ed’s train!

Being in the train felt like Europe – not just because Ed was in a train in the first place, but also because half of the people Ed saw were Europeans about Ed’s age or younger!

From Union Station, Ed took the Red Line to Pershing Square in downtown. It’s easy to forget that there’s an increasingly expansive subway system in Los Angeles!

Walking around downtown, you quickly realize that it must have been very glitzy and glamorous back in the day. There are so many intricately detailed facades on the buildings and they must have looked very impressive years ago. But today, much of it is run down and decrepit. Several years ago, Downtown LA began a resurgence of sorts, and there are plenty of signs of it throughout downtown – art galleries, hip shops, restaurants, lofts, etc. Still, there’s some ways to go.

The Toy District: full of discount toy sellers, specializing in knockoffs!

This was undoubtedly the strangest and funniest sighting from the day: Obama dog tags! The funniest part is how the banners advertise them (grammatically incorrectly) as if they’re the hottest thing right now – “YES – We make dog tag!” If nothing else, it shows how happy so many different worldwide communities are about Obama coming to power.