RES magazine

“Film, Music, Art, Design, Culture.” I mean, really, what else is there anyway? My dad got me hooked onto this magazine a few years ago when I was still living at home. I was never really into magazines – before I discovered RES magazine. This magazine is so cool because they have such a high regard for design (and therefore the layout is great, modern, easy to follow, compelling, etc), keep up-to-date with interesting articles, but really because of their use of multimedia.

I have always been really interested in music and love discovering new bands. Yet apart from hearing about new things from my friends, I don’t seem to be very good at discovering things on my own, haha. One of the best things about RES is that, as a quarterly magazine, every issue comes complete with a DVD that has a variety of new music videos (often by really great directors, etc), short films, and new music. I’ve discovered many bands that I ended up loving from RES – not to mention got a whole different kind of inside look into the current (often independent) music video world (these aren’t really the type of videos that would be shown on mTV, etc). And although my dad first gave me this magazine for the music, I ended up discovering a bunch of interesting filmmakers from these DVDs and articles also!

And their website is even more hands on. The main index has an elegant style of design matched with a simple color palate and instructions. Under the main heading, the three main links lead you wherever you want to go within the magazine – all made easy under one site ! – magazine – resfest – watch and listen. Plus you have access to all of their great articles. Some of the people focused on in the most recent issue include Matthew Barney, Beck, Michel Gondry, Miranda July, Richard Linklater, Animal Collective, Gael Garcia Bernal - just to name a few...

RES has had plenty of time to develop as their ten year issue is coming out soon, yet has remained involved in the more underground side of things – staying true to the alternative and independent artists of the times. I definitely recommend this site, this magazine, checking out resfest, etc etc etc!



http://www.res.com/

THIS IS NOT AN ART BLOG

MAGRITTE

Saturday morning, my dad calls me up. He was listening to NPR and they mentioned how it was the 2nd to last day of the Magritte exhibit at the LACMA. A sly way of urging me to go he slips in, “I doubt I’ll make it down there by tomorrow, but I thought you might want to go.” Actually, I was glad he reminded me because I had wanted to go. I was already driving aimlessly in my roommate’s car (he had gone to Vegas for the weekend and conveniently left me his car key) I decided to head over the to show.



The second-to-last day of the show, I knew it’d be crowded. And crowded it was. The set up the show, the exhibition itself, was great I thought. They paid special attention to detail: doors and walkways were carved from his made-famous images (the man the bowler hat, recognizable abstract shapes), the carpet was a repetitive image of his famous sky with clouds.



And it was a lot of fun getting to see a lot of these famous paintings in person (as it always is with images like his). The show was actually titled Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images and was based not only off his works, but features many contemporary artists (31 other artists, to be specific, including Vija Celmins, Andy Warhol, and Robert Gober – to name a few of the memorable ones) whose work had been based off or greatly influenced by his. While is really an interesting concept and worked quite well with some works, some of the pieces were a little far stretched – maybe just playing around with words and word juxtaposition in art rather than actually being more related to Magritte’s works. I guess that this works in some ways, seeing as Magritte’s most celebrated contribution to art history is his play with words and images, but I think his work is deeper than that, and a lot of the contemporary art that I saw wasn’t.





One of my favorite things about this show, however, was due to the audience. Maybe it’s a blessing that I went on the last day with the rest of the Los Angeles crowd. Many of the people were there as families and had brought their young children with them, little ones maybe only five years old, etc. Because of the surrealist nature of his work, it was a lot of fun to see how these kids were reacting the pieces. There was one little boy and his father who were looking at Le temps traversé together. Of course the boy was squirming a bit, it was towards the end of the exhibit, but once the painting got his attention he was exclaiming, “Oh dad, I love this one! I love it!” and then after a brief pause, “Where’s the other part of the train, Daddy?”



There were kids at the show like him, full of wonderment and excitement. And there were others, like the two boys I saw with their parents on my way out who were griping to their moms, “What are these? How are these pictures? I don’t get it” without even really glancing at the works. It was just funny seeing/hearing all the different interpretations of the work, especially from a child’s POV.



Either way, it was overall an interesting show. I would recommend it, if it hadn’t already ended.

DRAWN HOME

Over the past five weekends, I’ve been helping crew on a USC thesis film project.
Most of the production majors in my year are actually crewing (for credit, as a specific position) on one of these four, competitive projects this semester. But most film majors don’t have a minor or another major. Since I’m a Fine Arts minor also, I decided this would be a good semester to take a break of sorts from film classes and just concentrate on my fine arts classes. I usually put my major first, and since film is so demanding, my paintings and photographs get put far on the backburner, further than I’d like to put them.

I do plan on crewing on one of these thesis projects (aka a “480” (named after the course number, CTPR 480)) in the fall, so I wanted to get some experience helping out on a crew this spring. As it turns out, a bunch of my friends are working on the same crew, on a short film called Drawn Home. I lucked out because this was the project that had the most production design work needed, and I wanted to help out with the art department. Here are some production stills and photographs from the sets and locations we’ve set up over the past few weeks.

Two of the main characters in the film, posing in front of the set up for the finale scene, a fantastical re-creation of a childhood drawing on a suburban lawn.


Drawings that the young version of the main character, Hanna, "did" for the film. I made a bunch of them. It was fun getting to draw like a kid again. :)


The carriage and some flowers from the finale night scene. (The first photograph in this blog is also from this finale scene.)


Another really cool thing about being so qualified (compared to the other PAs on these projects who are usually freshman, etc), is that they let me have a lot more control on the set. For many of the smaller scenes in the film I was actually given the role of production designer, while the actually production designers worked on setting up the bigger scenes.
This is a still from the studio that I designed for the main character, Hanna.

I've had a really great experience working with this crew. Now I can't wait to crew on my own 480 next semester!