All in a Weekend’s Work and Play

I’ve been distracted by several things recently, and so (even more than is usually the case) there’s far more to report than there is time to report it. Among the highlights are, as already mentioned in the comments, a Saturday visit to MOCA (Geffen Contemporary) to see the Takashi Murakami exhibition. (Coinciding nicely with me about to embark upon reading “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” by the other very well known Murakami: Haruki Murakami.)

His simplest motif – which he reuses again and again in many pieces – is the smiling flowers in various colours. The 2D version of the 3D flower box is one of my favourites, and here it is in a room that is wallpapered with the motif. There’s a more solemn one with a range of expressions on the flowers’ faces in an entire field of them (“Kawaii – Vacances”) (including one shedding a tear), but I could not find a good web reproduction of it. The below is a rather small version:

It’s only the second weekend since it opened here in LA and it is hugely popular, with tons of people in the exhibit spaces walking around excitedly and pointing at things. (This being LA, this included a lot of activity in the special Louis Vuitton room, which was doing a brisk business in selling Murakami’d Marc Jacobs handbags… Somehow I managed to leave without one.)

One of the pieces that -being huge and detailed- had many people lingering to take in the details: Tan Tan Bo Puking – a.k.a. Gero Tan. As an interesting detail, some of the smiling flowers appear along the bottom border again, although you cannot see them in this reproduction.

The line to get tickets was so long that there was a danger that my part of the line would not make it in before closing time. Happily, I had the idea of simply buying myself a membership for a year at a level that allowed me to take in four guests – the people I was actually with – and entirely skip the line. No – it was not some frivoulous extravagance (I’m not a big fan of those, and neither is my budget). A quick computation of the ticket price for all of us showed that (after being given the ticket cash by my friends) I only need go a couple more times to similar MOCA events in the coming year (as I will no doubt do) and I will have paid for it.

Anyway, it was rather good indeed, and I recommend going along if you’re in the area. There’s paintings, sculptures, and video to be seen – at times and in turns playful, garish, clever, serious, silly… provocative in a good way. (Here’s a random LA Times article on the exhibition, and a photogallery is here.) Right and left show shots from activity in the video room, including viewing of a Kanye West video made by Murakami, and a short film based on the adventures of two Murakami characters, Kaikai and Kiki.

Sunday, after my usual Farmer’s market visit (finished off as usual with a tamale for lunch at one of my favourite stops there), I went to sit in a cafe and work on writing Monday’s midterm exam for my electromagnetism class. I’d had this nice idea on what to have them do for a while now, and needed to turn it into a real worked out computation, and see if it would be a reasonable question. It turned out to be nice and cute (essentially playing about with a quadrupole and then immersing it into a dielectric – such fun!), although I am not sure my students will agree. They are going to complain – I predict – that I had no business asking them to compute components of a tensor (the quadrupole moment) for a test on chapter 3 and 4 material when tensors were done and dusted way back in chapter 1. Just not fair. Bad professor. Well, sure they’ll say that, but I could not resist having an excuse to connect the tensor to the second Legendre polynomial [tex](3\cos^2\theta-1)/2[/tex] and get them to do something with it. By sticking with worked examples that involve only the dipole moment (a vector), the textbook does nothing beyond the first Legendre polynomial, which is just boring old [tex]\cos\theta[/tex]. They’ll thank me one day. (Ok, maybe only in my dreams.)

[Update: Well, Tameem (the TA who proctored the exam while I ran an errand) was able to send me a text message to say he was still alive, so that means the students did not form an angry mob. Or perhaps they are saving the mobbing for when I show up for class on Wednesday…?]

Sunday afternoon also saw me finally re-pot an unhappy umbrella tree (Schefflera actinophylla, I think) into a pot that will allow its over-constrained root system to spread a bit. It already looked happier at the prospect, immediately after I put it into the pot. …A bit of gentle slashing at the root ball to free them up and jog them into action, covering all up, watering, and it was done.

-cvj