Because Facebook Wasn't Enough

East Germany is a lonely place

Today, Joey and I went to the Wende Museum in Culver City, a small, one-room museum housing all sorts of artifacts and documents from Cold-War era Eastern Europe and Soviet Union. The current exhibit is called “Facing the Wall,” detailing the experiences of the Berlin Wall.  There were sample passports, a model of the checkpoint, and objects from Eastern Europe. Barbed wire and a video camera stared down at us, adding to the Cold War atmosphere. 

This is Joey looking at some of these artifacts:

A good portion of the exhibit focused on techniques for teaching border guards how to distinguish faked passports. They had manuals and sample tests. Joey and I spent some time testing our own skills. We did okay. This is Joey trying to discern between various fakes:

They had a TV playing oral histories from various people who witnessed the Berlin Wall. The oral history we watched was a guard from the Wall. He decided to resign and they threw him in prison.

Also, we were the only people there. Like, legitimately the only people. There weren’t any docents or security guards or anything. Which was a little strange. We could hear people talking on the other side of the door in the above picture, but they never came out to say anything to us. The Iron Curtain is isolating indeed. 

(We attributed this to the fact that the museum is probably more an archive for scholarly research than a museum museum.)

The museum was free, and totally worth a quick trip! It’s only open on Fridays, unless you make an appointment. They also have various special events, and an art exhibition in downtown LA. 

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om nom nom getty

Maddie and I went to the Getty today. It was super exciting.

First, we took the Celebrity portrait tour, which started with a very large pastel of a French magistrate and ended with a very buff Richard Gere. (Actually it ended with Abraham Lincoln, but the Gere photo is much more recent and citing it encompasses the scope much more accurately.) They gave out these radio devices that allowed us to hear the tour guide without him raising his voice, which was pretty neat. 

We also rented these iPod touches that had a Getty app that would tell us more about specific pieces. It also clustered certain exhibits into themed tours, taking us through different time periods and floors. We took the “Taste of Art” audio tour.

This is Maddie examining some China. Europeans and Westerners have this fascination with Eastern objects that I just find somewhat strange. Somehow a Japanese painting in the middle of a Victorian dining room just doesn’t seem right when it is, in fact, quite so. Anyhoo, this extended to porcelain goods, which Europeans couldn’t manufacture for the longest time, and tea, which was at one time such a valuable commodity, the audio tour informed it, “it was kept under lock and key”

The tour also featured a number of artworks depicting food and wine. This is me looking at a painting of a kitchen preparing for a feast. The audio tour detailed the social implications of food: the opulence suggested wealth, while the presence of food harvested in differing seasons indicated the presence of a greenhouse, another sign of wealth. From this painting, I also learned that people used to give artichokes as wedding presents, as they were considered aphrodisiacs. (Sexy, huh?)

The whole tour made me very hungry. They spent forever talking about chocolate, and Maddie and I were practically drooling. 

It also inspired two possible choices for my reading list for after Soul on Ice: Empires of Food, which is about “feast, famine, and the rise and fall of civilizations” and Chasing Aphrodite, which details the looting scandal at the Getty (eeek)

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1984 at The Actors Gang

OKAY LAST EXCITING THING I’M POSTING FOR A WHILE I SWEAR

Last Friday, Maddie and I went to opening night of 1984 at The Actors Gang. It was especially interesting because I’d seen it the first time through my freshman year of high school seven years ago. It was one of my first forays into the world of non-mainstream musicals theatre, and I thought it would be interesting to see what I thought of it now.

1984 was, and continues to be, quite possibly my favorite show I’ve ever seen at Actors Gang. it’s a powerful piece of literature, and the version Tim Robbins uses is especially interesting in its interpretation. It’s set up like an interrogation, with Party members acting out the various roles in Winston’s life. I don’t remember what I thought of it freshman year, but I’m a bit divided on my opinion of this now. It’s a really, really interesting way of presenting the story, and it provides a novel twist to show how this story affects the different Party members. At the same time, I really like the isolation and alienation of the original Orwell. Having other Party members experience and interpret Winston’s story - seeing them affected and almost empathizing with him - takes away from the chilling nature of the story. What’s so frightening about Orwell’s totalitarianism is that it is, indeed, total.

Watching it was weird because I so distinctly remember the first time I saw it. The main difference I noticed was the alternate configuration of the set. Also, I saw one cast last time, another this round. But much of the blocking and imagery was still the same. The context is also different: the first time I saw it, we were into the second Bush term; this time, we’re in the age of Obama and Occupy. Neither time, as I recall, directly referenced the politics of the time, but somehow in the Bush era critiques of totalitarianism seemed more immediate. Not that it doesn’t resonate now, but for some strange reason it was so much easier to link 1984 with the Patriot Act than with NDAA. 

Maddie and I also went on a bit of a memory trip talking about Java and our Italian sodas. Daw, high school.

Go see it! There are tickets on Goldstar!

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Headhunters and Where Do We Go Now?

Last Thursday I decided to take advantage of my renewed employment at the Landmark to see two movies in other languages.

Where do we go now is a Lebanese film about a village where the men are about to explode in religious sectarian violence but for the constant intervention of the women, who are somehow able to remain friends with people of a different religion. It toed the lined between comedic and dramatic, and was vaguely not really a musical.

Headhunters was a Norwegian thriller about an art thief on the run from a dangerous tracker. There was way way way more blood than I anticipated, but it was certainly interesting.

The moral of the two movies: Men are idiots and need women to straighten them out. (For realz: what woman hears “I helped develop nanotechnology for tracking people and was part of a very brutal unit of special forces” and thinks, Hmm, I’ll steal your stuff?)

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Cleopatra multimedia extravaganza!

Today I both visited the Cleopatra exhibit at the Science Center AND finished reading a biography of her. Bam.

Both the book and the exhibit attempt to “right the wrongs” done by thousands of years of male historians interpreting her actions through misogynistic and western-centric lenses. They focus on the mystique surrounding Cleopatra and establishing her as an intelligent woman in her own right, as opposed to the traditional depiction of her as a temptress and seductress. 

I found the book more successful in this attempt. For one, the book was written by a woman and the exhibit curated by men, which really shouldn’t affect the quality but just knowing that somehow did. The exhibit also took full advantage of the exotic connotations of Cleopatra: a sultry voice on the audiotour relished words like “lover.” The exhibit placed great emphasis on the emotional reasons for her affairs while the book detailed the political reasoning behind Cleopatra’s alliances with Caesar and Mark Antony. 

The book delves much more deeply into the double standards surrounding the historiography. As the biographer Stacy Schiff points out, Cleopatra is known for having two great love affairs with two men who had upwards of dozens between the two of them. My favorite distinction she made related to the language used in describing history: men “strategize” while women “scheme.” Schiff attributes this to the social construct of Rome, which value men over women (unlike Egypt, which had had several powerful empresses) The exhibit addresses the discrepancy between East and West and the biases of male Western biographers, but focuses on it much less and in a more cursory manner.

In the book, Schiff dismisses rumors of Cleopatra’s renowned beauty, utilizing coins to determine that she was not that attractive and that instead her wit and intelligence won her the favor of two of the most powerful men in the world. She attributes the validity of the likeness to the fact that Cleopatra approved these coins, and thus they indicated how she wanted her subjects to see her. The exhibit made the argument that the coins were designed to evoke the memory of her ancestors, and thus are more in line with the images on past coins and thus do not accurately convey her appearance. 

What was really interesting though was how much the exhibit emphasized her appearance. They kept talking about her great beauty and even dedicated an entire section to the discussion of her looks. That this is even a topic for discussion illustrates the inherent bias in the study of female leaders that Schiff continuously criticizes. After all, no one ever discusses whether or not Mark Antony was a dashing enough fellow to woo all those women - they call him a powerful, intelligent and wealthy (well, debatable) man who happened to love the ladies. The Cleopatra both the book and the exhibit lay out is all three of those things in large quantities, and yet it is considered imperative for her to have the face to back it up. 

At this point I realize it sounds like I’m bashing on the exhibit, but I want to make clear: it was really neat. Possibly the coolest thing was how it detailed the excavation process. Many of the artifacts (which were all super cool) also featured a multimedia exhibit showing how they got them. Most were found underwater, in the now sunken old Alexandria. It also provided tangible examples of the artifacts Schiff worked off of to put her biography together. It’s one thing to read about someone interpreting history; it’s another thing to see how they did it. So yeah, when I grow up, I want to be a scuba diving archaeologist. 

The book is Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff, and the exhibit is at the California Science Center in until December 31. 

(I’d really recommend doing both the book and the exhibit. The latter tends to say things like “The brother died” while the book is like “She arranged to have her brother murdered.”)

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Shanghai Girls and mahjong

So on my last book post I lied. Instead of reading Soul on Ice, I read Shanghai Girls. It chronicles the journey of two affluent girls from Shanghai as they are thrust into the world of “Paper Brides” through an arranged marriage with two young men in America. Along the way, they encounter World War II and the Communist Scare, depicting a time before Chinese were the model minority.

(Throughout the novel, I tended to think the younger sister May was a little brat. But maybe that’s just me reacting as an older sibling)

What was really interesting was after I read the book, I went and played mahjong with my grandma for a few hours. She also showed me a bunch of pictures of her family. My great-grandfather came over in 1910, my great-grandmother in 1920, and a whole slew of children were born between then and the 1930s, making them roughly contemporary to the book. Turns out my great-grandma similarly procured a Chinese wife for one of her sons, among other similarities. 

Needless to say, the combination made me super excited for my Chinese American history class. 

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Crevice

So Molly and I saw this delightful play at Impact Theatre two Fridays ago. It was the first time I got to enjoy the beer part of “Pizza. Beer. Plays” so needless to say I was excited. 

Although I liked the last show I’d seen at Impact - an appropriately grisly interpretation of the very grisly Titus Andronicus - I wasn’t a fan of Disassembly, the last original show I’d seen at Impact. (See my review on the CTD blog here) It had been jumbled bit of manic nowhereness. But Crevice made up for it. It was fast, frantic and frenetic, with just the right amount of sugar and spice. 

It’s about a pair of siblings going nowhere with their lives. The sister was just left at the alter and doesn’t know what to do; the brother is trying to make it as an actor and instead just smokes a lot of pot. They fall into a magical crevice in their living room, sending them to a world where everything seems to go right. Or does it?

It was a fun evening and I’d def recommend it!

You can get more info by clicking here

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So I’ve done all kinds of fun and exciting things in the last week and a half and somehow neglected to blog about them

Brace yourself tumblr

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