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December 31st, 2037
11:28 pm - SO LONG, LIVEJOURNAL!
Howdy, folks. I've stopped posting regularly here at LiveJournal.
I'm not deleting this account, but rather keeping it as an archive and reminder of all the many years of awesomeness that LiveJournal provided in my life. Starting here in 2003, I discovered a likeminded community of nerds, weirdos, geeks, gays and bears -- many of whom I am still great friends with to this day in real life.
LiveJournal wasn't my first online community -- I'd been chatting for years before that on AOL, IRC and BBSes -- but it was the first one that felt innately collaborative and very much "real-time" with the events of my life. Other services have overtaken -- and accelerated -- the usefulness and sense of community I originally found here, but they haven't quite replaced it. I'll miss it terribly, but forge onward.
You can reach me at the following interwebs: http://about.me/davecobb/
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April 18th, 2018
11:21 am - OF MUPPETS AND MOVIE PALACES
While in NYC this weekend, I had an unexpectedly Poignant Moment (tm) while visiting the Museum of the Moving Image.
Back in 1986 on a high school field trip to LA’s “Temporary” wing of MOCA | The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (now permanently part of MOCA known as the The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA), I saw a retrospective of Jonathan Borofsky and Red Grooms.
In particular, Grooms & Lysiane Luong’s “Tut’s Fever” installation absolutely rewired my 16-year-old brain, because it wasn’t just fine art hung on a wall, it was fully dimensional art you walked through. It’s a complete Egyptian-styled movie palace, from marquee to snack bar to theater, all humorously rendered in Grooms’ signature outsider-folk-art style, filled with numerous pop-culture references and visual commentary (hieroglyphs with Mickey Mouse, a sarcophagus that you could lift up to reveal a James Dean mummy inside smoking from a pack of Camel cigarettes rolled up in his sleeve, etc.). It’s a silly-yet-pointed love-letter to movie palaces and our cultural enshrinement of celebrity.
I imprinted on the installation pretty hard — I couldn’t comprehend “fine art” in a museum could be that funny, and that completely immersive. It was art I could walk through and touch and “be in” — which obviously influenced my future career choices.
Years later, I was happy to discover the complete, immersive installation had found a permanent home in the collection of the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, which I stumbled upon during a business trip about a decade later in the mid-90s.
Today, I went back to the newly-renovated museum, which reopened in 2011. In particular, I was excited to see their new permanent Jim Henson exhibition, obviously yet another huge influence on my life and work. It’s a lovely and intimate timeline of Henson’s entire career, which of course means it had all of my childhood best friends on display (growing up on Sesame Street as a toddler, my first word was “cookie”, for obvious reasons).
After feeling all the feels from seeing such an amazing retrospective of one of my personal and professional heroes, I turn the corner to see, yet again, Grooms’ “Tut’s Fever”, which I had totally forgotten was on permanent display there.
Imagine my surprise when I found out that the actual “theater” part of Grooms’ creation was being used as basically the finale of the Henson exhibit, showing episodes of “The Muppet Show”, and tons of behind-the-scenes footage from Henson’s incredible career. You could have knocked me over with a feather.
There I sat, in the darkened-yet-colorfully-garish theater, completely surrounded by works of art that have shaped and influenced me very, very deeply. I had to collect myself a bit afterwards, and am so thankful that the stars aligned for such a personalized mash-up to pop into my life right now.
Click to see a full album of photos
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March 23rd, 2018
March 22nd, 2018
March 21st, 2018
March 20th, 2018
March 17th, 2018
12:00 pm - My tweets
- Fri, 21:32: RT @ThinkwellGroup: Now available on Digital, Blu-Ray, and DVD - FERDINAND features 14 pieces of unique content produced by Thinkwell Media…
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March 14th, 2018
March 13th, 2018
March 10th, 2018
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