LA is good for few things: yogurt trends, race relations, and people watching. this past weekend, jessica and i went to a david lynch photography exhibit opening, where the pics were part of a lynch/danger mouse/sparklehorse collaboration. don’t know who any of these people are? you’ll be ok. the photos were appallingly bad, but the lynchians in attendance were top notch. in order to take frontal photos of people without being creepy and getting in their faces, i sat just to the side of a room entrance and took arty action shots.

below i offer the photos w/ the terse nondescriptions these people deserve.

is that a dead animal on your pants or are you just happy to see me? oh.

you are a younger version of mort goldman from family guy .

hey, guy. i think you spilled some bleach. and ripped your shirt. and forgot to get a new haircut since 1995 …

are you lost?

no snark. i just like this one.

where do you even find floral leather like that? and silver plastic glasses? there’s so much amazing, i ran out of arrows.

anyway, i realized that exhibit openings like this one are really just an excuse for people to take pictures of people who are there to have photos taken of them. how many SLR cameras do you see in this shot?

ok only two, but there were way more there, i swear.

i capped off the night with a kill pixie exhibit opening hosted by tim roth of recent lie to me fame.

the crowd at this event was way more normal looking than the one earlier in the day, so i have nothing to report from the “people are f’ing weird” department. except maybe this site: tim roth addicted.

per the previous post:

and i’m officially terrible at photoshop.

smithsonian magazine published an article this month about greek statues that has been blowing my mind for the past weekend. a german archaeologist is on a mission to prove that greek statues were actually painted and colorful, and to be honest, really tacky-looking.

he’s using ancient texts (euripides: “If only I could shed my beauty and assume an uglier aspect / The way you would wipe color off a statue”) and chemical analysis to prove that pigments were used on the statues — statues that we all have automatically assumed were white.

To us, classical antiquity means white marble. Not so to the Greeks, who thought of their gods in living color and portrayed them that way too. The temples that housed them were in color, also, like mighty stage sets. Time and weather have stripped most of the hues away. And for centuries people who should have known better pretended that color scarcely mattered.

think about this: an entire era of art, neoclassicism, assumes that the statues that were recovered from ancient times were as white in pre-jesus times as they were when they found them. the entire idea of marble-white simplicity as beauty is probably based on a lie. the white house, capitol building, city hall, etc. all have roots in the pristine greek aesthetic.

i consider this a paradigm-shifting revelation for myself. and check out the slideshow. the world is a really scary, lonely place right now.

dubbed one of the biggest, baddest parties in dc, the hirshhorn after hours was chockful of DCites dressed in their sunday’s best (read: dresses clearly not bought in DC, accompanied by oversized purses stuffed with flats or flip flops).

new-to-me music was played, overpriced drinks were drunk, inaccessible art was seen, and too-cool-for-school fun was had. i even ran into my boss.

i was lame and didn’t take any pictures of the event itself, but this hipster blog had a much nicer camera and did the whole thing better justice.

what i did take pics of, however, was me eating at ben’s chili bowl afterward. check out the food, the crew, and me, workin’ it.