Giant Robot Store and GR2 News
GR2. The dry run. It was 6:35pm and we’re scheduled to be open at 6:30pm. We heard some knocks, people are standing outside, some just opened the door and walked in. It signaled the opening of GR2. There was no speech or meditations on the project, it was a situation of having to be ready because of what the clock told us. As each minute passed us, we were muttering “we need to open,” and then even while we were not quite done, we opened the doors. People drifted in looking up and around. Those who frequent GR2, noticed a huge difference, those who don’t, just walked in as if this is how it’s always been.
It took a little over a week and the new GR2 is done. This isn’t the grand re-opening, we’re saving that for after the tweaks and so forth. Year of the Dragon show Jan 28th. It’ll be manager Michelle Borok’s last art show before she moves to Mongolia. Sadness for us and a strong hello to Mongolia. GR2 will be a work in progress and hopefully it’ll continue that way for a while.
The LA Natural History Museum isn’t as large as what you might see in NYC, but it does have a First Friday program featuring an open museum and separate admission for the bands who were in this case, Mariachi El Bronx and El Haru Kuroi. Both great bands sporting a Latin flavor. The sound isn’t at it’s best inside of a museum, but the energy was high and the bands played great.
Yet, the museum itself is a spectacle. On a first friday you can check it out for the price of admission, but do be careful. $10 parking. Why so high? Perhaps it’s because the museum has been redone and each of the sections I got to see looked spectacular. Clean, up to date and of course a great section on dinosaurs which is a must have if you’re going to boast natural history. Impressive and unlike the musty aired museum I remembered from way back. The gorilla at bottom looks real.
The skeletons look as good as they do anywhere else. The collection here is no joke and it’s probably highly underrated.
Activism and Japanese Americans? Yes it happened. Japanese American National Museum’s Drawing the Line captures this feeling in an exhibition as related to Pacific Standard Time. It’s a series and the text from the JANM site is as follows. “Drawing the Line is part of Pacific Standard Time. This unprecedented collaboration, initiated by the Getty, brings together more than sixty cultural institutions from across Southern California for six months beginning October 2011 to tell the story of the birth of the L.A. art scene.” Here’s some photos below. The first photo says it all. A jacket in the background filled with buttons, a guitar, and a photo of Nobuko Miyamoto and Chris Iijima, the subject of a Tad Nakamura film, Song for Ourselves.
Did you know a Japanese American, Larry Shinoda designed the 63 split window Corvette? The Monza and the Boss Mustangs? The version in the lobby is a specimen.
